Christa Giles

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Wilde’s and Huysmans’ work gives expression to a
yearning which could not be answered, and through the
recognition of this impossibility, this yearning was
transmuted into irony. Their recognition of man’s
complexity and the relativity of the modern world meant
that they presented man as internally divided, not bound to
any one truth or ideal except such as could be found or
created in art. Their desire for transcendence manifests
itself in the theme of satanism, which suggests a desire to
annihilate boundaries, transcend limitations, or assert
freedom – to experience all sensations. However, these
desires and actions are once removed by the ironist’s own
dissective intellect so that subjective experience becomes a
failed attempt to move beyond the restrictions of reality. It
is for this reason that the mask was one of both comedy, or
farce, and tragedy – for Wilde and Huysmans the two
became inseparable. The decadent ironist is disengaged yet
experiences intensely through the artifices of the
imagination; he is simultaneously ecstatic and self-
mocking. Wilde and Huysmans expressed this ironical pose
in terms of reversal, paradox, and the subversion of social
norms, and their relativistic approach efficaciously allowed