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

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...