Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum

The Truth of Masks

Giles Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351555456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause celebre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley's groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept of the simulacrum to resituate Wilde's work in relation to both his precursors and his contemporaries, Whiteley's study reads Wilde through Deleuze and postmodern philosophical commentary on the simulacrum. In a series of striking juxtapositions, Whiteley challenges us to rethink both Oscar Wilde's aesthetics and his philosophy, to take seriously both the man and the mask. His philosophy of masks is revealed to figure a truth of a different kind - the simulacra through which Wilde begins to develop and formulate a mature philosophy that constitutes an ethics of joy.

1 Intentions: Nature has good intentions, of course, but as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

Oscar Wilde¹

Wilde published the volume of essays entitled Intentions in 1891. The idea had been germinating since July 1889. He had approached William Blackwood about the possibility of printing a volume to include ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, published that same month in Blackwood’s Magazine (Letters, p. 405). Said volume did not materialize, however, and when Intentions eventually came out, it was shorn of ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’. Instead, it included only the essays ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ and ‘The Truth of Masks’, and the dialogues ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’.²

Wilde’s chosen title Intentions is significant. Only a year earlier, he had reviewed Walter Pater’s collection of essays entitled Appreciations in the Speaker (1889; reviewed by Wilde as ‘Mr. Pater’s Last Volume’, 22 March 1890), and his title clearly plays against Pater’s.³ The review undertakes an analysis of the book within the context of its title:

‘Appreciations’, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given by Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite essays, of delicately wrought works of art — some of them being almost Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realize the nineteenth century one must realize every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. (CW, VII, 244)

The word ‘appreciation’ comes from the Latin ‘appretiare’ meaning to estimate quality — to value, judge and rank something. Wilde draws attention to the diversity of subjects dealt with in the collection (style, romanticism, classicism, Shakespeare) and suggests that Pater finds in these diverse subjects something of equal esteem. But the continuation of Wilde’s argument, that ‘to know anything about oneself, one must know all about others’, veers, at least on the surface, well away from the subject’s ostensible territory and thus the ‘proper’ subject of a review, sounding instead like it was lifted straight out of one of the dialogues of his later volume of Intentions. Indeed, in a sense, it was, or rather, would be: from the second sentence quoted onwards, the entire text becomes a verbatim autocitation in Wilde’s essay on ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’, which appeared in The Nineteenth Century in two parts, in July and December 1890, and was later reworked in Intentions as ‘The Critic as Artist’ (CW, IV, 176–77).⁴ Thus, Wilde’s review is in a sense autobiographical at the very time that he tries to distance himself from autobiography. Wilde’s appreciation of Pater’s Appreciations is an appreciation that is itself not simply passive but active and critical in the Wildean sense of the word. Wilde’s appreciation of Pater’s Appreciations is thus also a statement of intentions.

Since Wilde invites us to think of the Latin root of the word ‘appreciation’, it is worth noting that the word ‘intention’ comes from the Latin ‘intendere’ meaning to expand or stretch out towards. It is a movement of projection and externalization. But one’s intentions are also statements of intent, a word deriving from the same root, but via old French coming to mean design or purpose. The title Intentions is thus itself a statement of intent on Wilde’s part. But what are these intentions? The pieces included in the volume seem to lack a common thread: we have two dialogues, ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’, and two essays, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ and ‘The Truth of Masks’. Of these two essays, the former is biographical, but at least seems in keeping with the overall tenor of the volume; the other, ‘The Truth of Masks’, is seemingly completely out of place (apart from its concluding paragraph), a fact Wilde appears to recognize when, writing a letter to William Heinemann in the summer of 1891 in the hope of republishing the volume, he suggests omitting the essay on ‘The Truth of Masks’ (Letters, p. 486). What then can be the intention linking Wilde’s pieces and what are the intentions of Intentions?

