What
is the mark of every literary decadence? That life no longer resides in the
whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence
reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at
the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is
the simile of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of
atoms.
Nietzsche
The
Case of Wagner 7
I am writing in the somber close of that voluptuous
day which it has been my pleasure to adumbrate, without the skill of a Bourget
or a Barres, which allures the reader to pursue the same path (or to vary the
metaphor) to sound the depths and shoals of exoteric passions…
DM8
Trevor-Roper tells us that the unpublished
manuscripts were seen by two experts, who both pronounced it a work of literary
genius. The historian then says that had they known about Backhouse’s career as
a forger and swindler, they might not have given this assessment. Trevor-Roper
even goes so far as to propose an alternative title to the work: “The Imaginary Sexual Life of E.T.
Backhouse…”
By his own admission, then, Trevor-Roper falls
prey to the biographical fallacy, which interprets a work solely in terms of
what is known about the author’s life. Modern critical theory discounts this
view, as we do here, especially when that view of the author’s life and milieu is
hopelessly compromised by prejudice and ignorance, as we have seen. Trevor-Roper
then claims that he assessed the manuscripts by testing them internally by
their content. However, after the Hitler diaries fiasco, we now know that
Trevor-Roper’s skills as a textual scholar were not as acute as he would have
us think they were. Trevor-Roper seems to have been blinded by his own
professional interests as a historian, and by the work’s subtitle: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny
Backhouse, and by the fact that Dr Hoeppli had asked Backhouse to write his memoirs. But just because the
good doctor had asked for memoirs does not mean that that is what Backhouse
gave him.
Modern critical theory asserts that a work
should be judged on its own merits as a discrete, autonomous entity; or at
least by situating it within a genre and looking at its relationship with other
works from the genre; and that it should not be judged by how it does or does
not fulfill an authorial intention – a risky concept in theoretical terms- or
by how it does or does not correspond to a real truth – another risky
theoretical concept.
I will argue that Decadence Mandchoue is to be regarded in its entirety as a
successful work of self-conscious, deliberate literary fiction – a novel - and
not as a failed work of history or autobiography. I suggest that presented with
an opportunity- and a reader- by Dr Hoeppli’s kind offer, Backhouse set out to
put to paper a work he had long planned in outline and detail in his mind, a
work that would bring to life and preserve the artistic movement of his youth.
Decadence and the Decadents
I
would fain hope that the Goncourt Freres, Baudelaire, Flaubert, even Gautier,
would have found in my narratives a certain appeal (Bog Znayet - God knows,)
not because of much literary skill in them inherent, but owing to l’accent de
la verite de laquelle j’ose me flatter.
DM 14
Backhouse’s achievement is best brought out
by focusing on the first part of the title he gave his work: Decadence Mandchoue. Although it was
written in 1943, the work’s whole style and atmosphere is of the 1890s, of The Yellow Book, of the Symbolists, and
in particular, the Decadents. In fact, as we will see, Decadence Mandchoue has a strong claim to be regarded as one of the great Decadent masterpieces, along
with Huysman’s A Rebours and Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
An outcrop of the Symbolist movement, the
Decadents were a loosely collected group of writers and works who took their
cue from Baudelaire, Poe, and De Quincey, and included some of the people
Backhouse had known in his youth: Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Verlaine, Huysman,
Pierre Loueys, and Aubrey Beardsly to name a few. Decadence reached a pitch of
concentration in the fin de siècle-
that is, the period covered by the narrative arc of Decadence Mandchoue- but it
didn’t start or end there. Decadent art can be found in all periods of Western
history: the novels of Petronius and Apuleius are just as Decadent as the
movies of Kenneth Anger. It was the
dominant artistic movement of Backhouse’s youth, and he was attracted to it by
force of circumstance and friendship, and by temperament, as Decadence Mandchoue shows.
In what follows I will use ‘Decadent’ to
denote the artistic movement or certain characteristics which conform to it,
and ‘decadent’ to refer to decline in the real historical and social world.
