CLASSIC
AND DECADENT LITERATURE
There are fundamentally
always two kinds of art: the classic and the decadent. "What are called classic," writes
Most people are undoubtedly familiar with the romantic aspect
of decadence as exemplified in the music of composers such as Liszt, Beethoven
(particularly his late works), Schubert, Chopin, Weber, et al., where 'the
whole' is generally subordinated to 'the parts' and sentiment gets the better
of form. Likewise most people are
familiar with the classicism of Mozart, Haydn, the early Beethoven, and even
much of Mendelssohn, where 'the parts' are generally subordinated to 'the
whole' and form gets the better of sentiment.
This classic/romantic dichotomy is especially apparent in music, but it
is also apparent in the arts of poetry, literature, sculpture, architecture,
and painting, where one or another of the two creative tendencies are usually found to predominate.
Some artists, it is true, seem to be a subtle combination of
both classicism and decadence (to use the more comprehensive term), or at least
they display a mostly classic or decadent approach to their respective arts at
different stages in their creative lives.
But a majority of artists seem to be mainly one or the other, and to
remain fairly consistently so, throughout the course of their creative
lives. It also seems that the classic
tends to alternate with the decadent, and that an epoch in art may be characterized
by the prevalence of whichever tendency happens to predominate during that
time. On average an art epoch tends to
last between twenty and forty years, and each successive epoch becomes a
revolt, in one way or another, against the preceding one. This is especially true of the early twentieth
century, which heralded in the works of authors like D.H. Lawrence, Thomas
Hardy, André Gide, Hermann Hesse,
and John Cowper Powys a classical revival in reaction to the predominating tone
of fin-de-siècle
decadence which had immediately preceded it.
There are, however, always exceptions to the general rule, and
one finds certain writers producing works seemingly quite out-of-character with
the prevailing tendency of their epoch: writers, for example, like Knut Hamsun, who wrote
predominantly classic literature during the last decade of the nineteenth
century, and, conversely, Aldous Huxley, who, in his
otherworldly and mystical predilections, was arguably an outsider in relation
to early twentieth-century classicism!
Of course, one could argue that Hamsun, who
continued to write in a predominantly classical spirit well into the twentieth
century, was really a herald and forerunner of the classical revival, and that
Huxley was effectively a protracted extension of fin-de-siècle decadence. But whatever the case, it should be apparent
that this general alternation between the two schools of art provides the
necessary incentive for each school to flourish in the manner most suited to
itself, since without a tension of opposites there would be little or no chance
of maintaining either!
I began by citing Havelock Ellis' definitions of the two main
kinds of art, and in order to clarify the differences between them, as well as
extend our study of this into an investigation of the leading creative
tendencies of a number of individual authors, I would like to define, in
greater detail, exactly what I consider to be the two chief forms of literary
classicism and decadence respectively.
Firstly, there is the classicism of what Ellis calls "The
love of natural things", which is to say, the appreciation of nature both
as it confronts our vision as external phenomena and our understanding
as internal phenomena. Thus these
natural phenomena may range over a vast area of experience which encompasses
anything from the splendour of a brightly-burning sun glimpsed at midday to the
celestial beauty of certain star formations seen at midnight; from the mystery
of birth to the mystery of death; from the changing generations of man to the
constancy of human life; from the daily intake of food and drink to the daily
voiding of excrement and urine, and so on.
The love of natural things, which was brought to such a high pitch in
the pagan culture of the early Classical Age, only to be superseded by
Christian decadence, with its emphasis on the Beyond and the futility of
worldly life, finds one of its earliest and most notable Western supporters in
Michel de Montaigne, who lived towards the close of
the Middle Ages and whose legendary tower, containing thousands of mostly
classical writings, provided him with both the necessary vantage-point over and
isolation from his age through which to transcend its decadent limitations and,
by turning his scholarly attention back towards the ancient Greeks, to
indirectly point the way forward towards the long-awaited future revival of the
classical ideal, as understood by a love of natural things.
In more recent times, however, one finds this form of
classicism brought to a veritable apotheosis in D.H. Lawrence, who must surely
rank as one of the few great classic poets of Western literature, as also in
some of the works of André Gide, notably Fruits of the Earth,
and still more recently in Gide's great classical
heir and spiritual disciple, Albert Camus, whose
outstanding fictional character, Patrice Mersault,
remains one of the most poignant examples of twentieth-century classicism that
we possess. With his emphasis on sun and
sea, human love and human happiness, sensual enjoyment, travel, frugality,
physicality, etc., Camus returns us to the simplicity
and ancient nobility of pagan life, and never more seductively so than in
lyrical essays like Nuptials
(1939) and Summer (1954).
