Paideia Today (Season 4, Episode 1) Oscar Wilde, Literary Modernism

[Music] hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of paidea today i am dr bill friesen and as always i am joined by my colleague dr scott mason and we are moving into season four people and today what do we have before us we have a highly polarizing author who has exerted a considerable influence on the 20th century um i know for a fact that dr mason has his reservations about this author i do too but in different ways and i'm talking perhaps uh obviously about uh the polarizing oscar wilde and the work in question we're looking at today is the importance of being earnest largely acknowledged to be his finest play it is if uh if you don't know it is a comedy to some extent it is a comedy of manners but it's many different things in addition to that and there's a lot to say on these fronts here oscar wilde was writing at an extremely interesting time in western cultural and western literary history and one of the reasons i was keen to talk about oscar wilde is that oscar wilde hands on a range of highly influential ideas which allow modernism to form up as it did after the first world war and this all began with an interest i had in modernist literature back during my master's studies at west and i was tracing the roots of modernism and there are many roots to modernism to be sure but one of the most interesting roots of modernism um is the aesthetics movement and the individuals in there are known collect or individually as the aesthetes and if the aesthetes have a reigning king it is not none other than our oscar wilde so at risk of being a little bit pedantic here i just want to trace a bit of the evolution cultural evolution of the 20th century and has this relates back to oscar wilde uh first thing we need to say is that right now in 2021 we are not living in the post-modern age i believe both you and i dr madison have signaled this at various points in our conversations in the past most thinkers out there whether they're philosophers or sociologists anthropologists or whomever acknowledged that the postmodern era either ended with the fall of the berlin wall in 89 or with the fall of the twin towers and that we are now in a fundamentally different era as of yet with no name there are parties out there who are fighting fiercely to have the names of their cultural movements attached to the current era but the very fact that they can still have battles and can still disagree on exactly who we are culturally shows you that we are in process this is a living cultural moment rather than one that has gone dead postmodernism on the other hand most thinkers can sit down discuss the main salient features that identify post-modernism and we can have a fair degree of consensus in the room as to what it is so nothing is moving there anymore i.e the movement culturally is dead it's identifiable yes no post-modernism obviously has an overwhelming influence on culture on art on everything and so understanding post-modernism and the nature of post-modernism for anybody who's serious about thinking is not optional you have to know about post-modernism and the influence of post-modernism the sources of post-modernism so on and so forth however post-modernism did not spring x nilio um it came from certain roots certain individuals certain movements certain groups certain institutions and i became frustrated during my master's studies with many postmodernists who did speak about the era they studied they taught and they researched as if indeed it had come without roots which by the way is a typical identifying feature of post-modernism the modernists reject the past the post-modernists don't even know about it so this in some senses it wasn't surprising so then of course we get to modernism and what constitutes modernism and what does not constitute modernism that's a fundamental question for understanding post-modernism and by way of extension where we are right now but post modernism which is the era between approximately 1918 and 1939 also didn't come out of nowhere so i became very curious where did it actually come from so i began tracing those routes and one of the most productive routes was the aesthetics movement and so i realized very quickly okay i need to understand what the aesthetics were all about because if i can understand that i can understand a lot of things that are going on later on in the 20th century oscar wilde proved to be invaluable for that in fact he became my prime object of study this is not to say that i necessarily like the literature of oscar wilde or the theater of oscar wilde but i do like the concepts and ideas that i can explore here because they're very useful to me and finally i'll end with this i discovered a little bit to my shock and dismay that the the astites didn't spring x nelio they too have roots and this is where i come to the bottom of the well i'm sure it goes down further than this but it's the french symbolists the french symbolists the french symbolists as the name implies are a bunch of poets who were primarily running out of paris um around the 1860s and 1870s they consist of people like malame and rimbold and most famously their king baudelaire and they have a number of artistic and intellectual and philosophical notions that make them highly distinctive and it is the influence of this school of thinking the school of writing in this school of poetry which exerts an extremely i would say not just a profound influence these people actually produce an english version of many of the same ideas which gets called the aesthetics movement but the aesthetics movement is derivative and that's one of my big points here so the symbolists are fascinated with symbolism and a lot of people ask why are people in why are poets in the modernist period so obsessed with symbols why is t.s eliot obsessed with symbols why is ezra pound obsessed with symbols why is hilda doolittle obsessed with symbols trace it all the way back and you'll end up with the symbolists in 1860s 1870s paris and yates for that matter and yates for that matter yes yates is obsessed with symbols where did that all come from um it you can trace it straight back in a relatively direct line right back to these french symbolist poets so if you get to know their tendencies this throws a lot of light on developments in the 20th century one of the things they wanted to talk about was um there was a going argument amongst these people about the artificiality of language so malame for instance wanted to turn lived real experience into artificial language that was one of his objectives baudelaire wanted to take it the other way around he wanted to start with language and turn it into and bear with me here a phenomenological construct which had a reality unto itself so it's free standing in some senses and experiments with that all his life especially in flowers of evil um what else do i want to say about these people they didn't like the astites and the symbolists did not did not like the middle classes so much so that they essentially declared war on them and this to me was also fascinating why is it that modern avant-garde artists nowadays continuously provoke middle-class sensibilities why do they set themselves out there