IL DECADENTISMO

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While, for one reason or another, the literary labels of "de cadence" or "decadentism" were either narrowed down to a strictly limited historical sense (the 1880s in France, the late Victorian period illustrated by writers like Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, etc.. in England), or simply dropped by most West European

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schools of criticism, the Italians seem to have reached early in the century some kind of a consensus with regard to the application of the two related notions, and have since gone on utilizing them and speculating about them. Today decadentismo constitutes one of the major historical and aesthetic categories of Italian literary scholarship, comparable in complexity and scope with such concepts as romanticism, naturalism, or modernism. In the introduction to his anthology Il decadentismo e la critica (1963), Riccardo Scrivano proposes a periodization of the development of decadentismo in Italian criticism, one that is helpful for the broadly expository purposes of this essay.

There are, according to Scrivano, three main phases in the evolution of the concept: (1) The first period starts at the turn of the century, when the term decadentismo was used in connection with contemporary European and especially French literature (as in Vittorio Pica's Letteratura d'eccezione, published in 1898), and ex tends to the early 1920s. During this time span the most important critical pronouncements on decadentismo are those of Benedetto Croce, whose negative attitude toward the "voluptuous refinements" and "animal sensuousness" of the international decadent movement is expressed in various essays and articles collected in the six volumes of La letteratura della nuova Italia, in Poesia e non poesia (first published in 1923), Poesia antica e moderna, etc. (2) The beginning of the second phase is marked by Francesco Flora s treatment of decadence in his book Dal romanticismo al futurismo (1921). Although still a highly controversial concept, decadentismo tends to be regarded increasingly as a natural outgrowth of romanticism. Undergoing a broad process of historicization, the concept gradually loses its negative connotations. The second phase ends with the clear-cut rejection of the old moralistic condemnation of decadence as aesthetic pathology. The new attitude toward decadentismo is represented by Walter Binni's Poetica del decadentismo (1936). (3) The third and last phase, starting in the late 1930s and still continuing, is characterized, according to Scrivano,

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by diverse attempts to link the "cultural and literary experience of decadentismo to social and political phenomena. "106

The notion of decadentismo, insofar as it is a distinctive category of Italian criticism, evolved largely as a reaction against Croce s insistent denunciation of modern decadence in literature and the arts. But Croce's approach to the question of decadence and decadentism, while almost totally negative, is often more complex and insightful than most of his philosophical adversaries would care to admit, and in some cases it clearly anticipates certain fruitful avenues of reflection. That is why it is probably safe to say that Croce is to a great extent responsible for the important role the concept of decadentism has played in twentieth-century Italian criticism and aesthetics. After all, this is not the first time in intellectual history that a powerful personality, by inspiring even an intensely negative reaction, has shaped a whole movement of ideas.

Croce's definition of decadentismo oscillates between a general aesthetic view of the matter of decadence (a view that equates de cadence with Art for Art's Sake, formalism, or aestheticism'07) and a more specific historical approach, which looks at the modern de cadent movement as a direct product of romanticism.'08 Consistent with his cult for aesthetic fullness. Croce rejects not only decadentism but romanticism at large, the latter being held responsible for the deep crisis in art, which constitutes the outstanding characteristic of modernity. A comprehensive statement of Croce's recurrent and unyielding antiromanticism is found in his article on "Aesthetics" written for the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

            But the chief problem of our time, to be overcome by aesthetics, is connected with the crisis in art and in
            judgments upon art produced by the romantic period. . The crisis of the romantic period, together with
            sources and characteristics peculiar to itself, had a magnitude of its own. It asserted an antithesis between
            naive and sentimental poetry, classical and romantic art, and thus denied the unity of art and asserted a
            duality of two fundamentally different arts, of

