Joris-Karl Huysmans is perhaps best known for his novel A Rebours, published in 1884. Its protagonist, Des Esseintes, weary of the real, revolted by its banality and vulgarity, turns his back on the external world and dedicates himself to the pursuit of extreme refinements in his sensibility, his aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual tastes. The book was proclaimed a breviary by fin-de-siècle aesthetes and decadents across Europe, and represents a key landmark in cultural history. But its refusal of the ordinary world presaged a specific spiritual journey on the part of its author, who subsequently charted his conversion to Christianity in a series of novels bearing titles such as En Route (1895), La Cathédrale (1898) and L'Oblat (1903). His final destination, coupled to the abiding cult surrounding A Rebours, has tended to obscure an important dimension of Huysmans’ writing here, alluded to by Rosalind Williams. Having set out with the intention of travelling to London, Des Esseintes decides he no longer needs to journey there after visiting the ‘Bodega’, a Paris bar specialising in English products such as ‘biscuits Palmers’ and ‘des mince pies’. He consumes a glass of ‘old port, light, delicate, Cockburn's very fine, magnificent old Regina’ followed by oxtail soup, haddock, beef and ale in another tavern, and satisfies himself that he has sufficiently experienced Old England by this means instead of actually embarking on a journey there. The extreme aestheticism of a gesture whereby the imaginary is made a substitute for the real thing should not blind us to the fact that while seeking to cultivate a form of elitist consumption Des Esseintes is merely doing what consumers everywhere do: he is buying into the dream that by consuming a branded product one can partake of an otherwise inaccessible reality.

Huysmans pointed out, in a preface to A Rebours written twenty years after its publication, that this book was written in order to liberate himself from his youthful adherence to Zola's naturalism. The texts that Huysmans wrote during this first phase of his career, while subsequently eclipsed by the special status of A Rebours and by the fruits of his religious conversion, have been critically evaluated chiefly in terms of their adherence to the tenets of the naturalist movement: and this has tended to overlook certain features that show them anticipating Des Esseintes’ stance as consumer.