Decadence and The Organic Metaphor PDF

Decadence and the Organic Metaphor
Author(s): WHITNEY DAVIS

Source: Representations, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 131-149
Published by: University of California Press
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131
WHI TNEY DAVI S
Decadence and the Organic Metaphor
N\+i \r +o +nr xox+\xr n\i x ronrs+s and cloud forests of Trini-
dad, Surinam, the Guianas, Venezuela, and Brazil, Catasetum tridentatum, the
Monks Head, must be counted as one of the most bizarre of all the tropical or-
chids.
1
In the nineteenth century the ower was cultivated in the Great Stove at
Kew, where the rst Catasetums arrived in 1823 from Trinidad, and it featured in
other European, colonial, and American botanical gardens and collections, such
as the hothouses maintained by the Reverend John Clowes at Manchester and by
the sixth Duke of Bedford at Woburn (the latters collection was presented by Queen
Victoria to Kew in 1844).
2
In these Victorian cultures of nature, many owers
perished. But if they survived, they could be studied at close quarters by scientists,
by artists, and by members of a botanically enthusiastic public. To quote one fa-
mous description, the two antennae of Catasetum are the most curious organ
of the ower; they form rigid horns tapering to a point, with a slit like an ad-
ders tongue (g. 1). When touched by a proboscis or a pencil, the left-hand
antenna will ing the pollinium disc from the chamber. Tearing away two balls
of pollen and the anther itself, it can hurl them two or three feet from the ower.
This mechanism of generation, sometimes called a sniper, sits within a striking
ower. As our description put it, the dull coppery and orange-spotted tintsthe
yawning cavity in the great fringed labellumthe one antenna projecting with
the other hanging downgive to these owers a strange, lurid, almost reptilian
appearance.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, orchids were thought to excite lust; such
a plant was a Satyrion, a name that survives in the lovely Satyrium erectum Lindley of
southern Africa. In Victorian taxonomy, the Monks Head was notorious for what
we might callwith only modest distortion of the termits sexual perversion. In
\ns+n\c+ While Charles Darwins evolutionary account of organic decay, decline, and extinction pro-
vided a model for accounts of supposedly similar processes in the domain of human culture and society,
Darwins own theory of natural selection depended on models of cultural and social transformation, degen-
eration, and destruction. In the full circuit of the organic metaphor of decadence, then, a theory of culture
was applied to nature and then re-applied to the cultural world even though cultural forms do not always
literally display processes of organic morbidity, and natural forms do not always literally display the results
of intentional human artistry, cultivation, and collection. The organic metaphor of decadence was some-
times used to imagine a continuous and regenerating life; sometimes, however, the organic metaphor
was used to imagine the necessity of all-pervasive death. The essay compares and contrasts these two
approachesexemplied, on the one hand, by Darwins own writings and, on the other hand, by Joris-
Karl Huysmanss Against Nature. / Rr rnrs rx+\+i oxs 89. Winter 2005 The Regents of the University
of California. i s s x 07346018, electronic i s s x 1533855X, pages 13149. All rights reserved. Direct
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at
www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
132 Rrr nrs rx+\+i oxs
riotnr 1. Anatomy of Catasetum tridentatum. Reprinted from Charles Darwin,
The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects (1862),
2nd ed. ( London, 1872), 180.
the middle years of the nineteenth century orchidologists believed that Catasetum
tridentatum was exclusively a male form: it grows only pollen-masses. These must
be transported to a femalewhere the seed itself will be produced. One persistent
student of Catasetum, Sir Robert Schomburgk, examined hundreds of examples
of the plant in Trinidad in the 1850s without nding a single seed-bearing ower.
Instead, the seed-vessels for the pollen of Catasetum tridentatum seemed to be found
on a ower assigned to Monacanthus viridis, another species altogether. Along with
Myanthus barbatus, a hermaphrodite, these owers were taken by Schomburgk
to constitute three distinct genera growing on the same plantdemonstrated,
Schomburgk thought, in a three-owered stem that he had harvested in British
133 Decadence and the Organic Metaphor
Guiana and preserved in alcohol at the Linnean Society.
3
On this basis, a distin-
guished orchidologist, Robert Allen Rolfe at Kew, could go so far as to claim that
the species concept could not be applied to Catasetum.
4
Needless to say, as the
pioneering botanist John Lindley noted in 1853, such cases shake to the founda-
tions all our ideas of the stability of genera and species.
5
The seeming absurdity
of Catasetum violated not only scripture-based notions of the special creation of
each immutable species as specically generative of its own continuing kind or
stock. It also contravened the Linnaean taxonomyit had classied Catasetum, Mo-
nacanthus, and Myanthusin which species generate within and only as the selfsame
species. All this was strange and lurid indeed: fewof the fantastic sexual menager-
ies envisioned toward the end of the century by Aubrey Beardsley (in part re-
sponding to these peculiar or perverse natural histories as he had come to learn of
them) could equal this polyhemisexual freakor triad of freakscultivated in the
hothouses of curious naturalists.
Charles Darwinit was his description of the strange, lurid, almost reptilian
appearance of the Monks Head that I quoted earlierresolved the conundrum
in 1862. The solution was simple, though it had defeated many experienced observ-
ers. In painstaking dissections of Catasetums spared by his friends and correspon-
dentshe had not yet realized his fond wish to build his own hothouse at Down
HouseDarwin showed that Catasetum is the male, Monacanthus the female, and
Myanthus a hermaphrodite of their single kind: in other words, that all three owers
belong to one and the same species. It is nowadays renamed Catasetum macrocarpum
or the large-fruited Catasetum. Monacanthus and Myanthus fell by the waysidetaxo-
nomic illusions extinguished not by natural selection itself but by a natural histori-
ans reordering of their genealogy. By the time Darwin came to study the Monks
Head, he had been investigating the mechanisms of orchid fertilization for several
years.
6
He set out his observations on the most remarkable of all orchidsspe-
cically, on the Catasetums Schomburgk had pickled a decade earlierin a paper
read at the Linnean Society in April 1862. In the same year he incorporated his
conclusions in The Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertil-
ized by Insectsthe rst book he had published after On the Origin of Species, which
had appeared three years earlier.
