THE OSCHOLARS

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THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

No 44: May 2008

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Maria Kasia Greenwood on Leslie Clack’s Oscar Wilde in Paris
Elżbieta Baraniecka on Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury in Augsburg
María DeGuzmán on Junot Díaz on Oscar Wao
Elisa Bizzotto on Michael Kaylor on Oscar Wilde, Pater and Hopkins
D.C. Rose on Alexandra Warwick on Oscar Wilde
Liberato Santoro-Brienza on Elisa Bizzotto on Imaginary Portraits
Laurence Taliarach-Vielmas on Andrew Mangham on Violent Women
Susan Cahill on Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on women’s bodies
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on Ann Stiles on neuorology
Michael Patrick Gillespie on Madeleine Humphreys on Edward Martyn
Chantal Beauvalot on Georges-Paul Collet on Jacques-Emile Blanche
Linda Zatlin on Rodney Engen on Aubrey Beardsley

THEATRE

OSCAR IN PARIS

« More Lives than One »

A play on the life of Oscar Wilde, at the Sudden Theatre, Paris, December, 2007.

Review by Maria Kasia Greenwood

When Les Clack, the ultra-talented actor and playwright, put together this one-man show about the life and works of Oscar Wilde, he used existing biographical material, but gave it his own, up-dated, slant. He played it before, prior to the December run at The Sudden Theatre in northern Montmartre, sometimes to acclaim and sometimes to abuse.

For at the centre of this hour-long performance is the famous man’s trial, something which earlier biographers had skipped or shirked. Understandably, for the trial at law of Oscar Wilde is problematic: should it have happened at all? how far was it fair? and why, for what psychological quirks of the protagonists themselves, was it necessary? By bringing in the trial right at the start (after the light-hearted recall of the Paris of the naughty nineties), Les Clack sets the tone of the play: tragic as well as comic, serious as well as flippant, guilt-ridden as well as blandly innocent. The witty sayings and humorous sallies are all there, but it is not simply a question of adulating Wilde’s outrageous gaiety and charm. When Les Clack gives us a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell comes over as far more sinister than Dame Edith Evans ever played her (in Anthony Asquith’s film classic), a kind of sussurating serpent who assesses the man who wants to marry her daughter with a stupidity so crass that its cruelty is masked by laughter.

With his actor’s grasp of complexities, Les Clack has intuited Oscar Wilde’s depths. However much activists for homosexual rights would wish to see the author as a guiltless ‘gay’, it is doubtful that Wilde could ever have seen himself as such. The man who famously quipped that he could resist everything except temptation, would hardly clamour for the social respectability of homosexual marriage – he had a heterosexual one already, complete with offspring, on his hands. Yet if, to-day, the politically correct designation of ‘gay’ confers innocent normality on the homosexual, the word ‘pederast’ still points to vice and crime, and Les Clack has the courage to use it (only once, admittedly) of Oscar Wilde.

So when we follow passages from Oscar Wilde’s trial – with the actor conjuring up now the barrister for the persecution, now the author at bay, we are caught in the drama of an agonized conscience; in the torturing of the secret sinful self as by religious inquisition, very different from attending to a logical argument, a rational demonstration, or an indulgent account of the facts, and Oscar Wilde’s predicament emerges in a newly lurid light. We are both touched and horrified, coming away feeling that the poet was the scapegoat for a psycho-drama, concocted by the real criminals – the Greek tragedy-like father and son – the Marquis of Queensberry and Lord Alfred Douglas. The hate between these two was driving them to mutual murder with bare hands, but successfully deflected on to a third party: so it was Oscar Wilde who was condemned, imprisoned, exiled, ruined, punished, penanced and perhaps, in the end, strangely saved, if not in the body at least in the suffering soul.

· After reading English at Oxford (Somerville) and French/ English Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, Maria Kasia Greenwood joined the University of Paris 7 as lecturer in English art and literature.  Specialising in British Art (thesis), and mediæval literature (habilitation), she has also published on 20th century novelists, and produced with students plays by Shaw, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.

