An Oasis of Horror

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTIONThe sentiment expressed by the verse from Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” that is used as a head-quote in the title-piece of this collection is translatable into English prose as: “A bitter knowledge it is that draws us to travel; today, yesterday and tomorrow, the monotonous and tiny world always makes us see our own reflection: an oasis of horror in a desert of deadly tedium.” To some, this might seem a depressing thought, but it did not seem so to Baudelaire and it does not seem so to me.

Baudelaire thought of horror as a species of exhilaration, whose principal effect on the human imagination was one of refreshment; in so saying he echoed the conviction of Edmund Burke who argued in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) —which extrapolates arguments from Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) to the effect that the healthy imagination requires mental exercise just as the healthy body requires physical exercise—that our awareness and perception of the sublime are invariably seasoned with horror.

It was the poems that Baudelaire collected in Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]—of which “Le voyage” is one of the key items—that came to embody and exemplify the notion of literary Decadence. The third edition of the collection, during whose preparation Baudelaire died, was published with a preface by Théophile Gautier, who identified the essence of the work as its “Decadent style”, which he defined in the following terms:

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

Such a style is, according to Gautier, “summoned to express all and to venture to the very extremes”. He claims that Baudelaire’s work partakes of “language already veined with the greenness of decomposition”—which is, he asserts, entirely appropriate to a civilization “where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a man who does not know his own needs.” Literary decadence is, in essence, calculatedly perverse in its assessments of beauty and morality, providing by its valiant opposition a necessary counterweight to vulgar and unthinking assumption.

Long after he was dead, Baudelaire inspired a Decadent Movement in France, which became definitive of fin de siècle sensibility. One of the historical and influential links between Baudelaire and the new Decadents was the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who called the first of his own collections of Decadent prose Contes cruels, because they spurned conventional means of attaining literary closure by celebrating “the irony of fate”—the capacity that the course of events has for thwarting human ambition in a frankly mocking fashion.

Because it became so firmly linked to the notion of the fin de siècle, the Decadent Movement did not survive the end of the nineteenth century in France and Decadent literature became increasingly unfashionable thereafter—but it was, by definition, a literary species guaranteed to thrive on its own unfashionability. The stories collected here have been woefully unappreciated, even when they have succeeded in reaching print—as some have not until now—but I have never been tempted to abandon the production of such items, and am far fonder of them than I am of many works that proved more economically viable. Throughout the early phases of my literary career, such as it has been, I remained acutely aware of the fact that Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde had died, miserable, wretched and almost universally despised, at the age of forty-six, and that poor Edgar Poe had not even got that far. Now that I am fifty-eight I feel that I am way ahead of the game, and I take what meager delight I can in the knowledge that I am highly likely to die beyond my means.