Respondent: Lisa Surwillo, Associate Professor of ILAC, Stanford

“Tú lo que quieres es gozar:” collectionism, self-fashioning, and the historical consciousness of franco-colombian decadence.”

In this chapter, I study two major decadent novels: José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa [After-dinner Conversation] and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours [Against Nature]. Therein, I seek to describe how these two novels’ meticulous representations of art collections, aesthetic judgements, and aesthetic experiences give rise to desirable projections of a national past (Huysmans) and a regional future (Silva). I also show that the appeal of these projections depends on the kind of individuality that the practice of collecting artworks and luxury objects is meant to produce. In A rebours, singularity and autonomy are the goal of Des Esseintes’ self-regulated aesthetic experiences. In De sobremesa, José Fernández seeks integrity—the unification of his divided self—through his artistic, commercial, and amorous pursuits. In neither case, however, is the singular, autonomous, and integrated individual valued for its own sake. Rather, these achievements of self-fashioning draw their normative force from medical discourses on national decline and regional backwardness. Thus, De sobremesa and A rebours represent different dimensions of artistic activity as a means to imagining alternative historical narratives for France and Latin America.

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