Decadence: Obscure literature of the fin de siecle and Belle Epoque - and other literary obsession

Due to its significant stylistic differences from prior movements, such as Romanticism and Naturalism, I believe French Decadent literature is a critical step between literature in the 19th and 20th Centuries. As such, we must study it if we want to understand the rise of Modernism and the upheaval it created in the arts at the turn of the 20th Century. This post is a brief initial stab at what I've picked up from reading French Decadent literature. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Monsieur Louis Pascal , 1893 (detail) While Decadent writing displayed some aspects of the dominant literary schools of the 19th Century – Romanticism and Naturalism – its writers went well beyond either movement’s boundaries and into new ground. Naturalism’s journalistic, detailed descriptions can be found in Decadent literature. However, Decadent writers use this tool to probe interior psychology rather than present external social reality. On the other hand, both Decadent literature and Romanticism are repl...

I was a bit disappointed by Rachilde’s novel The Tower of Love . It was translated into English - for the first time - by Jennifer Higgins. Melanie Hawthorne, who has translated The Animal as well as a new version of Monsieur Venus , provides a foreword. I have no reason to question the quality of the translation, and it reads very well. I believe my issue is with the novel itself. Well-written, oozing with dark atmosphere, and packed with the lurid content Rachilde’s known for, T he Tower of Love just didn’t land with the same impact as other novels I’ve read by her. It isn’t as effective at merging its ingredients into something cerebrally challenging. It’s Rachilde-lite, and I often felt I was reading a gothic work verging of the ‘horrid novel’ variety (though clearly miles above the likes of Udolpho in quality). Rachilde imputes plenty of creepy deviance to Mathurin Barnabas, the keeper of the titular lighthouse. He wears self-crafted hairpieces that (I’m guessing) are sourced f...

Lauren Fischer made an excellent choice in selecting The Animal as a new Rachilde novel to translate for English readers. Not only can we expand our exposure to her oeuvre, but the plotting and characterization in The Animal is another example of her brilliantly provocative, if oftentimes bizarre, exploration of sexuality and gender. And, as with her other novels, The Animal is replete with the interior psychological angst and alienation that underlies the best French Decadent literature.   Eleanor Keane’s foreword is helpful guidance to approaching the novel and its author. She notes how the Decadent movement “reveled in dismantling traditional gender roles and offered new and challenging perspectives on concepts of sexual dissidence, transgression, and pleasure.” As a result, it “offered Rachilde a valuable outlet for her creative potential and subversive imagination”. 1 Indeed, both the author - and the Decadent Movement in general - aimed to challenge traditional social a...

For the last several years, I've been obsessed with literature from the French Decadent Movement, with a bit of Symbolism tossed in. It’s why I started this blog.  The Fin de Siècle was a time of glittering beauty and pernicious darkness, with amazing social and technological progress creating both dizzying excitement and poisonous angst. In addition, the vitality of the period’s avant-garde art, music, and writing, and the beauty of its crafts, posters, and design aesthetics deeply appeal to me. So much so that, if I believed in so-called past lives, then I was a bohemian artist, writer, or journalist in the Fin de Siècle demimonde. Someone who died at a relatively young age without achieving fame. On a more grounded note, my exploration of French Decadent literature has given me insight into a question I've had since I was young: What happened during a mere 20 years in Paris to transform the arts from Hugo-Zola-Monet-Rodin-Debussy to Gide-Proust-Matisse-Picasso-Satie? The sta...

One of the challenges in reading French Decadent literature is a shortage of English translations. Many works by key Decadent writers, such as Jean Lorrain, Catulle Mendes, J.-K. Huysmans, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde lack recent (or any) English translation. This hampers the ability to study a literary movement that, in my opinion, played a significant role in the transformation of literature from Romanticism and Naturalism to Modernism. In the case of Rachilde, I believe her only novel in English was – for a long time – an old translation of her succès de scandale Monsieur Vénus (1884). In the 90’s, access to her oeuvre broadened somewhat. Melanie Hawthorne translated The Juggler (1900), and Liz Heron translated The Marquise de Sade (1887). Later, Monsieur Vénus itself received a much-needed new translation from Hawthorne. However, this was still only a glimpse of her fin de siècle output.  The problem with old translations of Decadent literature is they’re inherently unrelia...

Edgar Degas,  Dans un cafe , 1875-1876 As part of a self-assigned project (see last post), I read several Paul Alexis novellas in place of his contribution to the 1880 Naturalist anthology, Evenings at Médan . One of them was The End of Lucie Pellegrin (translator Richard Robinson, Snuggly Books), in which all the principal characters are sex workers. The novella reminded me of something I’d noticed a while ago: the focus on – even preoccupation with – sex workers in French literature of the fin de siècle.  Consider, in the same year Alexis released his novella, Naturalist leader Emile Zola published Nana , a novel peopled with prostitutes and courtesans. J.-K. Huysmans’ first novel was Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) which - maybe in hopes of a succès de scandale? - he’d rushed to publish before Edmond de Goncourt finished La Fille Elisa (1877). As for French Decadent authors, sex workers were common fixtures in their novels and stories about the demimonde throughout t...

As mentioned in a prior post, I’d given myself an assignment to read J.-K. Huysmans’ novels in the order in which they were written. My objective was to track his progression from a Naturalist writer in Emile Zola’s orbit to the author who wrote À rebours , the novel some refer to as “the Decadent bible”.  I skipped Huysmans’ first effort, Le drageoir aux épices (1874) and started with his first two novels: Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) and The Vatard Sisters (1879). After that was "Sac au dos", his contribution to Evenings at Médan , an 1880 anthology of French Naturalism comprised of stories by six different authors. As a mini-survey of French Naturalism, I gave myself a sub-assignment to read all six stories in Evenings at Médan .  Unfortunately, there’s no English version of the anthology. I was able to read the stories by Zola (“The Attack on the Mill”) and Guy de Maupassant (“Boule de Suif”) via English language anthologies of each authors’ short stories. Howev...