CHAPTER TWO: DECADENT FICTION
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In 1884 two novels were published in Paris that embody two different ways of
viewing decadence in prose fiction. Both Joris Karl Huysmans's A rebours
and Josephin Peladan's Le vice supreme would meet most definitions of decadence.
Both take up themes of social and physical decay and examine sexual and
psychological perversities in detail. In both, women are destructive and art is
a debilitating obsession. Beneath what energies the characters exhibit is an
alluring nihilism that confuses idealism and morbidity. But aside from certain
common subjects and trappings, the two novels are profoundly different—not
only in their social and aesthetic assumptions but also in their styles.
Despite objections that style is an inexact way of defining Decadence, it is
only by founding the term on a concept of style that it can be useful in
aesthetic discourse. From this point of view, the two novels I have mentioned
represent two different concepts of decadent
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fiction. A rebours is a Decadent novel. Its themes and characters are typical of
the Decadent world view, but more importantly, its style embodies Decadent
aesthetic assumptions. It derives from the natty Romanticism of Gautier, the
gritty reporting of Zola's Natu ralism, and Flaubert's yoking of idealism and
Realism.1 It leads on to Wilde, D'Annunzio, Mirbeau, Lorrain, and, rather
surprisingly, Rilke.
Le vice supreme, which is only the first in a long series of novels called La
decadence latine, is a novel of decadence. To suggest, as George Ross Ridge
does, that French decadence is "simply the literature of this period which
implicitly or explicitly reflects the general obsession with social, political,
moral decadence," is of little use in making aesthetic distinctions.2 Many
themes are common to various styles of writing in the eighties and nineties,
which are, in other ways, quite different. Thus, although it is true, as Mario
Praz says, that "Peladan's work is a veritable encyclopedia of the
Decadents," an interest in such subjects as hereditary degeneracy,
androgyny, the art of Gustave Moreau, and the music of Richard Wagner does not
therefore make Peladan a Decadent artist, for these subjects appear in
Naturalist, Realist, and Symbolist writings as well and were also topics for
investigation by social historians and scientists of the time.3 Whatever
adjective one applies to his bizarre personal career, Peladan is not a Decadent
but a conventional writer. He pays little attention to craft; cliches are
welcome and commonplaces commonplace. His narrative, though neither slick nor
subtle, is essentially linear, a chronological record linked by strong
incidents, strange reyelations, and dramatic reversals. Peladan's characters are
spared from becoming Gothic stereotypes by an infusion of modern perversity, but
even the most forceful of them, such as Leonora d'Este and Merodack, are masks
for thematic purposes. Powering the machinery of the plot are supernatural
assumptions bearing a strong relationship to Symbolist aspirations and beliefs
that were the basis of Peladan's Order of the Rose + Croix. These spiritual
assumptions can be traced to the popular Swedenborgism of the cen tury and, in
fiction, to Balzac's trilogy, Recherche de l'absolu.4 Al though it treats themes
and discusses issues familiar in Decadent works of art, Peladan's novel is
traditional and represents a judg ment upon, not a manifestation of, decadence.
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Peladan's fiction of decadence is related to the novels of "Ra childe"
(Marguerite Eymery), such as Monsieur Venus (1884) and La sanglante ironie
(1891), though her style is said to resemble her femmes nietzcheenes in "la
force, la nettete, la sobriete, la vivacite. "5 Others who wrote of
decadence were Catulle Mendes and Elemir Bourges. The latter's Le crepuscule des
dieux (1884) is in a special category that deals with the decline of families,
in this case a noble one. The novel begins in 1866 on the birthday of Charles
d'Este, duke of Blankenbourg; Wagner is directing music from his own Tannhduser
and Die Valkyrie for the event. The duke is called away when he learns that
Prussian forces have entered his duchy, a prelude to Prussian hegemony that
would, in 1871, become the German empire. At the end of the novel, after
numerous perverse and violent events, Duke Charles is attending a performance at
Bayreuth ten years later. He reflects upon the change in his life.
Et comme a
cette voix amere de la Norme du passe, le Duc songea soudain
de dix annees
en arriere; il se revit A Blanken bourg. Alors, c'etait lui que ion
acclamait,
lorsqu'il entrait dans une loge de theatre; la bassesse, les adulations,
les adora
tions rampaient A ses pieds. Mais ces jours enivrants de son regne
n'avaient
servi quA preparer les plus cruel maiheurs de toutes sortes, jusqu' A
precipitier
enfin ce maitre se grand et si absolu dans un abime d'impuissance et
de neant. Ah!
trois fois nefaste cette aube glacee ou ii avait quitte Wendessen,
aban donne
son beau duche quil ne devait jamais plu revoir! Au moment de
monter en
berline, il avait demande A Wagner le titre du dernier opera de
L'Anneau du
Niebelung:
"Le
Crepuscule des Dieux, Monseigneur Et comme si cette parole eut contenu
quelque
malediction, de ce jour avait commence, pour le Duc, le lent et
sombre
crepuscule de sa vie.
(And like
that bitter voice of the past Order the Duke dreamed suddenly of ten
years ago; he
lived again at Blankenbourg. Then he was the one acclaimed
when he
entered the loge of the theater; abasements, adulations, adorations
groveled at
his feet. But the intoxicating days of his reign hadn't served to
prepare for
very cruel evils of all sorts when the great and absolute master fell
into an abyss
of impotence and nothingness. Ah, thrice unlucky that icy dawn
when he left
Wendessen, abandoning his beautiful
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duchy that he
would never see again! As he entered the coach he had asked
Wagner the
title of the last opera of The Ring of the Nibelung:
"The
Twilight of the Gods," my lord. And as though those words had
contained
some malediction, from that day began for the Duke the lingering
and somber
twilight of his life.)6
The novel ends with the duke's will requesting that a monument like the Scaligeri memorial in Verona be erected to his memory.
The history of family decline became a common subject, especially in German fiction.7 Max Brod's Schloss Nornepygge (1908) is an interesting example. The novel opens with a gathering of sophisticated men who wish to overcome the conventions of fiction. They are members of a club whose principal rule is that nothing obvious may be discussed. The novel consists of a series of political and aesthetic incidents and ends with the bleak pessimism and death of the young aesthete Walder Nornepygge. Many other writers in Ger many and Austria took decadence as a topic, including Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, and Thomas Mann, though Mann's, as we shall see, was a special case. Very often these writers are highly critical of their subjects, as Schnitzler is in his dramatic series, Anatol (1893), which describes the familiar effete type. But even when they are sympathetic, what sets them off from Decadent art is their style, which is normally entirely conventional.
In contrast, Huysmans's A rebours is a Decadent novel.8 It is luxuriously
composed, consisting not of a traditional unified narrative but of a sequence of
set pieces, elaborations upon such related topics as gems, perfumes, flowers,
art works, Anglophilia, and so forth. Huysmans examines his central character's
sensibility with the loving fascination of a Narcissus gazing into a compact. He
reveals character through ornament and decoration rather than through plot
complication. Des Esseintes is as stylized in fiction as he wishes life to be in
fact. He is an embodiment less of a living type than of an aesthetic ideal.
Although Des Esseintes seems to revel in sin and de cay, at bottom he yearns for
purity. He is tantalized by the faith he cannot seize and repelled by the
commercialism and banality of the modern bourgeoisie that drive him back in
spirit to an older, more primitive, and therefore presumably simpler, time,
though he can-
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not hide his scepticism about that ideal time. He is an idealist seek ing to
enact ideals he does not fully trust, a pessimist who cannot fully reject a
world he despises. His is the longing and dismay of sustained frustration. The
mental irritation that motivates Des Es seintes is also an aspect of Huysmans's
style, designed to intrigue the reader and reproduce in him the state of
exacerbation pictured in Des Esseintes. Style communicates the virus of
discontent and provocation to the half-suspecting reader, only half-suspecting
because the perversities and passions recounted in the narrative are frozen and
constrained by the seemingly antiseptic ornateness and eccentricity of the
manner in which they are conveyed.
Only the strain of fiction following from Huysmans is properly Decadent, though there is a middle region occupied by novels that, although closely allied to the Decadent novel and containing features of the novel of decadence, consciously stand apart from either. The best of this type are represented in novels by Andre Gide and Thomas Mann. Of course, all boundaries blur when we talk about classifications among works of art, yet certain distinctions are not only possible but useful. Like other forms of Decadent art, the Decadent novel, which derives from Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) and Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), exhibits an apparent atomization unified by an occult or ostensibly insignificant pattern of themes or motifs. It depends upon a sustained tension of anticipation culminating in an incomplete or unsatisfying conclusion. The subjective quality of the narrative, generally focusing upon the emotions and thoughts of a single, intensely sensitive character, is counterbalanced by elaborateness of style. Before examining style in the Decadent novel, we should glance back at the important influences shaping that style.
Gautier introduced a new element into fiction that would eventually shape
much of the literature of the fin de siecle. He added a note of perverse
elegance to the Romanticism of his day. Most Romantic artists emphasized
sincerity of emotion over formal technique, but Gautier championed a view that
would later find ardent support among aesthetes of all persuasions. In his
preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier took an arch stand, very like Wilde's
later defense of art for art's sake. Answering critics who attack literature for
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its moral quality, he observed, "Books follow morals, not morals
books."9 Literature should not be expected to be useful. "There is
nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever;
everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's
needs are ignoble and disgusting like his poor and infirm nature. The most
useful place in a house is the water-closet" (p. xxv). This passage aptly
prefigures the manner of Gautier's novel, for while it is elegantly written and
takes as its theme the quest for beauty, it opposes that elegance and beauty
with references to gross and morally corrupt events. If Gautier's is not a
Decadent style as I have defined it, his approach opens the way for the
combination of such a style with congenial themes. The story concerns the
Chevalier D'Albert's restless yearning for his ideal woman.
The most obviously decadent feature of Mademoiselle de Mau pin is its titillating treatment of unusual and abnormal love. Feeling that he'd be wiser to grapple with realities than to pursue "some fantastic ideal attired in cloudy perfections," DAlbert takes the fleshly Rosette as his lover (p. 37). But his phantasmal yearning per sists. He longs for beauty not merely in woman but in himself, wishing for the strength of Hercules beneath the skin of Antinous. "A beautiful mask to allure and fascinate its prey, wings to swoop down upon it and carry it off, and claws to rend it;—so long as I have not these I shall be unhappy," he laments (p. 89). In his frustration, D'Albert likens himself to Sardanapalus and such exhausted Roman emperors as Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. "I am attacked by the malady which seizes nations and powerful men in their old age—the impossible" (p. 91). How relentlessly this note would be echoed by later generations!
D'Albert's desire to unite in himself the vigorous manhood of Hercules and
the ambivalent sexuality of Antinous initiates the theme of androgyny that will
become so familiar in fin-de-siecle literature, but his sexual dilemma becomes
even more complicated when the effeminate Theodore de Serannes appears to
capture Rosette's candid fancy.'10 He is alarmed by his own attraction to young
Theodore and appalled that his type of perfect beauty exists in a man whom he
cannot help but love. Lamenting the lost ancient world, D'Albert deplores the
character of the new. "I am a man of the Homeric times," he says,
preferring matter to spirituality, Venus Anadyomene to the Madonna (p. 133).
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D'Albert resembles later Decadent heroes in his preferences for the antique,
primitive world over an effete modern civilization. Like them, homosexual love
intrigues him, and he feels a certain animos ity toward woman for having
replaced man as a type of beauty. The ancients had combined masculine and
feminine, "And so the hermaphrodite was one of the most eagerly cherished
chimeras of idolatrous antiquity" (p. 143).
