To begin, I would like to formally say that I have felt uncomfortable when I have read De Profundis in the past, but this time I felt particularly guilt-ridden as I read Oscar Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison. While I would jokingly like to propose that my feeling of being a deviant/guilty reader came from the fact that our text in its Xeroxed and stapled form (especially with its footnotes which referenced the unknowable notes on p. 000) made me feel as if I was reading a stolen copy of the yet to be released Harry Potter novel, in all seriousness, this version of the letter in its copied and unfinished form reminded me of the fact that I was reading something not meant for my consumption. That simply, I was reading someone else’s mail.
The mythology/story the editors outline for us in the first footnote to the letter reminded me all the more of the material nature of the letter and the fact that it was altered, edited, “improved” upon, and reprinted without Wilde’s permission (a practice which Wilde denounces in the letter itself when he refers to Douglas reprinting his letters for profit or prestige). While I can see the merits of reading the letter, the fact that I can read an annotated edition of Wilde’s manuscript while the man to whom the letter was originally intended never received all of Wilde’s words, let alone that he could not experience the text on the blue ruled prison paper, infuriates me. Further, the fact that the British Library reprinted the original manuscript in “facsimile” form and heightened its value by only making 495 copies sickens me all the more. I refer to the British Library “facsimile” in quotes because even though it supposedly allows for the letter to be experienced in Wilde’s own hand, its binding in blue leather and cloth, not to mention its cohesive nature in book form, allow for the legitimization, not to mention the heightened culture capital, of reading words intended for another. Additionally, let’s not forget that out of the limited run of 495, 95 copies were signed by Merlin Holland, Wilde’s only grandson, and thus, the man who can justify the selling of Wilde’s letter for profit. (See the listing for the edition: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=66286638&searchurl=sortby%3D1%26y%3D0%26kn%3Dfacsimile%2Boscar%2Bwilde%2Bde%2Bprofundis%26x%3D0 )
My main question revolves around the role we, as scholars, play in the legitimization of such practices. Do we support the reprinting of Wilde’s manuscript? Do we place more value on editions with Wilde’s grandson’s stamp of approval? Do we assume that it is ethically correct to read other people’s mail as long as all the players are long dead? Does the facsimile edition become more acceptable if it has an unlimited run? Perhaps I am being too extreme here because frankly, I’m all for the archive and the reading of diaries and letters, but in the spirit of this class, I would like to wonder at the “afterlife” of private correspondence and the necessity to which permission must be obtained before one edits, reprints or alters another’s work. The editor’s note on Robbie Ross’s misreadings of Wilde’s word choice, improvements on his syntax and the shifting or removing of whole lines or paragraphs, combined with the editors’ own admission that the letter is reprinted in its entirety except for the fact that they made it easier to read by adding more paragraph breaks, makes me question the difference between these two seemingly divergent practices. Are we intended to feel more at ease as scholars to read an edition such as this one? Does referring to this edition over the Dover paperback edition make our work more intellectually rigorous? What is the value in reading one version over another?
I know I would not have begun to question these issues if it were not for Wilde’s attention to money and labor in the letter itself, not to mention his constant reference to Douglas’s vanity and spendthrift “nature.” I originally set out to write this post in regards to history and (mis)remembrance in regards to the editorial notes and what we as contemporary readers can or cannot believe in either the editorial comments or Wilde’s one-sided letter, but I hope that the questions I have raised were not the wrong ones. Perhaps it’s because it’s the summer and my life is then, by default, less crazy, but I cannot help but wonder at our own labors and what we value in terms of the archive. Where do we draw the line in terms of privacy/permission? Does the line even need to be drawn? Perhaps not. Maybe in setting something down on paper, one is consciously aware of the fact that it may one day be published, edited, or altered. Are we as critics as “bad” as Douglas is for presuming to dedicate a volume to Wilde without his permission? What responsibility do we have to our subjects, our readers and our peers in regards to these situations?
–NSAH
Interesting! I can relate to the feeling you describe, but I have to confess that for me it was far outweighed by a delight in gossipy prurience. I felt a little vindicated by the extract from Wilde’s letter to Robert Ross which we could see at the end of De Profundis, in which he asks for the letter to be distributed to friends so that they could see Wilde’s side of the story; but in fact, seeing the minutiae of this iconic figure’s interpersonal relationships was a major pleasure of the text for me.
It makes me think about the work I do in online culture, though – about the care that I feel it’s necessary to take to protect people’s identities and their words, how I wouldn’t link to public blog posts outside the community they’re addressed to without permission, even when I really want to… But standards of privacy vary, and I think I read Wilde’s letter as more public in some ways, as a performance of private discourse that he chose to publicize (since he asked Ross to have it typed), than I perceive some contemporary ostensibly ‘public’ writings to be.
