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  • Salome©: The Fetishization of a Textual Corpus
  • Megan Becker-Leckrone (bio)

I. The Salome Effect

I have been considering, under different aspects, some of the forces that make interpretation necessary and virtually impossible, and some of the constraints under which it is carried on. I have spoken of deafness and forgetfulness as properties not only of texts, but of history, and of interpreters. . . . And I have suggested that interpretation, which corrupts or transforms, begins so early in the development of narrative texts that the recovery of the real right original thing is an illusory quest.

Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy

The Salome theme, or just “Salome,” as the narrative has come to be named by gestures motivated by more than mere efforts at shorthand, is said to originate in the Gospels and then reemerge in the nineteenth century, appropriated by European Decadence as a representative myth of eroticism, taboo, and transgression. Brian Parker asserts this characteristic critical observation in an essay in Modern Drama: “The centrality of the Salome motif to European painting and literature from about 1860 to the outbreak of World War I is now widely accepted. Artists and writers ‘depict [Salome] so often,’ says Philippe Jullian, ‘that the little Jewish princess . . . may be regarded as the goddess of the Decadence.” 1 Furthermore, critics largely concur that this revival chose a natural and logical source: Mark’s and Matthew’s understated reporting of how John the Baptist met his death, they agree, is replete with decadent potentiality.

Often cited in such arguments is the famous passage from Huysmans’s A Rebours (Against Nature), in which protagonist Des Esseintes breathlessly exalts Salome and describes a rich symbolism, a description that is seen as setting the tone for modern treatments of the myth. For Des Esseintes, Salome is “the symbolic incarnation of undying lust, the [End Page 239] goddess of immortal Hysteria . . . the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning . . . everything she touches.” 2 Des Esseintes’s “Salome” is, obviously, the woman rather than the story, a body rather than a text. “She” is the object of his fascination, his desire “incarnate,” his fetish.

Contemporary criticism generally seconds this assessment of “Salome,” taking the symbolism involved a step further: Salome represents Decadentism’s ideals; Des Esseintes (only the “character” of Oscar Wilde is called upon more often to play the role of famous dandy) represents the Decadent. The seductive appeal that “woman” effects on that “man” is representative of the myth’s effect on an entire artistic movement. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Oscar Wilde, employs the trope of female seduction to describe the intertextual transmission of the Salome myth: “Salome, having danced before the imaginations of European painters and sculptors for a thousand years, in the nineteenth century turned her beguilements to literature” (OW 339). With a deliberate slippage between woman and text that is meant to be clever but is nevertheless not disinterested, Ellmann’s metaphor characterizes a recurring critical stance: figuring the peculiar intertextuality of the Salome story by mimicking the fetishistic gesture. Not only Decadents but also their commentators conflate character and plot, woman and text. And the fact that Ellmann’s approach is self-consciously figurative does not exonerate the gesture. Rather, it underscores what is fetishistic about his reading: that the conflation depends upon a disavowal. In “Je sais bien, mais quand même,” one of the classic essays on fetishism after Freud, Octave Mannoni argues that disavowal is a psychic economy which, importantly, does not operate in the field of literal belief. 3 Rather disavowal (Verleugnung in Freud’s texts) operates in the field of knowledge, that is in spite of knowledge, to effect a sort of disingenuous belief. Mannoni’s title is a paraphrase of the fetishist’s disavowal, and it aptly describes Ellmann’s gesture. Ellmann, like Mannoni’s fetishist, knows very well that a story and a woman are not identical, but just the same he figures them as if they are.

But the logic of fetishism I would like to outline in the commentary surrounding the Salome myth goes beyond the sort of thematic figuration I describe above. Criticism’s conflation of woman and text involves a fetishism...

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