OSCAR WILDE'S HUMILITY: A REASSESSMENT OF THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL.
Humble - \hem-bel1. Adjective - not proud or haughty: not arrogant or assertive
2. Adjective - ranking low in a hierarchy or scale
3. Verb - to destroy the power, independence, or prestige of --Adapted from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary
RECENTLY dubbed the inventor of modern celebrity, (1) Oscar Wilde is not an artist we often to associate with humility. We remember him instead as the king of the late-Victorian stage, the outspoken apostle of aestheticism, the brilliant provocateur, and the master of paradox who crafted such aphorisms as, "Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance," and, "Lying, the telling of beautiful, untrue things is the proper aim of Art." But with his final work, the 654-line poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde complicated his legacy. The work seems to reject all of the principles Wilde established in his earlier works. Its style is not refined but commonplace, in imitation of the traditional ballad form. It draws its content not purely from imagined scenarios but from historical facts and firsthand observation. And, most striking of all, it depicts not the rarefied world of West End society rooms but the brutal and sordid realities of prison life. This humility of style and subject matter (as in sense #2 above) came with a correlative humility on the part of Wilde himself (sense #1). He wrote to a friend:
I, of course, feel that [Reading Gaol] is too autobiographical and that real experiences are alien things that should never influence one. But it was wrung out of me, a cry of pain, the cry of Marsyas, not the song of Apollo. Still, there are some good things in it. I feel as if I had made a sonnet out of skilly [i.e. gruel]! And that is something. (Letters 708)
Gone is the self-promotion that characterized Wilde's career in the years before he went to prison. In its place is a more chastened, more ambivalent mode of self-assessment.
For critics who prize the drama, criticism, and fiction that made Wilde famous, the radical difference of Reading Gaol cries out for explanation. Most have responded by portraying Reading Goal not as a great work in its own right, but as a symptom of artistic and imaginative decline, an index of the depth to which Wilde fell in his later years. For them, prison humbled Wilde (sense #3), shattering not just his health and reputation but his imaginative power as well. Thus Seamus Heaney celebrates the "brilliant paradoxes... the over-the-topness at knocking the bottom out of things, the Tightness of all his wrong-footing, all that exhilarated high-wire word-play, [and] all that freedom to affront and exult in his own uniqueness" he finds in Wilde's pre-prison writings, but he sees Wilde's decision to write about "ugly true things" in Reading Gaol as a tragic lapse. "When he walked on air, he was on solid ground," Heaney writes, "But when he stepped on earth to help the plight of lesser mortals, he became Oisin rather than Oscar. His strength dwindled and his distinction vanished" (97). Similarly, Michael Patrick Gillespie praises the rich "ambiguity" of Wilde's pre-prison works but denounces Reading Gaol as "a manipulative emotional diatribe" in which Wilde "draws a singleminded, heavy-handed, linear sentimentality into every stanza." He concludes that "Wilde's late writings reflect much less imaginative ambition than did his earlier work" (160). For Harold Bloom, the powerful effects of Reading Gaol (unlike those of Wilde's fiction, drama and criticism) are borrowed from other works of literature, making the poem "an embarrassment to read." Ultimately, for Bloom, it is evidence that, at least as a poet, Wilde "lacked the strength to overcome his anxiety of influence" (6).
