The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky

      Recent scholarship on British aestheticism has persuasively teased out the underlying cultural politics of a movement that was long associated with the same apolitical turn from the world that still defines decadence. Aestheticist literary form served as a medium for marginalized groups—gay men and lesbians, middle-class women, socialists, and avant-garde artists alike—to criticize mainstream society and speak to others who shared their experiences and desires.³⁰ Despite the fact that the lines between the two movements were exceedingly blurry, scholarship on decadence remains tied to the sense of isolation, social fragmentation, and nihilistic withdrawal that we find in Bourget and other contemporary commentators. I demonstrate in this book, however, that decadent writers engaged the most pressing issues of nineteenth-century political and social theory—law and the public good, constitutions and social contracts, nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism—from a wide range of political stances on the left and the right. More directly oppositional and more resolutely cosmopolitan than the aesthetes in their critique of contemporary communities, the decadents foreshadow the new kind of intellectual that Julia Kristeva names the “dissident,” a figure who challenges the master discourses of society not from the position of the sovereign individual doing battle with the masses but as an advocate of a transformatively “modern community.”³¹

      The decadents adumbrate their ideal of a modern community against the twin pillars of the nineteenth-century bourgeois ascendancy: liberalism and nationalism. The most significant revisionary scholarship on the fin de siècle has for the most part focused on cultural politics, detailing the ways in which writers in the period challenged contemporary norms of gender, sexuality, and economic value. This approach has provided a much more nuanced picture of the historical moment than earlier scholarship had allowed, but it has also tended to overlook the important ways in which these writers also commented upon larger macropolitical issues. One notable exception is the work of scholars such as Linda Dowling and David Wayne Thomas, who have found suggestive traces of the liberal tradition in fin-de-siècle writing, from the language of autonomy and self-cultivation, to the individualization of aesthetic experience, to the hope William Morris and others pinned on the politically transformative powers of artistic appreciation.³² But the decadents’ engagement with liberal and other political theories is considerably more thoroughgoing, and often more critical, than Dowling and Thomas indicate. Even those decadent writers most clearly influenced by certain strains of liberalism (such as Pater and Lee, who are often grouped with the aesthetes) are also deeply suspicious of the kind of community liberalism imagines in theory and brings about in practice. Their disdain for nationalism arises from similar concerns. The decadents object in particular to the way liberal thinking and nationalist thinking sweep together entire populations under overarching rubrics, ascribing rights and privileges—those enumerated in constitutions or evoked by the mythology of a national character—to subjects who did not choose or never desired to be so defined. The self-selected community of taste so often imagined in decadent writing is a frankly elitist protest against and revisionary alternative to this quasi-universalizing contemporary order. It is a cliché of scholarship on the movement that the decadents harshly condemned the bourgeoisie; I show in this book that their attack had reasoned and politically sophisticated (if often troubling) foundations.

      As Jacques Rancière has argued, art and literature are political not because they convey deliberate political messages or give form to the unconscious ideological positions of their producers but because they “change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.” Aesthetic forms enable the politically marginalized—those officially excluded from political participation or alienated from the prevailing social order—to discover a collective voice.³³ Decadent writers find this voice in older ideas of social and political organization and in the possibilities for association opened up by the rapid growth of print culture in the period. Turning the tables on contemporary critics who accused them of excessive individualism, for example, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Gautier, I show in Chapters 1 and 2, challenge the liberal valorization of individual self-interest by evoking the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Disdainful of the rising tide of nationalism that dominated European politics after 1870, later writers like Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pater, Wilde, and Lee, I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, counter the prevailing notion of a community united by ties of blood, a vernacular language, and geographical boundaries by advocating self-selected and international communities of taste modeled on the early modern libertine underground. Republican virtue and libertine subversion may seem radically opposed, but they both exemplify alternative models of community that make sense of the decadents’ disidentification with bourgeois modernity, providing them with a shared idiom for the critique of contemporary liberalism and nationalism. In Chapter 5, I look at the ways Lee, Pater, and Beardsley describe quasi-utopian communities composed of dispersed individuals who gain (or retrospectively embody) a sense of unity in and through acts of reading and writing but who may never meet face to face.

      The theory of decadence, I noted above, arose out of the historiography of ancient empires, and long served as a commentary on the fate of modern nations, so it is easy to see how it could become a medium for critique as well.³⁴ This critique was not lost on all contemporary commentators. Nordau characterized the decadents in Degeneration as part of a broader cultural threat to modern civilization, a threat epitomized for him by the tendency of writers in the movement to form alternative communities—specifically, artistic schools—that loudly rejected mainstream values. Yet Nordau is too easy to caricature, and with the exception of some perceptive discussions of the phenomenon in Pater’s writings, the fascination of decadent writers with politics and communities has remained obscure to later readers.³⁵

      The most obvious reason is the looming figure of Huysmans’s paradigmatic decadent protagonist the duc Floressas des Esseintes, from À rebours (1884), the novel that all but wrote what Eugenio Donato calls “the script of decadence.”³⁶ Sick of the world, Des Esseintes escapes to an artificial paradise devoid of people (apart from his servants) but filled with objects, apparently substituting the passive thrills of perverse consumption for life in the real world. Des Esseintes’s dramatic withdrawal defined the decadent movement in the nineteenth century, and in many ways continues to define it for contemporary scholars. In an influential account of fin-de-siècle literary movements, for example, Gagnier cites Des Esseintes as the epitome of a decadent individual “psychologically incapable of living with freedom,” who seeks “immunization against contamination and an illusory autonomy” in the hierarchical and overtly structured world of art. By contrast with the sexually and politically radical aestheticism of Wilde and Morris, decadence is an escape from complexity and change, “a tiny, safe space” from which the writer can criticize bourgeois society without the cost of genuine political struggle.³⁷ Gagnier’s taxonomy was instrumental in making aestheticism a significant object of investigation for Anglo-American scholars, but it also contributed to the relative neglect of decadence, which remains for most readers a shadowy and reactionary “phase” of aestheticism, a pale imitation of French forerunners, or a literary-historical wrong turn rather than an analytical category of its own. Fin-de-siècle writers did not always draw such clear lines. For example, scholars at the forefront of the recent renaissance in the study of Michael Field (the collective pen name of Katharine Bradley and her niece and lover, Edith Cooper) have situated the poets firmly in the milieu of aestheticism, even stressing their thoroughgoing opposition to decadence.³⁸ Yet Michael Field maintained friendships with many of the leading figures of the decadent movement, and eagerly read the works of Baudelaire, Swinburne, Verlaine, and other prominent decadent writers. As