Baedeker Decadence

ELT 49 : 2 2006 a significant addition to twentieth-century literary study. For it is not simply the omissions discussed but the easy adoption of critical paradigms that lets the volume down: for example the assumptions that "gender" is only relevant to women and homosexuals; or that a modernist style sprang up indigenously in the colonies. In not questioning the assumptions inherent in such discussions of gender and non-European literature many more questions are left to go begging. Moreover, this unquestioning application of late-twentieth-century critical theories closes down rather than opens up the century's literature to further discussion. Ronan McDonald's "Irish Literature: Tradition and Modernity" is a valuable example of the critic posing new possibilities for discussion at the end of the essay, but his example is a rarity, whose exception proves the rule. As a result the volume itself becomes a handbook of "New Traditions": as much a reflection of late-twentieth-century critical practice, its mores and its blind spots, as a narrative of the new traditions of twentieth-century English literature. KATHERINE BAXTER London Baedeker Decadence George C. Schoolfield. A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion 1884-1927. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xvi + 415 pp. $45.00 DECADENCE is a foreign country: they do things differently there; a traveler could use some help in getting around. A Blue Guide sounds as if it would be useful, but a Rough Guide might have its charms as well. Lonely Planet would be appropriate for "the neurotic decadent, quite incapable of life, save in a world of his own devising" (Schoolfield, xiv). I'd even welcome a Decadence for Dummies, so long as it came in plain yellow wrappers. For his part, George C. Schoolfield has chosen the once-ubiquitous Baedeker guides as his model for, as his subtitle has it, "Charting a Literary Fashion 1884-1927." The name Baedeker spells, as it were, "tourist," which is why Edmund Wilson entitled his foreign dispatches Europe without Baedeker and why T. S. Eliot, in his nastiest little poem, gave the American Burbank a Baedeker to match in repulsiveness Bleistein's cigar. The Baedeker guides had a clear purpose: as the preface to Baedeker 's London and Its Environs (1892) puts it: "The chief object of the Handbook for London, like that of the Editor's other European guidebooks , is to enable the traveller so to employ his time, his money, and his energy that he may derive the greatest amount of pleasure and 228 BOOK REVIEWS instruction from the visit to the greatest city in the modern world." The combination of capitalist principles (as in, the productive employment of time, money, and labor) with more classical ideals (getting your dulce along with your utile) is typical of the series. So is the London guide's attention to details—many, many details—that can do so much to spoil a good trip. Go to St. Paul's Cathedral (the first stop on Baedeker's London itinerary) and try to see the building while reading the description of it. It can induce a state of representational vertigo as you try to observe the reredos and the cupola, the apex of the impediment above the second row of pillars, the tabular monuments and, to the left of the door of the north transept, the monuments beginning with Napier and running to Dr. Johnson, whose statue, by Bacon, is, thankfully, the only one Baedeker awards an asterisk; and do this all the while you're fumbling to find them on the page. The trouble isn't that a Baedeker tells you too much but that it tells it in bits and pieces, anatomizing the tourist's gaze into a swirling smudge of historical and technical terms. Following Baedeker's itinerary could drive you to seek the fresh air ("Leaving St. Paul's Churchyard, on the N. Side of the church, we enter Paternoster Row, so called from...") and live happily with "No Baedeker ," as the cosmopolitan Misters Emerson urge Lucie to do in Forster's A Room with a View. Schoolfield has no new theory of Decadence to propound, and no theorists to draw upon; the book...