Megan
Becker-Leckrone
[This article was
first published in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory
eds. Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, Kenneth Womack (New York: Continuum Press,
May 2002) pp.658-65. It is here republished by kind permission and remains
copyright © to the author, from whom permission for citation should be sought.]
Devoting most of his
career to poetry, prose fiction, and drama, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote the
bulk of his critical work between 1885 and 1891. Along with a number of book reviews and brief
articles, this corpus consists chiefly of just six major essays: ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1885), ‘The Decay of
Lying’ (1889), ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (1889), ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’
(1889), ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1890), and ‘The Critic as Artist’
(1890). In May 1891, four of these six
essays were published together in a volume suggestively entitled Intentions,
although each of the six was at one time or another considered for inclusion in
the book (Danson, 1997, 7-8). Wilde also
published in 1891 the well-known ‘Preface’ to his only novel, The Picture of
Dorian Gray; a brief series of aphorisms on beauty and art, the ‘Preface’ serves
as a pithy distillation of the paradoxical, subtly equivocal theoretical
framework the essays collectively establish.
In 1895, Wilde’s own words would be interpreted, ironically, as utterly
unequivocal evidence against him in the scandalous libel and criminal suits
that eventually sent him to jail and effectively ended his career.
This tragic conclusion
did not extinguish Wilde’s legacy. In
fact, it is safe to say that his words have graced more greeting cards and
bookbags than any other author featured in this book – all testaments to the
prominent place Wilde holds in our cultural landscape to this day. Yet such a distinction does more than
indicate a unique literary and critical influence. Most obviously, it attests to the witty,
epigrammatic memorability of his declarations and, moreover, acknowledges that
when many people speak of Oscar Wilde, they often refer to a personality and a
life as much as a collection of ideas and texts. Indeed, for a writer who famously explores
the question of art’s relation to life, and whose life and work together offer
an uncommonly rich site for examining the overdetermined sexual and social
culture of late-Victorian England, such a focus is in many ways warranted. For despite his avowed artistic detachment
from the age in which he lived, Wilde was a keen social critic. In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ to name
just one example, his description of the public’s despotic potential to quash –
like Mill’s ‘tyranny of the majority’ – independently thinking, creative
individuals provides an eerily prescient analysis of the fate which would
befall him. Recent Wilde scholars have
explored such issues in groundbreaking ways.
But noting his status as cultural icon also points to a peculiar
challenge his critics face, that of diffusing the still popular idea of Wilde
as just a stereotype or a sloganeer.
Beyond the mannered
eccentricities Wilde exhibited in his deliberate cultivation of a public
persona, beyond the famous utterances that seem to serve as captions to it,
lies a largely coherent and complex aesthetic theory of ‘art for art’s sake,’
derived from the aestheticism of Walter Pater, though not merely derivative of
it. Morality and immorality, art and
life, truth and lies – throughout his work, each of these categories garner
their very particular meaning by way of Wilde’s paradoxical rhetoric and
self-consciously performative style. In
a generically diverse body of criticism – which includes lists of cryptic or
ambiguously referential aphorisms, a story of a fatally wayward critic, an
appreciation of a forging and murdering artist, and two dialogues involving
voices that are not merely transparent representations of Wilde’s own
theoretical ‘intentions’ – how he makes his arguments often matters just as
much as what, at isolated moments, they assert.
Separated from their intellectual or discursive context – on bookbags or
greeting cards – these statements amuse, convey a personality, and perhaps seem
cleverly apt. In their discursive
context, they do much more. Wilde’s
response to important critical thinkers who preceded him, his critique of the
prevailing wisdom of his time, and his relevance to theoretical debates that
continue to this day are considerable and warrant serious consideration.
Wilde’s insistence on
the separation between art and life, and his claim for art’s priority in that
pairing, point significantly to questions of aesthetic representation and
reception that span the history of critical discourse from the classical age to
the present. The privilege he gives to
the imaginative, rather than mimetic, function of art recalls the ancient
poetic dispute between Plato and Aristotle and also situates him in a tradition
of poetic apologies from Sidney to the Romantics. As Hazard Adams explains, Wilde recognizes in
his own era that ‘the theory of imitation was undergoing a crucial change. The trend, at least since Kant and Coleridge,
had been to emphasize art’s power to make, not to copy’ (Adams, 1992, 657). Like Pater’s, Wilde’s concept of aesthetic
autonomy belongs to and raises the stakes of this intellectual current. If art does not primarily ‘copy’ life or
nature, then what does it do? Wilde’s
provocative response to this question at once severs and reverses this mimetic
relationship, proposing instead that ‘Life imitates Art’ (Wilde, 1989,
985). Although it is the second effect –
the reversal – in Wilde’s proposal that has gained the status of truism, both
of the gestures have significant implications within the history of critical
theory.
