However improbably, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission returns continually to the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans for inspiration, if one can call it inspiration, this exercise in disillusionment seeking its literary echo. All the more surprising is Houellebecq’s insistence on a view of Huysmans that scarcely anyone, even those who have read his best work, will recognize, despite its being scrupulously accurate in its biographical and literary detail. When Huysmans is read today, it is almost invariably as the quintessential Decadent of À rebours, which Houellebecq touches upon only lightly when he declares it a masterpiece and then declines to discuss it in any meaningful way except to ask where one goes, where Huysmans went, where Houellebecq’s protagonist François might go, when his best work, his greatest inspirations, and his greatest dissipations are behind him. “In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans,” the protagonist worries, “the obvious problem was what to do with À rebours. Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivaled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?” Houellebecq even seems to be inviting us to contemplate his own midlife crisis as a novelist and wonder if, after writing the great novel of cynicism in our time, after exploring in painful detail better than anyone else all the great whatevers of modern anomie, he has simply run out of fresh disillusionments to anatomize in prose. His answer to his own question is quite simply Durtal, Huysmans’ other great literary accomplishment, the autobiographical alter ego around whom he focalized a series of somewhat mystical, somewhat Naturalistic, somewhat Decadent novels of Catholic conversion that occupied him for much of the two decades that followed the success of À rebours.

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