Decadent Temporality
In 1979 Richard Gilman described decadence as âan epithet that relies entirely on the norm it implicitly calls up and points to no substantive conditionâ (Gilman 1979), and others have also concluded that we should understand decadence as a textual and social strategy (Gagnier 1986; Constable, Denisoff, and Potolsky 1999; Stetz 2010). European and most Western terms for âdecadenceâ derive from the Latin de+cadera, meaning to fall away from, and in most traditions decadence is used to mean cultures that have declined from robust civilizations: in the age of modern empires and nation building, Europeans called Ottomans decadent, Latin Americans and Slavs called Europeans decadent, Europe called Rome decadent, France called America decadent. In more internal struggles, dictators and authoritarian regimes attempt to purge decadents from the state or polis. And, using negative stereotypes in a positive, affirmative sense, rebels and revolutionaries often nominate themselves as decadent with respect to the status quo. If literary genres generally designate a temporalityâthe time of fear (Gothic), the time of memory (elegy), the time of the domus (domestic fiction), the time of seasons (pastoral), and so forthâliteratures perceived, or self-nominated, as decadent designate a temporal category of the decline away from established norms. Rather than appear as the last, effete gasp of declining civilizations, Decadent literatures often appear in societies in which local traditions are in contact, and often in conflict, with the forces of modernization, less products of modern Europe and North America than effects in most cultures undergoing similar processes of change.
One of the greatest British critics of decadence, Holbrook Jackson understood this tension or anxiety about change when he described the 1890s, the typically decadent decade in Britain, as âA decade singularly rich in ideas, personal genius and social will,â whose âcentral characteristic was a widespread concern for the correctâthe most effective, most powerful, most righteousâmode of livingâ (Jackson 1914: 12, 17). In The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893) Arthur Symons wrote that it typically appeared at the end of great civilizations, e.g. the Hellenic or Roman, and was characterized by intense self-consciousness, restless curiosity in research, over-subtilizing refinement, and spiritual and moral perversity. It often appeared, he said, as a new and beautiful and interesting disease. In the age of empire, it was obsessed with the local and minute. In the age of Romantic nature, it turned to the mysteries of the urban. In the age of purposiveness, productivity, and reproduction, it was in praise of idleness, critical reflection, sterile contemplation, even sexual excitement largely mental (Symons 1893).
Yet if decadence was, as Symons thought, âa disease of truth,â it was a new and beautiful and interesting disease, often appearing as egoism, feminism, or naturalism in relation to hegemonic forces and norms. It sought out the particular perspective against the dominant whole, studied the details with a dedication to the empirical truth of the senses, and often looked so objectively at the data that it made no evaluative distinction between health and disease. Against the dominant ideology of progress, the decadent saw the pathology of everyday life. Freud became one of the two key philosophers of European Decadence (with Nietzsche) because, contrary to Enlightenment reasonâthe belief in the mindâs ability to discern and act upon oneâs interestsâhe saw that humans were equally subject to irrationality and self-destruction; that subjectivity was based on a relationship with others; and that individualismâthe psychosomatic drive toward self-assertionâwas always confronted with the presence of others. The New Woman writer George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) captured the intellectual spirit of the age in Europeâand this as her protagonist was confronting her loverâwith âI was analysing, being analysed, criticising, being criticisedâ (Nelson 2001: 30).
