Table Of ContentDecadence in Literature and Intellectual
Debate since 1945
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Decadence in Literature and
Intellectual Debate
since 1945
Edited by
D L
IEMO ANDGRAF
DECADENCE IN LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL DEBATE SINCE 1945
Copyright © Diemo Landgraf, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 ISBN 978-1-137-43101-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above c ompanies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-49219-0 ISBN 978-1-137-43102-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137431028
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Decadence in literature and intellectual debate since 1945 / edited by
Diemo Landgraf.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–43101–1 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Decadence in literature. I. Landgraf, Diemo, editor.
PN56.D45D436 2014
809(cid:25).911—dc23 2014019911
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Diemo Landgraf vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Part 1 Historical and Philosophical Perspectives
1 On the Notion of Decadence in the FRG and France
after 1945—with Examples by Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Botho Strauß, and
Richard Millet
Diemo Landgraf 3
2 “In the very quick of the nightmare”: Decadence and
Mystics of Wilderness in Henry Miller’s Cultural
Criticism of Modernity
Mario Bosincu 25
3 The Function of Decadence and Ascendance in
Analytic Philosophy
Jens Lemanski and Konstantin Alogas 49
4 Progress and Decadence—Poststructuralism as
Progressivism
Gerald Hoffleit 67
Part 2 Decadence and the Politics of
Culture and Language
5 The Concept of Decadence as Ideological and Law
Enforcement Category in the GDR
Torben Ibs 85
vi Contents
6 Joual en stock: The Controversial Issue of Language
Quality and Autochthonous Standardization in Quebec
Claus D. Pusch 111
Part 3 Literary and Film Studies
7 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Early “Trilogy of Decadence”:
L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962)
Jakob Willis 133
8 Houellebecq’s Fin de Siècle: Crisis of Society, Crisis of
the Novel—Thematic and Poetological Intertextuality
between Michel Houellebecq and Joris-Karl Huysmans
Betül Dilmac 153
9 The Shadow of Decadence: The Latin American Boom
and the Taboo of the Spanish Novel of the Democratic
Period
Pablo Sánchez
Translated from the Spanish language by Jon Regan 171
10 Exile and Writing: Alfredo Bryce Echenique and the
Decadence of the Myth of Paris
Blanca Navarro Pardiñas
Translated from the Spanish language by Jon Regan 187
11 Tradition, (Post)Modernity, and Decadence in Vargas
Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes and Los cuadernos de
don Rigoberto
Diemo Landgraf 205
About the Authors 225
Index of Persons 229
Index of Terms 231
Preface
Diemo Landgraf
Are ours times of decadence? This is, for example, what the Peruvian Nobel
Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa asserts at the beginning of his essay La
civilización del espectáculo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2012): “culture is going
through a profound crisis and has entered into decadence” (13–14, my
translation). He is referring not only to his home country, Peru, but to the
entire Western world. Since the 1990s, this view has been assumed by an
increasing number of artists and intellectuals, but it has had little reso-
nance in the academic world.
In Europe, theories of decadence reached their height from the middle
of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War. At the same
time that thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche
criticized the way the Western world was developing politically, socially,
and culturally, artists such as Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans
played up their own decadence and that of society, producing the phe-
nomenon of decadent art. In North America, the idea of a “New World”
where immigrants from “Old Europe” could start their lives anew gave the
continent an aura of youthfulness and never-ending progress. However,
writers such as Walt Whitman considered the aberrations of the “American
Dream” to be a kind of decadence.
After the Second World War, the concept of decadence was rejected due
to the new ideological context of social democracy and liberal capitalism.
Untimely writers such as Henry Miller and Julius Evola who clung to the
idea of decadence were often frowned upon as pessimists and outsiders.
With the current crises in different regions of the world, the concept
of decadence has become relevant once again. In the Western world, the
limits of the welfare state that has been granting an incomparably high
viii Preface
living standard to the citizens have become apparent, and social, ethnic,
religious, and economic conflicts force us to question the optimism that
had prevailed since the end of the Second World War in view of constant
economic growth and technological progress. The ideology of political
correctness and projects of the political elite such as worldwide gover-
nance evoke criticism about the corruption of culture and science and new
forms of totalitarianism. Prominent writers such as Botho Strauß, Michel
Houellebecq, and Richard Millet attempt to explore the reasons for cul-
tural and social decline in their societies, and the term decadence is once
again being used in political discussions. In the field of literary and cultural
studies, however, the understanding of decadence is still mainly confined
to aesthetic phenomena from Baudelaire to the European fin de siècle.
