Decadence
Cohen, Arthur A.
Close behind are suggestions that Pope social scientist not to hedge his bets. He, spiral (if one is forbearing with decline) John Paul I wrote his inaugural address worries about the...
...They had tural enactment...
...He's been able conceptions...
...its results are at least us- other is a man around forty...
...It is the difference between decadence...
...discriminate not only effects and prod- Mr...
...they clus- M. Evans, $9.95, 288 pp...
...of journalistic hue and cry, for decadence which it is difficult to resist...
...vision is critical to the phenomenological investigation of culture, whether religious, humanist, philosophical is beside The course of sexual mores the point...
...and then traced back the experience of To examine without visionary the victim, Terry Dunn...
...Back home, his father dead, ter and conduct energies that reach them he married a nice girl he'd known in TM< SAITIII ii IINQM.ATMR...
...It would southern Illinois, he had a bad experience 31 August 1979: 475...
...Historical perspective is full and is "irrefutable...
...All the infrequent employment of Augustinian much longer than Gilman's inquiry...
...Less admirable is his began seeing prostitutes exclusively, Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals than rather puritanical approach...
...hrternatianal Teilhard de Chardin's essay on dec- In high school he was bewildered about Dept...
...300 Nnrlh Zeeb Road 58 Bedford Raw adence (had he written one) would have sex, explored Chicago strip joints, Ann A,bor, MI 49106 London...
...And its might allow one to devastate a cultural (himself an eminent practitioner) favored pre-modern career, brilliantly high- pretension...
...The rhetoric of has not made us free, and that people are came more desperate, had another affair, decadence is the refuge of abashed moral more confused than gratified...
...All the more The only element, then, which I found is an "absolute genius" (p...
...Scheler would pin and those Gilman risks partriarchs depend upon the rhetoric of What is to the point about this observato discern...
...The pope's first six weeks Hebblethwaite or Andrew Greeley...
...For readers of Commonweal it is esorous essay on Decadence is dif- Decadence is, of course, an epithet as pecially fitting to recall that Gilman ficult to situate in the spectrum of Ameri- Gilman concludes...
...decadence is the charge of the man of Goodbar was about how casual sex can resentment...
...Goodbar began with a murder, uct, but the spirit and creation as...
...But it seems he worries satisfaction, models sought and models his own warning, issued at the top of most about Cardinal Cody's being al- forsaken...
...They are RUCE COOK KNOWS we're all in trou- exclusive relationships and thought sex moral discernments in ages that no longer ble...
...rich, sources are abundant, discussion of literary tendenz exacting, asides and: glosses frequently suggestive...
...tising...
...They were divorced...
...worked in his essay on ressentiment, Melaniphy begins an investigation...
...among the church's principal appeals) and it would have been parti pris, but I But it does propose that an organizing and, having done this turn of criticism would have gnawed the bone longer...
...In the army in modalities of self-judgment) are also Frankfurt, he had a better, but still Bruce Cook phenomena of cultural interaction...
...the consciousness, experiences, and awaiting something (the fad or fashion) Indeed, his comments about the third of even prejudices of their observers...
...By the end, Sex Life has told us that, 1 frame of theory that allows the critic to and worse...
...Detective Sergeant Joseph ages against each other in the effort to Melaniphy finds two nude corpses on a identify the precipitate that remains after bed in a seedy room near the Chicagowithering stares have turned the oppo- Evanston border...
...from the whole array of moral and cul- college to escape his mother...
...Catholicism supplied a tion, spinning out its implications, and supplied itself with the frisson of alien- relevant, if not always useful, armamenconsequences...
...tion is not to recall a tradition traduced or using...
...well...
...Norton, $8.95, 185 pp...
...What is needed then is a kill...
...This judgment, Greeley insists, produce something of quality...
...the single reality as a refraction of Civilizations wane, all is a downward ignored, since this comment has no perCommonweal: 474 sonal vector at all...
...Not less myself-equally, on for Nouvelle Revue Frangaise...
...On one his more hortatory Will to Power, for level, Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr...
...It would never have about manners and morals) is not going panoply and excess (which many of the been as witty, adept and deliciously vicito advance the discussion of decadence true proponents of decadence found ous as Gilman's essay on Decadence (quite the contrary, it might impede it...
...Whole ages and civiliza- Barrie Hughes two daughters...
...Whe she left the firm, he bedare speak of morality...
...Miuafilme are morally encoded ab initio...
...It reasserts in perversity the Chapter 14, that "When a man becomes lowed to remain as Archbishop of claim of hope, masked by the posturings pope, a process of mythologization starts Chicago...
...The marriage single souls- may be similarly afflicted...
...They frightening, experience with a German are constellating conceptions...
...But he was restless...
...on the job were "flawless" (p...
...This is the way Scheler beaten to death...
...Admira- began seeing prostitutes...
...This or someone (guru, politician, Messiah) the year's popes are almost embarrassing is not a problem peculiar to Peter to get civilization off its becalming dead in their praise...
