Decadence and the Great War

DiscussionsThe Chapel of the Abyss

Rejoignez LibraryThing pour poster.

Decadence and the Great War

Ce sujet est actuellement indiqué comme "en sommeil"—le dernier message date de plus de 90 jours. Vous pouvez le réveiller en postant une réponse.

1kswolff
Jan 17, 2013, 11:34 pm

Was the Great War, aka World War One, the bookend of European decadence? Was Huysmans reconfigured in the postwar silliness of PG Wodehouse? Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches and Ernst Junger's memoir became a proto-fascist classic, as well as Oswald Spengler's sprawling Decline of the West

Then there's Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, Yvan Goll, and Sassoon and Owen.

Whither the Great War?

2housefulofpaper
Jan 18, 2013, 8:22 pm

I'm always painfully aware of how gauche and ignorant my posts are shown to be in this group, but I'll have a stab at putting some thoughts down...

This will have to be an Anglo-centric answer, due to sheer ignorance of the details of events on mainland Europe.

I would guess that "decadent" as a label had been in bad odour since Oscar Wilde's trial 20 years earlier. I read somewhere - possibly one of Arthur Machen's essays reprinted by Tartarus Press - that after that, the English Decadents thereafter called themselves Symbolists. No one would admit to ever being "a Decadent".

Be that as it may, I'd tentatively suggest that "decadent" meaning "Late Romanticism" was already over by 1914. The genuine innovations of Modernism were already in place in literature, the visual arts, music. But "decadent" to describe "immoralism", "louche behaviour" and so forth would have been (i) used by disapproving puritan types and (ii) applied, by them, to Modernist works with a fine disregard for the niceties of Art History. (Things only changed when Art became Big Business, but that's by the by).

So, art had changed, but there were plenty of people who couldn't really see (or hear, or read) the art, but were really concerned with the behaviour they associated with it, and that (they thought) hadn't changed; if anything it had got worse.

There was an appetite for war among a large section of the British public. They thought that "War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's fluid cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect..." (Edmund Gosse, "War and Literature" (1914), quoted in Philip Hoare, Wilde's Last Stand). One could also cite Sherlock Holmes' "There's an East Wind coming, Watson" speech from "His Last Bow".

As Hoare explains in his book, the "disinfectant" of the Great War had exactly the opposite effect to what Gosse supposed. "With London nearer to the front lines than it was to many of its provincial cities, the capital acted as one huge war camp, with an attendant 'camp follower outlook. The bushes of Hyde Park - and the Marlborough Street Police Court Register - bore witness to that'". Another irony: "Wartime use of narcotics for medicinal purposes, and there consequent overproduction by the pharmaceutical industry, had made drugs much more readily available, and the problem of abuse was increasing." Cocaine was supposedly introduced into London by Canadian troops.

As well as enabling this behaviour on the Home Front, the War of course changed British society in other ways - through killing so many young men, through putting women in the workplace, through its sheer cost to the country (or rather, to the Empire). This is crass generalisation of course, but it also meant that the experiences of Wilde's generation, and the experiences of the War generation, were so different that it did mean the end of the way of life from which the decadence sprang (remember class comes into this, the aristocracy and the upper middle class were a minority of the population. A majority of people were still working on the land before WWI. Even in urban areas, the music hall and the popular press did not represent "decadent" culture - which was also, of course, High Culture).

So yes, there was still an avant garde, but it hadn't been doing the same things as the decadents before the War, and the inner lives of those who'd been through the War were so different from the inner lives of the Late Victorian and Edwardians that there was no going back to "the old days".

3zenomax
Jan 19, 2013, 7:43 am

If that is what a gauche posting is like, let's have more of it.

I look to the emerging movements coming out of the Great War, dada, Vorticism, futurism and the like. They were more inclined to engage with the world, even if by setting themselves against the status quo. Technical innovation, anger and ridicule rather than ennui. Was it also a looking forward with hope as opposed to looking backwards with despair?

4kswolff
Jan 19, 2013, 9:29 am

I highly recommend Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon, in its depiction of the decadent and depraved world of Weimar Berlin. Like Belle Epoque Paris, Weimar Berlin was an epicenter of decadence. One also remembers Herman Goering, upon his arrest, dressed like a Roman emperor, coiffed and lipsticked like some extra from Cabaret In addition to his countless crimes and atrocities, he was a man of considerable aesthetic taste (as opposed to plutocratic philistines like William Randolph Hearst), including the countless works of art he plundered from European collections. He was a like a demonic spawn of Des Essientes, Maldoror, and von Richtofen. One can also extend this conversation into the decadent tastes of modern dictators (see Dictator Chic: http://dictatorchic.tumblr.com/)

Another great book taxonomizing Weimar and Nazi aesthetics is: The Art of the Third Reich by Peter Adam

As far as technical innovation goes, one should also mention the brilliant German-Jewish pop cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who wrote the Arcades Project, about the Paris arcades, the precursor of department stores. Benjamin also wrote an important essay on Baudelaire.

5anarchistbanjo
Modifié : Jan 22, 2013, 5:48 am

One of Side Real Presses latest books, "Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy" by Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste suggests that the decadence movement in Europe was a disillusionment with the idealism that prevailed before WWI.

This was compared to the stark reality and horror of trench warfare with the massive loss of life on all sides. War no longer became romantic. This was a major shift in collective thinking.

Prior to WWI we see the "civilization of culture" at a high point with Vienna as its capital. The Nobel prizes have been awarded, there is the world fair, great leaps in technology and the sciences. There is a great faith in humanity and what it can do. Freemasonry and the western mystery traditions were at a high.

This all collapsed during WWI and the wave of bitterness and disillusionment brought the flapper movement of the twenties as well as the reactive prohibition era and the return to fundamental religious values, another great dark age if you will.

These are just my thoughts on this interesting subject. Most of my interest in translation is to bring some of the pre-WWI literature back into circulation. I remain more interested in that than decadence per se.

I love reading past issues of Jugend and Simplicissimus for this very reason and hope to translate some of that as well.

-joe

6kswolff
Oct 7, 2015, 11:31 am

An interesting book review about The Novel-Essay by Stefano Ercolino:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-questionable-orthodoxy-of-genres

“HYBRID GENRES,” and the questionable orthodoxy of traditional genres, are subjects that continue to vex literary theory. Consider Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, or Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: What do these novels share? What kind of novels are they? Are these books truly novels, or are they another form altogether."

Later in the essay, the reviewer writes:

"The history of the novel-essay parallels the crisis of modernity, from 1884–1947: tracking the sociological, political, and economic outcomes of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and Paris Commune (1871); the diffusion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s philosophy (known as “school of suspicion”) throughout Europe; the failure of Positivism; Einstein’s relativism theory (1905, 1916); World War I and II; the birth and the failures of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism."

The First World War falls squarely in the middle of this "crisis of modernity."

Devenir membre pour poster.