In the first sense,
the separation Wilde imposes upon the mimetic formula, upon a ‘natural’ order
from life to art, elaborates a chief tenet of Pater’s aesthetic criticism: art in its highest form is something more and
other than a mere reflection of the natural world. This emphatic distinction underwrites
aestheticism’s notorious insistence that, in Pater’s words, ‘[t]he office of
the poet is not that of the moralist’ (Pater, 1986, 427). For Pater, the true source of art – its
‘active principle’ – corresponds to what Wilde also privileges, ‘imagination’
(Pater, 1986, 428). What it generates,
for both of them, is ‘beauty’ and ‘pleasure.’
Wilde’s at times outlandish preference for the artificial over the
natural – his protagonist’s refusal, for instance, to go outside in ‘The Decay
of Lying’ – are best read within this specific context. As Pater explains in his essay, ‘Wordsworth’
(1874), the active principle in art is not entirely natural – not ‘rooted in the ground’ or ‘tethered down to a
world’ – but rather ‘something very different from this’ (Pater, 1986,
428). In the ‘Preface’ to The
Renaissance, Pater calls this ‘something’ Wordsworth’s ‘unique, incommunicable
faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things,’ but he
implies that this ‘strange . . . sense’ might itself be of another order
(Pater, 1980, xxii). Even this
quintessential nature poet, Pater audaciously suggests, produces his greatest
work not in mirroring the world around him, but in ‘moments of profound,
imaginative power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and
expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant mind’
(Pater, 1986, 424, emphasis mine). In
such moments, ‘the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,
flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator . . . of the world in
which he lived’ (424). In Pater’s
figuration here, the visiting light of the imagination upon the natural object
decisively transforms it. The result is
a ‘new nature’ and a different world.
The true task of the
aesthetic critic, correspondingly, consists of discovering the elemental traces
of such moments in the work of art – and again, aesthetic separation proves a
key dynamic. Pater outlines this project
in the ‘Preface,’ where he characterizes the critic’s work as a subliming
process of elemental ‘refinement.’ The
‘function of the aesthetic critic’ – like that of a ‘chemist’ – ‘is to
distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts’ precisely what
generates beauty from what does not.
Reading Wordsworth’s poetry, in particular, Pater argues the aesthetic
critic must ‘disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may
be found in combination . . . [and leave] only what the heat of their
imagination has wholly fused and transformed,’ thus subtly dismissing in the
domestic, earth-bound aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry nineteenth century readers
typically privileged (what Paul de Man calls the ‘Victorian Wordsworth’)
(Pater, 1980, xx-xxi). Though often by exaggerating it to the point of seeming
elitism, translating it into impertinent solipsism, or playing it up as the
stereotypical dandy’s hot-house cult of artifice, Wilde adheres closely to
Pater’s aesthetic vision.
The effective reversal
in Wilde’s life-and-art formula draws less directly from Pater and has, perhaps
fittingly, become Wilde’s signature claim.
Yet it does not just describe the uncanny way in which real events seem
to offer types or act out scenarios prefigured by artistic media, as it is
popularly interpreted. Nor does it
simply ‘refer . . . to the fact that fashionable ladies in the 1880s tried to
dress and look like the beautiful figures in the paintings of Rossetti or
Burne-Jones’ (Longxi, 1988, 90-1).
Rather, Wilde argues we perceive the world by means of the conceptual
models provided for us by art. ‘Things
are because we see them, and what we see and how we see it, depends on the arts
that have influenced us,’ explains Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (Wilde, 1989,
986). No perception is immediate. What is is culturally constructed, and in a
sense interpreted for us, already, by existing forms of understanding. While by no means original to Wilde, this
observation highlights a significant post-romantic intellectual undercurrent to
the prevailing realism and positivism of Victorian culture; namely, a growing
skepticism in the possibility of objective perception, aesthetic or
otherwise. In ‘The Critic as Artist’ and
‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ his insistence on implicating critical discourse
itself in this constructivist condition aligns him suggestively with Nietzsche
and even Freud.
