À rebours comme « poème du désert », une anachorèse avortée ?

À rebours: a poem of the desert? In any event, it is a complex novel and unbridled gospel in which the anchorite is pursued by his swarming aesthetic and literary desires. A portrait of Des Esseintes as a failed hermit. An Upper Thebaid or library that draws on mystical literature, the rhetoric of the Desert Fathers from Saint Jerome to the life of Anthony, Christian asceticism and Latin Patrology in a literary exercise that parodies the scriptural dichotomy: writing no longer invigorates, it petrifies.