Reading: Decadent Culture

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century) (Hardcover) by David Weir
Hardcover: 233 pages
Publisher: State University of New York Press; illustrated edition edition (November 8, 2007)

The culture of decadence in the United States, historically considered, begs the question: what, after all, is decadence? As many critics have observed, decadence is hard to define because the concept is so nuanced and polyvalent that the very procedure of definition misses the point. The moment we say “Decadence is,” the game is lost: decadence and denotation appear to be opposed. Indeed, before we can even begin to say what decadence is, we must first say what decadence is.

“Inevitably, this means that there is something secondhand about American decandence, so the traditional, negative meaning of ‘decadence’ as “mannered imitation” has some relevance to the American variant. Still, this “decadent decadence” is not without its appeal, given the cultural alternatives on offer in 1890s America. … Perhaps the final paradox of American decadence is simply this: that only by ending could the culture continue.

Americans are not degenerate; rather, they are exhausted. In Nordau’s Europe, degeneracy is the ruin of civilization; in Beard’s and Weir’s America, civilization is the ruin of the citizenry, or, at least, that portion of the citizenry charged with doing the “brain-work” that keeps up the capitalist economy humming. “

Looking backward now, we can only be nostalgic for that vanished age when depravity and corruption actually meant something, when excess needed careful calculation and perversion required discipline and discretion. Today, of course, America offers no shortage of depravity, corruption, excess, and possibly even perversion, but never decadence: it is too late for that.

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