Surette, Leon

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

ends up hiring "an albino bulimic bisexual genetically challenged troll of corpuscularity and whiteness, with twelve toes and apparently limitless dandruff"  (167). The enlightened Meliorite hiring committee, however, is "delighted, for  it had hired the best-qualified  philosopher it could find  to suit its needs, which lay primarily in metaphysics and epistemology" (167). In spite of  its allegiances with the great satires of  the West, this novel, like most of  those satires, will not change its target. For radical feminists,  especially those at the university, tend to regard the criticism that comes their way simply as further  evidence of,  as the Ovarian professors  put it, "the enslavewombent, exploitation and oppression of  all womben evherywhere by men" (54). The best Tafler  can hope for  from  them is that they do not gonadtropically challenge him. But like those great satires, this one may well entertain some readers and remain as a significant  testimony to the forms  of  resentment, fanaticism,  corruption, and idiocy of  which we are capable. David Weir Decadence  and the Making  of  Modernism Amherst: University of  Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. 232. $50.00 $17.95 Reviewed by Leon Surette It is a great pleasure to review a book so well written, and so full  of  well-presented and well-argued analysis. Weir's argument is that modernity takes shape at least partly in response to nineteenth-century decadence. Specifically,  he maintains that "narrative discontinuity, heightened description, [and] erudite allusiveness" were elements of  novelistic rhetoric that "had already had their day in France in the form  of  le  style  de  décadence"  (149). To advance his thesis, Weir begins with a masterful  twenty-page survey of  the uses and definitions  of "decadence"—including recent feminist  assessments—that leaves the term its polyvalence while articulating its range of  reference. In some respects, Weir's thesis coincides with early assessments of modernism—notably Edmund Wilson's Axel's  Castle  (1933). But, until recently, the New Critical formalist  take on Modernism had relegated the argument for continuity heretical. Weir resuscitates this view through a detailed and lucid analysis of  the phenomenon of  decadence itself.  Weir notes that decadence, admittedly a rather nebulous category, highlights transition, especially endings, but also beginnings. Modernism, for  example, is seen as substituting the sense of ending found  in decadence for  a sense of  beginning. Similarly, decadence may refer  to style or to content. Once again, Weir argues that Modernism adopts realistic canons for  its content, but decadent canons for  its style and rhetoric. Book Reviews 101 Put in this summary form,  the argument sounds almost trite, but there is nothing trite about Weir's substantial and persuasive study. The analyses of Flaubert's Salammbô  (1863), the Goncourts' Germinie  Lacerteux  (1864), Pater's Marius  the Epicurian  (1885), and of  Huysman's A rebours (1884) are valuable in themselves, and form  an illuminating background to the novelistic practice of Joyce and Gide. Joyce scholars will profit  from  Weir's placing of  Joyce's undoubted originality within the context of  decadence, where it is rarely placed—at least by appreciative and well-informed  critics. This reader, at least, comes away with a more balanced understanding of  Joyce's achievement than that found  in the canonical assessments of  Hugh Kenner and Richard Ellmann, fine  as those were for  their time. Decadence  and the Making  of  Modernism  is a work of  literary history, a genre of scholarly endeavor that New Criticism nearly killed—dismissing it as "source-hunting." It is now being revived, but in the shadow of  "New Historicism" in which the objective is to expose the reprobate opinions and attitudes inscribed in the object texts. Weir's objective, in contrast, is to recover the aesthetic milieu in which early modernist works were conceived and to place them in their historical context. In a "Postface"  Weir draws attention to some of  the parallels—also noted by others—between the current end-of-millennium  milieu and the previous fin  de siècle, the primary focus  of  his study. He points out that Habermas and Lyotard both characterize postmodernism in opposition to modernism—thereby engaging in a reprise of  the polemics of  decadence. For Habermas, postmodernism is "a neoconservative reaction to the unfinished  business of modernity." For Lyotard, in contrast, it is an escape from  modernism, "a collection of  self-legitimating  'metanarratives' that perpetuate the myth of human progress" (196). Weir found  the same confrontation  in the nineteenth century between the Comtean optimism of  the Goncourts and Zola on the one hand and the decadence of  Flaubert and Huysmans on the other. Moreover, he finds  that "as with decadence, the term postmodernism seems to be a universal antonym, drawing its meaning from  whatever it sets itself  against" (197). However, Decadence  and the Making  of  Modernism  is not a polemical work. Rather it is an important contribution to the ongoing reassessment of  literary modernism, which was understood for  so long only from  within itself,  and then—no more accurately—from  the hostile perspective of  varieties of postmodernism. Weir is well read in the critical literature, and moves through it with a grace and generosity that is in stark contrast to so much current literary critical prose. He does not ignore the offensive  nature of  decadent topics and attitudes as a New Critical formalist  would have done, nor does he moralize over them as a New Historicist would. All in all, a very fine  study. 102 The  International  Fiction  Review 24 (1997) 

David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

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David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

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