“In the very quick of the nightmare”: Decadence and Mystics of Wilderness in Henry Miller’s Cultural Criticism of Modernity

Abstract

In 1878, Friedrich Nietzsche (1988) spoke of a Cultur-Herbst-gefühl (sense of the autumn of culture) (504) that also oppressed his contemporaries in the face of the specter of the decadence of Western civilization haunting Europe.¹ Quite noteworthy is that he traced back the causes of déca-dence to a dynamic inherent in the development of European society itself. As he (1997) remarked in On the Genealogy of Morality, “the civilization and taming of man” has reduced him to “the sick animal” (88) since “the ascetic priest has ruined spiritual health wherever he has come to rule” (107). Nevertheless, “the sickliness of the type of man who has lived up till now” (88) was to be ascribed to a further phenomenon. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (2002) defined “the democratic movement” as “a mediocritization and depreciation of humanity in value” (91) leading to the “degeneration and diminution of humanity into the perfect herd animal” and into “stunted little animals with equal rights and equal claims” (92). In view of such degeneration processes, he (1967) conceived of his “ecstatic nihilism” as “a mighty pressure and hammer” with which the philosopher “breaks and removes degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life” (544).