Decadent art is characterized by the
following elements: an obsession with artifice over nature; an obsession with
the erotic; the movement of what is marginal to the centre and vice versa; an
obsession with the darker side of life, a kind of nostalgie de la boue balanced by a surface sheen of glamour;
inversion, both aesthetic, in which ugliness is made beautiful and the
beautiful is made ugly, and moral, in which deviance becomes fascinating while
what is conventionally correct is seen as banal; an obsession with the
androgyne, the hermaphrodite, and the femme
fatale; an obsession with the occult and heightened spiritual or emotional
states; a taste for Rome, with its cannibalism, drag, and officially sanctioned
sexual corruption of the young; a corroding use of irony; a breakdown in the
barriers between what is accepted as ‘taste’ and what is not; an obsession with
the exotic and an Orientalist perspective on it; a nostalgia for the past and a
delight in decline; a preference for the ruined and a prevailing mood of mould;
a delight in paradox; an obsession with obsession itself, perhaps, if the
energy required for real obsession was not being constantly sapped by the
enervating presence of ennui or the torpor induced by drugs; an interest in
states of (deliberately) altered consciousness
and synesthesia; …
The text signals its Decadent antecedents
in the very first paragraph of Chapter 1, which contains references to Decadent
artists, both in the text and in Backhouse’s own footnotes, including Wilde,
Robbie Ross, Huysmans, Verlaine, Anatole France and Swinburne. The narrator
tells us that the impulse to put pen to paper comes not from unholy lust nor decadence raffinee, but so much as from
instinctive curiosity and the spirit of Shakespeare’s sonnets (these last
of course form the basis of another great Decadent work: Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W.H., another text
couched in the form of an oral confession.)
Chapter 14 begins with a long disquisition
on the Decadents, in which the narrator specifically mentions the Decadent
aesthetic of favoring artifice over nature and describes the mood of his own
work in distinctly Decadent terms: I
definitely have in my mind the tint of mouldiness; wherein the woodlouse
thrives and multiplies. He quotes de Goncourt, la nature pour moi est ennemie, and gives a brief analysis of the
difference in their attitude to nature between Flaubert, Baudelaire and
Goncourt; he repeats once again his generic insistence that he is writing
truth, but does so in the context of Flaubert’s disgust of nature, which is of
course Decadent.
Resolutely apolitical, elitist and anti-
democratic, Decadence emphasizes the primacy of individual experience over
historical and social processes. All of these elements are characteristic of Decadence Mandchoue, as we will see. In
what follows I will first look at how the text’s assertion of veracity is part
of the Decadent aesthetic; then we will
see how this aesthetic informs the structure, language and imagery of the text.
Decadent Truth
Flaubert
exists in petto in these my studies, rich, according to normal conception, in
human depravity but owing nought to art, since they all happen to be true.
DM 14
The biggest obstacle to regarding Decadence Mandchoue as a successful work
of art and not as a failed historical document, is, paradoxically, the text’s own
claims that it is a true historical
document.
But.
The insistence on the veracity of the
events revealed is simply an aesthetic gesture: it is not real truth, but
artistic truth: this is not a memoir, but an imitation of a memoir. The
insistence on truth in Backhouse’s China
Memoirs should be understood as part of an artifice of verisimilitude, one
that is a characteristic maneuvre of Decadent art, which favours the fictional
autobiography and confession as a form: consider De Quincey’s Confessions; consider Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,
consider Abbe Jules by Octave Mirbeau,
consider Teleny, which has the form
of an oral confession; consider Balzac’s Sarrasine
with its nesting narratives. We are no more to take the text’s autobiographical
form as real than we are to understand, say, Dostoevsky’s underground man’s
notes as real. Backhouse’s China Memoirs
are no more memoirs than The Life and
Opinions of the Tomcat Murr are really written by a cat. When Fanny Hill
asserts in her Memoir that everything
she says is the stark naked truth, we don’t take this literally
because we know that this is a standard Decadent trope. The same goes for
Backhouse’s China Memoirs. In fact, we can go one step further and say that the appearance of
attempted veracity Backhouse gives his text is a species of hoax, one that
Trevor-Roper swallows hook line and sinker because he reads it as a clumsily authentic
but really spurious historical document, and not as the finely wrought work of Decadent
art it really is.
