Des Esseintes is the quintessential modern man: questing, longing for ‘something’ which isn’t what one wanted after all. The quest goes on, anxiously seeking new experiences, only to tell oneself, ‘No! That’s not what I meant. That really is not it’!
Did Decadence ever really go away? In literary senses, it had its time. Is today the era of the New Decadence? Our senses, constantly overwhelmed to the point of satiety, we are never so unsatisfied. The moral certitudes we, as a society, clung to, have been eroded. We have access to more information, more TV & radio, yet we cannot hear ourselves in amongst the noise. We blot out the world, like Des Esseintes, with beautiful things and hope we can pacify the longing, the angst, with some new drug, some glittering opiate that will still the voice that keeps asking, ‘What’s it all about, then’?
Huysmans offers no answers, maybe there aren’t any. But he does a beautiful job illuminating the path.