Decadent Style

435 grudge against him, had poisoned his dog. 'That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I poisoned his dog.'" Stevenson always had a keen appreciation of eccentricity. Irvine Lovelands was the missing link, Silverado's Caliban. The only thing he did well was grin, chew gum and spit. But, as Stevenson recognized, he was also quite delighted with himself. It is the Stevenson who delighted as well in characters like Irvine Lovelands and tumble-down places like Silverado that readers should get to know. Franklin E. Court Northern Illinois University 6. DECADENT STYLE John R. Reed. Decadent Style. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985. $30.00 In Decadent Style John R. Reed attempts to "unravel" the confusion which has dominated criticism of nineteenth-century decadent literature. He shares, he says, the dismay of others at the inaccuracy or vagueness of the term. For purposes of clarification. Reed distinguishes decadence as a cultural term from decadence as an aesthetic term. He defines a decadent work as one which "elaborates an existing tradition to the point of apparent dissolution" and decadent style as "a highly self-conscious dissolution of established form for the purpose of creating a subtler, pervasive, and cerebral form." Reed's basic problem is this. Having found a few fin de siècle works which he admires, Reed constructs a definition which describes their structure. Thereafter, any work which does not fit his definition is rejected as being decadent (with a lower case "d") instead of Decadent. Reed often suggests that works and writers which do not fall within his construct are somehow necessarily inferior. And since little English literature falls therein, English literature gets short shrift here. All this is set up in a Preface which is more troublesome than helpful. He discusses fiction, poetry, art, and music but not theater, architecture, or "other possible fields" because he is unqualified to do so and because it is unnecessary to begin with. Why not? He wishes to avoid offending the specialist while making his subject "as accessible as possible to the general reader." Surely he did not expect a book on decadent style to compete with lacocca's autobiography. He works "with accessible rather than definitive texts." Why? None of these self-imposed limitations 436 will encourage the specialist, his only audience. In the Introduction he talks in the most general way about "what decadence signified in the late nineteenth century ." The brevity may be necessary, but Reed's own purple prose, his hopeless or—at best—simplistic use of critical terms, and his methodology are not. What are we to make of prose, of judgments like these in a scholarly book: "Victorianism was a removal of Romanticism from heath to parlour, from the byways of the psyche to the real labyrinthian streets of London or Paris and the intricate conventions of bourgeois society"? Or this, in a discussion of Wilde: "The twin Circes—Hal 1 ward the artist and Wotton the aesthete—transform a heedless pagan beauty into a nineteenth-century swine. Dorian is Wilde's Lady of Shalott"? Does he mean that the Lady of Shalott was either a pagan beauty or a swine; first one, then the other? Or this: "Wilde knew that ideal beauty does not dwell in the world but is the smoke rising above the senses as they burn in each moment, not with a hard, gemlike flame, but with the crackling ferocity of the flesh"? This is impressionistic criticism of the worst kind. Consider then Reed's use of literary terminology: "Decadence combines Aestheticism and Naturalism, Parnassasism precision and innovative intent." Or, Huysmans combines the "aesthetic sensuality and fastidiousness" of Gautier with the "thematic and stylistic curiosities" of Flaubert." Or this: Wilde's "The Burden of Itys" is "basically a Keatsean excursion with late-century developments added"; it "does approach the Decadent style if only shadowily." No wonder that we professors of literature are fast becoming the dinosaurs of the academic world. Reed's ingenuousness is often startling. After assuring us that Joyce's Ulysses benefited from the innovation of decadent...