Le satanisme et le roman

In Huysmans’ writings, the interest he takes in Satanism appears to come partly from a constant attraction to the documentary requirements of naturalism, and partly from a violent desire for spirituality. Là-bas, which is an account of this period, seems to be a composite novel, built around three narrative lines, but also unified by the common and insistent reference to Satanism, presented above all as a collection of discourses defined by tradition and by transmission procedures. It is not so much the knowledge of Satan as the attraction for those who hold it, which is at the center of the work and gives it a dimension of being an inquiry. It is also in this fixed interest for the followers that the reader traces the story of the hero-author: a progressive development of a representation of Satanism marked on the one hand by extreme erudition and on the other by a fascination for the undefined nature and the excess of confusion,-and, finally, the revelation of a way of being satanic, which can only really be apprehended in the dual nature of possession, and not in the disappointment of the encounter.Besides the relationship which is then established between the works and a form of novel lending itself to the union of the composite and the initiatory, of the confused and the erudite, we can assess how Satanism affected Huysmans, haunted at the time by the possibility of escaping the alternative of positivism and blind faith, and what it could have brought him: knowing the obscure, a relationship with knowledge which did not dampen the desire, a resistance within which spirituality can be experienced