Unforbidden Pleasures Page 2

  Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known … alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

  This, of course, is not a fashionable view, at least not in universities, nor among socialists. It was a view, paradoxically, that would ultimately be exploited by a voracious art market. But what I am interested in here, both historically and psychologically, is what Wilde took to be the preconditions for both Art and Individualism: turning a blind eye to other people and what they want (in his wonderful poem ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’, Ian Crichton Smith writes, ‘Language is other people’). Wilde’s artist does not ask the contemporary question, ‘How can I make myself worth investing in?’, but asks instead, ‘What do I really want to make?’ As Wilde put it further on in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ‘A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent … ’; he makes art ‘for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted’. Wilde is so insistent, we might presume or conjecture, partly because he was all too aware of his own all too compromising desire to please; and of the predations of the market that were commodifying art at an unprecedented rate. The artist, for Wilde, becomes that strange, improbable creature, a law unto himself, supposedly untrammelled by the laws of others. People start to have fantasies about more private languages when the public languages don’t do the trick. People start idealizing outlaws when the law is felt to be unduly excluding. The desire for freedom is the desire for new rules. And new rules mean new names for things.

  The kind of pleasure, the kind of language, Wilde is wanting and promoting is sabotaged by being or doing what other people want from him (and often, for Wilde, by being encouraged to do rather than just to be). The whole notion of the forbidden, of course, prescribes the individual’s legitimate pleasures. And organizes what people can legitimately want from each other (what people are wanting from, and for, each other being the way in which ‘the problem’ is always formulated). Indeed, what other people might want from the artist, Wilde suggests, destroys him as an artist; his art ‘has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want’. It is the Art that ‘vanishes’, that ‘degenerates’ once the artist starts attending to other people’s wants, once he abrogates what Wilde called in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), ‘that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence’. Whether it is called the mother or the market, Mama or Mammon, what other people want, at least from the artist, is the saboteur of art and growth. When Ernest suggests, in the dialogue that is ‘The Critic as Artist’, that ‘great artists work unconsciously [and] that they were “wiser than they knew” ’, his friend Gilbert, the more overtly ‘Wildean’ character of the two, replies, ‘It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing … A great poet sings because he chooses to sing.’ The great artist is self-conscious and deliberate; but in this story the artist can be conscious of himself only by forgetting the existence of other people (the public, to the Wildean artist, are ‘non-existent’). Other people, in other words, distract us from our selves; what they want from us – and other people are relentless wanters for Wilde, monstrous in their greed, and in their greed for reassurance – distorts and pre-empts what the artist wants from and for himself. In this purity-and-danger version of art and individualism, the artist is always endangered by other people. He is in danger of forgetting himself; and endangered by the kind of pleasure – the masochistic pleasure – compliance can bring. To avert this catastrophe he must forget about other people. He must live as if – implausible as it might sound – other people, particularly the arbiters of taste, do not exist. It is, though, a version of what every child has to be able to do when necessary – pretend he has no parents, or pretend that his parents are not really his parents: the child choosing his future by choosing his inheritance; the child at once wanting to be what the parents apparently need him to be – wanting to restore the parents to their lost perfection – and doing something else entirely. The child as double agent.

  III

  We can see Wilde as, among other things, trying to find ways of recovering people’s pleasure in each other’s company (his plays make us enjoy people talking to each other, for example, in quite new ways; as though it was a terrible thing to make talking uninteresting). Something about a certain fantasy concerning the individual and individualism, about what was deemed to be valuable regarding the self and sociability, was felt to be under threat by Wilde, and many of his late-nineteenth-century contemporaries. Indeed, in 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, John Stuart Mill had written, in what became the manifesto of modern liberalism, On Liberty, in a chapter entitled ‘Of Individuality’, ‘He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.’ Mill’s On Liberty – in which ‘the tyranny of the majority’, a newly monstrous ‘public opinion’, threatened to stifle what he called ‘The only freedom which deserves the name … pursuing our own good in our own way’ – was the importantly earnest precursor of Wilde’s rather more alluringly stylish preoccupations.

  So we might ask, more simplistically, what was the problem that Wilde’s particular version of aestheticism was a solution to? Was it the precariousness of the modern individual finding out, and holding on to, what matters most to him? Or the difficulty of living in a world in which collaboration is assumed to be unavailable or unavailing? Or the fear, perhaps, that there may be nothing that matters most, or much, or even enough? Or is it that the whole project of wanting to be a law unto oneself exposes one’s fear of other people and how powerful they can be, or seem to be? Indeed, one’s morality could turn into no more and no less than one’s defiance of other people’s moralities. Or it could turn into a new-found moral inventiveness; not merely, as Blake proposed, by the inventing of one’s own system to avoid being oppressed by another man’s, but also by the finding of new, unoppressive moralities: moralities that are not systems; moralities that could be objects of desire more akin to sexual or aesthetic objects; moralities that could be both relished and exhilarating; moralities that might inspire rather than humiliate. Moralities that might make what people want from each other pleasurable rather than punishing; and might, indeed, change what people want from each other.

