Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m a big fan of unapologetically sexy women: from big-titted, pouty, walking id-ticklers like Angelina Jolie to the subtler mind-fuckers (and I mean that in a good way) like Helene Cixous in all her resplendent milkiness. Hell, I even enjoy that snarky basilisk, Camille Paglia, from time to naughty time. I cracked Kipnis’ Against Love in exactly this spirit (ooh, look at those cute panties on the cover!), with pom-poms at the ready, looking forward to what the Salon.com reviewer called her “bracing,” “invigorating,” and “audacious” ideas about love.
Now that I have spent several hours with this writer, I wonder how she could have chosen such a topic. The only evidence I see of Kipnis’ experience with love is her tremendous love affair with her “bracing,” “invigorating,” “audacious” self.* “So this is what can happen when you surround yourself with sycophantic grad students for too long,” I thought. “You devise little intellectual games to show off your erudition and covertly bitch about people who don’t subscribe to your fan club.”
Meeoow!
So…what connections do I see between Kipnis and the Victorian writers we’ve been discussing? Well, there are a number of 19th century contributors to the intellectual hit parade she substitutes for her own analysis, but maybe I should start with our readings. Putting aside Meredith for the moment, I must return to Arnold’s complaint that his fellow Englishman’s highest good seems to be the right to do as he or she pleases, clearly a virtue that Kipnis feels our self-abnegating society still underrates. We have engaged in an interesting debate about Arnold’s use of sarcasm on the subject, and I must admit now – after reading Kipnis – that I now see how this rhetorical strategy could work a person’s nerves. For example, she likes to put genuine criticisms against her argument in sassy quotations – eg. charges of “selfishness,” “immaturity,” etc. – instead of actually responding to them. Her choice of format – the polemic – also works to safeguard her sophomoric position against any real scrutiny (I think that I am beginning to see Professor Tongson’s point about the ethics behind certain formal choices). Having conceded the similarity in their rhetorical devices, I must now, however, extricate poor Arnold from Kipnis’ snot-nosed company. I know that a number of us were troubled by Arnold’s assumption of a monolithic ideal culture (rightly so), but at least he thought out this utopia enough to question whether the individual’s freedom should be the ultimate end of all of our collective endeavors. Kipnis, on the other hand, seems to feel that she can sidestep such ethical questions with a plethora of dodgy logical fallacies (hasty generalizations, false dichotomies, non sequiturs, post hoc, poisoning that damned well, etc.) as long as they are in service of playtime! Sorry Matthew, when this kind of rant ranks as counter-culturist, it looks like the Philistines have won.
Kipnis’ use of Marx seems particularly manipulative in this regard. Alexis was right about Arnold: he did seem to be echoing Marx when defending the rights of the powerless. Maybe we would like to criticize him for not admitting his intellectual debt; personally, I’d like to criticize Kipnis for name-dropping so shamelessly. Witness this little nugget of self-love: “if love is the latest form of alienated labor, would rereading Capital as a marriage manual be the most appropriate response?” (21). [Cue the appreciative chuckles]. Oh, and love is also the opiate of the masses. Actually, you can just substitute “love” for any of Marx’s bugbears – you’re just that clever. God knows, your audience hasn’t read any Marx, so you can just make it up as you go along if you want. For example, you can pretend that Marx thinks that “work” is a bad word, and forget that pesky “alienated” stipulation. If that doesn’t work, spice your argument liberally with Freud, of course ignoring any of the specificity of his work too (eg. whatever you do, don’t attempt to define “repression”). In fact, if you follow Kipnis’ model, everyone will have lost track your topic after a few pages (Love? Desire? Marriage?), and you will be able to quote the New Yorker and poach other scholars’ work to your heart’s delight.
