Dandies, cynics and skeptics: pathologies of decadentism in Wilde, Huysmans and Houellebecq

Abstract

The present essay aims at presenting, in a comparative and updated perspective, two different readings of crucial themes in regard to the XIX century, such as dandyism and decadentism. In this sense, it approximates, respectively, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission: A Novel (2015), to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ emblematic novel À rebours (1884). Both Wilde’s and Houllebecq’s works, in distinct ways, approach these issues through remarkably unusual keys. The former displaces its refinement, towards an appetite for melodramatic cruelty as it explores the monstrous margin of its time. The latter deviates from the disenchanted melancholy of its crepuscular climate, drifting in both satire and cynicism, as it acknowledges the convergence between the decadentism of the nineteen hundreds and our dystopian present time, which is demeaned by the workings of human deterritorialization.