These criticisms are voiced in different terms, but they share the common assumption that the humility of style and subject matter we find in Reading Gaol is not compatible with imagination and invention. Thus, for them, the poem offers its reader a narrow range of possible aesthetic and ethical responses. Powerful it may be, but more in the manner of propaganda than true poetry. As William Buckler puts it, Reading Gaol is "emotionally appealing to a wide audience," but for that very reason it is not "intellectually resistant" enough to satisfy more discerning critics (40). Here, I want to suggest a new way of reading Reading Gaol, one that resists the assumption that humility and imaginative ambition are necessarily opposed to one another. As a matter of expedience, I discuss content and form separately. First, I look at the graphic, even repulsive images that characterize Reading Gaol. By reclaiming "filth" and "disgust" as aesthetic categories, I show that Reading Gaol offers a subtle and sophisticated array of possible responses to its readers. Secondly, I expand the discussion to consider the ethical implications of Reading Gaol. By examining the poem's historical context and its subtle appropriation of the gallows ballad form, I show that its social message is far more complex than a simple plea for prison reform. Finally, drawing upon the work of William Lynch, I offer a set of criteria by which we can understand Reading Gaol not as a signal of decline but as a great imaginative achievement in its own right.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine. The brackish water that we drink Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks Wild-eyed, and cries to Time. (Poems 214)
Lines like these make it easy to assume that in Reading Gaol Wilde is out to offer a strictly realist, almost journalistic, description of the material conditions of prison life. These lines are almost overwhelmingly sensory, asking us to imagine being confronted by filth in the things we ingest and in the places where we dwell. It is important to recognize, though, that these images do more than provide factual information about dangerous or unhealthy conditions. They participate in a wide-ranging interrogation of the mechanisms by which we reject not just objects and materials but also ideas and people as disgusting. In fact, stanzas like the ones quoted above, which describe material filth, make up a very small percentage of the 109 total stanzas in the poem.
The vast majority of the poem describes the treatment of people as filth, not because of their material qualities but because of the transgressions they represent. Most notably Wilde offers a detailed description of the manner of execution and burial of the poem's central character, identified only as C.T.W, who is hanged for murder and buried outside the prison walls. Wilde writes:
They hanged him as a beast is hanged: They did not even toll A requiem that might have brought Rest to his startled soul, But hurriedly they took him out, And hid him in a hole. They stripped him of his canvas clothes, And gave him to the flies: They mocked the swollen purple throat, And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud In which their convict lies. (Poems 211-12)
The executed man gives these lines a focus, but they are not about him, strictly speaking. He is the passive object of the actions of others while "they," the subjects performing the actions, actually direct our view and occupy our attention. We see the man, as it were, through "their" eyes. And thus the question becomes, Do we see what they see?
In order to understand why this question matters we have to consider what is involved in the work of examining filth in the first place. In her seminal work, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores at some length the necessary methodology of analyzing filth. The answer she arrives at is that if we want to understand what a particular culture or society considers dirty or dangerous, we need to look beyond the material. Douglas writes:
Dirt... is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. The idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. (44)
Douglas would argue that our desire to exclude a murderer as filthy does not have to do with any immediate perceived threat. Rather it is a form of ritual exclusion, part of an attempt to maintain order in a complex and ambiguous world.
Subsequent research both in psychology and anthropology has confirmed Douglas's insights. Disgust is not a sense (unlearned, a product of nature) but an emotion (learned, a product of culture). Thus disgust looks very different for us depending on our culture, our historical situation, and our stage of life. Indeed, as William Miller has shown, despite its etymological link to taste (Latin: gustus), disgust is not linked to gustation, the gag reflex, or any other involuntary action. Disgust goes above and beyond the material events that occasion it. Miller writes, "When something has a taste we do not like, we do not feel contaminated by it unless it also disgusts us; when something disgusts us, however, we feel tainted" (12). Neither is disgust determined primarily by rational ideas about pathogens and the diseases they cause. As Julia Kristeva puts it, it is "not lack of cleanliness or health" that determines what disgusts us "but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). The point is that disgust is never inevitable or absolute. It is always situational, a matter not just of bare perception but one that involves the imaginative work of interpretation.