Indeed, generalization is Kipnis’ best friend. Unlike Arnold, who takes some time out of his criticism to situate himself as a specific person with specific experiences; and unlike Meredith who anchors his Modern Love with a straightforwardly biased first-person narrative; Kipnis eschews personalizing her polemic (in an interview, she actually made fun of other writers who did so). I understand that we are living in a post-author world, but I still think that it is intellectually dishonest to presume to speak for everybody, especially on such a personal topic. Natasha set a good example for us in class today when she prefaced her comment with a frank admission of her potential for personal bias. Fortunately, I think she is in good company in our class; unfortunately, Kipnis wasn’t there to hear it. For someone who is so suspicious of cultural authority, Kipnis wields universalism with aplomb. She is so sure that her jaundiced view of love is the only honest response to the issue, she blithely asserts, “Race, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation will cause minor but ultimately insignificant variations in response” (83). That’s right, we are all bored, narcissistic intellectuals – don’t bother denying it. Your sweet satisfaction with your mate (or mates) is false consciousness. What you really want is DRAMA! I mean, “Isn’t this ‘maturity’ business a bit of an anti-aphrodisiac in itself?” (58). I don’t know about you, but I love writers who assume that I’m an idiot. I especially like this treatment from a woman who sincerely asks why the American public’s interest in political sex scandals waned at the turn of this century – adultery is not the only way to feel alive, Laura. Not being blown up works too.
I just realized that, after criticizing Kipnis for her use of sarcasm, I have been dipping in and out of that colorful inkpot myself throughout this post. I am sorry for it…not sorry enough to erase it…but sorry enough to feel a little silly. I also reserve a special apology for Jessica for my use of a crappy metaphor a couple of sentences ago. I suppose the most painful part of reading Kipnis is the lurking feeling that, in the hands of another author, Against Love could have been an interesting book instead of an object of ridicule. Cultural constructions of love, desire, and commitment (whether historical, current, or utopian) deserve our attention, and I hope that we may be able to shed more light on these subjects than she does.
*This line represents my attempt to follow Arnold’s idea of listening to one’s “best self.” My original explanation of Kipnis’ ignorance was much, much ruder.
- Erika
This, like Trisha’s post, is an exercise in finding the good.
I agree with you, Erika, that the way Kipnis uses and abuses cultural capital is rather irritating and disingenuous. You also might be right to say she uses the polemic form to shield herself from certain criticisms. When, in the “Reader Advisory” she says, “Please note that ‘against’ is also a word with more than one meaning. Polemics aren’t necessarily unconflicted (nor are the polemicists); rhetoric and sentiment aren’t always identical twins,” what she seems to mean is, “The author of this book is in no way responsible for the opinions stated herein.” Well, that’s tricky.
However, Kipnis is a great deal more sincere than you’re giving her credit for being, and I think the choice of the polemic form is one of the ways we can see that sincerity. Yes, it may be true that her “argument” is full of all those things we all tell our little 140 students not to do (false dichotomies, poisoning the well, etc.) but if she wrote a “legitimate” argument against love, got it published by Duke UP or some other dinosaur of a university press, who the hell would read it? And this question of readership is important because her main intention, I think, is basically good. That intention is to try to show people that there might be another way to think about things. The world doesn’t have to be as it seems. You don’t have to suffer silently or be resigned. I think that’s an important message, and one that probably ought to be communicated to a hell of a lot of unhappy people who are resigned to “the way things are.” And if the vehicle to deliver that message has to be something a bit unwieldy, a bit unacademic, well, I don’t see a problem. For many, it might prove to be a jumping off point (and I mean to bigger and better things, more reading for instance, and not suicide). I think that form is greatly preferable to the self-help form which she judiciously skewers. You might be right in suggesting that she’s a bit condescending (something we’ve talked a lot about in seminar) to her audience, but maybe that’s what people respond to. Maybe that’s what gets them moving. Righteous anger, and even sarcasm and caustic wit, can be good things. (Incidentally, I’m certainly not all for Kipnis, but I’m not all against her either.)
The problem, of course, is that what is to the person sitting on this side of the fence sarcasm and righteous anger, is to the person sitting on that side dogma and intolerance. If any of us came across a book written in this tone about, say, how people of color are inferior to white people, our heads would surely explode. (In a way, she’s right that love is a subject against which no one could be, and yet, for that very reason, it’s also the easiest subject to be against. There’s something so abstract and distant about love that attacking it in the way she does—despite her conflation of love, sex, coupledom, marriage—is a bit like attacking air.)
