Utopian Collections: Goncourt and Huysmans Against the Grain

For Edmond de Goncourt as well as for the Duke Jean Floressas des Esseintes, life in Paris has become unbearable. Disgusted by the muddy streets, the noise and the lack of taste of their times, they both resolve that the only solution to live within such a society is to seclude themselves in a house from where the century and its despise for beauty cannot reach them. For Goncourt, with the guided visit of his domicile in La Maison d’un artiste (1882), as well as for des Esseintes, in J.-K. Huysmans’ À rebours (1884), the purpose of their seclusion is twofold: to save themselves, and protect their ideal of taste, a mode of living where beauty reigns and where the scattered pieces of their different collections can find a proper place. I will discuss the idea of the collection as an aesthetic utopia and how the frantic collector, moved by his passion for beauty, builds, among the bric-a-brac of bibelots and rare objects, a forlorn universe literally cut off from its epoch. I will conceive utopia, in the case of these two texts, as a form of life: the possibility to suppress the ugliness of reality and to live according to ones own aesthetical wishes. And the best way of achieving this form is by composing a collection