Decadent Visions of Salome

I picked up my copy of Huysmans' A Rebours on monday. Yes, it was that kind of week that needed full-fledged indulgence, pessimism, and complete and utter misanthropy. Not that I haven't picked it up a weekend or two for random binges of decadence. In short, I like the book.
The novel is centered around Des Esseintes, a character who is essentially bored with the secular, with the stench of ignorance, dirtiness and banality that fill the streets of Paris. Seclusion and withdrawal are all too appropriate for the sickly indulgent hero of the story,

"with the desire to escape from a hateful period of sordid degradation, the longing to see no more pictures of the human form toiling in Paris between four walls or roaming the streets in search of money had taken increasing hold of him."

Of course, no story is based on nothingness, well maybe some, but A Rebours is not the exception. When in 1881 Huysmans fell ill of Neuralgia, he decided to retire to a castle in Fontenay-aux-Roses to convalesce. A newly acquired ambivalence to Impressionism—which he once praised for its ultra-naturalist style—and an overall disillusionment and disgust for the materialistic complex of the city had also began to take over him. Not coincidentally though. He was just a man of the times, when a new-found self-awareness and disillusionment was being adopted by poets, writers, and artists alike. Decadence, for Mallarmé and Baudelaire, meant retreat, pessimism, subjectivity and rejection. Things Huysmans became far too acquinted with.
So, the landscape  in which the novel is conceived becomes central to the novel itself. As Huysmans Des Esseintes retreats to a castle in the french countryside, we are ntroduced to eccentric decorations, completely blocked out windows, a red boudoir, a dinning room designed to resemble a ship's cabin, the servants who were never to be seen or heard so as not to disturb the lack of human contact, and the weird schedule he creates for himself in which all is turned around so as to flip his perception of when night and day happen. Most notably though, we are introduced to his art collection.
Herein the dream-inducing collection filled with feverish prints and hallucinating sights of Salome and creatures that can only live in the utmost corners of our imagination,

"for the delectation of his mind and the delight of his eyes he had to seek evocative works which would transport him to some unfamiliar world, point the way to new possibilities, and shake up his nervous system by way of erudite fancies, complicated nightmares, suave and sinister visions."

He searched for paintings by el Greco, and prints by Jan Van Luyken and Bresdin. But it was the work of Moreau and Redon that caused him to enter into hallucinating visions.
By Moreau he owned both Salome Dancing Before Herod and The Apparition. Both of which, according to Des Esseintes were executed in a manner that only "brains shaken and harpened and rendered almost clairvoyant by neurosis" could. But particularly Salome, whose irresistible essence of lust and beauty was responsible for numerous of Des Esseintes' trances.
On Salome Dancing Before Herod:
On The Apparition:
While Huysmans is specific in writing about Moreau's work, with Odilon Redon it all becomes more muddled and abstract. He gives us only descriptions and certain specific characteristics to conjure up images and atmospheres found in the artwork—artworks that the educated audience of the times would have known and though of when reading. The key though was, to specifically define them—the artwork—would be to kill the experience (see Mallarmé)
Long-winded and overtly descriptive? yes. But that was the point. Symbolism, or Decadence, was about going against Naturalism. No longer observing Parisian life, but looking inward and indulging in every feeling and whim. I guess what I find so completely magical and fascinating that while the frail and sickly Des Esseintes is quite possibly the most  horrible human being he is the medium with which Huysmans channels the multiple levels of perceiving the artwork. The awareness of an event or object is rooted in more than one of the senses. This is especially true if we think of about it in terms of Baudelaire's theory of Correspondences, or in a Mallarmean level of sense perception taking over the rational. In Huysmans I find a text so rich in symbolism that is has to be read with our eyes, with our ears, with or hands, with our taste buds... basically making it the ultimate Symbolist text, extending beyond a physical thing that expresses the written word and takes over the senses.
Plus you have to admire anybody who makes a novel about nothing, in which nothing happens, work. Its a book full of excessive and tiring descriptions of colors, odors, dreams, and feelings. So if you're into that, read it.