The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892) establishes a lively dialogue with Swinburne and Verlaine, borrowing recognizably decadent strategies to carve out a specifically female and homoerotic space within the movement.
For Gagnier and other scholars, the deepest problems of decadence are political, stemming in particular from the association of the movement with reactionary thinking. The political views of decadent writers can be exceedingly cryptic, but as I have noted, they are not exclusively reactionary, ranging from the anarchist left to the monarchial right, often in the works of a single author. The classic instance is Baudelaire, who swung violently from an early interest in utopian socialism to reactionary conservatism in his later years. Other writers’ political views are similarly problematic. Swinburne cast himself as a defender of classical republican traditions and later became a jingoistic panegyrist of the empire; Huysmans began his career as a socially critical Naturalist, and later became an apologist for an ultraconservative strain of Catholicism; Wilde promoted socialism but also evoked the traditions of the British aristocracy; the French decadent Octave Mirbeau turned from an early conservatism to a later advocacy of anarchism; Gabriele D’Annunzio and Maurice Barrès were drawn to fascism in the twentieth century; Stéphane Mallarmé avoided identifying with any political party. This dizzying array of political convictions might be taken as evidence of ideological incoherence—a political style matching Bourget’s description of decadent literary style—but the decadents found common cause across party lines, seeing themselves as part of a larger movement despite their varying beliefs. As Richard Dellamora his written, “Decadent critique can be directed from liberal, socialist, and/or anarchist perspectives, as well as from conservative or even reactionary ones. Whether from the left or the right, however, decadence is always radical in its opposition to the organization of modern urban, industrial, and commercial society.” 39 The seeming chaos of decadent politics epitomizes the underlying interest in the fate of contemporary communities that writers in the movement shared with mainstream figures such as Bourget or George Eliot, as well as with fin-de-siècle sociologists such as Tönnies and Emile Durkheim. Whatever their explicit political lineage, decadent ideas about community are critical of contemporary society in ways that go beyond traditionalist appeals to blood and land. Indeed, decadent antinationalism takes aim at just this kind of appeal.
Since the eighteenth century, taste has been understood as a kind of embryonic politics. In Friedrich von Schiller’s succinct formulation, “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”40 The feeling for beauty is common to all humans, Schiller argues, transcending partisan interest and political circumstances to unite people sympathetically before they unite politically. Individual acts of judgment connect the subject to a larger community. A number of scholars, informed by Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, have noted that the nineteenth-century state achieved by political means what Schiller imagined in theory.41 The decadents make the politics of taste more explicitly partisan, and more directly critical of the hegemonic aims of the modern state, by investing their appreciative discussions of books, artworks, objects, and other writers with political imagery and ideas. Associating their outsider views about representation with a radical critique of modern social and political formations, they cast Poe as an avatar of republican virtue and treat the contracts formed between decadent teachers and students as parodic versions of the social contract. Baudelaire turns the praise of beauty into an attack on the division of public virtue from private pleasure that follows the establishment of bourgeois hegemony after the Revolutions of 1848. Decadent collections promote an idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan counter to the feverish scholarly activity that consolidated national literary canons in the period. Judgments of taste in these examples are an active site for political commentary, a means by which writers think their way into new forms of community. If decadence seems explicitly to turn away from the public and institutional structures of “politics”—to borrow Chantal Mouffe’s useful distinction—it implicitly addresses the dimension of “the political,” engaging both thematically and stylistically in the conflicts that underlie all social relationships, and that unite or divide communities.42 Decadence is at once a medium for political thought, a vocabulary for criticizing the foundations of liberalism and nationalism, and a method for imagining a community of the future. It would be wrong simply to dismiss the less savory aspects of the movement—its pervasive misogyny, orientalism, and antidemocratic elitism—but it is also wrong to let these attitudes entirely define our sense of the politics of decadence.
The Decadent Republic of Letters traces the emergence and development of a decadent discourse about community and politics from Baudelaire’s early writings to Beardsley’s unfinished novel The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser. As we will see in the first two chapters of the book, Baudelaire set the stage for the decadent movement by charging his discussions of artists, writers, and social types like the dandy with the language and conceptual categories of classical republican theory. In Chapter 1, “ ‘Partisans Inconnus’: Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire,” I find echoes of this theory in a wide range of Baudelaire’s writings. Although he is deeply ambivalent about contemporary republicans, Baudelaire draws upon the language and imagery of the classical republican tradition to comment on the relationship between art and community. Against the individualism and legal formalism of the ascendant bourgeoisie, he defines the production and reception of art and literature as collective acts. Beauty is not an escapist diversion from reality but a public good essential to the workings of the polis, the true res publica of modernity. I follow this idea as it emerges in Baudelaire’s discussion of artistic schools in the Salon de 1846, recurs in his descriptions of quasi-aristocratic “families” of elite readers, viewers, and social performers, and is transformed in the writings on Poe. Informed by the counterrevolutionary writings of the political theorist Joseph de Maistre, Baudelaire characterizes Poe as a martyr who sacrifices himself to a tyrannous American public opinion for the benefit of a sympathetic community devoted to the production and reception of beauty.
In Chapter 2, “The Politics of Appreciation: Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire,” I turn to Baudelaire’s earliest advocates in France and England, who characterize the poet in much the same way Baudelaire had characterized Poe: as a martyr for art and the foundation for a new community of taste. Reading key works of tribute published in the immediate wake of Baudelaire’s death—Gautier’s “Notice” to Les Fleurs du mal and Swinburne’s elegy “Ave atque Vale,” both from 1868—I trace out the ways in which the two writers both preserve and transform the poet’s ideas about community into what I call a “politics of appreciation.” Like Baudelaire, Gautier and Swinburne appeal to the imagery of classical republicanism. Borrowing the form of the Athenian funeral oration, Gautier characterizes Baudelaire as a warrior for beauty and the leader of an emerging countercultural community. He is a keen observer and recorder of modern decadence, who documents the corruption of the Second Empire and defends the rights of outsiders to form their own communities. Swinburne gestures toward the collectivist mythology of the republican city-state. His critical writings, which were deeply influenced by Baudelaire, make the appreciation of neglected figures a crucial responsibility of posterity; the critic posthumously provides the rebellious genius with the kind of sympathetic community he or she was denied while alive. In “Ave atque Vale,” Swinburne appeals to the republican trope of political fraternity to describe his sense of sympathy with Baudelaire, a sympathy founded not on personal interaction (the two writers never met) but on the production and reception of poetry. Gautier and Swinburne profess political beliefs starkly different from Baudelaire’s (and from each other’s), but together they canonize his claim that beauty is a contribution of the public good, and that reading and writing are collective acts analogous to political participation.
Chapters 3 and 4 unearth a long unrecognized decadent critique of nationalism. Decadent writers are highly cosmopolitan