The Decadent movement, from the
French décadence, "decay" was a late-19th-century artistic and
literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic
ideology of excess and artificiality.
The Decadent movement first
flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United
States.
The movement was characterized by
a belief in the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism[over logic
and the natural world
The concept of decadence dates to
the 18th century, especially from the writings of Montesquieu, the
Enlightenment philosopher who suggested that the decline (décadence) of the
Roman Empire was in large part due to its moral decay and loss of cultural standards.
When Latin scholar Désiré Nisard turned toward
French literature, he compared Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general to the
Roman decadence, men sacrificing their craft and their cultural values for the
sake of pleasure. The trends that he identified, such as an interest in
description, a lack of adherence to the conventional rules of literature and
art, and a love for extravagant language were the seeds of the Decadent
movement.
The first major development in
French decadence appeared when writers Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire
used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal
"progress".
Baudelaire referred to himself as
decadent in his 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal and exalted the Roman decline
as a model for modern poets to express their passion. He later used the term
decadence to include the subversion of traditional categories in pursuit of
full, sensual expression.
In his lengthy introduction to
Baudelaire in the front of the 1868 Les Fleurs du mal, Gautier at first rejects
the application of the term decadent, as meant by the critic, but then works
his way to an admission of decadence on Baudelaire's own terms: a preference
for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy,
and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.
The Belgian Félicien Rops was
instrumental in the development of this early stage of the Decadent movement.
A friend of Baudelaire, he was a
frequent illustrator of Baudelaire's writing, at the request of the author
himself. Rops delighted in breaking artistic convention and shocking the public
with gruesome, fantastical horror. He was explicitly interested in the Satanic,
and he frequently sought to portray the double-threat of Satan and Woman.
At times, his only goal was the
portrayal of a woman he'd observed debasing herself in the pursuit of her own
pleasure.
It has been suggested that, no matter how
horrific and perverse his images could be, Rops' invocation of supernatural
elements was sufficient to keep Baudelaire situated in a spiritually aware
universe that maintained a cynical kind of hope, even if the poetry
"requires a strong stomach".
Their work was the worship of beauty disguised
as the worship of evil. For both of them, mortality and all manner of
corruptions were always on their mind.
The ability of Rops to see and portray the
same world as they did made him a popular illustrator for other decadent
authors.
The concept of decadence lingered
after that, but it was not until 1884 that Maurice Barrès referred to a
particular group of writers as Decadents. He defined this group as those who
had been influenced heavily by Baudelaire, though they were also influenced by
Gothic novels and the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Many were
associated with Symbolism, others with Aestheticism.
The pursuit of these authors, according to
Arthur Symons, was "a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the
impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life",
and their achievement, as he saw it, was "to be a disembodied voice, and
yet the voice of a human soul".
Apostle Bartolomew flayed alive, by Jan
Luyken, 1685
In his 1884 decadent novel À
rebours (English: Against Nature or Against the Grain), Joris-Karl Huysmans
identified likely candidates for the core of the Decadent movement, which he
seemed to view Baudelaire as sitting above: Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière,
Theodore Hannon and Stéphane Mallarmé. His character Des Esseintes hailed these
writers for their creativity and their craftsmanship, suggesting that they
filled him with "insidious delight" as they used a "secret
language" to explore "twisted and precious ideas".
Not only did À rebours define an
ideology and a literature, but it also created an influential perspective on
visual art. The character of Des Esseintes explicitly heralded the paintings of
Gustave Moreau, the 17th-century Dutch engraver Jan Luyken's illustrations to
the Martyrs Mirror and the lithographs of Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon.
The choice of these works
established a decadent perspective on art which favored madness and
irrationality, graphic violence, frank pessimism about cultural institutions,
and a disregard for visual logic of the natural world. It has been suggested
that a dream vision that Des Esseintes describes is based on the series of
satanic encounters painted by Félicien Rops.
Capitalizing on the momentum of
Huysmans' work, Anatole Baju founded the magazine Le Décadent in 1886, an
effort to define and organize the Decadent movement in a formal way. This group
of writers did not only look to escape the boredom of the banal, but they
sought to shock, scandalize, and subvert the expectations and values of
society, believing that such freedom and creative experimentation would improve
humanity.
Not everyone was comfortable with
Baju and Le Décadent, even including some who had been published in its pages.
Rival writer Jean Moréas published his Symbolist Manifesto, largely to escape
association with the Decadent movement, despite their shared heritage. Moréas
and Gustave Kahn, among others, formed rival publications to reinforce the
distinction.
Paul Verlaine embraced the label at first,
applauding it as a brilliant marketing choice by Baju. After seeing his own
words exploited and tiring of Le Décadent publishing works falsely attributed
to Arthur Rimbaud, however, Verlaine came to sour on Baju personally, and he
eventually rejected the label, as well.
Decadence continued on in France,
but it was limited largely to Anatole Baju and his followers, who refined their
focus even further on perverse sexuality, material extravagance, and up-ending
social expectations. Far-fetched plots were acceptable if they helped generate
the desired moments of salacious experience or glorification of the morbid and
grotesque. Writers who embraced the sort of decadence featured in Le Décadent
include Albert Aurier, Rachilde, Pierre Vareilles, Miguel Hernández, Jean Lorrain
and Laurent Tailhade. Many of these authors did also publish symbolist works,
however, and it unclear how strongly they would have identified with Baju as
decadents.
In France, the Decadent movement
is often said to have begun with either Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature
(1884) or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
This movement essentially gave way to
Symbolism when Le Décadent closed down in 1889 and Anatole Baju turned toward
politics and became associated with anarchy.
A few writers continued the decadent
tradition, such as Octave Mirbeau, but Decadence was no longer a recognized
movement, let alone a force in literature or art.
Beginning with the association of
decadence with cultural decline, it is not uncommon to associate decadence in
general with transitional times and their associated moods of pessimism and
uncertainty. In France, the heart of the Decadent movement was during the 1880s
and 1890s, the time of fin de siècle, or end-of-the-century gloom.
As part of that overall
transition, many scholars of Decadence, such as David Weir, regard Decadence as
a dynamic transition between Romanticism and Modernism, especially considering
the decadent tendency to dehumanize and distort in the name of pleasure and
fantasy.
Symbolism has often been confused
with the Decadent movement. Arthur Symons, a British poet and literary critic
contemporary with the movement, at one time considered Decadence in literature
to be a parent category that included both Symbolism and Impressionism, as
rebellions against realism. He defined this common, decadent thread as "an
intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an
over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity". He referred to all such literature as "a new and
beautiful and interesting disease".
Later, however, he described the
Decadent movement as an "interlude, half a mock interlude" that
distracted critics from seeing and appreciating the larger and more important
trend, which was the development of Symbolism.
It is true that the two groups
share an ideological descent from Baudelaire and for a time they both
considered themselves as part of one sphere of new, anti-establishment
literature. They worked together and met together for quite a while, as if they
were part of the same movement.
Maurice Barrès referred to this group as
decadents, but he also referred to one of them (Stéphane Mallarmé) as a
symbolist. Even Jean Moréas used both terms for his own group of writers as
late as 1885.
Only a year later, however, Jean
Moréas wrote his Symbolist Manifesto to assert a difference between the
symbolists with whom he allied himself and this the new group of decadents
associated with Anatole Baju and Le Décadent.
Even after this, there was sufficient common
ground of interest, method, and language to blur the lines more than the
manifesto might have suggested.
In the world of visual arts, it
can be even more difficult to distinguish decadence from symbolism. In fact,
Stephen Romer has referred to Félicien Rops, Gustave Moreau, and Fernand
Khnopff as "Symbolist-Decadent painters and engravers".
Nevertheless, there are clear
ideological differences between those who continued on as symbolists and those
who have been called "dissidents" for remaining in the Decadent
movement. Often, there was little doubt that Baju and his group were producing
work that was decadent, but there is frequently more question about the work of
the symbolists.
Decadence actually belittles
nature in the name of artistry. In Huysmans’ Against Nature, for instance, the
main character Des Esseintes says of nature: "There is not one of her
inventions, no matter how subtle or imposing it may be, which human genius
cannot create ... There can be no doubt about it: this eternal, driveling, old
woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace
her by artifice."
