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Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet

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The American Heritage Dictionary defines "decadence" as "a process, condition, or period of deterioration or decline, as in morals or art; decay." The word has its origins in Vulgar Latin, where its meaning was "to decay". However, use of the word in Roman times is unattested, the first documentary evidence of its Latinate origins appearing in the Medieval Latin of the second millenium of the Christian era.

Notwithstanding that fact, the word has often been associated with ancient Rome, particularly the historical and political, as well as the artistic, decline of that once great civilization. As Richard Gilman points out, in his compelling tour-de-force, "Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet", "though the word was not used by the Romans, so strongly has modern consciousness been impressed by its evocative and categorical power that it has been widely and anachronistically employed in regard to Rome."

More significantly, the word has been used in regard to Ancient Rome in a misleading way, replacing generally descriptive words used by contemporary Roman historians and chroniclers with the more value-laden, modern term. For, as Gilman also convincingly demonstrates, "decadence" has become, in the course of time, an evaluative and judgmental word, a word which no longer describes reality, a word which is merely an epithet.

"Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet" is a fascinating and erudite discursive essay on the way in which the meaning and use of the word has been vulgarized over the course of time, a singular demonstration of the way "we cheat ourselves of truth through language." Tracing the use of the term from its Latin origins, Gilman shows how the word has been used facilely, with little thought or consideration for its true meaning, to denote anything which contravenes moral or literary or artistic convention.

Thus, the word attached itself to the writings of Baudelaire, Gautier, Huysmans, and others, the so-called "poetes maudits", who became the "French Decadents". Indeed, the label carried over to England, where Oscar Wilde represented the ultimate example of "decadence" in English literature and society, the homosexual aesthete. However, ascription of the term to these writers was nothing more than a kind of intellectual laziness, for while the innuendo of the word was that of decline, the reality of their writing was not. As Gilman quite astutely notes, "the existence of a word does not guarantee a reality, palpable or abstract, to which it refers."

From its belated ubiquity in the nineteenth century, Gilman moves on to a critical discussion of twentieth century analytical attempts to attach certain meaning to the word, examining the 1948 work of British philosopher C.E.M. Joad, "Decadence", which Gilman describes as "extremely useful, since in its pursuit of the subject it goes down nearly every blind alley into which the word has enticed so many minds." Gilman then moves into the more recent proliferation of the word, where its meaning has become particularly haphazard and devoid of content.

Sadly out of print, "Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet" is a significant study of a word that is often used, but little understood, "a portmanteau stuffed with emptiness."

This is an important essay on language as much as it is an investigation into the meanings that the word "Decadence" has had since it's invention, which was sometime in the Middle Ages.

The best ddescription of the meaning of this word comes in page 19 of my edition which is the Farrar Strauss and Giroux paperback with the lavender cover: "...."decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social and cultural attitudes, and even technology" In other words what was 'decadent' then may not be now, and viceversa, it changes all the time with cultural perception, which is the first great observation, of many in this wonderful book.

I was particularly interested in reading it as I thought it could clarify "Historical Decadence" the most famous and common being that one which supposedly existed in the Roman Empire. I say supposedly because I had always understood that Caligula and Nero were the best examples of that decadence, yet they were emperors relatively close to the beginning of the institution of Empire in Rome. After Nero's death in A.D. 68 the Roman Empire went on for another 408 years, or twenty five generations, which pretty much rules out the possibility that these two emperors were 'decaying' the empire with their rule. Furthermore, after the transition of the Roman Western Empire to Ostrogoth kingdom, the Eastern part of the Empire, with its capital in Constantinople (modern Istambul) managed for another full one thousand years, ending only with the invation of the Ottomans in 1453. How can anything so decaying, sick, putrid, corrupt, and inmorally driven (all words closely associated with the onset of decadence) have lasted longer than all the modern institutions we know of??

The answer in this book is that the feeling of "historical decadence" already existed within the Roman cultural context as a concept, and had been referred to as such by Horace, during the reign of Augustus, the very first of the Ceasars, and was a matter of ideological conception that had no root in historical reality. So in conclusion, the 'idea' that empires, like human bodies, grow, develop, age and die, is and has always been misguided at best. These are complex historical processes that can not be explained away by the use of one word, no matter how significant. The reality in historical terms is that one civilization rises and absorbs, and dominates the other, but it does not need the preamble of a period of 'decadence' to do so. A very helpful clarification is that during the period when the Roman Empire was pagan, and their 'morality' was 'decadent' they were at the strongest, politically, as all the great conquests as well as major cultural contributions were accomplished during the period, not later. The 'decadent' Empire that "fell" to the invading Barbarians (although this was a long and complex process, not one that happened overnight) had been Christian for over a hundred and fifty years, or nine generations, so Christianity by then could be assumed to have changed the 'decadent' morals and mores that suppossedly existed with the pagans and yet somehow that change did NOT make them stronger to resist the influx of Barbarian invasion.

The author also deals at length with the literary 'decadence' such as was understood as a literary movement, existent in France first and closely associated with Symbolism, which was also a movement in the plastic arts and England during the later part of the 19th century where it is invariably associated with the Aesthetic Movement, but more memorably with Oscar Wilde and the issue of his homosexuality, which became a "cause celebre" as a ressult of his trials, his disgrace and two years of hard labor in jail. The author concludes that the definition of 'decadence' is a label, if anything, it meant change, a switch from one style to the next and not the degenaration of style itself. The author is particularly good at explaining why Wilde was not a 'decadent' writer, but a modern one, though to the retrograde, Victorian morality of the time, a word like 'decadence' was a very handy tool to manipulate public opinion against the write ; furthermore it clarifies that the existence of homosexuality is and has been, a normal human phenomenon and in no way an indication of the 'decline' in the morals of a society or empire. .

The author also investigates other authors that have dealt with the subject, such as Gibbon, which he correctly labels more a novelist than a historian, and Joad who wrote an entire book on the subject while missing the point.

The word 'decadence' has been used as a derogatory adjective by totalitarian governments/tyrants which have found it a very attractive label to attack and condemn any form of dissent from their orthodoxy, as for example the "Decadent Art Exhibition" which Hitler's cultural watchdogs staged in Munich in 1937, so it's very illuminating to have the word described here as a convenient label, a dangerous tool of manipulators to attack change and dissent.

I strongly recommend the book to those who 'think' they know the meaning of this interesting word, so often used now to invoke anything that is perceived to be "deviant" in sexuality, as to actually obscure other uses it once had. The reading is enlightening and erudite but never overbearing or boring.