Christa Giles

necessary…or is a vital part of the
environment in which we live, it is outside
the proper sphere of art. 337
121
This was not an indiscriminate rejection of realism on
Wilde’s part but rather, like Huysmans, he rejected Zola’s
naturalism as leading towards a cul-de-sac. He sought to
redefine his own preferred type of realism:
The difference between such a book as M.
Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions
Perdues is the difference between unimaginative
realism and imaginative reality. 338
Huysmans articulates this same view in Là-bas, where he
invokes a new brand of naturalism, a ˝spiritual
naturalism,˝ 339 interestingly also citing Balzac as a true
proponent of just such a naturalism.
The focus on the dream in Wilde’s and Huysmans’
work issued from the assertion of the primacy of the
imagination, the spiritual, the invisible as opposed to the
visible. The new scientific spirit and materialism provoked
in reaction subjectivism and concomitant narcissism.
Salomé, in her narcissistic solitude and sterility, embodies
such decadent preoccupations which are, as we have seen,
closely related to the concept of dandyism. In other words,
such a turning inward constitutes a rejection of positivism