French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

Decadence versus Naturalism

The problem for the Decadents was to locate a space in which they could express their contempt for the materialist culture in which they found themselves, and where they could be free, so to speak, to cultivate their own hysteria. In practical terms, this involved finding a physical location as protected as possible from the rising tide of vulgarity and what Baudelaire calls the ‘tyranny of the human face’. In
A Rebours
, Des Esseintes removes from Paris to Fontenay-les-Roses, where he proceeds to do up a house with the exquisite furnishings, paintings, and exotic flowers of his caprice. He ventures once into the nearby village, sees a group of ‘pot-bellied bourgeois with sideburns’, and recoils in horror. Similarly, in
Axël
—the play by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam—the effete aristocrat Axël retires for good into the crypt of his castle, with the immortal phrase: ‘Living? The servants will do that for us.’ A dandified solitude characterizes several of the protagonists in the stories gathered here, who live either in Parisian apartments, hung with heavy drapes and well insulated from the
hoi polloi
, or in crumbling familial chateaus, inspired by the Gothic, and in particular by Poe’s languid scion in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. A part of
Decadent taste involves a hyper-sensitivity to anything too loud or flashy or vulgar, and by the same token, a horror at the overly utilitarian excrescence of modernity. For example, the functional, anonymous room in the
hôtel garni
or
meublé
, in all its ‘sepulchral horror’, then as now, is frequently the setting of choice for clandestine encounters, squalor and despair in all its forms. Jean Lorrain, for one, displays a keen sensitivity to atmosphere, whether of the sordid hotel room or the disreputable
bouge
—the low dive of Parisian night-life. As for the brothel, Marcel Schwob’s story of that name conveys all the sealed mystery and suggestive horror of the place, viewed as it is through the eyes of a band of curious children, ignorant as to its true nature and function.

Another practical difficulty, though of a different order, that faced the writer of the
fin de siècle
was, quite simply, what exactly was there left for him to write about? By the end of the nineteenth century the literary landscape in France must have looked like the aftermath of a comprehensive scorched-earth policy, the giants Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert having, in their different ways, shared out the
Comédie humaine
and the
moeurs provinciales
—not to mention the
Légende des siècles
—between them. And there was another contemporary force, of formidable influence and popularity, to be reckoned with: Émile Zola and the school of Naturalism. Zola embraces scientism, and he is the founding father of the ‘statistically’ researched, documented novel that draws on the welter of new information about the species made available in every kind of report, whether socio-political, economic, or medical. Faced with these monuments, who between them exhausted the art of realist description, it is not surprising that the Decadents, and their close relatives the Symbolists, clustered around Baudelaire, who hated the things they hated, who deliberately chose a rarefied, spiritual ambivalence, whose perceptions are essentially those of a solitary, and whose attractive melancholy stemmed in large measure precisely from an overdose of ‘reality’. Poetry had nothing to do with description, or with reportage; it was not the things themselves, ‘but the relations between them’ that counted, as Mallarmé explained, in an influential essay in which the great Symbolist tries to carve out a space in which his own art could exist.
¹²
Mallarmé uses
the word ‘reportage’ advisedly, for this period saw the heyday of the written press; the things themselves lay everywhere to hand, in the great plethora of journals which purveyed every kind of miscellanea and
fait divers
—a form of reportage that even gave rise to a literary form, in Félix Fénéon’s ‘
Nouvelles en trois lignes
’ (‘Stories in Three Lines’), that consisted of barely rearranged dispatches from press agencies like Havas which landed on his editorial desk at
Le Matin
. ‘Em. Girard received a chimney upon his head, at Saint-Maur. At Montreuil, R. Taillerot, who was emptying his septic tank, fell in and drowned’, reads one of them.
¹³
Such fragments were the sustenance and delight of savage satirists of petty-bourgeois existence, like Mirbeau or Bloy. What the papers reported, day after day, was a drop in the birth-rate, the ravages of alcoholism, drugs, sexually transmitted disease, and tuberculosis, and every variety of sordid crime—things that seemed to announce a
fin-de-siècle
reversal of meliorism or ‘evolution’. The Naturalists, especially, were avid devourers of the newspapers. But Mallarmé’s witty riposte to the apparently incontrovertible ‘facts’ purveyed by the daily paper was to claim that a column of print might hold the key to the universe, if only the words were arranged otherwise. The task of the ‘Décadent’ or the ‘Mystique’ was to suggest the ‘horror of the forest, or the mute, scattered thunder in the foliage’, but to
exclude
‘the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees’.
¹⁴