Gautier explores the theme of a third sex in Theodore, who is really a woman with ambiguous sexual desires, aroused more by feminine than by masculine attractions and especially by the immature graces of her squire, Ninon, who is in "that adorable transition period when the little girl is blended with the young girl" (p. 274). Gautier's novel is a comedy, even a farce, though its conclusion states a theme that would be treated with great seriousness later. Mademoiselle de Maupin, otherwise Theodore in disguise, satisfies her lustful curiosity by giving herself as a virgin to D'Albert in an athletic night of love and afterward to Rosette as well. She then leaves both, writing to D'Albert later that he has been the man who has opened up a new world of sensations to her. She may not give herself again to any man, but she will remain an ideal for him.
The elegant, exotic, and perverse treatment of love is evident else where in Gautier's fiction. In "One of Cleopatra's Nights" the voluptuous Egyptian seduces a beautiful young man and enjoys a night of love, then makes him drink poison so that he will die before Antony's return. In "The Vampire" Romualdo, a young priest, is enthralled by the beautiful Clarimonda, a great courtesan whose orgies "renewed the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra."" Although reported dead, she appears one night in Romualdo's bedroom. Gautier's description of her recalls the titillating necrophilia and frail lust so much admired later in Poe. The description is worth quoting.
Her sole
vestment was the linen shroud that had covered her upon her state
bed, and the
folds of which she drew over her bosom as if she were ashamed
of being so
little clothed, but her small hand could not manage it. It was so
white that
the colour of the drapery was confounded with that of the flesh
under the
pale light of the lamp. Enveloped in the delicate tissue which
revealed all
the contours of her body, she resembled an antique
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marble statue
of a bather rather than a woman filled with life. Dead or living,
statue or
woman, shadow or body, her beauty was still the same; only the
green gleam
of her eyes was some what dulled, and her mouth, so purple of
yore, had now
only a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks. (Pp.
292—93)
Clarimonda guides Romualdo to a dream life of sensual indulgence, surviving by drinking a small portion of his blood. In his waking life Romualdo remains a simple parish priest, oppressed by a sense of pollution. When Father Serapion offers to free him from his enchantment, he accepts. The older priest leads him to Clarimonda's grave where he uncovers her lovely form and sprinkles it with holy water. It crumbles to dust, and the communion between Clarimonda and Romualdo is ended.
This is like a Hoffmann tale intensified by touches of the sinister and the perverse. Hoffmann's fanciful treatment of unusual psycho logical states becomes kinky in Gautier's hands. This sinister sexuality, if more pronounced and explicit, was part of the furniture of the Gothic literature only recently out of fashion. Gautier's contribution was to associate it with aesthetic appreciation and to lend it an antique rather than a medieval—that is to say a pagan rather than a Christian—tone. Hence Clarimonda's orgies recall Assyria and Egypt. In "One of Cleopatra's Nights," Gautier remarks, "Our world of to-day is puny indeed beside the antique world," and de scribes the spectacular banquets and ceremonies of that time. The narrator laments, "To-day, deprived of such dazzling spectacles of omnipotent will, of the lofty contemplation of some human mind whose least wish makes itself visible in actions unparalleled, in enormities of granite and brass, the world becomes irredeemably and hopelessly dull. Man is no longer represented in the realization of his imperial fancy."12
This yearning for a dominating will and a world comprehensible in grand terms
became bitterly intense among' Decadent writers, but unlike Gautier, they were
"tainted" by the taste for virginity, mysticism, and melancholy that
D'Albert condemned as Christian incursions. They had small confidence in the
mammoth will of a single being and exercised their wills in creating a haven—usually
an aesthetic haven—against the nothingness of the abyss, represented
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materially by vulgar commercialism and intellectually by the meaninglessness of
human existence. Like other Romantics of his time, Gautier urged forceful
outward expression, an extension of the boundaries of the self. Writers of the
late nineteenth century had developed a siege mentality and sought instead to
preserve their souls by renunciation and refinement.'3 The Decadents were not
afflicted with a loss of will. They were as much preoccupied with it as the
previous generation. But they could no longer believe in its vast potential.
Small subjective victories were what they sought. Even the splendid barbaric
past that Gautier admired had become for them a trope, not a reality. What they
salvaged from Gautier was a manner and a few themes. What they added—their
means of exerting the will—was aesthetic elaboration. Mademoiselle de Mau pin,
though stylistically exciting and narratively adept, is entirely in a
traditional mold. To the Decadents, the form of their fiction was itself a
feature of what they wished to express. In this area Flaubert was their model.
Gautier had allowed himself some detailed catalogues and descriptions, but they were nothing like the sustained elaborations that constitute the substance of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. These inventories may appear redundant; for example, chapter two depicts St. Anthony's temptation by each of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Queen of Sheba, whom he resists with effort. The next chapter consists of a dialogue with Hilarion, who challenges Anthony's views on suffering, miracles, and Scripture. Chapter four parades a series of prophets, including Manes and Valentinus, who put forth their differing beliefs. Anthony next encounters famous magicians like Simon and Apollonius. A procession of gods and idols from various nations and epochs fills up the next chapter. And so on.
This relentless cataloguing might be tedious if while offering a melange of
characters, practices, and emblems from various religions, Flaubert was not also
analyzing Anthony's mind. Psychological tensions engender the saint's visions,
as chapter one, a sort of prelude, shows. 14 Doubting the value of his reclusive
life, Anthony broods on faith and science. Certain biblical passages that he
reads now—about King Nabuchodonosor or the Queen of Sheba, for example—surface
later as part of a moral scheme. Anthony's speculations also lead to the
conclusion that "it is this science which enables
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us to know the natural loves and natural repulsions of all things, and to play
upon them. . . . Therefore, it is really possible to modify what appears to be
the immutable order of the universe."
The themes of science and faith, among others, alternate in a rondo or fugal form throughout the work. Chapter one states the novel's major themes, but it also shows the emotional strain behind Anthony's intellectual excursions. Images of physical and spiritual yearning—a prostitute, a chariot drawn by two white horses—dazzle his mind, and he collapses. Subsequent events reveal the physical, as opposed to the intellectual and spiritual, bases of Anthony's sufferings.
Near the end of chapter one, Anthony introduces the important recurring theme of woman. Sheba is the main representative in chapter two. Ennoia, the feminine spirit who migrates from Helen, to Lucretia, to Delilah, appears prominently in chapter three, which also tells the story of Menippus's vampire bride. Chapter five discusses ancient goddesses such as Diana of Ephesus and Venus Anadyomene. But it is in chapter seven, when Anthony thinks of his young sister, Ammonaria, so sensuously that he must reprimand his rebellious body, that we grasp the reason for his mortification of the flesh. If Anthony does not fully grasp how these sensations reveal his hidden drives, we as witnesses to his fantasy may. Sexual curiosity becomes one more manifestation of the contending drive toward loss of self through abnegation or self-possession. Woman now appears as a monstrous intertwining of lust and death—the one engendering, the other destroying. "It is a skull, crowned with roses, dominating the torso of a woman nacrously white. Below a shroud starred with specks of gold forms something like a tail; and the whole body undulates, after the fashion of a gigantic worm erect on end" (p. 253). The image would become commonplace in the art and literature of the next generation.
Manner and content qualify The Temptation as a model for the Decadent novel.
It is composed of a sequence of set pieces rendered in a complicated and ornate
self-advertizing style. The segments of the work are detachable, yet when read
in sequence they create an anticipatory mood like that of musical composition.
Each segment develops a theme from the prelude and, seeming to arrive at a
resolution, sounds instead a new theme that anticipates the segment to
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come. Thus, although chapter two ends with Anthony's rejection of Sheba, Anthony
has admitted to himself that the whippings with which he punishes himself for
his self-gratifying hallucinations give him physical pleasure. The next chapter,
accordingly, takes up the theme of hypocrisy. At the end of that chapter,
although a dispute over Scripture comes to an end, a sustained note—Hilarion s
promise to introduce Anthony to wise men—persists into the next chapter, where
prophets and magicians pass in review before the saint. Before they have done,
the next theme is anticipated when Apollonius details his knowledge of the gods.
This technique maintains a tension of expectation that replaces the suspense
engendered by traditional plotting. The far subtler psychological tension that
leads closer and closer to self-revelation for Anthony is less evident, though
more dramatic, as it crescendoes in the minor tonality of the gruesome
love-death image and is resolved on the triumphant tonic chord of the rising
Christ-like sun.16
The exotic materials of Flaubert's Temptation were to become familiar baggage for later writers and artists—Sheba and other destructive women and goddesses of all sorts, sphinxes, chimeras, abstruse religious practices, the opposition of Christianity and pagan ism, the union of love and death, the fascination with pleasurable debasements and humiliations, the yearnings for ineffable experience, the pursuit of the idea, and soon. But we must not overlook a more mundane subject of Flaubert's tale that is important to Decadent novelists, his treatment of science.
In an attempt to prove that existence is purposeless, the Devil reveals to
Anthony the whole extent of the universe and argues that man cannot know any of
it truly because he is imprisoned by his subjectivity: "The knowledge of
things comes to thee only through the medium of thy mind. Even as a concave
mirror, it deforms the objects it reflects; and thou has no means whatever of
verifying their exactitude" (p.241). He contests the elementary foundations
of perception. "May not Form be, perhaps, an error of thy senses,—
Substance a figment of thy imagination?" (p. 242). But this denial of all
faith renews Anthony's, for by delving into the microscopic regions of nature,
he feels that he beholds the birth of life and the beginning of motion. He
yearns to penetrate each atom and descend to the very bottom of matter, to
become matter itself. In the awesome
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and baffling atomization of all existence, he has discovered the human capacity
to conceive of order. His salvation is the revelation that fallible human
imagination conveys form to mutable matter. Imagination may dredge up monsters
or saviors. This message is embodied in the form of Temptation. The apparently
random, atomized details of the seemingly discontinuous chapters are actually
bonded together by a covert force represented by various motifs and themes and
ultimately signifying the assembling power of the human imagination. To a large
degree Flaubert's novel is an allegory of redemption for the fractured self.
Anthony's visions unite his learning, his experiences, and his imaginings
through the organizing power of creative mind. 17 Flaubert's fiction calls upon
the reader to reconstruct its subtle order. In so doing, the reader may learn
that the Palace of Art is surrounded by monsters but preserves in its tower the
fabricating energy that weaves tower, monsters, and world as well.
Joris Karl Huysmans's A rebours combines the aesthetic sensuality and fastidiousness of Gautier's novel with the thematic and sty listic curiosities of Flaubert's. Havelock Ellis declared A rebours Huysmans's central work because it "most powerfully concentrated his whole vision of life."'8 At first glance, however, Huysmans's novel seems more dissolution than concentration, both in theme and style. Duc Jean des Esseintes, his main character, is the last of a noble family whose excesses have aggravated an inherent nervous weakness and further impoverished the exhausted blood of his race. Too refined for coarseness and too febrile to enjoy the refinements of sensual experience, he has "plunged into the nether depths" of sexuality to emerge all the more afflicted with ennui.'9 He establishes a retreat designed solely for his own satisfaction, which requires the rejection of anything ordinary or natural. Thus he lives mainly by night, designs his rooms with an eye to books and rare flowers rather than useful furniture, and makes his ornamental furnishings emphasize the violation of their original purpose—a church lectern bears a decidedly secular book, a church vestment becomes a wall hanging, and a triptych done in neat missal lettering exhibits poems by Baudelaire.
As in Flaubert's Temptation, Huysmans's first chapter states the tone and
themes for what is to follow. The second chapter makes
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explicit des Esseintes's belief that nature must be superseded by art:
"Artifice was in des Esseintes' philosophy the distinctive mark of human genius" (p. 22). Accordingly, this and later chapters elaborate the philosophy of unnaturalness. Imagination being superior to vulgar fact, actual travel is futile, and des Esseintes fashions one room of his retreat to resemble a ship, porthole and all, so that he need not travel to gain the effect of travel. Chapter three relates des Esseintes's preference for decadent Latin writings over the approved classical texts. The next records his odd experiments with precious stones and liquers. At this point, Huysmans discloses a new theme that recurs throughout the remainder of the novel—the reassertion of nature. It is stated with all the force of the Naturalism that had characterized Huysmans's writing to this time.
