Variations of decadence : reflections on Julian Barnes’ 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘢𝘵

Abstract

Why are we drawn to decadence? No single answer on the complex variations of decadence’s allure will suffice. The task is no easier in the context of a special issue on neo-Victorian decadence. Nevertheless, some form of response must be tried, if only because of the reflections it can prompt through the (mis)readings it repeats and the (re)readings it invites. And so, inadequately, we take a stab at an answer. We are drawn to decadence because of the validation it offers to personal or collective enervation, exquisiteness, and excess. It countenances the luxuriant, the dissipative, and the aesthetic. These categories are too loosely run together, admittedly, and the words deployed seem to bear, implicitly and incongruously, tones of reproof. Yet what’s not to like in looseness (volupté: one need hardly say more) if not for a peculiar unease which, even and as it is repressed, makes decadence more tantalizing in its prospect and chancier in its actuality? The cares and uncertainties of the world are kept at bay by a cocooning of one’s self – soi, in French – in the soie, the silk, of Apollonian attitudinizing. This is only one mode of decadence and seems to constitute some play of delusion, but all forms of decadence must act like there’s no tomorrow. The decadent attitude must be flaunted, vaunting its contempt for measure. But this mostly holds if we are, in fact, committed to decadence and lost to or lost in it: for instance, and in another of its modes, by making ourselves at one with the languor, the affectation, the fastidious disdain of its costumed, flâneuring drift (all words used here, as befits the context, without negativity). If, on the other hand, the decadent existence proves too consuming – so that we swerve away from affirming and totalizing it as our life/style – then we are drawn to it differently. We still regard it in fascination, but we indulge it at a distance, only vicariously intent on the disposition for the flamboyantly unconstrained and on the fall that can be visited upon it by the world and by fate.