...Not less lighted in Gilman's opening chapters, occasion-have been known to summon Germany, where Max Scheler, Ernst makes clear how the ages after antiquity up my own ancient doctrine to serve as Cassirer, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Sim- employed decadence to signalize the fal- precedent for contemporary criticism...
...he the common lot of us all...
...But he is too much the have done so...
...F.A Dept...
...234...
...The dialectic compels preci- or fourteen, who has been strangled...
...All true...
...I, at least, require something more, Arthur A. Cohen deceit of its popular marketing, giving not necessarily a longer book, but someway to a peroration of disgust with the thing more...
...He, spiral (if one is forbearing with decline) John Paul I wrote his inaugural address worries about the pope's eventual deci- or a linear plunge (if one is impatient for from scratch the night he was elected, sions concerning sexual ethics and his apocalypse...
...Outspoken and have (this imaginary essay) investigated and disgust, would have proposed a explicit Catholicism (or Jewish teachings the hollow show of ecclesiastical theology of hope...
...248...
...Jack was the son of defeated parents...
...It is so vulgar and intemperate, the cry of con- dipped into the quiver of Catholic much more appropriate to the French tra- servatives bent on philistine rejection of thought and selected a toxic shaft or two dition of inquiry where distinguished lit- novelty and experiment, or the avant- when he reviewed drama in these pages terateurs parse and examine a single no- garde's self-congratulation on having some years ago...
...Biblical (although not both at once and architectonic source of judgment, a not Scheler's essay on ressentiment is not certainly not by the same critics...
...236) and reason to praise those who can suffi- lacking in Richard Gilman's otherwise "the most gifted pope we've ever had" ciently transcend these limitations and arresting essay is a commanding point of (p...
...A pre-war tradition com- age and emplaced a raspberry on the jaw tarium of organizing principle which mon to the essayists that Jacques Riviere of bourgeois smugness...
...This allows the reflective, deliber- For Complete Information ever, the cultural dissection is not rend- ate narrative to go back and explore Jack WRITE ered necessarily subjective and unscien- Gawlor from 1952, his senior year in tk varsity tific, but rather the terms of the argument high school, to the present...
...R (CHARD GILMAN'S elegant and vig- whole business...
...ing the history of its usage, and finally, at main to begin with, leaves me dissatisthe end, exhausted and annoyed with the fied...
...Where the vision obtains, how- killer...
...that events are always filtered through an ennui before the storm, a lassitude For that matter, neither does Greeley...
...He began to rise in advertions may be thought decadent or bored...
...mel, among others, were taking a variety ling away from the excellence and nobil- Clearly, if one reads Gilman's text careof obdurate cultural phenomena and put- ity of ancient patrimony, both pagan and fully, one can detect a hankering for the ting them under the glass of inspection...
...WC I R 4EJ centered on the church's opposition to his wanted to be a writer...
...prostitute...
...In fact, Gilman's DECADENCE: the whole of culture and the more prag- concluding judgment that decadence is matic _undertaking of employing the now employed as brickbat, shibboleth, THE STRANGE LIFE OF AN EPITHET metaphor of decadence as it is given, rhetorical device, emptied of relevant Richard Gilman examining its possible meanings, sketch- meaning, never having had a settled doFarrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95, 180 pp...
...Both men view...
...He had an What matters is that these terms, more Steven Krellll affair with a woman at his office, a new than simply provocative or descriptive, kind of woman who didn't believe in are accusatory and judging...
...He would have been better served by that confusion...
...but all All sic et non these excellences fail, somehow, to compel me to rethink...
...Its history is surely once-on appropriate occasionscan intellectual undertaking...
...Clearly decadence suggests and Hebblethwaite's generally uncritical eventual handling of dispensations from something about human longing and disembrace of Pope John Paul II in spite of clerical celibacy...
...Decadence 'or boredom or Dada (as SRI LIFE with a black prostitute...
...The sion and care...
...One is a boy, thirteen nents to ash...
...was not sexually exciting...
...He knows the sexual revolution was fun...
...His wife went discourse...
...obliging the analysis to construct and de- Out of a gnawing sense of personal iden- is Available in stroy, to project and demolish, until what tification, he becomes more interested in MICROFORM remains is a version of the man of ontic the murdered man's nature than in his envy...
...It is center...
...At college in U.S A England transformational evolutionism...
...metaphors of, debased cultures, ages of category to set the record straight, a perMethodologically how different nonethe- the world, cultural youth and senes- sistent reference to Catholic intellectual less...
...Sex Life spares scheme, the argument must be passion- us the murder itself, and begins with the ately dialetical, all sic et non, pitting us- aftermath...
...In this context, Gilman bly, his novel, Sex Life, tries to deal with out to work...
...And If these books prove nothing else, it is is somehow linked with cultural acedia, Hebblethwaite doesn't...
...and, even more significant, how cence, the descent of gold to the metallic tradition as both friend and foe of his vast the chasm between the implications dross of what follows, the mythology of argument...
Vol. 106 • August 1979 • No. 15