Alexis
Thanks for calling my attention to the letter fragment, Alexis! In all honesty, when I got to the end of the letter, I stopped reading because I thought the next letter was unrelated, but now I see that it was! I think it would help me a bit if I had read the letter to Robert Ross before I began the letter to Alfred Lord Douglas. At the same time, Ross did such a shitty job in terms of copying/giving the letter to Douglas, that I can’t help but wonder if my “guilt” would still be there.
At any rate, I need to get my hands on the whole letter to Ross!
P.S. The last comment was written by NSAH
Surviving the Grotesque
I have been thinking about the connections between the grotesque and the comical. Wilde writes that, “the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put Tragedy into the raiment of Comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker-on…Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style. Our very dress makes us grotesque.” (756). Wilde mentions the word grotesque no less than 11 times throughout the text, sometimes to describe his unraveling relationship with Bosie, other times to point out the gross circumstances he found himself in or, most fitting of all, to highlight the behavior of either Bosie or Bosie’s father. Often, Wilde conflates father and son to levy what is likely the deepest criticism of Bosie, and thus hit him where it hurts the most, and to convey to the reader that the unimaginative, freeloader son and the deeply vindictive, coarse father are one in the same. Caught in the middle of old grievances, Wilde is forced to play the role of the comical fool, the third leg in the courtside entertainment in this drama and in the end, he is left in a cage, dressed in miserable costume, and discarded like some useless jack-in-the-box.
It is interesting to note that Wilde’s life is constantly entangled in a triangulation of sorts, and his retelling of events makes it clear that a third party or entity is always present in his battles. First, we have Wilde, Bosie and either ego dominating the dynamics of the relationship. Then Wilde, Bosie and Bosie’s father enter into their fatal interactions that lead to his trial. Then we witness the showdown between Wilde, Bosie’s father and the law, followed by the drama between Wilde, Bosie’s father and the audience that he seems to be writing for in De Profundis. I’d like to argue that for Wilde, the voyeuristic, and often deeply sadistic and judgmental public is firmly implicated in the spectacle of his sensational trial and imprisonment, and in the resulting prison letter. He reveals a public eager for salacious gossip and scandal, and, in perhaps one of the most moving passages of the text, suggests that those who crave and feast off of sensation are bereft of the most decent elements of humanity. He recalls how people laughed at him as he stood in his prison garb and faced the crowds assembled outside the train platforms. Here, once again, the grotesque and the comical converge to reveal an image of a clown entertaining the crowd. Yet his writing uncovers a deeply sentimental reproach for those unable to feel compassion. He writes, “Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque…Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people who laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not on my pedestal. I was in the pillory. But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality…to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. Unbeautiful are their lives who do it. In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?” (757).
In many ways, De Profundis is as much a response to the people’s transient interest and passing curiosity in the trial and case of Wilde as a public castigation of Bosie. Wilde is keenly aware of the collective project of shame being engineered and dumped upon him by a public eager for spectacle and sensation. This allows him to speak openly for the first time under the guise of writing a “letter.” Given Bosie’s penchant for selling Wilde’s personal letters, and Wilde’s knowledge of this (and in fact, he reserves some of his most cutting words for Bosie as a result of his plan to publish them) this letter was never meant to be a private transmission between old “friends.” Wilde must have known others would surely get their hands on it, and so decided to tell his side of the story and catalogue all the intimate details of their relationship. The concept of the “letter” then, experiences a curious transformation from mechanism of private messenger to a ledger where debts are calculated and transactions lodged. Wilde goes to great lengths to itemize and categorize the ruined inventory of their life together, and yet, perhaps most strikingly, most grotesquely of all, he does it from a space of such detached coolness, such tempered reasonableness, that Wilde’s narrative reads more like a calculated meditation on the consequences produced by trafficking in an economy of triviality for triviality’s sake, of allowing a base mentality with a lack of imagination to infiltrate the space of an artist, than the bitter reproach of an angry man seeking to get even.
Wilde’s turn to Christ in the latter part of his letter signals another instance of triangulation as he conjures the image of the trinity. Though previous permutations of three had been injurious to him, here he finds a guiding light in the morass of modernity. God, Son and Holy Spirit are the pure three, and if, as Wilde points out, “[t]he supreme vice is shallowness” (775) then its logical antithetical is a life devoted to something of substance—to love, sympathy and imagination, the three elements he sees most missing in Bosie, his father and the world surrounding them.
In the end De Profundis can be read not only as an accounting of both time and money spent, but also of the costs the artist must bear for the hard lessons learned. Here, Wilde offers a portrait of modernity that ultimately reveals an economy of commodity exchange preoccupied by modalities of prescribed time and transaction value—How much time did I waste and how much did it cost me? How much time is left and what do I [still] owe? If the letter had stopped at this, the text would have been implicated in its own accusations of pettiness and sensationalism since it takes on the curious role of both an unpaid bill—with all the attendant language of commerce—and a public notice that resembles a press release calling for the “truth” on behalf of a celebrity. But Wilde’s greater goal is not just to inventory past hurts and damages incurred, but ultimately to advocate against the shallowness of the modern world and the elements of the grotesque he has so far endured.
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