As Wilde continues to describe attitudes about the body of the executed murderer, he highlights the contingency of the system that excluded him. Wilde writes:
For three long years they will not sow Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky With unreproachful stare. They think a murderer's heart would taint Each simple seed they sow. It is not true! God's kindly earth Is kindlier than men know, And the red rose would but blow more red, The white rose whiter blow. (Poems 210)
In the second stanza quoted here Wilde highlights what William Cohen calls "the dual nature of filth." According to Cohen, "when polluting objects are thought of as trash, waste, junk, or refuse, they become conceivably productive." He offers a paradigmatic example in the case of excrement; it can either appear disgusting (i.e. polluting) or productive as a fertilizer like manure (i.e. reusable) depending upon where it is placed and how it is evaluated (x-xi). Wilde imagines just such a reusability for the body of the executed convict. The process of its exclusion invested his body with the power to taint. But no system of exclusion is absolute. With the strange image of a "red, red rose" blooming "Out of his mouth," as he writes a few lines later, Wilde is asking us to keep our imaginations open to ways that polluting power can be repurposed and reintegrated.
We can see Wilde's manipulation of the "dual nature of filth" most clearly in his artful manipulation of the image of quicklime. He draws upon the various properties and cultural associations of quicklime to make it alternately mark either purity or pollution. Quicklime, simple calcium oxide in chemical terms, is a bright white and highly caustic chemical compound. It was a very common cleaning substance throughout the nineteenth century, often used to purify sewage. Government officials attempted to introduce quicklime into burials to neutralize odors and prevent the spread of disease. They found, however, that it was "revolting," as one parliamentary report called it, "to a person standing by and seeing quick-lime thrown on the body of a relation" (House of Commons Papers 122). Quicklime signaled that a deceased loved one was "nothing but a hygiene problem" (Richardson 227). Wilde marshals both aspects of quicklime--its ability to signal filth as well as its ability to purify--to turn it into a source of honor and lasting significance. Consider the following stanzas that describe the quicklime burial of the executed man:
For he has a pall, this wretched man, Such as few men can claim: Deep down below a prison-yard, Naked for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot, Wrapt in a sheet of flame! And all the while the burning lime Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night, And the soft flesh by the day, It eats the flesh and bone by turns, But it eats the heart alway. (210)
Wilde uses the fact that calcium oxide is bright white in color to call the material the corpse's "pall," "shroud," and "winding sheet" (see lines 456, 521, and 641). Ultimately, rather than making the corpse's rejection complete by consuming it, the quicklime indicates permanence. It "eats" continually for an infinite duration. It becomes a "sheet of flame" that never goes away. Even at the end of the poem Wilde tells us "in burning winding sheet he lies" still "eaten by teeth of flame." The very technology meant to reduce him and seal his annihilation with its caustic action becomes more like an eternal flame that indicates his redemption. (2)
With this link between redemption and disgust in mind we can understand the strange effect of the enigmatic refrain for which Reading Gaol is most famous. The refrain occurs in three main forms. First Wilde writes, "The man had killed the thing he loved," which he follows up with "Each man kills the thing he loves," and then finally with "And all men kill the thing they love." Wilde shows that, recognized in a particular way, the crime for which the man is punished is a basic condition shared by "each" or "all" of us. It is not a unique event we can isolate and eliminate. Seen this way, it is impossible to find it disgusting. This is not to say that Wilde is making an apologia for the condemned man's actions. He never suggests that the man should not be punished, or even that he should not be killed. In fact, he writes:
In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. (216)
The link between punishment and crime, between murder and execution, is ironclad and inalterable. Whatever strong emotions of disgust and repulsion we had felt--either at the prison system or the condemned man--they are absent from this stanza. We finally occupy a more chastened view. Having experienced the subtle mechanisms by which disgust is produced we finally become able to see both the power and the inherent instability of disgust and to watch it all "in silence."
This much is clear about the famously graphic content of Reading Gaol: the poem's evocations of disgust are neither simple nor automatic. The poem develops repulsion into a rich emotional and intellectual experience, raising questions about the real causes and consequences of what we reject. There is no reason to think that the aesthetic response of repulsion is inherently less important or less complex than that of much more commonly discussed responses like desire. In fact, affect theorist Sianne Ngai has recently lamented the fact that "Theories, poetics, and ethics of 'desire' abound, but something about disgust seems to have resisted attention" (332). In the case of Reading Gaol such attention reveals many layers of complexity.
