5 - Between the Lunatic Asylum and the Street: Illness, Crime and Dissidence in El caso clínico by Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent

Summary

This chapter takes as its focus the work of Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, a notable decadent writer of Spanish fin-de-siècle literature, and it concentrates specifically on his novel El caso clínico, which serves as a prime example of the unrest permeating fin-de-siècle culture, and which in general is related to a rejection of the project of modernity, in so far as we understand modernity as a set of socio-historical relations sketched out via new regimes of control over the subject. Fin-de-siècle aesthetics run against the project of modernity, so that, as Felski notes (1995: 4–5), we find opposed to the narrative of modern subjectivity, which is linked to a process of rationalization, productivity and repression, a counter-narrative in which the modern subject is passive, pleasureseeking, ungrounded and – with some frequency – feminized.

The phenomenon of decadence is fundamental to this counter-narrative, the idea of decadence being as omnipresent in European culture of the second half of the nineteenth century as it is difficult to pinpoint and define (Praz 1970; Balakian 1977; Constable, Dennisoff and Potolski 1999; Bernheimer 2003). The issue is even more complex in Hispanic culture, where ‘el término decadencia fue pronto asociado al modernismo, que a veces era considerado como causa, a veces como manifestación de decadencia o a veces como ambas cosas’ (the term decadence was rapidly associated with modernism, at times seen as what had brought it into being, at times as a symptom of decadence, or at times as both) (Litvak 1990: 113), so that formal characteristics of modernism (renewal of vocabulary and metrics, eclecticism, and so forth) and the attitude of the modernistas (opposition to positivism, rebellion against social norms) were understood in direct relation to the idea of decadence.

Going beyond the list of themes and images that often stands in for a definition of ‘decadence’, including prominent figures such as the femme fatale, the androgyne, the dandy and the bohemian, we should emphasize the degree to which the notion of decadence is closely linked to the awareness of the process of history that informs the project of modernity We can find this sense of history in foundational pieces as early as the sonnet ‘Langueur’ (1883) by Paul Verlaine and the manifesto ‘Aux lecteurs!’ by Anatole Baju and Luc Vajernet which opened the publication of Le Décadent littéraire et artistique (1886).