Decadence

Decadentism is an artistic, philosophical and, mainly, literary movement that had its origin in France in the last two decades of the century XIX and was developed throughout almost all of Europe and some countries in America. The name decadentism emerged as a derogatory and ironic term used by academic criticism, however, the definition was adopted by those for whom it was intended.

Designation

The humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 for France left the permanent impression on the new generation that an era had ended; The dominant aesthetic at the time, naturalism, also offered an extremely unpleasant, ugly and anti-aesthetic vision of life. According to Louis Marquèze-Pouey, it was Maurice Barrès who first applied and made official the name décadents to a literary group in 1884, which he identified precisely by its initiators. À rebours / A Huysmans' contra (1884) was undoubtedly the movement's wake. But the term was derogatory, and it only became widespread with the controversy that provoked a parody in the form of a pastiche of its aesthetics, themes, styles and even the biographies of its fainted authors (neuropaths, morphine addicts, amoral, pessimists, foreigners or worse: Germanophiles and Wagnerians), Les déliquescences. Poèmes décadents d'Adoré Floupette, avec sa vie para Marius Tapora. Byzance: chez Lion Vanné éditeur, 1885; In reality, it was less mockingly printed in the workshops of the magazine Lutèce and its authors, who invented Floupette and his bosom friend and biographer Tapora, "second-class pharmacist", They were the journalists of this publication, Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire.

Aesthetics

One of the best expressions of this movement is reflected in Verlaine's verse: I am the final empire of decadence. Verlaine was precisely at the head of the movement for some time, especially after the publication of The Damned Poets (1884).

Decadentism was the antithesis of the poetic movement of the Parnassians and their doctrine, inspired by the classical ideal of art for art's sake, despite the fact that Verlaine, one of the greatest exponents of decadentism, had originally been a Parnassian. The pictorial and sculptural formula of the Parnassians (ut pictura poesis, according to the norm of Horace), is replaced in decadentism by the ideal of a poetry that tends to the quality of music, that it is only form(Walter Pater) and values freedom of expression to the point of being indifferent in its assessment of moral issues. The intellectual aestheticism of Pater (1839-1894), skeptical and enemy of all affiliation and commitment, is considered an early supporter of "availability" in the André Gide way, and he plays with ideas as if they were crystal pearls without ever believing in them:

We have been granted a certain time interval, finished which we will leave this earthly dwelling. Some human beings feel that this interval is going through indifference, others handed over to great passions and the wisest to art and songs

Decadentism attacks bourgeois morals and customs, attempts to evade everyday reality, exalts individual and unfortunate heroism and explores the most extreme regions of sensitivity and the unconscious.

Aestheticism was generally accompanied by an exoticism and interest in distant countries, especially oriental ones, which exercised great fascination in authors such as the Frenchman Pierre Louÿs, in his novel Aphrodite (1896). and in his poems The songs of Bilitis (1894). As well as in the also French Pierre Loti and, accompanied by dandyism, in Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, or in the English Richard Francis Burton, explorer and translator of a controversial version of One Thousand and One Nights.

But the maximum expression of decadentism is the novel À rebours (Against the grain), written in 1884 by the Frenchman Joris-Karl Huysmans, who is considered one of the most rebellious and significant writers of the end of the century. The novel narrates the exquisite lifestyle of Duke Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who locks himself in a provincial house to satisfy the purpose of replacing reality with the dream of reality. This character became an exemplary model of the decadents, in such a way that characters such as Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, and Andrea Sperelli, by Gabriele D'Annunzio, are considered direct descendants of Des Esseintes, among others. À rebours was defined by the English poet Arthur Symons as the breviary of decadentism.

Decay, on the other hand, is an accumulation of signs or sensitive descriptions whose meaning is not hidden, as in symbolism: it is fundamentally artificial. It was Oscar Wilde who perhaps formulated it most clearly in The Decline of Lies with the suggestion of three doctrines about art:

1. "Art never expresses anything but itself."
2. "All evil art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them to ideals."
3. "Life imitates art much more than art imitates life"

After which, he suggested a conclusion quite in contrast to Moréas's search for the hidden truth: "Lying, telling beautiful and false things, is the correct aim of Art."

Decadentism in Europe

The precedent of the cursed French poets (Isidore Ducasse, better known as Lautréamont; and Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, especially), and those followed by Pierre Louÿs, Pierre Loti, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, has already been mentioned. and Joris-Karl Huysmans; Les Complaintes by Jules Laforgue, Légende d'âmes et de sangs, first book by René Ghil; Anatole Baju, founder in April 1886 of the magazine Le Décadent Littéraire et Artistique, which lasted with various vicissitudes until 1889. Dead Witches by Georges Rodenbach; the first stage of Jean Moréas; the Italians Gabriele D'Annunzio and, in a certain way, Giovanni Pascoli, for whom everything modern and urban is a degeneration of the pure and primitive; in Great Britain, the figures of Oscar Wilde, especially in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and his short stories, his teacher Walter Pater, who published a sacred novel for his generation, Marius the Epicurean (1885); George Moore, also a disciple of Pater; the poet, critic and essayist Algernon Charles Swinburne; Arthur Symons, author of the collection of poems The Blonde Angel, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson.

Decadentism in Spain and Latin America

Spain and Latin America were also influenced by this aesthetic-literary attitude, and all poetry at the end of the century responds to the artistic ideals of art for art's sake. This is how the modernism of the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío and the Mexican José Juan Tablada can be considered. In Spain, the first Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Isaac Muñoz, Emilio Carrere, Álvaro Retana, Melchor Almagro and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent are characteristic figures. Artistic decadence was much more persistent in America: Julián del Casal, Efrén Rebolledo, Amado Nervo, Leopoldo Lugones, Mariano Azuela, César Vallejo, Horacio Quiroga and many others filled many years of Latin American literary life and in them the French note was never present. absent.

End of decadence and subsequent influence

Around 1890, the magazine Mercure de France came out in favor of symbolism. From then on, the trajectory of Decadentism, understood as a movement, can be considered finished. Previously, in September 1866, an article published by Jean Moréas in Le Figaro, spoke for the first time of symbolism, referring to the forest of symbols from the poem "Correspondances" by Baudelaire.

Theories of symbolism were published in the magazine Le symboliste, while the decadents continued to use Le décadent as a vehicle to spread their theories. Thus the divergence was outlined between decadents, complacent experimenters in the field of the senses and language, and symbolists, who seek the absolute values of the word and aspire to express a universal harmony of the world.

Decadentism as a meeting point

Later, some critics expanded the meaning of the term decadent as opposed to conventionalisms. In this way, decadentism would be, in its origins, anti-academic in painting, anti-positivist in philosophy, anti-naturalist in literature. Thus, trends, schools and orientations, often diverse and distant, ended up coming together and being included under the same label.

Generically, those forms of art that surpass or alter reality in evocation, in analogy, in evasion, in symbol are defined as decadent. The list of names may include Rainer Maria Rilke, Constantine Cavafy, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Stearns Eliot, or avant-garde movements, such as surrealism, Russian imagism, cubism, or the critical realism of Thomas Mann.