Christa Giles

32
there is nothing really beautiful save what is
of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly,
for it expresses a need, and man’s needs are
low and disgusting, like his own poor,
wretched nature. The most useful place in a
house is the watercloset…though I am not a
dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle
and tambourines to that of the Speaker’s bell.
I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my
bread for jam. The occupation which best
befits civilized man seems to me to be
idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or a
cigar. . . . I am aware that there are people
who prefer mills to churches, and the bread of
the body to the bread of the soul. I have
nothing to say to such people. They deserve
to be economists in this world and in the next
likewise. 69
The idea that ˝as long as a thing is useful or
necessary to us…it is outside the proper sphere of art˝ 70
became a central tenet in Huysmans’ and Wilde’s
conceptions of art, and of course one corollary of this belief
was their concern with the anti-natural or artificial. In A
rebours Huysmans is concerned with the aestheticization of
the external world and therefore a reversal takes place
whereby art steps across the boundaries and moves into the
world of life, while life moves into the world of art.