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            which it took the side of the second, as that appropriate to the modern age, by upholding the primary
            importance in art of feeling, passion and fancy.... Later, it was thought that the disease had run its course and
            that romanticism was a thing of the past; but though some of its contents and some of its forms were dead,
            its soul was not: its soul consisting in this tendency on the part of art toward an immediate expression of
            passions and impressions. Hence it changed its name but went on living and working. It called itself "realism,"
            "verism, symbolism," "artistic style," "impressionism." "sensualism," 'imagism," "decadentism," and nowadays,
            in its extreme forms, "expressionism and "futurism."... The tendency to destroy the idea of art is a
            characteristic of our age; and this tendency is based on the proton pseudos which confuses mental or
            aesthetic expression with natural or practical expression—the expression which passes confusedly from
            sensation to sensation and is a mere effect of sensation. with the expression which art elaborates, as it builds,
            draws. colours or models, and which is its beautiful creation. The problem for aesthetics to-day is the
            reassertion and defence of the classical against romanticism: the synthetic, formal theoretical element which is
            the proprium of art, as against the affective element which it is the business of art to resolve into itself, but
            which to-day has turned against it and threatens to displace it.

As we see, romanticism—by whatever name it calls itself—is the modern disease and the starting point of all decadence. Such a sweeping condemnation of romanticism reminds us, among others, of Nisard, and it turns out that Croce actually admired the author of Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la de cadence. 109

It should be noted that Croce distinguishes between decadenza (decadence proper) and decadentismo. Decadenza is a more general notion; it denotes decay in all walks of life—moral, political, religious, and artistic decadence are taken together as implying each other. 110 Decadentismo has a specialized aesthetic-historical mean ing and it refers to various postromantic schools, movements, or "isms." In an essay dating from 1919 ("La storia delle arti figurative"), Croce speaks of a new direction that he characterizes as decadentistica and that he sees as subsuming such movements as

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"impressionism," "cubism." "futurism, "111 that is, movements that considered themselves avant-garde.

Like the baroque. with which it has numerous points in com mon, decadentism is for Croce a concrete historical form of eternal aesthetic "sinfulness or even, more generally, of human "sinful ness" (". . . Un peccato estetico, ma anche tin peccato umano, e universale e perpetuo, come tutti i peccati umani"). 112 However, while believing that true poetry is essentially unclassifiable and implicitlv ahistorical or transhistorical, Croce tends to consider "artistic perversions in rather precise historical terms, as if universal evil could manifest itself artistically only in and through history. Thus, for him, the baroque heresy dominates Europe from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century;113 as for decadentism. it is an outgrowth of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century romanticism, and has exerted its increasingly obnoxious influence since the middle of the nineteenth century. That is why, referring to a poet like D'Annunzio—the unanimously recognized prototype of Italian decadentismo—one may be entitled to point out numerous traits of' barocchismo in his works, but only when one has first realized that a D'Annunzio could have emerged only after romanticism and other related movements."4 While historical labels can tell us nothing about the nature of great poetic works, they are justifiable and eyen necessary when we deal with aesthetic diseases or aberrations. Croce historicizes the concept of decadentism only to reject all that it stands for.

Although he frequently used the term and the critical concept of decadentismo. Croce never analyzed it (as he did the baroque) in a more systematic fashion. The first such analysis was attempted by Francesco Flora in 1921. In his book Dal roma nticismo alfuturismo, whose first chapter deals. significantly, with romantic decadence ("La decadenza romantica"), Flora discusses a variety of historical and stylistic aspects of what he calls the "age of decadentism" (aes theticism. sensuousness of the poetic word, fragmentarisin in poetry, etc. ). Other critics and literary historians of the 1920s feel

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attracted to the theme of literary decadence. Luigi Russo, for in stance, in his 1922 book Narratori, examines the decadent prose of such writers as D'Annunzio, Fogazzaro, and Oriani, noting that while romanticism had been wholly nationalistic (Manzoni), decadentism manifested an opposite, "Europeanizing" tendency."5

The new concept of decadentism as a continuation of certain profound and aesthetically legitimate trends of romanticism is central to Mario Praz's important book La came, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930), translated into English under the title The Romantic Agony (1933). Praz's approach is directly and indirectly polemical with regard to Croce's conception of literature, which is based on a rigid metaphysical distinction between classicism and romanticism, a distinction that implies the severe condemnation (on ultimately moral grounds) of both romanticism and decadentism. Praz refuses to see decadentism as an exacerbation of the romantic sense of crisis; in his view, decadentism is wholly contained in romanticism and both are concrete historical forms of taste, which, as such, do not have to be justified by any transcendental or extrinsic criteria. That is, romanticism and decadentism—the latter being simply an aspect of the former—are aesthetically as legitimate as classicism or any other historical form of taste. But Praz goes much further: in "Byzantium," the last chapter of his book, he offers what I believe to be the most complete and sensitive description to that date of decadentism as an international phenomenon, observed in three major Western literatures, French, English, and Italian.