In the circumstances, which were crowded, to choose ‘vice’ as a subject, and the rare, perverse, and novel sensations and pleasures associated with it, was thus a deliberate ploy. It helped, of course, that such pleasures were deemed out of reach, shocking, and even incomprehensible to the bourgeois mentality. Pierre Louÿs has a story called ‘Une volupté nouvelle’ (‘A Fresh Pleasure’), and it could stand as a title of many of these tales. Jean Lorrain’s ‘The Man Who Loved Consumptives’, which is included here, describing the erotic tastes of a man in rude health who seeks out women dying of consumption, is a queasily effective example of the genre. Victor Hugo’s remark in a letter thanking Baudelaire for his poems—‘vous créez un frisson nouveau’—literally, ‘you are creating a novel shudder’, was an ambition that federates the writers of the period. So they sought out the
bouge
and the
maison close
, the opium den and the
bordello—Jean Lorrain, who moved seamlessly from the smartest salon to the lowest dive, was to introduce his friend Huysmans to polymorphous pleasures. When Huysmans converted to Catholicism the friendship faltered—but Catholic ritual itself, blasphemously inverted, had been the target of choice for decadents and voluptuaries, at least since the Marquis de Sade, and it continued to be so throughout this period, culminating in writers of the modern era like Pierre Jean Jouve and Georges Bataille. Vice, and the fascination attendant upon it, is of course everywhere present in Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu
. In one of his projected prefaces to
Les Fleurs du mal
, Baudelaire, envisages the attempt to extract the
beauty
that lies in evil—the smiling serpent has its hypnotic charm, after all. He remarks in passing that, in any case, many illustrious poets that went before him had dwelled much in the ‘more flowery provinces of the poetic domain’.
¹⁵
Huysmans says much the same in his 1903 preface, where he explains how it came to be that Lust,
luxure
, was the one capital sin fastened upon by his contemporaries. Writing with the retrospective smugness of the convert, he suggests that Pride would have been a better one.

‘La femme’

It is in this context that the misogyny which fires these writers, almost without exception, needs to be understood. Their misogyny is obvious, generalized, and virulent. It seems to infect their very style: the use of particular adjectives to describe a woman’s physicality—either to praise or to blame—recurs in all of them. American feminists who have set to work on misogyny suggest it is a form of male hysteria.
¹⁶
It is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Decadent period, in that it is so widespread. Once again, it is the dissociation of ideas which enables, and indeed inflames, the misogyny of these writers, and frees them from the statutory requirements of Romance chivalry; and there is a sense in which, knocked from her restrictive pedestal, woman is freed too, her sexual power unleashed. The cerebral sensualist Remy de Gourmont applies his theory of dissociation to woman, and finds that her beauty is associated with happiness because of the accompanying promise of sensual fulfilment, which is how he
interprets Stendhal’s definition of beauty as ‘the promise of happiness’. Strip away the partiality of male desire, then woman, viewed aesthetically, is no more beautiful than the male, indeed, is less so. Schopenhauer had already concluded thus, in his notorious, jaundiced aphorisms on the fair sex. Baudelaire decided she was ‘natural’ and therefore ‘abominable’, Tristan Corbière had dubbed her ‘la bête féroce’ (‘savage beast’), Jules Laforgue the ‘mammifère à chignon’ (‘mammal with her hair in a bun’), and T. S. Eliot, a latecomer following Laforgue, called her ‘the eternal enemy of the absolute’. Maupassant is violently ambivalent about women. His story ‘Fou?’ (‘Mad?’), in which a possessive lover, derailed by his wife’s apparently insatiable sensuality—in fact a projection of his own—and the ‘infamy’ housed in the sumptuous vessel of her body, finds she is taking satisfaction from horse-riding and wreaks his vengeance on both her and the horse, is a truly nasty case in point. Octave Mirbeau is perhaps the most energetic woman-hater of them all, his personal experience of marriage—to the sensual, and apparently faithless,
cocotte
and former actress Alice Regnault—explaining much. His male subjects suffer humiliation at the hands of women, who are often unconscious sadists, withholding sexual favours or placing them elsewhere. In recent readings of ‘Decadent sexology’ mentioned above, feminist psychoanalysts recuperate female agency in the form of a power-struggle or sadomasochistic bind; but it is often merely the persistence of their own desire, faced with the bland facts of sensuality and beauty which echo back at them (a form of the
femme fatale
, if you will), that seems to enrage and baffle the male protagonists. This is especially so in Maupassant and Mirbeau and in the quasi-pornographic stories by Mendès, and it leads them on occasion to murderous intent. Whatever the emphasis we choose to give, female sexual power is never more insistent than here, and the New Woman is threatening. The writings of these male authors constitute a kind of allergic reaction. The black humour of Mirbeau’s cruel little tale included here, ‘The Bath’, speaks volumes.