7
In his new book Darwin dealt with the trimor-
phic polygamy of the Monks Headto use his termsas well as its peculiar mech-
anism of generation.
Darwins discovery of Catasetum macrocarpum was a small but sturdy buttress in
his accumulating demonstration that conventional taxonomy had been too much
yoked to scriptural doctrines of the constancy of species formof the type of the
kind. In fact, traditional taxonomy continues to this day to require the preservation
of the type specimens of a named species. But in this selection and conservation,
Darwin thought, it too often overlooked the array of modications that natural
selection, as Darwin called it, can introduce over time into the morphology of or-
ganic beings. For Darwin, these modications were sometimes strange and lurid.
But at the same time they were always beautiful and wonderfulto use his
repeated characterizations of sexual adaptations like the sniping of Catasetum.
In his book on the sexuality of orchids (its subtitle was On the Good Eects
of Intercrossing), Darwin tried to show that the most bizarre organs of generation
have for their main object the fertilisation of the owers with pollen brought by
insects from a distinct plant.
8
Darwin placed his emphasis on the physical dis-
tinctness of the inorescences. In the case of a Catasetum and his mate (a Mona-
canthus) growing several yards apart in the rain forest, a bee will be struck by the
blow of the pollen ung by Catasetum and will, of course, buzz olater to alight
on Monacanthus and fertilize her with the snipers payload. Indeed, Darwin deter-
mined that the polliniummust change its orientation (this requires almost a minute
during the bees ight) before it can be caught on the recipients stigma. Thus snip-
ing promotes, if it does not actually enforce, fertilization across two or more ino-
rescences. In other words, Darwin empirically consolidated a point he had more
or less assumed in The Origin of Speciesnamely, that it is an almost universal law
of nature that the higher organic beings require an occasional cross with another
individual; or, which is the same thing, that no hermaphrodite fertilises itself for a
perpetuity of generations. As his orchidological treatise of 1862 famously put it,
Nature tells us . . . that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation.
9
Here Darwin
placed his emphasis on the issue of a perpetuity of generationsfor hermaphrodites
can self-fertilize from generation to generation. But ultimately cross-fertilization
guarantees the vitality and the perpetuity of species; cross-fertilization continually
introduces newmodicationsnowunderstood in terms of genetic reshuing and
chromosomal mutationand provides ever-renewed resources for new adapta-
tions as necessary. By contrast, in the longest term a self-fertilizing species will be
destined to decay and die out. Eventually its capacity to generate resilient modi-
cations will be inadequate to meet the environmental pressures it must face
including competition fromits own progeny. Crossing itself with itself, it will repro-
duce only itself in all its strength and all its weakness. Paradoxically, then, its very
stability and constancy spells its doom as a vital kind.
In the Darwinian world, immutable species will eventually become decadent
species, tending toward adaptive outmoding and numerical declinefor in Dar-
wins account modication is life, is change and growth. Darwin took up this
matterthe nuts and bolts of his dynamic of evolution by natural selectionin
the extended demonstrations that he showcased in The Eects of Cross and Self-
Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, published in 1876, and The Dierent Forms of
Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, published in 1877. ( In these books Darwin
advanced a theoryunder the name pangenesisof the gemmules or germ-
substance itself; his idea can be seen as a speculative precursor of the gene theory.
If he had been able to keep better track of the ratios recurring in his tables of
morphological modication in continuous cross-fertilization he might well have
achieved Gregor Mendels discovery of the regular stochasmof the heredity of char-
acters.)
10
In The Origin of Species, Darwin had identied the mechanism of evolution.
In his major botanical worksthey might equally be described as his principal
culturalist researcheshe identied its raw material: he described what nature it
is that is by its nature in evolution. His account provided a coherent theory for all
practices of orchidological and other cultivation that has persisted to the present
daya theory of culture for nature. In Darwins evolutionary perspective, the
strange and lurid forms of the orchids (and in general the diversities of sexual life)
betoken lifes vitality as suchthe self-renewing generativeness or ever-newness of
surging nature.
At this point we should note the disjunction between this kind of orchid and the
orchids represented in a later nineteenth-century Decadent text like A Reboursfor
readers will have noted the possibility that Darwins description of the partners in
the fertilization of the Monks Head could just as well have been Joris-Karl Huys-
manss in his novel of 1884. Indeed, in preparing to write his novel Huysmans con-
sulted specialist treatises of botany, horticulture, and the like, along with his curi-
ous old books of patristics, mystical ascetics, or forgotten Anglo-Saxon Latinity.
11
As described in the eighth chapter of A Rebours, the orchids collected by Duc Jean
Floressas des Esseintes encapsulate (in some measure they are the very vehicle of )
his decadenceof the attenuation, exaggeration, and morbidity of his vitality. At
one time Des Esseintes had collected real articial owers made of rubber, silk,
wire, and paper. But for his hothouse at Fontenay, his retreat outside Paris, he came
to desire natural owers that would look like fakes, and indeed, not one of [his
orchids] looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain, and metal had been lent
by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities.
12
The owers repre-
sent the natural historythe inhuman factof a seeming long cultivation and
high artice. At the same time this history incarnates disease, decline, and decay.
The gardeners brought in still more varieties [of owers], this time aecting the appearance
of a factitious skin covered with a network of counterfeit veins. Most of them, as if ravaged
by syphilis or leprosy, displayed livid patches of esh mottled with roseola, damasked
with dartre; others had the bright pink colour of a scar that is healing or the brown tint of
a scab that is forming. . . . Where [Nature] had not found it possible to imitate the work
of human hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes of animals organs, to
borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting esh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened
skin (98, 101).
As passages like this might suggest, in the novels world Des Esseintess orchids
embody a specically venereal morbidity, to use Charles Bernheimers phrase.
