The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (5 page)

Huysmans conspicuously failed to make the grade as a wholehearted Decadent, but unlike Péladan he did seem to have made a very concerted effort.
In
À rebours
he paraded himself (for few doubted that the anti-hero Des Esseintes was a thinly-disguised representation of the author) as a man who had plumbed the depths of Decadence much more thoroughly than mere poseurs like Rachilde, and had returned, not only to tell the tale but to deliver a verdict.
Huysmans was seemingly brought by experience to the same conclusion that Barbey D’Aurevilly had reached by consideration of the logic of the argument, that the Decadent road had only two possible destinations: the foot of the cross or the
suicide’s grave.
Huysmans not only chose the former on his own account, but went on to write a series of novels which painstakingly conducted a fictional projection of himself along the same route.

The chief virtue which
À rebours
has is its plausibility.
The effete aristocrat Des Esseintes has a fine record of perversions, but they are mostly behind him when the story – such as it is – begins.
The lifestyle described by the text is close enough to the ordinary to make the character believable, and to make it possible for the reader to identify with him.
Reading Rachilde or Jean Lorrain could only, in the final analysis, be a kind of textual voyeurism; in that sense if no other their novels are pornographic.
By contrast,
À rebours
offered a central character whose sensibilities were Decadent through and through, but whose adventures in calculated perversity were as authentically
impuissant
as one might expect from a disorganised and apathetic person.

Des Esseintes’ Decadence is certainly elaborate, but it is mostly cerebral; he spends most of his time reading, eating and strolling, and all his self-indulgences are bordered by detached anxiety.
A note of sour realism is eventually forced to intrude upon his search for exotic experience when he takes medical advice which assures him that he simply cannot carry on if he wishes to avoid pain, misery and death – and having received that advice he suffers an entirely plausible, if very un-Decadent, attack of common sense.

Des Esseintes observes himself constantly, becoming the ideal reader as well as the central character of the life-story whose narrative he laboriously constructs.
He is more self-conscious than the other heroes of the Decadent boom, and his self-consciousness retains a suspicious hint of cold sanity which the likes of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Jean Lorrain were probably incapable of
admitting to their work.
À rebours
is an essay feebly masquerading as a novel, and it is hardly surprising that it transcended the relatively tawdry genre of which it appeared to be a part to become a textbook of Decadence, and a handbook for those Decadents whose interest in the movement was more aesthetic than practical.

Huysmans did not, of course, conclude his analysis of Decadence with
À rebours.
His next work, too, can be regarded as an amplification of themes found in Barbey d’Aurevilly, who had explored the role of active evil in modern life in his misogynistic collection of stories
Les Diaboliques
(1874; tr.
as
The She-Devils
).
The series of novels with which Huysmans followed
À rebours
, chronicling the career of one Durtal, begins with a lurid examination of the temptations of Satanism,
Là-Bas
(1891).

Durtal, fed up to the back teeth with the awfulness of modern Paris, attempts to escape into dreams of a more vivid time (such pursuits of the artificial paradises of legend-encrusted history are a significant sub-theme of Decadent fantasy).
While researching a biography of France’s most notorious monster, Gilles de Rais, he is drawn into contact with the Satanists of contemporary Paris – in particular with Mme.
Chantelouve, in whose company he attends a Black Mass.
Eventually, though, Durtal plumps for God instead of Satan, and is drawn in
En route
(1895) to the other extreme of life in a Trappist monastery, before going on in
La Cathédrale
(1898) and
L’oblat
(1903) to explore other facets of the religious life.

One recalls, of course, that Gilles de Rais sent the Churchmen of his day into paroxysms of triumphant delight with his eventual repentance of all his horrible sins; he delivered the most spectacular confession ever heard before going gladly to his death – and then, one presumes, to Heaven.
The fact of his having been such a
conscientious Decadent in his earlier days similarly enhanced the value of Huysmans’ conversion in the eyes of those who received him into the bosom of the Roman Church.
Perhaps one should also recall, however, that Gibbon’s overview of the Decline and Fall of Rome saw the ancient empire’s conversion to Christianity merely as one more stage in its long decay.
If we are to accept (on the evidence of its dubious pseudo-psychological underpinning) the conclusion that Decadence was really a species of silliness, we can hardly make out any better case for Catholicism.
What Huysmans and Durtal – and all those who followed their example – mapped out was not really a road to salvation, but merely a path from frying pan to fire.
On the other hand, it must remain a matter of opinion as to whether any of the other escapes from Decadent consciousness measured out by other writers were, in the end, any more satisfactory.

