The erosion of realism

Even before the turn of the century, in the midst of triumphant  bourgeois culture,  the certainties  of realism began to crumble. The Decadents and Symbolists of the 1880s, of whom the great poster artists were the public face, rejected bourgeois values of Progress and Reason. They used the dark colours   lacking  in  the  sunny  landscape   of  Reason.  J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907)  considered himself a disciple of Zola; but in 1884 he published his infamous novel A Rebours (Against Nature, or Arse Backwards). Huysmans'  hero, Duke Jean des Esseintes, was the last of an 'ancient lineage' in which 'the males were becoming more and more effeminate': 'a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung, with sunken cheeks, cold eyes of steely blue, a nose turned  up yet straight, and slender, dry hands'.5

This was, as Robert Nye points out, 'the perfect type of exhausted and degenerate aristocrat'  whose loss of manhood and virility seemed to conservative thinkers to epitomise the problem facing France. The Jew, the homosexual and to some extent the intellectual were this terrifying Other. The homosexual or 'invert' was 'an unmanned degenerate'.6  Des Esseintes was modelled on Count Robert de Montesquiou, whose portrait appropri­ ately graces the cover of the Penguin edition and who was also the model for Proust's Baron de Charius,, another  'invert'.

The duke  determined  to reverse  the  rational.  In one  chapter,  he replaced all the plants in his home with artificial flowers, but then, 'sick of artificial flowers mimicking real ones, he wanted real flowers that looked artificial'. He thus bred hideous, degenerate flowers:

Most  of them, as if ravaged by syphilis and leprosy, displayed pallid flesh blotched with measle-like spots ...; others had the vibrant pink of a scar beginning to heal or the brown of a scab beginning to
form; ... he had achieved his aim; not one looked real; it was as if
man had lent cloth, paper, porcelain and metal to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities.7

At the end the duke delighted in having to feed himself by enima pumps, thus giving the title a literal sense. Behind the desire to shock lay a new aesthetic,  praising  artifice  instead  of  Nature,   contrariness   instead  of Reason, and degeneracy instead of Progress.

What  terrified conservative commentators  delighted a new generation of writers, who saw in the duke's perverted tastes a way out of the dead end of realism. The new decadent  aesthetic  was soon  the 'in' thing.  In Oscar Wilde's  The Picture of Dorian  Gray  (1891),   A  Rebours  is 'the yellow book'  which  begins Dorian's  initiation  into evil. It showed  him 'the sins of the world ... in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound  of flutes': 'One  hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint  or the morbid confessions  of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.'

Wilde  had  not yet read  Huysmans'  most deeply  troubling  work, La-bas (Down  There- 1891),  which involved Satanism and  the  ritual sacrifice of babies. Perhaps because he was seeking something  beyond the material world, Huysmans then moved to devout Catholicism with La Cathedrale  (The  Cathedral   - 1898), which   was   underpinned    by  a Symbolist reading of Chartres Cathedral.

The fictional des Esseintes's favourite  poet was the  real Stephane Mallarme (1842-98),  whose 1876  masterpiece L'Apres-midi d'un faune (A Satyr's Afternoon)   was a dream of desire which replaced the material world with a psychic one. In 1885, Mallarme  returned  the compliment  in Prose (pour  des  Esseintes) (Prose for des  Esseintes), suggesting  that the aim of the artist should  be to please des Esseintes. The following year, the poet Jean Moreas (1856-1910)  published a Manifesto which used the word  'Symbolism'  for  a  new aesthetic,')  applying  it  to poets  such as Mallarme,  Verlaine and  Rimbaud, who  went  beyond  decadence:  they evoked a second  level of reading, something immaterial more real than the material world, turning their backs on realism.

There were Symbolists and Decadents in the visual arts, too. Some delighted in images of the grotesque and the sinister, like the young Odilon Redon (1840-1916),  whose noirs ('blacks') were deeply troubling: most famous of these is the lithograph  L' Araignee (Smiling Spider-1885). Like Huysmans,  Redon finally moved to Catholicism and finished his work with the extraordinary  post-Impressionist murals of Fontfroide Abbey.

The young composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918)  sought to do for music what the Symbolists had done for literature. He was inspired by the discovery of Javanese  music at the 1889 Exposition. Its rich colours and rhythms and  its absence  of development  revolutionised  his thinking.  In 1894, his first masterpiece received acclaim: L'Apres-midi d'un faune was
an evocation of Mallarmé's poem in dreamy, apparently  formless music, whose 110 bars matched the poem's 110 lines.

This work revolutionized music and brought Debussy fame. Gone were the driving rhythms and dynamic development characteristic of nineteenth-century music. L'Apres-midi does not so much go somewhere as weave a spell or evoke a place of magic and sensuality, a sleepy summer day and the satyr's joys. The specificities and concreteness of realism disappear; the material world exists no longer for itself (if at all) but only to suggest other, deeper truths.

In 1893 Debussy attended the premiere of Pelleas et Melisande, a play by the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck. Set in a nebulous, fairy tale past, the play conveys hopelessness and melancholy. Prince Golaud finds Melisande by a fountain in the wood and marries her, although she cannot say who she is or where she comes from. The story of the play is secondary to its mood and to the constant symbolism of water, from which Melisande emerges and in which she loses her memory, her identity and finally her wedding ring. Golaud, perhaps already fore­ seeing the end, takes his brother Pelleas to the 'stagnant pool' in the dungeon of the castle: 'Do you smell the odour of death that rises from it?' he asks. 'Your voice!' he exclaims to Melisande. 'It is fresher and purer than water. It is like pure water on my lips.' Pelleas et Melisande carried Symbolism to new heights.

Debussy realised that it was the perfect text for the opera he longed to write. He set the play as it was except for cutting four small scenes. Setting unversified prose to music was revolutionary and brought out the musical qualities of sung French. Finished in 1895, the opera premiered (at the Opera Comique, not the Opera) in 1902. Its floating harmonies and melancholy melodies matched perfectly the eerie ambiguities of the text. It quickly established itself as the most essentially French of all operas and for many the masterpiece of French opera. Both the text and the music reject realism, development and progress. They foreshadow a different time from the developmental and progressive narratives that characterised realism.