Neurosyphilitics and madmen: The French fin-de-siècle fictions of Huysmans, Lermina, and Maupassant.

This chapter considers a neurological approach to analyzing the decadent and fantastic fictions of the French fin-de-siècle. It focuses on three texts whose depictions of male nervosism were influenced by Charles Baudelaire's biography of Edgar Allan Poe and by contemporary medical discourses, including those of Jean-Martin Charcot and George Miller Beard: Joris-Karl Huysmans' À Rebours (1884), Jules Lermina's Les Fous (1885), and Guy de Maupassant's Le Horlà (1885-1887). Although these authors were philosophically antipositivist and antimaterialist, they used scientific theories of neurasthenia, neurodegeneration, and visual hallucination to probe the frontiers between body and spirit, the known and the unknowable.