We are decadent. It’s obvious. Look around you. Books have been replaced by screens, restaurants are bigger cultural events than art (though they too are dying), and our highest cultural temple is The Traitors. “Western civilisation is being destroyed by its own decadence,” ran a Daily Telegraph headline last year. In his book The Decadent Society, American journalist Ross Douthat argues that the US has been in decline ever since Neil Armstrong got back from the moon. And conservative provocateur Michel Houellebecq has made the decadence of the west a pervasive theme of his novels – including the most recent, Annihilation, which I got for Christmas and read by twinkling tree lights, its bleak vision gradually sapping my festive spirit. So now I am going to inflict Houellebecq’s story on you.
A French civil servant, returning to his teenage bedroom, sees his old posters for The Matrix Revolutions and it all comes flooding back. He was obsessed with that 2003 film, he remembers, but his younger sister Cécile and her generation had other fandoms: “Not Nirvana now, but Radiohead; and not The Matrix, but The Lord of the Rings. There were only two years between them, but that might have been enough to explain the difference, things still moved quite quickly in those days, much less quickly than in the 1960s, of course, or even in the 1970s, the deceleration and immobilisation of the west, heralding its annihilation, had been progressive.”
Houellebecq, with his limitless melancholy, gives the west’s doom an unexpected pop-cultural twist here, seeing nothing short of the abyss in the “deceleration” of teen trends since the days when Neo gave way to Gandalf. By the “deceleration and immobilisation” of western culture Houellebecq means, as I understand it, the relative lack of truly new trends, ideas and movements compared with 50 or 60 years ago. While the 1960s produced Bob Dylan, we have Timothée Chalamet playing him. If you wanted to take this further, you could argue that visual art is repeating ideas first advanced by Marcel Duchamp before the first world war and that even theoretical physics – as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin argues in his book The Trouble With Physics – is just retreading the discoveries Einstein and Heisenberg made a century ago.
But is there really such a steep decline and slow-down in our culture? To stay with Houellebecq’s use of cinema as an example, I recently rewatched the 2004 film Van Helsing after seeing the new remake of Nosferatu and if they are to be taken as symptoms of cultural health, you’d have to say civilisation has improved a lot in the last two decades, for Nosferatu has so much more belief in the art of film. On the other hand, both are vastly inferior to FW Murnau’s original Nosferatu, therefore presumably the civilisation of Germany when it was released in 1922 was much greater than ours. But wait, wasn’t that the decadent Weimar republic, where people fiddled with each other while democracy burned?
The idea that a culture can be decadent is an entertaining but empty myth, one that makes assumptions about culture and history that are much less intelligent than they seem. At the heart of it is the idea that an entire society, or way of life, can be diseased. It’s an organic image that takes the “social body” literally – and, in looking for symptoms of malaise in this vast body, tends to see them in sexual behaviour.
That’s how we picture the most infamous example of a civilisation that supposedly rotted from within: the Roman empire. In his 1847 painting Romans in Their Decadence, the French artist Thomas Couture fills a huge canvas with sensual Romans indulging themselves. A woman on a couch languorously recovers from her pleasures at the centre of the orgy while couples embrace all around her. These bacchanals are framed by the virtuous straight lines of classical columns. That classical order, that rational virtue, represents ancient civilisation itself, but here we see the start of its voluptuous ruin.
And Roman decadence is still box office. In Gladiator II, Rome has declined to the point of having not one but two camp, psychopathic emperors, prancing around murderously in interiors whose design and lighting owes much to Couture’s contemporary, the history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme.
It shows how confused the idea of decadence is that, according to Houellebecq, Smolin or anyone else who equates decline with “deceleration”, a lack of intellectual novelty could be a failing. In the ancient world, on the contrary, the classical style was judged perfect therefore timeless. You couldn’t build anything better than a temple with a columned portico or write anything better than Virgil’s Aeneid, so change could only be for the worse. The very lack of innovation that some see today as decadence was praised by previous ages as stability, balance and harmony. Nor is that only a western view. Most civilisations have sought to triumph over the passage of time – from Buddhism aspiring to Nirvana to pre-communist China preserving its empire in reverence for the ancestors.
This classical idea that continuity is culture’s highest goal was so pervasive in pre-modern times that, in order to break from it, the 19th-century avant garde had to explicitly embrace decadence. If the choice was between living in an ordered, unchanging world and being branded decadent, French poets and artists chose the latter. And how.
Couture taught Édouard Manet, the painter of sleazy modern life and the friend of writers including Baudelaire and Mallarmé, who embraced “décadence”. These French Decadent poets wallowed in louche sexuality, alcoholic and psychedelic experiences, as they invented new kinds of writing that could describe the wild unpredictability of modern existence. Baudelaire’s poem A Carcass literally delights in decay. “Remember the object we saw, my love,” he begins, before going on to describe the sight of a rotting donkey, “its legs in the air, like a lubricious woman”, a shared experience he remembers as profoundly erotic. Is that decadent? Absolutely. Did it bring down France? No, it inaugurated the golden age of French culture that gave birth to modern art.
The ideal of decadence was popularised most outrageously by Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 novel Against Nature (À Rebours). Its hero insulates himself from reality by drinking strangely coloured liqueurs and encrusting the shell of his pet tortoise with jewels (the weight kills it). It’s the favourite book of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, decadence having quickly spread from Paris to late Victorian Britain. Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book hurled their explicitly decadent ways in the faces of their elders. Decadence, in other words, is just another word for being modern.
In fact, critics of western decadence miss the painfully obvious fact that there is nothing that is more truly western, or historically hallowed. There’s no evidence that decadence ever brought a civilisation down. Yet there’s ample evidence that it is a socially liberating, culturally creative force that has generated much of the greatest art, literature and music of the past 150 years.
Houellebecq himself may be proof of that himself. For this compelling writer has a very ambiguous relationship with decadence. While he mourns a civilisation he believes to be in decline, he is consciously influenced by 19th-century French decadent writers. His most infamous novel Submission is in fact partly a homage to the decadent novelist Huysmans: the narrator is a literary academic who specialises in him, and who starts the novel by saying: “Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend.”
He goes on to cite Émile Zola’s complaint that character and action in Against Nature don’t go anywhere, they are frozen – which is also a good description of the way Houellebecq writes. His stunning Serotonin is deliberately as static as Against Nature. In Annihilation, which has much more plot, the civil servant Paul’s niece is doing a PhD on French decadent writers. She’s funding it with sex work, as he discovers by accident when he calls on her services.
Ugh, is that OK? Clearly not. Houellebecq shoves his grossness into your head along with his despair in a demonic brew that may even be poisonous. How decadent is that? He is the unhealthiest and best of today’s serious novelists.
Meanwhile, at the National Theatre in London, I watch Ncuti Gatwa at the piano in a pink satin gown opening a panto-esque production of The Importance of Being Earnest that joyously rips the surface off Wilde’s play to reveal every subtextual subversion. Is that decadent? Are we? Let’s hope so.
