One of the clearest and cleverest explanations of modernity was made by a London schoolteacher writing in the guise of a geometrical figure. In 1884, while serving as headmaster of the City of London School, Edwin Abbott published Flatland under the pseudonym “A. Square.” This playful and didactic book, subtitled “A Romance of Many Dimensions,” insists on the reality of a world that can be conceived but not seen. It presents a fully comprehensible vision of “Flatland,” a society that knows just two dimensions. The encounter between “A Square” who lives in Flatland and an otherworldly creature – a sphere from the mysterious three-dimensional Spaceland – prompts confusion and astonishment.
Abbott spares no detail in capturing the disbelief and incredulity the square feels when his worldview is challenged. He believed that the rules of his world were fixed and could be fully expressed through exercising the mind and the senses, his full mathematical comprehension of Flatland. The sphere explodes the square’s certainty and security in the reliability of his empirical understanding of his surroundings. He proves the existence of another dimension, a plane of reality the square had not seen or comprehended previously. The thought experiment that engendered this episode is easy to visualize and describe. Abbott feigned a more limited perspective and then demonstrated the jolt that comes with the revelation of the world’s true nature. The schoolteacher’s lesson cuts to the heart of modernism: our experience of reality is ignorant of the many invisible and unknowable forces that shape the world. The true purpose of art and philosophy is to give us access to those other worlds. Yet this late nineteenth-century insistence on the primacy of the intangible and ephemeral would cause fear and anxiety that peaked at crisis levels by the turn of the century.You are living on a Plane. What you style Flatland is the vast level surface of what I may call a fluid, on, or in, the top of which you and your countrymen move about, without rising above it or falling below it.I am not a plane Figure, but a Solid. You call me a Circle; but in reality I am not a Circle, but an infinite number of Circles, of size varying from a Point to a Circle of thirteen inches in diameter, one placed on the top of the other. When I cut through your plane as I am now doing, I make in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle. For even a Sphere – which is my proper name in my own country – if he manifests himself at all to an inhabitant of Flatland – must needs manifest himself as a Circle. […]The diminished brightness of your eye indicates incredulity. But now prepare to receive proof positive of the truth of my assertions. You cannot indeed see more than one of my sections, or Circles, at a time; for you have no power to raise your eye out of the plane of Flatland; but you can at least see that, as I rise in Space, so my sections become smaller. See now, I will rise; and the effect upon your eye will be that my Circle will become smaller and smaller till it dwindles to a point and finally vanishes.There was no “rising” that I could see; but he diminished and finally vanished. I winked once or twice to make sure that I was not dreaming. But it was no dream. For from the depths of nowhere came forth a hollow voice – close to my heart it seemed – “Am I quite gone? Are you convinced now? Well, now I will gradually return to Flatland and you shall see my section become larger and larger.”Every reader in Spaceland will easily understand that my mysterious Guest was speaking the language of truth and even of simplicity. But to me, proficient though I was in Flatland Mathematics, it was by no means a simple matter. The rough diagram given above will make it clear to any Spaceland child that the Sphere, ascending in the three positions indicated there, must needs have manifested himself to me, or to any Flatlander, as a Circle, at first of full size, then small, and at last very small indeed, approaching to a Point. But to me, although I saw the facts before me, the causes were as dark as ever. All that I could comprehend was, that the Circle had made himself smaller and vanished, and that he had now reappeared and was rapidly making himself larger.When he regained his original size, he heaved a deep sigh; for he perceived by my silence that I had altogether failed to comprehend him. And indeed I was now inclining to the belief that he must be no Circle at all, but some extremely clever juggler; or else that the old wives’ tales were true, and that after all there were such people as Enchanters and Magicians.1
The unsettling and unseen presence of Abbott’s sphere would haunt numerous works of European literature from the 1890s. Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture places the tension between the visible and the invisible at the center of the paradigmatic shifts in knowledge and perception of the late nineteenth century. By using this tension as a vehicle for analyzing Decadence from a broadly framed international perspective, this book finds a semblance of communality in different strains of Decadence, Symbolism, and modernism. The fallacy of Decadence’s narrow geography and cultural purview has steadily eroded in scholarship over the past decades. Robert Stilling shows this emphatically by demonstrating the relevance of Decadent discourse for postcolonial writers. He is among those exploding the notion of the “nationalization of literary decadence.”2 For the writers I analyze, this global perspective comes by way of their shared sense of anxiety and crisis, a unifying thread of my analyses that serves as an entry point to the complexity of distinguishing between Decadence and Symbolism. Despite the muddle that was modernism, certain notes emerged that could pull together its various aesthetics, worldviews, and cultural contexts.