"Over the sea," he writes in Nuptials at Tipasa, "hangs the vast silence of
But there is another voice which runs roughly parallel with
what may be termed secular naturalism, and has also become louder in recent
times. I refer, of course, to the voice
of religious naturalism. This classicism
extends beyond the largely aesthetic surface appreciation of nature by those
authors dedicated to secular naturalism, and embraces a pantheistic or
semi-pantheistic appreciation of it, such as one finds to varying extents in
Goethe and Rousseau in the eighteenth century, in Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman, and Arnold in the nineteenth century, and in Hardy, Hesse, and, most poignantly, John Cowper Powys in the
twentieth century. This religious aspect
of man's relationship to nature is perfectly expressed in Wordsworth's Lines Composed a few
miles above Tintern Abbey, wherein the poet tells
of:-
"... a sense sublime
Of
something far more deeply interfused,
Whose
dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And
the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."
Likewise we find, in his essay On Nature, Emerson
writing: "It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object." - This, then, is the positive side of
classical naturalism, the side we find predominating in John Cowper Powys,
particularly in works such as The Art of Happiness, A Philosophy of
Solitude, and In Defence of Sensuality, where his philosophy of 'Elementalism', or the cult of nature worship, draws our
attention to a partly spiritual rather than simply material identification with
nature. If D.H. Lawrence stands out as
the leading British exponent of profane naturalism in the first-half of the
twentieth century, then John Cowper Powys must surely rank as the leading
British exponent of religious naturalism - its spiritual counterpart.
However, contemporaneously with the natural form of classicism
we find another form, on the whole a less noble and agreeable form but,
nevertheless, one which has also made itself increasingly heard in recent
years: what might be termed the classicism of social phenomena, or the love of
everyday life. If the most suitable term
we could find to define the first form of classicism was naturalism, then this
second form of it can only be defined in terms of realism, albeit a realism
that accepts rather than rejects the society or life it strives to portray. Indeed, such a classical realism regularly
delights in the minutiae of everyday commonplace life, committing itself to a
portrayal of even the most seemingly trivial actions and situations. It is not the sublime colours of various
kinds of flowers, the beauty of a sunset, the mystery of birth and death, or a
spiritual identification with plant life which mostly concerns the authors of
this school but, on the contrary, such things as the baseness of certain
people, the seductive powers of various women, the financial positions of
particular individuals, the nature of so-and-so's clandestine amours, etc.,
which goad their pens into scathing action.
To some extent one might divide this school of writers into
nobles and plebeians, or those who, whatever their social background, grant
most of their literary attention to the portrayal of grand-bourgeois and
upper-class life and, conversely, those who grant most of it to the portrayal of working-class
and petty-bourgeois life. This
distinction is, I believe, relatively significant, because it helps us to know
whether the realism in question is likely to be clean or dirty, proud or
humble, prim or obscene, rich or poor, choice or vulgar, etc. etc., according
to the context. The most typical
examples of the 'noble' classical-realist tradition are authors such as
Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Turgenev,
Henry James, and Thomas Mann, while the tradition of 'plebeian' classical
realism calls to mind authors like Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Hamsun,
Joyce, and Henry Miller. Obviously there
are exceptions and borderline cases, and no-one can be classified as wholly one
thing or another. But, for purposes of a
fairly tenable categorization, such generalizations are not without some merit.
Having briefly dealt with the main classical literary
approaches based solely on theme, it is now time for us to examine, in slightly
greater detail, their decadent and more prevalent antitheses, which, at least
in one of their popular manifestations, correspond to what Havelock Ellis
defines as: "The research for the things which seem to lie beyond
Nature." As I attempted to describe
the classic forms in a given order, I shall do the same with their decadent
counterparts, and thereby endeavour to highlight the corresponding antitheses
to each classic form.
