Decadence from Belfast to Byzantium

Abstract

Decadence is usually implicated in temporality, perceived in narrative terms in relation to a particular history of decline and fall from prior achievement or normality. The prototype of all such histories tends to be found in the later history of Rome. This essay, looking beyond Rome itself, proposes an alternative model of decadence associated not so much with temporality as with space and spatial metaphor, with extremity, distance, precarious connection and relations between perceived centre and periphery. The Byzantine and Alexandrian antecedents of the Greek poet Constantinos Cavafy (1863-1933), much admired by E.M. Forster, remind us of the prolonged but attenuated survival of the classical tradition in the Roman Empire, recalling Hagia Sophia and Hypatia instead of Caligula or the crumbling Coliseum. Cavafy provides a bridge to and a different perspective on classically-influenced notions of opulent decadence. This perspective finds interesting expression in Irish writing from Yeats to the Belfast writer Derek Mahon, so the discussion concludes by wondering why this should be so, exploring possible connections between culture at the end of its tether and geographical and political extremity.