Backhouse includes the use of his own name
and experiences for the narrator and events of the text because he recognizes
their potential for Decadent art, as we shall see. But the narrator is not
Backhouse himself, but ‘Backhouse’, in the same way that Victor Segalen in Rene Leys is not the author Victor
Segalen, but the character ‘Victor Segalen’. The text only appears to be the
crazy visions of an exhausted Old China Hand, in which the boundary between
imagination and memory, between fact and fantasy, is constantly dissolving.
This appearance of rambling exhaustion is fully in keeping with the Decadent
aesthetic, which values decline and nostalgia and digression.
I an old man
A dull head among windy spaces
T.S.Eliot
Gerontion
| |
Forward
to the Reader DM
If we look again at the Forward to the Reader in more detail, Backhouse
seems to be signaling this artificial nature of the work quite clearly. We know that Backhouse absolutely detested
his family, so his remark about his respectable
family is to be understood as a sarcastic inversion of values centered on
the word ‘respectable’, a piece of Victorian, Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy which
Backhouse despised for obvious reasons, and which he transgresses and mocks in
the text that follows. The last sentence of the Forward similarly is to be understood as a piece of sarcasm: Such an action i.e of fiction supplanting
facts, would assuredly be despicable and indicative of no sense of honour
whatsoever, rendering me unworthy of decent people’s society! That
exclamation mark speaks volumes. We can imagine, from his rejection of the
foreign community in Beijing, what Backhouse thought of ‘decent people’s
society’. The whole ethos of Decadence is to reject what is ‘decent’.
Decadent Structure
In his study of Decadent writers and the
Decadent aesthetic, Affirmations
(1915) Havelock Ellis writes that one of the key characteristics of Decadence
is that the whole is subordinated to the
parts. He takes his cue here from Nietzsche, who in turn was paraphrasing
Bourget, whom Backhouse mentions in the quote I gave at the beginning.
Derek Sandhaus notes that there is some
uncertainty as to the correct ordering of the chapters, which can be taken as
isolated descriptions of events or scenes from the narrator’s life in Beijing. The
text refuses an overall narrative arc, and at the same time thereby refuses the
chronological development of an autobiographical narrative. Instead, what we
have is a series of atomized vignettes, which could conceivably be read in any
order. The narrator constantly refers to his work as ‘his studies’, or ‘this paper’,
showing he that he thinks of it in terms of a multiplicity of collected smaller
units rather than one big one. A quick glance at the chapter titles also
signals the work’s Decadence, with the inclusion of standard Decadent terms and
tropes: interlude, nocturne, vampire, cabinet
secret, demons, eunuchs, temple, palace, hammam and so on. While a sense of an overall design
is refused, however, a close reading of any of the chapters reveals careful
planning and patterning and a sense of a design within each chapter, a sense of
each chapter as a discrete, atomic entity.
We’ve already seen how the Cagliosotro
chapter takes key scenes from Cixi’s life and adds Decadent elements to them. A
close reading of another chapter, The
Fire From Heaven, Chapter 9 describes an incident in which two young lovers
in a pavilion on an island in the lake in the Forbidden City are obliterated by
a lightning bolt in flagrante delicto
during a fierce storm. The gathering storm clouds, both real and metaphorical,
are carefully built up during the narrative, which describes a pleasure jaunt
across the lake in a barge with Cixi, Li Lien Ying, the narrator, and a
beautiful young actor who is one of the doomed lovers, and who has just been
pleasuring Cixi. Present also is one of the Empress Dowager’s chamber maids,
who will be the other doomed lover, and a host of servants. As the storm
builds, they discuss the Confucian belief that only bad people are struck by
lightning, and then several antecedents are given. The most important of these
is the erotic tale of the death by lightning of the Jiaqing Emperor, in the
arms of his male lover. In this prefiguring narrative the Emperor and his
favorite are reduced to a pile of white ash.
After the lightning strikes, there is a
terrible fire in which the pavilion is burnt to the ground. As the storm
recedes, a lurid red sunset – the sunset
of Decadence itself- illuminates the turbulent waters of the lake. ‘Backhouse’ in a footnote describes the sinister illumination of the fire which was
then still burning fiercely and the lurid rays of an angry sunset, like a lost
soul that shall always suffer…and then describes how the lovers have also
been reduced to a pile of white ash. The chapter is beautifully crafted, with
all the details adding to the meaning of the whole, with a series of
prefigurings and echoes, and a carefully built up mood. This is self- conscious
techne, craft, art, not the mere
ramblings of fond memory.
