Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness by Ben Nichols (review)

799 Avant-garde photography, too, gained from its encounter with the era’s aestheticist and decadent sensibilities, as so-called pictorialist photographers rejected a drab realism for a sumptuous artificiality that strove for “painterly” effects in which beauty of subject matter, composition, and tonality held sway over documentary verisimilitude. (See the 1993 museum catalogue Pictorialism into Modernism for a fine account of this crucial episode in the history of photography.) The decadent/modernist dyad in literature examined in this collection prompts one to wonder, too, how decadence informed the music of modernist composers. The musicologist Richard Taruskin has noted of the “decadent” work of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, the unusual use of “semitonal adjacencies” that allowed for once “exotic or recondite harmonies and tonal relations” to seem acceptable.2 To be sure, there are some shrewd observations on Wilde’s “Salome” as it morphed into Strauss’s opera in Ellen Crowell’s essay in this volume. Crowell points to the tension in the opera between the gruesome head of John the Baptist and the symbolist fantasy that eschewed ugly naturalistic elements. There is a telling anecdote, shared with me by the musicologist Charles Rosen, that recounts how Strauss stopped the rehearsal of the first production of “Salome” in Dresden when the soprano playing Salome swung the head of the Baptist too ostentatiously. “Please, please, my dear,” the composer supposedly wailed. “The music is disgusting enough.” Disgust, so prevalent in decadent writing and art, is yet another feature that decadent fin de siècle aesthetics bequeathed to modernist artistry. With an introduction that manages to be both succinct and encyclopedic, Decadence in the Age of Modernism is an illuminating and ground-breaking consideration of an under-examined subject, one that ably demonstrates that the fin not only outlived the siècle, it thrived in a new century.