Certain flavors from des Esseintes's "mouth organ" revive memories of a visit to the tooth-extractor, memories that conclude in loathsome details—"a blue tooth with a red thread hanging from it" and bloody spittle marking the stairway down from the operator's office (p. 48). Recalling himself from this memory to "everyday matters," des Esseintes discovers that the turtle whose shell he has had encrusted with precious stones is dead; "it had not been able to sup port the dazzling splendour imposed upon it" (pp. 48—49).A jeweled turtle is scarcely an everyday matter, but death and bad teeth are. The memory of the dental extraction conjures the mortification of the turtle. Beneath the artifice with which des Esseintes diverts himself is still that nature of pain and death that cannot be disguised or denied for long.
As in the musical pattern of Flaubert's Temptation, Huysmans's novel blends
two contrasting themes of nature and artifice; other themes associated with
Decadence and adumbrated in the Tempta tion are also developed in a manner
resembling Flaubert's. Thus the presentation of nature as tooth decay and art as
an ornamented turtle develops by chapter four into an actual examination of
works of art that des Esseintes admires by such artists as Moreau, Redon, and
Bresdin. Some works please him by their manner, others by their subjects as
well. He relishes Moreau's Salome, who signifies woman as sin and danger, and
Jan Luyken's series of plates Religious Persecution, with their grotesque and
appalling scenes of torture. These motifs of sin, women suffering, and religion
culminate in des Esseintes's
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desire "to fit up a Trappists' cell that should have the look of the
genuine article, and yet of course be nothing of the sort" (p.62).
The next chapter offers variations on the theme of sex, including des Esseintes's experimental effort to debauch a young man. The motif of religion, sounded early in the novel, returns in chapter seven, swelling to a major theme and entwining itself with other themes as they rise, are stated, and fade in their turn. For example, des Esseintes concludes that his present aesthetic aspirations amount "to the same thing as religious enthusiasms, aspirations towards an unknown universe, towards a far-off beatitude, just as ardently to be desired as that promised to believers by the Scriptures" (p. 76). He has combined the sensuous pleasures of Catholic taste with Schopenhaurian pessimism because he cannot believe in an afterlife and because both share a fundamental belief in the vileness of life and the wickedness of men (p. 80).
Chapter eight begins as a dissertation on hothouse flowers, another example of nature altered and rarefied by man, but recalling the note struck by the description of Moreau's Salome, the flowers evoke images of disease, particularly syphilis, which culminate in a hideous nightmare associating woman's sexuality with corruption and danger (p. 93). Nature reasserts itself in its cruelest form.
This note is sustained in the next chapter where des Esseintes re members his various mistresses and the peculiar demands he made upon them, at one point drawing directly upon Flaubert's Temptation by having his ventriloquist lover enact with him a dialogue between the Chimera and the Sphinx (p. 102). But although he yearns for licentious pleasures and mystic ecstasies to release him from the vulgarities of existence, des Esseintes's extravagances only hasten his physical collapse. In trying to escape nature, he confirms his bondage to it.
Chapter ten is a disquisition upon perfumes. Because it could stand alone
like the chapters on gems, flowers, books, and so forth, it too seems to
dissolve the novel into a loose confederation of set pieces; but like the others
it functions importantly in the sequence, for in it, through the most evanescent
of senses, des Esseintes is forced to recognize the illusoriness of all things,
leading him to conclude that perception is governed by imagination.
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The motif of recovery appears when des Esseintes asserts the curative power of
perfumes. This motif of rehabilitation is the basic subject of chapter eleven,
in which he plans a journey to England, thus recalling earlier motifs of travel
and Anglophilia. Des Esseintes aborts his journey when he realizes that he can
derive all of the benefits of a visit to England without its inconveniences
simply by watching swarms of Englishmen in a tavern. The trip serves its
function, for des Esseintes returns home refreshed and with a renewed interest
in his possessions. Chapter twelve accordingly is an affectionate account of his
library, especially works dealing with sacred themes. This catalogue climaxes
with his interest in the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly, which combine mysticism
and sadism, thus bringing his imagination full circle to the theme of decadence
be cause d'Aurevilly's writings were "the only ones whose matter and style
offered those gamey flavours, those stains of disease and decay, that cankered
surface, that taste of rotten-ripeness which he so loved to savour among the
decadent writers, Latin and Monastic, of the early ages" (pp. 15 1—52).
Sickened by hot weather, des Esseintes reflects upon the folly of procreation, which prompts him to a lamentation on the replacement of brothels by beer halls. This apparently desultory chapter marches nonetheless to a significant conclusion—that des Esseintes loathes the age in which he lives. Therefore, in chapter fourteen, Huysmans treats us to a survey of modern literature, frankly reflective of his own temperament. The writers he admires yearn as he does for a world unlike the one they know. "In some cases, it is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others, it is an impulse towards the fantastic, the land of dreams, it is a vision more or less vivid of a time to come whose images reproduce, without his being aware, as a result of atavism, that of by-gone epochs" (p. 169). Des Esseintes concludes with Mallarme's poetry, the last addition to his library, for it is to him the supreme example of French literary decadence.
In fact,
the decadence of a literature, attacked by incurable organic disease,
enfeebled by
the decay of ideas, exhausted by the excess of grammatical
subtlety,
sensitive only to the whims of curiosity that torment a fever patient,
and yet eager
in its expiring
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[34]
hours
to express every thought and fancy, frantic to make good all the
omissions of
the past; tortured on its death-bed by the craving to leave a
record of the
most subtle pangs of suffering, was incarnate in Mallarme in the
most
consummate and exquisite perfection. (Pp. 186—87)
Although it bears some resemblance to what I have described as Decadent style, Mallarme's style is significantly different, for it neglects precisely the quality that distinguishes A rebours—its reconstitutive atomism.
A rebours begins with physical decay; but as each chapter anatomizes one or another appeal to des Esseintes's senses, we realize that the true effect is upon his spirit. In testing each sensory experience, he abstracts it, making sensation phantasmal; life retreats to imagination and imagination dwells upon disease and decay. Etiolation of sense forms a rondo with another major theme—the etiolation of art. Visual and literary arts have also migrated from sensory vividness to intellectual refinement—from Balzac to Mallarme Art no longer seeks to depict the world but to escape it by fashioning an illusory world of the imagination. It is a noble gesture, perhaps, but as doomed as des Esseintes's attempt to escape the reality of the flesh and its decay. The persistent dissonant notes of death and disease have shaped the very images that furnish his artificial world. Huysmans stresses the irony of this point when he describes des Esseintes's recourse to an enema. The sickly nobleman appreciates the joke himself since it epitomizes his attempt to reverse nature. "A man could hardly go farther; nourishment thus absorbed was surely the last aberration from the natural that could be committed" (p. 195). Ordered back to a normal life, des Esseintes realizes that there can be no normal life for him. The world is a commercial dungheap, all nobility and faith corrupted, materialistic American values triumphant, the hateful bourgeoisie regnant. Even pessimism can no longer console des Esseintes; only a religious faith that he cannot accept would cure him.
Des Esseintes's experiments with his senses are themselves at tempts to force
the fragmentary into some unified meaning, thereby imitating the structure of
Against the Grain. If he did not realize this fact when he was composing the
novel, Huysmans knew it eventually,
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for in his preface written twenty years later he criticizes des Esseintes for
approaching his various obsessions—for example, precious stones and exotic
flowers—strictly at the sensuous level instead of considering the independent
power of their symbolism.20 Des Esseintes's experiments fail because no larger
imaginative scheme organizes his atomized impressions. Gems are texture and
light, flowers are shape and color, aromas are merely scents. To give meaning to
these sources of sensation, the imagination must discover an en compassing mode
of unification. Des Esseintes cannot do that. Huysmans found his unifying power
in the Catholic faith with its abundance of symbols.
In stating that the writers he admires also yearn for a remote, exotic time, Huysmans singles out Flaubert's Temptation. A rebours is a variation upon Flaubert's tale, a variation that has passed through the acid bath of Naturalism. Des Esseintes also craves a faith but in its absence tests the gratifications of the flesh. Anthony's temptations spring from his subconscious; des Esseintes consciously invites his. Anthony's experiences cleanse his spirit and free him for a redemptive vision that binds his sensations together in one final purpose; des Esseintes's experiments deplete him, making redemption and consolidation more desirable and less likely.
If the theme is different, the manner of Huysmans's novel is self-
consciously similar to Flaubert's. The elegantly composed individual chapters
seem to be discrete units but are actually united by powerfully charged motifs
of nature, religion, decay, disease, sex, and flight. These motifs, in turn, are
subdivided into more detailed motifs. Thus the recurrent motif of irregular
sexuality may take the form of the destructive woman, the debauched or seduced
child, the perverse sexual encounter, and so forth. Moreover, these motifs and
submotifs are interwoven, forming a complicated rope of incidents. Looking
ahead, Huysmans's novel seems to be a collection of separate beads; looking
back, it reveals itself as a rosary, albeit a rosary of strange faith. Each
separate segment teases the reader on by hints and suggestions. Its method is
provocation and irresolution. Abandoning plot, the novel becomes a tapestry in
which elegant designs lead to empty spaces or to new arabesques. One or another
physical or mental appetite is stimulated only to be robbed of gratification and
turned aside to some new pursuit. Just as des Esseintes restlessly
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[36]
proceeds from one experiment to another, so too does the reader advance from one
ungratified curiosity to another. At the conclusion he remains unsatisfied, as
though a symphony in A minor had concluded with a single suspended
G-minor-seventh chord—the painful and permanent uneasiness of "the
Christian who doubts...the sceptic who would fain believe," the galley
slave alone at night at sea with no beacon light of hope (p. 206).
In one of the best articles written on A rebours, Joseph Halpern explains that "because the decadent use of language itself is offered as the subject matter of the text, Huysmans's style is marked by an open-endedness of the prose sentence and the interminable regression of parodic repetition." It is a book written against itself and its language is that of "untruth (artifice, illusion, deviation, mensonge) expressed in the idiom of truth." This purposely self- frustrating technique devalues meaning, thus "the Decadent text circles around an empty center."2' And yet one feature remains. Halpern notes that at the heart of Decadent narrative lies an unending repetition of desire, but he sees this repetition as essentially mechanical. In fact the constantly modulating tension of that desire is the real meaning of the narrative, for it implicates the reader in the same unresolved anticipation. If the Decadent writer and protagonist is Narcissus, the pool of his text may give back more than one heartsick reflection.
When Oscar Wilde came to write a novel, he borrowed much of what he had
learned from the French, though The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is not merely
a copy of Huysmans's embroidery. The fretwork is less fine, though done to the
same pattern; there is a distinctive Wildean note to this Decadent novel. Like
so many products of Decadent art, Wilde's novel deals with a yearning for the
impossible, a foredoomed pursuit of beauty that ends in frustration because
humans, who experience beauty through their senses, corrupt it in the process of
enjoyment. The essence of beauty eludes the capacity to apprehend it. Dorian
Gray embodies this danger, but Lord Henry Wotton, who understands it, is too
wise, or too cowardly, to attempt what he elegantly describes. His position is
mainly negative—the familiar Decadent rejection of the world as it is.
"Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form
of the grossest immorality."22
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Decadent literature is a literature of the ego and thus its paramount crime and
paramount victory is the violation of ego. The corruption of another person's
integrity is often the root sin in a Decadent novel. Usually, as with des
Esseintes's attempt to corrupt Auguste or Lord Henry's to infect the innocent
Dorian with his own curiosity— it is the violation of youth or inexperience by
age or satiety. And what more subtle experiment with experience than to have the
subject of study experiment upon itself, as is the case with Dorian?
Since Wilde calls attention to Huysmans's novel obliquely and imitates its mode of cataloguing works of art, jewels, ecclesiastical vestments, and so on, we may assume that he wanted the resemblance noticed. Wilde often poked fun at the very principles he asserted. In some cases, as when his American tour coincided with the American run of Patience, this self-mockery was profitable, though genuine. Dorian Gray is largely parodic, but only for a select audience. 23
Wilde's novel imitates the themes and trappings of Decadent literature—the
futile quest for beauty, the fascination with mystery, the toying with the
supernatural, the examination of perverse and criminal deeds. In form the novel
approximates an allegory or a philosophical tract. Chapter one presents the
artist's encounter with the ideal as Basil Hallward recounts his discovery of
Dorian. In the second chapter Lord Henry's conversation with Dorian is
intelligence making thoughtless beauty conscious of itself. The ideal be gins to
yearn for embodiment in matter. These chapters, cast as dialogues, read like
dramatized Paterian lectures with salt added. The third chapter, also separable
and self-contained, recounts Dorian's history. Learning that Dorian is the child
of parents who have died for love after the fashion of popular romance, Lord
Henry calls Dorian the "son of Love and Death." Basil Hallward
pictures Dorian as an ideal to inspire a fresh school of art, romantic yet
Greek. But to Lord Henry, Dorian is the symbol of a new hedonism. Later, young
men see Dorian as the splendid combination of scholarly culture and perfect
manners. In short, Dorian reflects the ideals of his day. He is a product of
hackneyed romance and he acts out, in the life that is to be art, the trivial
melodramas of seduction and betrayal, corruption of the innocent, murder, and
intrigue.24 Dorian is the ideal of art reified in an ugly age; thus when he
shows Basil the portrait, the image grown wrinkled and vile, he asks,
"Can't you see your ideal in
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[38]
it?" The stunned Basil responds, "I worshipped you too much. We are
both punished" (pp. 121—22). The ideal cannot exist in the world. Its
manifestations in matter are always imperfect, more imperfect the cruder the
age. The reiteration of this imperfection tantalizes the artist and deceives the
spectator of art.
Like A rebours, Dorian Gray lacks a forceful plot line and proceeds according to the stages of an argument. I have already summarized the first three. The next few chapters, concerning Sybil Vane, treat the unwelcome discovery that art is illusion, that life and art are antithetical. Dorian's Julietian idyll becomes a sordid tale of seduction and betrayal. Chapter nine restates the relationship between the artist and his ideal. The next two chapters review Dorian's experiments with his senses following the model established by Huysmans. In the next two, Basil again confronts Dorian, learns what has become of his painting, and dies, the victim of his ideal. The next few chapters mimic the tales of sin and crime common in the sensational subliterature of the day. Alan Campbell is black mailed into destroying Hallward's corpse; Dorian encounters a ruined disciple in an opium den and evades James Vane's revenge. In Chapter seventeen, a sort of interlude, Lord Henry remarks, "I hate vulgar realism in literature," thereby calling our attention to what has just been parodied in Dorian's adventures (p. 147). The melodrama ends with the irony of Vane's accidental death. In the penultimate chapter Lord Henry, not realizing that Dorian now embodies in his life all the tawdry and conventional sins prevalent in contemporary literature, exclaims to Dorian: "The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It al ways will Worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found" (p. 163). But Dorian has not yet entirely approximated his age. That is the crowning achievement of the last chapter, where he discovers his capacity for hypocrisy. Now he is complete, and in an effort to efface this totally corrupted ideal, he destroys his portrait and himself.
Wilde wrote that Dorian was "a fantastic variation on Huysmans'
over-realistic study of the artistic temper in our inartistic age."25 But
if Wilde has transformed Huysmans's brutally literal story into a parodic
fantasy, he has done so in a "curious jewelled style" resembling
Huysmans's, though Wilde goes further than Huysmans in
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[39]
reducing much of his novel to phrases, following the pattern set by his own
preface, which consists entirely of maxims. This style, from witty maxim to
unexpected development in the narrative, is quintessentially provocative. The
novel is almost one grand paradox, the purpose of which is to suspend any final
conclusion. The individual chapters are not so clearly capable of independence
as are Huysmans s, but they are similar in character and similarly establish a
covert unity based upon certain recurrent motifs; Wilde's technique is much
looser than Huysmans's and the hidden parody that binds his work together more
arch than acid. But the fundamentals of Decadent style are here—a conscious
violation of traditional fictional plotting, a fragmentation of story into
separable set pieces that, when knowingly reassembled, constitute a new and
disturbing form, in this case a mocking transformation of fiction into morality
tale.
Bruce Haley argues that Wilde consciously applied the same Spencerian formulas to the growth and decay of the individual in "The Critic as Artist," "De Profundis," and Dorian Gray that he had applied to political history in his university essay entitled "The Rise of Historical Criticism." Forms dominated by single elements were pure, Wilde said, and therefore less enduring, whereas impure forms composed of dissimilar elements could survive longer. He championed the human imagination because it could multiply itself. Ac cording to this scheme, Dorian Gray's chief error is not to indulge in sensuous experiments but to take his portrait as a fixed image of his soul—in fact, a conscience. Wilde also asserted the importance of individualism as a diversifying power in the State.26 Wilde's willingness to invite a constant multiplication and division of the self testified to his confidence in the imagination's power to reorder the self's fragments at will. His novel toys with successes and failures of such integration in its main characters.
Dorian Gray both endorses and parodies the matter and manner of Decadence. In
a self-conscious style it describes the unclean progress of its central figure,
who represents the ideal of art reduced to Victorian banality. The twin Circes—Hallward
the artist and Wotton the aesthete—transform a heedless pagan beauty into a
nineteenth century swine. Dorian is Wilde's Lady of Shalott. In describing this
transformation, Wilde indicates that beneath the severe Hebraism
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[40]
espoused by his society lies a craving for a more primitive Hellenism. The
acceptance of the aesthetic picture of life involved an acknowledgment, not of
disembodied beauty, but of the sanctification of matter. Wilde approved the
union of soul and body but rejected the culture of his time that could not
appreciate, but hypocritically hungered for, a beauty that it would embrace only
in disguise. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote with great insight that an aesthete is
steeped in propriety whereas Wilde "was a figure of impropriety, tragic
impropriety. . . . He was forever surrounded by a tragic air of horror. He kept
challenging life unceasingly. And he sensed life lying in wait in order to
spring upon him out of the darkness."27 Wilde knew that ideal beauty does
not dwell in the world but is the smoke rising above the senses as they burn in
each moment, not with a hard, gemlike flame, but with the crackling ferocity of
the flesh.
Wilde touched the Decadent novel with his characteristic wit, but when Gabriele D'Annunzio seized it, he did so with what Mario Praz called "his entire ignorance of humor," bringing instead" 'carnality of thought', the gift of being able to endow every thought with 'a weight of blood', the gift of the Word." Praz named him the Victor Hugo of Decadence.28 Like Wilde, D'Annunzio was notorious for his behavior as well as for his art, though it was the art that brought him to public notice at the age of sixteen. D'Annunzio wrote Decadent novels that were self-consciously concerned with decadence. Domenico Vittorini considers his first novel, Il piacere (1889), his best, though Phillipe Jullian calls it a plagiarism of L'education sentimentale, and Sergio Pacifici concludes that, in seeking to judge the decadent society he depicted in this and other stories, DAnnunzio was himself caught in its web.29 I shall look at two later novels.
Trionfo della morte (1894) is a full-blown Decadent novel on a Decadent
theme. It describes the doomed love of Giorgio Aurispa and Ippolita Sanzio.
Giorgio's longing for the ideal is symbolized in different ways but is
constantly related to his memory of a music- loving uncle who committed suicide.
Thus longing for death is the counterpart of his craving for the absolute.
Giorgio's confused ideal of woman breeds a characteristic revulsion from
feminine sexuality, which he identifies with sin and death in the familiar
Decadent manner. Ippolita is Giorgio's illusion of beauty. He first sees her
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cloaked with the enchantment of music in a bizarre religious setting and
thereafter associates her spiritual beauty with music. But when they become
Lovers, sordid details emerge—Ippolita's brutish husband, her impoverished
family, and so on. This incommensurate- ness in Ippolita is mirrored in
Giorgio's life, for his own father is a boorish, unfaithful, and improvident
husband over whom Giorgio can exert no control, despite his mother's pleas.
Shamed and sickened by these circumstances, Giorgio turns to memories of his be
loved uncle Demetrio, who killed himself in a room that Giorgio keeps sacred.
Although Ippolita is a normal, amorous woman, Giorgio imposes two contradictory
images upon her. Gradually ceasing to represent ideal beauty, she becomes for
Giorgio the symbol of impure beauty and carnal entrapment. Finally, in a
perverse imitation of Tristan and Isolde, Giorgio kills both of them by seizing
Ippolita and leaping from a cliff.
Like des Esseintes, Giorgio suffers—or enjoys—an acute sensibility that gives him the capacity for great sensuous pleasure but which also leaves him vulnerable to neurotic pain. Eventually pleasure and pain become intertwined. Giorgio's experiences constitute an involuntary search for organization within himself. Like des Esseintes and Dorian, he is greedy for new impressions, especially delighting in the sensations of art, but beneath his refinement lies a craving for primordial simplicity and fierceness. He prefers memory and imagination to reality and can fasten upon nothing to bind his personality to the world—not love, not art, not religion. Dissolution, a yielding to death and chaos, underlies what intensity there is in Giorgio's nature. Deciding finally that he and Ippolita must die together, he feels his inner life decompose and dissolve, bringing up from its depth "shapeless fragments of diverse nature, as little recognizable as if they had not belonged to the life of the same man."30
This egoism built upon a void entails a need evident elsewhere in Decadent
literature—the need to control other lives through sex or aggression. Giorgio
wishes to know and possess Ippolita entirely. He suffers when she leaves him,
not merely because he misses her physical presence, but because her mind will
entertain impressions inaccessible to him. He is jealous of any memories and
emotions that do not immediately involve him, and his greatest delight in
Ippolita is to see her approximate his own nature. He "had been
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present at the most intoxicating spectacle of which an intellectual lover can
dream. He had seen the loved woman become metamorphosed after his own image,
borrow his thoughts, his judgments, his tastes, his disdains, his predilections,
his melancholies, all that which gives a special imprint and character to the
mind" (p. 187). Correspondingly, Giorgio dreads any influence that
threatens to al ter his plans to shape his own life, though this dread may be no
more than a mask for irresolution.
Trionfo della morte treats Decadent themes with a detachment that permits D'Annunzio to judge characters with whom he may nonetheless sympathize. As narrator he is more powerful than his characters, who are caught and suspended in his style. D'Annunzio's novel is looser than A rebours or Dorian Gray, but the technique is similar. There is no real story line. Rather the narrative proceeds from one set piece to another in the form of dialogue, descriptive sketch, recollected sensation, or dramatized event. The novel opens with the lovers coming upon the scene of a suicide, initiating a motif sounded most richly in Giorgio's memories of his beloved uncle and prefiguring the form of suicide-murder that ends the story. The dialogue and hidden thoughts of the characters in the first chapters present the recurrent themes of male-female antagonism and alienation of ideal from real. A couple of chapters later the two lovers consider a holiday at Orvieto, which Giorgio describes in detail, only to conclude, in an echo of des Esseintes or Axel: "Since we have already enjoyed in imagination the essence of pleasure, since we have tasted all that our sensations and sentiments could experience of what is rarest and most delicate, I would advise that we renounce the experience of reality" (p. 27). They abandon Orvieto for another location whose charm is that it is unknown to them.
