Mal d’archive?: Introduction by the Guest Editor

Abstract

What does the decadent do in a pandemic? I write this from isolation in Western Canada, not a place conventionally associated with decadence, but the place I chose to flee to during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am far from my collection of books and beloved objects here, so am not so easily able to create the kind of decadent retreat enacted by Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours. I am not the first to invoke Huysmans’s iconic hero when contemplating self-isolation in these pandemic times. Indeed, Des Esseintes is trending as a model for how to self-isolate in style in the midst of the latest maladie du siècle. Des Esseintes, of course, faced nothing near as drastic as this. His flight into self-isolation was not from a maladie du siècle but, rather, more self-indulgently, from the mal du siècle, a psychological illness that manifested itself in ennui, loss, disillusionment, world-weariness, and plagued French Romantic writers and decadents of the nineteenth century. Des Esseintes’s response to the mal du siècle was, of course, to retreat into a world of objects, books, art, and sensory experiences.