Christa Giles

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the one means to escape and momentarily reveal what lies
beyond the phenomenal world. In effect, art was perceived
by Schopenhauer as being opposed to the blind,
unthinking, mechanistic forces of a life whose ˝aim˝ is
death. Thus ˝art had a soul but man had not.˝ Once man is
detached from the real world he could contemplate beauty,
entirely freed in that moment from the domination of the
will. ˝Such contemplation,˝ says Kuhn,
is synonymous with the authentic joy in art,
the pleasure derived from the perception of a
beauty freed of the contingent. The state is
that of the ˝privileged moment˝ . . . It is this
instant alone that, according to both Proust
and Schopenhauer, is capable of radically
breaking the monotonous cycle of an
existence dominated by the recurrence of
desire, fulfillment and boredom. 499
It is this attempt to ˝kill time˝ and ˝boredom,˝ to ˝escape,˝
which is the function of art for Des Esseintes. Of course,
Huysmans often also attributes to art a religious or spiritual
function even as Wilde, in the Paterian tradition,
apotheosises ˝the moment.˝ In one of his ˝poems in prose,˝
he describes how man takes a bronze image of ˝The Sorrow
that endureth for Ever,˝ throws it into the furnace, ˝and out