[ top ] Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish Attitudes [Field Day Pamphlets, No. 6] (Derry: Field Day 1984), Wildes is an art of inversion where each side exemplifies qualities which we would normally expect in its opposite, as every dichotomy dichotomises. The inversion of expectations of the audience may also be found in the plays [Importance ] depiction of sexuality. So it is the women who read heavy works of German philosophy and attend university courses, while the men lounge elegantly on sofas. The men are filled with romantic impetuosity and breathless surges of emotion, but it is the women who cynically discuss the finer points of male physique [...] In all these scenes Wilde is applying this doctrine of the androgyny of the healthy personality. [ /] Antithesis was the master key of the entire Victorian cast of mind Wilde saw that by this mechanism the English male could attribute to the Irish all those traits of poetry, emotion and soft charms which a stern Victorian code [7] had forced him to deny to himself[,] but he knew from experience that the two peoples are a lot more alike than they care to admit - that the Irish can as often be cold, polite, and calculating as the English can be sentimental, emotional and violent. [...] Wilde is interested in the moment of modernism when the ancient antithesis dissolves to reveal an underlying unity. Like Yeats, he could see that talent perceives differences, but only genius perceives unity. / This same inversion of conventional expectations would explain the pose adopted by Wilde in England. All the norms of his childhood were now to be reversed. (pp.7-8.) [ ] Wilde is one of the first modernist writers to take for subject not the knowledge of good and evil, but what Lionel Trilling was later to call the knowledge of good-and-evil [recte Henry James]. he insists that men and women know themselves in all their aspects and that they cease to suppress those attributes which they may find painful or unflattering. (p.9.)
Declan Kiberd, Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman, in Inventing Ireland (London: Cape 1995), pp.33-50; Kiberd regards Wildes jilting by Florence Balcombe as a massive disappointment, whereon he vowed to leave Ireland probably for good (Letters, Hart-Davies, 20-21.) Wilde was, however, the first intellectual from Ireland who proceeded to London with the aim of dismantling its imperial mythology from within its own structures. He saw that those who wanted to invent Ireland might first have to reinvent England. (p.32.) Further: His famous parents were probably too busy to offer the one commodity that is signally lacking in all his pals, that continuous tenderness and intimacy which might have given him a sense of himself. (p.34.) The ease with which Wilde effected the transition from stage Irishman to stage Englishman was his ultimate comment on the shallowness of such categories. (p.36.) [ top ] John Stokes, Oscar Wilde, in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, ed. Ian Ousby (Cambridge UP 1988): In Lady Windermeres Fan (1892)] the life-style of the dandy Lord Darlington becomes a practical option, if you pretend to be good, the world doesnt take you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it does. Mrs Erlynne learns that being good is allowing the world to think you bad, and Lady Windermere, the puritan - and her daughter - learns that deception is sometimes necessary and beneficial, emerging more tolerant than she began. In A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingsworth is the dandy; Hester Worseley, another puritanical young woman; Mrs Arbuthnot a genuine fallen woman; her son Gerald, at the centre of the play, is to act as secretary to Lord Illingsworth, who is also attempting to seduce Hester, and turns out to be his (Geralds) father. In An Ideal Husband, the dandy is Lord Goring, who tries to help politician Robert Chiltern, being blackmailed over his association with a shady financier Baron Arnheim.