During the 1920s and l930s, as a result of the insights of Flora, Russo, Praz, and others, the notion of decadentismo becomes a category of literary history and criticism purified of both pejorative and approbative connotations. The new status of the term is as sessed by XValter Binni in the introduction to his Poetica del decadentismo. Decadentism, Binni points out, "should be seen as an historical phenomenon manifested concretely in single poetic indi vidualities," as a "poetic climate" that does not imply any predetermined value approach. In other words, decadentism has produced,

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like other artistic movements, major and minor writers. "In brief," Binni concludes, "for us the label 'great decadent poet' does not sound more equivocal or absurd than the label 'great romantic poet. 116

The concept that forms the basis of Binni's poetics of decadentism is significantly broader than the one that emerged from the late nineteenth-century French discussion of decadence. The central element in his decadentismo is the philosophic-aesthetic no tion of decadence, which operates in Nietzsche's critique of Wagner and, more generally, in his analysis of West European modernity. For Binni. "the three legitimate fathers of decadentism are Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner. "117 Seen in this light, the major developments in French poetry since Baudelaire appear as specifically decadent, and figures like Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlane, the symbolistes, and Valery become actual cornerstones in Binni's attempt to reconstruct the poetics of decadentism, that is, to discover the structural principles and aspects of decadentism's poetic self-consciousness. It may be worthwhile to recall here that by the 1930s French criticism had almost completely abandoned the notion of decadence and, as shown earlier, applied the epithet de cadent only to a small group of minor writers of the 1880s. By the same time, critics in other Western countries had come to refer to what the Italians were calling decadentisimo by a variety of other names—the enlarged version of modernismo in the Hispanic world (as used by Federico de Onis), "modernism" in the English- speaking world, etc.

The Italian preference for decadentismo and the subsequent enrichment of this concept can be explained, aside from the enormous influence of Croce and the complex reaction it provoked, by the historical coincidence between the Italians' discovery of the great innovative trends in post-Baudelairean French poetry and the strong impact of Nietzsche's philosophy, with its tragic dialectic and its identification of modernity and decadence. Through Nietzsche, the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner at the turn of the century, as it exerted itself on, among others, D'Annunzio, also came to

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be seen as typically decadent. Nietzsche himself, perceived as a highly controversial thinker, became, more than a theorist, a repre sentative of decadentism. If such an obstreperously avant-garde movement as futurism was declared decadentistic not only by adversaries like Croce but also by objective critics like Binni and many others, this was due in part to the adoption by the futurists of certain superficially understood Nietzschean ideas—"vivere pecicolosa mente," the affirmation of life against history, the cult of violence and war, etc. I would venture to say that the terminological choice of decadentisrno itself was determined primarily by the influence of Nietzsche, and only secondarily by that of Nietzsche's own French sources.

Binni's Poetica del decadentismo, although recognizing that there is a relationship between romanticism and decadentism, is, unlike Praz's Romantic Agony, interested in stressing the differences between the two rather than the similarities. The fundamental thesis of Binni is summarized in the observation that "between romanticism and decadentism there is the distance that separates the violent affirmation of the self from its more refined analysis. "118 As a culture of subjectivity, decadentism implies an expansion of the self beyond its traditionally established boundaries, and the "refined analysis" of which Binni speaks clearly entails the pursuit of the self in its venturesome discovery of the unconscious. in this sense, there is an intriguing parallelism between the development of literary decadentism and the appearance and evolution of modern psychoanalysis."119 Such analogies, by which the aesthetic concept of decadentism is expanded to embrace and ac count for more general characteristics of intellectual modernity. point to the speculative inclination of twentieth-century Italian criticism as a whole, an inclination confirmed, among other things, by the fact that initially artistic notions such as decadentismo could be readily adopted and applied to nonartistic matters by cultural critics and even philosophers. The latter case is illustrated by Norberto Bobbio's book, La filosofia del decadentisimo (1944), in which decadentism