An example of how who’s delivering a message and in what manner will influence how that person’s message is received: if I had been foolish enough to begin a post with a sentence like “Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m a big fan of unapologetically sexy women: from big-titted, pouty, walking id-ticklers like Angelina Jolie to the subtler mind-fuckers (and I mean that in a good way) like Helene Cixous in all her resplendent milkiness” can you imagine the fiery hell and condemnation that would’ve rained down on me? When Erika does it, though, it’s witty…or something. I’m being silly, yes, but, at the same time I’m a bit serious. The point I’m stumbling toward here is that when talking about humor, sarcasm, and wit there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as the intentional fallacy. It may be important to consider who Laura Kipnis is, and what her position vis-à-vis the academy and society at large is. She sure as hell isn’t one of the cubicle jockeys at which Against Love seems (but, indeed, maybe only seems) to be aimed. Perhaps this raises one of those authenticity issues that were discussed in reference to Subculture.
On the other hand, god knows that opening sentence (Erika’s, that is) got my attention. And your cover has panties on it? Mine has the damn opening paragraph of “Love’s Labors” bracketed by absurdly large quotation marks. How interesting the contrast (just what is the relationship between panties and paragraphs?), and yet how boring my edition!
JH
I, too, am intrigued by the panties and envious that Erika’s copy has them; mine doesn’t.
No panties on my copy, either. What do they look like?
To ‘Realize’ De Profundis…
Similar to Nietzsche, Schiller, and Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic views were connected to an unsystematic politics. He avowed the ethics of socialism (as the state in Plato’s ‘Republic’ was intended to help improve ‘the individual’), yet concurrently recognized its limitations in advancing the cause of aesthetics. Thus, Wilde was preoccupied with an aestheticism that espoused neither naïve idealism nor simply focused on the autonomy and disinterestedness of art. Wilde’s statement of views were influenced by a tradition of Irish literary wit, and despite the fact that he often spoke against ‘morality,’ which referred to conservative philistine mores of the period that we’re familiar with in Foucault’s “We Victorians,” he maintained that aesthetics ought to be linked to moral and spiritual life. He emphasized the primacy of aesthetics only to the extent that the former has power to transform the ethical. Wilde did not argue for a didactic theory of art, nor did he wish to support the status quo, but he thought art could help fashion individual virtues—that is, it could engender ‘humanitarian sympathy’ as well as help us realize our transnational literary and philosophical precursors.
Wilde aimed at forging a connection between aesthetics and ethics. For example, he would have opposed a separation of the ethical ‘mechanism’ from an aesthetic ‘dynamic’ in Carlyle, and the separation between Hellenism and Hebraism in Arnold. He would have noted contradictions in ‘C&A’ between nationalism and disinterestedness. In forging the aforementioned connection, he was much influenced by Kant, Schiller, Pater, and Ruskin. (Wilde was exposed to Kant at Trinity College and read widely in his work). He maintained the humanistic function of ‘truth in art,’ emphasizing ‘the problem of life.’ Despite this, we have reason to inquire into his approach to the problem of evil and social harms that are inherent in daily life. We have reason to interrogate Wilde’s depiction of ‘bad things happen to good people.’ Did he view such things ironically? Or did he maintain a classical conception of evil (i.e., that evil is error…a kind of proto-Derridean detour)? How is ‘culture’ set against the fallible individual? Is De Profundis a theologically soaked reprimand against his accusers? Is it ‘liberation theology’? Or is it rather a ‘didactic’ missive in the vein of Plato’s The Crito, which is aimed at a specific audience?
There seems to be a tone of artificiality in De Profundis. Does Wilde self-consciously advance the “lie” of art (as Fellini does)—a lie that aims at a ‘greater good’ of ethical instruction? Perhaps his point is closer to Plato’s in the ‘Allegory of the Cave’: what observers believe is the truth—that ‘seeing is believing’—is a massive delusion. Wilde seems to focus on truth as a logical possibility; he refrains from a dogmatism of ‘truth’ in order to posit logically possible worlds that contain amplified versions of it. In this way, Wilde’s art is not an ‘escape’ from life (in a Romantic sense), but a sufficient condition that provides access to analyzing life. We have reason to interrogate Wilde’s use of certain words, such as ‘art’ and ‘life.’
Does ‘art’ imply the artifact and object or the ethical and spiritual potential in each of us? Does ‘life’ imply the existential situation or the subtle ‘Grecian Urn’ stillness in art? How does ‘art’ and ‘life’ become linked to serve as a template for linking aesthetics and ethics? How does Wilde accomplish this, if he does, in contrast to the dualisms of Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin? In these latter folks, the aesthetic is set apart from human activity and lived experience.