The present book aims to bridge the gap between decadence as it is tra-
ditionally understood in literary and cultural studies and its relevance to
current phenomena. Decadence being a “social and philosophical category
of human experience,” as the French sociologist Julien Freund puts it (La
décadence: histoire sociologique et philosophique d’une catégorie de l’expérience
humaine. Paris: Sirey, 1984), means there is no restriction to single cul-
tures, languages, and geographical regions in the world. Among the vast
array of possible topics, the present contributions focus on philosophical
perspectives, discussions in the fields of cultural and language politics,
literary texts, and movies from Europe and America since 1945. Relevant
questions concern the signs and forms of and the reasons for decadence,
as well as the ideological and political positioning of those thinkers and
artists who use the term. Between the different contributions, many con-
nections can be observed:
The first chapter, written by myself, starts with an overview of the his-
tory and the political and ideological context of the notion of decadence in
Europe since the eighteenth century. Although the term is most often used
to refer to concrete cases of political, social, and cultural decline and regres-
sion, artists and philosophers in particular have had an important role in
shaping its meaning. As the chosen examples reveal, this has not changed
after 1945: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun,
Botho Strauß’s essay “Goat Song Rising,” and Richard Millet’s essay
Phantom Language, followed by Literary Praise of Anders Breivik all reflect
the loss of sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and
France after the Second World War and thereby show that decadence is
generally the by-product of a real decline of political power. In this sense,
the cases of the FRG and France are examples of a development that has
affected all of Europe since 1945 and that might be the future of the cur-
rent superpower the United States, as a consequence of inner crises, over-
expansion, and the rise of new global players such as China.
Preface ix
The second chapter by Mario Bosincu focuses on the pathologies of
American society as criticized by Henry Miller in his travel diary The Air-
Conditioned Nightmare and other writings. By reading Miller’s diagno-
sis in light of Walt Whitman’s views on American culture, Bosincu gives
insights into the self-image of the homo Americanus as somebody who feels
empowered with a world historical mission and, at the same time, into the
reasons for the nation’s degeneration into soulless materialism, a feature
that was exported to Europe with the United States’ hegemony after the
Second World War. Miller’s counter model for the homo Americanus is the
poet who brings together art and life and who has again found access to
spirituality by opening up to Nature.
In the third chapter, Jens Lemanski and Konstantin Alogas analyze the
importance of ascendance-decadence schemes in analytic philosophy since
1945. Since the beginnings of modern European philosophy, the represen-
tatives of the different approaches and schools have classified other authors
and their theories either as ascendant or decadent. Although Lemanski and
Alogas’s contribution is not linked to the dominant concept of decadence
as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon of decline and regression
(most often related to the fall of Rome or the writings of authors such as
Baudelaire and Nietzsche), it reveals a key component of any theory of
decadence, that is, the dichotomy between progress and decadence.
Based on the example of poststructuralism, the fourth chapter by
Gerald Hoffleit shows how the concept of progress can become a ten-
dentious term and part of a political strategy that promotes ideas and
forms of life that are considered decadent from the traditional point of
view. Poststructuralism, including related approaches such as deconstruc-
tion, constitutes one of the most influential intellectual movements since
the Second World War. As Hoffleit argues, poststructuralism is not only
opposed to the concept of decadence and the related traditional view of
European society and culture, but it is also one of the causes of modern
decadence itself: by characterizing everything traditional as “obsolete,” it
undermines morality, cultural values, and the standards of rationality and
scholarship that have prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment, and it
thereby exerts an utterly destructive influence.
In the fifth chapter, Torben Ibs gives insight into the significance of
the notion of decadence in the communist world during the Cold War era,
namely in the German Democratic Republic. There, the term was mainly
used to stigmatize the ideological opponent. In the beginning, the cultural
superstructure of the “bourgeoisie” and, later, commercial Americanized
mass culture in particular (which is also criticized by many nonsocialist
intellectuals; cf. chapters 1 and 8), were perceived as “poison,” that is, a
weapon of cultural warfare with the purpose of weakening and destroying
