Variations of Decadence: Reflections on Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat

Why are we drawn to decadence? No single answer on the complex variations of decadence’s allure
\nwill suffice. The task is no easier in the context of a special issue on neo-Victorian decadence. 
\nNevertheless, some form of response must be tried, if only because of the reflections it can prompt
\nthrough the (mis)readings it repeats and the (re)readings it invites. And so, inadequately, we take a 
\nstab at an answer. We are drawn to decadence because of the validation it offers to personal or 
\ncollective enervation, exquisiteness, and excess. It countenances the luxuriant, the dissipative, and 
\nthe aesthetic. These categories are too loosely run together, admittedly, and the words deployed 
\nseem to bear, implicitly and incongruously, tones of reproof. Yet what’s not to like in looseness
\n(volupté: one need hardly say more) if not for a peculiar unease which, even and as it is repressed, 
\nmakes decadence more tantalizing in its prospect and chancier in its actuality? The cares and 
\nuncertainties of the world are kept at bay by a cocooning of one’s self – soi, in French – in the soie, 
\nthe silk, of Apollonian attitudinizing. This is only one mode of decadence and seems to constitute 
\nsome play of delusion, but all forms of decadence must act like there’s no tomorrow. The decadent 
\nattitude must be flaunted, vaunting its contempt for measure. But this mostly holds if we are, in 
\nfact, committed to decadence and lost to or lost in it: for instance, and in another of its modes, by 
\nmaking ourselves at one with the languor, the affectation, the fastidious disdain of its costumed, 
\nflâneuring drift (all words used here, as befits the context, without negativity). If, on the other 
\nhand, the decadent existence proves too consuming – so that we swerve away from affirming and 
\ntotalizing it as our life/style – then we are drawn to it differently. We still regard it in fascination,
\nbut we indulge it at a distance, only vicariously intent on the disposition for the flamboyantly 
\nunconstrained and on the fall that can be visited upon it by the world and by fate.