|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MAY I SAY NOTHING?
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ESSAYS : RESPONSES TO
REVIEWS : ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Issue no 51 : March 2010
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We apologise
for the long delay since number 50
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
<<
‘And I, my Lord? May I say nothing?’ >> |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
_____ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
We renamed this section, in September 2008, streamlining
it from its previous version And I? May I Say Nothing? Work published here is original work
submitted to us. We also offer this
section as an open platform for early publication of articles from MA or
doctoral candidates that reflect their work, and if these reach a certain
level of competence, they will not be peer-reviewed unless at the author’s
request. In time to come we will
publish, in different sections, (a) submissions that have passed double blind
peer review; (b) undergraduate writing. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
To
the Table of Contents of this page |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
. Norbert Lennartz |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pulp Fiction? Oscar Wilde’s and George Gissing’s
Responses to 19th-Century Trash Culture
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In the context of late Victorian literature, the
year 1891 must be considered to be one of the anni mirabiles. That year
not only saw the publication of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but also that of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man under Socialism and
George Gissing’s New Grub Street. While the first two novels are noteworthy for
the fact that they seem to translate the triangular constellation of the
medieval morality play into modern narratives and fashion the dandy as the
devilish intruder upon the time-honoured values of life, The Soul of Man under Socialism and New Grub Street deal with the threat that arises not so much out
of an egotistical supraculture as out of a popular mainstream culture that
substitutes the artist as a poeta
doctus for a profit-seeking producer of ephemeral and dubious literary
texts. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The enormous changes that affected not only the
literary market, but the entire structure of 19th-century society can even be
perceived in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
where the dandy-villain is no longer a fascinating creature of supernatural
or aristocratic descent.[1]
Alec, originally called Stoke before he arrogated the name of the extinct
d’Urbervilles, is the epitome of a new aspiring generation of people that,
despite their vulgarity,[2]
inevitably make their way to the top and, like cultural vampires, take into
their possession the names, symbols and belongings of the representatives of the
formerly high, but now decayed and bloodless culture. This process, which culminates in Alec’s
rape of Tess, in the parvenu’s violating the body of the impoverished old
culture, is described in terms of crude Darwinism as the crucial moment when
the ‘beautiful feminine tissue [of her body], sensitive as gossamer, and
practically blank as snow as yet’ is imprinted with ‘a coarse pattern’ and
when ‘the coarse appropriates the finer.’[3]
To visualize this act of crude appropriation, Hardy uses the image of the
garden of the Stoke-d’Urbervilles’ house, which used to be a hortus conclusus, in accordance with
the tradition of the garden as a symbol of hierarchical order, but is now ‘a
trampled and sanded square;’[4]
and what could stress Hardy’s argument of cultural subversion more than the
passage in which the house is shown overrun with parasitical ivy?[5]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In New Grub
Street, George Gissing, an admirer of Hardy’s and a reader of Tess of the d’Urbervilles,[6]
transferred the struggle between ‘the coarse’ and ‘the finer’ from the social
sphere into the realm of literature where, by the end of the 19th century,
the new demands of mass production and easily digestible fiction were readily
met by a phalanx of writers who, like Anthony Trollope or second-tier writers
like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Hall Caine and Marie Corelli,[7]
profited from the emergent market of pop and trash culture, which was
rapidly circulated by the mushrooming lending libraries and magazines like Tit-Bits. As Philip Waller argues, the new market for
the late Victorian fiction factory with its flood of six-shilling novels and
penny magazines not only corresponded to the ‘age of increasing hurry,’[8]
but it also met the demands of a new generation that rated quantity higher
than quality, velocity superior to Keats’s art of ‘slow time’[9]
and little morsels of crude fiction more palatable than densely packed
three-volume novels. The fact that
Leopold Bloom reads an issue of Tit-Bits
on the toilet, tears it into fragments and ‘wipe[s] himself with it’[10]
can only be seen as an unmistakeable sign of the contempt with which James
Joyce and other high-culture writers looked on the these products of modern
popular culture. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In Gissing’s novel, this dichotomy between high
and pop culture, between art and mass production, is mainly personified by
the two writers Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon, with the latter
particularly characterized by attributes of decline and weakness: ‘He looked
something older than his years, which were two-and-thirty; on his face was
the pallor of mental suffering.’[11]
While Reardon desperately clings to criteria of quality and persistently sees
novel writing in terms of art, his antagonist Jasper Milvain – marked by the
attitude of the self-complacent bourgeois – is introduced into the story less
as an artist than as an entrepreneur who fashions himself as ‘the literary man
of 1882’ (8) and unscrupulously caters to the ‘literary fare that is in
demand in every part of the world’ (9).
