After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

4. Decaying Forward: Satiety and Society

4 Decaying Forward: Satiety and Society 99 Thunder against it. Complain that it is not poetic. Call it a period of transition and decadence. Gustave Flaubert’s entry for “Epoch (our)” in his Dictionary of Received Ideas In history as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life. Karl Marx (Weiss, 90) One of the most valuable documents about the nineteenth-century fin de siècle is Max Nordau’s wide-ranging polemic, Degeneration. Published in German in 1892 as Entartung, and translated into English three years later, this book champions the progressivist liberal -humanism of its author against such classic decadent texts as J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours. Offering a basic taxonomy of “degenerates ,” it classifies these “aberrant” people as either “mystics” or “egomaniacs,” and identifies them as enemies of the Enlightenment project. The degenerate is treated with a clinical eye for dissection and diagnosis (indeed, Nordau was a physician). If we consider the Victorian context of his observations, it should come as no surprise that his prescriptions focus on symptoms rooted in various sexual pathologies. Nordau’s importance stems from the fact that he argues against his age’s libidinal millenarianism, while simultaneously perpetuating its terms and concerns. Nordau compares the fin de siècle mood to “the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently forever” (3). Sex and death are further intertwined when he describes this cultural pathology as equivalent to [t]he envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young lovers making for a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine plague, seeking in an enchanted garden the experiences of a Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour. (ibid.) Nordau’s definitions of “healthy” and “sick” circle around a shared territory (“the uncertain hour”), which is both liminal and libidinal. All further diagnostic distinctions emerge from this highly charged and ambiguous rhetorical space. Believing that eroticism “includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration,” Nordau cites Richard Wagner and other “higher degenerates” as exemplary victims of “erotic madness” (182). His Darwinian argument then traces this madness to two historical forces, which merge in the middle of the nineteenth century to create a degenerative effect in those who are too weak to assimilate change. The first force is time itself, which healthy men acknowledge as a force indifferent to human measuring systems, such as the calendar. The marking of time, however, nevertheless suggests to impressionable and mystically inclined minds the supernatural patterns of divine plans, pointing toward some kind of conclusion. Nordau argues that just because we have to know what day it is in order to conduct our daily business, we shouldn’t instill the years with numerological significance . For him, the approaching twentieth century thus becomes burdened with the “childish” projections of fatalistic fantasies. This delusional tendency is further aggravated by the second historical force, namely, the rapid industrialization of Western Europe. Nordau argues that this unprecedented historical leap reinforces a sense of cultural acceleration, whether this is interpreted as directed toward a brighter future or a dark abyss. The cultural effect of these combined forces is thus an overwhelming fatigue. The late nineteenth century inherited stress fractures caused by the exhaustion of the previous generation, which had to cope with “this enormous increase in organic expenditure” (39): Humanity can point to no century in which the inventions which penetrate so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual are crowded so thick as in ours . . . . The humblest village inhabitant has to-day a wider geographical horizon, more numerous and complex intellectual interests, than the prime minister of a petty, or even a second-rate state a century ago. If he do but read his paper, let it be the most innocent provincial rag, he takes part, certainly not by active interference and influence, but by a continuous receptive curiosity, in the thousand events which take place After the Orgy 100 in all parts of the globe, and he interests himself simultaneously in the issue of a revolution in Chili, in a bush-war in East Africa, a massacre in North China, a famine in Russia, a street-row in Spain, an international exhibition in North America. A cook receives and...