Christa Giles

style, just as the earth suspended in the void,
depends on nothing external for its support; a
book which would have almost no subject, or
at least in which the subject would be almost
invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest
works are those that contain the least matter,
the closer expression comes to thought the
closer language comes to coinciding and
merging with it, the finer the result. I believe
the future of Art lies in this direction. 438
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This concern with language leads in La Tentation de Saint-
Antoine to the use of interminable catalogues and
seemingly redundant description. But for the decadent it
is not merely a rarefied desire to become intoxicated ˝with
the magical charms of style, to thrill to the delicious
sorcery of the unusual epithet which, while retaining all
its precision, opens up infinite perspectives to the
imagination of the initiate,˝ 439 it is also a means of
generating through repetition and elaboration a sense of
stasis which forces the reader to focus on the words
themselves as independent entities, units only of the
whole. As Paul Bourget pointed out:
A similar law governs the development and
decadence of that other organism which we
call language. A style of decadence is one in