For this reason and
others, Wilde’s reversal resonates unmistakably with concerns central to
contemporary theory. If, as Jonathan
Culler has recently suggested, theory characteristically involves a critique of
common sense and an interrogation of what we assume is ‘natural,’ then Wilde’s
work is theoretical through and through (Culler, 1997, 4). The aestheticism or decadence Wilde espouses
declares itself overtly ‘against nature’ in its emphasis both on art’s autonomy
and on the constructedness of ‘life.’
As Linda Dowling argues in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin
de Siècle, the aestheticist proposal announces a specifically late-Victorian
state of affairs: a linguistic and
epistemological condition wherein ‘nature,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘truth’ cannot be
sustained as self-evident, stable, or authoritative categories, if indeed they
ever could be. Both Wilde’s theory of
art and his often affected stylistic self-consciousness, according to Dowling,
‘emerge . . . from a linguistic crisis, a crisis in Victorian attitudes towards
language brought about by the new comparative philology earlier imported from
the continent’ and largely inherited from romanticism (Dowling, 1986,
xi-xii).
One benefit of
Dowling’s reading is that it obviates the need to reconcile the seeming
inconsistency between the gravity of Wilde’s ideas and the levity of their
presentation. In this light, we can see
the relentless play of Wilde’s texts – his dizzying use of paradox, the witty
exaggerations, carefully staged dialogues and complex narrative frameworks –
not as the frivolous camouflage for serious ideas, but as performative
demonstrations of them. What Wilde’s
essays so often ironically present are occasions that raise, in Dowling’s
words, the ‘spectre of autonomous language’ – that is, adumbrations that our
words might not correspond to our world or, more ominously, our ‘intentions’ in
a harmoniously referential way (xii).
In this sense, there is a profound consistency between the content of
Wilde’s aesthetic theory and his performative style. Dowling considers the latter a strategically
formulated ‘counterpoetics of disruption and parody and stylistic derangement,
a critique not so much of Wordsworthian nature as of the metaphysics involved
in any sentimental notion of a simple world of grass and trees and flowers’
(x). For this reason, Dowling suggests that aestheticism and key
poststructuralist projects – Foucault’s, Derrida’s – share a common critical
lineage, albeit on separate sides of the ‘metaphysical rupture brought about by
Saussurean linguistics’ (xiii).
A close look at
Wilde’s notorious use of paradox serves as an instructive illustration of the
‘counterpoetics’ Dowling describes. In
all of his paradoxical assertions, Wilde takes the commonsense, apparently
natural order of things (the doxa) and reverses it, goes against it (para) in a
way that seems initially wittily absurd, but which comes to make a certain sense
upon reflection. To cite just one
example, we can look at the concluding sentences of Wilde’s ‘Preface’ to The
Picture of Dorian Gray, written in part to counter the moral opprobrium the
novel’s serial appearance first precipitated.
Here, Wilde offers three declarations that, taken together, form a kind
of skewed syllogism:
We can forgive a man
for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is
that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless (Wilde, 1989, 17).
In a text purportedly
defending Wilde’s own work of art, it seems absurd to declare such a work
‘useless.’ But the paradoxical logic
draws out a key cultural assumption – in this case, the presumed connection
between utility and value, especially with regard to art. He furthermore glosses the seemingly obvious
truth that what is ‘useful’ would also have more value than what is
‘useless.’ Wilde’s apparently
self-defeating defense, that ‘[a]ll art is quite useless,’ in fact, both articulates
a long-standing bias – at least since Plato – that art is not socially or
morally ‘useful’ and thus not valuable (or conversely, that it is useful, but
only to the extent that it does serve society or morality) and turns it on its
head. In the process, Wilde dislocates
utility and value, makes them opposites, and then reorders them, so that what
is ‘useful’ becomes, paradoxically, what is not to be ‘admire[d].’ And art’s ‘uselessness,’ in turn and inextricably
within these terms, becomes its unique, lofty essence. Danson stresses the importance of context,
both textual and intellectual, in understanding the force of such
utterances: ‘In Wildean paradox . . .
the ironized new meanings of words are only realizable in relation to their old
meanings, which the paradox, for its subversive purpose, keeps in circulation’
(Danson, 1997, 150). Thus, the word
‘useless’ becomes a kind of portmanteau in which we may read a long history of
aesthetic theory. His paradox glosses at
once Plato’s banishment of poetry from the republic, Kant’s description of the
aesthetic object’s ‘purposive purposelessness,’ the ‘intense’ aesthetic
admiration Pater advocates, as well as the contemporary popular sentiment Wilde
means to subvert.
