Christa Giles

He has conjured up the devil once more, in
this age when belief is dead, even in God, and
he shows him triumphing over all ridicule, all
laughter. 228
˝What a queer age,˝ Durtal observes near the end of
Là-bas, ˝it is just at the moment when positivism is at its
zenith that mysticism rises again.˝ 229 This is reiterated at the
end of Là-bas: ˝It’s a two-sided age. People believe nothing,
yet gobble everything.˝ 230 Much of both Wilde’s and
Huysmans’ interest in diabolism and the occult has its
origin in both this loss of faith and rejection of a
materialistic and positivistic age. Indeed, Barbey
D’Aurevilly claimed that in the writing of A rebours
Huysmans had written ˝the nosography of a society
destroyed by the rot of materialism.˝ 231 The United States
came to represent in Huysmans’ mind the embodiment of a
Philistine, materialistic democracy. In Là-bas he identified
this materialism with the school of naturalism:
This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities
of modern life and flatters our positively
American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force
and apotheosizes the cash register . . . it defers
to the nauseating taste of the mob. 232
And Wilde echoed Huysmans when he wrote of the
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