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is identified with irrationalism in philosophy and specifically with existentialism. 120

From the 1930s on, decadentismo has been a constant theme of discussion in Italian criticism. Luigi Russo and Francesco Flora'2' developed and refined their early insights into the question of decadentism, and a large number of other critics—among them Luciano Ancesehi and A. Momigliano—contributed to the enrichment of the concept along aesthetic or cultural-historical lines. After World War II, two major factors have had a direct influence on the continuing debate around decadentism. First, the fall of Fascism and the ensuing sense of liberation stimulated a renewal of Italy's interest and participation in European cultural life, as a result of which, on a literary plane. the major representatives of Western modernism— Proust. Mann. Joyce, Kafka, etc.—enjoyed a wider diffusion and became starting points of new and fruitful critical explorations. Interestingly. these authors were usually studied within the framework of the concept of decadentismo. and as a natural consequence of such applications the concept itself had to undergo a subtle process of redefinition. For all practical purposes, today's decadentismo is a near-perfect synonym for our modernism, and a recent expository study such as Elio Gioanola's Il decadentismo (1972) might be taken by an English reader, if its would-be translator were to replace decadentismo by "modernism, as one more introduction to literary modernism.'22 The second postwar development with direct bearing on the question of decadentismo has been the emergence in Italy of a strong school of Marxist criticism.

Although occasionally the Italian Marxist interpretation of decadentism. especially during the 1950s, was unavoidably trapped in the simple-minded schematism of the Zhdanovist view of de cadence. it was on the whole protected from the dangers of vulgar Marxism by the fact that the concept of decadentismo had already reached, as a result of the attack on Croce's aesthetic idealism, a degree of subtlety and complexity that no serious critic could possibly ignore. Also, the treatment of literary problems in Antonio

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Gramsci's posthumous writings—the Quaderni del carcere—offered Italian Marxists an example of sociological and political analysis of literature that had little if anything to do with the strident slogans and cliches of the postwar official cultural line of Stalinism.123 With regard to decadentismo, there are sometimes wide differences of opinion between individual Italian Marxists—and this is refreshing when we think of the painful uniformity of the Soviet ideological orthodoxy, which, as we have seen, has not revised its position vis-a-vis "bourgeois decadence" even after Stalin's death and the condemnation of the "personality cult."

Whether decadentismo appears as a broader or narrower historical period, whether it is seen as comprising the avant-gardes or as being distinct from them, whether it is identified with one or another particular aspect or phase of modernity, the Italian Marxist and, more generally, sociologically-oriented critics—I have in mind such critics as Giuseppe Petronio, Carlo Salman, Leone de Castris—tend to agree on certain fundamental issues, and in the first place on the link between decadentismo and a consciousness of crisis. Even though its premises can be wrong, or false, or "mythical," decadentism is redeemed, and not only aesthetically, by the intense experience of the sense of crisis from which it originates. According to de Castris (Decadentismo e realismo [1959]), decadentism contains even the possibility of a new realism, a realism of inner life, of consciousness, interested primarily in the sell' that experiences the crisis and less in the naturalistic representation of the milieu.'24 Even a critic like Salinari, who is closer to Marxist "orthodoxy," and who defines decadentism as a "spiritualistic reaction within the context of the last progressive manifestation of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought, positivism," that is, as a negative phenomenon, recognizes that decadentism also has positive notes:

            Certainly, this reaction corresponded to an involutive process which affected the whole of European society
            and which brought about the drama of the First World War. But, on the other hand, this same reaction
            resulted in the separation from the ruling class of many

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artists who openly adopted an attitude of opposition. The conscious ness of crisis, the solitude of the artist severed from his natural historical humus, the despair of modern man are the great themes through which artists of various nations become aware of their alienation from contemporary society."'

Such a view is clearly a far cry from the official Soviet Marxist theory of decadentism as a direct and utterly obnoxious manifesta tion of bourgeois ideology. The actual nature of decadentism is infinitely more complex, contradictory, and intellectually challenging. The Italian Marxists were confronted with an aesthetically and his torically sophisticated concept of decadentismo and, with few exceptions, they felt obliged to deal with it objectively and to pay attention to nuances and subtle, but essential, details.