Read The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) for Free Online Page B
Authors: Brian Stableford
Decadent sensibility. Lorrain was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and was instrumental in bringing Wilde into the circle of the French Decadent writers, thus securing an important link between the French and English Movements. He was never as popular with the reading public as Rachilde, but if anyone deserves to be considered the central figure and fulcrum of the Movement it was he.
Lorrain’s characters, like Rachilde’s, explore all the usual avenues of perverse self-indulgence, plus one or two rarely met elsewhere (hair-fetichism; visits to abattoirs for the purpose of supping blood; and marrying tubercular wives for the pleasure of watching them waste away) but his attitude to such adventures is rather more clinical. He was also – again like Rachilde – a great devotee of literary symbolism, constantly searching for new metaphors with which to illuminate the perversions of human desire.
Lorrain’s short fiction includes many psychological horror stories, akin to Maupassant’s but differently inspired. Attempts to cope with his perennially poor health gave him many opportunities to explore the fringe medicine of the day, and he became intimately familiar with the hallucinatory effects of ether. Few writers have ever been such scrupulous observers of their own paranoid nightmares.
Lorrain’s novels and collections of stories mostly did not escape from the periodicals into more permanent form until the fashionability of Decadence was on the decline, but they remain key examples of the Decadent sensibility. His best work is to be found in his collections, including Sonyeuse (1891) and Buveurs d’âmes (1893), but his novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901) is arguably the most significant extended study of the Decadent personality after À rebours.
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By comparison with the novels of Rachilde, Mendès and Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont’s work is much lighter in tone, but his lightness is quite distinct from the lightness of Mendès’ shorter pieces. Gourmont was the sentimentalist of the Movement, and his Decadent short fiction mostly consists of dreamy erotic fantasies which celebrate the faithlessness of lovers in a manner far more mystical than cynical. Gourmont is far more famous today as a critic than a writer, and those of his prose works which are still praised are not the ones most closely affiliated to the Decadent Movement, but he was as influential a figure as any during the Movement’s brief heyday. Though his experiments with prose style and his strong theoretical interest in mysticism served eventually to remove him from the mainstream of Decadence, they were in their inception essentially Decadent moves. His short novel Le Fantome (1891) is probably the most typically Decadent of his works, featuring the usual perversions, but it has a glossiness and essential charm which make it distinctive. The extended prose poems collected in Histoires Magiques (1912) are far closer in spirit to the works of Pierre Louÿs than to the short stories of Rachilde and Lorrain, but they are the most perfect representations of an aspect of the French Decadent consciousness which was just as important as Mendès’ cynical playfulness or Lorrain’s horror stories.
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In the midst of the lurid excess which seemed to contemporary observers to be the hallmark of the Decadent novel. À rebours – the book which was eventually canonised as the archetypal novel of Decadence – must have seemed rather restrained in its descriptions of sexual indulgence. However, it owes its archetypal status not to its extremity but to the highly scrupulous way in which it went about its psychological analysis of the Decadent state of mind; the greater delicacy of Huysmans’ prose is expressed in more than one way.
Huysmans conspicuously failed to make the grade as a wholehearted Decadent, but unlike Péladan he did seem to have made a very concerted effort. In À rebours he paraded himself (for few doubted that the anti-hero Des
Lorrain’s characters, like Rachilde’s, explore all the usual avenues of perverse self-indulgence, plus one or two rarely met elsewhere (hair-fetichism; visits to abattoirs for the purpose of supping blood; and marrying tubercular wives for the pleasure of watching them waste away) but his attitude to such adventures is rather more clinical. He was also – again like Rachilde – a great devotee of literary symbolism, constantly searching for new metaphors with which to illuminate the perversions of human desire.
Lorrain’s short fiction includes many psychological horror stories, akin to Maupassant’s but differently inspired. Attempts to cope with his perennially poor health gave him many opportunities to explore the fringe medicine of the day, and he became intimately familiar with the hallucinatory effects of ether. Few writers have ever been such scrupulous observers of their own paranoid nightmares.
Lorrain’s novels and collections of stories mostly did not escape from the periodicals into more permanent form until the fashionability of Decadence was on the decline, but they remain key examples of the Decadent sensibility. His best work is to be found in his collections, including Sonyeuse (1891) and Buveurs d’âmes (1893), but his novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901) is arguably the most significant extended study of the Decadent personality after À rebours.
**********
By comparison with the novels of Rachilde, Mendès and Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont’s work is much lighter in tone, but his lightness is quite distinct from the lightness of Mendès’ shorter pieces. Gourmont was the sentimentalist of the Movement, and his Decadent short fiction mostly consists of dreamy erotic fantasies which celebrate the faithlessness of lovers in a manner far more mystical than cynical. Gourmont is far more famous today as a critic than a writer, and those of his prose works which are still praised are not the ones most closely affiliated to the Decadent Movement, but he was as influential a figure as any during the Movement’s brief heyday. Though his experiments with prose style and his strong theoretical interest in mysticism served eventually to remove him from the mainstream of Decadence, they were in their inception essentially Decadent moves. His short novel Le Fantome (1891) is probably the most typically Decadent of his works, featuring the usual perversions, but it has a glossiness and essential charm which make it distinctive. The extended prose poems collected in Histoires Magiques (1912) are far closer in spirit to the works of Pierre Louÿs than to the short stories of Rachilde and Lorrain, but they are the most perfect representations of an aspect of the French Decadent consciousness which was just as important as Mendès’ cynical playfulness or Lorrain’s horror stories.
**********
In the midst of the lurid excess which seemed to contemporary observers to be the hallmark of the Decadent novel. À rebours – the book which was eventually canonised as the archetypal novel of Decadence – must have seemed rather restrained in its descriptions of sexual indulgence. However, it owes its archetypal status not to its extremity but to the highly scrupulous way in which it went about its psychological analysis of the Decadent state of mind; the greater delicacy of Huysmans’ prose is expressed in more than one way.
Huysmans conspicuously failed to make the grade as a wholehearted Decadent, but unlike Péladan he did seem to have made a very concerted effort. In À rebours he paraded himself (for few doubted that the anti-hero Des