The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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journal Le Décadent, but the term had already circulated for many years before in advanced literary and artistic circles, and underwrote a project that attracted writers from both sides of the English Channel who found common cause in each other’s works.7
Etymologically, decadence means to fall down or from (from the Latin de + cadere). It describes a temporal contrast or comparison. A body, a society, or an artistic form falls away from something prior and better: health, virtue, tradition, and so forth. Eighteenth-century historians such as the baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon adapted this definition to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. In 1834, the French academic critic Désiré Nisard applied the term to literature in his influential study Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poëtes latins de la décadence, arguing that French Romanticism marks a decline of artistic value from the age of Louis XIV, much as the discredited corpus of “decadent” Silver Age Latin poetry marked a decline from the artistic and political unity of the early empire.8 Nisard’s study fixed the constellation of ideas and metaphors literary decadence still evokes today, from the imagery of Roman decline to sensual indulgence, extreme erudition, and linguistic complexity. Writers later in the century deployed the term both to praise and to condemn. Théophile Gautier, as we will see in Chapter 2, used the word to characterize the “maturity” of Baudelaire’s poetry, turning historical belatedness into an artistic virtue. Max Nordau, in his widely read 1892 book Entartung [Degeneration], took the organic metaphor underlying the concept literally, accusing fin-de-siècle writers of laboring under mental and physical debilities. Baudelaire, for his part, mocked critics like Nisard, ironically noting that if decadence is indeed an organic affliction, then poets like him have little choice but to accept their fate: “It is entirely unfair to blame us for accomplishing such a mysterious law.”9
The writers I discuss in this book use the word “decadence” and its familiar associations in a wide range of contexts and toward a variety of ends; more often than not, they regard it with Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s revisionary eye, transforming a term of opprobrium into a means of self-defense or countercultural identification. But I am less interested in tracing these uses in any systematic way than in documenting aspects of the decadent movement that remain obscure even for contemporary readers. Critics since Nisard have characterized decadent writing as if its qualities somehow followed from the definition of the term itself, as if there were certain essential traits that mark a text (or a person, or a historical moment) as decadent. But this reasoning is circular: decadent texts are decadent because they have decadent traits, which can only be discerned by analyzing texts one already assumes (or takes on faith) to be decadent. Not surprisingly, the word and the movement fall apart under scrutiny—as Gilman’s study demonstrates—or hang together in provisional or fundamentally unconvincing ways that must be defended with every new scholarly foray. This fact accounts for the prevailing “introductory” orientation of scholarship on the movement: every scholar of decadence becomes, as it were, a decadent scholar, seeking some fixed point amidst a kaleidoscopic array of names, texts, traits, rival movements, and stylistic gestures.10
I argue in this book, by contrast, that decadence is a consciously adopted and freely adapted literary stance, a characteristic mode of reception, rather than a discernible quality of things or people. It is a form of judgment and a way of doing things with texts. As Richard Le Gallienne perceptively put it in an article from 1892, decadence lies not in a particular theme or style but in “the character of the treatment.”11 Decadent writers sort incessantly through the materials of the cultural past, defining their relationship to others in the movement by collecting disparate themes, tropes, and stylistic manners from around the globe and binding them together according to their peculiar tastes and proclivities. Foregrounding acts of selection, juxtaposition, and critical discernment, they piece together ostentatiously borrowed parts, rather than purporting to create in any traditional sense or according to a clearly delineated doctrine. Reception is for these writers a crucial means of production.
Because it never adumbrated a single, unified doctrine, decadence attracted writers of strikingly various interests and talents, many of whom took up the stance for a time and later moved on to other forms, and even repudiated the movement altogether. The relationship of decadent writers to each another is closer to what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance,” which is marked by “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” than to the overriding unity of purpose that characterizes (at least ideally) a traditional literary group.12 They are united by the things they like and the ways they talk about them. The decadents incessantly drew lines of affiliation back in time and across national borders, declaring their (permanent or provisional) allegiance to the movement by asserting a family resemblance with admired contemporaries or figures from the past. These lines shifted often, even for the same writer at different moments in his or her career. Baudelaire and Poe are constant points of reference; for others, influences as diverse as Pericles, Petronius, Apuleius, Ronsard, Nicolas Chorier, Sade, Blake, Flaubert, Verlaine, and Wagner supplement or even supplant their role. Works are “decadent” not because they realize a doctrine or make use of certain styles and themes but because they move within a recognizable network of canonical books, pervasive influences, recycled stories, erudite commentaries, and shared tastes. Each decadent text borrows from and expands the network, locating itself by reference to the names or books it evokes and leaving its own contributions behind.13
Regarding decadence as an evolving literary stance rather than a fixed set of traits brings into focus a mostly unrecognized vision of cosmopolitan community that pervades the movement. Critics have long argued that the key characteristic of decadent writing is a turn away from the world and the public interest to the interiority of the private self. True to the etymology of the term, decadence deviates from or rejects some norm. It is nihilistic, condemnatory, and destructive, a perverse mirror of the bourgeois individualism it claims to abhor. In his essay on Baudelaire, Bourget describes decadent societies as organisms in which the “cells” no longer work together in the interest of the whole; such societies “produce too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life.” Decadent style exemplifies this social atomization: “A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to make way for the independence of the page, the page is decomposed to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the independence of the word.”14 Nordau sees the decadent as a willful deviant, “an ordinary man with a minus sign,” suffering from a “mania for contradiction,” which only masks his fundamental conformism: “The ordinary man always seeks to think, to feel, and to do exactly the same as the multitude; the decadent seeks to do exactly the contrary.”15 More recently, George C. Schoolfield characterizes the decadent as a besieged elitist, who “regards himself as being set apart, more fragile, more learned, more perverse, and certainly more sensitive than his contemporaries.”16 Other recent critics have treated decadence more positively as a form of cultural critique, but they effectively define the movement in the same terms as Bourget and Nordau do. Charles Bernheimer writes, for example, that decadence entails both an appeal to and a subversion of accepted norms; it is “inhabited by a doubleness that puts fundamental moral and social values in question.”17 Most famously exemplified by Wilde’s epigrammatic deconstructions of received wisdom, decadent opposition here becomes strategic, an overturning of bourgeois ideology through parody, paradox, and subversive appropriation. The decadent, however, is still a nihilistic outsider who rejects social belonging out of disgust with the bourgeoisie.
I argue in this book that decadent writing, so long associated with isolation, withdrawal, and nihilistic repudiation, is in fact preoccupied with communities. The fin-de-siècle literary and intellectual world was a ferment of burgeoning countercultures. Avant-garde writers rubbed shoulders and shared the pages of journals with anarchists, socialists, utopians, Uranians, feminists, spiritualists, and radical vegetarians. Although they did not always agree with the goals of all of these activists, the decadents regarded themselves as a part of the broader counterculture, and participated in its efforts to imagine new forms of affiliation and sociality.18 Decadent withdrawal is always collective, a ritualized performance of what Regenia Gagnier calls “creative repudiation.”19 Ostentatiously breaking