Decadence by definition is a time of change, a falling away from an experienced organicism into a splintered or factious temporality. In Britain, the fin de SiĂšcle showed the rise of giant corporations, mass production, and consumption, the development and distribution of electrical energy (âiron lilies of the Strandâ meant streetlights in Richard Le Gallienneâs âBallad of Londonâ [1888] where London is the âGreat city of Midnight Sunâ) and aviation and motor vehicles (âever-muttering prisoned storm/ the heart of London beating warmâ in John Davidsonâs âLondonâ [1894]). In Western science, evolution, genetics, and the âNew Physicsâ transformed knowledge of time, life, matter, and space. In politics, the people became the masses in the age of mass parties, mass media, and sport. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896 with the motto of citius, altius, fortius: faster, higher, stronger, proclaiming the dream of progress through competition. These changes gave rise to the concomitant fears of Taylorization, that the individual would be mechanized, routinized, massified. The German Ferdinand Tönnies developed the theory of Gemeinschaft (Community) as distinguished from Gesellschaft (Society) and the French Ămile Durkheim theorized modern societies in terms of anomie and suicide.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 80 percent of the British population were rural; by 1900, 80 percent lived in the cities. Social crowding revealed divisions and ethnicities often against the background of global or imperial economic formations, as with the Irish Literary Renaissance (also known as the Celtic Twilight), and the revival of Cornish, Welsh, and Gaelic languages against the dominant Anglophone. In terms of gender, the perspectives of women became prominent in the so-called New Woman literature, which often counterposed traditional, ideal forms of femininity against modern womenâs worldly perspectives. Menâs and womenâs relationships were said to be âbetween two centuries.â The novelist Thomas Hardy wrote in Candour in English Fiction (1890): âBy a sincere school of Fiction we may understand a Fiction that expresses truly the views of life prevalent in its time. ⊠Life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely concerned with ⊠the relation of the sexes, and the substitution for such catastrophes as favour the false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that âthey married and were happy ever afterâ [by] catastrophes based upon sexual relations as it [sic] isâ (Hardy 1890). New Woman literature is less about womanâs traditional role of reproduction than about the production of creativity and ideas. Babies are more often ideas or symbols, not children in themselves.
Charles Baudelaire summed up the paradoxes of Decadence as early as 1857 (âFurther Notes on Edgar Poeâ) when he described it as a sunset of astonishing illumination, its degenerations turning into generations of new possibility: âThe sun which a few hours ago was crushing everything beneath the weight of its vertical, white light will soon be flooding the western horizon with varied colours. In the changing splendours of this dying sun, some poetic minds will find new joys; they will discover dazzling colonnades, cascades of molten metal, a paradise of fire, a melancholy splendour ⊠And the sunset will then appear to them as the marvellous allegory of a soul, imbued with life, going down beyond the horizon, with a magnificent wealth of thoughts and dreamsâ (Baudelaire 1992: 189).
Global Decadence
The tensions and anxieties of change in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to the most famous European definition of Decadence, first penned by Désiré Nisard in 1834 and taken up by Paul Bourget, Nietzsche, and Havelock Ellis at the fin de SiÚcle, as a decomposition or deformation of the relationship between the part and the whole:
The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing it should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy, and in order that these lesser organisms should themselves perform their functions with energy, it is necessary that the cells comprising them should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well-being, and of heredity. A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word. A decadent style, in short, is an anarchistic style in which everything is sacrificed to the development of the individual parts.
(Ellis 1932: 52 [1889], see Gagnier 2010)
According to this definition, an exemplum of Decadent style is Joris-Karl Huysmansâs description of the Crucifixion in LĂ -Bas (1891). Here the reader is increasingly distanced from the eventâthe holiest moment in Christendomâfirst by the fact that it is mediated through a work of art, Matthias GrĂŒnewaldâs Crucifixion, and then by the heightened artificiality of the language itself, in which âthe unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the wordâ:
Purulence was setting in; the seeping wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealed blackberry juice; a milky pus tinged with pinkish hue, similar to those grey Moselle wines, oozed down the chest and over the abdomen with its rumpled loin-cloth. The knees had been forced together, twisting the shins outwards over the feet which, stapled one on top of the other, had begun to putrefy and turn green beneath the seeping blood. These congealing spongiform feet were terrible to behold; the flesh swelled over the head of the nail, while the toes, furiously clenched, with their blue, hook-like horns, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hand, turning benediction into a curse, as they frantically clawed at the ochre-coloured earth, as ferruginous as the purple soil of Thuringia.
(Huysmans 2001: 3â14 and Gagnier 2010: 170â71)
To introduce such profane stylistic intrusions as âblackberry juice,â âMoselle wines,â âspongiform feet,â and âochre-coloured earth, as ferruginous as the purple soil of Thuringiaâ into the sacred sceneâsuch decompositions or deformations of the relationship between part and whole were characteristic of Decadent literatures of the fin de SiĂšcle.
