Dandyism by Gutkin Len;

Author:Gutkin, Len;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004120 Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Nightwood and Decadent Style

Barnes’s career and its reception can therefore tell us something general about modernism’s ambivalence toward decadence and aestheticism. The story begins with her 1915 volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women. With its Beardsleyesque illustrations and its lovingly evoked figures of decay (“Though her lips are vague as fancy/In her youth/They bloom vivid and repulsive/As the truth”), Barnes’s early volume of poems could seem a mere tissue of fin de siècle mannerisms, a last little gasp of the Yellow Nineties.41 Barnes herself tried to suppress a 1949 reprint of The Book of Repulsive Women and left it out of the vita she sent to Who’s Who.42 This unsuccessful suppression—the reprint went forward without her blessing—might stand as an emblem for the suppression of modernism’s debt to decadent style more generally.

In fact, all of Barnes’s work and especially Nightwood would remain signally indebted to the textures and themes of decadence, as the critical consensus of the last few years has come to reflect. Erin G. Carlston sums it up well when she writes that “all of the varied genres and styles Barnes explores exemplify the definition Arthur Symons formulated of decadence in 1897: ‘That learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness of beauty, deliberately abnormal’ [Symons 149].”43 David Weir’s inclusion of Barnes at the end of his survey of decadent culture in the United States handily enumerates the characteristically decadent aspects of her career and art, from her association with Guido Bruno (1884–1942), publisher of decadent texts including Repulsive Women, to her exploitation in Nightwood of such decadent topoi as the “‘fatal woman’ theme”—the canonical treatment of which is Wilde’s Salome—and degeneration theory.44 Furthermore, and crucial for our purposes, there are “the varieties of sexuality that can be called ‘decadent’ because they are at some remove from heterosexual ‘norms’”;45 as adumbrated above, Nightwood’s interest in transvestism taps into a decadent-dandiacal lineage whose ancestral locus classicus is Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), and which also includes Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884).

Thematically, Nightwood partakes of decadence’s focus on elaborate artificiality, non-normative sexuality, and extremes of psychological investigation. Formally, it inherits decadence’s conflation of exceptional fineness with deliberate grotesquerie, a grotesquerie specifically, even obsessively, invested in discovering the bestial in the human. As early as Repulsive Women, Barnes had explored in “Twilight of the Illicit” an animalizing rhetoric soaked in decadent tropes; the accompanying illustration depicts a sort of hybrid lizard-woman, an icon of the degenerate paradoxically ascendant, triumphant. The poem itself describes a weariness entirely at odds with the erect posture of the figure in the illustration; between them, poem and illustration map out the dialectic of savage energy and world-weary exhaustion characteristic of decadence in general and of the discourse of degeneration theory in particular. An uncomplimentary verse portrait, “Twilight” begins, “You, with your long blank udders / And you calms / Your spotted linen and your / Slack’ning arms.

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