13
Huysmans represented it to be entirely distinct fromthe generative vitalityalways
associated with fertilization, reproduction, dissemination, and proliferationthat
his nervous protagonist has never attained; Des Esseintes is the last heir of a once-
sturdy house said to have become degenerate (17). Lacking healthy progeny of his
own, he has elaborated the peculiarly decadent articial-natural or highly selected
culture of his hothouse ( Des Esseintess collection seemingly includes both wild
tropical imports and articially selected productions of French horticultural art;
102). By implication he has invented his own peculiar sexuality outsideand mor-
bidly compromisingthe possibility of procreation. In this regard I cannot wholly
agree with the common suggestion that Des Esseintess orchids specically repre-
sent a feared and devouring female sexuality, though perhaps this can be said about
some of the other owers in his collectionfor example, his Venus y-trap and
his other vegetable ghouls (100).
14
Huysmans associated the orchids with Des
Esseintess lineage and its decline into monstrositya venereal catastrophe that
cannot be identied exclusively with Des Esseintess heterosexual venery in view of
the pedophilic and homosexual episodes in his several passages a` rebours nar-
rated in the novel. But the specic orientation of Des Esseintess projected sexuality
(never clearly identied in terms of any particular desire or choice) is less important
than its general decadence, even if its decadence must have derived in part and in
some way from a protracted history of unproductive and unsuccessful arrange-
ments of generationfrom its morbid disruption. As Duc Jean murmurs when he
appraised the great tide of vegetation owing into his house, his vast collection
of orchids and carnivorous plants, tout nest que syphilisit all comes down to syphi-
lis in the end (101).
To be sure. But in view of Huysmanss display of specialist connoisseurship in
representing his protagonists collection we must observe that he did not say that
the dukes orchids, though depraved and unhealthy in formal aspect (102), in
their resemblance to the lesions of leprosy and the chancres of syphilis, are speci-
cally decadent in the then-current botanical sense, namely, in Darwins sense
that they descend from an inbred stock of insuciently cross-fertilized and
modication-poor kind of organic being, and as such tend toward irreversible Mal-
thusian decline and eventual Darwinian extinction. Nor, indeed, did Huysmans
say that the orchidsunlike Des Esseintess own human family and lineageare
specically degenerate in the technical sense given to that termby contemporary
Darwinian biologists, such as Sir Edwin Ray Lankester at Oxford. These scholars
canvased the full range of evolutionary histories that had been made visible by Dar-
wins principlesa range misconceived in Herbert Spencers rst principles and
other pre-Darwinian schemes of cosmic history to present a unilineal historical
development from more homogeneous to more heterogeneous orders. Lankester
and other observers noticed species degenerate in the sense that they have lost
once-vital functions of sensation, locomotion, or nutritionfunctions nowbecome
vestigial or evidently deleted altogether. These creatures have been modied in nat-
ural selection from a more complex or higher into a simpler or lower formfor
example, in the adaptation of parasitism among the barnacles that Darwin had
studied on the coast of Chile in his service on the Beagle.
15
Challenged by his oppo-
nents to explain why primitive Foraminafera do not seem to have appreciably
evolved, to have been modied, Darwin pointed out in 1863 that animals may
even become degraded if their simplied structure remains well tted for their
habits of life, as we see in certain parasitic crustaceans [that is, barnacles].
16
What might appear to be a persistent and stable (unmodied) kind could be under-
stood to be a degenerate formwith its more dierentiated ancestor sometimes
unrecognized as suchsubsisting in a kind of durable if down-scaled and de-
dierentiated equilibrium.
If Des Esseintess family line is said to be degenerate, his orchidsin the vocab-
ulary for organic histories current in Huysmanss dayare neither specically deca-
dent nor specically degenerate modied tokens of the previous type of their genea-
logical stock. The orchids of the novel are no more and no less than the stock itself,
the manifestation or incarnation of its natural identity and historyan identity
and history that Des Esseintes embraces as supposedly his own. Still, if the orchids
themselves are neither decadent nor degenerate in any substantive evolutionary
sense so far as any botanical fact provided in the novel might suggest, it seems that
it is decadent and maybe degenerate to idealize them as Huysmanss protagonist
doesto brood over them in the hothouse. Virtually the same descriptions of what
is virtually the same owerDarwins description on the one hand and Huys-
manss on the otherin context noticed dierent aspects of their meaning.
The potential decline and extinction of its kind is as much a part of an organ-
isms historicity as its potential fertility and proliferation. But unlike Decadent writ-
ers and artists, Darwin did not consistently represent death at the absolute heart
or innermost vortex of natural history. As he wrote in 1839 in one of his early note-
books, It is dicult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings
going on in the peaceful woods & smiling elds.
17
Although he recognized the
temporality of decline and extinction in natural selection (albeit somewhat reluc-
tantly), he had no overarching speculative frameworknothing akin to a Freudian
death drive or a Heideggerean being-toward-deathwithin which to situate any
given form in the absolute temporality of its decline and death.
18
Rather, he tended
to orient his researches to the leading edge of organic variation bound up as a per-
sisting adaptationa living and to that extent a successful formthat might or might
not historically be tending toward its complete disappearance, its evolutionary ex-
tinction. Indeed, the continuous history of modication in generation ensures that
even if a particular form becomes extinct it can leave its descendants in the living
world; in a sense the end or death of organic formunlike the end or death of
narcissistic psychic desire or individuated concrete Dasein imagined by Freud or
Heideggeris not absolute insofar as formcontinues to evolve. The very extinction
of a particular form can testify to the vital historical persistence of its own progeny:
as Darwin showed, modied descendants well-tted to the latest circumstances
tend to supplant and extinguish their progenitors. Needless to say, the deposited
history of naturethe fossil recordseems to give evidence of the extinction of
forms, whether or not they should be described as decadent or degenerate. ( In de-
veloping his theory Darwin carefully studied extinct Ur-barnacles of the British
Islesspecies said by later Darwinian biologists to have degeneratively lost their
locomotive functions.)