Firstly we have the decadence which stands in opposition to
profane naturalism, the decadence, namely, of profane antinaturalism
and aestheticism. One finds here a
predominating tone of disgust with natural facts and occurrences, a revolt
against the natural-world-order, against the apparent beauty or utility of
various natural phenomena, against the imposition to eat, drink, sleep,
copulate, urinate, defecate, etc., which invariably characterizes the
lifestyles of human beings. It's as
though man, the eternal slave of nature, wishes to overcome nature, to live, in
a spirit of reckless defiance, outside of and beyond it. A very clear example of this disgust with the
natural-world-order, particularly that aspect of it entailing defecation, is to
be found in Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century. But more recent examples undoubtedly include
Baudelaire, Wilde, Huysmans, Beckett, Genêt, and Sartre, whose various natural bêtes noires confirm their respective claims to the kind of decadence
we are characterizing by disgust with natural phenomena. In the late-nineteenth century this disgust
reached a veritable apogee with Huysmans' Against
the Grain, whose leading character, Des Esseintes,
contrives to live in complete solitude in his specially-designed villa at Fontenay, to pass much of his time there in a
highly-sophisticated aesthetic contemplation of certain choice works, both
literary and plastic, and to avoid, as far as possible, any direct contact with
the outside world. Unfortunately for
him, this life of aesthetic sophistication - with its unbounded admiration for
such hyperdecadent artists and poets as Redon, Luyken, Moreau, Poe,
Baudelaire, and Mallarmé - eventually leads to a
series of nervous crises which, in their final consummation, make it imperative
for him to return to the less-unnatural world of Parisian society from which he
had so earnestly fled. As is well known,
Against the Grain was to have a profound influence on Oscar Wilde, and
his Picture of Dorian Gray, though less decadent than its great French
prototype, nevertheless brought this kind of writing to a head in
late-nineteenth-century
However, with the general change of literary approach to one of
classicism in the early decades of the next century, profane antinaturalism, though not entirely vanquished, played a
much-less pervasive role. But its voice
began to reappear from time to time in the 'thirties, and never more
unashamedly so than in Sartre's Nausea (1938). Like the protagonist of Huysmans'
novel, Antoine Roquentin lives against the
grain. But he lives against the grain of
life as life rather than as time spoilt by human folly, without even the
consolation or raison d'être of the sophisticated aestheticism which Huysmans' tragic character reserves for himself. If human folly is a sufficiently strong
motive to drive Des Esseintes into a monk-like
isolation from society, in order to lead a life he considers to be of some
intrinsic value (the Nietzschean overtones of which
are impossible to ignore), the only motive strong enough to isolate Roquentin from humanity is the sheer absurdity of life
itself, the apparent pointlessness of an existence which exists for no other
reason than its inability not to exist, and the contemplation of
which engenders that disgust and revolt epitomized by the word 'nausea'. When, trapped in a moment of such nausea in
the local park at Bouville, Roquentin
shouts: "What filth! What filth!", it is with all the poignant
anguish of one who realizes that existence is eternal and inescapable, and that
it's therefore impossible for anything, including the idea of existence, not to
exist. The man is virtually suffocating
in the oppressive consciousness of existence, which, aggravated by the
realization that external phenomena are like masks over the uniform substance
of things, is as apparent in the sight of a gnarled tree root as in the rest of
the tree itself. Fortunately for him,
however, this oppressive consciousness is an intermittent rather than a
permanent condition, so Roquentin is enabled to
breathe a clearer air, so to speak, once the 'nausea' has passed.
While discussing Sartre's general approach to decadence, which
is essentially Protestant in character, it is worth drawing attention to his
psychoanalytical biography of Baudelaire, a key work in the understanding of
decadent consciousness. For by dwelling
on the psychological rather than the purely material or factual aspects of his
subject's life, Sartre lays bare the underlining consciousness of profane antinaturalism with a sureness and deftness only to be
expected from a profoundly kindred spirit.
Speculative though much of the work may be, we are inexorably led
towards the conclusion that the dedication and fastidiousness with which
Baudelaire applied himself to the regulation of his decadent lifestyle - and
thus to the perpetuation of a calculated degree of spiritual sterility
(aecidia) - was of such a magnitude as to make even the lifestyle of Huysmans' Des Esseintes appear
comparatively naturalistic!