Terry Eagleton, Introduction to Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems (London: Dent, 1991): Aestheticism at its most challenging is concerned not to isolate art from life but to aestheticise life itself - to imbue it with the rich intricate expressiveness of a work of art. To live well, in Wildes view, was to turn oneself into an artifact - to savour each of ones moments with the unique intensity of a poem. Art was thus not a substitute for living, but the very model for it. In his dress, speech, deportment, in the minutiae of his daily conduct, Wilde [strove] to live with the elegance and self-completion of a great painting or a symphony - to allow each of his varied inclinations free realisation, and to shape them in provisional harmony. Such supreme freedom of self-expression was for him the very essence of morality. (p.xxi.) The Importance of Being Earnest is an intoxicatingly comic play, almost giddy with its own effervescent wit yet beautifully controlled. What prevents us from finding it too oppressively mannered is its geniality and high spirits, the deep good humour which sounds through its precious wit. Its fast-moving farcical plot presses the whole dramatic action into a kind of surrealist dimension where it is sustained by nothing but its own exhilarating momentum. The play stacks illusion upon illusion, but reveals high society to be quite as unreal as itself; it deconstructs the distinction between fact and fiction. (p.xxiv.) If Wilde mocks, he does so with a certain genial affection, as a licensed jester rather than a sardonic scourge [...]. Their [his plays] wit shows up the English nobility as blockheads and parasites, but belongs to the very social world it criticises. (p.xxv.) Dorian Gray does indeed represent in Freuds terms, the return of the repressed - a ghastly, uncannily powerful exposure of the dangers of the hedonistic creed, which in the heartless Dorian now takes the form of driving a young girl to suicide. [...] But Dorian Gray, guilt-ridden and tormented though it may be, is in no simple sense Wildes recantation. For one thing, its sumptuous, hothouse style colludes with the very aestheticism the book officially questions. (p.xviii.) Dorians callow ideology of pleasure is something of a travesty of his creators own philosophy. For Wilde, self-cultivation is the absolute goal of human life, but it involves an all-round Hellenistic development of the personality, not just the pursuit of perverse sensations. (pp.xviii-ix.)
[ top ] Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro N. Carolina, ELT Press; [distrib. by] Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1993): [...] revaluations of Wilde as well-known and as thorough as those by Richard Ellmann and Richard Pine continue to read Wildes life as a tragedy, his scandals and trials as a fall, occasioned by the hubris of the too-successful socialite (p.2.) The new Wilde is occupied less by the brilliant salon life of the 1980s and much more by hard and sometimes rather prosaic work. Wilde becomes the epitome of the new type of professorial writer at the turn of the century, concerned with the unglamorous business of self-promotion, negotiating with publishers, cultivating potential reviewers, and constantly polishing his work. Moreover his interests are now seen to be much more wide ranging than those associated with the literary and art worlds of the time. The new Wilde is preoccupied with issues such as authority, gender, identity, and prison reform; he is seen as thoroughly and seriously engaged with some of the most contentious and intellectual issued of his day. / It is not surprising that this changed perception of Wilde has coincided with the emergence of relatively new areas of study within English. Generally speaking, most of the changes which have occurred in Wilde criticism over the past fifteen years have their origins in larger changes which have taken place in the various practices of the discipline. One of the most significant of these changes concerns literary history. For the first seventy years of this century, literary history assumed, but never made explicit, a set of values which marginalized or excluded writers such as Wilde. One of the anomalies of that history is that major but controversial figures of the late nineteenth century, although written about at great length, have rarely been marked out as worthy of serious intellectual attention; they never appeared as central figures in the canon which literary history enshrined. So although Wilde may have been acknowledged as a theoretician of culture, or as a propagandist for art, or as a figure to be accommodated uncomfortably within the history of English bourgeois sexual ethics, he was never accorded the status of sage to stand alongside Victorian worthies such as Matthew Arnold or John Stuart Mill. Consistently accused of superficiality and slightness, he was invariably credited only with a kind of clever haute vulgarisation - Wilde the disciple, to use the accepted euphemism, of Pater, of Ruskin, of Godwin. (p.3.) Further: This situation changed dramatically with the advent of the sustained, if sometimes unfocused, critique of the values and assumptions underlying traditional literary historiography whcih occurred in the mid-1970s and the 1980s [...] where the categogries of the social and the literary, hitherto seen as mutually exclusive, were now no longer helf ot