REPOST: DAT on Wilde

(I believe DAT is Domino A. Torres?)
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.