BUNBURY IN AUGSBURG

Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury oder Ernst sein ist wichtig: Eine triviale Komödie für ernsthafte Leute. Deutsch von Rainer Kohlmayer.

Reviewed by Elżbieta Baraniecka

When I sat down in the slightly antiquated chair of the Komödie Theatre in Augsburg, on the 29th of January, 2008, almost all the seats had already been taken. It was one of the last performances of the play, which premiered on the 24th of November, 2007, and I was wondering whether the presence of such a large audience was a promise of high-quality acting and an entertaining show or rather simply the consequence of a few previous performances being cancelled due to one of the actors catching a cold.

The play began very traditionally with Algernon’s manservant, Lane, creatively arranging a silver plate with cucumber sandwiches on a very decorative chaise longue in Art Nouveau style. In combination with the golden walls erected around this only piece of furniture on the stage, the overall impact was indeed impressive and promising, as was the double-role performance of Anton Koelbl. With his artistic chaos of hair and the wonderfully reserved irony in his voice the actor played Lane in the first part of the play, and later the butler Merriman, perfectly unmoved by anything occurring on the stage, this time his hair combed and neat. This small modification of Wilde’s play interestingly pushed the duality of having both city and country identities even further, opening it to the speculation that Algy and Jack might not have been the only ones who led the exciting double life of a Bunburyist.

A touch less successful but still very convincing was André Willmund in the role of Algernon Moncrieff. The studied nonchalance of his appearance, his stubbly beard and his posing like a Roman god on the chaise longue on Jack’s arrival, together with Wilde’s brilliantly epigrammatic text made him a very credible representation of the incorrigible dandy of the fin de siècle. Unfortunately, some of this supremely hilarious dandyism, pointed with Algernon’s statements of uttermost ‘stylish’ cynicism, was lost due to Alexander Koll’s rather stiff and pompous interpretation of his role as Jack Worthing. Watching Koll’s performance made it very difficult to believe that Jack could ever be capable of inventing himself a second identity to enjoy the less moral but more fashionable side of life. Even his very dandy-like costume and slightly overdone make-up did not help much. Jack did not seem to be able to keep up with the refined eloquence of Algy’s statements, much less join in his brilliant play of mischievous rhetoric. His responses seemed to be too straightforward and to lack the same playful tone.

Willmund and Koll’s female counterparts, Mirjam Smejkal as Gwendolen and Ines Kurenbach as Cecily, both seemed to be very good choices for these roles. Clever, ironic and eloquent, Smejkal made a perfect younger version of her fierce mother Lady Bracknell (Eva Maria Keller). With her very skilful acting, she created a figure of a woman whom you easily believe to be able to always get what she wants. Equally convincing was Ms. Kurenbach with her angelic appearance veiling her less-than-angelic plans.

Entertaining as their acting might be considered separately, some bizarre interpretative choices of certain scenes spoiled the effect of the actresses’ good individual performances. An idea that seems to have completely backfired is the fight between the two women, who believed they are engaged to the same man. Not only was this exchange of blows, kicks and hair-pulling very brutal (Gwendolen kicked Cecily in the face while the latter was lying on the floor), it was also extremely overdone, out-of-place and simply disturbed the aestheticism of the understated, ironic tone of Wilde’s play. Also the decision to perform with the curtains down the scene in which the two women, having discovered the ‘true’ identities of Algernon and Jack and deciding to feel offended for a while, hide in the tea-room, did not achieve spectacular effects. Quite the opposite, placing Gwendolen and Cecily before the curtains threatened to break the illusion of the fourth wall at any time. The audience thus suddenly became part of the tea-room and the impression of the autonomous world of the play was disturbed for no justifiable reason.

The promise of a good performance faded even farther away with the appearance of Miss Prism, who, if we are to believe Lady Bracknell’s description, should be ‘a female of repellent aspect’ and, calculating the years passed from the unfortunate incident with the bag, should be in her fifties, and who in the Augsburg production was neither. Ute Fiedler, who played the part, was not only extremely attractive with her curly blond hair and very pretty face but also behaved in a rather over-the-top manner, being anything but the ‘picture of respectability’ (Pastor Chasuble). When she was supposed to examine the bag, she actually managed to put it onto her head, and in the final scene she jumped on Pastor Chasuble (Martin Herrmann), almost knocking him down, and bestowed on him what appears to be a very prolonged kiss.

