Modern Narratives and Decadent Things in Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors

Portraits, books, prints, jewels, antiques, and a wide variety of bibelots are but a few of the many things that fill the pages of Decadent texts. Critics most often approach the Decadent obsession with material objects from psychological and/or consumer-culture perspectives, such that the many collectibles with which some of the most infamous Decadent protagonists surround themselves become windows into a morbid Decadent psychology or into the uneasy complicity between Decadent ideals of art and an emerging consumer culture. However, some of the most well-known Decadent texts, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours (1884) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), suggest that the Decadent interest in things can be read more profitably as a function of the development of a number of specimen-oriented sciences, including biology, physiology, and evolutionary anthropology.

When Huysmans's Des Esseintes experiments with the effects of a number of objects (portraits, books, prints, jewels) on his physical well-being and mood, carefully manipulating variables such as texture, colour, sound, taste, and smell, and observing the changes in his own body, or when Wilde's Dorian Gray attempts to explain how his own atoms and those of his portrait might "call" each other "in secret love or strange affinity,"¹ we are most certainly in the presence of a Decadent artist and scientist. These Decadents not only share what Christine Ferguson defines as a Victorian scientific ethos based on a desire for complete freedom (especially from usefulness) in the pursuit of knowledge, ² but they also adopt a decidedly materialist perspective common across the increasingly specimen-based sciences of the nineteenth century and their concerted effort to "see the object as in itself it really is."³ At a time when what Elaine Freedgood calls "thing culture"⁴ gives way to commodity culture, the Decadents explore the material properties of things, their circulation, and their potential value and significance in the construction of the human and its narratives (scientific and literary).

This article examines the work of a lesser-known Decadent writer, Arthur Machen, who (like Huysmans and Wilde) studies the relation between people and things and in doing so pressures definitions of the modern and of modernity premised on particular subject-object relations. Even if Machen claimed he was "'not even a small part, but no part at all' of the 1890s," critics increasingly agree that his work certainly flags itself as Decadent.⁵ His collection of stories The Great God Pan (1894) and his novel The Three Impostors (1895) are examples of Decadent texts that best highlight the underinvestigated but compelling relationship between Decadence and Victorian scientific materialism. More specifically, Machen's The Three Impostors, a tale of the dealings of a secret society of Decadent fetish-worshippers, is ultimately a kind of parody of his contemporaries' "scientific" attempts to read and narrate object culture.⁶ While displaying a keen awareness of the emerging science of anthropology and its practice of building developmental narratives based on found cultural objects, Machen builds a narrative around an ancient coin that self-consciously questions the primitive versus modern distinction of anthropological narratives of his time and the conceptual separation of people and things that supposedly defines modernity.⁷

Modern London & Its Primitive Things

In keeping with the Decadent appreciation for artifice, The Three Impostors is self-consciously staged from beginning to end. It begins with a "Prologue," which is actually part of the text's final scene: two flâneurs (Dyson, a Decadent writer, and Phillipps, an amateur ethnologist) out for a stroll encounter an abandoned house (from which three impostors have just left, holding a small, bloody package). While looking at the house from the outside, Dyson points to an upper window, insisting that "that room ... is within all blood and fire."⁸ It is not until the last pages of the text that Dyson, Phillipps, and readers enter that very room and discover the remains of a man who has just been "artistically" tortured and burned to death by the three impostors. Although in no position to understand this macabre...