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Copyright © 1992, 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
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INTRODUCTION
The artistic notion of Decadence was first defined by Theophile Gautier in the introduction that he wrote to the third edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which appeared not long after Baudelaire’s death in 1866. According to this celebratory essay, “the style of the decadence” is “no other thing than Art arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking color from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness.”
Such a style, Gautier argues, should be “summoned to express all and to venture to the very extremes”. Baudelaire’s work recalled to his mind “language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring of the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek Art fallen into deliquescence; but such is the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a man who does not know his own needs.”
Gautier goes on to say of Decadent style that “contrary to the classical style, it admits of backgrounds where the specters of superstition, the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of night, remorse which leaps out and falls back noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day, and all that the soul in its deepest depths and innermost caverns conceals of darkness, deformity and horror, move together confusedly.”
This was written before the humiliating collapse of France’s so-called Second Empire in 1870, which seemed to lend further credence to the notion that the nation and the civilization it represented were in terminal decline. Gautier’s analysis of Baudelaire, in combination with Paul Verlaine’s study of other “accursed poets”, was taken up as a manifesto by a number of prose writers in the 1880s, most prominent among them Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde and Remy de Gourmont. Their work became definitive of the fin-de-siècle period, and it had a considerable, if somewhat muted, influence on the development of fantasy fiction in England and America. Its influence in England—very evident in the prose fiction of such writers as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel and R. Murray Gilchrist—was swiftly curtailed when the conviction of Oscar Wilde strangled the English Decadent Movement in its cradle. American “Bohemians” like Ambrose Bierce, James Huneker and Edgar Saltus fared only slightly better in a moral landscape constricted by the Bible Belt and easing its way towards Prohibition.
As second-rate comedians are fond of pointing out, no one was ever hurt by a fall, however steep; it is the abrupt halt at the end that does the damage. Since the invention of the parachute it has been possible for the adventurously-inclined to make a sport out of free-falling, to savor the aesthetics of descent. This, in metaphorical terms, was the strategy of those artists we now call Decadent. They decided that in spite of (perhaps even because of) its obvious technological achievements their imperially-ambitious society was in a state of irrevocable cultural decline. They elected, therefore, to explore and advertise the peculiar aesthetics of cultural free-fall.
Decadent art is not representative; it does not reflect commonplace conceptions of “Life” or “Nature”, which it despises and makes every attempt to de-mythologize. Decadent literature points instead the way to an opposite ideal, wherein life and nature would become entirely subject to every kind of clever artifice. Because this ideal is incapable of attainment in practice, Decadent literature is essentially pessimistic, and sometimes brutally horrific, but this makes it all the more ruthless in demolishing the pretensions of rival philosophies. It mocks these rivals mercilessly, taking delight in questioning or overturning all judgments that are ordinarily taken for granted.
Decadent artists are eager to make their fantasies as gorgeous as possible, but they know well enough that anyone who undertakes Odysseys in Exotica will encounter all manner of chimeras. Such artists, knowing the futility of taking refuge in the commonplace, desire to confront these chimeras, to see them clearly even though no understanding of them or reconciliation with them is possible. Decadent artists have an avid hunger for sensation, which can sometimes override the overly simple distinctions which are normally drawn between the pleasant and the unpleasant, they know that horror is a stimulant. They also feel that there is some essential truth in horror: that the world is sick at heart, and that even the most obvious of evils—pain, death, and disease—might require aesthetic re-evaluation.
Decadent literature is, intrinsically and proudly, a literature of moral challenge; it is skeptical, cynical and satirical. It recognizes that everyday morality does not work, either in practical or in psychological terms, and is therefore a sham, but that ideal morality is—not necessarily unfortunately—unattainable. The moral of a Decadent prose-poem or conte cruel, if it has a moral at all, is likely to recommend that we should make the best compromises we can, recognize that they are compromises, and refuse to be ashamed of them. Decadent art is, however, dedicated to the smashing of all icons and idols, and it is always ready to attack stern moralists of every stripe; it is fiercely intolerant of intolerance and revels in the paradoxicality of such a stance.
The fashionability of literary Decadence was brief even in France. It faded away with the birth of a new century and the steady advancement of the rival philosophy of progress. That rival philosophy has achieved such dominance over human thought in the twentieth century that the idea of civilizations slowly and contentedly crumbling to dust seems hardly tenable. Notwithstanding T. S. Eliot’s judgment, the overwhelming majority opinion during the last hundred years has been that the world is far more likely to end in a bang than a long-drawn-out simper. To the extent that Decadent prose has survived in the twentieth century it has lived a fugitive and marginal existence, whose most adventurous produce was consigned to the absurd environment of the American pulp magazine Weird Tales, where H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith took some of its preoccupations and mannerisms to a new limit.
Most modern writers of Decadent fantasies have little alternative but to work within the Lovecraftian tradition, most of their publications emerging from small presses; notable exemplary practitioners include Thomas Ligotti, Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Jeff VanderMeer. This collection assembles some of my shorter works in this vein; others can be found in the Necronomicon Press collection Fables and Fantasies (1996). Longer stories in a similar vein include The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires (Mark Ziesing 1996) and its two sequels, initially published in abridged form as “The Black Blood of the Dead” (1997) and “The Gateway of Eternity” (1999)—although I hope that a portmanteau version will one day appear. Many of my science fiction novels, most obviously Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future (Borgo 1994) and Architects of Emortality (Tor, 1999), also have significant Decadent elements.
“Salome” was originally published in The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales ed. Brian Stableford, Dedalus 1992. “O For a Fiery Gloom and Thee” was published in Sirens ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, HarperPrism 1998. “The Last Worshipper of Proteus” was published in Beyond 2 (June/July 1995). “The Evil That Men Do” was published in Realms of Fantasy August 1995. “Ebony Eyes” was published in Horrors! 365 Scary Stories ed. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg & Martin H. Greenberg, Barnes & Noble, 1998 (as by Francis Amery). “The Fisherman’s Child” was published in The Penny Dreadfull 10 [April 1998]. “The Storyteller’s Tale” was published in The Anthology of Fantasy and the Supernatural ed. Stephen Jones & David Sutton. Tiger, 1994. “The Unluckiest Thief” was published in Interzone 60 (June 1992). “The Light of Achernar” was published in The Last Continent ed. John Pelan, Shadowlands Press, 1999.
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