140701 assembled Cambridge Companion essay 1997
Jerusha McCormack
WILDE'S FICTION(S)
To talk about Wilde's fiction, is to talk about everything, for Oscar was his own best work of art.
Born and educated in Ireland, Wilde came from a country which gives·aprivileged status to fiction. In the words of his predecessor, William Carlton,meditating on 'Paddy's' skill at the alibi: 'Fiction is the basis of society, thebond of commercial prosperity, the channel of communication betweennation and nation, and not unfrequently the interpreter between a man andhis own conscience.'[1] It follows that, if fiction is the very stuff by whichsociety is made, Wilde could only become a writer - and an Irishman - in England. Only there could he create himself through the fictions whichformed 'the channel of communication between nation and nation', thestereotypes by which one understood the other.
A member of the leading class known as Anglo-Irish, Wilde createdhimself by living on both sides of the hyphen. If in Ireland, his family been aqueer kind of English people - at once upholders of the embattled Britishregime and, at the same time, more Irish than the Irish themselves - inEngland, Wilde became a queer kind of Irishman.
Arriving in Oxford from Dublin, Wilde beat the scholars at their owngame, scooping a Double First. Although born of the 'gentry' in Ireland, Wilde assumed the status of an English aristocrat, leisured, extravagant,charming and mannered. If these virtues were exaggerated, it was only togive a double edge to the performance, parodying as well the stereotype ofthe Irish: lazy, improvident, charming and witty. As Matthew Arnoldtrenchantly observed, the Irish had, by their very nature, more in commonwith the English upper class than either of them held with the hard-working,thrifty and dour English middle class.[2]
Setting the stamp on that collusion, Wilde made himself over as a dandy, one who, as a leisured outsider, sought to establish (in the words of Baudelaire) 'a new kind of aristocracy'.[3]
Despising the very society intowhich he seeks initiation, the dandy takes his revenge by creating himself in its image, miming its clothes, its manners and mannerisms. („Imitation”as Wilde observed, „can be made the sincerest form of insult‟ (CW, 1086). Inherently exaggerated, such mimicry exposes the fissure of its ownperformance: the double standards on which it rests. What the dandy performs is a kind of psychic jujitsu - he 'throws people' by using the forceof their attitude to defeat them. In effect, by means of his performance thedandy gets his audience to share his contempt for itself.
By these methods, the dandy fashions himself literally at the expense ofhis audience, thus coming to represent the transactions by which thepowerless, the nobodies, assume power and importance. As was said ofthe great Beau Brummell: 'He was a nobody, who made himself asomebody, and gave the law to everybody."[4] His pursuit is of power; hisstyle not a mere act of homage to fashion but, in fact, a passionate revoltagainst convention itself. Revolt is not repudiation. Its potency relies on theforce of what it repudiates. As another exponent of dandyism, Barbeyd'Aurevilly, observed: 'Dandyism, while still respecting theconventionalities, plays with them. While admitting their power, it suffersfrom and revenges itself upon them, and pleads them as an excuse againstthemselves; dominates and is dominated by them in turn.'[5]
It is this reciprocity of turn and counterturn, the implicit structure of an act of provocation and revenge, upon which I wish to focus in the performanceof Wilde's dandyism.
COUNTERSPEECH
Having come to the centre from the periphery, Wilde arrived as anoutsider, attuned to the doublespeak of the Empire at home. Empirespeakmirrored its master. Just as the Englishman prided himself on his integrity, Empirespeak presented itself as single, insistent and sincere. It wasspoken in one tone, without nuance or irony; and it was the voice ofpassion, commitment and command - the voice of what passes as truth. Itspeaks the big words that men die for - God, King, Country. And itpresumes unanimous consent. To this single, passionate voice, Wilde thusproposes another: one that speaks double, in the ironical and self-cancelling wit of the dandy.
In creating himself through this voice, Wilde drew on the resonances ofhis own cultural heritage. Growing up in a British colony, he had (inevitably)become conscious of its methods of linguistic control: those directed,through the colonial regime, to indoctrinating the tenets of Empirespeak.Wilde's Irish background made him forever suspicious of official cant. In hisone sustained political critique of British society, 'The Soul of Man underSocialism', Wilde comments that 'one of the results of the extraordinarytyranny of authority in that words are absolutely distorted from their properand simple meaning, and arc used to express the obverse of their right signification' (CW 1194).
