Decadence – a short introduction
What do we mean when we talk about decadence? There is a mundane sense in which "decadent" is treating yourself to an extra chocolate praline or drinking a glass of champagne on an ordinary Tuesday. That’s not decadence, it's just an ordinary and healthy affirmation of life, I would say. Then there is a more general sense in which decadence stands for decline and decay, not least at the level of civilization: the Roman decadence, i. e. period before the fall of the Roman Empire. We will use the term decadence as a literary and artistic movement around the turn of the 20th century, mainly in France.
What characterizes this movement? There is no distinctive school, no chief ideologist, as is the case, for example, with the contemporary movement naturalism, for which Zola defined the aesthetics. Decadence was rather a pejorative epithet applied to writers by opponents. In 1883, with a book called Essais de psychologie contemporaine, the then influential but now forgotten, literary critic and author Paul Bourget, makes psychologizing readings of five authors, one of whom is the precursor of decadence and its constant source of inspiration: Charles Baudelaire, whom Bourget identifies as decadent. According to Bourget, decadence is an "esprit de négation de la vie", i.e. a fundamental attitude that denies life. Decadence is the state in which an individual, a society, art forms, etc. no longer are in harmony with the world, or life itself. Bourget speaks of a hypersensitivity which means that the individual, in this case Baudelaire, never can settle in the world. He emphasizes that this is a disease that befalls you, not something you actively chooses. Even that which seems most unnatural is given by nature. When the even more influential critic Sainte-Beuve would define Baudelaire's peculiarity, he described it as “a luxurious gazebo built in the middle of an inaccessible and desolate wilderness – only the wilderness is Paris”. It is in this baudelairian gazebo that the decadents made their home.
So, if we are to try to identify some common features, the works of the Decadents are mainly characterized by this weariness of life and decay – moral, physical, civilizational – by a disgust with the present and distrust of all old truths. The old order – guaranteed by the two great powers, the King and the Church – has been lost and the new faith in progress and the emerging capitalist system is not convincing them. In literature, this manifests itself as a taste for the grotesque, the twisted, the ironic, the faded, the perverse, the artificial, the sick, the mannered, the distorted, the erotic (not explicitly, the texts of decadence rarely become pornographic), a sexual charge that is ultimately impotent: a last spasm before civilization is lost.
Decadence did not have a program, but if it did, it would be Paul Verlaine's poem "Letargi" ("Langueur") from the collection Jadis et naguère, published in 1884 (this is a literal translation of the Swedish translation by Elias Wraak, I will include the French original after the text together with a more poetic translation in English):
I am the Empire at the end of decadence watching the barbarians pass by, pale and proud. The poems I write are mere ennui, The dance of sadness is described in shimmering gold. The soul is devastated and suffering has thickened. They say there is a bloody war at our border. What happens when desire has withered and faded? when the flowers have withered from our existence? When you lack the courage to boldly seek death? Empty the chalice! Bathyllos, you must stop laughing ... The chalice is empty! Nothing to say, nothing to understand. Just a ridiculous poem to throw on the fire. Only a runaway slave who has stopped caring. Just a vague boredom that now haunts you.
The poem alludes to the fall of the Roman Empire, and reflects Verlaine’s own time of decline. But it is a static image, the barbarians never come with their new era, the decadent text always lingers in that last moment of dull meaninglessness. In a way, decadence is a reaction to the scientific approach of naturalism; one could see it as a further development of Romanticism, where realism is not concerned with the external, material world but with the inner, spiritual one. The credo of decadence is Baudelaire's: anywhere out of the world (which he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe). Out of the world, towards what, again in Baudelaire's words, can be called the artificial paradises. You get there with the help of drugs, alcohol – and poetry. The major difference to both Romanticism and Naturalism, however, is that the Decadent does not believe in the potential of language either. While the other two movements are fundamentally positive in their approach to language, the decadent feels that it has begun to dissolve – the words are no longer fully attached to what they signify, a rupture that will continue under modernism and find its completion in what we call postmodernism. It is in this way that decadence can be seen as a direct precursor to 20th century literature, it is in this sense that it can appear surprisingly modern. Linguistic categories are not to be trusted: an example of this is the recurring androgynous motif and other more perverted figures transgressing gender borders.
In other aspects, the decadent texts can sometimes feel outmoded. There is a fondness for femme fatales, linguistic ornaments, enigmatic sphinxes, strange plants... it’s an aethstetic too teatrical for the modern mind. One could perhaps summarize the decadence in two images: the first being the biblical princess Salome dancing in the blood of the prophet John the Baptist after asking for his head on a platter and receiving it from the king seduced by her sensual charm; the other the flowers of des Esseintes in what is known as the bible of the decadents, the novel À rebours by J.-K. Huysmans from 1884. These flowers are real flowers chosen because of their artificial look, like orchids made of paper. Nature is at its prime when it appears artificial. Out of the world.