Set pieces located at Giorgio's country home describe his bestial father, his
candy-obsessed aunt, and his elaborate recollections of childhood. Others
include the massively developed visit to the pilgrimage shrine of the Madonna at
Casal Bordino, which is studded with disgusting physical details, and
expositions on art, such as Giorgio's memories of Wagnerian performances at
Bayreuth. Al though the method is not so compact as Huysmans's, it is the same—
a sequence of highly wrought, ornamentally detailed, almost detachable segments
united by mood, motif, and image rather than by a generative story line.
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Set pieces are one means of disintegrating the novel by separating it into
chunks, but another disintegrating device operates at a more basic level with
the use of crude, even shocking, Naturalistic details. One splendid example of
this device is the description of the bruised and bleeding pilgrims at Casal
Bordino crawling on the floor, licking the ground, while priests collect their
offerings. D'Annunzio's friend Francesco Michetti vividly rendered this scene in
a huge Naturalistic canvas. Another example is the microscopic description of a
drowned boy, which ambivalently teeters between loathsomeness and beauty.
His face
was scarcely livid, with a snub nose, prominent fore head, very long
eye-lashes, a
half-open mouth with large, violet- colored lips between which
showed the
white teeth, spaced one from another. His neck was thin, flaccid,
like a
withered stem, marked with tiny folds. The tendons of the arm were
weak; the
arms were slender, covered with a down like the fine feathers that
cover a newly
hatched bird. His ribs were prominent and distinct; a darker line
divided the
skin in the middle of the chest; the umbilicus protruded like a knot.
The feet, a
little swollen, had the same yellowish color as the hands; and the
small hands
were callous, covered with warts, with white nails that were
beginning to
turn livid. On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and lower
down, on the
knees, along the limbs, reddish spots appeared. All the
particularities of this miserable body assumed an extraordinary significance in
George's
eyes, immobilized as they were, and fixed forever in the rigidity of
death. (Pp.
345—46)
The technique recalls Baudelaire's achievement in "Un charogne."
D'Annunzio's manner is designed to frustrate narrative drive. The massive
accumulation of detail makes objects, ideas, and moods stand like obstructions
in the narrative flow. They fix attention like objects in a painting,
approximating the time-space equation of visual art more than the time-movement
equation of literature. The prose, as ornate and peculiar as Huysmans's or
XVilde's, calls attention to itself, seeming paradoxically to atomize yet fuse
the narrative into a solid block of experience. For example, the word tristezza
echoes throughout the first chapter, so preoccupied with morte and amore, and
leads to passages like the following, which evoke a funereal monumentality:
"Si soffermo, come per reccogliere e per assap
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orare Ia tristezza sparsa nel giorno morente. Il Pincio, intorno, era deserto
ormai, silenzioso, pieno d'un'ombra viletta in cui le erme biancheggiavano come
sepolcri. La citta sottoposta si copriva di ceneri. Gocce di pioggia, rare,
cadevano" ("And she stopped as if to recall and live over again the
sorrows scattered through the day that was about to close. Around them, now, the
Pincio was deserted, full of silence, full of violet shadows in which the busts
on their pedestals took on the appearance of funereal monuments. Below, the city
was covered with ashes. A few drops of rain were falling").31 This is just
one of many similar passages that call up motifs of sorrow, break age,
emptiness, whiteness, morbidity, and falling. It prepares for later references
to funeral monuments, shadow, and fallen bodies until in the last chapter the
lovers, viewing themselves as Tristan and Isolde, recapitulate the opening
events of the story. As they stand on a precipice from which they can see the
lights of a city in the distance, Giorgio remembers the corpse of the drowned
boy on the beach far below and recalls the scene on the Pincio. They have be
come the sorrow between love and death that ends with their fall.
But if on the one hand D'Annunzio retards the movement of his story, on the
other he creates a forward movement by tantalizing and provoking the reader in
much the same way that Huysmans did. A scene suggests a certain development but
modulates into a new complexity, which, as it approaches resolution, turns into
some thing unforeseen. The section of the novel entitled "La casa paterna
(The paternal roof), for example, begins with Giorgio's re turn to the family
home. Giorgio's impatience with his mother seems to result from her complaints
about her husband, who has been lavishing money on the mother of his
illegitimate children. This dilemma remains unresolved as we learn of an old
aunt with a perpetual, almost illicit, craving for candy. Giorgio's disgust with
his family is apparently modified by his affection for his married sister and
her child, but they become a source of pain to him too through his shameful
inability to control his father or console his mother. One situation after the
other remains unresolved until Giorgio turns for comfort to memories of his
uncle Demetrio who had saved him from drowning and with whom he had shared an
intense love of music; but this memory provides no comfort, for it is trans
formed into a painful meditation upon suicide; we are forced to
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share Giorgio's aggravating bewilderment at why Demetrio killed himself. Giorgio
is himself tempted to suicide but decides that he need not make that choice
"yet" since he still feels bound to life— especially through
Ippolita.
The subtle interweaving of themes is not sufficiently evident in this simplified account. But if one realizes that the novel opens with Giorgio and Ippolita happening upon the scene of a suicide, that death and music are variously associated with each other, and that the discovery of a drowned boy, recalling Giorgio's rescue from a similar fate by his beloved uncle, precedes the suicide-murder of the lovers, the section becomes more disturbingly intricate, for the image of Ippolita that beckons to Giorgio at its close is not symbolic of life at all but is a disguised form of death, a truth that may not be present to Giorgio's consciousness any more than it is to the reader's.
This technique of suspension, delay, unexpected modulation from one idea or mood to another is not accidental but elaborately self-conscious. In describing the music of Wagner, which he ad mired and frankly emulated,32 D'Annunzio describes his own style as well.
And, in
the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every
misery, that
the human voice had ever expressed. The melodies emerged from
the symphonic
depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting
into one
another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more
rest less and
poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and expressed a
continual and
ever-vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of
the chromatic
progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that
eluded every
grasp, al though it shone ever so near. In the changings of the
tone, rhythm,
and measure, in the succession of syncopes, there was a
truceless
search, there was a limitless covetousness, there was the long torture
of desire
ever deceived and ever extinguished. A motif, a symbol of eternal
desire,
eternally exasperated by a deceptive possession, returned every instant
with a cruel
persistence; it enlarged, it dominated, now illuminating the crests of
the harmonic
waves, now obscuring them with funereal dark ness. (P. 370)
This passage openly acknowledges one of the central assumptions
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in Decadent art, that aesthetic movement is not a consequence of sequential acts
in a temporal field but a transformation of emotional and psychic energy through
the tension created by changing forms of desire. Like Baudelaire and the
Symbolist poets who followed him, as well as many Symbolist and Decadent
painters, D'Annunzio and Wagner sought to cancel time by dislocating action to
the non- spatial "place" of the mind.
Jacques Goudet has noted that Il trionfo della morte and Il fuoco (1900) have, in the general discrediting of D'Annunzio's novels, been the objects of "una relativa misericordia" for the same reason—they contain some splendid passages worth anthologizing. Speaking specifically of Il fuoco, Goudet added later "Pero, una successione di splendidi brani di antologia non costituisce un romanzo" (How ever, a succession of splendid anthology pieces does not constitute a novel).33 I contend that Il Trionfo and Il fuoco are not traditional novels but Decadent novels, purposely subverting the conventions of fiction. Mario Ricciardi describes the progressive dissolution of the genre in D'Annunzio's hands.
Nello
sviluppo della prosa romanzesca di D'Annunzio compai ono elementi
interni che
propagono la dissoluzione, la riduzi one finale della struttura del
genere sia a
livello di ideologia (come abbiarno visto per la presenza del
Superuomo
quale pro tagonista) sia a livello di organismi formali con
l'eliminazione progressiva di canoni tipologici quali la successione degli
eventi, i
nessi di
sviluppo, la frammentazione organizzata della pagina stessa.
(In the
development of D'Annunzio's prose romance, internal elements appear
that
encourage the dissolution and the final reduction of the structure of the
genre either
at the level of ideology (as we have seen through the presence of
the Superman
as protagonist) or at the level of formal systems with the
progressive
elimination of narrative conventions such as the succession of
events, the
links of development, the atomized organization of the very
page.)34
Il trionfo and Ilfuoco do seem fragmented in one sense, but like other
Decadent novels they have a covert organizing structure. Like Il trionfo,
Ilfuoco is made up of set pieces or "brani di antologia."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[47]
One of these, a speech delivered by Stelio Effrena early in the novel, is
actually a version of a speech entitled "L'allegoria dell' Autunno"
that D 'Annunzio himself delivered in a similar situation. Lesser and greater
"essays" follow—on dogs, on the art of the future—but these
apparently disparate segments are unified by persistent phrases, im ages, and
motifs. One passage accompanies exchanges between Ste ho and La Foscarina, his
lover, like a Wagnerian leitmotif. It first appears as they float across the
water near Venice. Stelio has ex pressed his vision of autumnal Venice, and they
are discussing poetry. Suddenly they are silenced by the salute of a man-of-war
as it lowers its flag, which descends "like some heroic dream suddenly
vanishing." As they drift into the shadow of the warship, their previous
sense of anxiety and passing time intensifies. "The silence seemed deeper
for a moment, and the gondola slipped into denser shadow as it grazed the flank
of the armed giant."35 La Foscarina now sounds the name that will haunt
their romance. She asks if Stelio knows that Donatella Arvale will sing at the
evening's ceremonies. The themes of severance in art and in love unite, bound
together by the contrasting images of a gondola loaded with pomegranates and an
iron-clad warship. Like several similar clusters of motifs these will appear in
expanding relationships throughout the novel. In one instance La Foscarina fears
that she will soon lose Ste ho, perhaps to Donatella, but nonetheless yearns to
bear him a child. She asks if he remembers the warship and the gondola loaded
with pomegranates, after which she brings up Donatella again. Stelio replies
that nothing must come between him and his art, an implicit rejection of both
her desire for a child and her fear about Donatella.
The paradoxical union of nihilism and striving will in Giorgio Aurispa, is, in this novel, divided between La Foscarina and Stelio Effrena. While she fears the passing of time and thinks of her early suffering and the eventual loss of youth and love, he dreams of achieving greatness in art. Hearing Donatella sing, Stelio senses the onset of poetic inspiration.
Again, as
before at other extraordinary hours of his journey, he felt that his fate
was present
and about to give his being a new impulse, perhaps to call to life in
it a
marvellous act of will. And as he reflected on the mediocrity of the many
obscure
destinies
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[48]
hanging over
those heads in the crowd, that were eager for the apparitions of
ideal life,
he rejoiced at being where he was to adore the auspicious
demon-figure
that had secretly come to visit him and to bring him a shrouded
gift in the
name of an unknown mistress. (Pp. 78—79)
Donatella will remain a remote symbol of Stelio's aspiration while La Foscarina, whose talent as an actress—she was directly modeled upon Eleonora Duse, despite D'Annunzio's disclaimers—symbolizes the passion of art. He possesses the one; the other he has yet to achieve.
Both women inspire Stelio, but he yearns for the ideal of art and his model once more is Wagner. His was a northern talent, Stelio explains, mine is Latin. Like Wagner he wishes to unite the ancient, even barbaric past with the present "so that the error of time seems destroyed and that unity of life to which I tend by the effort of my art be made manifest" (p. 345). His art is to be an embodiment and expression of the Latin spirit. It will be a public art, a national art. A special theater will be built for his drama, just as Bayreuth was created for Wagner's. Appropriately enough, the novel ends with Wagner's funeral, at which Stelio serves as one of the pallbearers, who look upon the dead composer's face, illuminated by a cold, in finite smile: "Their hearts, with a wondering fear that made them religious, felt as if they were receiving the revelation of a divine secret" (p. 400).
