ABSTRACT
In his recent study, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, Vincent Sherry has directed attention to a temporal paradox in early modernist writing: namely, that despite its emphasis on contemporaneity, present time in works such as the seafaring fictions of Joseph Conrad is marked by an atmosphere of social, political, and cultural decline. The sense of stasis that one frequently encounters in reading the Oriental fictions of Somerset Maugham expresses in temporal terms the folding of the narrative within a sense of imperial totality. In Maugham’s south sea tales and The Moon and Sixpence, his homage to Paul Gauguin, Europeans often find themselves in a temporally suspended environment in which they are confined to remote, albeit oddly suburban, outstations with bungalows, tennis courts, golf courses, and social clubs. Maugham provides a semiotic linkage to the cross of racial with sexual degeneracy in the ragtime music that plays on Thompson’s gramophone when she entertains American sailors in her room.