Does Wilde’s own life, as it is represented in De Profundis, become an ‘ideal’ in moral terms (as it is perhaps similar to Socrates’s life in his last days)? Or is it a tragic captivity narrative of a ‘fallen’ Anglo-Irish aristocrat? Or is it a kind of self-promoting ‘reality TV’ advertisement? Is it a document that demonstrates his life to be an evolving work of art? Is it a statement of subjective tragedy or a ‘work of art’ that is a fated/necessary consequence of historical and material forces? How does ‘deviance’ or ‘decadence’ inform his sense of personal tragedy or moral insight? Does the artistic significance of his life fashion an identity between moral and aesthetic value? In what way is De Profundis Wilde’s version of Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’?
Perhaps I shouldn’t pose these questions or so many of them…
But I guess the main question that harangues me has to do with fashioning one’s life into art, and it seems that ‘the ethical’ and ‘the aesthetic’ are two categories not obviously linked, or aren’t linked to sufficiently allow ‘life’ to have the significance of ‘art.’ De Profundis seems to be an ‘ethical’ statement on the aesthetics of lived experience (the relationship between Wilde-Douglas), as is thus implied: “We think in Eternity, but we move slowly through time.” Aesthetics and ethical actions are tenuously linked: “To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize every moment.” It is also an antinomy that Kant brings forth in the Critique of Pure Reason. How do we negotiate the intuition that human beings act in accordance with free will while also acknowledging that moral agents occupy a world governed by natural (physical) laws? In his work on ethics, Kant returns to the question, which becomes re-fashioned: How are agents morally responsible if many of their actions are involuntary? How are natural laws or categorical imperatives self-legislated rather than expressions of external material conditions? Nonetheless, what does Wilde imply in the above statement as he uses the word ‘realize’? Does it mean that we cannot neglect the connection between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘ethical’ since both are enmeshed in a co-terminus notion of spatiotemporality? (How does that work?) As I previously metioned, Wilde argues for the following: the ‘ethical’ life is inevitably linked to the ‘aesthetic’ life, and vice versa. This is a big topic worth exploring…
I have more to say…later…Daddy needs more coffee…and protein… and per previous conversation on book cover panties…I can’t seem to locate mine either…
Although De Profundis is formally a letter to a particular person (albeit the length of a treatise), we could examine it as a document that addresses several issues. For example, we could look at it as a response to nationalism—the type of racialism or imperialism espoused in Arnold’s ‘C&A.’ I am more or less interested in the issue of logical coherence in Wilde’s ethical aesthetics, which seems to float on ‘paradoxical truths.’ But we might want to define the word ‘paradox.’ There are two kinds: (i) epistemic paradoxes are riddles that involve the concept of knowledge. Typically, answers attempt to demonstrate that the initial question is a pseudo-question. (There are such things as bad or fallacious questions). (ii) The riddle immediately informs us of an inconsistency; it guides us into correcting at least one deep error – about concepts such as justification, evidence, or rational belief. I want to discover whether Wilde’s ‘paradoxical truths’ are genuine questions or pseudo-questions. Because, it would seem, ‘truth’ ought to be clear and not paradoxical. ‘Truth’ is a property of sentences–a given sentence is true in all possible worlds. A ‘paradoxical truth’ seems to imply epistemic confusion, illusion, or logical inconsistency (a type of non-sequitur whereby two or more statements contradict). Is it a sentence with a truth-value that depends on contextual utterance or conditions? Thus, what is the problem that Wilde addresses? Why is the result a ‘paradoxical truth’? Why would this result be satisfactory?
How do we formulate a clear statement of the main problem? One might begin by treading water a bit…
How would Wilde agree or disagree with Arnold? Although in ‘C&A’ aesthetics seems to be linked to ethics, it isn’t. Arnold is advocating a kind of cultural imperialism—cultural indoctrination or coercion—that hinges on an English idea of the state. ‘Culture’ gives us the idea of the state, which is in opposition to ‘anarchy.’ ‘Culture’ is that which is ‘sweet and light,’ the best that has been thought and said—it lacks ‘strength and fire.’ The latter is basically Hebraistic, referring to (Protestant?) religious mores and restrictions. The idea of culture is to increase intellectual curiosity and ‘disinterestedness.’ Guardians of culture are permitted to combat anarchy with ‘fire and strength.’
