‘A Disembodied Voice’: The Posthuman Formlessness of Decadence

Abstract

For all of their apparent flash and flaunting, British decadents have proven notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when it comes to prose writers. Some authors, such as Walter Pater and Vernon Lee, were never interested in being connected with the term ‘decadent’, while others, such as Oscar Wilde, presented themselves or their works as deca- dent only to turn around and contradict their claims. Indeed, it is rare to find a piece of British prose of any considerable length that does not repeatedly move away from beingdecadent to describing decadence— that is, from embodying its character to representing it at a remove. By the 1890s, the very subject of representation over embodiment—surface over essence, mask over face—had saturated the discourse of decadence to such a degree as to push it over the edge into the self-referential. Writing in 1893, Arthur Symons, in his article ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, portrays decadence as ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refine- ment, a spiritual and moral perversity’.¹ In the end, for Symons, there can be no coherent decadent self, only ‘a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’.² How, then, could decadent prose hope to trace the form of a phenomenon characterized bv disembodiment?