Richard Gilman
REFLECTIONS ON DECADENCE
The belief that there are periods in the arts when, after a
brilliant flowering, decline sets in and an erstwhile robustness lapses
into debility and enervation, goes on being held in the face of the
clearest truth that powerful art does not "give way" to weak art,
turning into it like an organism running down, although what we
think of as strong art may indeed be succeeded by the weak. The idea
would seem to derive from the same anthropomorphic bent, the same
impulse
to
interpret from analogy to the body's fate, that we have seen
at work in the political and social spheres.
That there have been and continue to be times of great artistic
vigor and assured style followed by ones of depleted energy and
uncertain manner; and that periods of imitation often succeed ones of
notable originality, is scarcely to be denied. But the problem with
thinking of those presumably inferior cultural eras as "decadent"
begins with the historical fact that in art both the imitative and the
crude- the seemingly bereft of skill-have been accorded the designa–
tion. And you cannot have it both ways: the imitative strives to be like
the model; the crude or primitive represents precisely a failure to be like
it, to reach its level.
Now, imitation in art may be bad (Ortega y Gasset called it
"nothing," a principle of emptiness), but
to
call it decadent is to
abandon the word's only plausible meaning. For if "decadence" means
a "falling down" or "away," which is what every dictionary offers as its
root sense, then the imitative by its very nature could hardly be
decadent, since its repetition of what has been validated and sanctified
in the imaginative realm is proof of its respect for, its unquestioning
acceptance of, the norm. One may argue that the imitative might be
considered decadent because it falls away from an ideal of originality,
but this is not how critics or academics, in their concern for safety in
cultural judgments, have ever argued. In an.y case, imitation is its own
condemnation and has no need for "decadence" to inform us about
itself.
Copyright
©
1979 by Richard Gilman