But it is not just the reader or the individual that responds to images of filth. As we have been suggesting, these images involve societies and institutions, most notably in the case of Reading Gaol, the prison and justice system. In the section that follows we will characterize the complex social and ethical message the poem embodies.
IN ORDER to approach the social message of Reading Gaol, we must consider yet another way the poem appears not to be "intellectually resistant": its form--its word choice, rhythm, rhyme scheme, focalization and stanza style, all of which present it as a popular gallows ballad. Just as in the previous section we saw that the effect of disgust or repulsion in Reading Gaol was not simple, but rather strategic and multifaceted, in this section we will see that the ostensibly simple aspects of the poem's form are similarly rich with imaginative possibilities. Let us begin, then, with the poem's first stanza:
He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed. (Poems 195)
The vocabulary used in the stanza is familiar and mostly monosyllabic (the only two-syllable words are "scarlet," "woman," and "murdered"). The alternating trimeter and tetrameter lines along with the ABCBDB rhyme scheme tells us the poem is a ballad, and indeed, like many of the most widely circulated ballads of the nineteenth century, it features an outlaw and a gallows scene. In these senses at least, as Buckler puts it, the poem "satisfies the popular notion of what poetry is or should be" (39).
But despite the uncomplicated diction, vocabulary, and syntax, the meaning of the stanza is not immediately clear. In fact, it ends up requiring complex interpretive work on the part of the reader. The first line tells us that "He did not wear his scarlet coat," but the second line, "for blood and wine are red," does not supply the causal explanation the conjunction "for" prepares us to receive. The connection initially seems to be based only on color: the coat is red like the wine and the blood. We cannot at first decide whether the scarlet coat, the wine, and the blood are substances or symbols (blood and wine are, after all, linked symbolically by the Eucharist). Even in the elaboration of the third and fourth lines, "And blood and wine were on his hands / When they found him with the dead," when the blood and wine clearly become associated with a murder, Wilde introduces a "they" who, we are aware, will do the work of interpreting. The causal chain of events "they" most likely care about--how he killed her, with what weapon, with or without help, with what motivations, and under what circumstances, etc.--are precisely the things the reader knows nothing about. We have no information to judge his sanity, for example, or whether the killing was premeditated, whether the woman was a wife or a lover. There may be extenuating circumstances, but they are not ours to judge because Wilde gives us no position from which to judge, no vantage point.
He gives that vantage point, we soon discover, to a number of different types of officials. The second stanza informs us:
He walked amongst the Trial Men In a suit of shabby gray; A cricket cap was on his head, And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked So wistfully at the day. (Poems 195)
This stanza offers the context of the trial, which is presumably the context the first line about the "scarlet coat" actually referred to. We understand that the context in which we watch the condemned man always involves the recognition of some "they." We are not seeing him, plain and simple; we are watching others watch him. We are being called upon to think specifically of the ways others will recognize and evaluate him and the crime he represents. We are forced to think of him not just as a man in cricket cap and a shabby grey suit but as the object of a kind of knowledge and the product of a certain type of interpretation. The interjection "But I...," however, also suggests that the perspective of the "Trial Men" is not the only one available. Unlike the "Trial Men" who are scrutinizing the condemned man as the subject of the justice system, the first person speaker of the poem attempts actually to see the condemned man, not just watch, surveil, or diagnose him.
