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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Nietzsche and Freud is meant to shock our pieties about ourselves. If
Wilde's writings seem irresistible, it is because there is very little in them to
resist.
The business of characterizing the tendencies of Wilde's work, with a
view to establishing what is singular and important about it, gives EHmann
trouble. Faced with the apparent inconsistency between Wilde's philosophical
materialism and his interest in mystical and ritualistic institutions such as the
Masonic Order (which he sampled while at Oxford) and the Catholic Church
(which he flirted with during his Oxford years and joined on his deathbed),
EHmann proposes that "contradictoriness was his orthodoxy." And else–
where, noting that the spirit informing the critical essays in
Intentions
seems
to be the inverse of the spirit informing
De ProJundis,
he suggests that for
Wilde "oscillation is a cardinal principle; it can be observed at work within
each book as well as between books."
But conferring a unity on Wilde's thought by ascribing discrepancies to
the intention to produce discrepancies threatens to reproduce the paradox–
mongering avant-gardist that EHmann wants to replace with the serious
moralist. So when contradictions crop up at points in Wilde's writing that
matter to the coherence of a larger view of things, EHmann volunteers to
paper over the division. For instance:
That art is sterile, and that art is infectious, are attitudes not beyond
reconciliation. Wilde never formulated their union , but he implied
something like this: by its creation of beauty, art reproaches the
world, calling attention to the world's faults by disregarding them, so
the sterility of art is an affront or a parable. Art may also outrage the
world by flouting its laws or by indulgently positing their violaton. Or
art may seduce the world by making it follow an example which seems
bad but is really salutary. In these ways the artist moves the world
towards self-recognition, with at least a tinge of self-redemption, as he
compels himself towards the same end.
This is, in aesthetic theory, the higher utilitarianism: art does us good
by turning its back on our welfare. It is familiar as, among other things, an
academic justification for the study of modern literature. IfWilde did believe
it, then (a)contradictoriness was apparently
not
his orthodoxy, and
(b)
he is
not as interesting or subversive a thinker as "The Critic as Artist" and "The
Decay of Lying" and
The Importance oj Being Earnest
make him seem.
And are all these things really inconsistencies? Like most critics, Wilde
had what might be called a theoretical aspect and a practical aspect to his
thought. As a theoretical matter he regarded sincerity, originality, and truth–
to-life as phantom values, impossible to ground or to verifY; as a practical
critic, he often expressed admiration for writing that struck him as sincere,