1.1 The Modernist Mindset: Ephemerality and Corporeality
The past half century has seen an astounding diversification of the scholarly appreciation of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and culture. The capaciousness of my approach – incorporating the development of conceptual understandings of modernism, Decadence, and Symbolism into analyses of works produced in Russia, England, and Belgium – reflects the expanded perspective of contemporary discourse around the fin de siècle, its precursors, and its aftermath. By the 1890s, the core tenets of nineteenth-century European culture, society, and aesthetics underwent a drastic revaluation. Art and literature of the period were tinged with the notion of decline since, to many, the world they knew and understood seemed to be coming to an end. Decadence and Modernism draws out the productive aspects of the era’s pessimism. A renewed appreciation for the historical and political has led to recent reappraisals of Decadence producing such notions as “The Decadent Republic of Letters,” “Landscapes of Decadence,” and “Decadent Modernism.”3 These point toward its vitality and durability and find an effective balance between Decadence as a social concept and Decadence as an aesthetic mode. Decadence and Modernism builds on these principles by expanding their purview to encompass Russian Decadence and Symbolism and putting canonical and non-canonical representations of European Decadence into dialogue. Alterity and liminality have frequently been an interest in Decadence; this book incorporates the other into the very processes of defining Decadence and shaping its role in modernism. Decadence and Modernism is rooted in the fear and uncertainty of the 1890s permeating much of Europe, adding a new perspective on the murkiness of modernism.
Decadence is an especially pliable concept well suited to traverse geographical and conceptual borders. Partly, this malleability comes from Decadence’s notorious resistance to definition. More productively, the concept of Decadence resides in the perception and intention of its users. Matthew Potolsky shifts the onus from production to reception, noting that Decadence “is a consciously adopted and freely adapted literary stance, a characteristic mode of reception, rather than a discernable quality of things of people.”4 I open with a focus on figures simultaneously receiving and producing Decadence: three Russian authors – Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, and Zinaida Gippius – who actively struggled with their identity as Decadent figures and sought to infuse modernism with the stylistic and epistemological imprint of Decadence. A major element of this discussion is the tension between the corporeality of Decadence and the ephemerality of Symbolism, a debate that transcends national contexts and emphasizes the international scope of modernism’s conceptual development. This juxtaposition comes to a head in this book’s final section with Bruges-la-Morte , the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach’s tale of murder in a “dead city.” I present the novel through its conflicted rhetorical devices which reflect failures of perception similar to contemporaneous works of late nineteenth-century British literature: Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . These texts are the subjects of my discussion of Decadence’s reliance on tropes of seeing and the visible in formulating its worldview. They both convey the chasm between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen. They strike at the core of Victorian sensibility and utilize Decadent concepts to confront its deeply unsettling truths. By regarding these texts as part of a single moment of cultural production, I argue for a prevailing friction between the tangible and the intangible in late nineteenth-century aesthetics. The works I analyze throughout this book represent different manifestations of the paradoxical relationship between Symbolism and Decadence. They are not all part of a conventional roster of Decadence or Symbolism, a canon that is continuously being unraveled with new appreciations of modernism enacted through such lenses as queer, postcolonial, and feminist studies. I contribute to this intervention by selecting authors who internalized the chaos of the fin de siècle. They conveyed a broader skepticism of human perception and a willingness to explore the recesses of the mind and society to counteract such fin-de-siècle angst. This is best seen by bridging multiple literatures, cultures, and methodological approaches.
An element of the recuperation of Decadence has been the exploration and affirmation of its complex contributions to late nineteenth-century society and its lasting influence on literature and culture well into the ...