Of course, below the surface the ancient instinct to idealize, even to idolize, remains intact—this tendency, common to both sexes, in Freud’s refrigerated language, to overvalue the love-object at the expense of the ego, which becomes depleted: it is the recognition of this drive which makes woman not only the indispensable foil to the Decadent writer, but his match. In this at least, he is at one with
Catholic prejudice: woman calls forth sensuality in man—she is thus the formidable temptress that must be shunned. With her hysteria, her caprices, her swooning desires, her possessiveness, her sentimentality, her imperious moods, and her sensuality, in the
fin-de-siècle
period woman comes up against something more redoubtable even than religious censure: the glacial stare of the dandy. And the dandy strives to be the reverse of all these things, to live his life perpetually in front of a mirror. He must always be immaculately turned-out, never emotionally spontaneous, always self-controlled. He is, eternally, the detached observer; he is everything contained in that loaded phrase of contemporary discourse, ‘the male gaze’. And it was to this gaze, indeed, that Charcot’s beautiful female hysterics were overwhelmingly submitted in the theatre of his clinic. But the dandy, whether he be called Baudelaire or the fictionalized Des Esseintes, is dismayed to find that, come what may, he finds all these ‘weaknesses’ in himself. And woman, undivided in herself, will always win out, just as nature will always win out. In his misogyny, Schopenhauer is cold and simply derides, but cerebral voluptuaries like Louÿs, Gourmont, or Mendès are subjugated, and indeed obsessed, by women in their sensual abandon, at least as they like to picture them. The Symbolist-Decadent painters and engravers—Gustave Moreau, Fernand Khnopff, Félicien Rops—helped to feed the flames.

There are distinctions to be made: it was chiefly the ‘legitimate spouse’ of the complacent bourgeois marriage that fuelled the most venomous invective—woman as the perpetuator of the hated tribe. And it is when one of these virtuous wives proves to be whorish, and to cuckold her husband everywhere, from the marital bed to the cheese-shop floor, and with everyone (as in one of Bloy’s stories here), that she is to be applauded. The Decadents, who revel in hyperbole and the grotesque, have little time for the subtler psychology of adultery
à la
Flaubert. Women whose ‘career’ is vice—the
filles
and prostitutes that are omnipresent in this literature—are frequently natural allies, for they are enemies of the ‘normative’; as are polymorphs, nymphomaniacs, androgynes, hermaphrodites. For all of these appear—along with a subliminal homosexuality, frequently, if obliquely, evoked by Lorrain in particular—to incarnate new and forbidden pleasures. The one celebrated female Decadent writer, Rachilde (whose texts are too long to be included here), made inversion and comprehensive role-reversal her subject in
Monsieur
Vénus
(1884). Zola, reviling what the Decadents would flock to, spoke of the androgyne as ‘the man-woman of rotted societies’. The woman is also admired for her use of artifice, in her
toilette
and in her make-up—the key text here being Baudelaire’s ‘Eloge du Maquillage’ (‘In Praise of Make-Up’); Baudelaire’s dandy prefers the made-up woman to the natural one, just as Villiers fantasizes Hadaly, a perfect, mechanically operated automaton, as the coming ideal, the ‘Future Eve’, as he calls her in his novel of that name, a kind of robotic precursor to the Stepford Wives. Sometimes this apparently compulsive misogyny takes a comic form. It infects literary style, but it also effects furniture: there is a passage in
A Rebours
in which the arabesques and scrollwork of Louis XV furniture are said to envelope woman in an atmosphere of vice, by imitating her charms, even in her spasms and transports of pleasure. In his story ‘Pft! Pft!’, included here, Jean Richepin makes parodic play of stock misogyny; the dandified, erudite, and cynical protagonist falls into the fatal trap of falling in love with the object observed, and suffers all the torments of sexual jealousy. His behaviour exasperates his mistress, who finally acts to confirm his worst suspicions. Male hysteria and projection are shown up to comic, if gory, effect.