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PARTISAN REVIEW
homosexuality.
As
he had to, Gilbert played this second aspect of the
character coyly. (There was nothing homosexual about Rossetti, but Pater's
homosexuality was well-rumored.) Although the plot of Patience revolves
around Bunthorne's astonishing ability to attract women, at the opera's end,
after everyone else has been paired off, he remains single, forced to content
himself with "a tulip or lily" - or, as Gilbert has it elsewhere, "a vegetable
love."
In the 1960s, these associations stopped being invidious in the way
they once were, and Wilde profited from the change in climate. The avant–
gardist today is invited to tweak the nose of established opinion; he may
sometimes,
if
he likes, punch it. If the insult isjudged provocative enough, or
amusing enough, few people begrudge him the rewards he collects from the
society whose values he has sneered at. Those rewards are now considered
society's way of winning the game. And the kind of amoral aestheticism that
is often associated with Wilde and with male homosexuality has come to be
regarded as a fresh and even a liberating attitude. Susan Sontag's "Notes on
Camp" (1964) was that attitude's manifesto: "The two pioneering forces of
modern sensibility," she explained, "are Jewish moral seriousness and homo–
sexual aestheticism and irony....TheJews pinned their hopes for integrating
into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have
pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp
is
a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness."
Oscar Wilde is the hero of "Notes on Camp."
Still, there is something unsatisfactory about regarding Wilde as the
precursor of distinctively late twentieth-century cultural styles. For one thing,
it effectively reduces his stature: next to a mocker and camper like Andy
Warhol, Wilde looks like a mere beginner. And it misses a quality ofWilde's
character that distinguishes him as decisively from Warhol in our century as
it did from Whistler (and Bunthorne) in his. For although he had a sense of
irony as complete as any Pop artist's, and a passion for celebrity as intense
as any social climber's, Wilde was not a cynic. He truly believed what he
wrote in
De Profundis
about awakening the imagination of his century -
which is why he was truly shattered when it was brought forcibly home to
him
that
his
century was happy to slumber on without him.
Wilde's recovery as a popular figure in the general culture has not quite
been matched in the academic culture. The academic literary historian likes a
clear genealogy of influence -Arnold is followed by Pater, who is followed in
turn by T.S. Eliot - and the problem with Wilde is knowing where to place
him.
Is he a late Victorian exotic, huddled under the wing of Pater? Or is he a
pioneer of sensibility, priming the culture for modernism? "Finding himself
overshadowed by old famous men he could not attack, for he was of their
time and shared its admirations," wrote Yeats in 1936, Wilde "tricked and
clowned to draw attention to himself." Yeats had a genuine, if sometimes