The longer essays
employ this strategy and others to enact a similar theoretical engagement. ‘The Decay of Lying,’ the first and most
anthologized essay in Intentions, is a not-quite Platonic dialogue that
considers the mimetic relationship between art and nature. The dialogue’s title refers to an article
Vivian (the parlor-room Socrates) reads to Cyril (his unequal foil) in the
course of their discussion: ‘The Decay
of Lying: A Protest.’ Vivian’s ‘protest’ most pointedly objects to
realism’s dominance as an artistic method and aesthetic ideal in
nineteenth-century art. But the protest
is embedded in a larger discussion that both articulates aestheticism’s central
argument and situates it in long history of discourse on mimesis.
[W]hat I am pleading
for is lying in art,’ not, Vivian emphasizes, in spheres where lying merely
serves venal interests – in politics, for instance. Vivian instead values the ‘fine lie,’
informed purely by the imagination, and created solely for its own sake (Wilde,
1989, 971). This differentiation points
to the first of his four ‘doctrines of the new aesthetics’; namely, that ‘Art
never expresses anything but itself. It
has an independent life, . . . and develops purely on its own lines’ (991). As does the ‘uselessness’ argument in the
‘Preface,’ Vivian’s doctrine calls art a distinct enterprise not properly
judged according to normative, rational standards of truth. In both instances, Wilde draws on the Kantian
argument that ‘to judge an art object in terms of use’ – or truth value – ‘is
not to make an aesthetic judgment’ (Adams,1992, 659). Kant’s separation of aesthetic from rational
or practical judgment also recalls Aristotle’s rescue of poetry from Plato’s
banishment. Wilde’s dialogue subtly
restages the ancient poetic debate between Plato and Aristotle, echoing
Aristotle’s insistence that poetry – in medium and manner – operates
differently than other forms of representation and should be judged
accordingly. In characteristically
paradoxical fashion, Wilde has Vivian explicitly enlist Plato himself in
support of this argument as much as he does Aristotle. Adopting Plato’s mimetic formula – wherein
poetry, at two removes from ‘truth,’ is a ‘lie’ – Wilde also turns it on its
head. What Plato declares poetry’s
ultimate weakness Wilde celebrates as its unique strength.
Vivian’s second
doctrine argues that realism strays from art’s distinct raison d’être. ‘As a method, realism is a complete failure
[for] it forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders
everything’ (979). His supporting
argument recalls Aristotle’s own mode of defense. He offers an etiological history of aesthetic
development that sees imaginative instinct as its ‘first stage’: ‘Art begins with . . . purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and nonexistent’ (978). Like Aristotle, Vivian too claims that this
primal instinct is ‘natural.’ But even
more so, Vivian’s ‘first stage’ is self-generated, ‘natural’ in that it stems
from human nature, from within. We
‘start . . . in life with a natural gift for exaggeration,’ and so too does art
begin with this essential element (973).
The second stage in this history might surprise those who read Wilde’s
separation of art and life absolutely, for here Vivian makes clear that there
is indeed a connection – but a very particular one: ‘Art takes life as part of her rough
material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms’ (978). Like Pater’s Wordsworth, who throws the light
of his imagination on nature and produces ‘a new nature,’ Vivian’s vision of
art relies on nature (‘life’) as well, but secondarily. Realism’s crucial error is to reverse this
proper order, to present a ‘third stage’ in which ‘life gets the upper hand,
and drives art into the wilderness.’ By
Wilde’s subtle redefinition of the very label his critics used to condemn his
aesthetic, realism’s late aberration becomes art’s ‘true decadence, and it is
from this that we are now suffering’ (978).
Mistaking the proper
relation between life and art, elevating life as an ‘artistic method’ instead
of using it as ‘rough material,’ stems from a more comprehensive misreading of
the mimetic formula. This ‘third
doctrine’ is the familiar suggestion that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art
imitates Life’ (985). In its service,
Wilde provides Vivian with some of his most outrageous claims: that London fogs ‘did not exist till art had
had invented them,’ that ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such
people’ (986, 988). But of course, Vivian
is not negating what ‘exists’ and what ‘is,’ but placing them within a specific
theory of perception. The outlandishness
of the examples may stem from the fact that Cyril reminds Vivian he needs these
proofs to make his theory ‘complete’ and challenges him to do so. Vivian’s flourish demonstrates that he
confidently accepts the challenge: ‘My
dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything’ (986).