Decadence
Mandchoue, then, consists of a series of exquisitely documented parts dissolving the
whole, as Camille Paglia puts it in Art
and Decadence.
Decadent Language
All style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.
Susan Sontag
Notes
on Camp
Backhouse’s
prose is the linguistic equivalent of Des Essientes’s tortoise.
The great
dilemma for Decadent literature is this: how can one truly achieve a Decadent
aesthetic, how can one really get at or get to Decadence in language that is
itself not corrupted by decadence? How can Decadence really be achieved by
using language that is utterly colonized by the middle-class, democratic forces
of the majority, the decent, the powerful, embodied in the two faced idol of
usage and prescription. Doesn’t the very inertia of the language, long
accustomed to a process of ‘normalization’, either under the heel of the censor
or the compulsion of market forces, fatally undermine the very ethos of
Decadence? What could a Decadent writer do to make language itself decadent?
What would a truly Decadent/decadent language even look like?
Mallarme’s way
out of this dilemma was to obliterate the norms of syntax and typesetting by
scattering his words across the page in a kind of to-hell-with-the-expense
gesture.
Oscar Wilde’s solution
in Dorian Gray was to empurple the
prose and create lists of fabulous objects and words, indeed making words
fabulous objects.
Huysman’s was to
compromise the poetic purity of his text by introducing an alien element of
extreme objectivity of description, a fascination with taxonomy and chronology,
and to include medical and scientific, Latin terminology, and words from
obscure technical discourse fields.
Backhouse uses
several methods to render his language Decadent. The first is to blend Wilde’s
tumescent approach with Huysman’s scientific curiosity. In keeping with the
Decadent parody of scientism, the narrator appears to believe that he is
writing a paper for an academic conference: It
is I think germane to the present paper… and includes footnotes by
‘Backhouse’.
His second
approach is to infect an English text with other languages, especially dead
languages such as Latin and Greek and Decadent languages such as French and
Chinese (for a respectable, decent, Anglo-Saxon reader, nothing is more Decadent
than French –pretentious, moi?). The
Chinese adds salt to the characterisation of Cixi and the other Chinese personages:
nearly everything they say is repeated three times, in English, Chinese characters,
and Wade Giles. They speak in their own tongue directly, and as it is refracted
(twice) through another tongue. Backhouse, in his use of Chinese, brings to the
fore the artifice of the language and its (ortho)graphical system, emphasizing
in many places the relationship between its extreme ornamental quality and how
this effects its meaning:
T’ung 統
does indeed mean ‘line’, and especially succession (as in Hsuan T’ung 宣統, succession to Hsuan Tsung宣統Tao
Kuang 道光), but unfortunately the words for President,
Tsung T’ung 總統 also
contain this character where it means supreme chief. The same thought struck
the Old Buddha who riveted her attention on the writing. “What T’ung does he (or she) mean?” p.217
The third way Backhouse
renders his language Decadent is to create, hovering above the narrative, as it
were, a multilingual discourse field of references to other texts, by means of
direct quotation or stylistic echoes. Space and time precludes us here from
looking in greater depth at these, but a cursory glance reveals that they
point, for the most part, to the theme of a decline from a golden age, and come
largely from other Decadent texts, both classical and ‘modern’.
What Mallarme, Wilde,
Huysmans and Backhouse have in common is that they all create an artifice of
language that foregrounds itself as Decadent:
the word becomes sovereign, as
Nietzsche writes. However, where Backhouse goes further than either Wilde or
Huysmans is first in the sheer range of his references, and second, in the
bravura way he handles camp. For a Decadent aesthetics to extend to language,
the language must also become decadent, and camp is one of the places you end up when you make language
decadent. Sontag writes in her seminal
essay Notes on Camp: Camp is art that proposes
itself too seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is
‘too much’, a remark that seems designed to apply specifically to areas of Backhouse’s
prose and project in Decadence Mandchoue.