19
But it is largely in the natural history of human culture that
we can fully observe and, more important, that we can fully experiencethat we
can best understandthe immanent struggle of forms of life new and old, once
and future, superseded and newly needed, growing and decliningeven if this
agon, writ large, also constitutes the cultural history of all nature as such and not
merely the natural history of our own human culture. To use a somewhat paradoxi-
cal formula, what Darwin himself had envisioned as natural selection and its tempo-
rality must be seen under the aspect of cultural temporalitythe horizon within
which we know death and within which, indeed, we are death.
To revert to my title, then, decadence is an organic metaphor. So it was among
ancient Roman critics of the literary styles and social mores of the day;
20
so it served
the Baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century in por-
traying the rise and decline of that Roman civilization;
21
and so it remained in late-
nineteenth-century and n-de-sie`cle polemics about a contemporary Decadent art
and a seemingly degenerate society. Indeed, the organic metaphor has been re-
marked, especially by its critics, in all discourses of decadencewhether we address
an attribution of decadence to a particular artistic practice or social custom ( like
that personied or performed in the 1890s by Oscar Wildes Lord Henry Wotton
in The Picture of Dorian Gray) or substantive theories of decadence ( like those circu-
lated by Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and other historians and sociologists
from the 1920s through the 1950s).
22
In these discourses on decadence, we might
think, an improper naturalismhas been imported into what should be a specically
cultural realma realm of specically aesthetic, political, and social history and
critique. Thus, for example, styles or civilizations can be said to have a life history
(and hence a decline and decadence) only metaphorically.
23
By the same token,
human character or the human psyche can be said to be degenerate only in the
terms of a pathologizing organicisminherently unsuited to the fundamentally non-
corporeal Geistlichkeit of human consciousness. As far as they go, these and similar
objections to the organic metaphor of decadenceto particular attributions and
to general histories of decadence in human sociability and consciousnessare well
taken. But ultimately they tend to miss the mark. At its heart, decadence is not so
much the metaphor in which Nature has been appliedapplied as a mere met-
aphor and to that extent supposedly in an improper wayto Culture. Darwin
frequently acknowledged the stimulus given to his botanical researches by the expe-
rience and the practical lore of ower growers and animal breeders; his own trea-
tise on The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication appeared in 1868. As
his metaphor of natural selection might suggest, and as Huysmanss orchid-
collecting critic-connoisseur conrms, at its heart decadence is really a metaphor
of Culture applied to Natureof a human necessity evident to us in and as culture
applied to all nature both within and without human culture itself.
Here we enter deep waters. They are no less murky for being familiar in the
scholarly and critical literature on decadence and decadences. The metaphorical
transfer that I have just mentioned builds upon a wholesalea radicalcultural
recognition of the ux of death in human experience as a fact of life. To use
Friedrich Nietzsches term, the historical sense of decadencethe Decadent
historical senseproers a radically thanatological hermeneutics of the self-
cultivation or what I am calling the culture of nature: all life comes into being and
passes away in irreversible metastasis and consumption, whether imagined as the
re and ame at the end or the heart of the world or as the ever-increasing attrition
of the least-t descendants of a once-well-constituted stock.
Scholars of decadent movements in ancient and modern cultures have rightly
pointed to the rhetorical contiguityeven the mutual solicitationof an acute
awareness of the essential declension of our days, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the rise of regenerationist doctrines of postcorporeality or immortality. Im
not Latinist enough to say whether the radical awareness of the constraints and
foibles of natural necessity expressed by Petronius or Macrobius had anything to
do with the projection of regeneration by Commodian of Gaza or the Eucharisticon
of Paulinus of Pella. But Huysmanss Des Esseintes arrayed and collated these dis-
junct texts in his library at Fontenay; he perused them during the long twilights of
his own decadence in order to discover a historical explanation and justication of
his own condition: they were continuing entries, he thought, in a centuries-long
history of reection on the material decomposition and the salvic reconstitution
of the cosmos.
24
In a comprehensive viewof the matter, Marius the Epicurean followed
its eponymous protagonist through the general noetic development as Mariuss own
history of consciousnessat least in Walter Paters vision of its Hellenistic and Ro-
man terms. Marius had been raised as a boy to expect and to accept his healing or
his death in the White Temple of Aesculapiusto live or to die without return.
But the more mature Marius nally embraced the Christian martyrs certainty of
resurrection. To be sure, if Paters view was comprehensive it was not unbiased.
The absolute and unregenerated death of a pagan self-awareness, Pater imagined,
was not without compensation in this life: at the threshold of death in the White
Temple, the young Marius experiences an ecstatic erotic and fundamentally narcis-
sistic awakeninghomoerotic and self-aective. In the White Temple, Marius
found his own self and image; whether he dies in its armsor instead might be
healed thereseems less momentous in his history than the erotic self-rendezvous
itself. Paters narrative of Mariuss self-transcendence found itself hard pressed to
transcend this beginningthe primal appearance of Mariuss genius. The em-
peror, Marcus Aurelius, and the Christian believers, priests, and bishop seem to be
pale shadows of the Aesculapian vision. In itself this diculty in Paters dramatic
presentation of the story exhibits the dynamic tensionPaters themebetween
types of generation understood in dierential relation to the fact of death.
It would be easy to dismiss Paters novel as the piety of a repentant classics
donshadowed by the very homoeroticisms it attempts to sublateif it were not
for the representativeness of its theme. Surveying the nineteenth-century French
and British Decadence, Marie-France David has shown howthe Christian novels of
the 1830s and 40sworks such as the Last Days of Pompeii and especially Cardinal
Wisemans Fabiolaimagined a world-historical cultural-spiritual antithesis (the
noetic poles traversed in Mariuss spiritual journey) personied in the twinned and
historically contemporary gures of Tiberius and Jesus.
25
( It is no surprise to nd
that the Tiberian position often inected Decadent forms of life in the later nine-
teenth century and at the n de sie`cle. To take a striking example, it was overtly
marked in the activities of Jacques Fersen, a minor Decadent poet and patron of
the arts; at the turn of the twentieth century, Ferseneeing a homosexual scandal
in Parisbuilt his very own Des-Esseintes-like retreat, the Villa Lysis, on the head-
lands of Capri above the ruined Villa of Tiberius, the notorious setting of the emper-
ors sexual debaucheries as narrated by the Roman historians.)