be so simple or so distinct. [...] As a consequence of such revaluations it has become possible to reintegrate those two figures which, for half a centruy, were almost distinct cases in British and Irish history: Wilde the writer and Wilde the flambouyant homosexual iconoclast no longer exclude each [4] other. The analysis of the relationships between authority, power, and ideology, and their representations in discourse, has also led to a general interest in what is sometimes termed the manipulation of meanings [...] The work of some recent criticshas allowed us to see much more clearly these processes at work [...] (p.5.) [ top ] Seamus Heaney, Speranza in Reading: On The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Redress of Poetry [Oxford Poetry Lectures] (London: Faber & Faber 1995), pp.83-102: I want[ed] to draw attention to these parallels and foreshadowings and coincidences of style and behaviour between mother and son. Its not that there is anything new in noticing the resemblance; its just that, by recalling it, the provenance of the ballad is illuminated even if its stylistic faults are not extenuated. [...] Its effects are probably deemed too broad, its popularity too [102] misplaced, its status within Wildes oeuvre too insecure to warrant serious consideration. And yet, for all that, the poem does give credence to the idea of poetry as a mode of redress. [ ] The master of the light touch came to submit to the heaviness of being and came, as a result, to leave his fingerprints on a great subject. (p.101-02.) [Heaney explicitly acknowledges in this essay the merits and influence of Declan Kiberds post-colonial reading of Wilde, along with those of Terry Eagleton.] Heaney remarks that W. B. Yeats, in compiling his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited The Ballad of Reading Gaol down from 109 stanzas to 38, writing in his Introduction: Now that I have plucked from The Ballad of Reading Gaol its foreign feathers it shows a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy, the contrary to all its author deliberately sought. I plucked out even famous lines because, effective in themselves, put into the Ballad they become artificial, trivial, arbitrary; a work of art can but have one subject. Further, Yeats wrote: I have stood in judgement upon the Ballad, bringing to light a great, or almost great poem, as he himself had done had be lived; my work gave me that privilege. (Heaney, op. cit., p.88.) Among the lines he culled acc. to Heaney were Yet each man kills the thing he loves,/By each let this be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word. / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword! Heaney comments that the power of this stanza derives from Wildes sense that the condemned man is his double thus fastening upon a figure through whom he could indulge in a vicarious exercise in self-castigation and self-pity, but Yeats was not prepared to allow this self-gratifying aspect of Wildes writing to absorb attention. (p.89); Heaney cites verses on the binding of the man for hanging (hangman comes with gardeners gloves ... and binds one with three leathern thongs), remarking that for the purposes of his ballad, less would have been more. (p.91).
Mary C. King, Oscar Wilde: Naming, Re-cognising and Re-Collecting and The Picture of Dorian Gray (typescript paper on Wilde, 1998): Wildes text [Dorian Gray] rigorously constructs, complicates and deconstructs these master pieces [sic]. It does so through the treacherous deployment of texts and of names as complicitous corrupt paratexts. As we tease out historys charmed nightmare of nominally compressed sentences, we are curiously encouraged to engage in our own disruptive-subversive readings of canonical versions of scriptures and literatures. Wildes revolutionary style requires and rewards not just the identification of referents, but the elucidation and advancement of relationships between the various levels of allusion. That traumatised hermetic art which leads to a door or a picture-frame beyond which there is nothing but life is historicised and positioned as an Anglo-Irish nineteenth century manifestation of the European bourgeois quest for the immortelle of pure origins, solipsistically desired, eternally sought and endlessly receding. As in Joyces critical modernism, so in Dorian Gray technique becomes the problem of history: style and form lead us into and beyond the world of the picture and the book, soliciting and negotiating subversive relationships between text and world and requiring us an insomniac reading against the grain. [ top ] Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (1997): He may, as he says, have lost his Dublin accent soon after arriving at Oxford as an undergraduate, since it would have separated him linguistically from his contemporaries, perhaps even caused him embarrassment, but later his Irishness would set him apart from what he regarded as the commonplace in English life and letters and was more a matter in which to take pride. [ ]. To be Irish was to be subversive but above all it was to be imaginative, qualities rooted deep in his nations culture and history and which, at the same time as they marked both the author and the man as an individual in an age of conformity, also wrote his name clearly [8] into the lists of public undesirables. (pp.8-9; for biographical details from this text, see Wilde1, supra.)