The fin de siecle Decadents were too
early to discover the potential of camp for the Decadent aesthetic (although
Wilde was moving in that direction in Salome),
but Backhouse, writing in 1943, used it as a subtle parody of the Decadent
voice, entirely in keeping with the Decadent aesthetic of parodying other
discourses, but in this case, parodying Decadence itself:
“Now I am going to have my
evening meal and an opium pipe: Good appetite and good digestion. You shall
attend upon me at the hour of the Rat (11pm); don’t forget that I expect much
better results than yesterday.”
“Oh, your Majesty, my tool
was dry as your own rainless Gobi desert.”
“Well, we will investigate
it on the spot. I will expound to you the twenty-two divers postures in the
‘Clouds and the Rain”, while you in your turn, discourse to me with your
inimitable humour the subject of which you are master; I mean that puzzling
vocabulary and nomenclature of your beloved homosexual and pederastic
preoccupations.” DM 14
Decadent Imagery
Oh
the Tired Hedonists, of course, It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed
to wear faded roses in our button holes when we meet, and to have a sort of
cult for Domitian…
Oscar Wilde
The
Decay of Lying
‘The Cult of
Domitian’ Wilde mentions in his parody stands more generally for the obsession
with Imperial Rome and its decline, which formed a historical reference point
for the Decadent movement of the fin de
siecle. But Backhouse had no need of Imperial Rome to underpin his version
of Decadence: he had his own decadent empire right to hand: China in the late Qing
Dynasty.
China in the
Decadent imagination was a site of mystery, magic and the all-important exotic.
Chinoiserie in Decadent texts functions as a symbol of extreme artifice and
aestheticism. Wilde’s 1886 poem Le
Panneau describes a Chinese screen with a
little ivory girl/Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl/with pale green nails of
polished jade. Yeats’s 1938 late Decadent poem Lapis Lazuli uses Chinese imagery to establish a world of artificial
beauty quite remote from everyday life. China was also a symbol of decadence, dissolution
and depravity. The works of Pierre Loti had created a vogue for the decadent exotic,
and in his book Les Derniers Jours De
Peking, he had described the bird droppings on the sumptuous carpets in the
golden throne rooms inside the Forbidden City. China allowed the Decadents to
dream of their own personal empires, and even in some cases to create them, as
Loti did, leaving Peking with cartloads of treasure looted from the Forbidden
City, writing: I leave Peking tomorrow,
and this will be the end of my little imperial dream…
It was also the
origin of opium, both as a material substance and as a cultural trope, a nexus
involving visions and inspiration but also debilitation and decline. Gautier
and Baudelaire both noted in their essays on opium how the drug induced a vague
melancholy when the visions wore off. Opium of course features heavily in Decadence Mandchoue. In fact there are
times when it reads as a kind of opium-induced tribute to the Orientalist
visions of Gautier and De Quincey. Oscar Wilde, in a very revealing essay on
Zhuangzi (unfortunately, the essay is wrongly anthologized as ‘Confucius’) saw
the Daoist philosopher as a prototypical Decadent, someone who preached a paradoxical
doctrine very similar to the Decadents’, of the immorality of consciously doing
good, and the virtues of extreme idleness. Zhuangzi also appears in Wilde’s
1889 essay The Decay of Lying as a
symbol of the man who does nothing useful, rather like Des Essientes himself,
or an Eastern version of that great Russian sage Oblomov.
By the end of
the 19th century, aside from the imagined Decadence in Western eyes,
China was also deeply steeped in real decadence, with an overwheening, corrupt
bureaucracy only interested in matters of protocol and face, putting up a
determined resistance to the modern world. It had an ancient and archaic
culture characterized by extreme artifice, ornamentation, and a populace
stupefied by opium addiction. Desiree Nisard, one of the early theorists of
Decadence in Europe, defined decadence in 1834 as a condition where verbal ingenuity has replaced moral vision,
ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought
and language, a description that applies perfectly to late 19th
century China, and to Decadence Mandchoue
itself.
This view of
China was not only held by the West, however. Chinese intellectuals of the
early 20th century also regarded their culture and country as decadent. Liang
Ji, a scholar of the Beijing opera, committed suicide out of despair at the
irreversible decline of his country, declaring that the four cardinal virtues
of Chinese culture: loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness, had been
replaced by the four decadent virtues of eating, drinking, amusement, and
pleasure.
