Comic Misconceptions

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Comic Misconceptions: Situating Salomé and À Rebours in the Tradition of Satire
When Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1893) was first published, close friend and literary
executor Robert Ross described its publication as “greeted by a chorus of ridicule” (xiii).
Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884), on the other hand, fared better: it became “the
acknowledged masterpiece of the international decadent movement” (Porter 95). This was
an infinitely better response to the low expectations of its writer who stated, “It [would] be
the biggest fiasco of the year” (Baldick 131). The difference in reception is interesting
because when read as works of satire, the critical deprecation or acclaim they received
essentially misses the mark. This is especially pertinent for À Rebours. A satirical reading
would mean the young generation of decadents inspired by its pages were worshipping a
novel that ridiculed the ideals they believed it propounded. Salomé would have a slightly
different story. It was condemned and officially banned from the stage for its blasphemous
interpretation of Biblical characters (Donohue 118), although its sexual gratuity was also an
issue (Primorac). The realisation that Wilde was also being facetious would have only
fuelled its scandal further. Nonetheless, the need to interpret these texts satirically plugs
the gap left by a wholly literal approach. In focusing on these responses, this essay shall
provide an alternative understanding of À Rebours and Salomé; one that provides insight
into Victorian humour and the period’s (mis)perception of satire by situating the primary
texts within the long-standing tradition of satire, determining how much, if at all, they
conform to convention. In finding a place, the reading and understanding of these texts will
be true to the mode of satire in which they have been situated.
On describing À Rebours literary antecedents, Laurence M. Porter stated:
“Huysmans's A rebours echoes Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, reviving the ancient
encyclopaedic genre . . . rooted in Menippean satire” (95). Menippean satire “is a Greco-

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Roman phenomenon” that is a “useful name for the epicenter of a range of phenomena,
both stylistic and thematic, that in fact evolve over time” (Relihan 110-1). Despite Relihan’s
misgivings regarding this particular form of satire and its protean nature, Northrop Frye’s
seminal text, Anatomy of Criticism, delivers the essence of its composition and the meaning
of evoking its usage:
[1.] The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental
attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious
and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their
occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. [2.] The
Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle
abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization,
which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces
of the ideas they represent . . . [3.] A constant theme in the tradition is the
ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus . . . The novelist sees evil and folly as
social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the
intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloriosus at
once symbolizes and defines. (309)
À Rebours can be shown to illicit all three of these qualities. For instance, the protagonist,
Jean Des Esseintes, spends his time in cerebral introspection of his refined, aristocratic
tastes, cut off from social interaction. His self-exile escape from bourgeois society literally
removes the text’s ability to deal with persons other than himself. The characters privy to
brief episodes with Des Esseintes are irrelevant as the narrative perspective always remains
on his supercilious yet pessimistic point of view. As the focus, the reader should look to Des
Esseintes as the subject being satirised, which the omniscient narrator’s meticulous

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recounting of his thoughts, attitudes and doings attests. A particularly pertinent example is
the account of the servants Des Esseintes ‘permits’ with him at Fontenay and the various
methods they must undertake to ensure their presence around the house is as incorporeal
as possible: “In short, he did everything he could to avoid seeing them or speaking to them
more often than was absolutely necessary” (Huysmans 18). Due to the extreme lengths Des
Esseintes goes to remain a recluse, Huysmans invites the reader to diagnose or criticise him.
It is this attention to the protagonist’s mental attitudes that À Rebours fulfils Frye’s first
criterion.
Following on to Frye’s second attribute, Menippean satire favouring “stylized” over
“naturalistic” characterisation is particularly interesting in regards to À Rebours because
before the unexpected success of this novel, Huysmans was a Naturalist writer.1
The
elements typical of Naturalist style are evident in À Rebours, this being denoted by length
the narrative goes to supply as many descriptions and details as possible:
As for the gaunt, febrile creatures of feeble constitution and nervous
disposition who sensual appetite craves dishes that are smoked and
seasoned, their eyes almost always prefer that most morbid and irritating of
colours, with its acid glow and unnatural splendour - orange. (Huysmans 16)
This example, of many, is rich in its attention to detail. In one sentence, the passage
describes the narrator’s opinion and associations with the colour orange. Moreover, in a
true feat of realist style, Huysmans attempts to describe the concept of orange without
initially using the word itself. However, from the response Naturalist writer and mentor to
Huysmans, Émile Zola, had to À Rebours, Huysmans had apparently deserted the values
1
. For earlier examples of Huysmans’ Naturalist works, see Marthe (1876) or The
Vatard Sisters (1879).

