Amy Sailer

[Decadence]

In 1893, Arthur Symons published “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” a short manifesto that rallied together a cohort of British and Continental writers under the banner of Decadence. Symons diagnosed that they lived in a sick and corrupted society, which could only be represented by a sick and corrupted literature. He marked this literature as self-conscious, restless, overly refined, and perverse. In this way, the literature reflected a civilization “grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action.” Like so many poets, prickled by John Keats’ conflation of Truth and Beauty, Symons sought to capture the truth of the poet’s intuition or impression rather than some eternal, objective Truth. The result is an Impressionism in poetry.

Like Symons, Oscar Wilde bristled at the motive in literature to perfectly capture Life and Nature. In “The Decay of Lying,” he rails against Romanticism and Realism, movements that subordinated art in service to life. Writers had become imitative instead of imaginative. At the time, novelists like Charles Dickens used realism to expose the dismal working and living conditions of industrial society. Realism was the vehicle for political advocacy. Wilde believed that the subordination of art to an ethical or political message stilted the imagination. He advocated Art for Art’s Sake. More particularly, Wilde reveled in ornamentation, even to the point of abstraction. The problem with literature these days, he laments, is that it has no style. As soon as writers try to create an immersive imitation of life, artistic style fades into the background. Like the brushstrokes in a James McNeill Whistler painting, which, as one approaches the canvas, suddenly reveal their own materiality, transforming from the illusion of the fold in a girl’s dress into a bare streak of gray-blue paint, so literary style should, through a trick of the eye, return to the fore. As for ethics, “any ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.”

How does one write ethical poetry while allowing the poem to develop on its own terms? We are still having the same conversation. Far and wide, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Decadence continues to offer poets and writers an alternative to revolutionary political expression. During the Harlem Renaissance, a second generation of poets and artists, including Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, hailed fin-de-siècle Aesthetes and Decadents to distinguish themselves from the earlier revolutionary vanguard led by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke. The Harlem Decadents objected to the monolithic project of “racial uplift” in literature, which would only portray the African diaspora as an upwardly mobile bourgeois class. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote in “Criteria of Negro Art,” “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” In the novel Infants of Spring and the story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” Thurman and Nugent vie for freedom of expression, to represent promiscuity, pansexuality, enjoyment of weed and booze, unemployment, an all around rejection of bourgeois values, and in an impressionistic, even ornamental style. In his book Beginning at the End, the scholar Robert Stilling beautifully illustrates the way postcolonial poets, including Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Walcott, Yinka Shonibare, Bernadine Evaristo, and Derek Mahon, have turned to Decadence to express their disillusionment with corrupt governments and artistic restrictions. And of course, Decadence endures as a queer poetics, finding new urgency as a result of the AIDS pandemic, in the poetry of Mark Doty and Lynda Hull, in the poetry of some of the poets in this very feature, as a way to grapple simultaneously with desire and disease. Arthur Symons said that a sick and corrupted society needs a sick and corrupted literature. Haunting decadence is the dream and the nightmare of progress.

I’m writing this preface into the third month of social distancing to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, during a week of protests following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four policemen. Never in my lifetime have the political body and the human body been so visibly interconnected. In my favorite post going viral at the moment, essayist Rebecca Solnit writes, “I think a lot of us feel that we are on the cusp of change, the ridge between one watershed and another. Crisis is the point, in medicine, at which the patient either recovers or heads toward death. A turning point. So much sorrow and destruction. A minority of destroyers. A new ethos and imagination emerging. Nothing is foreordained; much is possible; the worst as well as the best. And a lot of it is up to us.” Solnit imagines the United States as a sick body, poised between recovery or death. For the fin-de-siècle Decadents, European empires were atrophying and decaying like their weak, consumptive European subjects. Today, many of the same social ills continue to plague us. The imperial exploitation of labor and resources. Automation. A rift between economic production and consumption. The policy changes necessary to redress climate change, police brutality, mass incarceration, income inequality, even the current pandemic, feel glacially slow to come. Symons wrote of a culture “too languid for the relief of action.” Poems of Decadence, I think, often address this feeling of inertia or fatigue. As Joyelle McSweeney writes, “Everything is burning. Man’s default mode is cruelty and exploitation, outrageous depredation and deprivation. We have to go backwards to find an art form that does not hide this truth under ideologies of progress or purity.”

While I don’t think the poems in this feature necessarily adhere to Art for Art’s Sake, inflected, as all art, by the anxieties of the world, I do believe their elaborate textures and contradictions subvert ideology. Decadence is a rich means for the expression of contradiction. Somehow, simultaneously, these poems entertain materialism and collectivism, refinement and excess, performativity and sincerity, pleasure and pain. Some of the poems here capture the fleeting movement of time and intuition in sensuous language. Some of the poems strut and soliloquize. In their bejeweled diction, their serpentine syntax, these poems accomplish, for me, what a Whistler painting accomplishes, flickering between representation and a gorgeous impressionism. So come. Join me at the corner of desire and dread.

—Amy Sailer