  This desire for different moralities could make one want to change the game by changing the language game; by finding new things to value, and new kinds of evaluation (and new things to say about evaluation). And all of this would sustain the possibility that both Wilde and Nietzsche refer to: the possibility that one could love being alive. The issue for them was not the difficulty of living, but the difficulty of really enjoying living. They both suggest, in their different ways, that we have been misinformed about our real pleasures (if authorities are people who tell us what we should enjoy, we have to wonder what it might mean to be encouraged to enjoy something). Will developing a colour-sense, Wilde asks, keep you going better than a sense of right and wrong (a version of the question: what are the difficulties involved in changing one’s vocabulary, and changing one’s vocabulary such that it really changes
one’s life?)? In his account of the artist, and of the critic as artist, of the artist as the exemplary individual, Wilde is attempting to sustain the idea of the individual through art; as though art were the ultimate proof, or guarantor, of the existence of the individual, and his greatest pleasure. As though individualism, or the pleasure of individualism, was now in doubt, might in fact go under, or even disappear. And the artist was the only person – or represented the only person – who could withstand the intimidation of consensus; who could resist being deformed by opinions and money (what Wilde referred to as the ‘vulgar’, the ‘common’). What we have to be wary of now, he suggests, is having too much in common with other people, and indeed with ourselves. We must be wary of being too knowing about knowingness.

  Art, for Wilde, was by definition not rational, because so-called rationality was a species of conformism. ‘There are two ways of disliking art,’ Gilbert says in ‘The Critic as Artist’; ‘One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness. It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.’ So art drives us mad. Or rather, art helps us to be as mad as we need to be to feel fully alive. Art wants to dispel rationality, the rationality that estranges people from their inspiration. So only bad art in his view can be understood or explained. And this in itself, of course, redescribes the critic’s project; the critic in Wilde’s account is both akin to the artist and in many ways even superior to the artist – ‘criticism is more creative than creation’. The critic is freer to make more of the artist’s art than the artist himself is capable of doing. In this account the Wildean critic takes the work of art further than the artist is able to do (explanation and understanding being the enemy of this process, the enemy of the artist’s real project). ‘The critic,’ Gilbert says, is ‘in his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect.’ The art is a pretext for the critic’s artistry. The critic creates new evocations in response to the artwork; the criticism itself then becoming a work of art in its turn. But, for the Wildean critic, it needs to be stressed that explaining and understanding a work of art is to miss the point. A real work of art should be strangely affecting; and it need not be in any way informative. John Ashbery’s remark that ‘the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about’ refers us back to Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’.

  Great art, in Wilde’s view – and Wilde always explicitly privileges the literary arts – enables us to forget ourselves, our rational, conforming, intelligible, law-abiding, too timid, explaining selves. And this forgetting makes other things possible. But the artist, we should note, in Wilde’s view, neither loses himself nor forgets himself – art ‘does not spring from inspiration’: the artist is ‘self-conscious and deliberate’ – he just needs to forget about other people. Wilde’s artist is in this sense both conscious and self-conscious, without at least wanting to be merely a propagandist (though of course the Wildean hero is always, paradoxically, too knowing, even though it is often his knowingness that undoes him: Dorian Gray kills himself; Lord Henry Wotton does not). So mindful is Wilde of the power of language that he seeks to use it with deliberation and calculation in the full knowledge that language is virtually defined by its unintended consequences.

  The ‘influence’ – to use one of Wilde’s key words – of language is inexplicable but decisive; Wilde wrote, for example, in The Portrait of Mr W. H. (1889) that the Symposium is Plato’s most ‘perfect’ because the most ‘poetical’ of the dialogues, which ‘began to exercise a strange influence over men, and to colour their words and thoughts, and manner of living’. By colouring people’s ‘words and thoughts, and manner of living’, Plato’s words (in Marsilio Ficino’s translation) developed people’s colour-sense. But though Wilde tries to tell us what the effect was, the word ‘strange’ in ‘strange influence’ by definition keeps his options open and unfamiliar (‘strange’ was another of Wilde’s key words, as it was for his erstwhile idol Pater). ‘Strange’ meaning ‘foreign’, ‘alien’, ‘uncanny’; as though language estranges us in its very familiarity.

  There was propaganda and there were enigmatic objects. Wilde, one could say, in his paradoxical way, was always propagandizing for the enigmatic object, the supreme enigmatic object being language itself, and its strange influence; with the (albeit contentious) implication that if we were to treat morality as an enigmatic object, and not as propaganda, our lives – not to mention our conversations about morality – would be more satisfying. We would be more genuinely puzzled about what we are using morality to do, and about what kinds of pleasure our different moralities might involve us in. And also more intrigued about what kinds of pleasure our different languages make possible. Wilde’s ‘rhetoric’, the critic Linda Dowling writes in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle, ‘describes the autonomous life of literary language, hinting at the dangerous effects that such language can have on human life and consciousness’. The danger she describes is of course directed at conventional morality. This dangerous ‘autonomous life of literary language’ makes the language itself sound like an outlaw, and these ‘dangerous effects’ of ‘such language’ that Dowling refers to were to be fateful for Wilde himself.