China as a
symbol of decadence, then, had a rich potential, and Backhouse saw this. With
his unparalleled knowledge of the culture, the people and the languages, he saw
that he was perfectly placed, by education, experience and inclination, to
create a work in which Western Decadence could interact with Chinese decadence.
If one is looking
for the moment when the Qing dynasty turned from greatness and began its
inexorable decline towards decadence, it is the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor
that springs to mind. After the pinnacle of greatness had been achieved in the
reigns of the Three Great Emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, followed
by a period of stablisation or stagnation during the reigns of Jiaqing and
Daoguang, the rot really sets in during the reign of Xianfeng and accelerates
inexorably thereafter, infecting irredeemably the reigns of the syphilitic
Tongzhi, the doomed and tragic Guangxu, and the infant puppet Puyi. What links
all these decadent Emperors together is the figure of Cixi, the Lady Yehonala,
consort of Xienfeng, mother of Tongzhi, nemesis and enemy of Guangxu, and
kingmaker on her deathbed of the infant Puyi. She is the thread running through
all the later reigns and overseeing –causing? – the decline of the Qing. She is
also Backhouse’s coherent nexus, the
figure that links together all the chapters of Decadence Mandchoue and its central embodiment of Decadence.
Doubly exotic (a
Celestial in a Western context, a Manchu in a Chinese context) she is also a
woman, and powerfully rapacious one at that. This is why Backhouse writes about
her in the way that he does, not because of his sick sexual fantasies, or to
titillate his tired old age with memories of his youthful debauchery, as the
text spuriously asserts, and as Trevor-Roper fell for, but because for Backhouse,
seeking to unite Western and Eastern modes of Decadence within a literary work,
she is, conveniently, a potent symbol of both decadence and Decadence. Presenting
her though the lens of personal, erotic memoir is a merely a convention of the
genre, as we have seen, so the question of whether Backhouse actually met her,
and whether the various congresses he describes with her are based on fact or
deluded fantasy therefore becomes irrelevant.
For a work of
art that aims at Decadence, a more powerful and resonant symbol cannot be
imagined. For what could possibly be more apt as an image of decadence, and as
a Decadent image, than an aged Empress locked in sexual congress with a young
homosexual, aristocratic foreigner? This symbol provides the focus of many kinds
of deviance and inversion: in power relations, in gender and sexual relations,
in age and cultural differences. It summons up feelings of disgust in the soul
of the literal minded, and feelings of transgressive delight in the soul of the
devotee of Decadence. Also, given the history of relations between China and
Britain specifically, and the Western powers generally, from the Opium Wars of
1842 onwards, what image could be more compelling, more richly, historically
ironic? Exactly who is being exploited when Cixi and the narrator perform their
osculations on each other’s private parts?
The Decadent Erotic
Style
is quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.
Oscar Wilde
The
Decay of Lying
Critics have
noted the connection between the Naturalism and Decadence, by noting how
Decadent texts frequently include a kind of scientific or medical curiosity
about depravity. The great taxonomies and histories of A rebours spring to mind here. Decadent writers like to include
spurious academic references, couching their lurid descriptions of deviance in
medical or scientific jargon. This has a twofold reason: an Aesopian use of
language to get Decadent texts past censors, but also to infect such respectable
scientific discourse with the spirit of Decadence itself, by incorporating
(parodies of) realistic elements into a thoroughly imaginative text. Decadence Mandchoue employs the same
strategy, as we have seen in the extract on the menu of the gay brothel quoted
in part 1 of this essai. Decadence Mandchoue everywhere shows an
exhaustive interest in the naming of parts and positions involved in all kinds
of sexual congress, in a number of different languages. It also includes lurid
and fascinating quasi-scientific – medical, anthropological, sociological -
information about eunuchs.