As a spiritual counterpart to the above-mentioned types of
decadence and antithesis to the classicism we defined as religious naturalism,
we find the decadence of supernaturalism, or religious antinaturalism. Unlike its profane cousin, this is a positive
decadence, and one which, since the decline of Christianity (hitherto its chief
Western manifestation), has increasingly come to be identified with
spiritualism, visionary experience, mysticism, astrology, the occult, etc. With an emphasis on that which seems to lie
beyond nature, supernaturalism has been championed by poets and writers such as
William Blake, August Strindberg, J.K. Huysmans, Barbey D'Aurevilly, George
William Russell (A.E.), W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley,
Dennis Wheatley, and Colin Wilson, each with his own particular field of
investigation. Thus, for example, we
find William Blake and George William Russell bringing to their writings the
fruits of mystical and visionary experience more usually perceived by artists,
that is to say, on a lower plane than the predominantly religious natures. In this context, mysticism is identified with
partial experience of the Godhead, or World Soul, through meditation of a less
pure and impersonal kind than with the non-artistic and predominantly religious
natures, while visionary experience is likewise identified with psychic
spectacles of a less pure and impersonal kind: human figures, chimeras,
transparent fruit, palaces, sickle moons, etc., which are individually
illuminated from the inside by variously- or uniformly-coloured lights that set
them off against a dark background. Or,
alternatively, with spectacles of magnificent landscapes, seascapes, or airscapes which are embellished with self-luminous objects,
like gems. The highest visionary
experience tends to involve the contemplation of an intensely pure inner light,
but, as a rule, this is not the visionary experience given to artists.
Indeed, it is primarily on account of his knowledge about such psychic phenomena
that we are justified in placing Aldous Huxley in the
context of the kind of decadence we're now discussing. For although he passed his life devoid of any
genuine mystical or visionary experience, his interest in and knowledge about
such matters makes him an invaluable source of information to anyone anxious to
acquire a general outline of what they entail and whom they concern. (It is
interesting to note that the change of visual orientation Huxley experienced
through the judicious use of mescaline, as described in The Doors of Perception
& Heaven and Hell, admits him, via the contemplation of a few flowers in
a small glass vase, to "The miracle, moment by moment, of naked
existence", which, in complete contrast to the naked existence experienced
by Antoine Roquentin in Nausea, is
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable. It just is.")
Similarly one might argue that the sceptical Huysmans (not the later Catholic convert) possessed a
tendency to investigate and relate that which was fundamentally alien to his
fundamental nature, and nowhere more clearly so than in the novel Down Below (Là Bas), where, largely in consequence of his historical
research into the life and crimes of the notorious fifteenth-century Satanist,
Gilles de Rais, its leading character, Durtal, becomes acquainted with late-nineteenth-century
Satanism, though purely as an outsider.
Here, too, we find Huysmans confined, as an
artist, to a mainly objective knowledge of occult phenomena, since a high
degree of subjective knowledge here would inevitably have turned him into a religious
propagandist and thereby prevented him from functioning as a genuine
writer. Conversely we find that Yeats,
who was definitely a genuine writer, laid claim to a certain amount of
subjective knowledge in spiritualism, and certainly his experiments in
psychical research would seem to make him less of a 'spiritual outsider' than
most other spiritually-inclined writers.
But, even so, there was much of the sceptic about Yeats and, though
spiritualism may have appealed to his curiosity, it is doubtful that he would
have become such an important poetic figure in early-twentieth-century
literature had he allowed it to play a greater role in his life and writings
than it apparently did. And the same, I
suspect, may be held true of Strindberg, whose Occult Diary stands
as a fairly isolated phenomenon in an otherwise predominantly rational output.
However, let us now progress to the second form of decadence, a
decadence which may also be subdivided into a positive and a negative approach,
and deal, firstly, with what we shall term positive antirealism - the
antithesis of 'noble' classical realism.
This type of decadence also has a number of branches at its disposal,
but each of them is dedicated to the sole end of transcending, on as
imaginative a plane as possible, the usual references to the everyday reality
of the classical realist. Thus it is a
positive decadence because, like the supernaturalism referred to above, it does
not directly attack its antithesis but, on the contrary, seeks to overcome it
through the establishment of its own unique world, an imaginary world with a
realism peculiar to itself.
The most famous contemporary example of this kind of writing is
undoubtedly J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
- a work of such imaginative scope as to be virtually in a class by
itself. Frankly, there is nothing in the
comparative decadent literature of any age or time that can be placed by the
side of this colossal feat of the imagination, and the human race may have to
wait many years yet, before anything of equal import is produced, assuming
anything like that could ever be produced again. For in this sphere of creativity, Tolkien has no peer.
