The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Chapter 3. Golden Books: Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization

c h a p t e r 3 Golden Books Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization False again the fabled link between the grandeur of Art, and the glories and virtues of the State! —James McNeill Whistler, “10 O’Clock” The Logic of Decadent Collecting Just prior to the famous passage in which he dreams of retreating to a “desert hermitage” set apart from the banalities of modern society, Des Esseintes fulminates about two problems: “He was constantly coming across some new source of offence, wincing at the patriotic or political twaddle [balivernes patriotiques et sociales] served up in the papers every morning, and exaggerating the importance of the triumphs which an omnipotent public reserves at all times and in all circumstances for works written without thought or style.” Patriotism and poor literary judgment might seem to be distinct concerns , but the two offenses are equivalent for Des Esseintes and directly motivate his withdrawal from society. They epitomize the impossibility of finding an adequate community: “It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies ; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.” He sells his ancestral home, breaks with all of his friends, and moves his belongings into a “refined Thebaid” on the outskirts of Paris, escaping from “the incessant deluge of human stupidity” to an isolated “ark” containing his favorite books and objects (AR 83–84; AN 8). Golden Books 71 Des Esseintes’s withdrawal from society into the rarified realm of his library and collections has long been taken as the very emblem of fin-de-siècle political quietism. But as I have argued, this kind of gesture is central to the decadent critique of bourgeois liberalism. Des Esseintes follows Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne into exile, and like them casts his retreat in unmistakably political terms. But the target of Des Esseintes’s disgust underscores the changing historical context for the discourse of decadence. The 1870s and 1880s were periods of increasingly strident nationalist rhetoric across Europe, sparked by the consolidation of the German nation under Otto von Bismarck , the ignominious French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and imperial competition abroad. Baudelaire, Gautier, and Swinburne are cosmopolitan in their tastes and outlook, and often criticize the reflexive patriotism of establishment writers, but nationalism is not a driving concern in their works. For Des Esseintes, by contrast, it is an unavoidable feature of the political landscape. He is not alone in his distaste. As we will see, antinationalism is central to decadent writing after 1870, arising in a variety of contexts and in many different works. Decadent writers in the period attack nationalist sentiments from both the left and the right, and propose a range of alternative perspectives. Decadent invocations of civic humanism oppose liberal individualism to broadly imagined collective ideals. Decadent antinationalism attacks a powerful new conception of political community not, as one might expect, from the perspective of the individual monad but from that of a rival community united by taste rather than origins or geography. If, as Timothy Brennan has suggested, the form of the realist novel both mimics and helps to produce the form of the nation, decadence challenges the form of the nation much as it decomposes literary style. This chapter explores the critique of nationalism implicit in one of the most recognizable features decadent texts: the collection and its conceptual adjunct, the literary canon. Decadent collectors might seem to reproduce the bourgeois privatization of aesthetic experience that Baudelaire criticized, but the objects they collect and their opinions about them contain an oblique answer to the pervasive union of patriotism with poor literary taste that so bothers Des Esseintes. In particular, they question the most important institutional form of that union: the national literary canon. Decadent collections mirror the literary and artistic canons compiled for nationalist purposes by scholars, editors, and schoolmasters throughout the nineteenth century. They make explicit claims for the canonical excellence of the books and objects they include , and had canonical effects for like-minded writers and readers. Whereas 72 chapter 3 national canons posit an organic unity between a people and its literary classics , decadent collections are idiosyncratic assemblages that draw from every corner of the globe, often bringing together artists, works, and objects that...