| View Larger Image | Degeneration (1895) | Paperbackby Max Simon Nordau (Author)
| List Price: | $19.60 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | General Books LLC | | Page Count: | 422 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 16, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 193,328rd |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: .I courses music in a different key, and the jet gives out a different perfume. .jJThis idea of accompanying verses with odours was thrown outwears ago, half in jest, by Ernest Eckstein. ) Paris has carried it out in sacred earnest. The new school fetch the puppet theatre out of the nursery, and enact pieces for adults which, with artificial simplicity, pretend to hide or reveal a f profound meaning, and with great talent and ingenuity execute a magic-lantern of prettily drawn and painted figures moving across surprisingly luminous backgrounds; and these living pictures make visible the process of thought in the mind of the author who recites his accompanying poem, while a piano endeavours to illustrate the leading emotion. And to enjoy such exhibitions as these society crowds into a suburban circus, the loft of a back tenement, a second-hand costumier's shop, or a fantastic artist's restaurant, where the performances, in some room consecrated to beery potations, bring together the greasy habitue and the dainty aristocratic fledgling. CHAPTER III. DIAGNOSIS. The manifestations described in the preceding chapter must be patent enough to everyone, be he never so narrow a Philistine. The Philistine, however, regards them as a passing fashion and nothing more; for him the current terms, caprice, eccentricity, affectation of novelty, imitation, instinct, afford a sufficient explanation. The purely literary mind, whose merely aesthetic culture does not enable him to understand the con- nections of things, and to seize their real meaning, deceives himself and others as to his ignorance by means of sounding phrases, and loftily talks of a ' restless quest of a new ideal by the modern spirit,' ' the richer vibrations of the refined nervous system of the present day,' ' the ... |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 2.5 based on 3 reviews)
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Verdicts from the throne by BHM (Halifax, Canada)  3 Stars
May 21, 2007
"Degeneration" was written by Max Nordau at the end of the nineteenth century. Nordau was an arch-conservative in his views, and was distressed by the threat to social stability posed by the swarm of "degenerates" infecting society. Although he starts off his book with some general discussion of the problem as he sees it, he soon turns to the analysis of those artists or writers who, in his opinion, exemplified mental degeneracy in particularly marked forms. His opinions read like pronouncements from the throne, as he treats the targets of his ire as medical cases whose insanity can be definitely established by someone with his scientific knowledge. In fact, it's downright frightening how glibly he can issue a sentence of insanity or mental degeneracy on someone simply by analyzing that person's written works, even fictional works.
Despite the creepiness of Degeneration - or perhaps because of it - there is definitely some fun to be had in reading the book. Also, although the text is a translation from the German, the quality of the English is generally very good. However, Nordau's analysis of any one person usually goes on far too long. This is likely a consequence of his assertion that an inability to concentrate for long periods of time is a key indicator of mental degeneracy, and he no doubt wanted to prove that he himself had strong powers of concentration. Alas, owing to the diseased condition of the ratiocinative centers of my brain, I usually got bored with the reading long before Nordau got bored with the writing.
There is one interesting wrinkle: around the time that Degeneration was published, Lev Tolstoi came out with an extended essay "What is Art?" In this essay, Tolstoi savages Baudelaire, Verlaine, Wagner ("a limited, self-opinionated German, of bad taste and bad style") and others. Nordau attacks these same persons from much the same angle. But get this: in his book, Nordau treats Tolstoi as a "degenerate mystic"! It would be interesting to find out how Nordau reacted when he discovered that someone he classified as a degenerate mystic held an opinion on "degenerate" art almost identical to his own. It would also be interesting to find out if Tolstoi ever mentions Nordau in his diary. A topic for research.
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An amusing lesson in pseudoscience by S. Gustafson (New Albany, IN USA) 3 Stars
December 08, 2000
This book is almost entirely bunk from its first page to the last. This is what makes it worth reading. Nordau was a nineteenth century believer in the supposed virtues of Clean Living. He thought that the works of contemporary poets and artists were too deliquescent and depraved. Looking for some grounds to condemn them while maintaining the facade of liberal objectivity, he turned to nineteenth century pseudoscience. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian anthropologist, had invented a doctrine of what could only be called forensic phrenology. He believed that criminals could be identified as "atavistic" by their physical features; in practise, just about any feature could be considered "atavistic." Nordau turns this starry wisdom against the poets and artists of whom he disapproves. Not surprisingly, they all turn out to have "atavistic" features in their person, and display equally apish traits in their art. Fortunately, in the process of condemning these writers, he must necessarily compile an anthology of some of the most interesting passages from the authors and intellectuals he condemns. This alone may be worth the price of admission. If you take this twaddle seriously, you will probably be infuriated by it. But who says ya gotta? (Atavism's got me in its simian clutches!) If you enjoy unintentionally (?) funny rants like Bram Dijkstra's -Idols of Perversity-, you might get some kicks here too.
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Alarming assault on the arts by TheIrrationalMan (Basildon, United Kingdom)  2 Stars
February 15, 2000
Max Nordau's "Degeneration", first published in 1892, is a scathing attack of the Decadents, Aesthetes, Parnassians and various artistic disciplines of the late nineteenth century. By adopting the superficial and thus highly questionable theory of Lombroso, Nordau, himself a physician and a disciple of the said Lombroso, interprets the works of such stars as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Wilde, Tolstoy, Wagner, Nietzsche and Ibsen as the result of physiological "degeneration" and classifies the various artists according to their respective pathologies - egomania, sadism, exhibitionism and mysticism. It is ironic that the author, a Zionist Jew with socialist leanings, should have anticipated the programs of Fascism in the twentieth century, with their public burnings of books, Cubist paintings and all other art forms arbitrarily deemed as "degenerate art". In contrast to such art forms, these regimes, of course encouraged "healthy" art, embodied in propagandist statues, usually depicting the athletic male type with upstretched arm, triumphantly affirming the ideals of authority, militarism and nationhood. Nordau is admittedly readable, writing in a lively and vitriolic style, pouring scorn on the figures he brings under his scrutiny. But it is a prohibitionist work compiled by an arch-conservative purist, explicitly calling for the suppression of so-called "undesirable" art and espousing a reductionist theory that may have enjoyed a vogue for some decades but is now recognised as manifestly worthless. An example of politics masquerading as science, to be approached with caution.
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