Simon J. James, review-notice on Philip Hoare, Wildes Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War (London: Duckworth 1997), 250pp.; deals with lawsuit of 1918, initiated by Maud Allen, the dancer in Salomé who was the implied object of charges of homosexuality under the caption The Cult of the Clitoris in Noel Pemberton Billings paper The Imperialist, contain charges that a black list of 47,000 British homosexuals being blackmailed by the German Government included the subscribers to the play (an idea suggested to Billing by Marie Corelli). [ top ] Munira H. Mutran, ed., Wildes Thread in the Fabric of Decadent Art, in ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 1 (June 1999), pp.65-67: [...] Though Dorian Gray is a very significant thread in the fabric of European decadent literature, it has no single sources, nor is it a mixture of works of the period. In one level, it interacts with other European threads reflecting the aesthetics of the moment; but it is unique, in a second level, as an original manifestation of the cultural atmosphere of the nineteenth century as it was drawing to a close. Let us then outline, although briefly, some of the important novels of the eighties and nineties in order in enhance similarities and above all, differences, among them. / Walter Peters Marius, the Epicurean (1885) portrays a philosophic journey in those charmed moments towards the end of the second century. Marius. a deeply religious boy, lives in the country-house where his family has dwelt for generations, and where the little gods in their altars receive a few violets, a cake dipped in wine, or morsel of honeycomb. More given to contemplation than to action, as he grows older, an overtension of the soul brings an appetite for adventure, for new experiences whether physical or spiritual. His journey as a pilgrim towards Rome begins, as he says, in search of perfection. In his conversations and long meditations he yearns to grasp the essence of a whole philosophical tradition, beginning with the theory of pleasure. The movements of his thoughts can be followed in the dialogue with Lucian, in which he asks if there are many ways to true philosophy and if each is different from the other, how to choose? How to know that in the door you have entered truth is? / Mariuss journey draws to an end after his visit to his old house, and the tombs of his ancestors, when he is aware that he is the last of a race, that the religion of Numa and the old world belong to a past which cannot be recovered. At this moment of despair he finds solace for the disease of the spirit, as he calls it, in the contact with the Christians, a small group of people who have a strange, new hope, and for whom the ideas of peace, chastity and cheerfulness area turning-point in his journey. As a primitive Christian, about to die, he receives the last rites, the oil applied to all those passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him. / In Paters novel, the idea of the end of an era and its consequences on religion, culture, philosophy and language establishes a parallel between the crumbling of the British Empire and that of the Romans, when the old andthe new values coexist. (p.65.)
[ top ] Simon Callow, The Importance of Remembering Oscar, in The Times [London] (Friday, 24 Nov. 2000), writes: [ ] the backlash has begun. Goaded by extravagant claims that he was a social, moral, artistic and intellectual revolutionary, the detractors have hit out: Wilde was a minor writer, they say: he was vain, snobbish and pompous; he was intellectually thin and morally suspect; his self-induced trial and subsequent imprisonment have swollen his significance out of all proportion to his achievements. / Those of us who love him must wryly admit that there is perhaps a modicum of truth in these accusations, but all this is besides the point. The single most consistent theme in Wildes writing is his assertion of the primacy of personality, and it is as a personality that he triumphantly survives the erosion of time. Callow recounts that Merlin Wilde showed him the lock of Wildes sisters hair which he always kept, and likewise a lock of Wildes hair which Robbie Ross cut on his deathbed, untouched by any trace of grey. (p.18.)
[ top ] Thomas Wright, [review] in Times Literary Supplement ( 9 Feb. 2001), p.3-5, quotes Wilde in a letter of 1898 to Robbie Ross: I shall live as the infamous Saint Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr. Further quotes Wilde to Frank Harris: Fifty years or a hundred years hence my comedies and my stories will be known and read by millions, and even my unhappy fate will call forth worldwide sympathy, and remarks: Wilde has emerged in the last few years as a serious (or at least a seriously trivial) intellectual, and as a dazzlingly protean figure. Notes that the following is misattributed by Barbara Belford to Wilde himself rather than a character: It is sad to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. (Sir Henry Wotton, Picture of Dorian Gray); also cites Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983).
[ top ] Fionnula Henderson, Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism: A Study of the Social Comedies [UU Diss., UUC 2001]: Wildes ambivalent views both on life and [7] on the purpose of art are especially evident in his four high-society comedies Lady Windermeres Fan (1891), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and lastly, his undoubted masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (also 1895). Performed to packed playhouses during Wildes brief latter years of glory as a successful playwright and darling of society, these four seemingly light, effervescent plays are in reality deep psychological and social studies, in which Aestheticisms socially and artistically-lauded representative Wilde appears to covertly criticise late Victorian high society and upper and middle class morality, whilst at the same time surreptitiously exploring gender-related issues such as the role of women and plight of homosexual or bisexual men as they try to come to terms with life in a patriarchal, homophobic and rigidly conventional society. Yet, in Wildes last two works - The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis (1905) - which were written after his public humiliation, imprisonment and eventual bankruptcy, his quicksilver point of view (which was so elusive and difficult to pin down in earlier works) is now much more consistent. (pp.7-8.)