Such an insight could only be won from a radical estrangement – not merely from the father country, but from the father-tongue. Wilde came to manhood in a colony where the peasants (as he later recalled) werebilingual (L,483). During his lifetime, when they lived under the compulsionof adopting a foreign tongue, he had witnessed a policy of what can only becalled linguistic terrorism. Wilde himself had learned a little Irish during hislong holidays with his family in County Mayo (his own son, Vyvyan, recallshim singing him a lullaby in Gaelic.)''[6] He was also, in his own style, awareof 'Celtic' deviations in occasional turns of phrase (L 289). As a writer, itwas the issue of language which sealed Wilde's sense of displacement; ashe wrote to Edmond de Goncourt: 'Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandaisde race, et les Anglais m'ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare (L
303).
Wilde escaped that fate by writing Salome in French. When he returnedfrom Paris to London to make himself as a writer, it was as a double onewho, under cover of wit, turned the doubles peak of Empire back on itself.To plot Wilde's career in counterspeech, one must begin with hissubversion of the sentence.
APHORISMS GONE WILDE
Wilde made himself through the quip: the quotable one-liner.
Examination of the ways he composed (such as the drafts of his plays)suggests that he began with a series of witty phrases, jokes or puns and shuffled them around between characters - and even between other texts. Once he had coined a phrase, it was likely to reappear anywhere.[7] Thus Wilde became his own best plagiarist, improvising on a series of lines hekept in his head, a worker in an oral tradition of his own creation.
It is important to note that Wilde came from a culture which, on bothsides of the Anglo-Irish divide, prided itself (and to some extent, still does) on being able to turn a phrase. Arriving at Oxford, Wilde entered a culturewhich was literate, and distrusted the oral; which was solemn, and distrusted wit; which was threatened, and policed the borderlines of such contentious issues as gender by a regime of reflex platitudes: those'formulas' which, as Matthew Arnold observed, the Englishman 'has alwaysat hand in order to save himself the trouble of thinking'.[8]
Those 'formulas' were sentences in all denotations of the word: agrammatical unit which expressed an opinion as if it were an axiom - a judgment which, posing as a kind of eternal truth, condemned all opposing opinion as untruth. Enforcing social consensus, such aphorisms weredeployed as a kind of border patrol to keep distinct such areas as 'good'and 'bad', 'manly' and 'womanly', 'trivial' and 'important'. In the society of thelate Empire, it is along these fronts that the linguistic battles were beingfought.
Despising safety, Wilde turned the linguistic front into a kind of no man'sland.[9] He did not fight by the rules - what he was fighting were the rules. His methods were strictly those of guerrilla warfare. Camouflaging his own attack in the language of the enemy, he blew it up. Take, for instance, this instance from 'Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young':'Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others' (CW 1244). In other words, 'good' people often tryto discredit attractive people - presumably for the threat they pose to theirgoodness - by calling them 'wicked'. In doing so, 'good' people of course also discredited themselves as being 'good': precisely the kind of self-cancelling oxymoron by which the dandy detonates the self-satisfied platitudes of his audience.
They are, in effect, hoist on their own cliché: amused at their ownexpense. Wilde is able to do this precisely because he uses the languageof his audience - a language already faithless, the language of common double-talk. In Wilde, Thomas Mann discovered much of the essentialNietzsche, his 'furious war on morality', and his transvaluation of moral intoaesthetic values.[10] But Wilde did not have Nietzsche; nor did he need him.Victorian hypocrisy was in itself a transvaluation of values. What Wilde didwas to expose the sleight of hand whereby one set of values counterfeited another; whereby the control of art, and certainly of Wilde, became an agenda - as it did in his trials - of social and political control:
EDWARD CARSON: Listen, sir. Here is one of the 'Phrasesand Philosophies' which you contributed to this magazine:'Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for thecurious attractiveness of others.' You think that true?
OSCAR WILDE: l rarely think that anything I write is true.
Wilde was sent to prison for a breach of the Criminal Law Amendment Actof I885 which made indecencies between men, even in private, a criminal offence. But (it may be argued) Wilde condemned himself by hisperformance in the dock. One might even say, he sentenced himself by challenging the very status of truth itself.