26
Organicized, the
cosmic spiritual struggle reappeared as an ever-present antithesis in the debates
over Darwinism in the 1860s and 70sthe distinction between living-and-dying
in natural necessity (the pagan and thanatist polebecome scientic and Darwin-
ian) versus dying-and-living in spiritual transcendence (the Christian and eternalist
polereasserted as moral).
27
And reculturalized in turn, it became the very dy-
namic of Decadent art in the 1880s and 1890s, then and even now understood on
the model of an organic metaphora metaphor for organic life and natural history
that had itself precipitated from a model of decadent culture and its history in the
rst place. In this nal recursion the model of the decline and death of human life
and its cultural forms applied to nature and its supposedly irreversible decay could
be reapplied to cultural practices that might or might not essentially exhibit any
kind of organic decomposition or morbidity. In this circuitry, decadencelike its
twin, the metaphor of sexualityis a fact of life, even a driving force, that life must
accept and might admire even in its deathliness.
The discursive passagethe speculative relocationof the signs and tokens of
death from culture to nature and from nature back to culture nds its own ground
in a recognition that natural necessityseen from a human cultural perspective
is not time-bound and time-limited in a phenomenal sense. The real time of organic
proliferation, the real time of organic extinction, the real time of all modication
and mutation and the real time of all adaptation and decadence in betweenlittle
or nothing of this historical temporality can readily be grasped as the real time of
any human experience. In the organic metaphor of decadence, human urgency or
the sense of timelinessthe need and desire to live and to act now and in the ux of
sensation and understanding heremust be imported from the experience of human
beings engaged in their social worlds into a timeless natural process that has no
essential temporal limit or bound. In the end, then, in the organic metaphor of
decadence the social temporality of aesthetic, political, and moral wish, choice, and
actionof desiring will in the human person and agentwill be translated into
the timeless vulcanism and larvation of natural-historical developmentder Wille
riotnr 2. Darwins tree of organic being. Reprinted from Charles
Darwin, Notebook B (183738), in Charles Darwins Notebooks,
18361844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries,
ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. ( Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 180. Reprinted by
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
in Arthur Schopenhauers sense. Indeed, Schopenhauers rewritinghis virtual
inversionof the ordinary terms of a sub-Cartesian philosophy of a knowing ego
exemplies the basic metaphorization at issue here. His philosophy became a touch-
stone for Decadents: when individual human will merely incarnates der Wille, and
as such strives to knowits (own) blind pulsation as the reality of the world (and itself )
behind representation, ideation, and artistic creation, then the timeless current of
der Wille must be the real identity and history of our own human will. Our most
self-conscious representations must recognize the pervasive force of this inconscient
Trieb or primary drive as the inhuman natural fact of our life.
28
To be sure, to make my point so far I have exaggerated the distinction between
the essentially immeasurable times of natural necessitytimeless so far as sensate
and sensuous human consciousness must be concernedand the deadly pace of
the temporalities of human experience in culture. Darwin did have a particular
image, if not a precise chronology, of the temporality of natural decline. His rst
notebook dealing with the Transmutation of Species, for example, visualized the
branching tree of organic being (g. 2).
29
According to his later description of
this history, As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch
out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has
been with the great Tree of Life, which lls with its dead and broken branches
the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its everbranching and beautiful
ramications.
30
In his early graphic envisioning of this traditional image, he tried
to show how some branches (all of them descend from an ancient form of the
species, 1) continue to throw out new twigsand live on in these descendants.
Other branches, however, do not proliferate (such as the left-hand branch at the
lowermost fork or the second pair of branchings as we move up the main trunk);
rather, they die out. ( In the diagram, the thirteen T-shaped branches represent
recent forms, descendent variants that are surviving in the implied present or
now of the diagram, and the twelve untipped branches represent contemporarys
[that] must have left no ospring at all; overall, the diagram represents the forma-
tion of many species in [the] same genus.) Indeed, Darwin thought that some
forms must die out because in the diagramhe assumed that the number of members
of the ancestral population (1) and of the survivor variants (A, B, C, and D) must
be the same. Graphically the diagram might tend to suggest the very opposite
pointnamely, that we should observe an absolute proliferation of members of the
population(s). But Darwin says he means that the thirteen survivors minus the
twelve extinguished forms equal 1. In a dierent inkand at a later moment?
he actually noted on the diagramthat [the] case must be that one generation then
should be as many living as now. To do this & to have many species in same genus
(as is). REQUIRES extinction. Or as his main note continued,
Thus genera would be formed,bearing relation to ancient types.with several extinct
forms, for if each species an ancient (1) is capable of making, 13 recent forms.Twelve
of the contemporarys must have left no ospring at all, so as to keep the number of species
constant. . . . This requires principle that the permanent varieties produced by conned
breeding & changing circumstances are continued & produce according to the adaptation
of such circumstances & therefore that death of species is a consequence.
31
Earlier in the notebook, in fact, Darwin had remarked that the tree of life should
perhaps be called the coral of life, [the] base of branches dead; so that passages
cannot be seen.
32
Implicitly, then, the Tree of Extinctionas we might call the diagram
oered a time line between an ancient 1 (the root trunk of the tree) and the
contemporaries A, B, C, and D (the crown of the tree): up-and-outwards means
later, younger, or newer, whether or not these variants leave ospringwhether
their variant form lives or dies. Moreover, Darwin surely intended a direct
correlation between the represented length of a branch and the historical duration of
a variation before modication. For example, the seven declining (nonsurviving)
variants closely related to the group of contemporaries B, C, and D seemingly ap-
peared later in the overall history, and mostly lived less long, than the four
forms extinguished on the ancestral pathway leading to the group at A. We can see,
too, that the complete decline of one particular variant is absolutely contemporary
riotnr 3. Darwins great Tree of Life. Reprinted from Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of Species ( London, 1859), 96.
with the orescence of the line immediately ancestral to group C; and we can see,
by contrast, that the decline of a variant that is ancestrally related to both these lines
continues to occur throughout the period of time that group C is ourishing. But
this history of relativeand most important of co-relationaldure es is not clearly
marked and measured graphically. Within the context and the history of decline
and extinction, the diagram explicitly tries to visualize not so much the duration
as the degree of the variations in the form of the ancestral species or what Darwin
later called variation of character: as Darwins main note put it, between A. &
B. [there is] immens [sic] gap of relation. C. and B. the nest gradation, B & D
rather greater distinction. Indeed, the model really observed variation as such as
the essential fact of natural historyspecically distinguished fromthe immutabil-
ity of species as supposed special creations. In Darwins stated interpretation of his
own image-model, then, it is virtually as if temporality is merely the secondary by-
product of essential primary variation rather than the other way around.
In his later published diagramof his doctrine, one of the most inuential scien-
tic images of his era, Darwin overtly chronicized his great Tree of Life to depict
a history of extinction, modication, and proliferation extending over fourteen
thousand generations (g. 3). I cannot nd a satisfactory internal explanation of
this particular dure e. Maybe it was simply an arbitrary way for Darwin to say an
awfully long timeespecially if the generations in question are supposed to be
human generations. But nothing in the analytic substance of Darwins genealogy of
the divergence of characters requires any temporal specication whatsoeverany speci-
cation, that is, beyond the duration of generation and reproduction itself. In the
natural history of decay and death an awfully long time or an Augenblick are all the
samethe timeless working of necessary variation in generation that occurred in
the immeasurably ancient past and will continue to occur indenitely into the fur-
thest future. Therefore I suspect that Darwins diagramit provided the latest or-
ganic metaphor for accounts of decay and extinction in human historyitself in-
herited and reprojected a rhetorical modeling of human generativeness in culture.
In the diagram, each horizontal axis of synchronic in-this-time-ness intersecting each
vertical axis of diachronic of-this-form-ness marks a particular here and now that
we can seefrom an Olympian evolutionists perspectiveto be tending toward
life or toward death. According to Darwin, his Great Tree shows the constant
tendency in the improved descendants of any one species to supplant and extermi-
nate in each stage of descent their predecessors and their original progenitor. The
literary resonances hereBiblical, Sophoclean, Saturnian, Shakespearean
deserve more attention than I can give them in this essay. But as an imagination
of a duration, fourteen thousand generations might count as a wish to out-
Methuselah any Methuselah: even the longest-lived human being cannot see all
this change and death as his time in his time. Building on ideas developed in Man
and Superman of 1895, in Back to Methuselah George Bernard Shawimagined in 1921
that creative evolution (as it had come to be called by that point) could produce
a race of highly improved human Methuselahsfor him, a partial refutation of
mechanistic Darwinism and a rebuke to pessimistic Decadence.
33
But Shaw did
not really say howthis evolution would cope with the resulting dire overpopulation
of Methusalehs. It would seem that the most creative evolution in Shaws sense
would also have to tolerate the greatest decadence in Darwins sense. ( Perhaps a
great deal of celibacy and onanism or a rather specialized culture of compulsory
homosexuality could mitigate proliferation?) And at any rate, Shaws futuristic
Methusaleh only lives a notch or two in the long Darwinian divergence.
We can now appreciate the proximity or the near identity of Darwins and
Huysmanss orchidsvirtually the very same forms. In both cases, the writers ap-
preciatethey admirethe morphology in question. They dwell at length, in de-
tail, and in practically the same terms on the distinctiveness of the form, its striking
color or shape or tasteas it were unnatural just to the degree that in no other
time and place, no other here and now, has nature generated such a thing. The
descriptions interpret the same history. But they dier in the degree to which a
human-historical subject of the temporality of the object in relation to its unique and
bizarre formal characterits strange and lurid variationhas been projected. On
the one hand, despite his seeming evolutionism, or rather precisely because of its
analytic and rhetorical framing, Darwins description is essentially atemporal and
the orchids adaptation seemingly timeless in its timea duration not dated by us
and certainly not date-ing of us even though it must extend from a time before
Darwins observation of it in Trinidad, Kew, or Down House to a time after the
publication of his dissections. If there is modication or decadence of the form, it
occurs, at least rhetorically or in the organic metaphor Darwin himself adopted, in
a history outside our experience of itin its natural history of natural selection.
( Thus Darwin often systematically overlooked the cultural history of natural de-
clinesuch as the disappearance of tropical orchids in their natural ecologies un-
der the pressures of agricultural and industrial development or, to take another
example, the situation of supposedly primitive peoples in the marginal habitats to
which they had been forced by colonial incursion.) To be fair, in The Eects of Self-
and Cross-Fertilisation Darwin did cultivate and track histories of modication, and
he showed that the pace of selection can be well within a human-historical or cul-
tural Augenblickas any successful tulip or dog breeder had known all along. But
the model of natural selection and its metaphorization of the cultures it observed
(and indeed created) in tulip- or dog-breeding or orchid collection and cultivation
required no essential specication of durationof the beginning and the ending of
a beautiful or wonderful variation persisting in the world temporarily. And on the
other hand, despite Huysmanss seemingly solipsistic sensationalism, or rather
within its specically thanatological perspective, his description of the ower is
essentially temporalizing: the orchids fantastic adaptation is absolutely time-
bounda point of time both in its time and in ours. Darwin takes the orchid,
though he may have observed only one single ower, to express the historicity of its
genera, species, and varieties across all their thousands of generationsthe Tree
of Life. Huysmans observes an orchid at one particular intersection of the vertical
and horizontal axes of the culture of its natural historynamely, the point identical
with the instant of human selection, with the moment (it has formal character and
temporal duration in itself ) of the collection of the form. This collectionand the
culture it bespeaksnecessarily is the mark of itsand ourdeath. Variation in
Darwinian selection, the natural history of the divergence of characters, seems
to have a merely arbitrary temporalitya historical frame extended and dated to
t the prior facts of ux and change. In Huysmanss projected history, by contrast,
an essential time-boundednessthe truth of generation, growth, decline, death,
and extinction in our own life and cultureconstitutes the very necessity of selec-
tion. It requires the essentially date-ing frame of cultivation that we extend in our
own time to face the facts of life and death throughout the whole of nature. In
Darwins, time is selection. In A Rebours, selectioncultivation, form, and even
human artistry and noesis as suchis time.
