Léon Bloy’s Symbolist Imagination

Abstract

Huysmans’ reputation as an ’aesthetic’ Catholic owes much to the image created by Léon Bloy in the satirical sections of his novel La Femme pauvre. There, in the guise of the artist Folantin, painter of canvasses such as ‘La Messe noire’ and ‘Les Trappistes en prière’ -titles in which literary equivalents are instantly recognisable -Huysmans is derided as one of those privileged mortals who have discovered God lurking in a stained-glass window.¹ Despite these public shows of scorn for his former friend, which arose from personal resentments that need not concern us here,² the two most important Catholic novelists of the century’s closing decades had many ideas in common. They included the conviction that Christian art, from the Renaissance onwards, was in a state of decadence. According to Bloy, Raphael and his contemporaries, the ancestors of ‘notre bondieuserie sulpicienne’ (FP, 80), had done as much harm to the Catholic cause as Luther. Their art, he writes in his other novel Le Désespéré, is inferior to ‘les extracorporelles Transfixions des Primitifs’ (D, 180). The thousand years of ‘patient ecstasy’ - the Middle Ages, an epoch venerated by him as by Huysmans - had been replaced by a falsely religious and profoundly profane art represented by paintings of Galathea’s well rounded buttocks (D, 178).