The speaker's descriptions of the condemned man attempt to identify imaginatively with the man's perspective. The speaker sees the man looking again and again at the sky and attempts in a faltering and failing way to understand the mystery of his perspective. For the most part, though, this imaginative identification does not actually work:
And I and all the souls in pain, Who tramped the other ring, Forgot if we ourselves had done A great or little thing, And watched with gaze of dull amaze The man who had to swing. And strange it was to see him pass With a step so light and gay, And strange it was to see him look So wistfully at the day, And strange it was to think that he Had such a debt to pay. (Poems 198-99)
With the repetition of "strange" and with words like "dull amaze," we see that the speaker of the poem and the other prisoners perhaps as well are not out to reduce the alterity of the condemned man. They seek to understand him, to see him, without reducing him to a diagnosis or making him the mere representative of crime. This is highlighted by the fact that the speaker of the poem never engages in any dialogue with the man. In fact, when the two pass one another in the yard, there is no communication at all between them:
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm We had crossed each other's way: But we made no sign, we said no word, We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night, But in the shameful day. (Poems 200)
The only speech from the condemned man that is ever reported is itself puzzling to the other prisoners:
And twice a day he smoked his pipe, And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad The hangman's hands were near. But why he said so strange a thing No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher's doom Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips, And make his face a mask. (Poems 201)
In the second stanza quoted above, we find that an inability to see sympathetically is almost an occupational hazard for the "Warder[s]." Unlike the fellow prisoners who try, albeit unsuccessfully, to understand the condemned man, the Warders are precluded by their work in the prison from seeing the man as anything but the object of the system they represent.
This lack of direct speech on the part of the condemned man is the main element that separates Wilde's ballad from other gallows ballads. This is an extremely important point for understanding the poem's social and ethical message. While many have seen Reading Gaol as owing something to poems like Thomas Hood's wildly popular "The Dream of Eugene Aram" or other gallows ballads like "The Ballad of Sam Hall," Wilde refuses the dramatic moments of speech that come at the end of these poems. In "Eugene Aram" the title character, overwhelmed with guilt, confesses the murder he has committed. In "Sam Hall," the title character only admits that "tis said" he "killed a man" and "split his bloody head." He remains recalcitrant and unrepentant to the last, calling out from the gallows, "Damn your eyes!" to all who come to watch him be executed. Whether the speaker's attitude is one of contrition or impudence, there is little question that the speaker is an outlaw. But in Wilde's poem we see a man whose actions are inherently puzzling, who protests neither that he is guilty nor that he is innocent but rather lets others engage in the work of recognition. Wilde further highlights this fact by departing from the common convention of placing the criminal's name in the ballad. Indeed, the poem is not and cannot be "The Ballad of Charles Thomas Wooldridge" or even "The Ballad of C.T.W"; it is truly a ballad of the prison itself since our focus is drawn not to any particular outlaw personality but to the entire penal system.
Through the end of the poem's third canto, the condemned man becomes subject to--is placed "before" or in sight of--a number of different agents who recognize and manage him in particular ways. In addition to the "Trial Men" who sentence him, he becomes subject to the work of the "Doctor," the "Chaplain," and the "Governor":
The Governor was strong upon The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract. (Poems 201)
Each of these agents represents a cultural or institutional mode of filth recognition. They care not about the man, but about upholding a particular system, whether it be law, science, or theology.
Many readers have taken issue with Wilde's use of "types" in these passages. Even before the poem was published, Wilde's friend Robert Ross and his publisher, Leonard Smithers, voiced objections on this point. Wilde's use of "types" is no doubt one of the features of the poem that leads Gillespie to claim that in Reading Gaol Wilde "lapses into cliched thinking and stereotypical representation" (164). But Wilde vigorously defended this stylistic choice. "The description is imaginary, just like the yellow face of the Governor, or the Caiaphaschaplain... it is abstract" he wrote to Smithers. And, writing to Ross, he insisted that "The point of the doctor... is a type. The account of the execution is not the account of the Reading scene; it is general" (Letters 679-80). In using "types" Wilde was not attempting, and simply failing, to present factual scenes. Rather, he was indicating a lack of individualism and imagination on the part of those he represents. We know from Wilde's later writings that prison convinced him that most cruelty was not the product of excessive individualism. Instead, it was produced by blind and thoughtless conformity. Writing specifically in reference to prison he claims, "Ordinary cruelty is... the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, and of stupidity. What is inhuman in modern life is officialism" (569). By intentionally conflating the agents with the modes of recognition they represent, Wilde highlights their "officialism." They are only stand-ins for their systems. They abdicate the role of responsibility and of imagination. They make themselves anonymous representatives of an impersonal order.
