Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle
Jan 2002 · Associated University Presse
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By fostering a belief in the unknowability of objective reality and the impending end of the world, the Decadents situated themselves in opposition to what was satisfying, healthy, and present. Yet if Decadent melancholy arose from object loss, expression of that melancholy inspired creation and shaped the work of art. Drawing on psychoanalytic studies of mourning, from Freud and Melanie Klein to Donald Winnicott and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Beauty Raises the Dead examines the unique way in which the Decadents defined loss as a precondition to literary creation. For the Decadents, Ziegler argues, the end of mourning need not be marked by wish-psychosis or a successful adaptation to objective reality. In J. K. Huysmans' Les Foules de Lourdes, art merges with prayer, so that if images evoking the Virgin are gotten right, they compel her to be present. In Marcel Schwob's Vies imaginaires, the supernatural power of religious art gives way to language as play. Enacting a series of identifications and dissociations, formations and undoings, Schwob's work exemplifies Decadent creation as a process of loss in which life is given and taken away, and the artist experiences again the mourning of everyday life.
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