If you are a novice to the texts of decadence, Joris-Karl Huysman's À rebours is the place to start. It is a novel that is nothing like a novel at all. Its protagonist, des Esseintes, is by an inheritance given the opportunity to organize his life in a perfectly aesthetic way. The book is just long lists of what the new home looks like, what art hangs on the walls, what books are on the bookshelf, what flowers, etc ... The famous, slightly more debauched episodes, like the black dinner where all the food is black and served on a black tablecloth by naked negresses in silver stockings, are just at the beginning of the novel before des Esseintes leaves Paris to shut himself up in his artificial twilight world. He is the typical decadent anti-hero: powerless, aristocratic, the last withered branch of a long family tree, unmanly, hypersensitive. The excesses are entirely intellectual, or more precisely, aesthetic. When des Esseintes decides to go on a trip to London, for example, he ends up just going to an English pub next to the French train station. That experience is so perfectly English that it surpasses an actual trip, and des Esseintes returns home, satisfied. The copy transcends the original.
The "no" to a grey and ugly humdrum existence formulated by À rebours has been interpreted as a "yes" to theatrical props and empty gestures, which is not the case, but rather a sincere search for beauty. Sincere and practical: it is a guide to every aspect of one's life: from eating habits to interior design. In this respect, it has a literary-historical value (although this is by no means its only value) as a trendsetter. The essayistic passages were read as shopping lists, previously unknown authors and artists such as the future grand maître of the Symbolists, Stéphane Mallarmé, became famous overnight.
It was, one might say, the starting point of decadence. If we leap forward 15 years, to 1901, we reach its climax and conclusion with Jean Lorrain's novel Monsieur de Phocas. It is, in many ways, far more decadent than À rebours. It is a majestic novel, redolent of opium and ether. It is the story of a depraved nobleman, the Duke de Freneuse (who calls himself Monsieur de Phocas), and his confession. The core of which is the search for a particular shade of green that will redeem him from the maelstrom of madness into which he is about to be drawn.
Monsieur de Phocas is a novel in which nothing is what it seems at first, everyone hides behind a mask – even its author: Jean Lorrain is a pseudonym for Paul Duval. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his duel with Marcel Proust (after a witty denunciation of Proust's debut novel, Les Plaisirs et les jours, in which he argued that Proust was just an untalented socialite who had used his contacts in high society to get published. No one was hurt in the duel). Lorrain's pen was as toxic as it was productive. It had to be, Lorrain came from a family of shipowners in Normandy and had to write to make his living. He was a flamboyant character in turn-of-the-century Paris: openly homosexual, always wearing make-up, violently addicted to drugs (he preferred ether, which was usually inhaled but which he drank, leading to his death), tirelessly curious of new perversions, and preferring to socialize in the demimonde – the half-world of grande horizontales, vaudevillians and semi-criminals. His Monsieur de Phocas is a kind of Gesamtroman: everyone he met, all the places he visited, all the art he saw was incorporated into it. Paris constitutes a world that Lorrain both hates and loves, and this ongoing tension is at the heart of the novel. He loves the glitter, and he despises it. It is the ambiguity of modern man, taken to its extreme in the protagonist de Freneuse.
Next week we will take a closer look at Monsieur the Phocas and how it embodies the spirit of the fin-de-siècle.
“Langueur” by Paul Verlaine Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence, Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse. L’âme seulette a mal au coeur d’un ennui dense. Là-bas on dit qu’il est de longs combats sanglants. O n’y pouvoir, étant si faible aux voeux si lents, O n’y vouloir fleurir un peu cette existence ! O n’y vouloir, ô n’y pouvoir mourir un peu ! Ah ! tout est bu ! Bathylle, as-tu fini de rire ? Ah ! tout est bu, tout est mangé ! Plus rien à dire! Seul, un poème un peu niais qu’on jette au feu, Seul, un esclave un peu coureur qui vous néglige, Seul, un ennui d’on ne sait quoi qui vous afflige ! “Languor” (translated by Gertrude Hall) I am the Empire in the last of its decline, That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass--the while Composing indolent acrostics, in a style Of gold, with languid sunshine dancing in each line. The solitary soul is heart-sick with a vile Ennui. Down yon, they say, War's torches bloody shine. Alas, to be so faint of will, one must resign The chance of brave adventure in the splendid file-- Of death, perchance! Alas, so lagging in desire! Ah, all is drunk! Bathyllus, hast done laughing, pray? Ah, all is drunk--all eaten! Nothing more to say! Alone, a vapid verse one tosses in the fire; Alone, a somewhat thievish slave neglecting one; Alone, a vague disgust of all beneath the sun!