**********

It was not religious faith but the attractions of a Symbolist movement shorn of Decadent pessimism and
impuissance
which were to provide a refuge for the majority of fair-weather Decadents who found the going too tough.
Some critics have, indeed, suggested that there was little more involved in the displacement of Decadence by Symbolism than a change of name.

Evidence to support this case includes the facts that Mallarmé’s reputation was substantially boosted by the revelation in
À rebours
that he was Des Esseintes’ favourite writer, and that Verlaine’s “Art poétique” (written in 1874 but not published until 1882) was adopted by the Symbolists as a key point of inspiration.
Further evidence was supplied by the short-lived English Decadent Movement, whose promulgator Arthur Symons
was quickly moved to protest, after the trial of Oscar Wilde, that it had really been a Symbolist Movement all along.
In actuality, though, the two terms should by no means be regarded as synonyms; what the Symbolists inherited (or took) from the Decadents was style without substance.
They were sympathetic to the Rimbaudian rational disordering of the senses and its careful avoidance of mundane description, but they were mostly uninterested in the anguish of the Decadents and its supportive apparatus of ideas.

Mallarmé’s achievement in producing Symbolism to eclipse Decadence was in contriving, after some initial dithering, to discover that which the Decadents thought impossible: a new poetic Ideal and a new quasi-religious poetic mission.
Though Mallarmé never actually produced the
Grand Oeuvre
about which he was always talking, it nevertheless sufficed as a hypothetical goal towards which all his work could be orientated.
He lay down for his followers a manifesto for life and art which was less uncomfortable to follow and more attractive as an item of commitment.
Mallarmé was, of course, a much happier man than Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Verlaine: he was more successful in love, and eventually succeded – as none of them had done – in providing himself with a good living and a sound reputation.

As the protopsychological theories which had briefly dignified their excesses fell into decline, it is hardly surprising that all but the hardiest of the Decadents deflected their careers into more promising literary territory, accepting Mallarmé’s offer of renewed hope and revitalised significance.
Nevertheless, the legacy of Decadence lingered at least until the end of the century, and its impact was not insignificant even upon the work of those writers who must be considered to have been on its periphery.

**********

FIN DE SIÉCLE:
THE DECADENCE OF DECADENCE

Barbey d’Aurevilly was wrong, of course, to argue that the only possible escape routes for the earnest Decadent were Catholicism and suicide.
Religious faith is not the only ideal to which a man might commit himself in order to recover the sense of being and doing something worthwhile.
Aesthetic and political creeds could both offer convenient exits for Decadents disenchanted with disenchantment, and did so; others could simply learn to look at themselves and their work more ironically, becoming self-mocking satirists.

In exactly the same way, there were many writers contemporary with the Decadent Movement whose unwillingness to give up some such commitment, or whose inability to become entirely earnest about Decadent themes, kept them on the periphery despite the influence of the same ideas and preoccupations which attracted the Decadents to Decadence.
Some of these writers warrant discussion in the context of Decadence if only to assist in the marking out of its blurred boundaries, and one or two of them produced important Decadent texts among works of other kinds.

The Comte de Villiers d’Isle Adam, whose
Contes cruels
(1883) were praised by Des Esseintes in
À rebours
would certainly be included with the Decadents were it not for an urgent Idealism in his work which kept
ennui
and
impuissance
from his literary agenda.
The
conte cruel
sub-genre which he pioneered, and which was subsequently taken up by writers like Maurice Level,
certainly contains some Decadent items, but it is also possessed by a strong sense of irony which is much less narrowly-focused than the irony of Mendès’ work.
The Decadent aristocrat Lord Ewald in Villiers’ misogynistic fantasy
L’Eve Future
(1886) finds an extraordinary way to transcend his predicament, when the inventor Edison builds him a perfect woman, thus taking the cult of the artificial to a new extreme.
In his own art-work, Villiers could never be content for long with apathetic accidie; some of his “cruel tales” exhibit an uneasy callousness which is perfectly Decadent, but they are not typical of his outlook; he went on to develop a conscientiously neo-Romantic extravagance in such visionary dramas as the posthumously-published
Axel
(1890).

