The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
European politics after the consolidation of the German Reich in 1871 and the rapid imperial expansion by the major powers in the following decades. Turning from the example of the republican city-state—an ideal increasingly adopted by nationalist writers—the later decadents associate themselves with another important influence in the formation of the movement: the early modern tradition of libertinism. Closely tied since the seventeenth century to antimonarchial and anticlerical sentiments, libertinism becomes a medium for decadent antinationalism. Although their works are not often pornographic, the decadents fashion themselves as modern libertines, an underground and transnational movement united around their peculiar tastes (artistic as well as sexual) and self-consciously subversive of mainstream norms and beliefs. The example of libertine subversion differs markedly from the early ideal of civic humanism and responds to a different political order, but it, too, is based on a vision of community and affiliation fundamentally at odds both with the modern Gesellschaft and with conservative nostalgia for a lost Gemeinschaft.
In Chapter 3, “Golden Books: Pater, Huysmans, and Decadent Canonization,” I trace the emergence of this subversive ideal by looking at the pervasive image of decadent collections and the interest among decadent writers in the process of canon formation. Decadent collections self-consciously look back to the libertine association of outsider taste with social and political subversion, an association materialized in the so-called gallant library of pornographic classics described in many libertine works. Like the gallant library, the decadent collection is filled with subversive books and objects, constituting a canonical expression of the decadent sensibility. Decadent collections take aim at the contemporary fashion for defining national literary canons. International, idiosyncratic, and manifestly artificial, these collections stand as an affront to purportedly organic national traditions in their design and their preoccupations. Looking at two works crucial to the formation of decadent taste—Pater’s The Renaissance and Huysmans’s À rebours —I show how collecting and canon formation are closely associated with images of national disintegration: porous borders, hybrid languages, and radical cosmopolitanism. This counternationalist model of canon formation informs the practice of what I call “mimetic canonization,” by which later decadents “find” themselves in the tastes of an influential mentor, much as the nation finds itself reflected in a list of national classics. The practice is suggestively employed in the infamous chapter 11 of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which details Dorian’s collections and tells of his descent into decadence, and in Michael Field’s book of ekphrasitc poems Sight and Song.
In Chapter 4, “A Mirror for Teachers: Decadent Pedagogy and Public Education,” I turn to another decadent appropriation of the libertine tradition. Both the decadents and the libertines are fascinated with the process of education. Libertine works are organized around scenes of sexual instruction and initiation that subvert social norms; the decadents similarly make education a central trope in their subversive attack on the form of the nation. I argue that the many stories of conversion, influence, and persuasion in decadence are directed against the specter of public education, which was a recent innovation in Europe and England. From its earliest emergence in the writings of early nineteenth-century German reformers, the idea of public education was closely associated with national formation. Schools shape the populace, transforming it from a collection of inward-turning small groups into a unified collective willing to defend the nation-state. Driven by vanity, desire, and a taste for domination or submission, decadent teachers and students become case studies in the folly of making education a means to or model for political order. I look at five decadent educational narratives that scrutinize the motivations of teachers and students in this way. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, and Lee’s Miss Brown all show teachers and students agreeing to pedagogical contracts that mock the liberal theory of the social contract. Rather than forming free and rational individuals, these contracts enshrine the students as paradoxically willing slaves. Turning next to Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and again to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I consider the discourse of influence that is so prevalent in decadent writing. Libertine works assume the ability of teachers to shape their students at will; for Pater and Wilde, by contrast, education ideally takes the form of an aesthetic self-culture that may be stimulated, but never fully directed, from above. Marius the Epicurean and The Picture of Dorian Gray describe the problematic lure of influence for both teacher and students, associating the desire for domination and submission their characters express with the alliance of public education and state power.
Gathering together a number of conceptual threads pertaining to international and aesthetic affiliation that run through the book, Chapter 5, “A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters: Some Versions of Decadent Community,” looks at three decadent works about the Renaissance—Lee’s Euphorion, Pater’s Gaston de Latour, and Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser —that describe communities formed by reading and writing. Baudelaire imagined himself as a member of a quasi-aristocratic elite of taste; later writers make this elite into the model for a broader international community. Borrowing from contemporary public sphere theory, I argue that the decadents constitute what Michael Warner calls a “counterpublic”—an oppositional social body made up of friends and strangers and formed by the production, circulation, and reception of texts. Lee defines the Renaissance not as a unified movement but as a series of contingent communities formed around wandering and hybridized literary and artistic forms. Pater’s protagonist Gaston imagines community in terms of the story of Pentecost, in which the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles as tongues of flame, each speaking the native language of the multi-ethnic group present at the event. Beardsley’s novel depicts the literally underground exile community of Venus and her retinue in the Hörsel, and addresses its readers by incessantly gesturing toward the familiar constellation of themes and rhetorical practices that had come to serve as shorthand for decadence. His work builds an address to the decadent counterpublic into its very composition.
My postscript, “Public Works,” finds a new idea about community in Mallarmé’s memorial sonnet for Baudelaire, “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire.” Eschewing the traditional imagery of monstrous flowers and exotic landscapes that dominated the nineteenth-century reception of Baudelaire, Mallarmé describes the poet in terms of sewers, street lamps, and public cemeteries. I see these images as evidence of a break from the decadent repudiation of modernity and a move toward a more inclusive notion of the relationship between poets and their audience. Like a public work, the poet provides material support for the community, a crucial means by which it can come to recognize its shared interests.
CHAPTER 1
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“Partisans Inconnus”
Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire
Great damage has been caused to terrestrial togetherness
[l’association terrestre], for centuries, by conflating it with the
brutal mirage, the city, its governments, or the civil code.
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres”
Le Salut public
Several months after the December 1851 coup d’état that launched Louis Napoleon into power and replaced the unstable French Second Republic with the veritable police state of the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote in a letter to his trustee Narcisse Ancelle that recent events had left him “physically depoliticized [dépolitiqué].”1 The Bonapartist coup has long been regarded as a crucial turning point in Baudelaire’s political development. In the years leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, Baudelaire was an enthusiastic partisan of socialist and republican political theorists such as Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He participated actively in the street fighting in 1848, and, as Richard D. E. Burton has argued in his meticulously documented study Baudelaire and the Second Republic, never wholly gave up his commitment to the republican ideals of the French Revolution. After 1852, Baudelaire began to read widely in the works of conservative figures