RICHARD GILMAN
177
Remy de Gourmont asserted that in relation to art it can only mean
imitation, in which case it would not mean what it always has
formally. And he pointed out how in so volatile a linguistic atmo–
sphere as that of late nineteenth-century France poets like Verlaine and
Mallarme found it possible to assimilate the idea of decadence as
imitation
to
its exact opposite-the idea of innovation. Going even
further
to
the root of the question, de Gourmont challenged the habit
of " blaming" bad or inferior periods of art on a process of the
degeneration of the superior. He writes:
From Racine to Vigny, France produced no great poet.
It
is a
fact. ... But it is not necessary to go beyond the fact itself, nor
to
attribute
to
it an absurd character of logic and necessity. Poetry was
asleep during the eighteenth century, through a lack of poets; but
thi failure was not the result of an excessively rich flowering of poets
earlier.
It
was what it was and nothing more.
If
we give itthe name of
decadence, we admit a sort of mysterious organism-a being, a
woman, Poetry, which is born, reproduces, and dies at almost regular
intervals, in accordance with the habits of human generation-an
agreeable conception, a subject for a dissertation or a lecture.
The dissertations continue to be written and the lectures given. In
a frequently perceptive book on the intellectual life of the nineteen
sixties, Morris Dickstein speaks of the unsure experiments of contem–
porary American writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and
Thomas Pynchon as constituting the "decadence of Modernism."
What is wrong with this formulation, to begin with, is the premise that
there is in fact such a thing as Modernism, that it is a species of being,
an entity. Against the conventional wisdom, I would suggest that it is
actually only a label, a term whose origins are obscure but which has
been given currency and status in the academy, where most such
nomenclature-expressionism, post-Chri tian, etc.-generally flour–
ishes. But of course the great literature of the earlier part of the century
has to be regarded metaphorically as an organism, a creature, in order
for it to be capable of decadence, capable, that is, of having a life-cycle
of the kind de Gourmont spoke about.
Of what use is an ascription of "decadence" to the writing that has
followed Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Mann, and the rest?
If
newer writing is
inferior, this is not because its predecessor had fallen into a sort of old
age and decrepitude. The earlier writing was what it was; you may
search for the grounds of its amplitude, which is what the subsequent
writing is always measured against, and find them perhaps in any
