À la recherche d’une poétique Les poèmes en prose du Drageoir aux épices face aux romans

Drageoir aux épices’s confrontation with the novel underlines the role of the prose poem in the establishment of Huysmans’s novelistic poetics. The oxymoronic nature of the genre, its polymorphism, and its singularity give free reign to the contradictory aspirations of the young writer. However, this anarchical force underpins a visible unity which, in the light of a retrospective reading, outlines the constants in Huysmans’s novels: mystery, egotism, the evocation of the past, and generic hybridity.