The evening seems to have been saved by the brilliant figure of Lady Bracknell with her pointed remarks and Eva Maria Keller, whose skilled acting kept the audience in stitches. Farcically flat and mono-dimensional as her character is, Keller yet managed to portray her figure elegantly, her voice always dignified and never attempting to force certain responses from the audience.

A successful traditional stage interpretation of a farce turns out to be a very challenging task, the performance constantly at risk of becoming a caricature of itself. Regrettably, this also seems to have happened with some of the scenes and actors of the Augsburg performance. Although the evening can by no means be pronounced a complete fiasco, the show left the reviewer with rather mixed feelings and a number of unfulfilled expectations.

· Elżbieta Baraniecka teaches a course on The Theatre of the Absurd at the University of Augsburg.

BOOKS

Oscar Goes Dominican

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead 2007. 352 pages ISBN 9781594489587

Review by María DeGuzmán

What’s Oscar Wao [Wilde] Doing After Trujillo?

What follows is an examination of Dominican-born, New Jersey-raised Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for what it does with iconic figures in relation to gendered ethnicities and nationalities. In particular, I focus on this novel’s Oscar Wilde factor. ‘What’s Oscar Wao [Wilde] Doing After Trujillo?’ What work do Oscar Wilde allusions perform in a novel by a U.S. Dominican writer? That ‘Oscar Wao’ is indeed a reference to Oscar Wilde is made explicit in Chapter 4 of the 8 chapters, in the center of the narrative: Yunior, a New Jersey Dominican and the narrator of the novel, says of his friend Oscar, the chief protagonist and tragic-comic ‘hero’ of the narrative:

… I could not believe how much he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, and I told him so. You look just like him, which was bad news for Oscar, because Melvin said, Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him that: Hey, Wao, what are you doing? …

And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.[1]

Both the title of the book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and passages such as this one make of Oscar Wilde a shadow-silhouette (with the word ‘silhouette’ I reference the book cover’s visual appearance remindful to me of African-American installation artist Kara Walker’s cut-out silhouettes of slave narratives) as inescapable as that of fukú (cursed and cursing) Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

In other words, as much as by the Trujillato, the chief New Jersey Dominican protagonist Oscar, whose actual last name is ‘de León,’ is marked by images of the Irish Victorian playwright, poet, novelist, short story writer, philosopher, married man and Socratic homosexual, aesthete and anarcho-socialist (born 1854 – died 1900) who fell from social grace at the hands of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry (John Sholto Douglas), Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, who dragged Wilde into charges of gross indecency (section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885) for his sexual relations with men including Lord Alfred Douglas. These charges led to Wilde’s criminal prosecution and repeated imprisonment that landed him in Reading Gaol (30 miles west of London) where he was condemned to two years hard labor as prisoner C.3.3. This punishment broke his health and hastened his early death of cerebral meningitis. During this time in Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde wrote the 50,000-word letter of sorrow to Lord Alfred Douglas later published as De Profundis (1905).

Junot Díaz’s character Oscar de León, alias Oscar Wao, is not Irish but Afro-Dominican (49), is not ostensibly homosexual (though scholar Lyn Di Iorio Sandín argues persuasively for the homoerotic homosocial dimensions of Oscar’s desires and of Diaz’s novel’s preoccupations with male sexuality), is not a Victorian, but a young man who is around 23 years old in the ‘early Clinton years’ (263). Nevertheless, Díaz’s novel constructs numerous layers of resemblance between Oscar de León (alias Wao) and Oscar Wilde. Like his Irish antecedent, Oscar de León does not conform to the proper gender codes. He is taunted for being ‘un marícon’ (222), the Spanish equivalent of ‘a fag.’ He is not masculine enough on account of his nerdy bookishness, his flabby fatness, his lack of female conquests, his fanciful writerliness (he concocts science fiction and fantasy-role playing stories remindful of Oscar Wilde’s investment in fairy tales, hagiography, ghost stories, and allegorical works of various kinds), his romanticism that impels him to suffer unto torture and death for love (he, like Oscar Wilde, becomes a martyr for ‘love’) and alternate-world utopianism.