  What kind of ‘moralist’, to use Ellmann’s word, was Wilde? What kind of moralist can anyone be once they acknowledge, or even want to celebrate, the unintended consequences of language, the strange influence of certain people’s words? Or even language itself as a potential outlaw? And if they prefer the aesthetic to ethics, beauty to morality, and so are seeking ways to live aside from the law, or beyond good and evil? The whole idea of the forbidden, of course, gives us an apparently coherent set of causes and consequences – of parameters – by giving us a set of rules and prohibitions, all of which need to be sufficiently understandable to guarantee our obedience. The language of prohibition is the dream of a language of straightforward influence, not strange influence; a language of orders, not impressions. A language of rules, not suggestions. Language as effective propaganda. And yet, of course, as Wilde would reveal again and again – would indeed relish exposing – to forbid something is to make it desirable. The forbidden coerces desire. It makes something strangely alluring. It may make us obedient, but it also makes us dream (often at the same time). To abide by a rule you have to have in mind what it would be to break it.

  ‘It is always,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘the unreadable that occurs.’ Not, that is, what we have supposedly understood. Whether or not this is strictly true, it reminds us of the pleasures of an amused scepticism. There may be lots of reasons why something is unreadable, but to be unreadable someone must have tried to read it first. Language has its effect, its strange influence, Wilde intimates, even when we are unable to read it. The rules – and especially in their most absolute form as the forbidden, the taboo – have to be readable and unforgettable, accessible and memorable. We have to be able to know what the rules are, and to think of this knowing as, in part, an understanding of what we do with them. We want, depending on our prejudices and preferences, some of the readable to occur, and some of it not to. And, Wilde adds, ‘It is always the unreadable that occurs.’ What we don’t know, what we haven’t understood, can be the realest thing about us. It can be what happens.

  So I want to read Wilde as encouraging us to forget, or to unlearn, certain words and phrases; to forget a vocabulary – words like ‘seriousness’, ‘duty’, ‘explanation’, ‘fact’ and ‘imitation’, and phrases like ‘living for others’, and ‘making oneself useful’ (‘The sure way of knowing nothing about life,’ Wilde wrote, ‘is to try to make
oneself useful’) – and to use words like ‘beauty’, ‘disobedience’, ‘development’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘perfection’, and phrases like ‘the beauty of life’ and ‘the joy of living’ instead. To forget (or to unlearn) a vocabulary is to foster a remembering of a different self – the enigmatic self, the only self we are ever going to have, if we want to have a self – and its plenitudes and pleasures (‘the have-nots and the yearning ones … have formed linguistic usage’, Nietzsche remarks in 1887 in The Gay Science). It is to a celebration of so-called selfishness – his own redescription of ‘selfishness’ – that Wilde invites us; to the laying down of a different kind of law.

  IV

  ‘A man is called selfish,’ Wilde said in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’,

  if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development … Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing … enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.

  ‘Infinite variety of type’ is a paradoxical phrase, acknowledging that, though there may be types, there may at least be an infinite variety of them. In describing the primary aim of life as self-development – or growth, as he sometimes calls it – Wilde is incorporating ideas from nineteenth-century biology and Darwinism into his aestheticism. And by describing it as ‘grossly selfish’ to require one’s neighbour to think as one does oneself, he is giving a commentary on Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself; which could also be described as grossly selfish. In all these Wildean stipulations, no one imposes anything on anyone else: it is that virtually unthinkable thing, a morality without intimidation, that Wilde is wanting to conjure up. He is wary, above all, of collusion, of the simulation of shared worlds through intimidation. For Wilde, it is as though the then modern individual was being forced to forget that he might have his own thoughts, his own desires, his own development. As though the pressures of uniformity were becoming unbearable (in Nietzsche’s language the instinct for life was being replaced by ‘the herd instinct’). What was needed was a redescription, a rewording of selfishness; and so, by definition, of whatever the self was deemed to be. And, by the same token, a reappraisal of what a rule or a law was deemed to be. There can be no self without rules, and vice versa. Wilde writes as though people might forget that they had a so-called self, that he or she had his or her own thoughts, personality and development; and that this was what the laws they lived by had led them to (as though conformity had become the new individualism). Wilde’s aestheticism, in other words, was an attempt to avert the elegiac; to persuade people to always prefer the next good thing. He wanted what his near-contemporary Nietzsche called ‘more life’; his object of desire, again like Nietzsche, was the future, not the past.