Symbolism treats language and
imagery as devices that can only approximate meaning and merely evoke complex
emotions and call the mind toward ideas it might not be able to comprehend. In
the words of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé:
Languages are imperfect because
multiple; the supreme language is missing...no one can utter words which would
bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate...how impossible it is for
language to express things...in the Poet's hands...by the consistent virtue and
necessity of an art which lives on fiction, it achieves its full efficacy.
Moréas asserted in his manifesto
on symbolism that words and images serve to dress the incomprehensible in such
a way that it can be approached, if not understood.
Decadence, on the other hand,
sees no path to higher truth in words and images. Instead, books, poetry, and
art itself as the creators of valid new worlds, thus the allegory of decadent
Wilde's Dorian Gray being poisoned by a book like a drug. Words and artifice
are the vehicles for human creativity, and Huysmans suggests that the illusions
of fantasy have their own reality: "The secret lies in knowing how to
proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and
succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself."
Both groups are disillusioned
with the meaning and truth offered by the natural world, rational thought, and
ordinary society. Symbolism turns its eyes toward Greater Purpose or on the
Ideal, using dreams and symbols to approach these esoteric primal truths. In
Mallarme's poem "Apparition", for instance, the word
"dreaming" appears twice, followed by "Dream" itself with a
capital D. In "The Windows", he speaks of this decadent disgust of
contentment with comfort and an endless desire for the exotic. He writes:
"So filled with disgust for the man whose soul is callous, sprawled in
comforts where his hungering is fed." In this continuing search for the
spiritual, therefore, Symbolism has been predisposed to concern itself with
purity and beauty and such mysterious imagery as those of fairies.
In contrast, Decadence states
there is no oblique approach to ultimate truth because there is no secret,
mystical truth. They despise the very idea of searching for such a thing. If
there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment.
The heroes of Decadent novels, for instance, have the unquenchable accumulation
of luxuries and pleasure, often exotic, as their goal, even the gory and the
shocking.
In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, decadent
Gustave Flaubert describes Saint Anthony's pleasure from watching disturbing
scenes of horror. Later Czech decadent Arthur Breisky has been quoted by
scholars as speaking to both the importance of illusion and of beauty:
"But isn't it necessary to believe a beautiful mask more than
reality?"
Ultimately, the distinction may
best be seen in their approach to art. Symbolism is an accumulation of
"symbols" that are there not to present their content but to evoke
greater ideas that their symbolism cannot expressly utter. According to Moréas,
it is an attempt to connect the objects and phenomena of the world to
"esoteric primordial truths" that cannot ever be directly approached.
Decadence, on the other hand, is
an accumulation of signs or descriptions acting as detailed catalogs of human
material riches as well as artifice.[30] It was Oscar Wilde who perhaps laid
this out most clearly in The Decay of Lying with the suggestion of three
doctrines on art, here excerpted into a list:
1. "Art never expresses
anything but itself."
2. "All bad art comes from
returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals."
3. "Life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates Life"
After which, he suggested a
conclusion quite in contrast to Moréas' search for shadow truth: "Lying,
the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."
In France, the Decadent movement
could not withstand the loss of its leading figures. Many of those associated
with the Decadent movement became symbolists after initially associating freely
with decadents. Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé were among those, though
both had been associated with Baju's Le Décadent for a time. Others kept a foot
in each camp. Albert Aurier wrote decadent pieces for Le Décadent and also
wrote symbolist poetry and art criticism.
Decadent writer Rachilde was
staunchly opposed to a symbolist take over of Le Décadent even though her own
one-act drama The Crystal Spider is almost certainly a symbolist work. Others,
once strong voices for decadence, abandoned the movement altogether. Joris-Karl
Huysmans grew to consider Against Nature as the starting point on his journey
into Roman Catholic symbolist work and the acceptance of hope. Anatole Baju,
once the self-appointed school-master of French decadence, came to think of the
movement as naive and half-hearted, willing to tinker and play with social
realities, but not to utterly destroy them. He left decadence for anarchy.
While the Decadent movement, per
se, was mostly a French phenomenon, the impact was felt more broadly.
Typically, the influence was felt as an interest in pleasure, an interest in
experimental sexuality, and a fascination with the bizarre, all packaged with a
somewhat trangressive spirit and an aesthetic that values material excess. Many
were also influenced by the Decadent movement's aesthetic emphasis on art for
its own sake.
