A Dilemma

Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' <I>A Dilemma</I> remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siècle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works—his 1881 <I>Against Nature</I>, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, <I>Down There</I>—<I>A Dilemma</I> presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.<br><br>Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, <B>Joris-Karl Huysmans</B> (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like <I>Marthe</I> and <I>Downstream</I> to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, <I>Against Nature</I> and the Satanist classic <I>Down There</I>, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, <I>Becalmed</I>, and his Catholic novels, <I>The Cathedral</I> and <I>The Oblate</I>.