Le Schopenhauer de Huysmans et Céard: deux avatars littéraires de la résignation

• Autores: Roderick Cooke
• Localización: Studi francesi, ISSN 0039-2944, Nº. 187, 2019, págs. 56-68
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • Examining both explicit and implicit references to Schopenhauer’s philosophy in J.-K. Huysmans’ À rebours (1884) and Henry Céard’s Une belle journée (1881), I argue that the two authors both created a version of it, in the midst of the ‘Schopenhauérisme’ craze in 1880s France, that validated their shared belief in resignation as an ethical category, and demonstrated the importance of resignation through the psychology of the two novels’ protagonists. In so doing, they modified the philosopher’s ideas both in line with their own existing beliefs, and in such a way as to allow the narrativization of philosophy in the naturalist novel. Whereas the intellectually limited protagonist of Une belle journée, Ernestine Duhamain, finds minor solace in a philosophical conclusion taken from Schopenhauer (I demonstrate the novel’s connection to the philosopher through a previously-undiscussed intertext with Céard’s article on Schopenhauer published the same year), Des Esseintes’ more overt engagement with Schopenhauer in À rebours brings instead suffering, announcing Huysmans’ future conversion to Catholicism. In their different ways, the two novels illustrate Céard’s and Huysmans’ attempts to differentiate their writing from that of Zola, who was harshly critical of Schopenhauer in his own La Joie de vivre. They also raise wider questions about the relationship between philosophy and literature, specifically the possible disjunction between the general abstraction of the former and the defined characters, plots and environments of the latter.