The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante's Ask the Dust

Abstract: Though fin de siècle decadence has seldom been recognized as a formative influence on John Fante's writing, the attitude toward modernity that Fante expresses in Ask the Dust is illegible without recourse to the decadent tradition. Tracing the novel's ideas about ethnicity, religion, and sexuality back to the fin de siècle , and reading Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1891 decadent novel Là-bas as its key intertext, we can see that Ask the Dust refashions decadence into an ambivalent survival strategy for transmuting alienation and suffering into a sense of personal consolation or power. Arturo Bandini, the novel's protagonist, poses as various decadent types, such as the dandy-flâneur, the diabolical apostate, and the impotent aesthete, as a means of transmuting the suffering he has endured as an ethnic other. At the same time, Fante himself employs decadence to critique the mutually implicative violences (ethnic, religious, sexual) that underlie judgments about social decay in the Depression-era United States. Fante's modernism ultimately amounts to an essaying of decadence—an asking of the dust for unsuspected consolations.