[ top ] Anthony Julius, review of Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (Fourth Estate), in Times Literary Supplement ( 16 May 2003 ), pp.10-11: In a lengthy review, Julius discusses the antinomian dimension of Wildes character and behaviour - a term which Wilde himself uses in De Profundis. (Julius conflates sentences from widely divergent parts of Wildes text, to produce the following synoptic passage: Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws [...] Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: as if anybody or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world. For him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely. He then proceeds to consider the facts and the his best and worse course that Wilde could have taken in defending himself against Queensburys aggression, demonstrating in principle that Wilde followed the worst possible course not only in charging the other with libel when, in fact, he was actually guilty of the very thing that he was accused of (posing as a sodomite) but also in giving the brief to solicitors other than his own, Sir George Lewis - quoting Lewiss saying to Wilde after the disaster of the first trial: Whats the use of coming to me now? I am powerless to do anything. If you had had the sense to bring Lord Queensburys card to me in the first place, I would have torn it up and thrown it in the fire and told you not to make a fool of yourself. [...] Julius ends his article by returning implicitly to his earlier theme of artistic antinomianism (one could argue that English literature itself is constitutively antinomian), suggesting that the writer is always of this kind and that the law is naturally of the opposite disposition, making it imperative to avoid making a contest between the two: When reviewing Wildes calamitous experience with the English legal system, the semantic association of, persecution with prosecution seems unaccidental, given the judicial nature of his oppression. It is the condemned Wilde, rather than the playwright and wit, who is most vivid in our imagination; it is the judges sentence, rather than any epigram of the prisoners, which resonates with us. This is at least in part because Wildes prosecution and conviction inaugurated two kinds of persecution of writers in this century. The first is the persecution of a writers work; the second is the persecution of the writer himself. (For full-text copy of this summary, see RICORSO Library, "Criticism" > Reviews", via index, or direct.) [ top ] Colm Tóibín, Darkness of the Heart, Introduction to Hesperus Edn. of The Return by Joseph Conrad (2004): In the last years of the 19th century, a number of writers who were in exile in England began, as outsiders, to consider the drama surrounding the brittleness of English manners and morals and the pressures on English stability. This offered them an alluring, mysterious and, at times, evasive subject. / Henry James, for example, remained fascinated by the English system of inheritance in which, on the death of her husband, the widow was cast aside while her son inherited the property. James sought to dramatise this in The Spoils of Poynton (1896). / It was this world, too, which Oscar Wilde described in his comedies of manners written in the early 1890s, work in which no Irish characters appeared, in which members of the English drawing-room class are mimicked and mocked, masked and unmasked. So, too, the hero, whoever he is, of Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) wallowed in the great unstable openness of London. The vast and various city, in all its ineffable mystery and otherness, offered these three writers an escape from their own narrow heritage, and a richly layered world to chart in its duplicity, and perhaps even its decline. / This close attention to English manners did not last long. James, once the new century had begun, returned to writing about Americans in Europe. Stevenson escaped to a more exotic landscape where he died in 1894. Wilde was destroyed by the very forces he mocked. The house of England, in all its glory, was not their property; they stayed as guests, watchful and untrusting. (Extract in The Guardian, Saturday, 3 April 2004.)
Eileen Battersby, Second Reading: The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde (1890), in The Irish Times (23 Aug. 2008), Weekend: Wotton first encounters Gray at the studio of Basil Hallward, who has not only recognised his dangerous allure but has captured it on canvas. Wilde, who always suffered for love, well understood the vulnerability of the lover. Wotton immediately seizes on Dorian Gray as a potential plaything, but Hallward is reluctant to share him, and his unease is obvious. The painter sees what he calls a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction and in the course of the conversation, Hallward emerges as a remarkable, probably doomed figure. I turned halfway round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time, he recalls. When our eyes met, I felt I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me [...]. Hallwards candid remarks have little effect on the thoughtless Wotton, who delights in drawing the young man away. / Meanwhile, Dorian Gray has become obsessed with a lovely young actress who nightly performs Shakespeare. He wants to marry her and persuades Wotton and Hallward to accompany him to the theatre. That evening, before their eyes, her acting lacks its usual skill. She has decided that now she is loved, she no longer needs to perform a part. Her symbolic intent eludes Gray who, furious that she has embarrassed him, denounces her. Having adored the actress, he rejects the real girl. Later he detects the first signs of change in his portrait. Alarmed, he plans to seek her forgiveness. It is too late; she has already killed herself. Grays fate is also decided. (p.12; for see full text, see RICORSO Library, Reviews, infra.) [ top ] John Wilson Foster, Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture (Dublin: IAP 2009): [...] We would expect such hostility to science form a man who, in Paglias words, projected himself internationally as the ultimate aesthete [Camilla Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertitti to Emily Dickinson, NY: Vintage Books 1991, p.523]. But on reflection the expectation seems shallow. To begin with, Wilde first knew that the marvels of design achievable by decorative art were often absent from nature, not through studying Art (as he declared in The Decay of Lying, but through readhing students of nature. He wrote in his Commonplace Book while a student of Oxford: We have out-grown the theory of design and talk easily of the ‘silly maladaptations of organic nature. (Clifford). [Oscar Wildes Oxford Notebooks, ed. Philip E. Smith II & Michael S. Helfand, OUP 1989, p.144.] The editors of the Commonplace Book do not offer a precise William Kingdon Clifford source of Wildes entry, and nor can I, but Clifford in his lecture On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought (repringed in an 1879 volume of Cliffords essays and lectures that Wilde read studiously), does discuss purposeless or defective adaptations in organic nature. (Lectures and Essays, ed. Lesilie Stephen & Sir Frederick Pollock, Macmillan 1901, Vol. I, pp162-66.] (p.33.) [Cont.]