Insofar as Villiers de l’Isle Adam was a Decadent at all one could argue that a Decadent consciousness which he would dearly have wished to avoid was briefly thrust upon him by circumstance.
He came from an aristocratic family in dire decline and failed utterly to redeem his position by making a useful marriage; small wonder, therefore, that he was occasionally possessed by splenetic hopelessness.
He was not the only writer to be thus seized against his will; Gérard de Nerval was to prove an unfortunate prototype for a group of writers who were gradually toppled into the abyss of mental disorder – usually by the ravages of syphillis.
Guy de Maupassant, who was a thoroughgoing realist in the greater part of his work, became increasingly fascinated by the effects of morbid hallucination as the spirochaete disordered his senses, and some of his work of the late eighties has a paranoid intensity.
The fact that he was never able to accept the literal existence of ghosts did not stop him from exploring the psychology of fear in a scrupulous and intense fashion, and his work in this vein is sometimes very close in spirit to the supernatural
stories of Jean Lorrain.

Visionary drama of the kind developed by Villiers de L’Isle Adam was also the preferred medium of the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, whose early work is very closely associated with the Decadent Movement, displaying passive characters helpless to defy the frankly mysterious forces which impel them towards their various dooms.
From
La Princesse Maleine
(1889) to
La mort de Tintagiles
(1894) his work is thoroughly pessimistic, but his most famous work,
L’oiseau bleu
(1909; tr, as
The Blue Bird
) is a much more hopeful allegory in which the power of the dreamer becomes sufficiently assertive to control and defy the threat of nightmare.

The theatre is not, in any case, a suitable medium for the Decadent consciousness, which requires more interiorization than drama can usually sustain, and more freedom from censorship than the stage usually allows.
The dilution and divergence of the Decadent consciousness after 1890 is much better exemplified by a handful of poets and novelists who, although preoccupied with certain characteristic Decadent themes, avoided any wholehearted immersion in the Movement.
All of them existed on the margins of Decadence, and were selective in those aspects of it which they elected to extrapolate.

**********

All of Jules Laforgue’s work was published during the heyday of the Decadent Movement, and he was readily associated with it by contemporary critics, but his poetry and short fiction are saved from authentic Decadent consciousness by the fact that his sense of irony was far too powerful.
Laforgue, like the poet Tristan Corbière before him, contrived to transform a
fundamentally gloomy outlook by the power of ironic wit.
He quickly developed a penchant for sparkling wordplay and pyrotechnic sarcasm, shown to best effect in his collection of six
Moralités légendaires
(1887), in which the pretensions of heroes like Perseus, Lohengrin and Hamlet are mercilessly deflated.
There is a full enough measure of
ennui
and
spleen
in Laforgue’s work, and he certainly exhibited the customary Decadent traits in his private life – even to the extent of dying young of tuberculosis in 1887 – but the work which he completed in his final years gives every evidence of the fact that he had turned satirically against the Movement which had briefly involved him.

Pierre Louÿs, by contrast, is not generally included in lists of Decadent writers, and understandably so – his use of Classical themes takes no account of Montesquieu’s theory of Roman decadence, being far more interested in the aesthetic glories of Greece than the tarnished grandeur of Rome.
But he did translate Lucian’s teasing series of dialogues concerning the pragmatic ideology of the courtesan, and he devoted much effort to a quasi-Decadent celebration of Lesbianism in
Les Chansons de Bilitis
(1894).
The glorification of Sapphic love is also a significant sub-text of his exotic historical
novel Aphrodite
(1896), which is set in Alexandria during the reign of Cleopatra’s elder sister Berenike.
There is nothing particularly neurasthenic about the characters who figure in this tale of fatal infatuation, but it stands in a direct line of descent from Gautier and makes rather less concession than Gautier did to the saving grace of grand passion.

Louÿs followed
Aphrodite
with
Les Aventures de roi Pausole
(1901), a Rabelaisian fantasy set in the imaginary realm of Tryphême – which, the author is careful to state, should not be mistaken for Utopia.
Here
the tone is deft and amusing; the eroticism is light-hearted, and literally pleads not to be taken seriously.
In more earnest work Louÿs retained a deep suspicion of the redeeming quality of love, as evidenced by the quasi-masochistic tale of disappointments
La Femme et le pantin
(1898; tr.
as
The Woman and the Puppet
) and the book which he could never bring himself to finish for publication,
Psyche
(issued posthumously, and incomplete, in 1925), and he spent the latter part of his life as a virtual recluse, but his incipient Decadence was compromised by a sentimentality which made him excessively regretful about the failure of sexual passion to live up to human hopes.

