Decadence and Decay in the Works of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams

Decadence and decay are major themes in the works of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams While both are Mid-Century Modernists, with notable works that are formally experimental, they also contend with the spiritual and material anxieties of the Modern Age. Degradation of family and society, a culture of defeat and corruption, and a haunted decor of rotten wood-beams and peeling gilt characterize their interpretation of The South.

Can we count Faulkner and Williams as Honorary Decadents?

I quite agree. I think Tennessee Williams' play Suddenly Last Summer is probably the most decadent work in American literature. Williams makes a direct reference to Oscar Wilde in it, using the name Sebastian Venerable, one of Oscar's aliases during his Parisian exile.

I should add Flannery O'Conner to the pantheon and would even say that the Southern Gothic movement is the American avatar of fin de siècle European decadence.

Someone should write about this subject and you are very well qualified to tackle the task. I should very much like to read the results if you do.

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." - Oscar Wilde

Baby Doll, the play and the movie, is/are old Williams favorites.

also Orpheus Descending

"When Flem Snopes came to clerk in her father’s store, Eula Varner was not quite thirteen. She was the last of the sixteen children, the baby, though she had overtaken and passed her mother in height in her tenth year. Now, though not yet thirteen years old, she was already bigger than most grown women and even her breasts were no longer the little, hard, fiercely-pointed cones of puberty or even maidenhood. On the contrary, her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times–honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof. She seemed to be not a living integer of her contemporary scene, but rather to exist in a teeming vacuum, hi which her days followed one another as though behind sound-proof glass, where she seemed to listen in sullen bemusement, with a weary wisdom heired of all mammalian maturity, to the enlarging of her own organs."

From The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of The Snopes Trilogy.

If that's not some Chateau d'Argol-level decadence, I'll eat my hat.

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I should add Flannery O'Conner to the pantheon and would even say that the Southern Gothic movement is the American avatar of fin de siècle European decadence.

One could also throw Walker Percy on to the pile as well, although I have not ready any of his stuff. But like O'Conner, he was a Southern writer and a Catholic.

Interesting topic - especially as I just returned from a long deep South journey up and down the fabled Highway 61 (Memphis, Clarksdale, MS, en route to New Orleans), and can verify that this is strange (that is to say, utterly distinct - if not decadent) country (in rural MS my credit card failed. I thought I had been scammed - but a call to the company informed me that Mississippi is considered a "risk country". Incredible).

So - to the venerable list above, I would add the Tennessee novels of Cormac McCarthy as well as Carson McCuller's Reflections in a Golden Eye. Walker Percy - physician novelist/amateur linguist/Catholic convert is more in the vein of Camus than Huysmans (I have only read three of his books, but assume the song remains the same throughout).

One of my favorite lines (and I suspect it's well-known) in literature comes from O'Connor's story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find":

"She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" Read the story for the context; you won't regret it.

I second benwaugh's assessment of Walker Percy: I've read one novel and one book of essays, and adore his voice and outlook very much. But though he seems quite capable of American Gothic, he seems more to poke at it enroute to something more detached. Catholicism is for him, I think, alive and not an engine of decadence so much as a means of escaping it.

5: I'm going to exclude Cormac McCarthy on the rather tepid reason of him being "too new." Although as an inheritor of Faulkner, etc., yes, spot-on.

In terms of Southern Gothic, it would be to our advantage to really unpack the term "Gothic" in that term.

I neglected to mention John Kennedy Toole.

5. It's been about 30 years since I've read A Good Man is Hard to Find. I dug out my Complete Stories of Flannery O'Conner and started a reread at lunch.

>7 kswolff:

Gothic is indeed a hazy literary term, in general. As a starting point, do we agree Castle of Otranto is appropriate, or is that itself a mis-step?

As a current denizen of MS and having lived for a few years in South Louisiana, there's certainly an air of decandence that adheres to this part of the country in a way that I haven't noticed (or felt) elsewhere. The French Quarter in New Orleans in particular is decadent in the old style, not entirly unlike the Bruges of a Rodenbach (the Cathedrals, basilicae, and nunneries dotting the city) or the Prague of Meyrink or Leppin (but with Voudoun in the place of the Prague Ghetto's alchemical/occultist underbelly) but with more jazz music. In New Orleans, today, it is possible to have an absinthe in the shadows of St. Joseph's cathedral and to have a Pimm's Cup in a house built in the early 1800s to receive Napoleon in exile on Chartes Street. If you go at the right time of year, you could even attend a masque.

There is likewise decay and despair in MS, where the great wealth acquired on the backs of slaves which produced a true land-based aristocracy in the 19th century has degenerated into the poverty and denial of the Union's poorest state. Look up the ruins of Windsor near Alcorn State University for a picture of the state of things in microcosm. There is also the palpable sting of defeat in the defiant contrarianism and drawling country-lawyer gentility of the upper-middle and upper classes; folks who can still wear seersucker suits and pull it off. They know what the rest of the country thinks of them and would have you believe that they frankly don't give a damn. It's only half a pose. I read somewhere that were one to exclude the Delta (the poorest part of the country, that area of the state that birthed the blues and where Robert Johnson has at least two gravesites; and the area where it sounds like our grande pere Herr Waugh had his card declined) MS would rank as merely mediocre on most of the poverty, education, obesity, infant mortality, and other quality-of-life lists upon which it currently brings up the rear. Of course, whether or not this is true, one cannot exclude it--indeed, the effort to forget, efface, deny, and bury this history is what got the state in its mess in the first place and is what keeps it there now. Faulkner's comment on the past not even being past isn't a bit of modernist cleverness here, it is a statement of fact. So decay, despair, defeat, and stung pride, yes, but I wouldn't quite call it decadence of the sort this group seems to be interested in. I'm just a southerner, though.

I concur with the comments on Walker Percy not being a decadent, and to the Camus comparison I would add Pascal with a bit of Vonnegut (though I'd be exaggerating if I said I were familiar with the latter, having only read a book and a half...) Walker Percy's work I know, and I know his landscapes. I've eaten lunch on the ground floor of the Standard Life Building in Jackson (now an apartment building) mentioned in the closing pages of the Moviegoer-- a restauraunt with a vegan menu, lest one think one has poor ol Mississippi pegged-- and I've even had business dealings with a gentlemen whose interview with Percy from years ago is published in one of the Conversations With Walker Percy books.

There is decadence in Faulkner to be sure: A Rose for Emily, Absalom, Absalom, it's there. The overripe prose, the humid and moss-choked atmospheres, the sense one gets whilst reading him that the heat in his books is not the heat of the massive Mississippi sun in a blue sky so much as the wet heat that brings mold and decay to once-proud mansions and tarpaper shacks on land once worked by slaves. Neurasthenic rich folks commiting suicide. It's there.

Whoops, got a bit long-winded. Perhaps someone can do the same for Vermont or Montana or someplace.

One more thing!

8: If Walker Percy is a Pascal, Toole is an Aquinas with a bawdy wit and an ear for "yat" dialogue. He's more comedian than decadent.

Back to lurking!

Good stuff! Perhaps it builds up after a period of lurking. Here's to more of each.

11: Then Faulkner is Giordano Bruno?