The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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a new and more amenable imagined community, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, composed of like-minded readers and writers scattered around the world and united by the production, circulation, and reception of art and literature.20 The decadents produced a remarkable number of collective manifestos and literary journals, but their interest in community is most powerfully evident in the themes and subjects of decadent writing, which look decisively beyond the frame of any localized national coterie to new and radically international frameworks for sociocultural belonging. Decadent writers were fascinated with the creation and destruction of communities. They were drawn to martyrs, who die publicly for a persecuted group, and drew stories and political concepts from moments of historical transition (late antiquity, the end of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century) marked by underground movements, revolutionary collectives, and secret societies. Decadent texts describe a striking range of quasi-utopian communities and promote new ideas about affiliation in the ways they address their readers. Significantly overlapping with the emerging gay and lesbian countercultures, decadence also provided a medium for writers to define communities united by sexual dissidence and nonnormative desires. The imagined community of other decadents provides writers from Baudelaire to Aubrey Beardsley with a coherent position from which to criticize contemporary political arrangements and to define the possibility of new ones.
Take, for example, an undated list of titles Baudelaire put together for a prospective monthly literary review. This list may have been written as early as 1852, when he drafted a proposal for a journal called Le Hibou philosophe [The Philosopher Owl], or as late as 1861, when the future decadent Catulle Mendès was launching his own journal, the Revue fantaisiste, and frequently sought Baudelaire’s advice. A number of titles on the list evoke stereotypically decadent images of isolation and retreat from the world: “L’Oasis,” “L’Hermitage,” “La Citerne du Désert [The Cistern of the Desert],” La Thébaïde, “Le Dernier Asyle de Muses [The Last Refuge of the Muses].” Another group of titles, however, describes communities or principles of affiliation: “Le Recueil de ces Messieurs [The Collection of These Gentlemen],” Les Bien Informés [The Well-Informed], Les Hermites volontaires [The Willing Hermits], Les Incroyables [The Incredible Ones]. Another title, Les Ouvriers de la dernière heure [Workers of the Final Hour], alludes to a parable of Jesus (Matthew 20:1–16)—better known in English as the parable of the workers in the vineyard— that concerns the mysterious nature of election (OC I, 53). Yet another, which Mendès adopted in 1875 for his most successful literary review, makes the underlying communal spirit of Baudelaire’s list manifest: “La République des Lettres.”21 The Enlightenment Republic of Letters was a loosely organized international group of writers and intellectuals who defined themselves as a polity apart, devoted to finding alternative models of affiliation and political order. Although the “citizens” of this republic lived under the rule of monarchs, they enacted the classical republican ideal of civic humanism and political participation on the page rather than within the borders of the kingdom.22 Working under the modern absolutism of the French Second Empire, Baudelaire resurrects this ideal in his list of titles, imagining a similarly international community of sympathizers brought together by writing and by a collective sense of alienation.
The communal ideals pervading Baudelaire’s list suggest that the overwhelming critical focus on decadence as decline, deviation, parody, and subversion distorts the most significant aims of the movement. This is true of the themes and stories to which decadent writers are drawn and the styles in which they tell them. Careful study of decadent texts reveals their ingenious reversals of social and artistic norms, but it is difficult for even a casual reader to miss the role of encomium, tribute, and eulogy in decadent writing. Decadent characters lavish praise on their favorite books and paintings, swoon over purple passages from decadent classics, launch panegyrics for ideas despised by the bourgeoisie, contemplate with great admiration the perversities of Nero and Caligula, or punctiliously follow the lessons of their decadent masters. Baudelaire composes long and fulsome dedications to his works, defends abused or misunderstood artistic figures, eulogizes the lost Paris of his memory, and lauds the use of cosmetics or the musical strains of flies surrounding a rotting corpse. Conversely, but within the same discursive register, he vituperates popular artists and writes venomous sonnets to his lovers. Wilde’s Salomé is composed almost entirely of expressions of appreciation or condemnation. The play opens with the Young Syrian’s praise of Salomé’s beauty, while Salomé herself addresses John with elaborate and starkly alternating words of praise and blame.
The rhetorical term for this mode of discourse is epideictic. Most critical writing is broadly epideictic, but decadent writers make the extremes of praise and blame central to both their critical and their poetic techniques. These techniques are not just a matter of individual temperament but a deliberate rhetorical choice, a way in which decadent writers appeal to an imagined community of sympathetic readers and writers by foregrounding the act of reception. The enthusiasm for the bizarre or recherché so often expressed in decadent texts carries a submerged communal element, embodying, as Kant noted about all judgments of taste, the liking of the perceiving subject along with an imperative for others to assent to the judgment. Just as Baudelaire admires Poe and Wagner for their insight into the failings of modernity or the transformative powers of art, so later decadent writers discover in the figures they praise (above all Baudelaire) a subversive, utopian, or nostalgic alternative to the present order. The reading of decadence as oppositional casts the decadent writer as a bitter outsider, condemning mass society in the name of a wounded individualism; the epideictic mode, by contrast, inscribes the decadent in a community of interest.23 The decadents were arguably the first literary group to realize the now-familiar, even banal association of subcultural affiliation with taste—the sense of attachment felt not by virtue of national origin or religious affiliation but through a liking for certain cultural forms. Expressions of enthusiasm, sympathy, and intellectual friendship are the coin of the realm in the decadent republic of letters.
Recent theorists of community have sought to think beyond existing political practices by looking toward what Giorgio Agamben calls the “coming community.” Against communal bonds defined by blood, territory, language, and the opposition of friend and enemy that Carl Schmitt placed at the heart of political association, this sense of community registers the bare experience of belonging or being-in-common. Rather than comprising an essential identity, totalizing communion, or stable distinction between insider and outsider, it is a bond, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “that forms ties without attachments, or even less fusion … that unbinds by binding, that reunites through the infinite exposition of an irreducible finitude.”24 In their effort to imagine a community founded on admiration and the exchange of texts, the decadents anticipate this project. They describe community as a dispersed phenomenon arising out of discrete moments of artistic production and reception, an almost utopian sense of belonging forged across space and time. It is not a completed “work” but a series of encounters and sensations. To play on Walter Benjamin’s well-known formulation, rather than aestheticizing politics, they find special political significance in the practices of reading and writing.25
Modern communitarian theory is closely associated with left and liberal intellectuals, but over the course of the nineteenth century a range of political groups laid claim to the language of community, from utopian socialists writing in the wake of the French Revolution—whose theories of association would influence Baudelaire—to far-right nationalists and traditionalists.26 Against the impersonal networks, state institutions, and mass movements of what Ferdinand Tönnies called the modern Gesellschaft (society), socialists and traditionalists alike sought to define a more intimate, if always vanishing or incipient, Gemeinschaft (community).27 Some decadent writers were drawn to utopian socialism, while others looked to anarchism, and still others cast their lot with reactionary Catholicism or (later in their careers) fascism.28 Regardless of the politics of their authors, however, the communities I find in decadent texts are radically open and aleatory, almost to the point of nonexistence, their members bound only by a shared sense of participation in a decadent republic of letters. Decadent communities embody what Ernst Bloch has described as the “anticipatory illumination”—an imaginary insight into real possibilities for social and political transformation gleaned from fictional worlds.29 Pushing the notion of community to a conceptual breaking point, the decadents produce