Christa Giles

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of thought and emotion and autonomous as such. Therein
lay the paradox that the only way to experience life fully
was to go to art.
The emphasis on art as an artifice accounts in part
for the decadent’s fascination with style. Des Esseintes
speaks appreciatively of Mallarmé’s ˝precious, interwoven
ideas…knotted together with an adhesive style, a unique
hermetic language, full of contracted phrases, elliptical
constructions, audacious tropes.˝ 474 The obscure
asymmetrical elaborate style, the surprising odd images
and metaphors, the lack of congruency between verbal
images where ˝nothing succeeds like excess˝ was the style
of Decadence. The appreciation of pattern, overall formal
structure, the excess of ornament were like arabesques over
the void or the mask which conceals nothing behind it.
What was sought was ˝un art qui est cependant le plus
compliqué, le plus verrouillé, le plus hautain de tous.˝ 475
Thus elaborate decoration and ornament in the novels
became a means of characterization as opposed to
development in plot. Des Esseintes is defined as much by
the language used to describe him as by his interests.
Conversely, in Wilde’s work, it is the interest and the
structure of the entirety of the novel which revealed Dorian
in a single image, that of the work of art as portrait: