Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2000) 385-90
Maria Ionita
University of Western Ontario
The
Cadence of Ennui
Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky,
eds. Perennial Decay. On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999; vi+318pp.; ISBN: 0812216784 (pbk.);
LC call no.: PN56.D45P47
Perennial Decay presents itself as an attempt to extract decadence
from underneath the negative stereotypes heaped upon it by an often unreceptive
criticism. This is indeed a worthy cause, given the fact that this particular
literary trend has often been deprived of an adequate critical treatment.
According to the editors’ preface, this volume sets out not only to remedy
this problem, but also to offer a synopsis of the academic reception of decadence:
“Rather than seeking merely to dismiss any particular critic or critical approach,
or to minimize the importance of both past and contemporary scholarship, we
hope here to raise what we consider significant questions about the academic
reception of decadence, questions
that we believe indicate and redefine the pertinence of decadent art and writing
to contemporary theoretical concerns” (2). Decadence is thus viewed as more
than “a parodic hiatus before the inception of Modernism” (1) or a “compendium
of transgressive themes and images” (2) – it is instead a trend that raises
“serious literary, political and historical questions” (1). Leaving aside
the fact that, as enunciated in the first pages of the book, both these issues
are hopelessly commonplace[1] (of course decadence is something
“more,” otherwise such a project would be pointless), the remedial treatment,
as proposed by the editors has to follow several preliminary measures. First,
decadence should not be treated as the “weak paradigm” anymore. Instead, one
must acknowledge the fact that it challenges and interferes with “the boundaries
and borders (national, sexual, definitional, historical, to name but a few)
that criticism normally relies upon to make its judgments, producing what
we call a ‘perennial decay’ of those boundaries and borders” (11). Consequently,
decadence “requires a criticism receptive not merely to its themes and styles
but also to its particular textual means and textual strategies” (11). Following
in the footsteps of the premise of the book, such assertions have unfortunately,
about as much relevance as the proverbial secret of Polichinelle – after all,
any type of decent literary criticism should be receptive to the textual
strategies of its object.
According to Constable and Dennisoff, decadent textual
strategies are intentionally designed to summon negative critical judgments in
order to question or subminate them. Since the very notion of decadence cannot
be separated from its negative connotations, as well as from the disparaging
comparison to the norm, decadent writers constantly rely on textual devices
that allow them to “undermine boundaries and differences” (21). To put its
simply, most decadent works act “like a two-way mirror, in which the reader’s
effort to see through the glass – an effort seemingly encouraged by the text’s
themes and styles – is frustrated by the persistence of his or her own
reflection” (17). The editors thus argue for a reconsideration of the very
meaning of the concept, which should be viewed not as a mere indicator for a
certain literary degenerescence, but rather as “a critical designation for a
work whose textual strategies are in constant tension with its supposed
explanations and examples” (19). Such are the cases of Huysmans’ A rebours,
and Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray – works which constantly
undermine both the mimetic paradigm of artistic creation and the concept of
decadence as degeneration.
The assumption that decadence is in some way also a
“différance” (although I must confess that I find the expression ‘perennial
decay’ rather unclear in the context) should arguably lie at the core of all
the essays gathered in the book. However, the gap between the editors’ intention
and the actual essays is often to wide to cross. The three predominantly theoretical
pieces gathered under the heading “Defining Decadence” are particularly bland,
as they do not seem to go beyond the ideas that the preface already developed.
Barbara Spackman’s “Intervensions” is an analysis of the various “lists” of
A rebours, and it explores “the way in which the text plays with and
within the binary opposition that constitutes sexual difference as a logic
of absolute difference” (36). The notion of “absolute difference” is taken
from Laplanche’s Castrations/ Symbolizations and signifies the difference
between the two terms of a binary opposition (such as non-male = female).
From this point of view, she argues, the endless lists of oddities that Des
Esseintes compiles are meant to be read as “systems of diversity that destabilize
the binary oppositions that structure the text. This point runs parallel to
another – the way in which the text emphasizes its artificiality and seems
to fight mimesis at every step (a “cosmetic” rather than mimetic aesthetic
theory, in Spackman’s felicitous expression [47]). This tendencies find their
most accurate expression in the chiasmus, the figure par excellence
of reversals of inversions (a “vrai faux,” to use the expression of Françoise
Gaillard, whom Spackman quotes generously throughout the essay). What remains
relatively unclear (at least in the way in which her explanation runs) is
the relation that the text bears to the psychoanalytical notion of “absolute
difference” as well as to the Freudian notion of fetishism. The whole argument
relies on a brief fragment which describes a
Michael Riffaterre’s “Decadent Paradoxes” starts once
more by blasting the favorite hobby-horse of the book: “the very meaning of the word decadent has encouraged
critics to make value judgments that do little more than translate biological
or chronological notions – such as senescence, exhaustion, the ‘end’ of the
century – into aesthetic terms.” Strangely enough, Riffaterre contradicts the
stereotype not by denying the accuracy of such value judgments, but
rather by identifying the same thematic concerns within Romanticism. He then
identifies paradox as the decadent artifice – something that Romantic
texts conspicuously lack. His definition of paradox is rather idiosyncratic
(especially in its relation to humor), and lacks any precise delimitation:
Paradox does not only offer
statements contrary to the reader’s expectation – or even to his or her idea of
reality – but expresses them disconcertingly, unpleasantly, or worse,
ridiculously, thereby arousing in the reader reactions ranging from an initial
incredulity, to irritation, to a sense of amusement before the too-evident
artifice of the procedure. Its mechanism is thus similar to that of humor. (66)
However, in this context a simplifying definition works
as well as a erudite one, since the bulk of the essay is made up of an accurate
and largely useless taxonomy of decadent paradoxes. Riffaterre carefully analyzes
the structure of the paradox (a “given” – the stage prior to the transformation
– and a “derivation” – the incongruous expression that results) and even goes
to identify three different types (metalinguistic, thematic and intertextual).
Each of these types is, in its turn carefully dissected, but the end result
looks more like a term paper than a scholarly essay. The ultimate goal of
“Decadent Paradoxes” remains obscure: the essay
Read in isolation, in terms
of the reality which it would then represent, this text [A Rebours],
this texts is perverse or artificial. But read intertextually, it really
appears to be an exercise, a variation on a model, and its pathos, far from
being unbearable, is like a musical score to be played, and is therefore a
legitimate source of pleasure. In the artifice, we then find a basic law of
literary narrative: emotion recollected in tranquility. (78)
Aside from the obvious fallacy of combining technical
and moral judgments in one statement, this phrase also manages to erase a
serious portion of the very raison d’être of decadent literature: precisely
the idea that good art does not need any moral justification. A type of literature
that is a legitimate source of pleasure (as opposed, presumably, to
one that is not) – is after all an idea which would have made Oscar Wilde
(incidentally, the legitimizing figure of this book) cringe!
“Pale Imitations” by Matthew Potolsky (included in
the last section of the volume, “Decadence, History and the Politics of
Language”) is by far the best and most seriously argued essay of the selection.
He analyzes the effect of imitation in Walter Pater’s final fiction “Apollo in
Picardy,” in the contexts of Pater’s own fascination with the reception of
classical myths in the Middle Ages. Potolsky comes to the conclusion that, far
from being the ultimate symptom of decadent weakness, imitation is in fact a
problematic and consciously employed literary device, supported by elaborate
imagery and structural effects within the text itself (the most salient being
the presentation of the text as a re-telling of a medieval manuscript
discovered during the time of the French Revolution): “The process of
incorporation and reinterpretation of the past shapes Pater’s text to such an
extent that the story about a dangerous imitation of the past cannot be
distinguished from the imitations of the (literary) past out of which it is
largely constructed” (245). Pater’s text initially seems to provide a view of
imitation that supports the common assumption that decadence is the consequence
of an inevitable historical decay:
Rather than treating imitation
as potentially a matter of choice and innovation – a characterization that
the composition of the story explicitly leaves open – the narrator characterizes
it as a matter of fate.... The course of history becomes a series of inevitable
repetitions that mere mortals... can neither control nor alter. (250)
But, Potolsky argues, the discovery of the manuscript
during the French Revolution also points towards a radically different
interpretation of the text. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s arguments that
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty
time, but time filled with now-time” and that “In every era, the attempt must
be made anew to wrest tradition from the conformism which is about to overpower
it,” Potolsky points out that Pater’s text goes against precisely the idea of a
“grand and fateful history” (251) and points out that the past is never fixed
but always open to interpretation. By generalizing, this, in Potolsky’s view,
is the message of decadent writing: a resistance in front of a literary history
that judges literature according to an immutable temporal scale that runs from
childhood to inevitable degeneration.
Matthew Potolsky’s essay is the only one that
convincingly argues in favor of the capacity of decadent literature to subvert
its own critical interpretation. Unfortunately, the most extensive section of the
book, the one which should have carried the weight of such a demonstration,
“Visualizing Decadence,” fails short of the task. With the exception of David
Wayne Thomas’s analysis of Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife
and Her Lover as a narrative of history and Hema Chari’s “Imperial
Dependency, Addiction, and the Decadent Body” (a postcolonialist analysis of
the figure of the Oriental opium addict[2]), the other essays are
invariably concerned with the representation of only one figure and its variations:
the homosexual, the transvestite, and, in its most generalizing aspect, the
inhabitant of the demimonde. Most of these essays dissimulate
surprisingly banal messages under the mask of overblown references. A case in
point would be Emily Apter’s “Spaces of the Demimondes,” which mentions an
overwhelming number of names and makes use of graceless academic barbarisms[3] to make the rather
redundant point that demimonde decadence is associated with the representation
of “half-worlds” and “self-exile” (144). Oscar Wilde, of course, plays a
prominent (yet purely decorative role, as no one seems interested in going
beyond the pose) in several of the eleven essays that make up the central part
of the book. The most interesting ones are Marc A. Weiner’s “Opera and the
Discourse of Decadence: from Wagner to AIDS” and Leonard R. Koos’ “Improper
Names: Pseudonyms and Transvestites in Decadent Prose.” Both issues would have
however benefitted from a deeper investigation. Weiner’s essay never goes
beyond extensive quotations from Wagner and Nietzsche, while Koos’ piece
confines itself to merely outlining the relation put forward by the title.
Perennial Decay is unfortunately a work that promises more than it
delivers. The effort is surely commendable, and, if nothing else, with an
index of eight small-print pages, the volume remains an useful reference instrument.
It also makes clear that the book that would effectively challenge the perspective
on decadent literature remains yet to be written.
[1]. For a much better treatment of slightly similar issues,
see Matei Calinescu’s chapter in Five Faces of Modernity (acknowledged
but, unfortunately never followed by this book). Unlike the analyses printed in Perennial
Decay, his refrains from any ethical or moral value judgments (even
if only to contradict them), and also, justly considers decadence as part
of modernity – an issue which Constable’s book never raises.
[2]. In this essay, Hema Chari is so busy keeping pure her
postcolonial paradigm, that she credits Hanif Kureishi with being the author
of Stephen Frears’ film My Beautiful Launderette
(229), when in fact he is the film’s screenwriter.
[3]. Such as “sphincteral eros” and “nonheteronormative
bodies” (try repeating this really fast ten times!).