Wilde seems to view culture organically as Arnold did. Accordingly, such an integrated or ‘social whole’ must be evaluated from an outside perspective (not from the point of view of those on the inside). A paradox arises as a matter of perspective (in a similar way to the Barber’s paradox…how does a barber shave himself if everyone in town goes to the barber to get shaved?) Thus, how is it possible to stand outside the conditions of one’s linguistic community?
Wilde may have appreciated Arnold’s ‘sweetness’ (a love for the intrinsic value of beauty) but perhaps had no use for his ‘light.’ Wilde, in a way, is a proto-Marxist: he saw contradictions everywhere in society. But one wonders how contradictions become manifested as ‘truths.’ He didn’t think art could convey a ‘universal truth.’ Since Wilde was versed in Kant as well as Hegel, dialectic could form the basis of ‘truthful’ masks. In this way, it seems Wilde links ‘sweetness’ to the fire of inspiration and personal freedom.
I’ll come back to this later…
“Racial and religious distinctions are used by Arnold to explain the kind of racial and religious discrimination practiced by the British in Ireland. His plea is the Burkean one for ‘healing measures,’ for the abolition of this kind of injustice. Yet the ground of his argument concedes the principle that in Ireland there is a collision between two racial types and two religions. Celt and Teuton, Catholic and Protestant, confront one another. Arnold’s attack on the hard and dull English civilization is extended to include the Protestants of Ulster whom he sees as representatives of the English middle class…the romanticizing of the Celt becomes, in effect, the romanticizing of the Irish Catholic. Burke’s attack on the Protestant Ascendancy is incorporated into Arnold’s attack on the English middle classes and the Protestant garrison in Ireland….It is possible…to trace a line of filiation from Burke’s early Tracts to Arnold’s essays of 1878-81…he [Arnold] gave fresh emphasis to the sectarian features which were part of the Irish political situation by providing them with a cultural myth….our idea of the Celtic tradition…The ideas of continuity and of betrayal…become associated with the experience of sectarian division in such a way that continuity has become the preserve of the Catholic Celts and betrayal the role of the Protestant garrison. For this we have to thank one of the greatest of English literary critics writing under the influence of the greatest of Irish political thinkers.” (Seamus Deane, “Arnold, Burke, and the Celts” in ‘Celtic Revivals’)
“Out of the depths I call to you, Lord; Lord, hear my cry! May your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. If you, Lord, mark our sins, Lord, who can stand? But with you is forgiveness and so you are revered.” (Psalm 130)
“I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible…My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines – written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:-
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, – He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
…they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.” (Wilde, DP)
—-
Out of the depths of suffering and pain, committed to redemption and obtaining mercy, Wilde often refers to motherhood, the maternal, and mothers in citing the unfortunate facts of historical drama and striving for individual perfection. (He also mentions the person of Christ in the Gospels, and Virgil’s guidance to Dante in hell). This reminds me of previous questions I raised on the connection between art and life, and aesthetics and ethics. De Profundis seems to be many things: a personal rant and an expression of outrage, a ‘reprimand,’ an attempt to acquire the moral high ground, a document of guilt, shame and hatred, a repentance, a condemnation of philistinism, an expose of the secret hypocrite in each of us…it’s perhaps the ‘paradoxical’ blog entry par excellence!
While reading it, I kept thinking about ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ Brendan Behan’s ‘Borstal Boy’ (a narrative of an Irish revolutionary in prison), and Terry Eagleton’s play ‘Saint Oscar.’ In the latter, we have a unique characterization of Wilde undergoing trial. Eagleton depicts Wilde on the stand in the courtroom:
“I object to this trial on the grounds that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of your racial fantasies. You cannot manacle a fantasy. I do not believe in your morality and I do not believe in your truth. I have my own truth and morality which I call art. I am not on trial here because I am a pervert but because I am an artist, which in your book comes to much the same thing. You hold that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. I hold that nothing is ever purely itself, and that the point where it becomes so is known as death. I therefore demand to be defended by metaphysicians rather than by lawyers, and that my jury should be composed of my peers—namely, poets, perverts, vagrants and geniuses.”
