RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound and Visual Poetry

151 Postmodern deCadenCe in Canadian sound and visuaL Poetry gREgoRy bEttS th revolushun will have to start tomorrow everythings too fuckd up today –bill bissett bend ovr so we can see whats in yr asshole, 1978 In the groundbreaking book on Canadian modernism Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, Brian Trehearne concludes with a rather whimsical speculation about Canadian postmodernism . Having successfully demonstrated the dominant influence of nineteenth-century European aestheticism on “an entire Canadian literary generation” (308) of modernists in the early years of the twentieth century, Trehearne openly wonders about a similar colonial “lag” that might connect Canadian postmodern authors like Leonard Cohen to Aestheticism’s successor , historical (capital “D”) Decadence (308). His reference is to the “libertinism, pessimism, and sense of spiritual exhaus- gREgoRy bEttS 152 tion”ofthenineteenth-centurySymbolist-Decadentmovement from Charles Baudelaire through Stéphane Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, in which art embodied the idea of “de-cadere,” a falling away or falling apart from established standards of excellence. Ideologically interwoven with the period’s decline of the French empire and a growing disdain for violence attached to empire and the state (similar in spirit to the unsettling epigraph from bill bissett above), historical Decadence signalled a loss of faith in a revolution that could renew present conditions. Free to revel in decentred subjectivities, art turned, in Baudelaire’s prophetic terms, to the “demon nation” that “riots in our brains” (5). The style is characterized by deviance in order to achieve, in Arthur Rimbaud’s terms, the “reasoned derangement of all senses” (303). An eloquent spokesman for the group, Pierre Bourget, explained the anarchist implications that informed the widespread embrace of the term “decadence”: We accept […] this terrible word decadence. […] It is decadence , but vigorous; with less accomplishment in its works, decadence is superior to organic periods because of the intensity of its geniuses. Its uneven, violent creations reveal more daring artists, and audacity is a virtue which despite ourselves elicits our sympathy. (qtd. in Călinescu 169) In an article on Baudelaire called “Théorie de la décadence,” Bourget developed his theory of decadence, by linking decadence to the breakdown of hierarchies within a society and to an increase in anarchic individualism. This emerging sense of an individual free of his or her responsibility to a society in decline receives famous expression in the opening line of Paul Verlaine’s sonnet “Langueurs”: “Je suis l’empire à la fin de la decadence” (192). Trehearne’s speculations on the influence of the historical Decadents on Canadian postmodernism were based on a re- poStmodERn dEcadEncE 153 curring pattern of colonial influence in previous Canadian art movements, including the colonial lag affecting Canadian modernism and, earlier, the lag between the English Romantics and their Canadian Confederation-era imitators. The model he works from seems useful and valid for explaining the colonial orientation of the writing produced in these earlier periods, but it does not fully address the dramatic shift that occurs in Canadian letters in the postmodern era. For while Trehearne claims that Canadian authors—what V.S. Naipaul might ungenerously describe as mimic men (and women)—are habitually behind thetimes,hedoesnotconsidertheradicalimplicationsofageneration of postmodern writers and theorists who used historical reference and intertextuality to challenge the whole notion of linear, progressive time and literary influence. These same postmodern Canadian writers, in fact, used their writing to argue and demonstrate their belief that there was no “behind” time to be ahead of. Trehearne’s lag model fails to acknowledge this radical reorientation of chronology in postmodern writing. Furthermore , it was not merely a Canadian phenomenon: similar reorientations were happening in postmodern writing around the world. Mexico’s Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, for instance, argued that humanity’s experience of time dramatically shifted in the postmodern era: whereas earlier aesthetic moments were characterized by their relation to linear, progressive history, postmodern authors abandoned Western conventional notions of time: “We are living the end of linear time, the time of succession : history, progress, modernity” (269). In contrast to this transhistorical experience of time, Trehearne’s centre-margin dissemination model relies on a modality no longer appropriate for or responsive to the particular ambitions of postmodernism. Ironically, Trehearne was right about the relationship between postmodernism and decadence, but for the wrong reasons. Postmodern authors and theorists, and not just Canadians , have widely returned to the historical Decadent writers. Marjorie Perloff attributes this in part to the historical Deca...