My aims in this chapter are modest: I wish to revisit some of Wilde’s most familiar critical material in the light of his philosophy of masks and the theory of the simulacrum. This return will, in turn, provide the foundation for the more expansive analyses that come in the following chapters of the book. If the phrase ‘the truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks’ from ‘The Truth of Masks’ is the refrain which guides the reading of Wilde developed in this book, we will see in this chapter how Wilde’s theory of the simulacrum is most systematically developed in the two dialogues ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’. I use the term ‘systematic’ advisedly, however. It is worth noting that unlike Pater, who schematizes his mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism in the third book of Marius the Epicurean (1885), Wilde did not leave us with a fully developed ‘system’ of his thought. It is this absence of a system which in part is responsible for the either–or critical alternative: either the absence of a system is testimony to the absence of philosophical substance in Wilde’s thought, or the system, such as it is, must be reconstructed by his critics from his writings, a reconstruction, as we have indicated, that has followed broadly idealist, and specifically Hegelian, lines. But, while it is certainly true that Wilde may be read as a Hegelian in these essays, there is also much in them that resists such an interpretation. It is the aim of this chapter to offer an alternative ‘reconstruction’ of Wilde’s philosophy that resists this idea of ‘system’. As we shall see, Wilde’s intention, at least in these two dialogues, is to affirm art as the philosophy of the mask, the power of the simulacrum.

The Function of criticism

At first glance, ‘The Critic as Artist’ certainly seems somewhat Hegelian. It deploys a series of loaded terms such as ‘the ideal’, ‘perfection’, ‘progress’ and ‘self­ consciousness’. In its general tenor, too, it seems idealist, a kind of narrative of enlightenment.⁵ ‘As civilization progresses and we become more highly organized’, Wilde argues, ‘the elect spirits of each age’ will be ‘the critical and cultured spirits’ (CW, IV, 166). The critic is thus a kind of Hegelian world­historical individual, who sums up the progressive spirit but also galvanizes it.⁶ And Hegel seems to have the final word of the dialogue, with Gilbert summing up his ‘new aesthetic’ by stating that ‘the Critical Spirit and the World Spirit are one’ (IV, 205). But there is a danger in reading the text so rigidly. Both ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’ take the form of dialogues, that Platonic form certainly associated with the dialectic as a method, but also self­consciously literary.⁷ Just as the character Glaucon, Plato’s real­life brother, does not represent Plato’s own opinion, neither do Gilbert or Vivian necessarily represent Wilde. They are masks, costumes to be put on, roles to be played or performed. They are simulacra.⁸

The main thrust of the argument of both dialogues revolves around a critique of the model of mimēsis in aesthetic criticism. In ‘The Critic as Artist’, Wilde names the simulacral power ‘criticism’. This designation is unsurprising in the context of Wilde’s relationship — his critical relationship — with late nineteenth­century critical theory, and in particular with the thought of Arnold, Ruskin and Pater. When flirting with autobiography at precisely the site of its erasure in his review of Pater’s Appreciations, Wilde is engaging in a complex dialogue with his mentor’s critical legacy, a legacy that Pater himself was also in the process of reconsidering and actively rereading during the same period.⁹ If the question of criticism had been, for Arnold, precisely a question of its function, this function was ultimately normative: to seek to see the object as it really is involves establishing that which is ontologically prior. What is at stake is the truth or meaning of the text, one that is objective and verifiable. And if the situation is less clear­cut in Pater, where the appreciation of the text always already rereads the original, disrupting the principle of ontological priority, the critic as the ghostly or simulacral presence residing uncannily in its textual host, it is left to Wilde to explicate Pater’s legacy, to push it beyond its own limits into a theatre of simulacra.

