Nordau, Darkly: The Degenerating Aesthetics of Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute

The turn-of-the-twentieth-century, with its immense innovations, was an unwieldy push into a future that seemed as yet unfixed. In the midst of such upheaval, and on the heels of Charles Darwin’s revelations about species evolution, a growing number of people saw cause for alarm regarding humanity’s own evolutionary trajectory. The theory of degeneration in particular became popular as an explanation for any perceived negative traits in humanity and was often linked to emerging biological accounts of the human species.¹ Scientists and theorists on both sides of the Atlantic took up Bénédict Morel’s famous Traité des dégénérescences (1857), including Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley.² Lombroso, for instance, popularized theories about criminals and other undesirable members of society that relied on phrenology and physiognomy to point to the biological body as proof of their innate “abnormality.”

Then, in 1892, Max Nordau published his seminal Entartung (translated into English as Degeneration in 1895), dedicating the book to Lombroso. While Lombroso’s focus on degenerate biology included a fear of its implications for culture and society, Nordau begins with the potential for danger already present in the cultural world:

Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil.

(vii)

Borrowing Lombroso’s classificatory system to lend his own book similar “scientific” weight, Nordau takes as his focus the artistic world, those individuals who escape Lombroso’s categories, but whose social influence holds the same dangerous potential as violent crime. The immense popularity of Nordau’s book, both as a pseudo-scientific treatment of a social problem and as charlatanism to be denounced or refuted, has caused his definition of degeneration to remain one of the most well-known (Pick 25).

Nordau’s version attributes the perceived fin-de-siècle cultural decline in part to the negative influence of select artists, identifiable through their aberrant bodies. He explains that this minority of degenerate artists “covers the whole visible surface of society, as a little oil extends over a large area of the surface of the sea,” and as a result “it appears as if the whole of civilized humanity were converted to the aesthetics of the Dusk of the Nations” (7). For Nordau, the potentially wide-spread nature of degeneration (through the influence of the few) threatens “the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty,” leaving behind only an aesthetics of doom and the ailing bodies that produce it (5). Yet by adding aesthetics and art to the biological body as a means of uncovering or marking degeneracy, Nordau simultaneously opens up new possibilities for overcoming degeneration. He sees the potential for cure inherent in naming aesthetics as the cause: simply remove the degenerate aesthetics, and those not too far gone will likely recover from its threatening influence. Nordau explains that “the difference between disease [degeneration] and health is not one of kind, but of quantity,” meaning that the worst degenerates have merely fallen to one side of the continuum, and those less extreme cases might still reverse to a “healthy” state with the right treatment or influence (552).

Within Nordau’s definition of degeneration is an inherent assumption that motivates his optimistic outlook on the short-lived nature of degeneration: that degenerates are diseased outliers— individuals rather than groups are to blame. This model, of dangerous individuals infecting the rest of society, is suggested in particular by an explicit connection between degeneration and epidemics:

Certain micro-organisms engendering mortal diseases have always been present— for example, the bacillus of cholera; but they only cause epidemics when circumstances arise intensely favourable for their rapid increase. . . . We...