Humanity does not take itself seriously enough. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how not to laugh, history would have been different.
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Men represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as women represent the triumph of mind over morals.
The truth is that Dorian Gray portrays the inanity of Lord Wotton, and at the same time denounces it. One character says of him: “Don’t mind him, my dear … He never means anything he says.” The author says of him: “He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. […] He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination.”
Lord Wotton delights in what he thinks are paradoxes, but his acquaintances do not hold paradoxes in high esteem:
‘They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,’ chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast-off clothes…. ‘Paradoxes are all very well in their way…,’ rejoined the baronet.
It is true that Lord Erskine says: “Was that a paradox? I didn’t think so. Perhaps it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tightrope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” Lord Erskine was not wrong, but Lord Wotton— not having anything to believe in—was mean with paradoxes, and on his tightrope it was common sense rather than Truth that performed acrobatics. But what did matter to Lord Wotton in any case?
‘And now my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch?’
‘I quite forget what I said,’ smiled Lord Henry. ‘Was it all very bad?’
In Dorian Gray few terrible things are said, but many are done. But basically Dorian does them because his friends have ruined him with their false paradoxes. In the end this is the lesson we can take from the novel. But Wilde would even deny this lesson, because he says clearly in the preface that “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” And the style of Dorian Gray resides totally in the portrayal of fatuousness. Consequently, even though Wilde was himself a victim of the very cynicism that he so ostentatiously displayed, and that so delighted readers and audiences, we should not do him the injustice of quoting his aphorisms in isolation, as though they were intended or were able to teach us something.
It is true that some of the best Wildean paradoxes appear in those Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which he published as maxims for life in an Oxford journal: Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
In examinations the foolish ask the questions that the wise cannot answer.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has discovered.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
When one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. Only the shallow know themselves.
The extent to which he considered these teachings to be true is evident in the replies he gave at his trial, when those sentences were objected to: “I rarely think that anything I write is true.” Or: “That is a pleasing paradox, but I do not set very high store on it as an axiom.” In any case, if “a truth ceases to be a truth when more than one person believes in it,” to what collective consensus could a truth uttered by Wilde aspire? And since “in all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential, and in all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential,” it is right not to ask Wilde for a strict distinction between (true) paradoxes, (obvious) aphorisms, and (false, or devoid of any truth value) reversible aphorisms. What he exhibits is a juror sententialis (which is a pleasurable rhetorical incontinence), not a passion for philosophy.
Wilde would have sworn by one single aphorism, and he staked his life on it in the end: “All art is quite useless.”
Paper given at a conference on Oscar Wilde held at the University of Bologna on 9 November 2000.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS BACHELOR
I am probably the least suitable speaker to celebrate Joyce’s bachelor of arts degree. After all, an article published in St. Stephens Magazine in 1901 claimed that it was ideas from Italy that had corrupted Joyce. But I did not ask to give this commemorative address: that is the responsibility of University College. As for the title of my lecture, perhaps my intertextual wordplay is not terribly original, but then I am only “a playboy of the southern world.”
I do, however, feel ill at ease with the title I have chosen: I would have liked to speak of the time when Jim, at Clongowes Wood College, announced his age by saying, “I am half past six.” But let us not stray from the subject, which is, of course Joyce as bachelor.
All of you know probably that bachelor has become a magic word in many studies of contemporary semantics, ever since it was passed down from author to author as the supreme example of an ambiguous term possessing at least four different meanings. A bachelor is (i) an unmarried male adult; (ii) a young knight in the service of another; (iii) a person who has obtained his first degree; and (iv) a male seal who has not yet managed to mate during the mating season. Nevertheless, Roman Jakobson has pointed out that despite their semantic differences, these four homonyms have an element of incompleteness in common, or at least of something unfinished. In any context, a bachelor is, then, someone who has not yet reached a state of maturity. The young male is not yet a husband or mature father, the page is not yet a knight who has received investiture, the young B.A. graduate is not yet a Ph.D., and the poor male seal has not yet discovered the joys of sex.
When our Jim left University College he was still an incomplete Joyce, in that he had not yet written those works without which Joyce would have remained little more than a bigheaded novice. However, I would like to underline the fact that despite this, at the end of his studies Jim was not so incomplete as one would like to believe, and that it was precisely during those years of study that he clearly outlined, in his first attempts at writing, the directions he would later take in his maturity.
Jim began his degree in 1898, studying English under the supervision of Father O’Neill, a pathetic enthusiast of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, Italian with Father Ghezzi, and French with Edouard Cadic. This was the period of neo-Thomist studies, which often provide the quickest route to misunderstanding Aquinas, but while he was at the College, and before the Pola Notebook and Paris Notebook, Jim had certainly understood something about Aquinas. He once said to Stanislaus that Thomas Aquinas is a very complex thinker because what he says resembles exactly what ordinary people say, or what they would like to say—and for me this means that he had understood an awful lot, if not everything, of the philosophy of Saint Thomas.
In “Drama and Life,” a lecture read on 20 January 1900 to the University College Literary and Historical Society, Joyce announced in advance the poetics of Dubliners: “Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.”
In “Ibsen’s New Drama,” published 1 April 1900 in the Fortnightly Review, we can identify that fundamental idea of artistic impersonality, which we find later in the Portrait. Referring to a work of drama, he writes: “Ibsen […] sees it steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes,” and the God of the Portrait Will be “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
In “James Clarence Mangan,” a lecture also given to the to the Literary and Historical Society on 15 February 1902 and published the following May in St Stephens Magazine, we find that “Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being, or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.” This is without doubt the first adumbration of the notion of epiphany as it would be