Is it possible or advisable to see the object as in itself it really is? Wilde’s meditation on this central question in ‘The Critic as Artist’ finds Gilbert musing on autobiography. The context here is not insignificantly the work of Pater (another thinker of criticism as autobiography), and a passage in which Pater is himself musing on his own uncanny precursor, Ruskin. For Gilbert, the ‘highest criticism’ is ‘the record of one’s own soul’:

It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography. (CW, IV, 154)

One’s own soul is fascinating (introducing the theme of narcissism, to which we shall return), and so to write critically about a subject is to write about oneself. Thus criticism is a form of masking precisely insofar as it is autobiographical: the critic wears the mask of the other in order to write about themselves.

This is a key point. If criticism as autobiography is a form of masking, Wilde’s analysis rests first and foremost on the Greek etymologies we discussed in the introduction. The Greek prosōpon, the face that is also the mask, gives us the literary device most germane to autobiography: prosopopeia — the poiēin of the prosōpon, the poetics of the face as the poetics of the mask. Thomas Hobbes, who Wilde had read, although not particularly appreciatively (unsurprisingly given this approbation of masking), sums it up as follows:

The Greeks have prosopon, which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage, and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a mask.¹⁰

For these reasons, autobiography is figured as a form of defacement according the influential formulation of Paul de Man.¹¹ The critical operation discussed here by Wilde (autobiography as a form of masking), and which he opposes to that of Arnold, would be itself prosopopeic. It figures a kind of la vie la mort or ‘life death’, to use the Derridean terminology.¹² As Philippe Sollers puts it in his analysis of Lautréamont, ‘s’agit de l’annihilation même du discours biographique’ [what is at stake is the very annihilation of biographical discourse], an operation he terms ‘thanatographie’.¹³

As a form of thanatographie, Wilde’s understanding of autobiography as prosopopeia constitutes a death mask. For Simon Critchley, thinking of the prosopopeic in the récits of Maurice Blanchot, the death mask figures ‘a face for that which has no face’.¹⁴ In his work with Guattari, Deleuze discusses such defacement or masking through the concept of visagéité or faciality:

Quand le visage s’efface, quand les traits de visagéité disparaissent, on peut être sûr qu’on est entré dans un autre régime, dans d’autres zones infiniment plus muettes et imperceptibles où s’opèrent des devenirs­animaux, des devenirs­ moléculaires souterrains, des déterritorialisations nocturnes qui débordent les limites du système signifiant. (MP, p. 145)

[When the face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more imperceptible, where subterranean becomings­animal occur, becomings­mole­ cular, nocturnal deterritorializations over­spilling the limits of the signifying system.] (p. 128)

This other regime is not the transcendental beyond of idealism, the heavenly world of the Platonic eidos or Hegelian Ideal, but rather the realm of the simulacra. Likewise, in his work on Francis Bacon, Deleuze builds on the idea and on the question of defacement: Bacon’s aesthetic constitutes ‘un projet très spécial [...] en tant que portraitiste: défaire le visage’ [a very particular project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face].¹⁵ The same motivation of dismantling the face, of seeing the object otherwise, also guides the critical operation as Wilde understands it. The truth of criticism is the truth of masks.

If these are the stakes of Wildean criticism, let us now turn to the mechanics of Wilde’s argument in more detail. For Wilde, criticism should not simply reproduce the artwork under review, but, since it ‘is really creative in the highest sense of the word’ (CW, IV, 153), it should itself become art. ‘It is the critical faculty’, he argues, ‘that invents fresh forms’ (IV, 144). The standard of mimēsis — which Plato had used in order to explain, but also to denigrate, art — is not applicable to criticism as Gilbert understands it. ‘Criticism’, says Gilbert, ‘is no more to be judged by any low stan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• IntroductIon: The Event Named Wilde, or, Wilde with Deleuze
• 1 Intentions: Nature has good intentions, of course, but as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
• 2 Intensities
• 3 Proper Names
• 4 Doubles
• 5 Commodities
• 6 Bodies
• 7 Women
• 8 Styles
• Conclusion Wilde’s Ethics of Joy
• Bibliography
• Index of Names, Places and Texts
• Index of Names, Places and Texts