Decadent failures: Memory in selected fin-de-siecle texts (Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, France, Constantine P. Cavafy, Greece, Oscar Wilde, Ireland)

Memory is the imaginative tool par excellence in the hands of the poetic persona in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Huysmans's des Esseintes, Wilde's Dorian Gray and Cavafy's “Hellenikos” in Complete Works. In a world of polarities and causality, the decadent hero may only survive by rejecting both, by resisting his insertion within a deterministic frame of reference and by actively pursuing the construction of his own self through a re-writing of his past. His efforts do not always yield the anticipated results. As a matter of fact, failure is more frequent than success. The process of liberation, however, does, in the works of all four writers, subvert and invalidate the traditional storage-retrieval model. The poetic persona in Baudelaire's work strives—although not entirely free from the maelstrom of temporal verticality—toward a-temporality in three major ways: poetic forgetfulness by means of oscillation, willful contraction and expansion of time in view of a complete reinvention of the self, and idealization in the realm of the arts. Des Esseintes finds himself at the same time master of a voluntary, radically aestheticist memory and slave to quasi-naturalistic recollection. He excels at poetically remembering when he projects himself onto an imaginary future and from a vantage point of view looks creatively back at a non-existent past. He fails miserably when he bodily experiences the weight of heredity and social norm. Dorian, on the other hand, fails throughout. Instead of happily oscillating between the two poles governing his life, Basil Hallway and Henry Wotton, depth and surface, destiny and self-fashioning, he decides, in clearly mercantile and anti-aestheticist fashion, to exchange the gift of perpetually becoming for that of eternally being. C. P. Cavafy's poetic persona is, to a certain extent, an accomplished aesthete. Deliberately transcending time by means of undercutting the authority of history, he exists in a world clearly free of time, undoubtedly created in imaginative memory. Living in the privileged seat of Hellenistic decadence, Alexandria, he transforms his city into a metaphor for poetic reminiscence.