"The triple decadence: Decadence of the material; of the writer's language. The virgin snow where Shakespeare and Montaigne used to cut their deep furrows, is now but a slope flattened by innumerable tracks until it is unable to receive an impression. Decadence of the myth, for there is no longer a unifying belief (as in Christianity or in Renaissance Man) to permit a writer a sense of awe and of awe which he shares with the mass of humanity. And even the last myth of all, the myth of the artist's vocation, of 'l'homme c'est rien, l'oeuvre c'est tout', is destroyed by the times, by the third decadence, that of society. In our lifetime we have seen the arts advance further and further into an obscure and sterile cul-de-sac. Science has done little to help the artist, beyond contributing radio, linotype and the cinema; inventions which enormously extend his scope, but which commit him more than ever to the policy of the State and the demands of the ignorant. Disney is the tenth-rate Shakespeare of our age, forced by his universal audience to elaborate his new-world sentimentality with increasing slickness. There may arise Leonardos of the screen and microphone who will astound us but not until the other arts have declined into regional or luxury crafts, like book-binding, cabinet-making, thatching or pargetting. Today an artist must expect to write in water and to cast in sand." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Mind (1944)
"The Nostalgia movement began with the Art Nouveau revival; and the Art Nouveau revival began with the Mucha exhibition (May-June 1963) and the Beardsley exhibition (May-Sept 1966) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London." --Bevis Hillier, The Style of the Century (1983)
'Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own--a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by débris, as if the end of the world were at hand.' --Alfred de Musset, Confessions of a Child of the Century (1896) [soon to be a movie?!]
One of these days i'll get around to writing a History of Archaïcizing. Vergil did it; & there was a full-blown movement in the time of Fronto & Apuleius. If i recall correctly, the Late Tang also saw something of the sort; & of course the people of the time we now know as the Renaissance, thought that THEY were returning to the Good Old Days... Beddoes in the 19c, & Doughty & Eddison in the early 20c, wanted to write like Elizabethans; later on, Barth & Jong wrote novels in pseudo-18c English...
"...the Japanese of the Heian epoch tended to treat each element of their imported [from China] culture as if it were something integral and perfected. Yet, while they did not question the perfection of the whole, for they were acute observers rather than restless critics, their temper and their circumstances modified its parts and changed its very essence. This is why much of the Heian culture seems to us thin and unreal. It was a product of literature rather than of life. So the terms of Indian metaphysics became a kind of fashionable jargon, Buddhist rites a spectacle, Chinese poetry an intellectual game. We might almost summarise by saying that religion became an art and art a religion. Certainly what most occupied the thoughts of the Heian courtiers were ceremonies, costumes, elegant pastimes like verse-making and amorous intrigue conducted according to rules. Perhaps most important of all, because it entered into all, was the art of penmanship. ...to have a good hand was to have breeding and taste." --G B Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931/1952)
'Mandelstam...[uses] words of various contradictory associations: magnificent and obsolete archaism and words of everyday occurrence hardly naturalized in poetry. His syntax especially is curiously mixed--rhetorical periods tussle with purely colloquial turns of phrase. And the construction of his poems is also such as to accentuate the difficulty, the ruggedness of his form: it is a broken line that changes its direction at every turn of the stanza. His flashes of majestic eloquence sound especially grand in this bizarre and unexpected setting.' --D S Mirsky, History of Russian Literature
Cf "blixen": "...a trend that's been going on for a long time: the subdivision of culture along nonethnic, nongeographic lines. Call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture. Long ago, you were born into a culture, today you choose your culture. [I call this volitional ethnicity. --m.] ...Whatever niche you're in has it's [sic] own set of shared knowledge, but there's less we share with everybody in our geographic community. ...It's more than trivial issues of what music you like, it's what you know." --Karl Widerquist writing in Cake (The Book Issue, 1997?)
' The Northern Cold
The sky glows one side black, three sides purple.
The Yellow River's ice closes, fish and dragons die,
Bark three inches thick cracks across the grain,
Carts a hundred piculs heavy mount the river's water.
Flowers of frost on the grass are as big as coins,
Brandished swords will not pierce the foggy sky,
Crashing ice flies in the swirling seas,
And cascades hang noiseless in the mountains, rainbows of jade.' --Li Ho [Li He] in: Poems of the Late T'ang, tr. A G Graham
Not only were the Late T'ang poets reviving the Palace Style of three centuries earlier (their enemies called it "insect carving"--!), some of them (especially the greatest of them, Li Shangyin) were producing what can only be described as an anticipation of Surrealism--twelve hundred years ago. (Fusheng Wu, The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods, 1998)