Although Wilde did not utter this statement (it is made by a fictional Oscar Wilde), it echoes statements that he actually did make. Also, in a Field Day pamphlet (1984), Declan Kiberd remarks: “Wilde saw that the image of the stage Irishman tells us more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the still vibrant Irish joke tells us far less about the Irishman’s foolishness than about the Englishman’s persistent and poignant desire to say something funny…Wilde was able to invert, and ultimately to challenge, all the time-honored myths about Ireland.”
Wilde challenges myths, hence the reason I quoted Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, and Declan Kiberd, in that De Profundis belongs to a tradition of long disaffected Irish prison journals, which includes the political defiance of John Mitchel’s diaries and extends to writings of IRA members (e.g., Brendan Behan) and leaders of Sinn Fein (e.g., Gerry Adams). This writing often aims at exposing political contradictions and injustice just as Wilde’s paradoxes aimed at signifying iconoclastic truths.
Much of the literary style in De Profundis that details personal tragedy is underscored by memories of his mother who was a nationalist poet. Thereby, much of his rhetorical style is ‘romantic,’ seemingly anticipating W.B. Yeats’s poetic lines: “Never give too much of the heart,” “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,” “Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart,” “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” and “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?”
Perhaps statements such as these, Wilde’s ‘truthful paradoxes,’ his description of suffering prison conditions, and his Augustinian ‘confession’ of righting wrongs, were a means to pattern a path of human solidarity. In confronting absurdity and contradiction, we attempt to assuage suffering with empathy and understanding, perhaps adopting Virgil’s guidance to Dante— in passing suffering souls we listen in silence to their cries of woe.
Lady Wilde was an important figure because of her sympathy with famine victims and the cause of independence. This influenced her son. In a lecture in San Francisco, Wilde mentioned his respect for those involved in the 1848 rebellion against British rule:
“I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the calendar. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well…who fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed…John Mitchel, too,…[and] Charles Gavan Duffy…men who made of lives noble poems… ‘By sheer power of Irish intelligence, by sheer strength of Irish genius, made a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’”
Then he referred to one of his mother’s songs, “The Ballad of the Brothers Sheares,” quoting these lines:
They [the brothers] are pale, but it is not fear that whitens
On each proud, high brow,
For the triumph of the martyr’s glory brightens
Around them even now…
Before them, shrinking, cowering, scarcely human,
The base informer bends,
Who, Judas-like, could sell the blood of true men
While he clasped their hand as friends.
In citing lines from his mother’s song, Wilde refers to a narrative of betrayal, a court trial, and a character of piteous endurance that may have informed his own later prison experience. Perhaps this demonstrates only a coincidence of behavior and style between mother and son, but it, too, may reveal something about our approach to De Profundis, a text rarely examined at length in our studies. As Wilde the aesthete converts into the image of a convict, we have reason to wonder whether he also transforms into a Lazarus. In routing his shadow through life, hell, and purgatory, perhaps his main contribution to an ‘ethical aesthetics’ comes in the form of a rant—a condemnation of the penal system, the ills of punishment, moral arrogance and the hypocrisy of imposed rehabilitation—and a revelation of common guilt we carry with us.
If Wilde’s prison writing signifies a return from the dead, it employs modes of confession, contrition, and self-indulgence that are required for art to triumph over life at last. In this return, rising above and writing from the perspective of inhuman conditions, he rebels against a society that dared to imprison any spirit, engendering in us as readers an appreciation of the ‘sweet and light,’ as well as the ‘fire’ of bold commitment and resistance. In this he makes a last plea in favor of culture, a defense against fated trials, the dominant ‘willful’ personalities that neglect the ideals of art and ignore the ideas of geniuses. De Profundis is a realization of human potential and individualism, an apologia of empathy, tolerance, and freedom. Perhaps ironically, the voice of an Irish convict in an English jail cell also sheds light on British imperialism and its penal system. As the voice of a man who spoke for many, Wilde’s suffering evokes the sympathy of human solidarity. It would be a voice heard again, echoing in the memories of those who in 1916 failed to establish Irish independence, and with the shade of Roger Casement, who endured a similar trial as Wilde did, while finally his body hung limp from the gallows.
