Durtal
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"And by a curious, a bizarre route Durtal, the everlasting Durtal, sought to achieve spiritually — a spirituality a rebours for it was by devil-worship and the study of Gilles de Rais of ill-fame, that he reached his goal."--Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) by James Huneker "'For Sinistrari d'Ameno,' observed Durtal, "'the incubi and succubi are not precisely demons, but animal spirits, intermediate between the demon and the angel, a sort of satyr or faun, such as were revered in the time of paganism, a sort of imp, such as were exorcised in the Middle Ages. Sinistrari adds that they do not need to pollute a sleeping man, since they possess genitals and are endowed with prolificacy.'"--Là-Bas (1891) by Joris-Karl Huysmans |
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Durtal is a recurring fictional character in the work of French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The character debuted in Là-Bas as a thinly disguised portrait of the author himself and would be the protagonist of all Huysmans' subsequent novels: En route, La Cathédrale and L'oblat. The novel sequence depicts Durtal's conversion from Satanism to Catholicism.
Norman Mailer appropriated Durtal to rewrite Là-Bas -- a novel by Huysmans about the first documented serial killer and pratictioner of -- in the noveletteTrial of the Warlock.
