Introduction: Decadent Poetics

Abstract

The term decadence—designating variously a literary form, a movement, and a period of literary history—is notoriously hard to pin down. It derives from the Latin decadëre, a ‘falling down’ or ‘falling away’, and the OEDgives the following definition: ‘The process of falling away or declining (from a prior state of excellence, vitality, prosperity, etc.); decay; impaired or deteriorated condition.’¹ In Decadent Style(1985) John R. Reed suggests that we need to avoid using the term in the lower case, referring as it does to ‘all those carelessly defined manifestations of change that inspired anxiety and depression in the second half of the last century’.² Yet the proximity to ideas of decline and falling away is, in many ways, what gives decadenceits semantic force, being both a term of opprobrium (connoting linguistic and moral decay) andthe ‘transvaluation’ (to use Nietzsche’s term) of the moral framework that allows for simplistic ideas of decay to circulate. The poetic is an integral part of this transvaluation, the literary text performing the de construc- tion of meaning and value. It was this point that Oscar Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, made in his lecture ‘There Is No Decay’, which he gave to the Bluecoat School, Liverpool, in February 1908. Ross declares that ‘what is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development’.³ He goes on to explain of decadence that ‘even if we accept Mr Balfour’s definition of its symptom—“the employment of an over-wrought technique”—we must remember that Decadence and Decay have now different meanings, though originally they meant the same sort of thing’.⁴