That Vivian indeed
manages to show that what seems so patently false may possess a certain kind of
truth underscores a further implication of ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as well as its
fourth doctrine. The aesthetic theory
Vivian proposes does not sophistically devote itself to what is merely false. And the ‘lying’ Vivian values, ultimately,
does not merely oppose truth, but rather a narrow understanding of it: ‘not simple truth but complex beauty’
(978). Perhaps recalling Keats, Vivian
supplants ‘simple truth’ with ‘complex beauty’ and thus implicitly equates the
latter with some higher, ‘truer’ object.
The paradoxical, equivocal valence of ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ throughout the
essay is contained in the essay’s ‘final revelation,’ that ‘lying, the telling
of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art’ (992).
‘The Critic as
Artist,’ also a dialogue, pursues many of these same assertions. Aestheticism’s spokesman here is Gilbert, who
corrects a number of ‘gross popular error[s]’ regarding criticism’s proper
relation to its aesthetic object. In
typical Wildean style, Gilbert presents this hypothesis by means of counter-intuitive
paradoxes that Ernest, more pugnaciously than Cyril, earnestly resists. ‘The
creative faculty is higher than the critical.
There is really no comparison between them,’ intones Ernest, Wilde’s
voice of orthodox opinion (1020).
Gilbert counters that we are wrong to consider criticism merely
secondary to the work of art it interprets and never creative in its own
right. He argues instead that this
hierarchy is unstable, indeed ‘entirely arbitrary’ (1020). ‘Criticism is itself
an art,’ and conversely genuinely ‘fine imaginative work’ is actually critical
(1026, 1020). For ‘there is no fine art
without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are
one’ (1020). Like poetry, criticism too
involves a working with existing materials and putting them into a new form
(1027). And here Gilbert insists that
not only do poets work with words and generic conventions, they draw from
existing works of art as well. Like
Vivian, Gilbert argues that art imitates art other art more often than life:
Homer retells existing myths, Keats writes poems about a translation of Homer’s
retelling, and so on. The work of the
critic is yet one more extension of that same process, its own retelling of
what has been told before. The argument
glosses Arnold’s claim that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object
as in itself it really is’ and rehearses Pater’s response to it (1028). Like Pater, Gilbert believes instead that
the critic’s ‘sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions’ (1028). The critic deludes himself if he believes
objectivity or ‘discovering the real intention of the artist’ is possible
(1029). Gilbert’s supporting example – in which he claims ‘the work of art [is]
simply . . . the starting-point for a new creation’ – subtly suggests that
Pater’s much criticized, idiosyncratic reading of the Mona Lisa might be
remarkable not for how willfully wrong it seems, but rather for how
dramatically it demonstrates this discursive and epistemological condition
(1029).
In fact, one may
fruitfully read Wilde’s ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ by the light of this proposal
as well. Written in the style of Pater’s
Appreciations and Imaginary Portraits, the essay studies the ‘artistic
temperament’ of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a minor nineteenth-century artist
who was also a notorious forger and murderer.
In ‘The Critic as Artist,’ Gilbert tells Ernest that Pater’s
‘imaginative insight . . . and poetic aim’ – indeed his very words – suffuse
Gilbert’s own impressions of the Mona Lisa.
‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ makes such a tongue-in-cheek avowal of
influence its guiding principle. Along
with details from Wainewright’s life and work (which Wilde liberally
embellishes), the essay is strategically laced with plagiarisms from Pater’s
critical work. Wilde’s ‘new creation’
from this raw material is at once a rehearsal of the critical ideal expressed
in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and an ingenious parody of it. Taking aestheticism’s purported separation
between aesthetic and moral judgments, Wilde offers hyperbolic enthusiasm for
Wainewright’s work, impertinently insisting that ‘[t]he fact of a man being a
poisoner is nothing against his prose’ (1007).
By giving his detractors such an outrageous version of aestheticism’s
ills – its flirtation with danger, its complicity with violence and amorality –
Wilde satirizes their censorious objections and, in the process, offers his own
subtle commentary on where the real force of Pater’s critical project might
lie. ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’
Wilde’s story of a wayward critic, explores similar ground. Obsessed with the personally overdetermined
belief that he knows the ‘true secret’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Cyril Graham
wanders down the garden path from creative criticism to outright forgery,
manufacturing evidence when he cannot find it.
The story shrewdly outlines just how much epistemological desire,
perhaps at the heart of creativity, necessarily drives the critical
impulse. Our own critical projects,
variously aimed at uncovering Wilde’s true ‘intentions,’ would do well to
remember that lesson.
Megan Becker-Leckrone
is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas where she
specializes in Literary Theory and 19th- and 20th-Century British
Literature. Her book Julia Kristeva and
Literary Theory was published by
Palgrave in 2005.
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