[ top ] Ciaran Murray, Disorientalism: Asian Subversion / Irish Visions Oscar Wilde Cancels a Country, pp.19-67 [Chap. 3]: The whole of Japan, declared Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, is a pure invention. There is no such country, there is no such people. We know, of course, what he meant; but there is a sense in which it might be said that for Wilde there were two such countries as Japan. He was born into one, and adopted into the other. The one stood for nature, the other for art. / The country he was born into might seem to have been Ireland; but it was an Ireland shaped by Japanese aesthetics. He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde, wrote his mother. Is that not grand, misty, and Ossianic? The land Wilde inherited, therefore, was the Celtic sublime: that vision of windswept heaths, abandoned palaces and a passionate and tragic people conjured up by Macpherson out of Irish myth and the romantic wildness derived from the gardens of Japan: that land upon which Sydney Owenson had composed successive fictional variations. / At Oxford, Wilde found the ideology which underpinned this vision represented by Ruskin. Ruskin had adopted the Romantic synthesis of nature and Gothic, a style believed to have arisen from the avenues of the forest, and seen by its revivalist Pugin as a healing alternative to the ravages of industrialism. As Pugin, however, had identified the middle ages with Catholicism, Ruskin shifted the emphasis to the Protestant gospel of meaningful labour. And so Oscar was involved in a project of Ruskins to make a road of a marshy lane. But the road was never completed; and he went down another path. While Ruskin fulminated on behalf of the medieval, Oscar overheard a quieter voice from elsewhere in Oxford that spoke to opposite effect, as Paters serene and exquisite prose evoked the fullness of life of the Renaissance. This was the way that Wilde was to go: deciding, as one of his characters puts it, that aesthetics are higher than ethics. (p.41.) [Cont.]
Fintan OToole, The Wilde spirit that speaks the language of the theatre, in The Irish Times (2 Oct. 2010), Weekend - Culture Shock [column], p.7. Wildes work anticipates the theatrical revolution that Beckett fomented in the 1950s. In The Importance of Being Earnest, he achieved something deceptively profound. / Just as the avant-garde painters of his time were seeking to create works that were pure surface, Wilde managed a complete theatrical shallowness. He made a play in which there are no motives, no inner lives, no direct connections between the world of the stage and the larger reality beyond. / He also chimed - coincidentally, of course - with the idea that the father of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure, was developing at the time. De Saussure called it the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the notion that words have no necessary connection to the things they signify. Apart from being a very good laugh, Wildes play is also a demonstration of the arbitrariness of naming: the importance of being called Earnest is purely capricious. In his inimitable way, Wilde was unleashing the terrifying idea (taken up again by Beckett) that language tells us far less than it pretends. / This idea was lost for the first half of 20th-century theatre. The dominant influence was that of Constantin Stanislavski and his insistence that the offstage life of theatrical characters was real. An actor playing a maid in a Chekhov play had to know where the maid was born, whether she wet the bed, how she did at school and when she had her first kiss. Every character had a narrative, and that narrative was rooted in an objective reality that could be fully imagined by the actor. Members of the audience would be given a performance that had the same dense texture of subtexts as their own lives. / Beckett is the anti-Stanislavski. [...] (For full text version, see RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
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