Louÿs’ protegé Charles Bargone, who wrote under the pseudony Claude Farrére, might have been a much more enthusiastic Decadent than his mentor, but he was far too late coming upon the scene to get involved in the Movement itself and his Decadent affectations were soon nipped in the bud.
He has the distinction, however, of having belatedly produced what probably deserves to be considered the ultimate study of the Decadent use and abuse of drugs, in his remarkable story-cycle
Fumée d’Opium
(1904; tr.
as
Black Opium
).
There had been many previous accounts of the careers of drug-users – notably Marcel Mallat’s
La Comtesse Morphine
(1885) – but most had followed Baudelaire’s example in being both
recherché
and censorious.
Farrère’s story-cycle follows the example of Jules Boissière’s
Les Fumeurs d’opium
(1896) in paying much more attention to the exoticism of the lands from which opium comes, where its use confuses and blends exotic dream-experiences with exotic landscapes.
It is, however, a more ornate and multi-faceted work than its predecessor, beginning with a group of “legends” and passing through “annals”, “ecstasies”, “doubts” and “phantoms” to a concluding
“nightmare”.

Farrére was to go on to produce many more works of an entirely un-Decadent stripe, most of which recall the upbeat exoticism of the sailor “Loti” (Julien Viaud).
His reinvestment in optimism was aided by political commitment, but it is perhaps significant that his vivid futuristic fantasy
Les condamnés a mort
(1920; tr.
as
Useless Hands
) features a hopeless revolution against technologically-sophisticated Capitalists whose comforts have robbed them of all moral sensibility.

Political commitment of one kind or another kept many of the leading French writers of the 1880s away from Decadence altogether.
When Anatole France abandoned the aristocratic values which he had inherited and turned against Catholicism he never paused to dally with Decadence but kept his hopes firmly invested in alternative visions of a better future.
The same was very nearly true of Octave Mirbeau, but the anarchism to which Mirbeau was attracted was a less dogmatic creed than France’s communism, and his novels are correspondingly unfocused.

Mirbeau’s work is too full of righteous wrath against the evils of the day to be reckoned properly neurasthenic (despite his use of the word in the title of one of his later books), but he was to produce in
Le jardin des supplices
(1899) a key work of quasi-Decadent fantasy.
The character of Clara, who entrances the hero and deflects him from his semi-purposeful journey to the East, is both a descendant and marvellously grotesque exaggeration of Gautier’s Cleopatra or Rachilde’s Marquise de Sade.
The allegorical tour of the garden of tortures which she takes in the company of the intimidated anti-hero is a portrait of the Decadent in search of distraction to end all such portraits, and represents the true culmination of that particular aspect of the Decadent adventure.
Afterwards, there really was nowhere else to go in search of intensity-through-sin.

**********

It is not easy to register a death-date for French Decadence as certain in its propriety as the birth-date which was registered by the publication of
Les Fleurs du Mal
.
The notable works by Mirbeau and Farrère cited above are really distanced studies of the Decadent outlook, arguably more comparable with Sainte-Beuve’s
Volupté
than with the novels cited in the previous section, and it would be a distortion to select one of them as a kind of tombstone.

Decadent style, in being supersededby Symbolism, was transformed rather than destroyed, and the same might be said of certain Decadent themes which were taken up in a flirtatious fashion by the first surrealists.
Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire both deployed in their prose works ideas which had formerly preoccupied the Decadents, but they made a macabre comedy out of them.
Jarry, in particular, occasionally came close to the Decadent spirit in
Les jours et les nuits
(1897), in which an unfit soldier seeks release from his predicament in hallucinations, and in his vivid historical melodrama
Messaline
(1900), set in decadent Rome.

One can find such echoes wherever one cares to look; however quickly Decadence may have passed from fashion it had made an indelible impression on the heritage of French literature.
The Decadent Movement was virtually extinct in France by 1900 (though some other nations had yet to produce their own quasi-Decadent literature at that time) but it left descendants to carry forward certain of its traits, and occasional throwbacks would be produced by those descendants for many years.

There is, in any case, a certain ironic futility about any attempt to register a time of death in respect of Decadent literature; the very essence of the idea of decadence is that death is merely a passing moment within a continuing process of decay, and it is entirely appropriate that echoes of the Decadent consciousness should continue to crop up long into the Twentieth Century, sometimes at long distances from the point of origin in Paris.
Baudelaire’s work, after all, remains very much alive, and though his celebrations of
spleen
and
ennui
have to be understood – if they are to be understood properly – in their proper historical context, they have nevertheless become immortal in the crystallizations of Decadent sensibility which are provided by
Les Fleurs du Mal
.
The flowers of evil were not hardy perennials, but because they are poems and not real flowers they cannot entirely wither into dust.