Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)
Charles Bernheimer
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0801867401
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a "stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds." In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term.
Decadent Subjects is a coherent and moving picture of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and thoughtful, this remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to show why people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence, all the more important as we emerge from our own fin de siècle.
Serge, who contemptuously denies nature, sensual pleasure, and the sexual body, and his slow-witted, virginal sister Désirée, who celebrates the pullulating fertility of the barnyard animals she maternally tends. In the isolated village, promiscuous sexual activity characterizes the relation of the brutish peasants both to each other — they are all incestuously related through multiple cousinages—and to the land they till, with which they are described as “fornicating.”3 The alternatives Zola
offers are singularly unappealing: on the one hand, a mindless embrace of nature as teeming animal generation; on the other, a violent repression of life in the flesh, so violent, indeed, that it leads to psychosomatic collapse. At the end of part 1, Serge, in a masochistic delirium, calls on the Virgin Mary to castrate him so that he can unite with her without sin. In the novel’s second part, Serge wakes up from his long illness to find himself in the symbolically named Paradou, which used to be a
dissolution—which entails behavior society calls dissolute—is both obscene, in the opening out of bodies and organs, and violent, in the attack on the individual’s established limits and the flirtation with death. Rituals of religious sacrifice, animal or human, had a comparable function, Bataille argues. Participants in the ceremony experienced the sacred as a spectacular revelation of the continuity of being to which death returned the sacrificial victim. In both erotic and sacred experience, we
Phocas had already evoked this misogynist image of Salome as femme fatale earlier in his journal when he watched the performance of a music hall dancer named Izé Kranile. Although there is no indication that her dance had anything to do with the Salome theme, Phocas identifies Izé in Huysmanian terms as “the creature of perdition execrated by the prophets, the eternal impure beast” and immediately evokes “the immemorial image”: “Salome! Salome! the Salome of Gustave Moreau and of Gustave Flaubert”
feelings specifically to the phallic stage of early libidinal organization, which follows the oral and anal stages, but nothing has really changed conceptually: the mature sexual organization, which recognizes a difference between maleness and femaleness rather than between phallic and castrated, inherits all the affective associations from the earlier theoretical distinction. “The fixation on the object that was once strongly desired, the woman’s penis, leaves indelible traces on the mental life of