Wilde's view of the cruelty of "officialism" helps explain the role of the--also anonymous--Warders in the poem. Even more directly than the other "types," like the Chaplain, the Doctor, and the Governor, the Warders carry out the task of managing the prisoners in their everyday lives, making sure they conform to the prison's system. The Warders present a key case of "officialism" because unlike these other authorities, they do not need to recognize filth for themselves or for the system; their sole aim is to enforce rules they have no role in creating. They are the administrators rather than the identifiers of filth, and that makes them all the more inhuman. Although they are always in close physical proximity to the condemned man ("by each side a Warder walked..."), they remain fixed not on care for his life but on his extermination (200). They preserve his life, but only so that it can be eliminated according to the proper specifications rather than by escape, suicide, or some other eventuality.
By the end of the third canto (the midway point of the poem) the Warders' management of the man as filth would seem successful. They carry out the execution and bury him in accordance with prison regulations: naked, in quicklime, outside the prison wall in unconsecrated ground, as we discussed in section one. He is managed as polluting until he, or at least his biological life, is destroyed. But in a transitional stanza in the fourth canto Wilde writes of the events following the burial:
The Warders strutted up and down, And kept their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span, And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at By the quicklime on their boots. (Poems 209)
The Warders, however they might try, cannot escape the taint they tried to manage and wholly reject. The very mineral they used to mark the convict's corpse now marks them as if their act of exclusion is polluting in its own right.
If certain "Types" are culpable for the mistreatment of the condemned man, then is the poem not propaganda directed against them? Are they not representatives of the institutions Wilde exposes? Are they not the very authorities Wilde's poem rails against? This is the wrong view to take of the poem's social message for two reasons. First, Wilde was never unequivocally in favor of prison reform. For example, in a letter to the Daily Chronicle, he writes that the proposed reform of increasing "the number of inspectors and official visitors... is entirely useless" because "The inspectors and justices of the peace that visit prisons come there for the purpose of seeing that the prison regulations are duly carried out" (Letters 722). While he supported the cause of improving food and water and preventing disease he also warned that tbese were "only a beginning" (725). He cautions, "to make these reforms effectual, much has to be done. And the first, and perhaps the most difficult task is to humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the warders, and to Christianise the chaplains" (726). This may be a kind of reform, but it is a reform that it is extremely difficult to be programmatic about. It is a reform that cannot happen by political means alone, but through reshaping the sympathetic imagination of individuals. Although Reading Gaol has at times been called propaganda, it is clear that Wilde's aim was never simply to sway public opinion in favor of particular policies.
More importantly, though, it is essential to recognize that the institutions and authorities depicted in Reading Gaol are themselves the products of reforms that happened in Wilde's own lifetime. Indeed, if we place Wilde's account of the Reading Prison within Michel Foucault's history of the prison in Western society, Discipline and Punish, we can immediately see that Wilde depicts not the gruesome public executions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what Foucault calls "spectacle[s] of the scaffold," but rather an ostensibly more "humane," i.e. less painful and gruesome, mode of execution. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 moved hangings out of public view and into the inside of prisons. For Foucault, this change is emblematic of the movement from the attempt to punish (punir) to the attempt to surveil, inspect, and monitor (surveiller). Foucault writes:
As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warder, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises the law needs: they reassure it that the body and pain are not the ultimate objects of its punitive action. (11)
In the earlier regime, that of punishment, the body had been the site where authority exercised its power by inflicting pain and ultimately death. But in the new regime, that of surveillance, the body of the condemned person is nothing but a husk, even an embarrassment, since, as Foucault puts it, after the spectacle of punishment recedes, the new penal system will increasingly take pride in its ability to judge "something other than crimes, namely the 'soul' of the criminal" (19). Wilde's great innovation, then, is to write a gallows ballad without the public spectacle of the gallows. Rather than allowing an outlaw to speak, Wilde shows the operations of a system that hides the condemned person, his execution, and his executed body.
