Huysmans’ın Tersine’yi yayınladığı 1884 yılında Fransız edebiyatı başını Zola’nın çektiği doğalcı akımın etkisinde, tek tip edebiyatın hayatın ve olayların oldukları gibi anlatıldığı ultra gerçekçi bir iklimin etkisinde can çekişiyordu ki Huysmans da bu etkinin altındaydı. It occurred to me that this tension within the meaning of the title itself is a good indication of the contents of the novel.

On that day my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white.

Being stuck with Des Esseintes for the whole duration of the book made a change from having so characters that you forget who's who.

Huysmans's next novel, En rade, an unromantic account of a summer spent in the country, did not sell as well as its predecessor. A student of the perfumer's art, Esseintes has developed several devices for titillating his jaded senses.

A Rebour is indeed the poisonous/liberating guide book that Dorian Gray has bound in various colours to suit his moods; the book that Symons described as “the breviary of the decadence. Ogni capitolo diventa occasione per riassumere particolari argomenti del passato, dall’arte delle gemme, dei profumi, dei fiori, di musica, canto, eccetera. Again and again, he tells us that he despises this or that thing because a merchant's wife likes it. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume". And so, of course, we see that they are just as dominated and defined by the culture as the ‘sheep’ they so assiduously mock.