On Decadence
In a remarkable new post at Is There No Sin In It?, A White Bear gives us her “half-assed” (not really) theory of decadence. She writes,
I hold that decadence is taking pleasure in something that either would or does create suffering either in the pleasured self (masochistic decadence) or in others (sadistic decadence).
She then describes examples of both in her own family’s history, both sadistic decadence in the form of practical jokes, and masochistic decadence in the form of addictions, and what seems implicitly to be something like drug- or alcohol-fueled sprees. Reading her descriptions of masochism, I was reminded first of Charles Bukowski and Barfly, next of the music Elvis made at Sun Records, which Greil Marcus linked to the self-destructive festival of the Southerner on a spree. It means spending all your money, losing whole days to blackouts, wandering and sleeping away from home. It is a consuming incandescence, and at the same time as ordinary as country songs (noted over at AWB’s site by one commenter already).
I’m interested in A White Bear’s conclusion:
This doesn’t mean that I’m not still occasionally a deeply depraved individual. I absolutely am. I am, in certain seasons, unkind and venal, driven by libido and ego, competitive, selfish, and cruel. In those seasons, I crave a return in kind from the objects of my worse nature. There is excruciating pleasure in it, and then it passes, and I am once again a lamb.
Max used to talk about the Zen principle of treating each obsessive thought and feeling as an angry bull. You can’t shoo the bull away without making it angry, so all you can do is put a fence around it, feed it every now and then, and leave it to its space. I often feel like I can’t cure myself of my decadent nature, but I can give it its space, feed it every so often, and preserve the rest of my mind from being trampled by it, the way it trampled both my grandfathers’.
This epitomizes the mild, but incurable, disagreement that I have with the Zen way of tending to the psyche; or at least, with the way Zen is practiced in the West. (It’s an appropriation of Eastern culture, to be sure, but often a relatively informed and wise one.) There is a symmetry between the gorgeous lucidity of AWB’s initial binary (sadistic and masochistic decadence), and the specificity of the image of the penned bull. The psychic event becomes reified, contained not only by its pen, but by its image.
For me, the Wildean maxim still holds. The only way to resist a temptation is to yield to it. The technology of thought at work here, designed to contain the sadistic and masochistic impulses towards suffering, also leaves one in total uncertainty about how to designate such containment. Where do decadence and suffering end? If rock ‘n roll is a product of masochistic decadence, as Marcus seems to think, is it a means of containment and catharsis, or an incitement? If practical jokes are an overly extreme form of sadistic humor, what about other kinds of jokes?
For me, recognizing self-destruction, and schadenfreude, and egotism, is like holding on to Proteus. At every point one has to say, this is decadence, and this is decadence. Hedonism is decadence. The obsessive ethic is decadence. Each metamorphosis is subtler, less dangerous, more secret, and more coherent. I am trying to cross the distance between my habits, and the part of me that slips into this or that little death, in protest. The act of naming dispels the break, without banishing what is most vivid. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
The difficulty of describing 21st-century decadence, I fear (and maybe I’ll repeat this comment at my place), is that it is in everything we do and feel, somewhere. Most jokes have in them a confluence of delight and pain, and the laughter that arises either from masochistic self-recognition or the sadistic recognition of pain in another.
I was thinking about this last week while I taught Pater and Wilde, trying to get my students to grasp exactly what you mention in your comment at my place, that decadence is not only about ignoring the ends of one’s means, but even going so far as to take pleasure in the incongruity of the means and the ends–perverse causality as titillation. (That is, Pater might not be interested in ends, but Wilde is extremely aware of them, as is Huysmans before him.) My students, I think, are having a hard time grasping what constitutes the decadent because they don’t really understand what a pre-decadent era felt like. All along in my survey class, we’ve discussed how we must look at the causality of texts to determine their ethics, and they get that “back then” people felt this or that way about, e.g., female chastity. But when we’re talking about Dracula or Freud, perhaps it mirrors their own sense of self and pleasure too much to allow them to be analytical about it.
In fact, I was hoping that by separating out the sadistic and the masochistic decadent urges, I could not only process my own personal stuff, but also perhaps create a more analytical structure for my students.
Thanks so much for your comments here, which are very helpful. I agree with you absolutely about Zen.
Pingback: Putting Aestheticism Back into Decadence (and Masochism Back into Sadism) « whetted
I have always taken Wilde and Pater, in their embrace of decadence or the “hard, gemlike flame,” to be talking about the need to embrace intense experience even if that entails excess; Wilde and Blake would say it necessarily does. The difficulty I have with the Proteus metaphor, though, is that it treats all excess as created equal. In fact, my experience has been that self-destructive excess (of drinking and drugs, but also of TV watching or just about anything) too easily becomes a way of deadening experience rather than enriching it, as with the stereotypical frat boy who gets smashed every Saturday and thus has the same weekend 52 times a year. This is why such excess trends towards habit and then addiction, the opposite of Huysmans’s ideal of continually new sensations. It’s also why, for every Bukowski, you have a Behan or a Malcolm Lowry (or, in other media, a Jim Morrison) whose excess killed their talent and themselves. I honestly don’t personally know anyone who has used a truly hedonistic lifestyle to enhance their talent—I grant that there must be some—but I do know plenty who have used it to blow their chances to be famous and talented.
AWB, sorry for not responding sooner. The one thing I would add, with reference to my post on sexuality and Buffy, is that most people think they’re getting away ironically with decadent attitudes that nonetheless define them. In other words, Dracula reads to us like camp, even while we continue to imitate it.
Tomemos, for me the key line in the original post is here: “Each metamorphosis is subtler, less dangerous, more secret, and more coherent.” I definitely have some fondness for both Under the Volcano and Morrison’s Doors, but the men themselves weren’t subtle. They never really worked to achieve what Matthew Arnold would have called “the grand style.”
The point is not to make humor and sadism (for example) practically equivalent; in many senses, humor is a triumphant sublimation of sadism. However, it is still reasonable to recognize the persistence of the symptom, because things rooted in violence and suffering are unstable. At any given moment, a series of jokes can turn nasty or awkwardly confessional, and the crisis can be averted more easily if, going in, we know the potential exists.
A little more: Sometimes the works of art that reveal a unique aspect of our lives were created at such a cost to the artist that it pains us to read the account of his or her life. But that doesn’t mean the art could have been what it was any other way. Take the bottle away from Lowry, and you might not have gotten that one sterling novel. Probably the best examination of this is in A River Runs Through It, both the book and the film.
Bukowski is basically a con man, selling style over substance, and constantly repeating himself. Barfly was one of the only things he ever did that was worthwhile, and it wasn’t his alone.
Pingback: Word events? « Is there no sin in it?