Christa Giles

INTRODUCTION
The central preoccupation of the Anglo-Irish
dramatist Oscar Wilde and the French novelist Joris Karl
Huysmans – a preoccupation which subsumes all of their
work – was the relationship of life and art. Art was
opposed to life but paradoxically depended on it. It enabled
man to experience life more intensely but simultaneously
denied life’s validity. Art became a way of escaping life, yet
it was also (by making us myriad-minded 1 ), a means of
living life more fully. This series of paradoxes, which
helped to clarify the nature of the relations between life and
art, transformed the decadent into a modern ironist. His
attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable resulted in
disillusionment and a perverse reaffirmation of the ideal of
art. The focus on these issues also reflected a concern with
notions of the self and the problem of identity which
emerged in Wilde and Huysmans’ work as an interest in
satanism and dandyism. For as the division between art
and life was underlined, art became more and more
identified with artifice – the anti-natural.