Decadent Novel
“Part of the problem of defining decadence has to do with the fact that a fully developed movement or school never actually existed, " notes Asti Hustvedt (13). The non-coalescence of decadence as a fin-de-siècle movement is not an accident but an exemplification of its underlying ethos. As Paul Bourget described it in 1883, decadence is the condition of a society when too many individuals resist the work of collective life; the cells of the social organism refuse to subordinate themselves to the whole. The resulting anarchic decline is manifested-and encoded positively-at all levels of the decadent enterprise. It is symbolized by the lone cell or atom working against nature, against the evolutionary success and reproduction of the whole of which it is a part. A decadent style, Bourget notes, is one in which “the unity of the book decomposes to make way for the independence of the page, the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence decomposes to make way for the independence of the word” (25). Yet although the solipsistic and transgressive dimensions of decadence countered the formation of a collective movement, leading to the classification of many examples of the decadent novel, such as Emile Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875, The Sin of Father Mouret), within the contiguous naturalist or symbolist movements, one novel has had lasting status as a paradoxical “bible” of decadence: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884, Against Nature).