In his intense and subtle essay on Huysmans, Havelock Ellis contrasted what
he called the idealism of the decadent and the classic artist. The [decadent art-
ist], he wrote, idealizes along the line of death, the [classic artist] along the line
of life which the whole race has followed, and both on their own grounds are irrefut-
able, the logic of life and the logic of death, alike solidly founded in the very struc-
ture of the world, of which man is the measuring rod.
34
Darwins orchids were
natural things idealized along the line of life; his measuring rod was his hothouse
recording of slight modication fromgeneration to generation. Huysmanss orchids
were cultivated things idealized along the line of death, and his measuring rod
was an arraying of owers set up for display today. Darwins and Huysmanss or-
chids are the very same organismspossibly at the very same stage or moment
of their own intrinsic orescence and desuetude. Their history, however, has been
grasped fromdierent ends: paradoxical as it might seem, Darwin sees nature from
the perspective of culture and death from the perspective of life, while Huysmans
sees culture from the perspective of nature and life from the perspective of death.
The metaphors of each writer depended on literal facts primordially recognized by
the otherbut each goes on to show what the other does not say. The orchid itself
might be the one history or the otherthe very sign of absolute perpetuity in trans-
mutation or the very token of utter evanescence in creation. More likely it is both
at oncethe germ and the husk, the nectar and the sting.
Not e s
1. This essay originated as a keynote address at the International Conference on Ancient
and Modern Decadence at Bristol University in July 2003. I am grateful to Jonathan
Dollimore, Charles Martindale, Matthew Potolsky, and Elizabeth Prettejohn for their
comments on that presentation.
2. See Joyce Stewart, The History of Orchids at Kew, in Joyce Stewart, ed., Orchids at
Kew (London, 1992), 126 (information on 1415). The Monks Head was rst de-
scribed in 1822.
3. Robert H. Schomburgk, On the Identity of Three Supposed Genera of Orchideous
Epiphytes, Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 17 (1837): 52122. The specimen
was illustrated in this report (plate 21).
4. Arthur W. Holst, The World of Catasetums (Portland, Or., 1999), 32; for Robert Allen
Rolfe, see Phillip Cribb and Joyce Stewart, Orchid Taxonomy, the Herbarium and
Library, in Stewart, Orchids at Kew, 9799.
5. John Lindley, The Vegetable Kingdom; or The Structure, Classication, and Uses of Plants Illus-
trated Upon the Natural System, 3rd ed. (London, 1853), 178. Lindley reported Schom-
burgks example inaccurately; according to him, the Catasetum was the female while
Monacanthus was sterile. Reporting that a similar specimen had appeared in the Duke
of Devonshires garden at Chatsworth, Lindley appeared to accept these anomalies;
they prepare the mind for more startling discoveries than could have been otherwise
anticipated (178). Schomburgk had already observed other inorescences like the one
he presented to the Linnean Society; because it was not unique, it could not be consid-
ered one of those freaks of Nature which not unfrequently occur but rather suggested
to him the idea that the genera Monachanthus, Myanthus, and Catasetum form but
one genus; The Identity of Three Supposed Genera, 521. But this provisional con-
clusionwhile on the right track in noting traces of sexual dierence in Orchideous
owersdid not resolve the problem; rather, it simply resettled it at a more general-
ized rung on the typological ladder.
6. See Darwins remarks in the Gardeners Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, no. 37 (Septem-
ber 14, 1861): 831, in Paul H. Barrett, ed., The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin (Chi-
cago, 1977), 2:41.
7. Charles Darwin, On the Three Remarkable Sexual Forms of Catasetum tridendatum,
An Orchid in the Possession of the Linnean Society, Journal of the Proceedings of the
Linnean Society (Botany) 6 (1862): 15157, in Collected Papers; 2:6369. For the main pub-
lication integrating his researches on Catasetums, see Charles Darwin, The Various Con-
trivances by Which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (1862), 2nd ed. (London, 1877), 180
(description of Catasetums), 193206 (description of C. tridentatum). In 1862 Darwin de-
scribed the orchid (nowC. macrocarpum) as trimorphic, belonging to the polygamous
class recognized by Linnaeus; later he called it heterostyled; Charles Darwin, The
Dierent Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (London, 1877), 2, 11. It would now
be described as heterogamous ( bearing sexually dierent owers) and polymorphic
(having two or more dierent forms of the species). According to recent research, in
C. macrocarpum sometimes owers are found with intermediate polymorphic owers
ranging from male-like to female-like, combining the features of male owers and
female owers in one sterile entity. Flowers previously thought to be hermaphroditic
[as in the case of Monacanthus] are in most cases non-functional and appear to be
errors ; N. A. van der Cingel, An Atlas of Orchid Pollination: America, Africa, Asia, and
Australia (Rotterdam, 2001), 84. It is not my purpose in this essay to consider post-
Darwinian orchidology.
8. Darwin, Various Contrivances, 1.
9. Ibid., 293. Cf. Charles Darwin, The Eects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable
Kingdom (London, 1877): In 1862 I summed up my observations on Orchids by saying
that nature abhors perpetual self fertilisation. If the word perpetual had been omitted,
the aphorismwould have been false. As it stands, I believe that it is true, though perhaps
rather too strongly expressed; and I should have added the self-evident proposition that
the propagation of the species, whether by self-fertilisation or by cross-fertilisation, or
asexually by buds, stolons, etc., is of paramount importance (8).
10. See Darwin, Cross and Self Fertilisation, 1618, 20, and Charles Darwin, Pangenesis,
Nature 3 (1871): 5023, in Collected Papers, 2:16567. The account of pangenesis was
amplied in the second volume of Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants
Under Domestication, 2nd ed. (London, 1876). For discussion, see Rasmus G. Winther,
Darwin on Variation and Heredity, Journal of the History of Biology 33 (2000): 425
55; for intellectual and historical context, see R. C. Olby, Origins of Mendelism, 2nd ed.
