Publisher's Weekly Review
What is Decadence? Most literary reference books don't list it as a movement; at most it's defined by time, place, a loose collection of titles, authors and little magazines, and how it shades into more established movements such as aestheticism, symbolism, naturalism. Weir, a professor of comparative literature and foreign languages, does a splendid job of breaking down the elements of decadence and of synthesizing current thinking on both it and modernism. Before going on to discuss Huysmans's A reboursperhaps the only unarguably decadent novelWeir describes the elements of decadence found in Flaubert's Salammbô, the Goncourt brothers' Germinie Lacerteux and, in England 20 years later, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. He then makes convincing arguments for the unmediated influence of decadence on modernist literature. Regarding Joyce, he shows not only that ``the unity of the book is decomposed... to give place to the independence of the word'' (to eviscerate Havelock Ellis), but also the heavy use of cultural references. He demonstrates that there is a deliberate anti-decadence in Gide's L'Immoraliste, which eschews decadent artificiality and sickness for a modernist health and naturalism. While Joyce, Gide, Flaubert, Huysmans are well known, Weir thankfully doesn't assume more than a passing acquaintance with his examples of decadence in decayOctave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices, Ben Hecht's Fantazius Mallare and James Huneker's Painted Veils. Following decadence from romanticism to his postface on post-structuralism, Weir's study is intriguing, well-written and widely accessible. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
In a concluding epigram that Wilde would have envied, Weir asks, "What is progress now but a desire to go backward to a time when it was possible to go forward?" He persuasively illustrates that the appeal of early modernism lies in the nostalgia it encourages, its psychological retreat to a time when there was a cultural turning point. Many of the authors Weir discusses lived through the fin de siecle. For them, Weir argues, there was always the possibility that life could be better in the 20th century. After the turn of the century, however, there was no deceptive escapist alternative. Weir begins his inventory with Flaubert's Salammbo, which goes back to pre-Hannibal Carthage, but he leaves the reader to decide whether cannibalism and unimaginable tortures were needed to cleanse the ancient world. Even if Flaubert was writing about the Second Empire, he could not have foreseen or judged the subsequent Franco-Prussian War and Commune massacres as indispensable cleansing. Each successive work studied puts itself in either a different time or a different moral landscape. The commonsense cause and effect of decency--which intervenes in Joyce, Gide, Huysmans, and Wilde--vanishes by the time clearheaded modernism uses wit and rhetoric to confront the contemporary world. Weir's own wit and rhetoric are delightful, and his reprise of the dilemma of decadence, last seen in the late 1970s, may introduce another recycling as we move toward close of the 20th century. Upper-division undergraduate and above. M. Gaddis Rose SUNY at Binghamton