To a large extent this meticulously written novel, with its realistic,
detailed descriptions and its aesthetic disquisitions, is a fable of the growth
of the artist. Stelio is the poet as superman at last. A fragmentary appearance
masks the novel's elaborate motivic structure by which the material world,
broken up into its details, is reassembled according to the poet's subjective
aim. Wagner himself be comes a motif, appearing early to represent Stelio's
inspiration and returning, either as a presence (Stelio witnesses the heroic
composer's collapse and assists him and later serves as a pallbearer at his
funeral) or as an abiding reminder of the power of art to transform life. The
city of Venice is another such motif, signifying, through various
transformations, the harvest abundance of art as well as the rich humus for a
new art. And throughout the novel, the same techniques
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[49]
of anticipation, suspension, and tantalization lead the reader from one
expectation to the next, whether involving the physical romance of Stelio and La
Foscarina or the aesthetic romance of their art. The novel ends unresolved.
Foscarina has planned an American tour, and Stelio must set about composing his
masterpiece. Nonetheless, in this subtle and elaborate fiction, the dissolution
characteristic of Decadent art serves an optimistic purpose, unlike Il tri onfo,
where Decadent style and Decadent themes ran together.
I shall not offer a catalogue of Decadent novels but must include a few more samples to illustrate some differences among them, for a popular view of Decadent fiction assumes more violent perversities than those in Huysmans, Wilde, or D'Annunzio. Works supplying such barbarities are Octave Mirbeau's Le jardin des supplices (1899) and Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas (1901).
Le jardin des supplices is not a good novel, nor is it a good example of a Decadent novel; but it is a good example of a bad Decadent novel. The tale opens with a group of men discoursing on various modes of murder. One man observes that they have neglected to mention female murderers. Against protests that woman is a teacher of compassion, this man claims to have known woman stripped of restraint, an "invincible force of destruction like nature's.' '36 Woman is the matrix of life and therefore of death as well, he says, and goes on to read a manuscript consisting of a sequence of loosely connected scenes. Early passages describe corruption in business, government, and society, indicting a culture motivated by bestial and selfish impulses.
An accomplice arranges the disgraced narrator's voyage to the Orient on a
fraudulent scientific expedition. On board ship he hears travelers exchanging
tales of human predation. A Frenchman, for example, discusses the subtle
distinctions to be found in the flavors of human flesh, and an Englishman
praises the qualities of a destructive bullet he has invented. The narrator also
meets the Englishwoman Clara, whom he sees as a naked Eve in a tropical garden,
an image of virtue, though he soon learns that she too is fascinated by death
and suffering. When he candidly discloses his corrupt past to this seemingly
unattainable beauty, instead of being revolted, she invites him to her cabin, a
"flicker of green flame" in her eye. Eventually he goes with Clara to
China, accompanying her on visits to
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[50]
witness a cavalcade of bizarre tortures, a prolonged debauch that finally
exhausts her. The narrator sees the tortures as symbolic of human existence and
Clara as a manifestation of life, voluptuous in spite of herself, indifferent to
individuals, and inescapably bound to repeat the lustful exhibition of grotesque
torture. It is a bleak, Schopenhauerian vision.
The novel approximates a Decadent style. Its catalogues and elaborate descriptions are mainly of murders and tortures, though there is an almost obligatory resume of shrubs and flowers in the Chinese torture garden. Motifs dealing mainly with sex, death, and decay weave a loose connecting thread through the narrative. Thus the opening association of destructive woman with nature is carried on in the identification of Clara with Eve, in her green, serpentine eyes, in her preference for flowers that smell like semen, and so forth.
There is little aspiration toward the ideal in this novel, but much revulsion from the ordinary. The novel's absolute is evil, its impulses nihilistic, its purpose negative. It is a fable of the abiding barbarity beneath the hypocritical surface of civilization and may be read as a satire. In the other novels we have examined, a yearning toward some positive end, whether true or illusory, constituted the provocation of the story. Part of the tension of these otherwise un- energetic tales lay in the constant reaching for possibilities that constantly prove phantasmal or inadequate. In Le jardin des supplice, this tantalization becomes instead a bombardment of the senses, in creasing in intensity from descriptions of mayhem to a progressively ingenious array of tortures that intrigue even as they repel and disgust, so that we as readers resemble the victim of one torture who is sexually caressed to death, pleasure and pain intertwining into oblivion.
Mirbeau's novel exploits a fashion, carrying it to an extreme in what amounts
to a species of parody. It does not share the serious purpose of Huysmans's,
Wilde's, or D'Annunzio's novels but in stead employs Decadent style and Decadent
themes to produce a sen sational story. Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas is a
similar exploitation of a form that was already passing out of fashion.37 The
novel is a textbook illustration of Decadent fiction, as though Lorrain first
anatomized the form and then fleshed it out with every possible organ and
ornament. His tale abounds with references to the usual
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[51]
accoutrements of Decadence, from sphinxes to lilies, and drops the names of many
artists associated with the Decadence, from Baudelaire to Moreau. Main
characters are based upon living persons, such as Whistler and Count Robert de
Montesquiou.38 Prostitutes, dance-hall girls, drugs, crimes, exotic and
elaborate art objects all appear in quantity along with perversions like
lesbianism, incest, and voyeurism.39
Like Le jardin des supplices most of the story is in the form of a manuscript. The notorious duc de Freneuse, otherwise Monsieur Phocas, leaves his document with the narrator just before departing for Asia. It contains "the first impressions of my sickness, the un conscious temptations of an existence foundering in occultism and neurosis."'0 The narrator explains that the manuscript, opening with quotations from Swinburne and Musset, records the transformation of an honest man to a debauchee, but there are signs from the outset that the "honest man is ripe for falling. Phocas's first entries express hatred for mankind and its base instincts. His admiration of statues, especially "the gaze so gloomy and remote" of the bust of Antinous at the Louvre, hints already at his yearning for ineffable experience presumably free from the taint of human passions.41 At the same time, he suffers an irrational desire to murder a woman with whom he has slept. When this feeling recurs, he writes, "Is there a double being in me?" (p. 25).
The novel proceeds in the customary fashion; each chapter is a kind of essay related to the others less by plot than by a tissue of repeated motifs, phrases, and themes. The chapter entitled "Oppression" treats various types of women who frequent music halls and their intriguing "phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervors, their heat of Lesbos" (p. 28). Although he claims to be revolted by such things, Phocas recognizes a streak of cruelty in himself evoked by women in peril.
In chapters that follow, he elaborates his obsession with eyes, as sociating
those of appealing women with the eyes of statues, including the tantalizing
Antinous. Repeating the theme of a multiple self, he begins to suspect that
there is another man in him who desires abominable things. Unlike Wilde, who
encourages the elaboration of one's selves, Phocas dreads the kinds of selves
that may sprout within him. His fear discloses the residuum of conventional
morality
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[52]
in his constitution. If the fascination with eyes reveals the consequences of
gazing steadily until hidden truths emerge, the fascination with masks offers a
corresponding impulse to keep such truths hidden.
The grotesque English painter Claudius Ethal seems to be Phocas's subtler alter ego. Ethal's art objects reflect his morbidity, for example, the bust he sculpted of a Neapolitan boy who died in his studio or the emerald ring made to replace the green eye of Sara Perez, Phillipe II's lover, whose eye was bitten out by the queen. Fleeing Ethal's influence, Phocas goes to Venice to admire its dead grandeur and beautiful old soul. Visiting a venereal ward there, he sees a female patient whose green eyes remind him of Antinous, Astarte, and the bust of the dead Neapolitan boy, Angelotto. Back in Paris, Ethal introduces Phocas to a collection of bizarre and perverted individuals. One chapter is an elaborate picture of an opium orgy, another of an opium dream.
Sir Thomas Welcome advises Phocas to leave Europe's worn-out civilization and travel to Asia, to Sicily, to places with ancient associations and young races who respond robustly to life. Visit seaports, he says. Among the prostitutes you witness the basic facts of life, and on side streets among the fruit vendors you see Astarte in the form of healthy, animallike women. Welcome has also suffered the obsession of a tantalizing gaze and believes that he knows the remedy for Phocas's affliction. But Phocas slips further and further into vice, fancying young girls and descending to voyeurism in a seedy hotel. In such a place the overheard love talk of a young couple inspires him to seek out a pure life again. He remembers the healthy simplicity of the family farm in Normandy and recalls the good-hearted and healthy Jean Des treux who died when Phocas was a boy. However, the return to Freneuse is a disappointment and leaves Phocas with a suspicion that Destreux's eyes may be the real symbol he seeks.
A letter from Welcome describes India in luxurious detail, men tioning
evenings such as de l'Isle-Adams could achieve in language or Moreau in
painting. Accordingly, the next chapter, in direct imitation of A rebours,
describes paintings at the Moreau museum, where Phocas discovers the exact gaze
of his dream in a figure in Moreau's The Suitors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They were the
eyes of my dream, the eyes of my obsession, the eyes of
anguish and
terror of which I had foretold the encounter, gaze more beautiful
than the gaze
of love, having become decisive, supernatural, and at last
themselves in
the dread of the last minute of life. And his theory seemed to me
finally
justified by the talent and genius of the painter. I understood finally the
beauty of
death, the supreme disguise of terror, the ineffable sovereignty of
eyes that are
about to die. (P. 358)
Disgusted by himself and Ethal, Phocas murders the painter and, liberated by his crime, takes Welcome's advice: ". . . to live with fervor a life of passion and adventure, to annihilate myself in the unknown, in the infinite, in the energy of youthful peoples, in the beauty of immutable races, in the sublimity of instincts" (p.405). He has a vision of a goddess clothed in transparent gauze, her eyes closed in an expression of ecstasy. She represents his secret: "That lethargic nudity possessed the enigma of my cure, that figure in the ecstasy of amorous death was the living incarnation of my secret" (p. 407).
Monsieur de Phocas fulfills all of the requirements of the Decadent novel and
contributes to the spirit of cultural decadence as well. The vices, the
catalogues of weird beauty, the mannered descriptions of works of art, the
fascination for and loathing of the flesh, the yearning for an ever-escaping
ideal ultimately associated with nothingness beyond experience, the attempt to
cancel the modern sense of time by the recovery of a precivilized existence—all
are thoroughly Decadent. The sense of provocation and unsettling excitation so
characteristic of Huysmans and D'Annunzio here incorporates the battering
sensationalism exploited by Mirbeau. The reader is not lured and enticed from
one scene or response to the next but is both dragged on by the insistent motif
of the gazing eyes and bludgeoned forward by detailed descriptions of
perversities. Nonetheless, although the work is more blatant and less skillful
than others we have examined, the blocks of description and introspection bound
together by repeated images, words, and motifs linked less by the suspense of
events elapsing in time than by the accumulation of psychological sensations
that create a new pattern of human experience represent the true Decadent style.
The frequent use of Decadent
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[54]
cliches and numerous allusions to works of art associated with Decadence reveal
a self-parodying manner entirely in keeping with the self-consciousness of
Decadent art.
Whatever else Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Lau rids Brigge (1910) may be, it is surely an anomaly in his own career and represents a crisis in his creative life as well, for it seems to ex press a negativism and angst not customarily associated with Rilke, and it has little in common with the poetry—whether Symbolist, Ding-gedicht, or the great unclassifiable elegies. Opinions vary on Malte. Hans Egon Holthusen calls it "a work which one day will rank with all those great masterpieces which represent some break through." For Norbert Fuerst it is "a magnificent failure." E. F. N. Jephcott, in an acute reading of Rilke's intentions, says that "the various fragments making up the notebooks are to be seen as forming a 'dance,' a pattern of interrelated movements"; the "self contained and self-sufficient" prose poems are integrated into a larger narrative structure that seeks the "mosaic-like unity" of si multaneity.42 In any case Malte is a memorable work, and if it is a novel, then it may be considered a germane example of Decadent style.