The erotic scenes hark back to the
anonymous novel Teleny, Frank
Harris’s My Life and Loves, John
Bloxam’s story The Priest and the Acolyte
and ‘Jack Saul’s’ autobiography Sins of
the Cities of the Plain, the ‘artistic’ pornography of Jean Lorrain, and the exotic erotica of Pierre Louys
and Pierre Loti: all notorious Decadent works. What distinguishes Decadence Mandchoue from these erotic
works, however, is that it is not really erotic. The prose style, the constant
code switching and quoting, is so artificial, so rococo, that it disallows an imaginative reconstruction in the mind
that is truly arousing. The sex scenes all follow the same pattern and involve
a lack of clear division between active and passive partners (unusual in real
life, one hears, but very common in gay lit), and whipping. The same sequence
of activities and elements are found for instance in Jack Saul and Teleny. This, then, is conventional,
literary, genre sex, in which language and structure foreground themselves, not
a description of real sex.
The androgynes, hermaphrodites and femmes fatale of Decadent art are
transformed in Decadence Mandchoue.
Cixi is of course the ultimate femme
fatale: an Empress who has her previous lovers murdered. The anxiety that
this will happen to the narrator surfaces in several places in the novel, and
one of the ways he assuages this is by keeping Cixi amused by regaling her with
stories of his gay life, in a Decadent reversal of Scheherazade’s situation.
The clitoromegalous Cixi is also a symbol of the hermaphrodite, as is the
homosexual narrator, who is sometimes passive and sometimes active in his
relations with her, and with his male lovers. Cixi during her lifetime was
regarded as the earthly incarnation of Guang Ying or Avalokiteśvara, a Bodhisattva who appears sometimes in male guise,
sometimes in female form. Her/His presence is ubiquitous all over Asia. Cixi,
the great Decadent Queen, is a Chinese version of Balzac’s hermaphroditic
character Seraphita, uniting the sensual and the occult within a Chinese,
Taoist context rather than a Swedenborgian one.
The text abounds in descriptions of beautiful
boys and eunuchs, the androgynes of Decadent art: Balzac’s castrato Sarrasine
is reincarnated as any number of candidates: Li Lien Ying, for example.
Conclusion
Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt
and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?
Theophile
Gautier
Histoire du romantism
Ironically, because he didn’t mean it this
way, Trevor-Roper was right to say that
Decadence Mandchoue is not merely
coloured by imagination in detail but pure fantasy throughout – and yet fantasy
which was spun with extraordinary ingenuity around and between true facts
accurately remembered or cunningly bent to sustain it. But is this not a
description of any work of art? Is this is not how any artist works in
consciously creating a work of fiction, especially historical fiction, which is
what Decadence Mandchoue is? Trevor-Roper’s
inept misreading of the work is likely to stick to it, like guano on a
monument. Sterling Seagrave, for example, who should know better as a long
seasoned Old China Hand himself, calls Decadence
Mandchoue the inflamed sexual fantasy
of a mind completely unhinged and calls it lunatic graffiti, unthinkingly following Trevor-Roper, and making
it clear that he had not actually read the work he is describing.
This might stand as a general response of
those who are ultimately hostile or unsympathetic towards the Decadent
aesthetic.
An important corrective here might be to look
at how the Chinese language translation of the book has been received. In his
introduction to the Chinese translation, the Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun praises
the work’s artistic cohesion.
The Chinese dissident writer Bao Pu (editor
of the banned Prisoner of the State: The
Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang) praises Backhouse’s
contributions to Western understanding of Chinese culture, - he is referring to
Backhouse’s other two books- and also deplores Trevor-Roper’s hatchet job on
Backhouse. A new generation of scholars in the field of East Asian studies from
Pacific universities is also reassessing Backhouse’s life and career.
A closer study of this work will reveal
more secrets, for instance: the presence of Daoist ideas and patterns, the
interaction between Backhouse’s European languages and use of Chinese, and a
closer comparison of the work with Rene
Leys and other Decadent and Modernist texts about China suggest themselves.
Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that Earnshaw Books will produce the second volume
Backhouse gave to Hoeppli.
Memory and imagination: the first counts as nothing
without the second, which is verily the ode of the agnostic to immortality and
gilds old age with the after- glow of youth. These dear phantoms of the past,
if they cannot restore happiness to one who moveth in what is certainly not an
ampler ether a diviner air, at least make life easier to be borne.
DM 8
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