He is virtually a god, a monster of the imagination whose other works,
including The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Silmarillion, both confirm and consolidate his
reputation as the foremost imaginative author of the age. (To the extent that
we are categorizing various authors according to their leading creative
tendencies, it should be apparent that, inasmuch as his creative life was
solely dedicated to this particular branch of antirealism, Tolkien
is one of the easiest and most clear-cut authors to categorize.) Other examples of this kind of decadence
include Lewis Carroll's
However, with this highly imaginative branch of positive
antirealism, which mostly appeals to children, there exists another and more
adult branch, which again comes in various guises and which may be
characterized by creations, on the one hand, like Goethe's Faust, Maturin's Melmoth the
Wanderer, and Lautréamont's Maldoror (whose omnipotent hero is able to do anything
from turning himself into a cricket in Paris drains, to swinging Mervyn, a helpless victim of his spleen, around on the end
of a rope on the top of the Vendôme Column, with a
view to precipitating him, projectile-like, in the general direction of the Panthèon), and by creations, on the other hand, like Jules
Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, H.G. Wells' The War
of the Worlds, and John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. The first type tends to involve men or beings
who have been supernaturally endowed with special powers, usually to the
detriment of other men, while the second type, in complete contrast, focuses
one's attention on the struggle between men and nonhuman or subhuman aggressors
who are stronger and more formidable than their human adversaries. In both cases, an unreal world is created,
but unlike that of Tolkien's hobbits, which is pure
fantasy, it is one in which human beings are directly involved and, as a
consequence, usually in a context not terribly far removed from the bounds of
plausibility.
But there exists, in addition to these otherworldly
interpretations of positive antirealist decadence, another interpretation
which, while providing one with a glimpse into a different world from that
usually portrayed in classical realism, nevertheless remains more attached to
the real world than to any imaginary one.
I refer, of course, to the 'romantic' decadence of authors such as
Gerard de Nerval, whose Journey to the Orient
unfolds vast worlds of exotic experience not to be encountered
between the pages of Stendhal, Flaubert (except in Salammbô),
Proust, or Henry James. One could of course argue that works like Journey
to the Orient are essentially classic insofar as
they endeavour to portray, objectively and unmaliciously,
a society existing abroad rather than the one into which the author was
born. But, on deeper reflection, it does
seem that the desire to portray a society other than one's own is fundamentally
or implicitly a rejection or, at the very least, criticism of that society, and
therefore something that can only be interpreted in terms of 'romantic'
decadence: the need to turn one's back on familiar reality and, in consequence,
explore the relatively unfamiliar reality of a different people.
Another more striking example of this 'romantic' interpretation
of positive antirealism, however, can be found in works which either take one
back in time to 'the Culture' or to 'the Civilization' (in the Spenglerian sense of those terms as described in The Decline of the West)
of a remote society, or forward in time to what the author supposes a future
society will be like. Flaubert's Salammbô is an excellent example of this tendency from
the historical point-of-view, while Hesse's The
Glass Bead Game endeavours to portray an elite society of ultra-refined
intellectuals who live, a few centuries hence, completely isolated from the
everyday world of commerce in a civilization (Castalia) dedicated to the study,
appreciation, assessment, and, where possible, manipulation of what is best in
Western culture. The devotees of this
cult of the past do not, as a rule, create anything original themselves. For as members of a late 'Civilization' they
are obliged to sustain themselves on the accumulated cultural wealth of earlier
centuries, rather like the ancient Greeks during the Hellenistic period. To some extent they are future Diderôts, compilers of a vast 'encyclopaedia' of Western
culture; an achievement, however, which is destined to be discarded, along with
its compilers, the 'Bead Game' players, come the dawn of a subsequent
'Culture'.
It is worth noting that Hesse, the
outstanding master of this branch of antirealism, had previously taken us back
to the world of Medieval Germany, to the heart of the Western 'Culture', in his
novel Narziss and Goldmund,
where Goldmund, its principal character, carves a
picaresque-like role for himself in blatantly heathenistic
opposition to the prevailing Zeitgeist, through his desire for sensual
gratification. The ascetic Narziss and the hedonistic Goldmund,
representing the contrary claims of spirit and body, are finally reconciled,
however, when Goldmund, certain to be executed for
crimes appertaining to his former lifestyle, is rescued from prison by Narziss and brought back to the monastic order from which
he had sought worldly escape: a sort of Des Esseintes
in reverse, from spirit to body and back to spirit again. One might say that whereas the body
ultimately triumphs (through Joseph Knecht's
resignation from the Castalian order) in 'the
Civilization' of The Glass Bead Game, it is the spirit which is
compelled to triumph (through Goldmund's
reconciliation with the monastic order) in 'the Culture' of Narziss and Goldmund, and so
we are made conscious of the profound logic and inevitability of the events
underlining its impressive dénouement.