I do not agree with William Eickhorst, who calls Malte a decadent work
because it contains all of the themes he lists as decadent and who wrongly
declares that "Rilke's personality and work are the essence of
decadence."43 Rilke shared some fin-de-siecle attitudes, but he was no more
decadent than William Butler Yeats. Both men developed their own forms of
affirmation out of the Aestheticism in which they were educated to art. Rilke
remained an aesthete, but certainly not a Decadent in any sense that I am using
the word. He defended Malte as a positive work, saying that the book,
"which seems to emerge in the proof that life is impossible, must so to
speak be read against the current. If it contains bitter reproaches, these are
absolutely not directed against life. On the contrary, they are the evidences
that, for lack of strength, through distraction and inherited errors we lost
almost completely the countless earthly riches that were intended for us."
Rilke acknowledged the profound effect that Jens Peter Jacobson had on him,
especially in disclosing "that wonderful feeling of self in which one's own
highly insecure ego
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
acquired a relative value that seemed more decisive than any possi ble
recognition."44 Jacobsen had written in his novel Niels Lyhne (1880) that
one could grow through reading, for example.
Do not sit
brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out
from
influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you
along and
submerge your inner most pet peculiarities in their mighty surge!
Never fear!
The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a
healthy
development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is
distinctive
only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound
growth in
yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.45
Jacobson's novel, though supposedly Naturalistic, is really the record of a soul conveyed in scenes remote in time and isolated from everyday needs. It criticizes the will-lessness of its characters, but it does so in a world-weary and sentimental tone. Rilke's Malte is also the record of a soul, but a soul that has witnessed more of the objective world, taken it into itself, and described the experience in a manner reflecting that experience. Jacobson's is an aesthetic, Rilke's a Decadent, novel. It seeks to achieve a simultaneity more associated with pictorial than with verbal art.46 Rilke renounced the unifying power of plot and action along a discernible time axis, preferring a unity arising out of mood and style. The novel consists, in effect, of a sequence of self-contained prose poems held together by a pattern of repeated words (solitude, fear), motifs (masks, faces, hands), and themes (death, transformation) that creates an intensity more immediate and yet more static than in the conventional novel. Studying an intensely sensitive artist's yearning for an aesthetic integration of his being, the narrative reveals instead, through immediate and remembered sensations, the evanescence of "self." A sense of frustration pervades the book, which is as morbid as any of D'Annunzio s.
In style and content Malte resembles the Decadent novel. The novel includes physically repulsive scenes and suggests sexual peculiarities—Malte's youthful role as a little girl, his fascination with dressing up in exotic clothing, his interest in Sappho, who
was ready to achieve to the end the whole of love."47 Like so many
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[56]
Symbolist and Decadent figures, Sappho "in the darkness of embracing . . .
delved not for satisfaction but for longing" (p. 203). Properly understood,
love is an incitement to an unmediable intensity of emotion. The novel describes
Malte's movement toward this awareness even as he tries to avoid it by
treasuring the solitude that smothers him. He ends his account and perhaps his
life with the fable of the Prodigal Son, which he interprets as "the legend
of him who did not want to be loved" (p. 310). But the escape from the
normal love of family into the solitude of anonymity is really a disguised
search for God's love, a search that requires Malte to reconstruct his entire
life. He must begin by making his childhood real and so returns home, not to
share family love, but to transcend it. His return is a pilgrimage into an
emotional void in order to achieve transcendent love. Malte's quest, his
impossible yearning, makes him a fallen Parsifal. Unable to achieve the
creator's necessary obliteration of himself in the face of the actual, Malte
nonetheless under stands that "a single denial at any time will force him
out of the state of grace, make him utterly sinful," and yet he cannot
manage creative self-effacement.48 Only by plunging into emptiness does one
achieve fullness. The abyss that terrified and fascinated Decadent artists from
Baudelaire to Beardsley, Rilke accepts.
Much as Malte resembles a Decadent novel, it is also a departure. Although the novel is set in Paris with an artist as protagonist and although it mentions Baudelaire prominently and praises Eleonora Duse, Rilke was not treating specifically Decadent issues but simply absorbing common influences. By the time he visited Paris, Wilde, Mallarme, and Verlaine were dead, though novels by writers such as Lorrain, Rachilde, and Proust kept alive themes that had interested artists of the nineties. Rilke, however, was strongly drawn in another direction. The artists who captured Rilke's imagination were Rodin and Cezanne.
It is at just such an intersection as Rilke's case that we may test our
definitions for their usefulness. Rilke was no Decadent, nor were his artistic
aspirations consonant with theirs, despite some resemblances. Yet Malte may
still be viewed technically as a Decadent novel, for it utilizes similar devices
to similar ends. The conscious atomization of linear narration in order to
construct a subtler unity sustained by independent but highly charged parts was
the same, as
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------[57]
was the focus upon a single nevrose protagonist, educated as much through
internal adventures as by sensation and driven by a longing for an elusive
ideal. Naturalistic detail paradoxically propels the story to a cancellation of
material existence in favor of some larger aspiration, as in the novels of
Huysmans and D'Annunzio. But Rilke's structure is looser. The vices touched upon
are not explored for their power to generate sensations in themselves nor to
tantalize the reader. The recurrent words, phrases, and motifs evolve poetically
rather than with a self-conscious, intellectualized artificiality. They follow a
pattern of transformation like that of human memory and reflection rather than a
consciously imposed aesthetic form. The work of art here no longer represents
the will binding its carefully crafted details together, but the soul openly
adventuring into itself. Malte looks forward to Proust, not back to Lorrain and
Mirbeau.
If The Notebooks of Malte Lau rids Brigge may still be defined as a Decadent novel, Gide's The immoralist (1902) cannot, though it is closely related to the form. Like the Decadent novel, Gide's concentrates on the internal adventure of a single individual. The scene of the novel's drama, he wrote, "is played out in my hero's own soul."49 Gide treats such typically Decadent themes as homosexuality, the "education" of the senses, and fascination with disease and crime. Michel, the central character, even sets forth a theory of cultural decadence in which he demonstrates that "culture, born of life, ultimately kills life" (p. 80). He admires the energy of barbarism and, in keeping with his theory, sets out to recover a precivilized life among Arab youths. Like Monsieur Phocas, Michel returns to a family estate in Normandy to pursue precultural pleasures. He sinks instead into a perverse game of criminality. Also like Phocas, Michel has a tutor, the mysterious adventurer Menalque, who preaches the value of egoism as opposed to restraint. "What seems different in yourself:
that's the one thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress" (p. 104). He laments the fragmentation of modern life and praises the ancient Greeks for whom "an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life an enactment of his philosophy" (p. 95).
Unlike the Decadent novel The Immoralist does not demonstrate in its style
and form the decadence it describes. The prose is lean and
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[58]muscular,
not lush and ornate. The story follows a genuine plot line based upon internal
and external crises and does not dwell upon aesthetic moments that create a
sense of pictorial stasis. Even those parts of the novel given over to the
exposition of ideas—Michel's summary of his lectures, Menalque's harangue—are
not offered as self-contained "essays" but are carefully integrated
into the narrative.
The Immoralist is more a novel of decadence than a Decadent novel, but here too it is different, lacking the usual excesses of that sensational mode. Although it describes events and characters typical of the Decadence, it subordinates them to a larger aesthetic purpose, beyond which, Gide says, "I have tried to prove nothing" (p. viii). The ending of the novel may seem a moral judgment upon Michel, who pleads for help from his friends, explaining that he lacks all volition. Michel echoes des Esseintes after his experiment has left him physically and morally exhausted: "Ah, but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me!—Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope."50 It may be, however, that rather than having been excessive in his attempt at liberation, Michel has not gone far enough. "Sometimes I'm afraid that what I have sup pressed will take its revenge," he says. (p. 170) Despite his insights, Michel still lacks full self-awareness.
The Immoralist, though clearly related to Decadence, employs a much different
style to different ends. Thomas Mann also went beyond Decadent style while
appropriating much of what characterizes it. In 1918 Mann described himself as
one of those European writers who grew up in the age of decadence but who was
experimenting with ways of overcoming it. His first great success, Bud- den
brooks (1901), is a novel of decadence like Bourges's Le crepus cule des dieux,
recording the decline of a powerful family, though in this case burgher rather
than noble. Some of the early stories play self-consciously with Decadent
themes; for example, with "Tristan" (1902) Mann vaunted his audacity
in treating a Wagnerian theme lightly. "Isn't it something!" he wrote
to his brother Heinrich while
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[59]
he was at work on the story. "A burlesque named Tristan?"51 But it was
the novella Death in Venice (1911) that offered the most concen trated picture
of the relationship between decadence and the artist. By The Magic Mountain
(1922) Mann had mastered his "musical," one might say Wagnerian,
technique of motivic development and much later, with Dr. Faustus (1947),
produced a novel very similar in character to what I have called the Decadent
novel.
Budden brooks is surely the greatest novel of family decline. Al though it took dissolution and decay as its theme, the novel was not negative. "It won't do to call Buddenbrooks a 'destructive' book" Mann objected. " 'Critical' and 'sardonic'—that may be. But not destructive. It is too affirmatively artistic, too lovingly graphic, at its core too cheerful."52 Although the book was merciless in its detailed recording of events, Mann insisted that he was not interested in the Naturalistic fascination for the pathological but sought to elevate pathology for "intellectual, poetic, symbolical ends." He admitted the same combination of Naturalism and Symbolism in Death in Venice.53 As we have seen, this combination is characteristic of Decadent fiction. Thus the long chronicle of the Buddenbrook family's decline explicitly examines predictable symptoms such as the in creasing subjectivity and self-gratification of family members— relatively normal in Tony, grotesque in Christian, and debilitating in Thomas. Wagner's music and Schopenhauer's philosophy con tribute to Thomas's gradual disintegration, leaving him to play a role sustained largely by external trappings, an effort that makes "of his life, his every word, his every motion, a constant irritating pretence."54 The family line ends in the aesthetic and ascetic young Hanno, to whom music is the only significant reality and who dies from a disease the doctor calls typhoid but which may be "quite simply, a form of dissolution, the garment, as it were, of death" (pp.590—91).
Budden brooks is traditional in form but employs some unusual devices. T. J.
Reed singles out the treatment of Hanno. "By the standards of this novel,
which remains basically conservative in its use of the pictorial perspective,
involvement with Hanno is, in a discreet way, of the maximum intensity. We see
through his eyes deeply enough and long enough to be fully aware of the
alternatives to Buddenbrook vitality. "55 Mann explains more technically
the nature
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of his achievement in the famous chapter on Hanno's disease. He admits to
"a kind of higher copying"; the details on typhoid fever were
"unabashedly lifted from an encyclopedia article and then 'versified,' as
it were." The chapter's merit consists of the "poeticization of
mechanically appropriated material (and in the trick of indirectly communicating
Hanno's death)."56 This higher copying bears a resemblance to the dedicated
cataloguing of the Decadent style, which was also raised to a "poetic"
level and given coherence by a pattern of motifs—a technique that Mann was
already exploit ing. Mann wrote a novel of decadence in Budden brooks, which
revealed an awareness not only of the cultural influences upon personal and
social decline but of artistic techniques for conveying that decline as well.