As we examine tensions in Wilde’s De Profundis between individualism and fate, various personalities, and the assignation of moral responsibility (which becomes a ‘paradoxical’ problem given the nature of actions that Wilde believed were determined by mitigating external causes) we have reason to consider his appeal to the figure of Christ as having a “Titan personality.” It seems that Wilde’s statements on Christ situate individualism within the realm of politics, and within the realm of aesthetics; his ideas on the fulfillment of its aims, whereby the individual is analogous to a nation, which has rights and its own sovereignty, is aligned with J.S. Mill’s ‘liberalism’ (in ‘On Liberty,’ 1869) and with Kant (in the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’). Let us recall Wilde’s statement, which is indebted to Kant’s antinomies, that “To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize at every moment.”
I mention the antinomies (from K’s ‘CPR’) because therein Kant wanted to show that reason could arrive at two defensible and valid opposing claims, which establish an irresolvable ‘philosophical problem.’ In regard to Wilde, a problem arises as a result of valid arguments in favor of two contradictory positions: (i) free will and agency, and (ii) the determinism of physical/natural laws. Current philosophical debates on free will, on consciousness, on the problem of evil, etc, are heavily indebted to Kant’s antinomies. And I suspect that Wilde’s paradoxes have a lineage to them. One such paradox involves the problem of self-knowledge; another relates to the possibility of individual freedom to achieve appropriate ends without the hindrance of dogmatism or religious intolerance.
As I stated earlier, Kant thinks that human agents are ends in themselves. But his views on ‘selfhood’ and ‘self-knowledge’ are complicated. In agreement with Hume, K thinks that the ‘self’ can be perceived or ‘intuited’ as a physical object, that is, as ‘phenomena.’ The thinking subject is conscious of itself as a perceived object. Since an aspect of the self is a ‘thinking thing,’ as Descartes concluded, then K maintains that its freedom and agency is implied as well. The ‘noumenal’ aspect of the self is outside the scope of rational thought, however, each agent is a rational being that attempts to discover the limits of thought and sense, including the basis of morality. In this way, human beings are ends and not means to fulfill diverse interests. Wilde’s individualism is premised on something like K’s idea of the self-conscious agent. Individuality is that which is nurtured, mothered, and molded: a thinking ‘self’ develops into an actual social being by the kind of ‘self-tutelage’ that K describes in “What is Enlightenment?”
For Wilde, it seems that individualism requires self-consciousness as well as the irony of social antagonism and contradiction. Perhaps it is also true that this is the basis for his aesthetic views. Wilde’s aesthetics seem to hinge on K’s notions about the ‘enlightened’ (or ‘cultured’) individual emerging from ‘immaturity.’ (Doesn’t W rebuke Bosie over and again for ‘immaturity’?) This latter state of being is the position occupied by a disciple, a student, or a follower—one such as Dante-the-pilgrim who requires Virgil’s tutelage. Many of Wilde’s statements and paradoxes convey moral sentiments—they tend to not imitate conventions but rather still advocate moral goods. Aesthetics and ethics become linked since the achievement of ‘beauty’ depends on an autonomous witness, an individual life fashioned in its own way, seeking perfection in character as Aristotle recommended, by overcoming dullness, passive consumption, and the temptations of mass merchandising.
Perhaps we see contradiction most clearly in the tension between art and life, which deal with two different areas of action. Art is autonomous and has the ability to give life meaning. At times Wilde proclaims that life ought to imitate art—he seems to embrace a mimetic and expressive view that resolves the paradoxical inter-relation between art and life. Art has an expressive function, but in its vivacity (to use a term from Hume) it can merge with life; art is independent from life, but reception of it connects it to life. An emphasis on reception is a notion derived from K. W merges the creative and the critical. The autonomy of art is the basis of its connection to life: it stands removed from life in order to convey the ethical nature of it.
In “Oscar and Oisin” (‘Eminent Domain’), Richard Ellmann remarks: “The sense of living a myth was implicit in Yeats’s defense of Wilde against the charge of being a poseur…[he was] an exponent of being true to the depths of one’s being, that posing ‘was merely living artistically, and it was the duty of everybody to have a conception of themselves, and he intended to conceive of himself.’” […]