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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1839

The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe

American Romanticism. United States. Written in English.

A tale of the hypersensitive Roderick Usher, last of his line, and the collapse of his family and his mansion.

What it handed down

To Against the Grain (À rebours) (1884)

Thematic kinship, well documented.

Poe, known in France through Baudelaire's translations, is praised in chapter 14 for his analysis of will and nervous disorder. Roderick Usher, the over-refined last heir of a decaying line shut in his house, is a direct prototype for des Esseintes.

Where it came from

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1764

The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole

Georgian. England. Written in English.

The first Gothic novel: a usurping prince, a doomed dynasty, a prophecy and a supernatural collapse of the castle.

What it handed down

To The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Walpole established the Gothic pattern of a doomed family whose house collapses at the end of its line. Poe adopts the decaying ancestral seat as the image of a family's ruin, ending with the mansion sinking into the tarn.

Where it came from

Hamlet, William Shakespeare c. 1600

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c. 1600

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Elizabethan. England. Written in English.

Tragedy of a Danish prince urged by his father's ghost to avenge a murder by his uncle.

What it handed down

To The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Direct source, well documented.

Walpole's preface to the second edition defends mixing the comic and tragic by appeal to Shakespeare. The ghostly father demanding justice and the usurper's guilt echo Hamlet.

Where it came from

Tragic Histories (Histoires tragiques), vol. 5, François de Belleforest 1570 follow this thread
Aeneid, Virgil 19 BCE follow this thread
Thyestes, Seneca the Younger c. 50 CE

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c. 50 CE

Thyestes

Seneca the Younger

Julio-Claudian. Imperial Rome. Written in Latin.

Revenge tragedy in which Atreus serves his brother Thyestes his own sons at a banquet, opening with the ghost of Tantalus.

What it handed down

To Hamlet (c. 1600)

Stylistic influence, probable.

Elizabethan revenge tragedy took its ghosts, rhetoric of vengeance and bloody banquets from Seneca, read in Latin and in the 1560s English translations. Hamlet's ghost and revenger belong to that Senecan line, though no single passage is copied.

Where it came from

Agamemnon, Aeschylus 458 BCE

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458 BCE

Agamemnon

Aeschylus

Classical Athens. Athens. Written in Ancient Greek.

First play of the Oresteia: Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy, under the curse of the house of Atreus.

What it handed down

To Thyestes (c. 50 CE)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Seneca's play dramatizes the crime behind the curse on the house of Atreus that Aeshylus's Cassandra sees in vision, the feast of Thyestes' children. Seneca reworked Greek tragic plots of this family in his Agamemnon and Thyestes.

Where it came from

Odyssey, Homer c. 725 BCE

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c. 725 BCE

Odyssey

Homer

Archaic. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.

Epic of Odysseus's ten-year voyage home from Troy, pursued by the anger of Poseidon.

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther

Direct source, well documented.

Werther carries his Homer everywhere and reads the Odyssey in the village, picturing the patriarchal simplicity of its world. His shift from Homer to Ossian charts his descent into despair.

To Satyricon

Structural model, well documented.

The narrator Encolpius is pursued by the wrath of Priapus as Odysseus was by Poseidon's, a parody frame scholars widely accept. The book also stages Homeric scenes in sordid modern settings.

To Aeneid

Structural model, well documented.

The first six books follow the Odyssey: a hero's wanderings, a storm, a banquet narrative of past sufferings, and a descent to the underworld. Virgil also revisits Homeric episodes such as the Cyclops' island.

To Agamemnon (458 BCE)

Direct source, well documented.

The Odyssey repeatedly tells of Agamemnon's murder on his homecoming by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, as a foil to Odysseus. Aeschylus builds his tragedy on this Homeric story.

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)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Hamlet (c. 1600)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Thyestes (c. 50 CE)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther

To Satyricon

To Aeneid

To Agamemnon (458 BCE)

Where it came from

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