Christa Giles

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palace becomes a quest into his own secret depths;
consequently his fear of the unknown is predominant.
Later he does try to ˝analyse himself,˝ 408 but only after
emerging from the wood which surrounds the castle, a
wood which is described as being a ˝chaos de plantes et
d’arbres.˝ 409 Within the forest, we are told, he felt sensations
analogous to those he experienced the previous night when
he dreamt. There is no need for Freud or Jung to make the
identification of the wood with Jacques’ unconscious nor to
emphasise Huysmans’ use of threshold imagery – all this is
implicit in the text. Jacques’ motive in analysing his dream
is to create some order from the ˝chaos.˝ And it is
interesting that as Huysmans describes the possible sources
of the dream, he moves beyond the prevalent
contemporary belief that dreams had a physical origin
(such as the disturbance of digestive functions).
Initially, Jacques attempts an exclusively literary
interpretation of the dream. Searching his memory, he finds
a possible correspondence between the Old Testament
story of Esther and the king:
il devait donc croire que cette lecture de la
Bible avait été couvée pendant des années
dans une des provinces de sa mémoire pour
qu’une fois la période d’incubation finie,