Offering a survey of diverse literatures from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, this chapter will show that the factors contributing to the rise of the Decadent Movement in France and Englandâthe decline of economic, social, religious, political, ethnic, regional, and gendered traditions under the forces of modernization that disrupted numerous relations of part to wholeâhave had similar effects elsewhere, giving rise to similar literary strategies. Literary decadence did not simply spread from Europe to other countries as a cultural movement, but it arose repeatedly and distinctly in response to changes or crises within various nations and cultures. While many of the writers targeted or self-identified as decadent were familiar with European Decadence, others evidently responded to similar socio-political conditions with similar literary tactics. Even when ostensibly translated from European Decadent authors, translations were creative interventions within their own specific environments, with self-directed goals. In exploring a wide survey of literatures from an extended period of time, our references will often necessarily be cursory; in the early stages of this kind of transcultural research, they are provisionally intended to engage with deeper research in each literary tradition and to foster dialogue on global literatures of decadence.
Most discussions of Decadence at the fin de SiĂšcle begin with ancient Rome in the fifth century, yet Chinese literati were also formulating deviations that they called decadent as early as the sixth century, the late Tang period (Wu 1998; Owen 1992). Praise and blame were the two functions of poetry in ancient China, praise for moral influence and blame for the decadence of the morally fallen state (Zhang Longxi). Under the Confucian system, poetry was cast as sincere expression; its function was to serve the State and its moral and social concerns. Confucians and Daoists valued spontaneity and naturalness and distrusted overly sophisticated speech. Tang Palace Style poetry of the Southern Dynasties, as in Xu Lingâs (507â83) New Songs from Jade Terrace on women at court, showed the poetâs fascination with aesthetic, technical, formal qualities or Wen æ, and was called a decadent literature that had brought down a nation, both for its preoccupation with style and its unconventional subject matter, i.e. women. In âOn Insect Carving,â Pei Ziye (469â530) wrote, âIn ancient times poetry consisted of Four Beginnings and Six Principles. It formed the moral and political atmosphere of the whole nation and displayed the will of gentlemen ⊠Writers of the later age paid attention only to the leaves and branches; they adopted florid style to please themselves ⊠From then on writers followed only the sound and shadow and gave up the correct model ⊠If Jizi heard this he would not have regarded it as the music of a thriving nation; and Confucius would never have taught such poetry to his son. Xun Qing once said that âin a chaotic time the writing is obscure and floridââ (Wu 30â31). The great aesthetician Liu Xie (5th century) wrote of the âDecline from the simple to the pretentious; literary style becomes more and more insipid as it approaches our own timeâ (âWenxin diaolongâ Wu 32). The politician, scholar, and calligrapher Yu Shinan (558â638) wrote, âHis Majesty wrote a poem in the Palace Style and ordered Yu Shinan to match it. He said, âYour Majestyâs poem is indeed artful, but its style is not proper. When a monarch likes certain things, his subjects below will like them in the extreme. I fear that if this poem is passed around, the customs of the entire empire will become decadent. Thus I dare not accept your commandââ (Wu 34). A thousand years later, in Record of the Decadent Chalice (1584) the Ming Minister Wang Shizhen continued to write of âgovernments of the time, retaining ancient names without ancient principles,â concluding that âIf government do not obtain the Way, nothing can be accomplishedâ (Hammond 1998: 36). Wang equally condemned decadent practices such as the improper granting of titles, the political influence of eunuchs, the erosion of the power of the literati (shidafu, Confucian scholar-officials) as arbiters of taste, the distortion of aesthetics by the marketplace, and the four-six style of ornate and flowery language suitable only for slander and flattery. The contemporary Syrian-Lebanese critic AdĆ«nÄ«s (AlÄ« Ahmad SaâÄ«d) writes that it was similar with classical Arabic, in which the Bedouin style was praised for its sincerity above that of the city (AdĆ«nÄ«s 2003).
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