decadent subjects

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Decadent Subjects (review)

Douglas Norman

The Comparatist, Volume 28, May 2004, pp. 163-164 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina Press

DOI: 10.1353/com.2004.0001

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THE COMPAKATIST

endure the Second World Warand crises ofidentity forlarge portions ofthe pop-ulation while minority (i.e., non-white) peoples struggle with social, political, andeconomic inequities imbedded in each respective country. Baldwin deftly weavesherargument and commentary around the lives and works offour brilliant African-

Americans who all crossed both the color line and the Iron Curtain to have an im-pact in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as in the US.

Baldwin's choice ofClaude McKay, Lngsten Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, andPaul Robeson allows herto comment simultaneously on the international import ofrace and society as well as to trace the Civil Rights history ofthe American Left andits place in the creation ofScviet propaganda at home and in the West. Her choiceoftexts forthese writers and thinkers is excellentdrawing from both High Cultureand popularcultural artifactsas she eschews the best known and most discussedworks in favoroflesserknown and more revealing treatises and essays publishedduring and afterthe writers' visits abroad and to Russia. She does well to use the

experience ofeach in another country to contextualize the writers' attitude towardrace, politics, and society abroad. She does less well, however, in relating the sameattitudinal mix to the US, lessening the book's success in commenting on Americanracismespecially slavery, imperialism, and capitalism.

Without question, Baldwin's forte in this work is her ability use archivalmaterial from both countries in both English and Russian giving her tremendousinsight into the reception that all fourofthese cases had domestically and abroad.This access to original documents allows (forces?) Baldwin to remainbalanced andcritical throughout herworkwithout once falling into the trap ofsentimentalizingor romanticizing the Soviet Union's attempt to build socialismeven in herdis-

cussion ofthe heady early years ofthe USSRwhich coincide with the creation ofthe American Left.Beyond the ColorLine and the Iron Curtain is an excellently researched and

presentedportrait of"red and black" and the myriad ofquestions that arise from thecrossing ofcolorand politics. Baldwin's workwill undoubtedly be required readingforany scholarattempting to understand "the race card" issue in any discussion ofart, politics, literature, and culture in the twentieth century.

Thomas J.GarzaUniversity ofTexas at Austin

CHARLES BERNHEIMERDecadent Subjects. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUP, 2002. 227 pp.

With Decadent Subjects, the late Charles Bemheimer sets out to explore thefundamentally paradoxical and contradictory characterofthe term "decadence"without diminishing its vital ambivalence. While, the authornotes, critics such asRichard Gilmanbemoan the term's lackofepistemological validity and its objectiveexistence in art and life, he sees in this slipperiness its "valuable subversive agency"(5). Bemheimerfocuses his analysis on many ofthe usual suspects associated with

literary decadence such as Huysmans, Lorrain, and Wilde, but he also includesnaturalist and realist writers like Flaubert, Zola, and Hardy, reading them against thegrain to show how decadence, once evoked, cannot be decisively exorcised fromtheirtexts.

Bemheimer opens his investigation with a look at Nietzsche, whose oftencontradictory philosophy frustrates any consistently stable perspective, to under-

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BOOKNOTES

score the paradoxical quality ofdecadence. ForNietzsche decadence is, amongotherthings, both a healthy body's natural function and a pathological excess to beeliminated. What Nietzsche teaches the author(and the authorthe reader) is that"decadence is a stimulant that causes a restless movement between perspectives"

ratherthan a durable, coherent designation (27). In the following chapter, Flaubert'sSalammb provides an instance ofdecadent irresolution as a novel that insists onits historicity yet, saturated by unassimilable particulars, persistently undoes thenotion ofhistorical narrative. In the centerpiece and, I think, most provocativechapterofthe book, Bemheimerdiscovers that "Most naturalist texts include, or

perhaps I should sayproduce, decadent moments, whereas die sense ofnatural pro-cess that subtends most decadent texts is entirely naturalistic in character" (58). Inselected works ofZola, Huysmans, Hardy, and Mirbeau, the author finds decadentnegation always already implied in naturalist affirmation, and vice versa. Boththreaten the masculine subject, one with masochistic dissolution into an all-en-

compassing feminine Nature, the otherwith castrating effects of"isolation in a de-natured space ofrepresentation and death" (70). As he positions castration as theforemost trope ofdecadence, Bemheimertakes up psychoanalytic models which

provide rich background forhis subsequent discussion o the fin-de-sicle malesubject imperiled by the contagious provocations ofdecadence.

Thefin de sicle 's favorite femme fatale takes the stage forthe fourth chapter.Acknowledging the explicit male insecurity and antifeminism ofthe Salome themein Mallarm, Huysmans, Lorrain, Wilde, and Beardsley, Bemheimercontends thatthe sinisterdancing princess also functions as a symbol fornegativity's powertosadomasochistically shatter the psyche and to compulsively castrate language into

a sterile reflexive mode. The final two chapters shift from literature to social anthro-pology andpsychoanalysis. Claiming scientific detachment, Lombroso andNordauseekto define the criminal and the degenerate in opposition to an illusive "normal-cy," but they succumb to decadent impulses precisely where they most emphaticallycondemn it Bemheimer demonstrates how the secure opposition ofhealthy selfanddiseased other collapses underthe pressure oftheirown theories. This approachcontinues into the final chapteras Freud also fails to posit a stable norm from whichdeviation could be measured. Bemheimer identifies a typical decadent pattern,running through all works he examines: "... a norm is projected from theperspec-tive ofwhich the decadent world is judged as such; simultaneously this norm is

shown to have nojustification forits authority, yet it is not abandoned" (167).Bemheimersucceeds in productively complicating our notions ofdecadenceby articulating its anxious movement through nineteenth-century literary, philo-sophical, and psychoanalytic thought without sacrificing the term's subversiveambivalence. Although he expertly deploys deconstructive strategies appropriateto his slippery topic, the book is remarkably lucid and accessible. Bernheimer'sfinal workrepresents an important revaluation ofa term central to understanding notonly nineteenth-century European literature but also twentieth-century literary and

psychoanalytic thought.

Douglas NormanUniversity ofTexas at AustinSt. Edwards University

Vol. 28 (2004): 164

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