Chapter 7 - Decadence and the fin de siècle

Summary

In French literary history, Proust occupies the position of an interstitial, ‘entre-deux’ writer poised between the literary experiments of the second half of the nineteenth century (spearheaded by, amongst others, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and the high modernism that was to challenge traditional genre conventions in the period between the two world wars. The young Proust made his first steps in literary criticism and fiction during the last decades of the nineteenth century and this transitional period with its effervescent intellectual atmosphere, rugged literary landscapes and diverse cultural preoccupations was to have a lasting influence on the future author of the Recherche. Like his fellow early modernists Joyce, Thomas Mann and Gide, Proust found in the cultural and literary imaginary of the fin de siècle a vast repertoire of themes and motifs which he appropriated for his own writing in a complex process of absorption, distancing and, ultimately, overcoming. The Zeitgeist of the fin de siècle, and more specifically the figures and aesthetics of one of its most prominent artistic movements – Decadence – offered him ample raw material for a novel that is both a reflection and a catalyst of the influences that have shaped it.