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PARTISAN REVIEW
has been a matter of assumptions and ascriptions that seemed to have
emerged as the result of a conspiracy with no one at its head, decadence,
as a word, a diagnosis, or, as has been prominent lately, a perverse
honorific, has simply been found
to
be there, on every fashionable
tongue, in every fashionable typewriter. And this is so despite the fact
that nobody seems to know what decadence truly is, although vulgar
and superficial theories of it abound and many phenomena are put
forward as instances of its presence among us.
Yet such is the tyranny of fashion that we are all presumed to
know perfectly well what is meant by the word in its current uses, all of
us, that is, who are supposed to know what anything means. We are
presumed to know that it denotes a fact or action or condition of the
same order as a number of other aspects of human behavior at the
fringe; we are expected to be able to distinguish it from other such
actualities, the way we distinguish anomie, say, or sexual perversion or
unorthodoxy of many other kinds.
One thing that makes this possible is that, unlike even Camp,
which appeared to be something quite new in human history (those
who employ the word most casuall y are generally unaware of its
material roots in Regency England and its verbal ones in France),
decadence is accepted as a recurring and universal phenomenon; we are
simply in a new phase or phases of what has always been known,
always bound sooner or later to display itself. This gives the word an
apparent solidity, a seeming facticity such as "human potential" or
"post-Christian" or the "new eroticism" can only pretend
to.
Being
presumably historical, proven, decadence seems therefore to be free of
the element of wishfulness that so evidently characterizes the other
terms offered here as examples of intellectual fashion.
But a wish is there, even if it is a great deal more subtle and better
masked. What is wanted, in all but some extreme and improbably
eccentric cases, is not really the thing itself, whatever that might be.
One can legitimatel y yearn for the end of Christianity or for a bisexual
revolution as the advent of the body as source of redoubled pleasure,
but to crave decadence wou ld rightly be regarded as a pose, would be
thought of in fact as a sign of decadence itself, the posturing quality of
which has come to be one of its prominently regarded features. When
Kenneth Tynan chats about decadence as though it were a charming
native dance or jet-setters hold parties with a theme of "decadence," the
testimony is only to falseness, pose, the inauthentic.
The desire, it seems likely, is for decadence
to
exist,
to be present in
one form or another, so that we can identify it or at least seem
to
and so
