À rebours

Discuss.

Boring and too flowery

French are fags

>french """literature"""

fantastic book, the pinnacle of 'decadent' literature

>too flowery
that's the point

is there anything made by french that isn't "decadent"? has french people ever wrote something virtuous?

...

decadent refers to a specific era, of fin de siècle Europe (specifically Paris), where the anxieties of the new modern age were sublimated into a sort of skeptical romanticism

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

He felt the same about his Rembrandts, which he examined now and then on the quiet; and it is of course true that, just as the loveliest melody in the world becomes unbearably vulgar once the public start humming it and the barrel-organs playing it, so the work of art that appeals to charlatans, endears itself to fools, and is not content to arouse the enthusiasm of a few connoisseurs, is thereby polluted in the eyes of the initiate and becomes commonplace, almost repulsive.

This sort of promiscuous admiration was in fact one of the most painful thorns in his flesh, for unaccountable vogues had utterly spoilt certain books and pictures for him that he had once held dear; confronted with the approbation of the mob, healways ended up by discovering some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and promptly rejected them, at the same time wondering whether his flair was not deserting him, his taste getting blunted.