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extolled by Naturalism: “[Huysmans] was leading the school astray, that . . . [he] was
burning [his] ships with such a book, inasmuch as no class of literature was possible of this
sort, where a single volume exhausted the subject” (“Preface”). In addition to the detail,
the Naturalism of Zola, and Huysmans’ earlier works, highlighted social ills through the drab
picture their delineations would paint (Dahlström 273-5). Arguably, Huysmans has not
deviated from Naturalism but in the way this style is put to use. The excessive detail serves
to exaggerate Des Esseintes rather than provide a direct commentary on his vices; thus, in
its absurdity it becomes a point of ridicule. In light of Frye’s second rule then, À Rebours is
able to conform to Naturalist characterisation to such an extent that it achieves its opposite,
becoming stylised.
Of Frye’s three criteria, the third typically encapsulates a general perception of
satire, some qualities of which have been discussed above; namely, ridicule of Des Esseintes
exposing his vices. However the demarcation that isolates Menippean satire as its own
mode is the specificity of the target. Des Esseintes is emblematic of the diseased intellect
that Menippean satire wishes to ridicule. The folly highlighted of him cannot be a social
disease due to the lengths he goes to attain solitude; therefore, his tastes form the
“maddened pedantry” of diseased intellect. Subsequently, À Rebours can be classified as
this classic Greco-Roman phenomenon (Relihan 110); however, before discussing its
reception in light of this new reading, the same designation of satirical mode will be
conducted of Wilde’s Salomé.
Salomé’s place in satirical tradition is not the same as À Rebours’. According to Frank
Palmeri, the satire of the 1890s onwards “had re-emerged as a culturally viable form, but
unlike the satire of a hundred years earlier, it often took as the objects of its attacks
technological advances and the otherwise unquestioned conventions of modern middle-

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class life” (375). Whilst À Rebours only came a decade before Salomé, Wilde’s work was
coming after a time in Britain where the “extreme positions on both right and left were
discouraged or silenced, while positions in the middle dominated the conversation (Palmeri
362). With this grant for intellectual freedom, Salomé can be seen as Wilde expressing this
right and doing so by taking on an entirely new genre to his past endeavours. Due to the
reputation he had garnered over the success of his earlier plays, A Woman of No Importance
(1893), An Ideal Husband (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
“overshadowed Wilde’s own persistent attempts over nearly the whole of his career to
writer producible poetic drama” (Donohue 119). As a result of this, Salomé cannot be
situated with À Rebours as Wilde’s play does not centre on the idea that it is satire but
rather, contains satirical elements to form a blend of poetic drama and humour.
Lisa Colletta in Dark Humor offers an understanding of Modernist satire of the 1920s
that, despite the two decades of separation, has application to the motley Salomé. She
states of Modernist humour as “[offering] none of the optimism of conventional social satire
that suggests correction of vice will lead to the reintegration of the individual into society.
Thus, in the dark humor of Modernist satire, the social content remains but its social
purpose all but disappears” (2). This is certainly pertinent to Salomé in which the
eponymous femme fatale ensures the beheading of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) for spurning
her advances. One can see there is a lack of “social purpose” in that there is no sense in
Salomé’s actions. Jokanaan rejects her love-upon-sight of him and her response is to have
him executed. Evidently, Wilde does not intend didacticism as an attribute of his play;
however, he endeavours to find humour in these ostensibly morbid acts through
senselessness, non-sequitur, and whimsy. For example:

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Jokanaan: Back! daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord.
Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her iniquities, and the cry of
her sins hath come up to the ears of God.
Salomé: Speak again, Jokanaan. Thy voice is wine to me. (77)
In Salomé’s interest piquing at Jokanaan’s derogation of her, the masochism or complete
disregard for the insult is clearly meant to be taken humorously. Without a didactic
element, Colletta stated that “comedy . . . offers the pleasurable – if only momentary –
protection of laughter in the face of injustice and brutality” (6). In the post-World War I
novels that are Colletta’s focus, her conjecture reaches for the notion that laughter is
employed as a coping mechanism. Whilst the precursor of her theory is true of Salomé, that
there is nothing to learn from it, Wilde is not using it for the same purpose. Instead, the
answer is a lot simpler: comedy for the sake of comedy. Witticism and humour permeate
many of Wilde’s works, from the acerbic hedonism of Sir Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) to even his dialogue essays.2
The satire and humour one sees in Salomé is simply a
by-product of Wilde’s style. It does not fit with other satire of its time because, as stated,
these were rising to administer to a political agenda that had previously been neglected by
the contemporary middle class (Palmeri 362). Salomé is therefore sui generis in its satirical
mode, being an amalgam of Wilde’s experiment into poetic drama and his propensity for
frivolity. As a result, unlike À Rebours whose reading can be done through an understanding
of Menippean satire, Salomé is more open in that it is not didactic or has an agenda; it is
entertainment. Therefore, having situated both primary texts, the subsequent readings will
2
. See Intentions, a compilation of Wilde’s essays: “The Decay of Lying” (1889), “Pen,
Pencil and Poison” (1889), “The Critic as Artist” (1890), and “The Truth of Masks (1885).

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be contrasted with their critical receptions to identify just how severely the punch line was
missed.
As stated, the problem with critiques for both primary texts is that in light of a
satirical reading they appear to be incongruous with such an interpretation. Of Salomé, for
instance, The Times stated: “An arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre,
repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the
reverse of sacred” (151). The anonymous reviewer finishes the quotation with an
acknowledgement that Wilde’s depiction of Biblical narratives was the “reverse of sacred”
but its en passant delivery suggests that the full extent of what Wilde was doing was being
missed. Rather, their interpretation only reflects the principles of the censors of the period
that prohibited the depiction of Biblical characters (Donohue 118). However, Wilde is going
further than that. The humour derived from Jokanaan’s treatment is based on ambivalence
towards his status as a prophet. To Wilde’s certainly Christian majority readership, the
characters who believe Jokanaan to spout “ridiculous things” are intrinsically ridiculous for
their ignorance of his true status as a prophet (Wilde 71). However, their ignorance is
further perpetuated by the language Wilde assigns to Jokanaan: “The Lord hath come. The
son of man hath come. The centaurs have hidden themselves in the rivers, and the sirens
have left the rivers, and are lying beneath the leaves of the forest” (73). By using an
amalgam of prophecy and nonsense such as in the quotation, Jokanaan appears eccentric
and thus lends credibility to the idea that he is merely disturbed. Conversely, Christianity is
not the only religion to bare Wilde’s scrutiny. For example, the play’s opening depicts
various soldiers and court attendants intermittently discussing their Gods as well as the
Hebrew God. Having begun by chastising some Jewish men for the futility of arguing the
semantics of their faith, the conversation eventually leads to the following:

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The Nubian: The Gods of my country are very fond of blood. Twice in the
year we sacrifice to them young men and maidens; fifty young men and a
hundred maidens. But it seems we never give them quite enough, for they
are very harsh to us.
The Cappadocian: In my country there are no Gods left. The Romans have
driven them out. (70)
The extract exudes irony at the straightforward reasoning it takes to tear flaws in foreign
gods yet the difficulty in reaching a simple conclusion of one’s own. This satirising of
multiple faiths serves to pull the reader’s attention from the blasphemous setting of Biblical
interpretation to harmless ridicule of non-Christians. How this would have affected criticism
would have been interesting to see. Considering the anonymous Times writer stopped his
review short of the meat of Wilde’s impudence, the furore would have been deafening.
However, with Wilde in prison at the first production of Salomé and the “English literary and
dramatic criticism [ignoring it] even more thoroughly than it did the rest of Wilde's writings”
(Donohue 119), perhaps he was lucky not many cared enough to give Salomé its due
attention. Nonetheless, what this has shown is the presence of a wholly literal reading of
Salomé that, having made an assumption of the seriousness of the play based on its Biblical
setting, fails to see any humour in it at all.
The reception of À Rebours is interesting because, as stated, it was not the “fiasco”
Huysmans thought it would be. Why this was so was because of the wide, literal misreading
discussed above. Whilst Des Esseintes spawned a new generation of decadents who
wanted to emulate his aesthete lifestyle, this was a movement borne of irony as from the
perspective of a satirical reading, their idol was the subject of ridicule. Huysmans appears
to attest to as much in his comments before À Rebours’ publication: “but I don't care a