Of course, ironically, the alternate-world utopianism conforms to an earlier code of masculinity pre-dating both the Victorian gentleman and the Dominican homeboy—and that is the code of chivalric romance, the code of the gallant knight errant willing to sacrifice for his ‘lady,’ whether that be the pretty-boy Lord Alfred Douglas (as in the case of Oscar Wilde) or a middle-aged, hard-drinking, often unconscious, semi-retired Dominican prostitute Ybón in the case of Oscar Wao. Oscar Wao’s blind, sacrificial love for Ybón brings him as close to Don Quijote deluded by his novels of caballería as it does to Oscar Wilde, but then all codes have their contradictions and hybrid complexities—even codes of masculinity.

Ultimately, the most important resemblance between Oscar Wao and Oscar Wilde, Díaz’s novel suggests, may be their sheer defiance of what Walter Mosley, African American novelist and writer of ‘afrofuturist science fiction,’ among other genres, refers to as ‘bone-cracking history’ in his book jacket blurb of Oscar Wao:

Set in New Jersey [and I would add the Dominican Republic], and haunted by the vision of Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is radiant with the hard lives of those who leave [the DR] and also of those who stay behind—it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.

Lyn Di Iorio Sandín takes a less salutary view of this novel, reading it through René Girard’s claims in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and The Scapegoat (1986) that human desire emerges from the experience of lack (the zero sum game) and that this basis in lack leads ineluctably to mimetic rivalry and violence.[2] Whether one sees the novel in Mosley’s radiant terms or not—one thing is clear. Oscar Wao is both suicidal and sacrificial (one might say masochistic) in his behavior toward the objects of his affection. In the middle of the novel he nearly kills himself by drinking too much ‘because some girl dissed him’ at the end of his sophomore year in college (169). At the end of the novel, he has given himself over entirely to his obsessive love for a middle-aged, semi-retired prostitute who is, unfortunately the girlfriend and later fiancée of a brutal member of the Dominican National Police—‘the capitán.’ This ‘capitán’ had ‘been young during the Trujillato … wasn’t until the North American Invasion that he earned his stripes … supported the U.S. Invaders, and because he was methodical and showed absolutely no mercy to the leftists, he was launched … into the top ranks of the military police. Was very busy under Demon Balaguer’ (294). For a short time Oscar Wao believes that his American citizenship will protect him as he tries to woo Ybón away from el capitán, but a near-fatal beating by the capitán’s henchmen shows him otherwise yet only increases his ill-founded and ill-fated belief that his relationship with Ybón is viable. Family members in the United States try to rescue him from his fatal fantasy by bringing him back to the States to heal, but at the first opportunity he returns to the Dominican Republic to continue courting Ybón. This time the capitán’s men kill him in a cane field, completing what they tried to do to him the first time and what was nearly done to his mother Hypatía Belicia Cabral for similar reasons in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship.

The pattern of obsessive love for a lot of pain to the point of torture and death in return resembles Oscar Wilde’s response to the troubles that Lord Alfred Douglas and his father (his capitán, so to speak) brought upon him, Oscar. Readers may find both Oscar Wilde’s and Oscar Wao’s behavior disturbingly foolish, self-destructive. About Oscar Wao’s pursuit of Ybón and his defiance of el capitán and all he represents, Lyn Di Iorio Sandín writes:

One is an evil man [the capitán] and the other [Oscar] has been an idealist and an innocent, and the third [Ybón] seems mostly indifferent [passive], and yet they are all three driven and compelled by the violence attending Oscar’s challenge of the Capitán and his pursuit of Yvón. (32)

