Decadent Subjects (review)

Douglas Norman

The Comparatist, Volume 28, May 2004, pp. 163-164 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: 10.1353/com.2004.0001

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/com/summary/v028/28.norman.html

Access provided by Princeton University (17 May 2013 14:00 GMT)

THE COMPAKATIST
endure the Second World War and crises of identity for large portions ofthe population while minority (i.e., non-white) peoples struggle with social, political, and economic inequities imbedded in each respective country. Baldwin deftly weaves
Americans who all crossed both the color line and the Iron Curtain to have an im-

her argument and commentary around the lives and works of four brilliant African-

Baldwin's choice ofClaude McKay, Lngsten Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson allows her to comment simultaneously on the international import of race and society as well as to trace the Civil Rights history ofthe American Left and its place in the creation ofScviet propaganda at home and in the West. Her choice oftexts for these writers and thinkers is excellentdrawing from both High Culture and popular cultural artifactsas she eschews the best known and most discussed works in favor of lesser known and more revealing treatises and essays published experience ofeach in another country to contextualize the writers' attitude toward race, politics, and society abroad. She does less well, however, in relating the same attitudinal mix to the US, lessening the book's success in commenting on American racismespecially slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Without question, Baldwin's forte in this work is her ability use archival material from both countries in both English and Russian giving her tremendous insight into the reception that all four ofthese cases had domestically and abroad. This access to original documents allows (forces?) Baldwin to remain balanced and critical throughout her work without once falling into the trap of sentimentalizing or romanticizing the Soviet Union's attempt to build socialismeven in her discussion ofthe heady early years ofthe USSR which coincide with the creation of
during and after the writers' visits abroad and to Russia. She does well to use the

pact in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as in the US.

the American Left.

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain is an excellently researched and presented portrait of"red and black" and the myriad ofquestions that arise from the crossing ofcolor and politics. Baldwin's work will undoubtedly be required reading for any scholar attempting to understand "the race card" issue in any discussion of art, politics, literature, and culture in the twentieth century. Thomas J. GarzaUniversity ofTexas at Austin
CHARLES BERNHEIMER Decadent Subjects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. 227 pp.

With Decadent Subjects, the late Charles Bemheimer sets out to explore the without diminishing its vital ambivalence. While, the author notes, critics such as Richard Gilman bemoan the term's lack ofepistemological validity and its objective existence in art and life, he sees in this slipperiness its "valuable subversive agency" (5). Bemheimer focuses his analysis on many ofthe usual suspects associated with literary decadence such as Huysmans, Lorrain, and Wilde, but he also includes naturalist and realist writers like Flaubert, Zola, and Hardy, reading them against the grain to show how decadence, once evoked, cannot be decisively exorcised from
their texts.

fundamentally paradoxical and contradictory character of the term "decadence"

Bemheimer opens his investigation with a look at Nietzsche, whose often contradictory philosophy frustrates any consistently stable perspective, to under-

VoIc 28 (2004): 163

BOOKNOTES
score the paradoxical quality of decadence. For Nietzsche decadence is, among other things, both a healthy body's natural function and a pathological excess to be eliminated. What Nietzsche teaches the author (and the author the reader) is that "decadence is a stimulant that causes a restless movement between perspectives" rather than a durable, coherent designation (27). In the following chapter, Flaubert's Salammb provides an instance of decadent irresolution as a novel that insists on its historicity yet, saturated by unassimilable particulars, persistently undoes the notion of historical narrative. In the centerpiece and, I think, most provocative chapter of the book, Bemheimer discovers that "Most naturalist texts include, or perhaps I should say produce, decadent moments, whereas die sense ofnatural process that subtends most decadent texts is entirely naturalistic in character" (58). In selected works ofZola, Huysmans, Hardy, and Mirbeau, the author finds decadent negation always already implied in naturalist affirmation, and vice versa. Both threaten the masculine subject, one with masochistic dissolution into an all-encompassing feminine Nature, the other with castrating effects of"isolation in a denatured space ofrepresentation and death" (70). As he positions castration as the foremost trope of decadence, Bemheimer takes up psychoanalytic models which provide rich background for his subsequent discussion o thefin-de-sicle male subject imperiled by the contagious provocations ofdecadence. Thefin de sicle 's favorite femme fatale takes the stage for the fourth chapter. Acknowledging the explicit male insecurity and antifeminism ofthe Salome theme the sinister dancing princess also functions as a symbol for negativity's power to sadomasochistically shatter the psyche and to compulsively castrate language into a sterile reflexive mode. The final two chapters shift from literature to social anthropology and psychoanalysis. Claiming scientific detachment, Lombroso and Nordau seek to define the criminal and the degenerate in opposition to an illusive "normalcy," but they succumb to decadent impulses precisely where they most emphatically diseased other collapses under the pressure of their own theories. This approach continues into the final chapter as Freud also fails to posit a stable norm from which deviation could be measured. Bemheimer identifies a typical decadent pattern, running through all works he examines: "... a norm is projected from the perspective of which the decadent world is judged as such; simultaneously this norm is shown to have no justification for its authority, yet it is not abandoned" (167). Bemheimer succeeds in productively complicating our notions ofdecadence by articulating its anxious movement through nineteenth-century literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic thought without sacrificing the term's subversive ambivalence. Although he expertly deploys deconstructive strategies appropriate
in Mallarm, Huysmans, Lorrain, Wilde, and Beardsley, Bemheimer contends that

condemn it Bemheimer demonstrates how the secure opposition ofhealthy selfand

to his slippery topic, the book is remarkably lucid and accessible. Bernheimer's

only nineteenth-century European literature but also twentieth-century literary and psychoanalytic thought. Douglas NormanUniversity ofTexas at Austin
St. Edwards University

final work represents an important revaluation ofa term central to understanding not

Vol. 28 (2004): 164