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Start with the unusual production format. Flecks of metallic stuff glitter in the flocked wallpaper on which it was printed. The large sweep of the pattern suggests grand formal rooms in high bourgeois manner. But the small scale of the pamphlet, cut from such paper, creates a bounded, finite space bracketed from and within the larger sphere of which it is inevitably a part. The material metaphor links production issues and editorial perspectives: the pamphlet is a piece of a social fabric whose extension exceeds the journal’s bounds. Meanwhile, the trapezoid shape whimsically destabilizes the object, which cannot take its place on a bookshelf without tipping forward or backward from the upright stance of better-behaved publications. The diagonal cut across the bottom edge makes it impossible for the work to rest on the firm ground of convention.

The graphics on its cover are reminiscent of things familiar to a literary public in 1896. The style and motifs echo the work of the most infamously renowned of British decadents, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley’s images to accompany the first English translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé had made their public appearance in 1894, and Beardsley’s work and imitators became a veritable industry. The Yellow Book (London: Elkins and Mathews, 1894-97); Jane Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry: The critical reception in England and France from 1893 to 1914 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley (London: V&A Publications, 1998), and of course, Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894, and Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894) for the images by Aubrey Beardsley in their original, unmodified version. The Wilde play, originally in French, had been banned from the London stage by an order of the Lord Chamberlain. Biblical characters, it seemed, were not meant to be vulgarized as theatrical entertainment. But the publication was immediately notorious. Beardsley’s suggestive images inspired their own censorious reactions, though Wilde expressed appreciation of the artist’s grasp of the erotic subtleties and perverse sexuality of his work. The distinctive style of Beardsley’s drawings became immediately recognizable. Amid a host of other talented artists and illustrators of the period, Beardsley established a visual style so distinctive that it was readily parodied. When Burgess sat down to the drawing table to sketch his collection of femmes fatales for the cover of Le Petit Journal , he turned to Beardsley’s sinewy line, carefully designed white shapes, and striking contrasts of pattern and motif in order to compose his own gallery of stylized figures.

The reference to Beardsley is a conspicuous sign that Burgess conceived of his publication within an existing sphere, as part of its current vocabulary and concerns, not naively or incidentally, but as a self-conscious gesture. Why not pick the popular work of Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, or Edward Burne-Jones, equally available for imitation? Rackham’s dark charms and elegant sense of the page, Crane’s rather chaste sensuality and delicate lines, and Burne-Jones’s pseudo-medievalism, though all artful, did not exude the decadence that made Beardsley’s work so much an expression of the recirculating air of hothouse life, unhealthily contained and constrained by social ennui. If Rackham’s fantastic images offer a glimpse of the fantasies and occasional nightmares that lurked in late Victorian nurseries, they did not make a cult of their own neurasthenic exhaustion or strike a pose of debauched affectation. Arthur Rackham’s first illustrated book was published in 1893, with the more elaborate and classic works, like The Brothers Grimm , appearing a few years later. See also Gordon Norten Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (NY: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976). The knowing-ness of Beardsley is not a betrayal of innocence, but an argument against its possibility in ways equaled perhaps only by the sensual opulence of the French symbolist painter Gustav Moreau, who was equally adept at his portrayal of Salomé. Moreau’s images have a heterosexual orientation and are equally seductive. The erotic portrayal of the young woman is elaborately integrated with the power of aesthetic surface and symbolist tenets. But Burgess’s decision to imitate Beardsley is a deliberate choice to parody decadence and all that it implies, not merely late Victorian popular art or esoteric fine art. The fact that he picks a well-published and recognizable illustrator reflects Burgess’s interest in a public audience and the ability of reference values to be shared through print circulation. The critical edge is sharper for this combination of concerns, since the shock tactics of that proto-avant-gardiste set was so resolutely determined to affront the sensibilities and hypocrisies of the world of bourgeois readers of which it was a part. Burgess puts the decadent stance firmly back into the framework of social relations and conventions.

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Source:  OpenStax, Le petit journal des refusées. OpenStax CNX. Jun 03, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10709/1.1
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