The Falls of History: Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature
The Falls of History: Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature
This chapter is devoted to the novel, Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. It focuses not only on the heterogeneous manifold of this novel, but also on its nonsynthetic unity. This novel seeks to pinpoint the minimal structure, organizational principle, or law, that accounts for the diversity of these motifs, topics, and theories whose irreducible complexity claims the reader's attention and demands interpretations that the very law of the text inevitably condemns to remaining always finite as far as their scope is concerned. This novel, rather than being centered around one however dominant and essential interpretation of history, seems to display a plurality of conflicting concepts of history. In this novel, history and its interpretations appear fragmented and mixed together without a real synthesis in which all these different concepts of history could play one role or another.
Keywords: Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans, minimal structure, organizational principle, law
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
