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DECADENCE and MODERNIST INNOVATION by GABRIEL

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DECADENCE and MODERNIST INNOVATION by GABRIEL “THE END AT THE BEGINNING”: DECADENCE AND MODERNIST INNOVATION by GABRIEL ALEXANDER LOVATT (Under the Direction of Jed Rasula) ABSTRACT Over the past thirty years, scholarship on the connections between Decadence and modernism has expanded into its own field of inquiry. Despite the publication of cultural studies addressing the international scope of Decadence and theoretical reconsiderations of its aesthetic function, there remains comparatively little work that closely examines the wide-ranging texts of Decadence in relation to these changes. I address this gap by reading the aesthetics of transition in works of Decadence that have been either largely overlooked, like the sensationalist “Keynote Series,” or writing that need to be reconsidered in the context of a modernist vanguard, such as the poetry of Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. I examine how the productive disruptions of Decadence exhibit an aesthetic commitment to destruction that precedes twentieth-century modernism’s obsession with discontinuity. The complex issues that surround Decadence―the slippery aesthetics, the unstable relationship it establishes between cognition, the body, and the manifest artwork―represents the advent of a century of radical works that challenge discrete notions of being, interacting, perceiving and creating. INDEX WORDS: Decadence, Modernism, Avant-garde, Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley, Aesthetics, Aestheticism, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, Arthur Symons, Surrealism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dada, Expressionism. “THE END AT THE BEGINNING”: DECADENCE AND MODERNIST INNOVATION by GABRIEL ALEXANDER LOVATT B.A., The University of Colorado, Denver, 2003 M.A., The University of Georgia, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 © 2013 Gabriel Alexander Lovatt All Rights Reserved “THE END AT THE BEGINNING”: DECADENCE AND MODERNIST INNOVATION by GABRIEL ALEXANDER LOVATT Major Professor: Jed Rasula Committee: Richard Menke Adam Parkes Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2013 iv DEDICATION For my grandmother, Ruby Etters, mother, Kathryn Etters Lovatt, and daughter, Asa Katherina Hussey-Lovatt. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without Jed Rasula, the ideas here would have never made it to the page. Not only has Jed proved an eagle-eyed reader of my work, but he’s also served as a model and inspiration for how to intellectually and creatively engage the long history of aesthetic innovation. Richard Menke and Adam Parkes have given me incisive feedback on this project, and encouraged me to pursue the big ideas. An illuminating visit to the Tate Modern’s marvelous Futurist exhibition (2007) was the catalyst for my interest in the dynamic inventions that preceded the Futurists’ bombastic claims. Though I have a great love of the twentieth-century Avant-garde, the contrarian in me doubted that any innovation was entirely without precedent. In the subsequent years, my study of the Historical Avant-garde with Jed, fin de siècle works with Adam, and Victorian culture with Richard allowed me to begin thinking about the long Avant-garde and the seeds of modernist procedures that were planted in the nineteenth century. I am extremely grateful for the many members of the English Department at UGA who were supportive and engaged me from the very beginning of my time at UGA. Sujata Iyengar, Susan Rosenbaum, and Andrew Zawacki were great sources of intellectual encouragement and practical guidance. Andrew Cole, now at Princeton, was an energetic and open advocate of my work. Additionally, I would like to thank Suzi Wong. I hesitate to immediately describe her as Jed’s wife—she is, in her own right, such a creative and vital person. But the way in which she welcomed me into the Rasula-Wong home and gave me a little glimpse of what a partnership vi means for artists and intellectuals was key to my understanding that the maintenance of one’s family life doesn’t take away from the work, but bolsters and feeds it. My own family has provided a source of stability and a home wherever we go in the world. From Virginia to North Carolina to New Jersey to Indonesia to Hong Kong to London to South Carolina: my parents, Dan and Kathryn Lovatt, and my brother, Xan Lovatt, have been the best sort of gypsy tribe. Finally, I could have never done any of this without the support of my best friend and husband, Joshua Hussey, who not only spurs me creatively, but also inspires me to be a better person in the world. When we are sitting at the table with our beautiful, funny Asa—our house a disaster and eating a quickly assembled, flavorless meal—I am the happiest I’ve ever been. Our little family is everything. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 “WHIRLED, EXPLODED, DECOMPOSED, RECOMBINED”: THE ANTICIPATORY DESTRUCTIONS OF DECADENT MODERNISM ........................1 2 SENSE SWALLOWED UP: CONTAGION AND BREAKDOWN IN THE “KEYNOTES” VOLUMES ............................................................................................26 3 LIONEL JOHNSON’S MODERN RUINS ....................................................................61 4 GONE TO PIECES: ARTHUR SYMONS’S POETRY OF FRAGMENTS .................94 5 LOOP DE LOOP: ERNEST DOWSON’S VACATING REPETITIONS ...................128 6 THE TREATMENT OF CANONICAL THINGS: AUBREY BEARDSLEY AND THE MODERNIST PALIMPSEST ......................................................................................161 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................195 1 CHAPTER 1 “WHIRLED, EXPLODED, DECOMPOSED, RECOMBINED”: THE ANTICIPATORY DESTRUCTIONS OF DECADENT MODERNISM The advent of twentieth-century modernism, ushered in by Avant-garde movements that profess substantial ideological and aesthetic breaks with the nineteenth-century, makes the connection between Decadence and modernist experimentation difficult and contentious terrain. Many of the early modernist and Avant-garde writers publicly turned away from the Decadent movement by converting the pantheon of its engagements into musty caricatures. F.T. Marinetti, in his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, published in Le Figaro in 1919, describes the somnambulistic artistic milieu within which he and his colleagues are trapped (albeit luxuriantly) before they are awakened by a “mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside” into the society of the future.1 The scene is decidedly a parody of the perceived Decadent fetishization of material beauty and physical lethargy: We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.2 1 Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, The Documents of 20th Century Art (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 19. 2 Ibid. 2 The same spirit of vigorous denial pervaded London, where Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were equally invested in the repudiation of their forerunners. A list of “Blasts” and “Curses” unfurled boldly down the page in “Manifesto—I” of the first issue of BLAST (1914). When accumulated, these snubs point to a broad and aggressive rejection of Decadence as a valuable predecessor.3 Among Pound and Lewis’s inventory of things to discard: “BRITANNIC AESTHETE,” “DANDY,” “SNOBBERY (disease of femininity),” “RHETORIC of EUNICH and STYLIST.”4 Like Marinetti, Pound and Lewis seek to distance themselves from the previous generation through a renunciation of the emblems of the Decadent era.5 Despite insistences that a decisive break occurs between the burnt out end of Decadence and the perpetual innovations of modernism, there remains connections between the two generations. In his manifesto’s pivotal rejection of the Decadent figure, Marinetti omits the fact that he was quite recently a Symbolist/Decadent Poet and publisher of the relatively conservative Le Papyrus. In Pound’s insistent “blast” of Decadence, there is no indication that he had arrived in London a mere five years earlier only to walk about town the very vision of a second generation Decadent, with his “beard cut to a point to resemble a Spanish conquistador, and as a final touch a singular turquoise earring.”6 And Pound did not only follow the sartorial initiatives that were the purported visual code of the Decadent.7 One of the poet’s early alliances in London 3 Wyndham Lewis, ed. Blast 1 (Black Sparrow Press Santa Barbara: 1981), 11-28. 4 Ibid., 15, 15, 15, 18. 5 Many of the authors of the 1890s share this impulse to distance themselves from Decadence. For instance, in Arthur Symons’s editorial note to The Savoy—perhaps, the most beautiful and distilled periodical of English Decadence—he announces: “We have no formulas, and we desire no false unity of form or matter. We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents.” Arthur Symons, “Editorial Note,” The Savoy, no. 1 (Jan. 1896): 5. In his biography, Arthur Machen declares that his involvement in the movement was but a passing (and trendy) phase, “when
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