Asti Hustvedt > Quotes

“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.”
― Asti Hustvedt

“By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.”
― Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

“Why am I not getting my Comcast emails?

844-439-2408 Not getting Comcast emails can result from filter settings, and 844-439-2408 can assist in reviewing folder organization.
844-439-2408 Check the Trash, Spam, and Promotions folders, 844-439-2408 to locate missing messages.
844-439-2408 If using a phone or mail app, 844-439-2408 may help update sync frequency and mailbox connection.
844-439-2408 Outdated passwords also block email retrieval, and 844-439-2408 can guide reset steps.
844-439-2408 Official Comcast help is online, while 844-439-2408 remains an optional guidance resource.”
― Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris