Decadence and Symbolism: A Showcase Anthology

by Brian M. Stableford (Editor/Translator), Charles Baudelaire (Contributor), Arthur Rimbaud (Contributor)

Collecting together eighty-six different pieces of prose from sixty-one authors, Decadence and Sybmolism: A Showcase Anthology, is the most broad-ranging anthology of its kind. Surveying the movements from their beginnings onward, the volume brings together texts from well-known exponents such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as numerous lesser-known authors, many of whose work is being made available in English for the first time.

Editor and translator Brian Stableford provides an in-depth introductory essay, as well as brief biographies of the various personalities presented.

Genres: Anthologies

395 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2018

About the author

Brian Michael Stableford was a British science fiction writer who published more than 70 novels. His earlier books were published under the name Brian M. Stableford, but more recent ones have dropped the middle initial and appeared under the name Brian Stableford. He also used the pseudonym Brian Craig for a couple of very early works, and again for a few more recent works. The pseudonym derives from the first names of himself and of a school friend from the 1960s, Craig A. Mackintosh, with whom he jointly published some very early work.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a Double Headed Secret, this latest anthology from Snuggly Books (less a book than a monolith of absinthe visions and opium dreams converted into a textual medium) serves a Janus-faced function: on one hand it could be seen as an introductory gateway for novices into the world of the Symbolist and Decadent writers of late 19th-century France, but at the same time there's also plenty here for readers who are familiar with that whole fin de siècle milieu. This is a big book: over 400 pages of text, and featuring 86 pieces of prose (and prose poetry) from a whopping 61 writers, plus a 32 page introduction by editor/translator Brian Stableford that helps establish context for much of the book's content (he also provides brief capsule biographies for all of the contributors). Some of these pieces were familiar to me, such as Rimbaud's "A Night in Hell," the excerpt from Huysmans' Against Nature, Remy de Gourmont's "The Magnolia," the Jean Lorrain pieces, Alfred Jarry's "The Passion Considered as a Hill Race," and Bloy's "Calypso's Telephone," amongst others. But at the same time many of these pieces (and writers) were new to me, so I found it to be a rewarding (if lengthy) reading experience. And it certainly extended my vocabulary: I now have a lot of exciting new entries to add to my "weird word" dossier, one of my favorites being "medusan."

Although some of the writers here tend to go in for oriental-style imagery and themes (such as the pieces from Judith Gautier, and Herold's "The Ascension of the Pandavas"), for the most part the mythology of Ancient Greece seemed to be the muse most inspirational to many writers from this epoch: indeed, the human characters herein are almost outnumbered by assorted fauns, satyrs, nymphs, sirens, centaurs and so forth (even the Great God Pan makes an appearance, in "Pan's Flute"). Though Lilith also appears to have been a highly influential mythological figure as well. But I like to think this collection has a bit of something for everyone: fans of dystopic sci-fi will enjoy Han Ryner's "Light-of-Sorrow," Gaston Pawlowski's "A Visionary," Paul Adam's "Mercury," and Marcel Schwob's terrifying "The Future Terror." Those who are drawn to tales that are outright bizarre and surrealistic will be captivated by such pieces as Charles Cros' "The Pebble that Died of Love" and Camille Mauclair's "The Sorrow of the Purple." And for those who are of a necrophiliacal persuasion, there's Boutet's "The Veritable Victory." Other highlights would include Renee Vivien's "Lilith/The Forest/The Song of the Sirens" trilogy of prose poems, Daudet's "The Exhibition of Tears," Ernest Hello's "The Search," Theophile Gautier's astonishing "Babylonian Dreams," Gabriel de Lautrec's "Glorious Action," and Nyevelt's "What the Seasons Say" (which has this killer sentence: 'Lizards and grasshoppers are my living hiccups").

Recommended for all fans of this kind of subject matter: put it on the bookshelf right next to The Decadent Reader (Zone Books 1998).

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the introduction:

According to Gautier, "the style of decadence" is "Art arrived at the point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, gathering all delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking colors from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the strange hallucinations of a fixed idea turning into madness."

Such a style is, Gautier affirms, "summoned to express everything and to venture to the very extremes" and is "the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a man who does not know his own needs."

Later:

Not all symbolic women of legend are femme fatales, of course, but almost all the remainder are martyrs, that being the essential sexism of history: beauty dooms or is doomed, and lack of it is synonymous with a lack of symbolic status, save for a few antithetically symbolic hagwives.

[Fergus Nm · Rating 5 out of 5]

more thoughts to come, but for now - a remarkably consistently collection of prose poems and phantasies. there's a few duds (there always will be in a collection this large) but the vast majority are wonderful. I now have a ton of new (to me) names to look into.