Exposing to ridicule the type of the bohemian ‘unpractical artist,’ as
he was idealized in the wake of Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie bohème (1851) and re-defining Samuel Johnson’s
pejorative idea of Grub Street as a new and modern place ‘supplied with
telegraphic communication’ (9), Milvain launches into a repudiation of old
and ossified myths like that of poetic inspiration: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly
rooted in their heads – that one mustn’t write save at the dictation of the
Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a
business. (13) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Even though the commercialization of literature
had begun with Defoe and in the 18th century had given rise to the hack
writer who was satirically exploited in the works of Swift and Sterne, the
Miltonic idea of writing under the auspices of a heavenly Muse was recaptured
by the Romantics, who were instrumental in cementing the myth of the poet as
an ingenious bard, as a prophet who addresses only a minority of initiated
people. When Milvain categorically
denies the existence of the ‘divine afflatus’ in 19th-century works of
popular culture, he consciously talks about literature as a trade that is
distinct from the canonized works of high culture represented by Homer, Dante
and Shakespeare. In his plea for ‘good,
coarse, marketable stuff’ (13; my
italics), he not only reverts to the vocabulary that Hardy uses to pinpoint
the modern supremacy of the uncouth, he further contributes to the
demystification of the poet when he defines his role as humouring the masses,
or ‘supplying the mob with the food it likes’ (13). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Adapting the metaphor of the brain as an
intellectual stomach, which has always been a common trope for the processes
of literary creation,[12]
Milvain detests any form of literary haute
cuisine and craves the power to produce cultural fast food which is
radically different both from Byron’s seasoned olla podrida in Don Juan
and from the nourishing food of high-brow Victorian literature, since his
novels are meant to out-trash ‘that trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand
copies’ (14). As Milvain protests, an
essential component of his anti-Romantic ars
poetica of popular and trash culture – totally ignored by the
unsuccessful legion of idealists and ‘literary pedants’ (14) – is the fact
that the production of literary junk food requires new skills. While the writer of the past aspired to the
private mode of ingenuity, to an elitism that was based on the
self-fashioning of the poet as an alter
deus, the modern writer is not only supposed to please the vulgar; in
order to strike a chord of familiarity with his common readership, he is even
supposed to ‘incarnate the genius of vulgarity’ (14). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The contradiction that is inherent in the phrase
the ‘genius of vulgarity,’ is not only meant to be an attack on Romantic
concepts of poetry, it is also ample evidence of the fact that, by the time
Hall Caine’s The Christian became
the first novel in Britain to sell one million copies,[13]
time-honoured hierarchies of values and taste were no longer valid and had
been superseded by a new aesthetics which was now solely defined by the
common, non-discriminating reader, the myriads of clerks whom Gissing
attacked in his novels.[14]
In his influential essay Culture and
Anarchy (1867), Matthew Arnold had already written about the consequences
that arose from the emergence of the new class of the suburbans, the
Philistines that, not unlike the ‘bawling, hustling and smashing’ mob, was
characterized as the ‘enemy of the children of light.’[15]
Linda Dowling is certainly right when she refers to the ‘apocalyptic note’ in
Arnold’s text:[16]
while Hobbes’s Leviathan managed to check man’s egotism, Arnold saw
democratization – moored in Bright’s laissez-faire capitalism – as the
perilous first stage of the downward slope to anarchy and vulgarity. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
One generation later, in the so-called Yellow
Nineties, the threat of vulgarization became so palpable that bestseller
writers like Caine, Corelli or Rider Haggard[17]
seemed to subvert not only the literary (sub-)culture as it was depicted by
Zola and the Continental Naturalists like Arno Holz and Gerhart Hauptmann,
but also the l’art pour l’art
movement as it was represented by Oscar Wilde. Seen in this context, Wilde’s motivation in
writing the essay The Soul of Man under
Socialism is apparent: severely castigating the consequences of
democratization he calls for a Socialism that is, however, less influenced
by Marx or by William Morris (who also published his Socialist utopia News from Nowhere in 1891) than by
Emerson’s concept of Romantic Individualism.[18]
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the
world of the vulgar is only perceptible as ‘the bourdon note of a distant
organ’ beyond the pale of Basil Hallward’s walled-in garden;[19]
and even the trashy theatre into which Dorian strays is temporarily endowed
with a certain solemnity on account of Sibyl Vane’s refined play-acting. There is no denying that Wilde detests
Naturalism and all crude forms of realism, the more so since he blames the
adherents of Zola for the decay of lying and is disgusted to see the rich
labyrinth of art reduced to a sterile laboratory.[20]
There is no indication of the fact that Wilde was acquainted with Gissing and
there is no mention of Wilde’s having read New Grub Street, but Delany’s claim that ‘[t]heir common ground
was limited to being three years apart in age and lovers of the classics’[21]
is in need of modification. Although
both come from different social backgrounds and champion conflicting
literary philosophies, they share the same ‘eugenic rhetoric of biologized
worth’[22]
and an aversion to the emergent trash culture and its democratized concept of
the artist as the distributor of short-lived and kitschy mass products. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
While one can argue with Jonathan Freedman that
the dandy ‘is by definition the perfect consumer’[23]
and that, in The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Wilde himself seems to challenge the new literary market by eclectically
mixing features of the popular genres – romance, horror, crime – with his
Pateresque ideas of New Hedonism, Wilde’s essay, however, targets a different
form of consumerism. Spurred on by the
numerous Milvains and paparazzi, late 19th-century readers turn into
non-discriminating iconoclasts and threaten to destroy the high-culture
aloofness which is vital to the artist as a creator of beauty: ‘In France, in
fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect
freedom. Here we allow absolute
freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.’[24]
It was Byron who, in the first canto of his Don Juan, gave a graphic description of the enormous shifts of
paradigm that were caused by the new power of the Regency press. The lack of heroes, the dismantling of
people by ‘cloying the gazettes with cant’[25]
and the dissemination of slander are clear indications of the fact that, by
the beginning of the 19th century, down-market journalism – one of the
achievements of the democracy of the bourgeois – had started to bring about
the political and cultural coup d’état
whose effects Wilde was compelled to face: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
But at the present moment it [= journalism] really is
the only estate. It has eaten up the
other three. The Lords Temporal say
nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons
has nothing to say and says it. We are
dominated by Journalism. In America
the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. (23) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In the clutches of the limitless despotism of
Journalism, Wilde’s Britain seems to adapt itself to a democratized and
popular culture that has forfeited its cultural legacy and marginalized its
last representatives of high culture like the ‘incomparable novelist’ George
Meredith (28). Arnold Bennett
complained of the new zeitgeist of
journalism and mass culture which produced ‘tolerably educated English people
who have never heard of Meredith, Hardy, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Kipling, Barrie,
Crockett; but you would travel far before you reached the zone where the name
of Braddon failed of its recognition.’[26]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The result of this cultural iconoclasm and
ignorance is, according to Wilde, a negative superlative, since ‘[n]o country
produces such badly written fiction, such tedious, common work in the
novel-form, such silly, vulgar plays as in England’ (18). Subjecting the literary output of his
country to severe criticism, Wilde even reverts to trenchant sarcasm when he
maintains that the production of trash culture is a challenge that no
true-bred artist can face up to, because, in order to meet the requirements
of shallow literature, he would be forced to ‘suppress his individualism,
forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is
valuable to him’ (19). In short, he
would need that ‘genius of vulgarity’ that Milvain tries to conjure up and
that both the dandy and the bohemian seek to counteract behind their façades
of supra- or subcultural artificiality.
Like Gissing, Wilde also makes use of the metaphor of food when he
refers to the general public’s dread of novelty and their desire to ‘swallow
their classics whole’ (19) without ever tasting them. Again, Gissing (implicitly via Milvain) and
Wilde agree when they imagine the average reader not as a connoisseur of
cultural delicacies, but as a gourmand gorging himself haphazardly. Faced with the public as the monstrous
other that takes bitter revenge on anything that does not live up to the
petty bourgeois’s norms of health, morality and patriotism, Wilde draws a
typically dandyish conclusion which, on account of financial dependency,
Reardon, Biffen or the Yules are far from endorsing. Advocating the concept of l’art pour l’art, which he also
expounds in the ‘Preface’ to The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde adopts the attitude of a poetic solipsist
and consequently states that a ‘true artist takes no notice whatever of the
public’ (28). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In his distrust of the mob, of the
representatives of British Philistinism, who call for easily consumable and
morally impeccable art, Wilde eventually launches into an apology for despotism,
which, despite its political calamities, produced outstanding works of
art. Seen in the wider context of the
cultural liberation of the lower classes, which, particularly in the Victorian
age, had encouraged writers to address new target groups and to initiate the
popularization of culture, Wilde’s cultural pessimism is of the same quality
as that of Gissing and H.G.
Wells. While, in the Time Machine (1896), Wells sees the
evolution of mankind in terms of a dystopian bipolarity between fragile,
victimized creatures (Eloi) and bestialized cannibals (Morlocks) – both
alike in their indifference to culture and art –, Wilde’s text seems to
underline the fact that Wells’s locus
terribilis is not a dystopain fantasy, but an encoded delineation of the
late Victorian period. The late
19th-century mob has turned out to be a far greater threat than the despotic
princes or corrupt popes, since in its Morlockian monstrosity, it is ‘a thing
blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious and obscene’ (30)
and keeps the dandies, the last paragons of the declining Eloi culture, in a
state of jeopardized isolation. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
II. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Wilde’s line of argumentation, which culminates
in the provocative statements that ‘[i]t is impossible for the artist to
live with the People’ and that a new Individualism, synonymous with a return
to Hellenism, must be aspired to, could not be more different from the sordid
reality from where Reardon, the Yules and Biffen have decided to fight the
proliferation of trash culture. This
difference is also underlined by the choice of genre: while Wilde
deliberately chooses the argumentative genre of an essay which he has end on
an upbeat note of prospective harmony and an ars vivendi reminiscent of Pater’s maxim of living ‘intensely,
fully, perfectly,’ Gissing, despite his self-understanding as an idealist
fallen into the lower depths,[27]
adheres to the idea of the novel as a tranche
de vie and thus depicts his London as another ‘city of dreadful night’
steeped in autumnal darkness, squalor and decay. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
What could be more different from Wilde’s plea
for a new Hellenism than the gloom that pervades Gissing’s novel? In the
twilight of a sky that is ‘dusking over’ (47) and makes Reardon’s sallowness
even more conspicuous, the reader is meant to see the twilight of a cultural
era. Compared to Milvain’s prolific
production of journalistic junk, Reardon’s efforts to produce high-quality
literature are not only constantly described in terms of a struggle with
emptiness and absence; they are also related to an intellectual dryness that
at one point is explicitly labelled as ‘abortive’ (47). Characterizing Reardon as a barren writer,
Gissing implicitly makes use of pre-texts and literary stock-in-trade motifs
in order to show to what extent the emergence of a new popular culture has
eroded the fundaments of European high culture. Thus, the novel inevitably turns into a
grim parody of the traditional idea of the pregnant poet giving birth to his
masterworks; and when Reardon refers to his pragmatic wife Amy as a Muse, as
a source of inspiration and intellectual insemination – ‘Your kindness is the
breath of life to me’ (52) –, Gissing dexterously takes up the former
reference to the Romantic idea of the divine afflatus in order to stress the
bitter irony that, by the end of the Victorian age, the inspiration is no
longer transmitted by the West Wind or other divine creatures, but by
profit-seeking women who are solely impressed by the fact that a trashy novel
with the telling title ‘The Hollow Statue’ is eminently successful with the
vulgar readership. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
With popular culture gaining ascendancy, the
Reading Room of the British Museum, deprecated by conservatives as a
heterotopia of a new ‘mixed or vulgar populace,’[28]
is identified as another wasteland of intellectual sterility. Like Reardon’s garret, the room is a place
of twilight and gloom, ‘a trackless desert of print’ (107), which, in an
almost surrealist manner, transforms people into machines or ignoble
vermin. One of these creatures,
keeping up ‘the paltry pretence of intellectual dignity’ (107), is Marian
Yule who, as her father’s amanuensis, is cooped up in the library which is
not so much a place of scholarly illumination as a darkish and nightmarish
cave in a modernized Dantean inferno.
Reduced to a mere automaton, a ‘mere machine for reading and writing’
(106), she is painfully aware of the infernal atmosphere of the library and,
consequently, compares an official with a ‘black, lost soul, doomed to wander
in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves’ (107). Gissing’s descriptions of the outdated
academic and literary world which blend iconographical references to hell
with the modern realm of machines and automatons eventually culminate in an
image that, 20 years prior to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), visualizes modern man’s metamorphosis
into an insect. Toiling in a room that
is almost completely penetrated by oppressively Dickensian fog, Marian
compares the group of infernal readers to ‘hapless flies caught in a huge
web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue’ (107).[29] |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The image of the fly is also used in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, when the
titular heroine is compared to a fly on a large-scale billiard table, about
to be crushed by the haphazard balls of fortune.[30]
While in Hardy’s novel, the image of the fly is used in an ontological
context and shows man’s puniness and insignificance in the face of an overwhelming
fate, Gissing employs the same image in order to show the aporia in which
late-Victorian intellectuals are locked.[31]
Milvain, the epitome of the modern trash-culture man, publishes his ephemeral
essays in a journal with the telling name Will-o’-the
Wisp and thus clearly leads a life that is characterized by lightness and
insubstantiality, whereas Marian and the others, the representatives of
academic and literary high culture, are not only caught in a net-like
structure which hampers their freedom of movement; in accordance with all the
other impoverished Grub Street writers, she is also trapped in a dead-end
circularity whose utter hopelessness Gissing tries to highlight with the aid
of various intertextual references.
Thus, the ‘great circle of the Catalogue,’ which reduces Marian to
insect-like non-entity, is echoed in the ‘endless circling’ (123) around a
plot, which alerts Reardon to the fact that he is not only in a chaos of
disease and suicide, but also in one of the never-ending rings of Dante’s
hell; the ‘fearful slough of despond’ (268) into which Reardon constantly
plunges, is taken from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress and the ‘valley of the shadow of books’ (189), to which Marian
is confined, is more than reminiscent of the depressing valley of the shadow
of death in Psalm 23. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Thus, in order to give a close description of the
agonies which the representatives of high-brow culture suffer in the face of
an emergent culture of insubstantial trash, Gissing intersperses his novel
with cross-references that are deeply moored in the time-honoured idea of felix culpa. But, no matter how long the ordeal of pain
and infernal horrors lasts, neither Dante nor Bunyan’s Christian is deprived
of his respective teleological reward; and the wanderer in the biblical
valley of the shadow of death is free from fear, since the Lord as the
shepherd offers his rod and staff as comfort.[32]
As if intent on thwarting his readers’ expectations, Gissing makes use of
these references only to underline his profound cultural pessimism, which is
devoid of not only of Christianity, but also of all traces of Wildean
aestheticism and exoticism. Neither
Reardon, nor Marian, nor Biffen, the latter of whom aspires to ‘an absolute
realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent’ (144), find any consolation;
instead of coming into contact with the Heavenly Jerusalem, Marian sees that
her ‘palace of joy’ (188) is a short-lived illusion, and Reardon’s plans to
re-visit Greece and to immerse himself in the relics of ancient culture are
relentlessly pitted against the sobering reality of his London misery, the ‘sooty
rain,’ his poverty and the unmistakable signs of imminent death. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In particular, the passage where he reminisces
with Biffen about the contemplation of beauty in Greece and Italy and where
he describes the ‘marvellous sunset’ in Athens in terms of an epiphany (with
a rainbow and a ‘diviner light’ transforming everything into a superhuman
ideality) must be understood not so much as an oddity out of tune with the
Bohemian ideal[33]
as a late 19th-century longing for a return to Hellenism and pagan beauty. In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Hellenism collapses under the weight of a
gigantic Latin cross, and while in Wilde’s works the Hellenic ideal is always
precariously poised between medievalized Christianity and Victorian
vulgarity, Gissing clearly shows Hellenism for what it is: an Arcadian dream
that is inevitably destroyed by the sordidness of modern life, by the ‘ache
of modernism’ which, in Hardy’s Tess
of the d’Urbervilles,[34]
is also synonymous with the rise of the uncouth, shallow and vulgar. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
III. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Depicting modern life in the clutches of trash
culture, Gissing makes his readers aware of the fact that the radical forms
of Darwinian commodification are also tied up with ideas of arbitrariness,
which clash with former concepts of merit and cultural decorum. Discussing Euripides with Biffen or
reciting Shakespeare’s Antony and
Cleopatra, Reardon refuses to see that he has isolated himself in a world
in which the axiom of the chain of being has been replaced by that of ‘crush
or be crushed’ and in which the relentless ‘scientific spirit’ has consigned
almost all the hallmarks and values of high culture to oblivion. Thus, it is hardly surprising, albeit
shocking to Reardon, that Amy not only proves to be a debased Muse, but that
she openly challenges her husband’s cultural standards, when she reverts to a
kind of literature that is defined as ‘specialism popularized’ and avidly
reads books that are a trivialized re-hash of the theories spread by Spencer,
Darwin and other scientific iconoclasts.
When the narrator refers to Amy as ‘a typical woman of the new time,
the woman who has developed concurrently with journalistic enterprise’
(361), he gives the concept of the new woman as it was propagated in the wake
of Ibsen’s problem plays an ironic twist, and thus introduces into the novel
the image of a modern woman who has forfeited her high-culture education and
substituted her sound knowledge of belletristic literature for the lurid
factualism which, by the end of the Victorian age, is enjoyed by a new and
influential caste ‘above the sphere of turf and west-endism.’ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
What the triangular constellation between
Reardon, Amy and Milvain also underlines is the fact that, with Reardon as
the odd man out, all time-honoured ideas of quality and industry are not so
much subject to concepts of poetic justice, as they are mercilessly exposed
to modern laws of opportunism. In a
world in which both the commodification of literature and a new pop and trash
culture are rampant, the creator of highbrow literature is an anachronism and
a self-imposed ‘prisoner of fate’ (412) who is no longer tolerated as a
quixotic fellow, but ruthlessly crushed by the wheel of fortune, which is
operated and manipulated by the vulgar and the ignoble. Thus, it must be considered highly ironic
when the last chapter of the novel is entitled ‘Rewards.’ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The idea that characters can count on a reward
after undergoing distressing ordeals was challenged for the first time in
William M. Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1847-48) and later
revealed to be incompatible with late 19th-century concepts of Darwinism,
determinism or existentialism. Having
wreaked havoc on Dorian Gray’s life, Lord Henry Wotton, the tempter and
amateur of intellectual vivisections, is never taken to task, nor is Angel
Clare, who exposes Tess to Alec’s devilish temptations. Thus, it is only consistent with the
pessimism of late 19th-century novels that representations of gross ‘injustice
which triumphs so flagrantly in the destinies of men’ (453) are also the
underlying pattern of Gissing’s novel.
Marian’s family is wrecked by disease and poverty, Biffen commits
suicide after a fire (glaringly unlike the purgatorial fire in Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre) has destroyed
his meagre existence, and Reardon eventually dies of consumption with his
last words being a truncated quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘We are such stuff as
dreams are made on, and our ---’ (454).
When Shakespeare’s Prospero speaks these lines and adds that ‘our
little life / Is rounded with a sleep,’[35]
he refers to the Platonic idea of life as a fleeting dream, which, translated
into Christian thought, underlines the insignificance of earthly existence
and the certitude that life’s dreamy sleep is succeeded both by an awakening
in heaven and by God’s weighing the balance of justice on Doomsday. For Reardon, the quotation, as his testimony
and his eschatologoi, is meant to
be not only an acknowledgement of the insubstantial nature of his life, but
also an acceptance of the bitter fact that life is as arbitrary as a dream
and that, in the context of man’s existential nightmare, all endeavours to
strive for meaning and quality are abortive.
According to the novel’s perverted system of justice, the only one who
is eventually eligible for rewards is Milvain, whose name conjures up vague
ideas both of vanity and of the destructiveness of the character Millwood in
George Lillo’s The London Merchant
(1731). Marrying Amy and enjoying the ‘dreamy
bliss’ (515) of a genteel life dedicated to shallowness and material success,[36]
Milvain, the epitome of egotism and commodified culture, finally triumphs
over all the representatives of a culture that had been on the decline since
the days of Byron. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
IV. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
While in 1891 Wilde still hoped to counteract
vulgarity with his concepts of individualism and dandyism, Gissing depicts a
world in which the vulgar have dealt the death blow to the artist. In his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde reverts to the mode of a
utopian or futurist writer who envisages a time when ‘through joy [...] the
Individualism of the future will develop itself’ (34). By the end of the essay, it becomes
patently obvious that Wilde rejects all forms of Naturalism as a remedy against
19th-century tendencies of vulgarity and endorses the aestheticist’s sympathy
with the totality of life, which, however, inconsistently excludes the
aspects of darkness and desolation: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
One should sympathize with the entirety of life, not
with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and
energy and health and freedom. (34) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
According to Wilde, the dramatization or even ‘worship’
of pain is a relic of the Middle Ages, ‘with its saints and martyrs, its love
of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with
knives, and its whipping with rods’ (34).
Wilde’s emphasis lies on the Renaissance whose grandeur was due to
the fact that it was committed to no social obligations, but only to the
development of the ingenious individual.
In the vein of Thomas Carlyle, who, in his 1840 lectures on Heroes and
Hero-Worship, endeavoured to resuscitate the idea of the genius and the hero,
Wilde proves to be an idealist who not only focuses on the regeneration of
the hero in the future, but also firmly believes in the victory of the new
individual over the mob with its culture of uniformity and mass
consumption. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In contradistinction to Wilde’s essay, Gissing’s
novel is deeply moored in the idea of the disappearance of the hero.[37]
Like Biffen who deals with ‘the essentially unheroic’ (144) and the farce of
human life, Gissing seems to dispense with any trace of ‘obstinate idealism’
and to depict a world, which, from the perspective of the high-brow artist,
is in a state of irredeemable disintegration. As if contradicting Wilde’s future-bound
optimism, Gissing shows the representatives of high culture firmly in the
grip of the vulgus, and, what is
more, the world of the individuals threatened or almost engulfed by
annihilation. In accordance with fin-de-siècle motifs of twilight and
decay, Reardon is not only confronted with the abortion of his intellectual
children, but also with the death of his son, and Biffen is eventually
overcome with ‘the actual desire of death, the simple longing for extinction’
(491). Gissing’s message is thus
blatantly clear: all visions of a cultural rejuvenation, which Wilde and the
aestheticists were fond of conjuring up, are as fallacious as the
multifarious ideas of the advent of the new individual or the Nietzschean
superman. Biffen’s ‘westward’ (492)
direction must therefore be read as a symbol of the decline of high-brow
culture, which, in the prime of their shallow and prosperous lives, the
representatives of the commercialization and vulgarization of culture are
unwilling to take notice of: ‘’Ha! isn’t the world a glorious place?’’ (515). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
v
Norbert Lennartz teaches at the University of
Würzburg. His 'Oscar Wilde's "The
Sphinx" - A Dramatic Monologue of the Dandy as a Young Man?' was
published in the Philological
Quarterly 83 (2004), 415-29. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sarah Victoria Turner |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The poetics of permanence: poetry, carving
and letter-cutting in the 20th century
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Abstract |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Poetry
and sculpture are intimately linked, yet how do we understand this complex
relationship through the sculpted object itself? Why is poetry important for
sculptural practice, and visa versa? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This
paper proposes that the craft of letter-cutting is a particularly rich
activity through which to explore the connections between words, letters and
sculptural practice. Craft, shape, space, composition, rhythm — these words
immediately conjure the pregnant spaces of connection and overlap between the
poet and letter-cutter. I do not want to simply collate case-studies of
carved poetic inscriptions, but instead forge an understanding of the
physical and sensual processes of translation from page to the hard and more
ostensibly durable materials of sculpture. What happens to a poem when it is
inscribed into stone or wood? Poetic inscriptions do not simply sit on the
sculpture’s surface, but are physically cut into the material. With each
rhythmical, precise tap of the carver’s chisel words become objects and
objects become words. The inscription can become an ‘artefact’, as the
contemporary letter-cutter Gary Breeze has remarked of his own work. There is
both a purpose and permanence involved in carving poems which effects, I will
suggest, both how poetry is read and viewed as ‘sculpture’. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Any
history of letter-cutting in the twentieth century cannot ignore the legacies
of the work of the carver, letter-cutter and sculptor, Eric Gill. His
experiments with the craft of lettering in the first half of the twentieth
century have influenced (and continue to influence) subsequent generations of
letterers and carvers, including Joseph Cribb, John Skelton, David Kindersley,
Ralph Beyer and, more recently, Gary Breeze. This paper takes the carved
inscription on the reverse of the Tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise
Cemetery in Paris as a starting point from which to explore the physical
connections between poetry and carving. Designed by Gill and carved by his
assistant, Joseph Cribb, on to (or more precisely into) a sculpted memorial
made by Jacob Epstein, the inscription contains an excerpt from Wilde’s last
poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Beginning
with these words of Wilde carved on his tomb, I want to suggest that carving
poetry is not only about providing a permanent anchorage for text (surely the
printed word can also do this?) but more about giving physical texture to
words, language, ideas and memories. This paper will explore further the
commemorative, memorialising function of poetry cut into stone (through the
work of Gill, Kindersley, Breeze and others) and demonstrate the rich and
suggestive poetics of language when it is made material. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
v
Sarah Victoria Turner is a Teaching Fellow in
History of Art, University of York, a Co-Editor of VISIONS and an Associate
Editor of THE OSCHOLARS. The paper of
which this is the abstract was given at the conference 'The Plastic
Expression the Fruitful Sphere': European Poets and Sculptors in the 20th
Century’ organized by The Centre for Modern European Literature, University
of Kent, in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute at the Henry Moore
Institute, Leeds, 20th November 2009. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Trevor Harris (ed.), Art,
Politics and Society in Britain 1880-1914 : Aspects of Modernity and
Modernism, was published Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2009, 143pp., ISBN 978-1-4438-1364-8 www.c-s-p.org. With the kind permission of Professor
Harris, we here publish the abstracts of the various chapters. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Constance Bantman :
‘Visionaries or Reactionaries? British Anarchism and Modernity’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century does not
correspond to the utopian, backward-looking caricature which it is often
reduced to. In Britain, as elsewhere, anarchists made a thorough
socio-economic analysis and often recognised the benefits of mechanisation
and the inevitability of the industrial order. The anarchists’ many links
with modernist avant-gardes at the time underline the innovative character of
their thought, whether on the philosophical, social or aesthetic levels. But
anarchism, like other socialist or progressive discourses of the time, bears
traces of conservative thought. The
ambiguity of this relationship with modernity is visible in the organisation
of rural communities founded on the ideal of a return to nature, typical of
the socialism inherited from Carlyle or William Morris. The attitude of
anarchists faced with the emergence of modern democracy and its social
potential, is typical of the reactionary discourse of the period, but also of
the fears expressed by many socialists. A progressive social stance could
therefore be conservative and perhaps had to be in order to be heard. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Isabelle Cases : ‘Modernity, Modernism
and the Re-Definition of Architecture in the Arts and Crafts Movement’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Arts and Crafts movement which developed at the end of
the nineteenth century brought together artist-artisans, sculptors and
architects, in reaction to the detrimental effects of industrial development
and modern means of production on social life and artistic production. The creation
of a number of societies like the Century Guild, the Arts Worker Guild and
the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, and the work of artists like Arthur
Mackmurdo, Selwyn Image and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, were to have a lasting
influence, modify artistic taste and lead to Art Nouveau and modernist
architecture. If the Arts and Crafts project was presented as a genuine
revolution, it none the less drew much of its inspiration from John Ruskin’s
medievalism and William Morris’s utopian vision which, as we know, came up
against ruthless economic demands. The Arts and Crafts vision, by opposing
the professionalisation of architecture and encouraging firms only to take on
genuine artisans, set itself the task of transcending some of the harmful
effects associated with modern society, of moving beyond the crisis by
bringing together different disciplines and by putting forward an alternative
definition of artistic value and practice. For all these reasons, studying
the movement enables us to explore, in a particularly favourable manner, the
relationship between modernity and modernism in fin-de-siècle Britain. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
David Cottington : ‘Modernities
and Avant-Gardes: London and Paris 1900-1914’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Both the concept of ‘modernity’ and that of ‘avant-garde’
have customarily been defined and deployed in terms of rupture, as marking a
period or a dynamic grounded in a sense of a deep discontinuity separating
the past from a present experienced as radically distinct from earlier times. Whilst this interpretive paradigm has begun
to be challenged—as this conference testifies—with regard to the first of
these two concepts, and the relation between modernity and historical
continuities has begun to be explored, it remains unchallenged with regard to
the second, with isolated exceptions.
Indeed present notions of the term ‘avant-garde’, particularly as
applied to artists, continue to be bedevilled by loose and slipshod usage
that obstructs the attainment of a historical understanding either of the
emergence and consolidation of the artistic avant-garde or of the
consequences of this dynamic for the development of artistic modernism. This
paper will seek to further such an understanding by analysing the
differential spaces in which the artistic avant-garde formations of London
and Paris were established in the years before the First World War, and the
meanings of modernity, tradition and their relation for the artists, critics
and supporters who made up their memberships. It will suggest more specific
and narrower criteria for the understanding of, and distinction between,
‘avant-garde’ as a noun and an adjective, on the basis of which it will
compare the hows and whys of the emergence and consolidation of the
avant-gardes of the two cities. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Magali Fleurot : ‘Individualistic Socialism
According to Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The end of the nineteenth century in Britain brings
various attempts to combine political ideas from the past with emerging currents
of thought: the clash between Marxism and hedonistic socialism is one such
fascinating confrontation. William Morris, Oscar Wilde or Edward Carpenter
achieved a remarkable and highly idiosyncratic synthesis of Marxist ideas and
a vision of art, which was to be held up high rather than dumbed down to make
it accessible. This essay aims to examine the contribution of Marxism –
notably its utopian elements – to the thought of the ‘individualist
socialists’ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Trevor Harris : ‘William Morris:
Socialist or Modernist? The Historical Contradictions of Craft’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This paper examines Morris’s place in the British
political culture of the late-nineteenth century. His aesthetics combined
with his socialist ideal have tended to generate contradictory
responses. Morris developed a vision
of socialism which was above all ethical, required restraint and promoted the
individual, and in which the State was minimal and governance was local. But
if it was to be attractive to his readers, Morris’s socialism had to compete
with modernity... His ideal society, however, was firmly tied to the English
Middle Ages, and based, moreover, on an interpretation of English history the
connotations of which were sometimes reactionary rather than radical or
progressive. In sum, Morris’s preferred vision of England was one which was
out of step with the developing political culture of modern Britain. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
John Mackenzie : Some Reflections on Aspects of Modernity
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
John MacKenzie's essay, which opens the volume, explores
the curious mixture of confidence and anxiety which is typical of the period
addressed by the book. He discusses the use and limits of such complex and
contested terms as 'modern' and 'anti-modern', 'modernity' and
'anti-modernity', 'modernism' and 'post-modernism'. In practice, he
concludes, these concepts are unavoidably interleaved, inseparable, and
require a flexible, eclectic approach if they are to be understood in
context. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Arnaud Page : ‘The ‘Crisis of Modernity’
and Graham Wallas: a Modernist Turn in the British Study of Politics?’.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Graham Wallas was a leading member of the Fabian Society
and professor of political science at the LSE. Wallas’s intellectual project,
developed in his first two books – Human Nature in Politics (1908) and The
Great Society (1914), was in effect a project to modernize political science
in Britain: a modernization founded on a rejection of the traditional
approach to political phenomena and a quantitative, social reorientation of
the discipline. Wallas, in his first two books, sets out a project to renew
the study of political science which was predicated on the recent discoveries
of American psychology. However, far from being on one side of a supposedly
straightforward opposition between tradition and modernity, he constantly
shuttled between the two. If his objective was, indeed, to sketch out a
modernist and neo-positivist reorientation for political science, then it was
also the expression of a deep anxiety in respect of the emergence of
political modernity. Like all social science or political projects at the
time, it was a question, in short, of reducing potential political disorder
and responding to what Peter Wagner has called ‘the first crisis of
modernity’. Studying the implementation of this project at the LSE enables us
to see how that institution, far from opposing the Oxbridge tradition (as the
historiography has often argued), in many ways continued to study political
science as it was studied in those two universities. This will allow us to
show why we have to question the familiar oppositions – between the
modernist/traditional or conservative/radical nature of any scientific
project – inherited form a teleological vision of the history of the social
sciences. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Stéphanie Prévost : ‘The Eastern
Question and Britain’s Foreign Policy (1876-1896)’
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The 1876 Bulgarian crisis in the ‘Eastern Question’
recalled Gladstone from political retirement. His ‘crusade against cruelty’
generated massive agitation all over Britain. The resort to crusading
rhetoric betrayed a backward movement designed to help face a fast-changing
world. This is all the more interesting since it stemmed from specific
political circles – sections of the Liberal party – and was thus derided by
the Conservatives as an inappropriate, idealist, non-pragmatic, and quite
possibly insane policy which should not be trusted by voters. The aim of this
essay is to demonstrate that nineteenth-century crusading rhetoric was
actually envisaged by Gladstone and some members of the Liberal Party as the
only alternative to Beaconsfieldian realpolitik
and potentially the sole valid means of fighting off the dangers of an
unknown future, precisely because it kept some sort of continuity with the
past. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sandra Mayer |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A ‘First-Rate Theatrical Fashion
Article’: Trading Wilde in the Fin-de-Siècle Viennese Literary Marketplace
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Abstract of a
paper given at the IASIL Conference ‘Irish Literatures - World
Perspectives’, 27-31 July 2009, University of Glasgow, Scotland. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy An Ideal Husband, the
blackmailing femme fatale Mrs Cheveley adroitly quips: “Since he has been at
