Christa Giles

58
the funeral, Pierrot gravely meets the guests holding his
dead wife’s syringe in one hand. Following the funeral he
emerges from a bar and falls in love with a mannequin
behind the glass in a wigmaker’s store. After several failed
attempts he finally brings the statue to dinner and then
attempts to rape her. During his ˝suit˝ there are two
interruptions – significantly from a tombstone-cutter and a
dandy. The dandy kisses the mannequin twice and Pierrot’s
saber falls upon her, and the dandy, assuming she is dead,
covers her with a sheet and leaves. It transpires that the
mannequin is not quite dead, and Pierrot attempts again to
rape her. She is unresponsive, and in an ironic attempt to
˝heat her up,˝ he sets fire to the room. He then goes to a
dressmaker’s shop, rapes a dummy, and escapes with her.
In the dandy/Pierrot we are presented with an
attempt to subvert the connection between illusion and
reality – a deliberate transgression of the line between the
two. Pierrot, historically the clown, the outcast, the
disinherited, the beaten, becomes in Huysmans’ hands a
parody of the dandy, a savage ironist whose actions suggest
his complete cynicism. He is also in some degree the artist
figure toying with death and artificiality. He becomes the
embodiment of a ˝modernity˝ which, in Wilde’s words:
put Tragedy into the raiment of Comedy, so
that the great realities seemed commonplace