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damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want
to say” (Baldick 131). At this juncture, Huysmans could be referring to a backlash of a literal
or satirical reading; however, it is his initial correspondence with Zola that tips the scales in
favour of À Rebours being satire. In a letter Zola sent on 20th
May 1884, he ends it with the
following: “In short, you have made me spend three very happy evenings. This book will be
classed at least as a curiosity among your books; but be very proud you have done it”
(Brendan xvii). Whilst not a particularly enthusiastic review, it speaks nothing of the
disappointment quoted by Huysmans in his “Preface, Written Twenty Years After the
Novel”. Zola’s 20th
May letter was before À Rebours’ immense popularity as the
“masterpiece of the international decadent movement” (Porter 95); therefore, it was still, in
both Huysmans’ and Zola’s eyes, the Menippean satire discussed previously. It was only
after Huysmans allowed himself to be swept up by the positive, literal interpretations of À
Rebours that Zola would accuse him of abandoning the principles of Naturalism. Max
Nordau’s 1892 review appears to even confirm Huysmans as a sycophant:
Huysmans, the classical type of the hysterical mind without originality, who is
the predestined victim of every suggestion, began his literary career as a
fanatical imitator of Zola, and produced in his first period of development,
romances and novels which . . . greatly surpassed his model in obscenity.
Then he swerved from naturalism . . . and began to ape the Diabolists,
particularly Baudelaire. (McGuinness 225)
Although Nordau’s review certainly does not so much as hint at a satirical reading of À
Rebours, it does lend credence to the idea that Huysmans was one to bend to whichever
master was more favourable. Consequently, this would make À Rebours’ success a strange
and somewhat ironic accident.

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Having situated both primary texts, the results of reading them under specific modes
of satire yielded interpretations that were wholly divergent to that held by criticism. The
necessity of reading Salomé and À Rebours as satire was to align the texts with contextual
evidence. In the former, Wilde’s propensity for whimsy becomes just as apparent as it is in
his previous works, doing so in a way that builds on the renewed vigour of late nineteenth
century satire. À Rebours, on the other hand, is more retrospective in its homage to Greco-
Roman satire. Being that this was a period where some felt it was the end of a great
empire, similar to the end of Rome whereby its rulers grew idle and complacent in
‘peacetime’, what better to ridicule the contemporary equivalent, Des Esseintes, than by
using a Roman literary weapon.

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Works Cited
Baldick, Robert. The Life of J-K Huysmans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1955. Print.
Beckson, Kyle. The Critical Heritage: Oscar Wilde. Hove: Psychology Press, 1997. Print.
Brendan, King. Introduction. À Rebours. By Joris-Karl Huysmans. Cambridge: Dedalus, 2008.
iii-xx. Print.
Colletta, Lisa. Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel. New York:
Macmillan, 2003. Print.
Dahlström, Carl E.W.L.. “Stringberg’s ‘Naturalististika Sorgespel’ and Zola’s Naturalism: I.
‘Fröken Julie’: Introduction.” Scandinavian Studies 17.8 (1943): 269-81. JSTOR. Web.
04 Jan. 2015.
Donohue, Joseph. "Distance, death and desire in Salome." The Cambridge Companion to
Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. 1st
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. pp. 118-
42. Cambridge Companions Online. Web. 03 Jan. 2015.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (A Rebours). Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Penguin,
2003. Print.
---. “Preface: Written Twenty Years After the Novel.” ibiblio. U of North Carolina, 1997.
Web. 02 Jan. 2015.
McGuinness, Patrick. Appendix II. Against Nature (A Rebours). By Joris-Karl Huysmans.
London: Penguin, 2003. 219-27. Print.
Palmeri, Frank. “Narrative Satire in the Nineteenth Century.” A Companion to Satire. Ed,
Ruben Quintero. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 361-76. Print.

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Porter, Laurence M.. "Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel.” The Cambridge Companion
to the French Novel. Ed. Timothy Unwin. 1st
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 93-
110. Cambridge Companions Online. Web. 03 Jan. 2015.
Primorac, Yelena. “Illustrating Wilde: An Examination of Aubrey Beardsley’s Interpretation
of Salome.” Victorian Web. Pennsylvania U, 2009. Web. 04 Jan. 2015.
Relihan, Joel. "Late Arrivals." The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire. Ed. Kirk
Freudenburg. 1st
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 109-22. Cambridge
Companions Online. Web. 03 Jan. 2015.
Ross, Robert. “A Note on ‘Salome.’” Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. By Oscar Wilde. New
York: Dover, 1967. xiii-xvi. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 2000. 65-
99. Print.

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