The theme of hiding is one Wilde expands on to great effect. He presents the penal system not as hiding its workings from citizens alone, but from Christ. He writes:
This too I know--and wise it were If each could know the same-- That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. With bars they blur the gracious moon, And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man Ever should look upon! (Poems 213)
In these stanzas Wilde unsettles the basic conceptual metaphor of the prison. Instead of serving as a way of containing or keeping in the moral filth of society, the prison becomes a way of keeping out any larger more redemptive influence. It becomes a way for the social system to maintain its own absolute jurisdiction. It must patrol its own limits, not because of the threat represented by the convicts and their crimes but because of the mercy and redemption represented by nature and by Christ.
AT THE outset we encountered one of Wilde's comments on Reading Gaol in which he called the poem, among other things, "a cry of pain." We are now in a better position to examine what Wilde might have meant by this statement and to decide whether we agree with Wilde's assessment of his own work. Elaine Scarry writes that physical pain "does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (4). A "cry of pain," in this sense, is the triumph of the inarticulate over the articulate. It is not expressive but reactive, more a reflex than an act of communication. As such, a cry of pain neither anticipates nor requires interpretation. We have shown that Reading Gaol is not "a cry of pain" in these senses. It is no simple, inarticulate reflex of reality. But one question remains: why draw upon personal experiences at all? Whatever complex attitudes and emotions Reading Gaol may promote, it still aims at autobiography and realism much more than any of Wilde's other literary writings. Does Wilde's decision to grapple with his actual experiences indicate that Reading Gaol is less of an achievement than works drawn more completely from imagined events and scenarios?
That depends on what we think the imagination is (or ought to be) for. It is, of course, rare to find literary critics who make "the finite, the limited, [and] the definite" central to their critical paradigm, but one important exception is William Lynch. In his major work, Christ and Apollo, Lynch attempted to show that "the arrival at insight requires a basic entrance into the finite and limited" (22). He identified a basic dichotomy in criticism. On the one hand, there was the view that
literature is literature and nothing else, that it stands on its own inward feet as a new reality over and against every other reality, that it is absolutely autonomous, that the imagination is a special and isolated faculty of man meant to put a relatively few in touch with a special and isolated field of reality. (1)
This temptation he called the "equivocal imagination." On the other hand, there was the "univocal imagination," which tended to
reduce everything, like and unlike, to a flat community of sameness--all in the name of an intelligibility and type of order that does not and cannot belong to the real world.... The univocal man has no respect for reality; he is either contemptuous of it, or destroys it, or distorts it, or flattens it--or he refuses to take up responsibility in the face of it. (160)
The former mode is, of course, an apt description of the approach to art that Wilde himself formulated in his pre-prison writings. (In fact the main exemplar of this mode Lynch mentions is Wilde's biographer and friend Andre Gide.) While this mode of the imagination is most recognizable in the Aesthetic or "Art for Art's sake" movement, a version of it is also evident in the postmodern celebration of pure difference and the infinite play of signifiers. The "univocal imagination," on the other hand, is the domain of didactic literature and propaganda.
