Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction (review)

Most critical studies of the last decades have challenged the traditional interpretation of Decadent aesthetics as a declaration of creative exhaustion and an endorsement of moral degeneration. Robert Ziegler's most recent book, Asymptote. An Approach to Decadent Fiction, falls into that group but distinguishes itself because it also attempts to delineate a common principle able to account for the different modalities through which Decadent literary works manifest their productive and regenerating impulse. This principle is highlighted in the title of the volume, which borrows from analytic geometry the notion of the asymptote, that is, a straight line whose distance from a curve approaches zero as they tend to infinity. Ziegler adopts this image to articulate the separation between the author and the character in Decadent fiction, going against the widespread tendency to overlap their respective standpoints as narcissistic self-reproductions of a single persona. The fictional protagonist, Ziegler claims, in fact expresses identities and values that do not coincide with those embodied by the authorial voice. Despite an apparent initial identification with the destructive, perverse, and solipsistic attitudes of their characters, Decadent artists dissociate themselves from those negative drives, and, by exorcizing them through the creativity of the writing process, reinstate the liberating and transformative power of aesthetic activity.

Upon these interpretive premises, the book analyzes a wide array of French Decadent works of fiction, arranging them according to categories that constitute chapter topics and also progressive stages of an evolution from pathological self-destructiveness to healthy artistic creation. Huysmans's À rebours and Mendes's Zo'har are the focus of the first chapter, "Perversion," where Ziegler traces a pattern from an apparent celebration of the character's corruption and creative sterility to the author's cultural disapproval of taboos and private sinful pleasures. Magic in Chapter Two brings together Péladan's Le Vice suprême and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axël as examples of a conflict between, on the one hand, solipsistic passions, occultism and elitist mysticism, and, on the other, communitarian interdependence and Christian doctrine. In the third chapter, "Change," an analysis of Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre and Rachilde's La Marquise de Sade focuses on the protagonists' rage and aggressiveness caused by confining gender roles but ultimately highlights the writers' ability to overcome identification with their heroines and to discipline their revengeful impulses. Through the notion of play, Chapter Four shows how in Schwob's Vies imaginaires and Lorrain's Histoires de masques the act of fashioning biographies and fabricating personae is followed by the authors' detachment from their characters' imaginary worlds and by their commitment to creative uniqueness. In the fifth and last chapter, "Creation," a discussion of Rodenbach's L'Art en exil and De Gourmont's Sixtine starts from the apparent inevitability of transitoriness and disintegration, loneliness and contempt of life, and culminates with a reevaluation of art's ability to exorcise failure and to break the confining walls of the self by promoting empathy.

In its treatment of the identitarian tug of war between Decadent writers and their fictional protagonists, the book adopts numerous psychoanalytic concepts, even though its general argumentation does not aim at a systematic psychoanalytic reading of texts. Its organizing principle remains the asymptote, which orients Ziegler's examination of each author's transformative process. While it promises structural rigor in the analysis of the Decadent literary corpus, the application of this concept in fact ultimately turns out to be a weakness in the overall analysis. The asymptote is invoked whenever the writer's vision seems to approach the character's world only to split apart and grow distant, yet it does not seem so indispensible to Ziegler's interpretation, and does not actually promote a conceptual progress in the study as a whole. In addition to resulting in some interpretive redundancy across chapters, the use of the asymptote does not seem totally accurate when the concept is supposed to function at a literal level and not...