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372 THOMAS GIBBONS Structural Images of Degeneration and Decay THOMAS GIBBONS J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, editors. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress New York: Columbia University Press 1985. xiv, 303. $40.00 Patrick Brantlinger. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1983. 307. $26.95, $9.95 paper Among the several seif-portraits by Kokoschka in the recently opened major exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery is one dated '939 which is laconically entitled Portrait of a Degenerate Artist. The title immediately brings to mind the notorious 'Exhibition of Degenerate Art' organized by the National Socialists in Munich in '937, in which the works of leading avant-garde artists such as Chagall and Kirchner were equated with works of art by the mentally ill and held up to savage ridicule and denunciation. It also brings to mind, inevitably, the horrors to which the'eugenic' policies of National Socialism led. Socialists of the German National persuasion were, however, far from unique in their diagnosis of contemporary art and society as I degenerate' and in their advocacy of 'eugenic reforms.' The alleged problems of social degeneracy and proposals for their solution are prominent in works by leading early twentiethcentury British 'progressive' socialists. Havelock Ellis, in The Task ofSocial Hygiene (19'3), saw the eugenic 'production of fine individuals ... as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path,' while H.G. Wells had earlier called for the 'merciful obliteration of the unfit' and indeed the total extermination of the world's non-white races (Anticipations, 1902). George Bernard Shaw, in the prose addenda to Man and Superman (1903), is much concerned with eugenics ('good breeding), and reaches the conclusion that 'We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth: NOT, of course, were the German National Socialists unique in regarding avant-garde artists and writers as degenerate and psychopathic. As the editors point out in the conclusion to their Degeneration:The Dark Side of Progress, certain Expressionists regarded the mentally ill as kindred souls: ". such writers as Ernst Stadler, Georg Trakl, Carl Einstein, Alfred D6blin, and the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck all used the voice ofthe madman as the poetic alter ego of the avant-garde. Wieland Herzfeld, publisher, poet, and essayist, stated this quite directly in '9'4 in a polemic published in the expressionist periodical Action. For him the madman was the model artist: 'They keep their own language - it is the statement of their psyche, and yet orthography, punctuation, even words and tums of phrase, which do not reflect their feelings, they avoid. Not out of forgetfulness but out of unwillingness.' The avant-garde in Germany accepted UNIVERSJ1Y OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1986/ 7 DEGENERATION AND DECAY 373 the mask of the madman and of the primitive - and hence of the degenerate since this status provided the artist who understood himself as different with the freedom of a new and different discourse. (P 291) Thus, 'in appropriating the label of "degenerate" the avant-garde entered into an unholy alliance with those who had developed the label of "degenerate" as a means of qualifying difference' (or 'otherness'). To which we may add that a ::laminant motif of the Early Modernist movement in literature and the arts as a whole is abelief that contemporary Western liberal-democratic culture was totally :,ankrupt and I decadent,' and that the only solution lay in a reversion to 'primitive' integrity, vitality, and spirituality. On examination, the values and ittitudes of the German Expressionists themselves often bear an uncanny ~esemblance to those of their National-Socialist tormentors. Considerations such as the above point to the astonishing pervasiveness of ?seudo-scientific notions of individual and social J degeneracy' in late nineteenth md early twentieth-century Western thought, a pervasiveness which it is the aim ,f Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress to reveal. The distinguished editors contribute two first-rate essays themselves (,Political Theory and Degeneration' 'yProfessor Gilman, and 'ImagesofDegeneration' byProfessorChamberlin), and lssemble a series of outstanding scholarly essays which cover the fields of listoriography, anthropology, sociology, sexology, biology, medicine, tech1Ology , literature, the...

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