RICHARD GILMAN
181
Once again, there are few things more difficult intellectually than
to
trace the biography or career of a word, an abstraction concerning
whose existence there are no
facts,
only instances of its appearance in
the guise of facts. To get finally at "decadence" we must now appeal
to
a faculty or operation of the mind we can acknowledge in other less
problematic areas. This movement is one which gives us a sensation of
being in a ort of shady and embarrassing transaction with language,
an irresolute and often enervating intercourse with it.
If
"decadence" is anything it is an epithet, and epithets of an
aggressive and not merely a descriptive kind, invective, all types of
verbal blows against actualities, disguise a loss of power and give off a
simultaneous feeling of wishfulness and fear. Words that seek
to
maim,
to
diminish or do away with parts of reality (or for that matter to
enhance, enlarge or transfigure them) issue from a realm of the mind in
which magic still holds sway. Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but an epithet will, through sorcery, turn them into powder.
Alberto Moravia has written hrewdly about the way epithets,
ascriptions and the like have functioned in the largest historical
contexts:
During lhe Middle Ages, antiquily was completely alien
to
men
because it was pagan, whereas the Middle Ages were Christian,
and Christianity wanted to be, and was, the paradox and opposite of
paganism. Christianity wanted, consciously wanted, antiquity to be
alien and unknown, to be denied, ignored, thrust into obscurity. In
order to achieve this result it performed a very simple operation: it
gave sin and
damnat~on
the fa e of antiquity: or ralher, it gave
antiquity the face of sin and damnation.
Moravia might have added: Christianity gave antiquity the
name
of sin and damnation, it struck at the ancient world with epithets.
"The later Roman poets were only decadent because the nineteenth
century wanted them to be," an historian has written. Whatever is
called decadent today receives the name as the result of a wish. For
"decadence," the word, is an epithet, neither more nor less, and this
should alert us at least to the possibility that there is nothing to which
it actually and legitimately applies. A woman is not a "bitch," though
we may call her one. Sexual offenders are not "fiends." Homosexuals
are not "fruits" or "queers." The Chinese are not the "yellow peril."
"Decadence" is obviously not a noun of the order of "chair," but
neither is it one of the order of "corruption," say, or "sadness" or even
"perversion." As an adjective it has none of the types of existence of
"refined" or "powerful" or "sensuous"; it offers only
reputed
physical
