‘A series of variations on a theme’: Reinvention and Amplification of Decadence in Jeremy Reed’s Dorian: A Sequel

In 2021 a book of twelve manifestoes was published by a group of writers, spearheaded by Brendan Connell and Justin Isis, who call themselves neo-decadents and are against what they term 'Neo-Passism', a symptom of capitalism in which 'we are trapped in numerous overlapping "era markets" running on commodified nostalgia'. 1 One of the contributors to these manifestos is the London-based, Jersey-born writer Jeremy Reed (1951-).Neo-decadence is reflected in what Reed calls the 'new real', whose distinguishing feature is '[i]ntensified visual imagery'; writing without it would be like a 'non-alcoholic drink'. 2 He hallows The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) as 'the epitome of decadence' and 'the first British underground novel' in which Oscar Wilde excels at 'saturated imagery', 3 and goes on to consider the work of William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson as worthy of the aesthetic embodied in Wilde's novel.For Reed, neo-decadence is not about resuscitating the past, but about 'being sucked forward into ultimate novelty by the forces of imagination that shape the new real into its appropriately expansive psychic postcode '. 4 What does Reed mean by 'expansive psychic postcode', and how does he embrace 'absolute novelty'?This is somewhat perplexing as his oeuvre is obsessed with the past.