DECADENT SUBJECTS: THE IDEA OF DECADENCE IN ART, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE CULTURE OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE IN EUROPE

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Corngold, Stanley

DECADENT SUBJECTS: THE IDEA OF DECADENCE IN ART, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE CULTURE OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE IN EUROPE. By Charles Bernheimer. Edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 228 p.

There is nothing antiquarian about the idea of decadence, the subject of the late Charles Bernheimer's marvelous book. "Decadence" has never ceased to be abused for pragmatic ends-vividly during the First World War, as one learns from Michael Howard's The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): "Liberal pacifism [around 1914] remained influential in Western democracies, but it was also widely seen, especially in Germany, as a symptom of moral decadence" (33). In an address to the nation by George W. Bush, one heard: "For a generation leading up to September the 11th, 2001, terrorists and their radical allies attacked innocent people in the Middle East and beyond, without facing a sustained and serious response. The terrorists became convinced that free nations were decadent and weak" (September 7, 2003). But neither "the Germans" nor George W. Bush knew what can be learnt from Bernheimer's book: that "decadence" is less a concept than the "avatar" of a ubiquitous death drive (p. 6). There is no innocent use of the term, none that will escape contamination: properties attributed to one's adversary under the head of his "decadence" are soon enough discovered active in the speaker or the speaker's base (the same diction that registers what "we" are not [decadents]-a distinction between us Americans and them Old Europeans set up as immitigable-is used by George W. Bush's base to characterize American "liberal pacifists"). Those who are proof against decadence become a shrinking minority; and this is the logic of Bernheimer's magisterial deconstruction of Nietzsche, Flaubert, Zola, Hardy, Mallarmé, Wilde, Moreau (and other "Salomaniacs"), Lombroso, Nordau, and, above all, Freud.

The "idea" of decadence, a phrase that dignifies excessively the uses to which it has been put, or, in a word, "the decadent," with its connotations of philistine hatred, is the "provocation" (p. 3) of Bernheimer's magnum opus. This is at once the saddest and most, exhilarating of books: sad because it is shadowed by death-the sudden inexplicable death of the author while he was writing it and thereafter the death of his friend Naomi Schor, one of the two editors. All this has the effect of darkening, making more grievous its theme: degeneration, the death drive, frenetic repetition. And yet there is the exhilaration of this book: it is fascinating, elegant, intellectually adroit, infused with the "kind of mobile, eroticized energy" that, in Bernheimer's reading of Freud's Leonardo, is granted by "the phallic mother. . . to her speculating sons" (p. 182). And so there is the elation of Charlie's survival-Charles Bernheimer was a close friend-as a fortification in culture, for a time, against an all-leveling death.

The idea of an energy frantically cathected to cultural activity to support "a pleasurably perverse relation to the world" (p. 182) is drawn out throughout the entire book and especially in the final, though unfinished, Freud essay. Here, we have a wonderfully persuasive connection of two complexes of ideas: one, the set of vulnerable fantasies in Freud, including the terms castration, fetishism, and phallic mother; two, the set of terms that Bernheimer induces from his earlier chapters on writers and painters as characteristic of the decadent, which includes hysteria, impotence, homosexuality, masochism, androgyny, thrill-seeking, sadism, and crime, to name but a few. For at the root of these affects is the fixation by these male writers on the woman as castrated male (and hence as marked by lack) and castrator of the male, bent madly, passionately on surrogation. Here Bernheimer speaks of Leonardo's libido sciendi, an increasingly evident feature of Bernheimer's own writing. Bernheimer's horror of fixity translates into a dialectical and rhetorical mobility that can leave the reader gasping to hold on; this emerges more and more thrillingly (and here you see how it might be true that every reader of decadence might be made to turn decadent) as this always very agile book becomes a sovereign work of analysis, the arraignment of Freud as a decadent creator of theoretical fictions ("neurosis," "the normal") whose fictional status Freud mostly forgets.

Indeed, mobility and fluency are factors in every aspect of this book, which, like Kafka's The Trial (on which, Bernheimer made a number of brilliant notations in his Flaubert and Kafka [1982]) is incomplete and left in the hands of its editor(s)-the worthy T. Jefferson Kline and the late Naomi Schor-as fascicles, as unnumbered chapters. The ideal form of having this book, as one can now have The Trial, would be in a cassette of unnumbered chapters, allowing the reader to arrange them as he or she would. Indeed I would have preferred to read the final (Freud) chapter ahead of the fourth from the last-"Visions of Salome"-in which the category of castration, undefined, floats somewhere between the literal, the nearly literal, and the rhetorical. While in both chapters castration is the "foremost trope of decadence" (117, 170), earlier it is used with a sort of conceptual confidence that is later repudiated.