Perhaps no text provides more fertile ground for the commonplace that the master trope of decadence is inversion than J. K. Huysmans’sA rebours. Lining itself up on the culturally devalued side of a series of familiar oppositions—feminine vs. masculine, degeneration vs. evolution, decadence vs. progress, sickness vs. health, artifice vs. nature, false vs. true, perversion vs. normalcy, and so on—the text seems merely to occupy the positionà rebours(against nature) and to accomplish an inversion that ends up reaffirming the “positive” side of the opposition on which it depends, negatively, for its own definition. Both Françoise...

Imagine the following scenario: at a dinner party I am telling a friend about the vacation from which I have just returned. I describe lolling naked in a hot tub at a luxurious resort, sipping chilled French champagne, nibbling delicious chocolate truffles, and flirting with a beautiful woman—or was it a beautiful boy?—who is soaking next to me. “How decadent!” exclaims my friend. Although perfectly current, this usage of the word warrants some reflection. It conveys quite a complex set of conflicted feelings. There is, of course, envy: my experience soundswonderfullydecadent to my friend in the...

The very meaning of the worddecadenthas encouraged critics to make value judgments that do little more than translate biological or chronological notions—such as senescence, exhaustion, the “end” of the century—into aesthetic terms. Among decadent writers themselves these notions produced a thematic universe whose most characteristic and frequently evoked traits include ennui and morbidity, and whose characters take a bitter pleasure in their disgust with life and cultivate an unhealthy sensibility—a taste for excess, a predisposition toward artifice, sadomasochistic experiments, and so on—in a quest to palliate theiracedia. This aspect of decadence—both the...

On April Fool’s Day, 1894, John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, sent off a letter to his son Alfred Douglas in which he complains about the young man’s relationship with Oscar Wilde: “To my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. … Your disgusted so-called father, Queensberry” (qtd. in Ellmann 394). The Marquess’s...

All narratives prompt one to ask at the end what progress they represent, what history they suggest. Peter Greenaway’s filmThe Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover(Allarts, 1989) ratchets this question further so that we need to ask as well after the very nature of progress and history. SoCookurges a further step into critique—if we understandcritiqueas an inquiry into foundations or conditions—and I look to this film to explore a sense in which decadent representation might pretend to such critique. And while this chapter does not aim to achieve an overarching determination...

Let us imagine the following scene: a young man, endowed with unusual aesthetic sensibility and great intellectual promise, attempts to communicate to those less sensitive the singular nature of an operatic air. He goes to great pains to explain the seductive realm that its sounds are intended to convey, especially the drama that the music accompanies. As his disquisition continues, his audience becomes increasingly aware of the physical strain that his enthusiasm, bordering on rapture, causes. His excitement grows to such intensity that those with whom he speaks begin to fear for his safety, for as he becomes ever more...

The purpose of juxtaposing Max Nordau’s millennially hyperanxious “Man of the Dusk of Nations,” Paul Morand’s fetish culture of decadent modernity, Brassai’s evocation of Henry Miller’s 1930s nostalgia for Belle Epoque Paris, and the testimonies of Nan Goldin’s sick or strung-out friends in New York circa 1990 is to affirm the fluidity of decadent periodizations, catalyzing style, historicity, and social formation. Eminently recyclable, the twilight sensibility of decadent fin-de-sièclism, implanted in the modernist turn, is both historicist and abstractable from history; soldered to a specific Zeitgeist, yet transferable to new codifications of cosmopolitan life. In what follows, I want to...

Toward the end of World War I, a curious legal trial took place in Britain that once again placed the name of Oscar Wilde before the public in the context of libel. Although this case echoed and at times explicitly evoked the notorious 1895 trials in which Wilde had sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel and in turn had been charged by the Crown with gross indecency and sodomy, when this trial began on 29 May 1918, Wilde was long since dead and was neither plaintiff nor defendant. Yet a cluster of associations he had helped to put into...

At a conference held a few years back in Brazil, I read a paper in which I reflected on the ambivalence and general disquiet awakened by Wilde in certain turn-of-the-century Latin American writers involved in the joint venture of constructing national identities and renewing literature. My paper attempted to capture the way in which José Martí’s gaze, for one Utopian moment, gathered Wilde the exemplary rebel and Wilde the problematic deviant (araro, aqueer, a fop) in one image—a conflictive one, to be sure, but stilloneimage. I attempted to reconstruct the moment when both “sides” of...

In 1898 an article appeared inLa Revue scientifiqueentitled “La découverte rapide de l’identité littéraire du Répertoire Bibliographiqueonomastiquedes Anonymes.” Its author Marcel Badouin, a librarian and self-styled “journaliste scientifique et surtout médical” [scientific and especially medical journalist] (648), proposed the construction of a system, in his own words “une police scientifique” [a scientific police] (651), that would be able to determine the identity of an author whose work had been published anonymously or under a pseudonym.¹ In a vocabulary characteristic of late nineteenth-century criminal anthropology, Badouin contended, “L’Anthropomètre classe descorpsd’homme; Le Bibliographe, qui s’occupe des...

The economic dependency that Marx ascribes to India, with respect to the opium cultivation and trade there by the East India Company, is a reflection on several levels of the country’s total addiction to, and dependency on, the imperial British rule. In the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the cultural significance of opium, and of opiate India, had a great impact on English literature. At this time, India was barely recovering from the repercussions of the Sepoy Mutiny, and the depictions of India in English literature were attributing cannibalistic traits to Indian culture. Colonizers were convinced that...

It is a long-standing critical commonplace to characterize literary decadence—usually disparagingly—in terms of imitation. “In the final analysis,” writes Remy de Gourmont, “the idea of decadence is identical with the idea of imitation” (116). G. L. Van Roosbroeck remarks, “The notion of decadence includes esthetically, the notion of imitation” (19). And James M. Smith writes that decadence relies on a “sterile imitation” of more “vigorous” literary forms (650). This dismissal of imitation, so widely imitated, as it were, in critical approaches to decadent writing, assumes that all imitation is somehow the sign of creative deficiency, the dying fall...

There is some accidental irony in including in a study of decadence a text—Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas—that was proclaimed by its author as an antidote to the implied decadence of Pater’s earlierStudies in the History of the Renaissance. The apparent irony is deepened when the modern student of decadence observes Pater’s specifically targeted audience within Oxford attack as a moral and aesthetic threat his carefully crafted tribute to the rebirth of classical culture in Europe. There were appreciative and discerning reviews ofStudies in the History of the Renaissance.¹ But the misgivings expressed (both...

One of the most entertaining—and, politically speaking, most instructive—parts of writing cultural history is the chance it gives to revisit the great ideological battlegrounds. Every such terrain has its own irreducible identity, formed out of the original negotiations its inhabitants conducted with each other and with the forces of their own past. But each generation of historians and critics who walks the ground comes bearing fresh information and perspectives and, not least, different vested interests, all of which together can produce renewed understandings of the energies locked into that particular form. Lines that traditionally defined opposing forces, apparently...

When we consider our encounters with the termdecadence, in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts, we are inevitably struck by the term's volatility across disciplinary boundaries, its nebulous character, and its omnivorous capacity, in the hands of those who deploy it, to designate any phenomena—aesthetic, social, political-that are deemed threatening, potentially contaminating, or nihilistic in the face of a tacit consensus about cultural norms and values. The very slipperiness of the term means that it effectively eludes responses to the question “What is decadence?” It doesn’t offer itself to unambiguous interpretation, but instead seems to exist by dint of...