the Foreign Office, he has been so much talked of in Vienna. They actually succeed
in spelling his name right in the newspapers. That in itself is fame, on the
continent”. What is meant as a mildly caustic reference to the errant
politician Sir Robert Chiltern, actually contains a perceptive diagnosis of
the mechanisms of international high-profile media publicity and reputation,
which might readily be applied to the case of the early twentieth-century
Viennese reception of the play’s author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Indeed, fin-de-siècle Vienna rapidly embraced the
Anglo-Irish writer and his works as potentially lucrative novelties in its
literary and theatrical marketplace, where they sparked extensive comment in
the feuilleton and drama review pages of the local press. Consequently,
Wilde’s increasing literary ‘market value’ was to be attributed to, and, at
the same time, encouraged further monopolisation by a considerable quantity
of translators, critics, editors, theatre managers and directors, who,
sometimes unwittingly, assumed the roles of cultural mediator figures as they
successfully shaped the author’s public and literary image. Particularly
Wilde’s society comedies, which reflect the author’s attempt to strike a
fragile balance between accomplished self-invention, professional recognition
and commercial success, found prevailing favour with Viennese audiences and
experienced their Vienna stage debuts within two years of the Viennese
premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1905. Subsequently, the
full-blown hype attending the novelty of Wilde’s works and sensationalist
biographical accounts of the author’s eccentric personality gave rise to a
pressing demand for new Wildean dramatic works, which in 1907 resulted in a
theatrical in-fight about the simultaneous premieres of two hastily produced
boulevard versions of Wilde’s only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In this paper, the reception of Oscar Wilde’s society
comedies in fin-de-siècle Vienna are placed within the context of the
remarkable dimensions of the contemporary Wilde-vogue, which combined a sense
of inseparable interdependence of the author’s life and work with polarising
instances of biographical myth-making and propagandistic instrumentalisation.
Moreover, it will be reviewed against the background of the local theatre
market, with specific reference to the material, structural and institutional
parameters of early twentieth-century culture industry and literary
production. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
v
Sandra Mayer studied English and History at
the universities of Sussex and Graz, where she submitted her MA thesis on the
impact of scandal on the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in early
twentieth-century England. She is
currently working on her PhD thesis at the University of Vienna, which
investigates the reception of Wilde’s plays on the Viennese stages in the
twentieth century as part of the Austrian Research Council project Weltbühne Wien (World Stage Vienna). www.univie.ac.at/weltbuehne_wien |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ireland, Modernism and the fin de siècle
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
For abstracts of the
papers of the conference Ireland,
Modernism and the fin de siècle, Mary Immaculate
College Limerick, 16th–17th
April 2010, click here. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Caroline
de Bendern |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
TO OSCAR
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Address delivered at
Père Lachaise on the occasion of the centenary of the transfer of the remains
of Oscar Wilde from Bagneux, 19th July 2009. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Dear Oscar, |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Hello, are you there? Maybe I’m talking into thin air…but
anyway… |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Here I stand, clad in light; this is in order to
distinguish myself so that you may notice me among this gathering of people
clad in dark. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It seems to me that this is an unique occasion to for me
to say to you how sorry I am about what that madman my great great
grandfather; John Sholto 8th Marquess of Queensberry did to you. They had no
right to treat you that way. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
But old Q is now dead as a doornail, remembered in bitter
shame, whereas you live on forever, remembered in glory. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The “Mad Bad Line” (as you once termed Bosie’s family) is
still going strong maybe not so bad or so quite so mad. Well.. of course you
know that Bosie’s son Raymond was completely round the bend, they had to lock
him up, and each time they let him out, he would chase the maid around the
table with a knife. My mother (Patricia Douglas) was a bit of a nutcase I
must say, and as for me, well I’d rather not talk about that… But my uncle
David, the now Marquess of Queensberry seems surprisingly normal, has eight
children and is still active professionally at over 80. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
When he was younger, David militated in the House of Lords
to decriminalise homosexuality. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Today, in the western hemisphere you and Boise could walk
the streets hand in hand without any fear of some old Q freaking out. . But
however, the human species has not really changed. Lately, the court case
against Michael Jackson, unjustly accused of child abuse (the boy who claimed
he had been abused, has now admitted that his father forced him to lie for
money). The humiliation and stress of the trial was certainly a factor of his
premature death. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Quite frankly, if you ask me, humanity sucks… I don’t
suppose you’re familiar with this expression, but I’m sure you get what I
mean. . |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You would have loved Michael; he had such a sweet,
beautiful smile. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Now there’s something’s been on my mind for quite some
time. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I’ve brought some wild flowers which I picked specially
for you, I hope you like them. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Well, it’s been nice talking to you. But Oscar please, I would really like to get outa this place
unscathed, Ann Queensberry told me she fell down on the way out and broke her
arm last time she came to visit you. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I love you Oscar |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bye for now…. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
v
Caroline de Bendern is a film maker and lives
in Normandy. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
To the Table of Contents of this page |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
