Christa Giles

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symbolic network, evokes some of the symbolic devices
which Freud outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
In En rade Huysmans utilizes three obscure dream
sequences in an attempt to juxtapose dream with reality. In
order further to accentuate the difference between the
conscious and unconscious life, he chose as his subject
matter two peasants, Jack and Louise Marles, contrasting
the crudities of country life with a fantastical dreamworld
replete with exotic detail. In a letter to Zola, Huysmans
claimed that originally he had intended to ˝divide the book
into reality by day and dream by night . . . writing
alternately one chapter of reality and one of dreams.˝ 321
Instead, he chose a much less effective route and
introduced into the text three dream sequences. The
ornamental, the patterned, in the dream sequences,
Huysmans invested with significance. The surface being
symbol was sufficient in itself. Thus, the importance of
purely ˝abstract decoration˝ 322 and of the ˝imaginative˝ and
˝pleasurable,˝ 323 of the ˝unreal˝ and ˝non-existent˝ 324 is
stressed throughout Wilde’s essays. Both Huysmans and
Wilde emphasised not meaning per se but the importance
of form and colour. For beauty (as the ˝symbol of symbols˝)
˝reveals everything because it expresses nothing.˝ 325 It is for
this reason that the painter Whistler whom Wilde and