Czech writers who were exposed to
the work of the Decadent movement saw in it the promise of a life they could
never know. These Bohemian decadent writers included Karel Hlaváček, Arnošt
Procházka, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, and Louisa Zikova. One Czech writer, Arthur
Breisky, embraced the full spirit of Le Décadent with its exultation in
material excess and a life of refinement and pleasure. From the Decadent
movement he learned the basic idea of a dandy, and his work is almost entirely
focused on developing a philosophy in which the Dandy is the consummate human,
surrounded by riches and elegance, theoretically above society, just as doomed
to death and despair as they.
Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, also
known as Dream Story (German: Traumnovelle), is a 1926 novella by the Austrian
writer Arthur Schnitzler. The book deals with the thoughts and psychological
transformations of Doctor Fridolin over a two-day period after his wife
confesses having had sexual fantasies involving another man. In this short
time, he meets many people who give clues to the world Schnitzler creates. This
culminates in the masquerade ball, an event of masked individualism, sex, and
danger for Doctor Fridolin, the outsider.
It was first published in
installments in the magazine Die Dame between December 1925 and March 1926. The
first book edition appeared in 1926 in S. Fischer Verlag. The best known of the
film adaptations is the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut by director-screenwriter
Stanley Kubrick and co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael, although it makes
significant alterations to the setting. Prior to this film, it had been adapted
for Austrian television in 1969, and a low-budget Italian film entitled
Nightmare in Venice in 1989.
The book belongs to the period of
the Decadent movement in Vienna after the turn of the 20th century.
Dream Story is set in
early-20th-century Vienna. The protagonist of the story is Fridolin, a
successful 35-year-old doctor who lives with his wife, Albertina (also
translated as Albertine), and their young daughter.
One night, Albertina confesses
that the previous summer, while they were on vacation in Denmark, she had a
sexual fantasy about a young Danish military officer. Fridolin then admits that
during that same vacation he had been attracted to a young girl on the beach.
Later that night, Fridolin is called to the deathbed of an important patient.
Finding the man dead, he is shocked when the man's daughter, Marianne,
professes her love to him. Restless, Fridolin leaves and begins to walk the
streets. Although tempted, he refuses the offer of a young prostitute named
Mizzi.
He encounters his old friend,
Nachtigall, who tells Fridolin that he will be playing piano at a secret
high-society orgy that night. Intrigued, Fridolin procures a mask and costume
and follows Nachtigall to the party at a private residence. Fridolin is shocked
to find several men in masks and costumes and naked women with only masks
engaged in various sexual activities. When a young woman warns him to leave,
Fridolin ignores her plea and is soon exposed as an interloper. The woman then
announces to the gathering that she will sacrifice herself for Fridolin, and he
is allowed to leave.
Upon his return home, Albertina
awakens and describes a dream she has had: While making love to the Danish
officer from her sexual fantasies, she had watched without sympathy as Fridolin
was tortured and crucified before her eyes. Fridolin is outraged because he
believes that this proves his wife wants to betray him. He resolves to pursue
his own sexual temptations.
The next day, Fridolin learns
that Nachtigall has been taken away by two mysterious men. He then goes to the
costume shop to return his costume and discovers that the shop-owner is
prostituting his teenage daughter to various men. He finds his way back to
where the orgy had taken place the previous night; before he can enter, he is
handed a note addressed to him by name that warns him not to pursue the matter.
Later, he visits Marianne, but she no longer expresses any interest in him.
Fridolin searches for Mizzi, the prostitute, but is unable to find her. He
reads that a young woman has been poisoned. Suspecting that she is the woman
who sacrificed herself for him, he views the woman's corpse in the morgue but
cannot identify her.
Fridolin returns home that night
to find Albertina asleep, with his mask from the previous night set on the
pillow on his side of the bed. When she wakes up, Fridolin confesses all of his
activities. After listening quietly, Albertina comforts him. Fridolin says that
it never will happen again, but Albertina tells him not to look too far into
the future, and that the important thing is that they survived through their
adventures.
The story ends with them greeting
the new day with their daughter.
Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film Eyes
Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack, is the
best-known adaptation. It is modernized and Americanized, set in New York City
in 1999 during the Christmas season, rather than in Vienna 1900 during Mardi
Gras.