Having dealt with the chief branches of the decadence we have
described as positive antirealism, it is now time for us to deal with its spiritual
counterpart, which we shall describe as negative antirealism. This type of decadence stands in an
antithetical relationship to what we earlier termed 'plebeian' classical
realism, and its chief manifestations inevitably take the guise of defeatism,
rebellion, and satire. Now whereas the
'plebeian' classical-realist attitude more or less accepts the society it
portrays or, at any rate, doesn't unduly attack it, the negative antirealist
attitude makes an attack on society its very raison d'être, the lifeblood of its
tragic inspiration. Such a book, for
example, as Celine's Journey to the End of the
Night (Voyage au Bout de la Nuit), belongs very
much to the class of defeatist literature, a class which has proliferated, this
century, with the spread of megalopolitan
civilization, and which can be traced, in varying forms, to the works of
authors like Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco. The predominating tone of such literature seems to imply a disgust with megalopolitan society, a world-weariness, a fatalistic
feeling of "What's the use?", coupled to an almost apocalyptic
pessimism concerning the future course of world events and man's helplessness
in the face of the mechanistic hell he has unleashed upon himself. Indeed, there is more than a hint of this tone
in various of the writings of Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, and J.K. Huysmans too, although not to the extent that one generally
finds it in the aforementioned authors.
But if disgust with and despair at a society best characterize
the defeatist decadents, then it is above all in their contempt for and
indifference towards a society that we find what could be called the rebellious
decadents most characterized, and nowhere more tellingly so than in George
Orwell's Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, whose mock-hero, Gordon Comstock, turns his back on
the money-worshipping commercial society of his day to pursue a career, doomed
from the outset, of lyric poet on a meagre salary secured by his humble
position as book-shop assistant. The
rebellious young Comstock is fundamentally a late-romantic in a society which
has long ceased to have any romantic pretensions, to produce, understand, or
revere great poets, and, as such, his career goes from bad to worse, losing him
one job after another, until, reduced to the meanest of book shops, he is
finally brought to his senses by the love of a young woman he has made pregnant
and whom, as a last resort, he decides to marry. The materialistic society from which he had
tried to flee may not have been conducive to the fostering of his romantic
ambitions as a poet, but it was still capable of exhibiting the redeeming power
of womanly love, that eternal theme of the generations, and so, thanks in part
to the generosity of his previous employer, our mock-hero returns to the money-dominated
world of advertising he had earlier rejected.
A moral here there may well be, but, realist that he was, Orwell also
had a strong streak of the genuine romantic about him, and this is certainly
apparent when we consider his horrified reaction, voiced in the essay Inside
the Whale, to the social passivity, resignation, and seeming indifference of
Henry Miller with regard, for example, to the existence of concentration camps,
purges, putsches, totalitarian regimes, weapons of mass destruction, etc., which
he was unable to accept or face with the same apparent complacency. But nowhere is this romantic streak more
evident than in his practical opposition to Franco which, to the utter
bewilderment of Miller, led him to venture out in the name of democracy, to do
battle with what he would have considered to be an authoritarian ogre.
There are, of course, other examples of rebellious antirealist
decadence to be found in Orwell, and to some extent one also finds this
tendency in authors like Hamsun (Hunger), and Hesse (Steppenwolf), though with a very different
emphasis in each case. I think, for
example, the plight of Harry Haller in Steppenwolf becomes easier to
understand once one sees this work in relation to what follows it, that is to
say, once one sees the contemporaneousness of its setting in relation, on the
one hand, to the past 'Culture' of Narziss and Goldmund and in relation, on the other
hand, to the envisaged future 'Civilization' of The Glass Bead Game, and
thereby realizes that, as a man caught between two ages in a transitional
period from, symbolically speaking, the spirit to the body, Harry Haller had a
lot to learn about the body and, as a consequence of the spirit's predominance
in the recent past of the Western 'Culture' - not to mention, if one takes
Haller for Hesse, in the history of his own deeply
religious family - was neither particularly happy nor, despite his previous
(failed) marriage, really conditioned to do so.
("Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two
ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would
suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation
is caught in this way between two ages, between two modes of life and thus
loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident,
for all morals, for being safe and innocent." - Here, in his preface to Steppenwolf
lies the key to what follows.) I
think the fact that the body, symbolized by the world, finally 'wins out',
thanks in large measure to the assistance of Hermine,
Maria, Pablo, et al., should be seen as a pointer towards The Glass Bead
Game where, in strict accordance with the prevalence of an advanced
'Civilization', Joseph Knecht ultimately resigns from
his post as 'Magister Ludi',
thereby signifying the triumph of the body over the spirit. For the cause of Haller's dilemma centres, it
seems to me, on the battle between 'Culture-man' and 'Civilization-man', and,
in accordance with the historical change destined for the Western soul, the
latter was ultimately fated to gain the ascendancy.
Hesse is unquestionably one of the
Western world's greatest authors and, for no small reason, one of the most
maligned and misunderstood. I do not
think he is likely to be seen in his true stature by anyone not well acquainted
with the works of Spengler and Jung. For the literary surface of
The meaning of satire is, I think, sufficiently appreciated by
a majority of people not to warrant any additional explanation here, and very
few of us would be ignorant of the satirical qualities to be encountered in
authors like Swift and Pope, where the vices and follies of various persons are
held up to ridicule in the clearest of critical lights. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that
satire is a relatively rare product of the creative imagination, demanding from
its exponent a degree of intellectual sophistication of sufficient magnitude to
carry weight in an area where attacks on society or individuals can
all-too-easily degenerate into or remain mere attacks, without the power to
convince one of their moral legitimacy.
Thus the great satirist is ever a first-rate critic, but a critic whose
criticism could never be confounded with malice for the sake of malice, or
vengefulness as a consequence of former hurts, or prejudice against particular
people, or propaganda in the interests of personal belief, political
allegiance, etc. The essential thing is
that we should come to understand and appreciate the fundamental logic
underlining a satirist's criticisms. For
true satire has nothing to do with that kind of writing, so easily mistaken for
it, which merely acquaints one with the personal prejudices, grudges,
revolutionary ambitions, or whatever, of its author. Works in that category are
almost invariably in the guise of either defeatist or rebellious decadence,
both of which we briefly investigated above.
I think one of the best examples of genuine satirical writing
can be found in Strindberg's The Red Room, a novel published in 1879
which virtually lampoons everything from the civil service to brotherly love,
from art criticism to publishing, from journalism to politics, and from
Stockholm society to acting. Indeed, there
seems to be little that doesn't fall for a scathing criticism of one sort or
another in this daring novel, which must surely rank as one of the greatest
satires ever written, and certainly one of the finest creative achievements of
a man whose imaginative genius was virtually unparalleled in the entire history
of nineteenth-century literature.
Another fine example of modern satire is Wyndham Lewis' The Roaring Queen,
the publication of which, scheduled to take place sometime in the 'thirties,
was held-up for a number of years on account of the 'libellous nature' of its
criticism of Arnold Bennett who, in the 'infamous' role of Shodbutt,
is made the chief representative of a species of literary dictatorship which
Lewis, seemingly, was unable to stomach.
Other works by this outstanding satirist of modern times, including Tarr (which Ezra Pound considered a masterpiece), are
also worth noting in the context of negative antirealism, the decadent
antithesis, you will recall, to what we earlier described as 'plebeian'
classical realism.
We have discovered, then, a perspective relating to the various
modes of literary activity which enables us to differentiate between the two
kinds of literature, viz. the classic and the decadent, and, further, to divide
them into two forms, viz. the naturalist and the realist, which we in turn
subdivided, on the one hand, into profane and religious, and, on the other
hand, into 'noble' and 'plebeian' types, providing, in each case, the
appropriate decadent antithesis. We also
discovered that each literary form, whether in terms of the classic or the
decadent, could be divided into a positive and a negative approach. Thus we agreed that the type of classical
naturalism which dealt with the love of natural phenomena on a religious plane,
as pantheism or elementalism, was positive in
relation to the purely profane or secular appreciation of nature encountered in
its classical counterpart. Likewise we
discovered that the decadent antithesis to each classical form could also be divided
into a positive and a negative approach.
