Abstract
Continental Decadence not only had an identifiable international literary rhetoric. Its rhetoric, without being self‐reflective or self‐referential, was its raison d'être also. A quintessential example is “Conte d'Amour” from Contes cruds by Villiers de l'Isle‐Adam (1838–89). Here rhetorical excess, both as redundancy and crypticism, conveys the typical Decadent gestus: morbid, gross and over‐refined, solipsistic. Such a rhetoric must be the medium for the label Decadent to be completely justified. As we follow the wake of Villiers' influence first outside French with Arthur Symons and Stefan George and next outside France (but in French) with Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe, and Georges Rodenbach, we find that each admirer selects features which reinforce his own bent. Symons follows Villiers most closely, using language to disguise and divert reality. George uses language to intensify reality. Maeterlinck, Van Lerberghe, and Rodenbach use language to reinterpret reality and, especially in the case of Rodenbach, to discredit rhetoric when divorced from reality. By the end of the 19th century, in prose the Naturalist verso of Decadence has pierced through the face; in poetry Decadence has modulated into Symbolism. But the full expression, found in Villiers, seems historically to have been necessary. There had to be cryptic statement and overstatement before there could be enduring statement.
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