The influences behind Against the Grain (À rebours)

1884

Against the Grain (À rebours)

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Decadent. France. Written in French.

Huysmans's novel (À rebours) follows Jean des Esseintes, the last of a worn-out aristocratic line, who shuts himself in a house at Fontenay and arranges his days around perfumes, jewels, Latin decadent authors, Moreau's paintings and Baudelaire's poems. Its library chapters on Petronius, Baudelaire, Poe, Flaubert and Mallarmé became a reading list for the Decadent movement.

Where it came from

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1857

The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal)

Charles Baudelaire

Second Empire. France. Written in French.

Baudelaire's verse collection on spleen, vice, the city and the ideal, prosecuted for obscenity on publication.

What it handed down

To Against the Grain (À rebours) (1884)

Direct source, well documented.

Des Esseintes has a unique edition of Baudelaire's poems printed in church-missal type and bound in pigskin (chapter 12), and treats Baudelaire as the poet who explored the hidden depths of the soul. The book's cult of artifice, perfume and spleen comes from poems such as 'Correspondances' and 'Spleen.'

To Hérodiade (Scène)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Mallarmé's early verse was heavily Baudelairean, and 'Hérodiade' carries Baudelaire's cult of sterile, mineral beauty into a woman who refuses all touch. The poem's chill perfumes and jewels follow poems such as 'La Beauté.'

Where it came from

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1829

Life, Poems and Thoughts of Joseph Delorme (Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme)

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

French Romanticism. France. Written in French.

Poems presented as the remains of a fictional consumptive medical student, dwelling on urban drabness and morbid melancholy.

What it handed down

To The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) (1857)

Thematic kinship, well documented.

Baudelaire told Sainte-Beuve in letters that he had read Joseph Delorme young and been marked by it. Its sickly urban melancholy, drab Parisian settings and analytical despair anticipate the 'Tableaux parisiens' and 'Spleen' poems.

Where it came from

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1774

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1774

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sturm und Drang. Germany. Written in German.

Epistolary novel of a sensitive young man's hopeless love and suicide.

What it handed down

To Life, Poems and Thoughts of Joseph Delorme (Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme) (1829)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Sainte-Beuve's fictional biography of a sensitive, doomed young man belongs to the line of Werther, which French Romantics read avidly. The device of presenting a dead youth's writings with an editor's frame follows Goethe's epistolary novel.

Where it came from

The Poems of Ossian, James Macpherson 1765
Odyssey, Homer c. 725 BCE follow this thread

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1765

The Poems of Ossian

James Macpherson

Georgian. Scotland. Written in English.

Prose poems presented as translations of an ancient Gaelic bard, full of mist, lament and fallen heroes.

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Direct source, well documented.

Near the end Werther reads Lotte his own translation of the 'Songs of Selma' from Ossian, a long quoted passage that brings their feelings into the open. Ossianic lament sets the mood of the novel's close.

Where it came from

Iliad, Homer c. 750 BCE

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c. 750 BCE

Iliad

Homer

Archaic. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.

Epic of the wrath of Achilles during the siege of Troy.

What it handed down

To The Poems of Ossian (1765)

Structural model, probable.

Macpherson presented his Fingal as a northern epic comparable to Homer, and Hugh Blair's accompanying dissertation pressed the comparison. Macpherson later published a translation of the Iliad himself.

To Aeneid

Structural model, well documented.

The second half of the Aeneid restages the Iliad in Italy, with Turnus as a new Achilles and single combats, catalogues and funeral games on the Homeric model.

Where it came from

This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.

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Where it came from

What it handed down

To Against the Grain (À rebours) (1884)

To Hérodiade (Scène)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) (1857)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Life, Poems and Thoughts of Joseph Delorme (Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme) (1829)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Poems of Ossian (1765)

To Aeneid

Where it came from

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