(Chicago, 1985).
11. For Huysmanss sources, see H. Brunner and J.-L. de Coninck, En marge dA Rebours de
J.-K. Huysmans (Paris, 1931), 10950; this collationthough it overlooks a great deal
has been repeated in subsequent scholarship. Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans
(Oxford, 1955), 8384, mentions Huysmanss abstracts of his [reading] notes for each
chapter of the novel. The inuence of the novel in later manifestations of literary and
artistic Decadence has been well documented; a thorough reviewconcentrating on
English literaturecan be found in G. A. Cevasco, The Breviary of the Decadence: J.-K.
Huysmanss A Rebours and English Literature (New York, 2001), with full references. In
2000, a previously unknown complete transcript of Oscar Wildes prosecution of the
Marquess of Queensberry in 1895 (usually studied in a much shorter text) unexpectedly
turned up; it shows that the novel played a major role in setting up Wildes defeat and
his subsequent prosecution for sodomy by the Crownand this despite the fact that
the judge nally ruled against Queensberrys counsels wish to cross-examine Wilde on
the erotic and sordid details of Huysmanss text; see Irish Peacock and Scarlett Marquess:
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, introduction and commentary by Merlin Holland (Lon-
don, 2003), 96100.
12. References are to J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmonds-
worth, 1959), 97 and 101.
13. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy,
and Culture of the Fin de Sie `cle in Europe, ed. T. Jeerson Kline and Naomi Schor (Balti-
more, 2002), 80. Bernheimer rightly focuses on how what is factitious and articial
[in Des Esseintess world] exhibits the spectacle of life in all its putrescent decomposi-
tion but without the biological motor that generates its entropic energy (79).
14. For Des Esseintess orchids as symbols of female sexuality, see, for example, Angela
Nuccitelli, A Rebours Symbol of the Femme-Fleure: A Key to Des Esseintes Obses-
sion, Symposium 28 (1974): 33645.
15. See Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirrepedia, with Figures of All the Species,
2 vols. (London, 185154); for comments on the Nauplius and adult forms, ancient
and modern (or degenerate), see E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration, A Chapter in Darwinism
(London, 1880), 3437.
16. Charles Darwin, The Doctrine of Heterogeny and the Modication of Species, Athe-
naeum, Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, no. 1852 (April 25, 1863): 55455,
in Collected Papers, 2:79.
17. Charles Darwin, Notebook E, March 12, 1839, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 1836
1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, transcribed and ed. Paul
H. Barrett, et al. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 429.
18. For fundamental considerations on the Freudian notion, see Jean Laplanche, Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis (1970), trans. Jerey Mehlman (Baltimore, 1976). For Martin
Heideggers perspective, see Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativ-
ity (1982), trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, 1991).
19. Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae or Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great
Britain, 2 vols. (London, 185154); see Lankester, Degeneration, 2325.
20. See Gordon Williams, Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire (Berke-
ley, 1978).
21. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur
and Decline of the Romans (1734), trans. Jehu Baker (New York, 1882); Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (177688), ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols.
(London, 18961900).
22. Aconcise critical guide to these grandiose schemes can be found in A. L. Kroeber, Styles
and Civilizations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957).
23. Thomas H. Munro, Evolution in the Arts and Other Theories of Culture History (Cleveland,
1963), is a massive review of the sources.
24. Huysmans, Against Nature, chap. 3 (4052).
25. Marie-France David, Antiquite latine et De cadence (Paris, 2001).
26. For the Villa Lysis, see Roger Peyrette, Amori et Dolori Sacrum: Jacques FersenLa Scelta
di Capri (Capri, 1990); for Fersen, see James Money, Capri: Island of Pleasure (London,
1986), 8693. I have discussed Fersens and other aesthetic-decadent forms of life in
the long nineteenth century in Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920, Art
History 24 (2001): 24777.
27. Perhaps the most powerful statement of the moral alternative to Darwinism ap-
peared in St. George Mivarts famous critical reviewof The Origin of Species in The Quar-
terly Review; see its full development in Mivart, The Genesis of Species (London, 1871).
But it was also palpable in the writing of Darwins professed supporters, such as Asa
Gray in the United States; see Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism
(1876), ed. A. Hunter Dupree (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
28. Arthur Schopenhauers metaphysical ethics was essential reading in later nineteenth-
century Decadence; it provided Des Esseintes with his preferred philosophical litera-
ture; see T. G. West, Schopenhauer, Huysmans, and French Naturalism, Journal of
European Studies 1 (1971): 31324; Alain Roger, Huysmans et Schopenhauer, in Huys-
mans: Une esthe tique de la de cadence, ed. Andre Guyaux, Christian Heck, and Robert Kopp
(Geneva, 1987), 8394. In a section on Human Values and Decadence, a ne (and
near-contemporary) polemical essay systematically contrasted the Schopenhauerian
(and Decadent) negation of life and Friedrich Nietzsches total acceptance and max-
imization of life; Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), trans. Helmut
Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst, Mass., 1986), 13660.
To be sure, Schopenhauer tried to preserve the ideational structure of aesthetic cre-
ationseven as he recognized their proximity to Will in his sensein his doctrine of
art as a replication of Platonic Ideas, a third kingdom, as Simmel put it, between
Will and empirical objects (81). I explore this conception in Schopenhauers Ontology
of Art, qui parle (forthcoming).
29. Charles Darwin, Notebook B(183738), 36, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 180. Aphoto-
graph of the page and the diagram is supplied in Mea Allan, Darwin and His Flowers:
The Key to Natural Selection (NewYork, 1977), 161. For Darwins historical and narrative
rhetorics, see especially Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin,
George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000).
30. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 96.
31. Charles Darwins Notebooks, 3738.
32. Darwin, Notebook B, 25, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 177.
33. See Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (NewYork, 1921), esp.
xviixxvi.
34. Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit (New York, 1930?), 267. The essay was included in later
editions of Elliss book, rst published in 1890, but it had originally been written for
Armations, published in 1898. It is one of the best studies of Huysmans, and literary
decadence, ever written.

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