Creative Fore-closure: Textual Space and the Empty Subject in J.-K. Huysmans

The novels of Huysmans often chronicle a failure to establish a permanent residence and as his characters' desire for spatial fixity is thwarted, so their homes become "lieux de passage." The emptying or dismantling of the house may proleptically signal a textual filling, the anticipated construction of the novel-to-come that the actual book passes over in silence. Huysmans's characters' "confrontation with nothingness" (Brombert 166), the absent subject of their forthcoming novel, may reflect not only the Decadents' tendency to obliterate substance with style, but their shifting of emphasis away from the book to the action of writing the next one. (RZ)