Christa Giles

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Redon’s ˝horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered
visions.˝ 386 Redon’s first series of lithographs entitled Le
Rêve was perceived as a ˝fantaisie macabre,˝ 387 a disturbing
and unsettling vision. It was the unconscious and
nightmarish aspects of these works which intrigued
Huysmans. Although the notion of the unconscious had
not yet been codified by Freud, his ideas emerged in many
writers’ works at the time; and as has been pointed out,
they are frequently to be found in Schopenhauer’s work, 388
with which both Wilde and Huysmans were familiar. It is
interesting, then, that Huysmans in his explication of
Redon’s work, should conjure up the memory of
childhood anxieties and remembrance of visions
experienced when ill with typhoid. He was fascinated by
the dream life and the irrational, and delighted in the
examination of the working of man’s mind – his conscious
and unconscious drives.
The abnormal, the irrational, were also considered
valuable in art because they functioned as a protest against
the materialism and positivism of the period, and for this
reason artists often juxtaposed the quotidian world with an
internal reality infused with the ambiguity and mystery of
the unknown. Like Wilde, Redon asserted that all artistic
creation was subjective, but he connected this less with the