The problem with both of these views for Lynch is that they ultimately hold a basic contempt for reality. He attempts to formulate an approach to imaginative work that takes reality seriously but that neither reduces reality to dogma nor attempts to escape from reality into the imagination. He writes that
The ideal solution would be that [in art] the world should 'signify' without becoming less actual in so doing. Our hope must be to discover such symbols as can make the imagination rise indeed, and yet keep all the tang and density of that actuality into which the imagination descends. (30)
Lynch calls this third way "the generative finite" or "the analogical." The analogical imagination seeks the universal in the particular without abandoning either. For this mode of the imagination "true understanding is gained only through entering into the contours of reality, for such understanding is an illumination that comes out of a passage through experience" (51). (3)
Lynch's "analogical imagination" offers a helpful set of criteria for understanding Wilde's project in Reading Gaol. It helps map out a creative space between pure Aestheticism and pure propaganda. Indeed, much of Wilde's writing from the later years of his life suggests that Wilde was seeking an imaginative mode that would neither be determined by his experiences nor deny the validity of his experiences. In his long prison letter De Profundis Wilde discusses two forms of "ruinous advice" he received about prison: the first was to forget who he was before prison; the second was that he should, upon his release, forget he had ever been in prison. But Wilde writes, "To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul" (166). But in order not to "arrest one's own development," an important quality was absolutely necessary: humility. Wilde explained that humility is not primarily about moral improvement. Rather, "Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences." Whereas earlier in his career Wilde had seen suffering and sorrow as uninteresting or meaningless, Wilde now claimed that humility taught him, "nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all."
To conclude: the humility of Reading Gaol is not an indication of a lack of imagination. Rich in its aesthetic effects, complex in its social and ethical implications, and central to Wilde's artistic project, Reading Gaol is a seriously undervalued poem. As we have seen, however, to take the poem seriously is to go against the grain of literary criticism's own basic understanding of the imagination, both in Wilde's work and in literary studies more generally. Perhaps then the most important challenge Reading Gaol offers us today is not simply to include it within existing paradigms but to use it to shift our basic assumptions about what the imagination is for. Wilde wrote in the conclusion of De Profundis, "Perhaps we have yet to know each other.... You came to me to learn of the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty" (Letters 511). Perhaps there is a Wilde we have yet to know as well. Whether we learn from him will have much to do with whether or not we are willing to revise our basic assumptions, not only about who Wilde is (and was), but also about the role of humility in artistic creation.
NOTES
(1) For a historical account of the ways in which Wilde invented modern celebrity see Friedman. Friedman focuses on Wilde's manipulation of the press and marketing during his 1882 American tour. For a more theoretical account focused on celebrity in late-Victorian drama see Marcus.
(2) A few historical details explain why quicklime loomed large in the late-Victorian consciousness. Made simply from burning limestone in a kiln, quicklime was relatively inexpensive at a time when the metropolitan areas all over England were experiencing rapid growth and had few centralized sanitation systems. It was prized in particular for its ability to neutralize odors. This was an especially important function since the majority of Victorian health professions were miasmatists, meaning they believed diseases could be spread through "bad air." Burial in quicklime was never standard practice despite the fact that overcrowded graveyards often presented a threat to public health. During outbreaks of cholera, though, health officials did resort to quicklime burial. Its other main function was to prevent grave robbery; often the bodies of executed criminals were coated in quicklime simply to prevent them from being exhumed and sold to anatomy schools (see Richardson 227).
(3) The fact that Lynch's work offers (at least provisional) solutions to some problems in contemporary literary study has not been lost on critics. Paul J. Contino, David Bentley Hart, and others have praised Lynch's prescience and have argued that Lynch's work could provide an important antidote to the excessive emphasis on the equivocal imagination that has dominated literary criticism in recent decades. Similarly, Terry Eagleton has characterized current problems in the field of literary criticism, not using Lynch's works but using a vocabulary drawn from medieval metaphysics along the same lines Lynch's. See Eagleton, The Event of Literature, chapter one, "Realists and Nominalists."
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| Author: | Beasley, Brett |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Date: | Sep 22, 2017 |
| Words: | 7354 |
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