And so we agreed that the type of anti-natural decadence which dealt
with a hatred of natural phenomena was negative in relation to supernaturalism,
its decadent counterpart, which took a distinctly positive stand in the
investigation of or belief in worlds apparently existing beyond the boundaries
of the everyday one. With these
particular divisions and subdivisions at our disposal, we were able to classify
various authors in terms of what we took to be their leading creative
tendencies. But in so doing, we were
obliged to accept the fact that, in a majority of cases, such classifications
could only serve as loose guidelines, as rough approximations to an author's
main creative approach rather than as immutable criteria by which to place him
in a definitive category. To be sure, we
found that certain authors, such as Camus and Tolkien, could be classified more easily in this manner
than others, like, for example, Huysmans and Hesse (whose works were divisible into two or more
categories), and although we satisfied ourselves that these others have been
classified in the most suitable way within the confines of a given form, we are
not beyond acknowledging the fact that contrary approaches to literature can
also be encountered in various of their writings, albeit to a much lesser
extent.
Finally, it is important for us to remember that, thus far, our
categorizations have been based solely on thematic material within the sphere
of literature, not on syntax, vocabulary, formal structure, etc. Thus we have confined ourselves to the
essence of literature. Also, except in
passing, we have not presumed to touch upon the relative classic/decadent
dichotomy in art, music, architecture, or sculpture, which, were we competent
to deal with such subjects in a similar way, would necessitate a considerable
extension to the current essay! In this
context it must suffice us to realize that a dichotomy between the two main
creative norms does indeed exist within all of the other arts, though, needless
to say, not in exactly the same way as with literature. Similarly, it must suffice us to realize that
a parallel division can be found in philosophy between the, as it were,
classical philosophy of the philosopher whose work directly relates to life and
can in some way affect the life of its time in a positive manner and,
conversely, the decadent philosophy of the philosopher whose work exists in a
kind of ivory tower of thought-for-thought's sake, without any real or positive
applicability to the life of its time.
But let us now briefly turn our attention to the question of
vocabulary, syntax, phraseology, etc., in literature, so as to differentiate
between the classic and the decadent approaches to style. You will recall that I cited
I think this fact is made amply clear when we contrast the
predominantly classic prose of a novel like Madame Bovary with the
predominantly decadent prose of Against the Grain, the extremely
well-chosen, expansive, tortured and tortuous vocabulary, complex syntax, methodical
phraseology, and unusual, not to say unique, formal structure of which signify
the veritable apotheosis of the decadent style.
It appears, from a general survey of decadent literature, that the chief
hallmarks of its style can usually be found in the use of rhetorical effusions,
highly technical expressions, exotic references, carefully-selected adjectives
and adverbs, esoteric foreign words-and-phrases, elongated sentences, and a
structure which has been subordinated to the interests of the parts; whilst a
similar scrutiny of classic literature will indicate, by contrast, that the
chief hallmarks of its style are usually to be found in the use of
short, simple sentences, exact rather than hyperbolic utterances, relatively
simple adjectives and adverbs, parts that are subordinated to the interests of
the overall structure, an appropriately formal or conventional syntax - in
short, by the use of moderate as opposed to extreme techniques. One might contend, furthermore, that the
authors of a classical subject-matter tend to employ a classic technique, those
of a decadent subject-matter a decadent technique, though this is by no means
invariably the case, as can be seen, for example, by the predominance of
decadent prose in James Joyce's Ulysses, which, thematically considered,
is essentially a classic work, and, conversely, by the mainly classic prose of J.R.R.Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which
fundamentally belongs to the realm of the decadent.
However, whatever the technique and subject-matter of any given
work may happen to be, there inevitably arises a serious question relating to
the comparative merits of the two kinds of literature: the question, namely, as
to whether the classic and the decadent are of equal importance or whether,
artistically speaking, the former is superior to the latter? Havelock Ellis was of the opinion that they
were of equal value in the stream of Western literature, but I incline to the
view that the classic is generally artistically superior to the decadent. There are, I fully admit, examples of
decadent literature which, like The Lord of the Rings and The Glass Bead
Game tower above many shorter and lesser classic works. But, on the whole, it seems to me that the
subject-matter and technical treatment of classic literature must inevitably
grant it precedence over the corresponding attributes of the decadent. Naturally, one's taste or temperament may
predispose one to prefer the decadent, even to loathe the classic. But I do not seriously believe that it would
entitle one to consider the decadent of equal artistic value to that which, by
dint of its intrinsic proportion, beauty, wholesomeness, pertinence, and
relative positivity, must always remain the perfect
art!
