182
PARTISAN REVIEW
data on which
to
base its claim
to
actuality. Its existence is purely
negative. It is a word chosen to fill a space. It emerges as the underside
or logical complement of something else, coerced into taking its place
in our vocabularies by the pressure of something that needs an
opposite, an enemy. "Decadence" is a scarecrow, a bogy, a red herring.
The "positive" reality of which "decadence" is the shadowy
obverse or complement is composed of all the standards and ideals by
which societies have judged themselves and been judged, all the criteria
and norms that have governed various aspects of public (and later
private) existence, or that have been thought
lO
govern them. These
change throughout history, of course, but what has remained constant
is the condition of mingled yearning and fear out of which something
drastically and exemplarily "wrong" has been posited in order to
buttress belief in, or at least adherence to, what is "right." Decadence
has always been made
to
function as a presumed mode of behavior or
action which stands as evidence of a withdrawal from normality;
whether this results from weakness,
ill
will, bad faith or cunning
decision, it is always the outcome of a fatal principle. Centrally, and
beyond moral categories, decadence has been thought of as a type of
regression, a falling away from others in their advance toward the
future.
It will be obvious that this function of decadence as a category
strongly resembles that of evil or sin in religious structurings of the
world. Decadence has in fact usually been regarded as a type of evil, a
peculiar, limited, ingrowing face of the bad.
In Catholic doctrine, for example, evil is, theologically, the
absence or deprivation of the good; decadence,
to
say it once again, is
the absence of or departure from certain norms. Yet there is a crucial
difference, which is that the idea of decadence is inseparably bound to
one particular value or criterion
to
which religion, theoretically at
least, has been hostile or indifferent. That value is "progress." In more
serious modes of thinking, decadence has historically been seen as the
end of a line of progress, a reversion following upon an arrest.
This idea of decadence as the opposite or obverse of progress is a
source of much of the mythology, both vulgar and elegant, that
surrounds the word and keeps it in being as fashionable description.
If
"progress" is itself the most undeterminable and undemonstrable of
words when used outside the area of physically measurable actions, if it
is an arbitrary reality, a category of wishful human judgment and not a
"truth," then to be linked with it as its dark complement, its opposi-