Death in Venice studies in detail the psychological decay of a literary artist torn between the repressive discipline of his art and its rebellious sources.57 Quite simply, it records Aschenbach's descent into a "perverse" infatuation for the beautiful young Tadzio. Preoccupation with morbidity, disease, and vice, as well as with cosmetics, doubles, and the refinements of art makes the novella compatible with Decadence. Moreover, the repetition of highly charged terms (Mussiggang, Musse, Form, and the like) and motifs (the red- haired stranger at the cemetery who resembles the gondolier and the street musician), and the lushly written prose poems (Aschenbach's bacchic vision) seem to qualify the narrative as a Decadent composition. But like Gide's The Immoralist, Death in Venice does not entirely fit the mode.
Decadent style balances Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, with the
Apollonian triumphing at great cost for its effort. Decadent style invites
primitive impulses but confines them in a strict and openly artificial form. It
is as though the Decadent novel as artifact represents a victory over its
subject matter. Death in Venice recommends instead a precarious ambivalence
between Apollo and Dionysus since to deny the unconscious forces that generate
artistic impulse may be more destructive than to liberate them. The synthesis of
Apollonian and Dionysian that Mann championed in art manifests itself as well in
the synthesis of literary styles employed in Death in Venice. The precision of
detailed observation, the symmetry of recurrent patterns, and the overall form
of the tale coexist with out-
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bursts of rhythmic, almost hymnic, poetry disguised as prose and obsessive
reiterations that focus on erotic themes alluding to pagan sources.
Aschenbach's history aims toward the ambiguous triumph of his end, for the culminating erotic obsession with Tadzio is simply a late, perhaps inevitable, realization of the ideal that has fed the writer's genius from the outset. The rejector of the abyss, the author who was a model of purity in style, now lounges with a look in his eye "between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams."58 In fantasy he ad dresses these words to Phaedrus-Tadzio, admitting that "we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide" (p. 72). Knowledge he rejects because it leads to the abyss; but turning to detachment and the love of beauty and form, he concedes that these too may lead to excess and the abyss.
Mann allowed that Stefan George was right in saying that "in Death in Venice the highest is drawn down into the realm of decadence"; yet while admitting that he "did not pass unscathed through the naturalistic school," Mann claims that his story is neither a disavowal nor a denunciation. Instead, it represents his belief that the problem of eroticism and beauty are comprehended "in the tension of life and mind." He quotes his own assertion of this view from Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man: "Therefore there is no union between them [life and mind], but only the brief, inebriating illusion of union and understanding, an eternal tension without resolution."59 Mann was fully conscious of the identification of Wagner, who died in Venice, with this unresolved tension between life and mind, eros and ideal; moreover, he recognized the musical devices by which this tension was conveyed and imitated them to some degree. Like Wagner's music dramas, Mann's novella incorporates stylistically the tension it describes and in so doing draws close to the themes and style of Decadence without being Decadent.
The Magic Mountain (1922) is a masterful exploitation of what Mann learned in
Death in Venice. In a climate of disease and decay, the "healthy" Hans
Castorp, in a serious parody of the Bildungs roman, undergoes reeducation by
mentors who are themselves in advanced stages of decay, representing the extreme
cravings for the
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dominance of intellect and will—the logics of light and darkness— both of
which lead on to the abyss, as does the inarticulate feeling of Peeperkorn. But
Castorp's real education comes through his own visions—of Eros, of
nothingness, and finally of that ideal of beauty represented by music, which is
both alluring and dangerous—' 'The fruit, sound and splendid enough for the
instant or so, yet extraordinarily prone to decay; the purest refreshment of the
spirit, if enjoyed at the right moment, but the next, capable of spreading decay
and corruption among men." More than this, however, "it was a subject
for self-conquest at the definite behest of conscience."60
The Magic Mountain deals specifically with the appropriation of the decadent into the healthy, and its style reflects this feature. Mann intended the work to be a humorous pendant to Death in Venice and purposely started out in a genial "English" manner; benign realism is the prevailing mode, though absorbing surprising passages that war with it, such as Hans's vision of the deadly perfection of form represented by the snow, his subsequent vision of the two hags, and his synthesizing fantasy of primitive unity. His incredible address to Clavdia in French is another instance. These psychic upwellings— visions of one abyss or another—remind us that Dionysus must be recognized, but the good-humored narrative manner always reasserts itself, toying with the leitmotif technique so characteristic of Decadent fiction.
The Magic Mountain is a higher kind of novel of decadence, though now in a
metaphysical not merely social or cultural sense. Later, in an attempt to treat
the theme of nothingness haunting the creative artist, Mann came close to
writing a true Decadent novel in Doctor Faustus (1947). His subject is once more
the artist's yearning for an impossible absolute, and he examines in detail the
attempt to balance the cold, detached Apollonian order with the chaotic,
generative Dionysian urge. But with Adrian Leverkuhn the very de sire to command
both attitudes is diseased from the outset and is typified in his syphilitic
affliction and the motifs surrounding it—a decadent touch borrowed from the
true case of that arch-critic of decadence, Friedrich Nietzsche. The novel's
literary and biographical allusiveness resembles that of the Decadent novel, so
dependent upon the reader's participation in completing the significance of its
symbols. The nihilistic impulse of Leverkuhn's artistic urge reveals itself in
the decadent musical form he conceives—a fictional trans
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mutation of Wagner and an actual adaptation of Schoenberg's the ones.61 Adrian's
homoerotic leanings reflect a comparable drive to ward personal nihilism, for
they are bound up with a quest for his own origins, themselves represented in
his memories of and return to his childhood home. Doctor Faustus is a
complicated indictment of a way of thinking associated both with Decadence and
National Socialism, especially in the linking of high idealism and the
glorification of barbarism, though in a truly Decadent ironic turn, this
barbarism is artificially concocted. Imitating Adrian's music, Mann constructs
his novel in a form now familiar to us—an interweaving of apparently disparate
motifs and themes that actually constitute a grand scheme held together by a
larger mood itself the product of this atomized texture.62 It was a virtuoso
performance in an outdated mode which Mann consciously employed to recall those
early days of the century when Decadence was still an influential, ambiguous
power. He had noticed as well that the apparently antithetical positions of
Decadence and National Socialism shared a deep and abiding similarity, a
similarity that I shall examine in the last chapter of this study.
Mann was a superb serious parodist and was able to transcend the subjects of his parody by transforming their matter and style to new ends. Other parodists of Decadent fiction were less successful and offer us little illumination of the achievement of Decadent style. A novel such as Robert Hichens's The Green Carnation (1894) is entirely conventional in style and derives its interest from the portraits of certain types, especially Esme Amarinth, who represented Oscar Wilde. Max Beerbohm was more successful. His essays mocked Decadent obsessions and were so clever that readers did not always recognize them as parodies, as with "A Defence of Cosmetics."" The Happy Hypocrite" transformed the Decadent theme of hypocrisy and masks into a modern fairy tale. "Enoch Soames" splendidly captures a certain decadent type—the minor poet imitating French themes of defeat and decay—but its narrative method does not pro vide any profound insight into Decadent style, except for the delightfully reflexive climax of the tale when Soames, traveling into the future, discovers that he will be remembered, not as an author, but as Beerbohm's fictional creation.
Parody of Decadent fiction was not easy because it called for a
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recognition of the relationship between details of style and the larger radical
design of the fictional whole. In fact certain collections of short stories
constitute a subclassification of Decadent style even though their individual
stories do not appear to fit the definition I have presented here simply because
they incorporate individual units—the separate stories—into a larger design
held together by motifs and stylistic devices.
Beyond a consideration of themes, it is not easy to discuss Decadent style in the short story, but three late-century collections in English, Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits (1887), Ernest Dowson's Dilemmas (1895), and Arthur Symons's Spiritual Adventures (1905), offer an opportunity to observe how Aestheticism modulates into Decadence.63 Unlike most collections of short fiction at the time, these three books are held together by consistent themes, images, and attitudes. All three emphasize mood and character over plot. All three deal mainly with artists, both as individuals and as representatives. All three describe the self-frustrating pursuit of the ideal and are associated not only by theme but also by a developing style that combines the traditional and the innovative. This union is less obvious in the short story than in some other forms because the short story itself was not yet a fully developed genre.64 Nonetheless, one may note a progression from stories resembling scholarly essays in Pater to the diarylike method Dowson includes to the downright autobiographical account that plays a part in Symons's collection. Each collection welds apparently heterogeneous methods and materials into new aesthetic wholes. In what follows I shall demonstrate how in their modes of relating theme and form these works constitute a miniature history of the movement from Aestheticism to Decadence.
The three collections offer a progression in their treatment of certain
common themes and materials. Pater's stories are situated in the past and offer
some hope that art can matter. Dowson intensifies Pater's theme of aesthetic
renunciation. Like Pater's, his characters seek to convert the banality of
sensuous experience into a less material aesthetic form. But where Pater's
"historical" figures have expansive aspirations, Dowson's contemporary
characters restrict themselves to personal objectives. The trace of selfishness
in Dow- son's stories permeates Symons's narratives, and he adds the elements of
cruelty and perversity.
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If the movement from cultivation of the individual sensibility to self-indulgent
and cruel egoism is one way of tracing the change from Aestheticism to
Decadence, another is in the treatment of the central theme of frustrated
yearning for the ideal. The Romantics lamented the distance between intellectual
ideal and temporal reality. Aesthetes and Decadents, however, were less
concerned with the distance between aesthetic ideal and sensuous reality than
with the generic difference between them. This difference pained the Aesthetes,
but the Decadents went further—they sought out circum stances that would
guarantee such pain. For its own sake they valued the depiction of the painful
denial of dreams.
Aestheticism was concerned with external charm, ornament as grace, and history as occasion for pensive reflection. These traits are present in Imaginary Portraits, but Pater's stories also reveal a discontent with superficiality and a technical interest in the function of details in a larger structure. The four stories in this volume, though independent and in fact published separately, nonetheless constitute a whole that is unified not only by similarity of theme but also by subtle motifs and images that form a recondite argument. Each story describes the career of an idealist who effects some transformation entailing painful consequences for himself.65 The stories are woven together by motifs of burial, exhumation, death, and rebirth. Other recurrent motifs—such as allusions to military power— remind us that the world is not merely aesthetic, just as mythic allusions indicate that, through human imaginative power, it is not simply material either.
These stories are Aesthetic in tone, manner, and subject matter; but a note
very much identifiable with Decadence emerges in the acute consciousness of
division and suffering implicit in the artist's life, in the fascination with
nothingness and death, and in the attention to ironic or hideous detail—as in
the accidental exhumations and in the ghastly dismemberment of Denys L'Auxerrois.
But a technical, generic change is also taking place. What appears to be no more
than a collection of short stories is in fact a subtly unified work, a form that
might be viewed as halfway between separate short stories and the chapters of a
novel. Moreover, the stories depart from simple story telling and appropriate
instead the manner of biography or history. They collapse from narrative into
scholarly discourse. Just as the related essays of The Renaissance are enlivened
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with fictional devices, the stories in Portraits become occasions for aesthetic
speculation, like a hidden narrative line, discoverable only by means of
repeated motifs and themes, that constitutes the final unity of the entire
collection. This unity was something essentially new.
Ernest Dowson's Dilemmas is also a unified whole though, like Pater's collection, composed of independently published stories. Dowson's stories also concentrate on instances of anguished yearning (he had at one time considered entitling the collection Blind Alleys), but whereas Pater described the incidental suffering of aspirants to aesthetic excellence, Dowson pictures individuals who to a great extent evoke the torturing frustrations they endure. The mythic heroism of Pater's seekers has shrunk to aesthetic fastidiousness. The stories play changes on one essential theme that is surely Decadent but was also familiar in the nineteenth century—the hopeless yearning after an impossible ideal. What makes Dowson's stories Decadent in mood is the perverse way in which "destiny" and "temperament" lead highly refined sensibilities into ironically tormenting circumstances. Also there is a provocative withholding of the desired object through a conscious or inadvertent act of sanctification. Aesthetic values are confused with sacred values. Those loved women who do not actually b