Here Di Iorio Sandín sees Oscar’s sacrifice not as transcending the colonial system of power and oppression, not as outside ‘coloniality’ (to borrow Peruvian historical social scientist Aníbal Quijano’s phrase) but as part and parcel of it—caught in mimetic triangles of desire. The scapegoat/slave desires more than anything what the master, el capitán, desires—this Ybón who hardly seems to have a will of her own. A similar analysis could be and has been made by biographers of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas to the extent that both Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde seem to have allowed the Marquess of Queensberry to dictate their fate—seems to have gotten ensnared in Queensbury’s damning slanders against the ‘love that dares not speak its name.’ Was it the patriarchal punishing heterosexist father that both Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde desired? This line of analysis cannot be overlooked particularly with regards to a larger investigation of the effects of coloniality (the ways in which colonialism structures what is thought, felt, imagined, and practiced).

And yet at the same time, I do not want to ignore the general movement of the end of the novel, which is to turn Oscar Wao into a posthumous hero in the eyes of Yunior, another Dominican from Paterson, New Jersey. If a younger cynical philandering Yunior participated in alternately pitying and poking fun at Oscar when they were at college, an older, wiser Yunior enshrines him in his memory: ‘Years and years now and I still think about him’ (324). And, a bit later on:

When I’m not teaching or coaching baseball or going to the gym or hanging out with the wifey I’m at home, writing. These days I write a lot. From can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. Learned that from Oscar. I’m a new man, you see, a new man, a new man. (326)

So much does Yunior come to admire the previously pitied and misunderstood Oscar that he becomes Oscar Wao’s faithful archivist, keeping his ‘books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers’ carefully stored in four refrigerators (330).

Díaz’s novel itself grants the romantic, utopian Oscar Wao the last word taken from ‘a long letter to [his sister] Lola, the last thing he wrote, apparently before he was killed’ (333). This last letter claims that, despite Ybón’s passivity toward the untenable situation of being the capitán’s girlfriend and fiancée and also using Oscar for emotional comfort, Oscar and she did actually have one whole happy weekend together ‘on some beach in Barahona while the capitán was away on ‘business’ (334) and that Oscar finally lost his virginity of twenty-three years and, furthermore, had a taste of ‘the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair …’ (334).

Ybón encourages Oscar to see the wait for this experience not in terms of lack, but in terms of ‘life,’ a gesture remindful of John Lennon’s famous quip, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ The novel’s final words are Oscar’s reaction to this new perspective’ ‘The beauty! The beauty!’ (335), a phrase which Lyn Di Iorio Sandín points out functions as:

a wonderful piece of mimicry itself it imitates, and subverts … Joseph Conrad’s late nineteenth century novel Heart of Darkness: ‘The horror! The horror!’ In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz’s last words are meant as self-critique of the darkness in his own soul. (31)

In contrastive resemblance does Junot Díaz’s novel encourage readers to read Oscar Wao’s last words as an affirmation of his own being, an improperly Dominican boy and man who becomes more than a ‘Latino scapegoat’—but a hero—by embracing his Dominican Republic experience in the form of Ybón despite the terrible punishment (one might say fukú, fuck you–curse) that awaits him for doing so? And how are readers supposed to process that affirmation at the end of a long transnational tale of trouble and torture? Is this ending one of the novel’s ways of trying to transcend or at least offer an alternative to the oppressive colonial hierarchies and colonial triangles of violent mimetic desire? Walter Mosley’s description of Díaz’s novel leans strongly toward a YES to answer this question when he describes the book as ‘a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.’ In fact, one might even point out that the novel is engaging deliberately in multiple levels of mimesis. Not only is the ending a mimetic reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but also speaking of Irish icons such as Oscar Wilde, it is imitating the ending of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) where Molly Bloom repeatedly exclaims ‘Yes.’ To support this observation I highlight this passage from Chapter 2 of Oscar Wao written from Oscar’s sister’s viewpoint:

By then I [Lola] had this plan. I was going to convince my brother to run away with me. My plan was that we would go to Dublin. I had met a bunch of Irish guys on the boardwalk and they had sold me on their country. I would become a backup singer for U_2, and both Bono and the drummer would fall in love with me, and Oscar would become the Dominican James Joyce. I really believed it would happen too. That’s how deluded I was by then. (68)