Decadence: Obscure literature of the fin de siecle and Belle Epoque - and other literary obsession

Edgar Degas,  Dans un cafe , 1875-1876 As part of a self-assigned project (see last post), I read several Paul Alexis novellas in place of his contribution to the 1880 Naturalist anthology, Evenings at Médan . One of them was The End of Lucie Pellegrin (translator Richard Robinson, Snuggly Books), in which all the principal characters are sex workers. The novella reminded me of something I’d noticed a while ago: the focus on – even preoccupation with – sex workers in French literature of the fin de siècle.  Consider, in the same year Alexis released his novella, Naturalist leader Emile Zola published Nana , a novel peopled with prostitutes and courtesans. J.-K. Huysmans’ first novel was Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) which - maybe in hopes of a succès de scandale? - he’d rushed to publish before Edmond de Goncourt finished La Fille Elisa (1877). As for French Decadent authors, sex workers were common fixtures in their novels and stories about the demimonde throughout t...

As mentioned in a prior post, I’d given myself an assignment to read J.-K. Huysmans’ novels in the order in which they were written. My objective was to track his progression from a Naturalist writer in Emile Zola’s orbit to the author who wrote À rebours , the novel some refer to as “the Decadent bible”.  I skipped Huysmans’ first effort, Le drageoir aux épices (1874) and started with his first two novels: Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) and The Vatard Sisters (1879). After that was "Sac au dos", his contribution to Evenings at Médan , an 1880 anthology of French Naturalism comprised of stories by six different authors. As a mini-survey of French Naturalism, I gave myself a sub-assignment to read all six stories in Evenings at Médan .  Unfortunately, there’s no English version of the anthology. I was able to read the stories by Zola (“The Attack on the Mill”) and Guy de Maupassant (“Boule de Suif”) via English language anthologies of each authors’ short stories. Howev...