The Decadent Subject

The Decadent Subject Charles Bernheimer A S A PERSPECTIVE on civilizations and cultures, the notion of decadence cannot stand alone. Its meaning is oppositional: some standard must be posited in relation to which a falling away, decay, or deterioration can be defined. This positive norm often is not explicitly recognized, since it consists in a society’s unquestioned assumptions about what is natural, good, right, progressive, and so forth. Decadence provides evidence of an arrest and regression on what is assumed to be a path of progressive cultural development. Hence the frequent association of decadence with illness, as if a civilization were an organism and it were infected by a debilitating virus. In his little book on the history of the idea of decadence, Richard Gil­ man indicts the word for its insubstantial vagueness, blaming what he calls the arbitrary and wishful qualities of the progressive norm for the indeterminacy of its negative complement. If there is no demonstrable truth content to the idea of progress, argues Gilman, “then to be linked to it as its dark complement, its oppositional mode, as ‘decadence’ is, means that the latter ought to be immediately suspect.” 1Suspect, that is, in terms of “the stable realities of the external world” (D, 14)—Gilman does acknowledge that the notion of decadence could be thought of as having an essentially metaphorical function that creatively suspends those realities. As two sides of an illusion, the progress-decadence dyad could conceivably open “a space in which to exist otherwise” (D, 161). The problem, as Gilman sees it, is that the metaphors of progress and decadence assert too strong and insistent a claim to historical and epistemological applicability for them to remain in the Active dimension. Castigating this claim as “injurious to the integrity and wholeness of communal experience” (D, 163), Gilman seems to be attacking the use of the word “decadent” as itself an unhealthy symptom of social decay. Rather than poetically adding to our knowledge of the world, this word, Gilman complains, replaces knowledge with illusion. Thus Gilman repeats in his own argument the same dualistic structure that he finds invalid as applied to decadence, only he posits “ knowl­ edge” and “actualities” rather than “progress” as the positive pole against which to judge the deficiency of “ decadence.” His moral earVol . XXXII, No. 4 53 L ’E sprit C réateur nestness blinds him to the irony of his critical position, making it impos­ sible for him to regard as “ suspect” his own assumptions about what is “real” and “actual” and consequently to place these terms, as I just have, in quotation marks. But Gilman’s blindness can in turn be illumi­ nating, for it suggests a fundamental difference between him and the writers and artists of the fin de siècle who took decadence as their sub­ ject. They did not reject the oppositional model, but they did treat both poles of the structure as equally suspect fictive inventions. Decadent creativity does indeed open a space in which to “exist otherwise” : it does so by showing that every normative standard is already inhabited by otherness. Yet decadence cannot know itself as such except by forgetting the constructedness of the norm against which it measures its deviance. This is what makes the decadent subject so slippery and elusive. It betrays itself as soon as it begins to give itself definition. I propose to explore this thesis through a brief analysis of three works whose decadence could be ascribed to a particularly egregious fallingaway from a norm, that of historical understanding in Flaubert’s Salammbô, of natural sexuality in Zola’s La Faute de l ’abbé Mouret, and of ethical propriety in Wilde’s The Picture o f Dorian Gray. Although of these three authors only Wilde is associated with decadence in traditional literary history, I believe that the peculiar anti-structural structure of the decadent subject transcends conventional literary cate­ gorizations. Indeed, Flaubert’s “realism” and Zola’s “naturalism” are, in the novels under consideration, more evidently decadent than is the supposed masterwork of the flamboyantly decadent 1890’s in England. * * * Salammbô was criticized as decadent even at the time of its publica­ tion. In his review, Sainte...