In this inter-chapter, I want to recover a dialect in cultural history that has not found its place in the critical language we have used in representing the tradition of literary modernism. In this language, the ostensibly progressive methods and advanced attitudes of modern art and science are working in the service of an observably antithetical force. It is not primitivism, whose synergy with modernist aesthetics has been well researched. What I am looking at comes instead under a heading that combines the methodologies of modernity and its designated representatives in modernism, which are routinely represented as forward-oriented in outlook and value, with its backward-tracking opposite, which, as it is imagined and conceived, exerts a reverse fascination: in a word, with decadence.

This term claims its use as a reference for the fundamental other of the modern, which is taken mainly as a synonym for advancement narratives, liberation fables, and progress mythologies. “Decadence” expresses not just a condition of being fallen from this increasingly mainstream value, as are the more unwitting representatives of the degeneration disclaimed in moralistic discourses of the later nineteenth century. “Decadence,” instead, represents an enriching debility of loss. It bespeaks an empowering economy of exhaustion, which preoccupies the most developed intelligences as a sometimes unexpected and so troubling but usually emboldening and powerfully attractive discovery. This is a motive interest sufficiently compelling to generate not only the conversation I am recapturing, but the coherence of an intellectual history that is also a cultural memory. It is, ultimately, the form of an artistic consciousness I will present as the sensibility of a profounder modernism. This lost conversation may be reconstituted from a broad resource, and its wider ground might be surveyed at first from above, as it were, in writings by three of its loftiest personages: Nietzsche, Freud, and Poe, who stand respectively in the middle and end and beginning of the history I am following.

“Sometimes in a phrase the characters spring to life so suddenly that one is taken aback,” T. S. Eliot writes in his introduction to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), “as if one had touched a wax-work figure and discovered that it was a live policeman.” Eliot’s point is reiterated in this description of one of Barnes’s many characters, Count Onatario Altamonte: “‘The living statues,’ she said, ‘He simply adores them’” (N, 13). If the puppet impersonating the human provides an image of the poetics of decadence, so the artificial, post-natural, aftermath imaginary of its historical understanding is demonstrated extensively in this novel and centrally in the biographical fiction of her protagonist. In a family lineage of dubious (the German patronymic originates in “a Jew of Italian descent”) but ever declining title, Baron Felix Volkbein is a figure “born to holy decay” (N, 1, 107). He lives in the backward-oriented fantasy of his aristocratic background, centering a representation of the remnant temporality that provides for the poetic tempos as well as imaginative narratives in literary decadence. The repetition that fades in the poems of Swinburne and Rossetti, of Pound and of Eliot too, shows in the dissipating strength of the family name, whose doubtful origin also recalls the degraded state of originality itself in the attitudes and practices of decadent writing.

This chapter presents a range of writing that comes under the general heading of the novel of the historical present. This fiction works overtly to the purpose of representing its current circumstance, which is defined imaginatively as well as chronologically by the (lengthening) turn of the century. For the historical content of the novel as genre, it claims the temporal imaginary of late days as the present condition of England. This is the establishing circumstance of the “decadence” this literature represents as a matter of imagined contemporary fact.

These books are written by novelists who are not identifiable in any ready-made way, however, with the traditions of literary decadence, either individually or, certainly, as a group: Henry James, Joseph Conrad and G. K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Frederic Manning and Rebecca West. Not as the tag attached to the more infamous of the Nineties writers, the “decadence” in these books works in a more complex and important way. It provides a record of end feeling as an established, if uneasily assimilated, understanding, one that has already generated a set of literary conventions and so needs to be taken as the record of an essential stage in literary history. These novels complement the historical content of late or last days with a broad and resourceful implementation of those literary techniques we established in “Afterward: A Poetics,” which, all in all, demonstrate the historical condition of decadence in a sort of poetics in prose.