as outliers certainly the influence of the romantics is part of that they like that outlaw figure but the symbolists were much more programmatic about why they were provoking uh and insulting the values of the middle classes they considered the middle classes and i'm just looking at my notes here they're considering them to be crass they consider them to be banal they considered them to be um wearyingly materialistic um they were um simplistic um they were well-meaning but ineffectually well-meaning they are hypocritical um they are as i've already said they're venal um their values in other words uh the symbolis and the estes thought the values of the middle classes must not make its way into proper respected art because that would corrupt the art because all these sorts of things dumb down the art make the arts simplistic et cetera et cetera et cetera so how do they respond you already know the answer to this one they invest themselves in sort of a dandy culture i don't know if our listeners know what a dandy is a dandy is usually a young man usually from at least an intellectually formidable background they indulge themselves in a life of pleasure and the arts and they are highly highly highly provocative um this is coming straight out of symbolist culture symbolist culture is also the culture that gives us um the infamous um oh the name escapes me not right now it's going to say vaudeville culture but it's not vaudeville culture it's the culture of the can can and this sort of thing as it arises in the latter part of the 19th century in france uh these things tend to be situated in very sketchy venues oftentimes houses of prostitution and things of that sort uh the name will come back to me no doubt but baudelaire was a regular at all these sorts of things and himself lived a life of pleasure predictably died of uh alcoholism and uh syphilis uh at a relatively young age anyway so uh so bill this isn't really interesting uh as a discussion for our audience because one of the many challenges people face when they study anything in the university is this even the term modern and it has so many different meanings in in so many different areas and has been used for a very long time in different periods to refer to different things and so we're stuck we're talking about literature now um but even in the context of literature the word modern has been used before now um like the coral the ancients and the moderns of the french academy in the late 17th century and into the into the 18th century the battle of the books as uh swift puts it um that's been there and moderns there just simply means uh the current the fashionable mode in this in in french um and and so what's ever present fashionable that's modern this is a very different meaning in philosophy it probably refers the philosophy of rene descartes and and the modernist turned towards uh the cogito as the grounding basis for um grounding knowledge and so forth i think therefore i am yeah yeah those that is not what we're talking about here uh and when we're coming to literature in particular the modernist period is a very specific era and tied with this and what then is challenging then is if we're going to talk about post-modern ism is to differentiate a literary response from a literary movement and you're suggesting a stronger legacy from a literary movement than most people are going to want to grant they're going to see it as a broader philosophical malaise a weariness with the world a a lack of belief in objective truth and so forth more of a philosophical uh response as it were um which goes along probably with the first world war and the destruction of the great powers at their own hands those sorts of things that will perhaps begin post-modernism although uh often it's pegged to the 1960s and the sexual revolution and so forth there but let's not get sidetracked with that but you want to see it more as an aesthetic movement you mentioned symbolism let me say one final thing here so i'm listening to you and i'm finding it intriguing um the symbol is a is a concept that coleridge actually speaks about um one of my academic areas of expertise is in the uh writing of samuel taylor coleridge and he talks about the symbol and becomes really important thereafter but not at the time and in general i think coleridge has been appropriated by those that come afterwards to be say well he's talking about initiating the same sort of thing aestheticism in other words but i don't agree and i have never agreed and i don't think that's what he's talking about when he's talking about the symbol he's talking about spiritual truths being wedded to um material things so the natural supernaturalism and specifically uh talking about the imagination and the way it conjoins these two things but that's not what you're talking about in the symbol this is now a more or less a crass materialism and an aestheticism that disconnects beauty from goodness and truth is not right yes this is where we're exactly where we're going to go so what happens they start off by exploring in their literature both the symbolists and the estates the connection between the concrete and the abstract extract the real and the ideal and then they begin to connect these things and turned with those two poles of values that you and i have been talking so much about uh aesthetics on the one hand and ethics on the other hand this is a big flash point in history for that discussion and it starts with the symbolists they they kick it off for us to the best of my knowledge uh like i said the tap root might run even deeper in fact it probably does if i runs all the way back to hume i think because he he he is going to attack the idea of the fact he makes what he calls the fact value distinction that we can't make uh assertions about values as if they were facts we can make objective statements about those things but not about values and so he begins the whole process but still yeah that's that's that's in the background and most people won't trace it back to hume but i would say i would want to connect it there yeah this is another thing that's curious about the symbolists and the astites and oscar wilde is a particularly um high profile flamboyant example and he's an illustration of it in his own person he's like lord byron right he is his own he every time wilde presents something in literature people think he's talking about himself and he probably is and likewise with byron and and he not only doesn't discourage it he probably encourages that he does yes so and that leads to his personal notoriety and also there's a cult of oscar wilde that grows out of it just like there is a byron yes we're gonna have to talk about that because that cult grows up for some some clear reasons um but yeah he's narcissistic he is unapologetically narcissistic and his narcissism is actually celebrated in certain circles but we'll talk about the underpinnings of that in just a bit the symbolists and the aesthetes are very erudite people and so oftentimes they're throwing around some very complicated uh thinking and complicated works and stuff like this but one of the things uh readers should be aware of or listeners in our case should be aware of is that their knowledge on certain subjects is spotty so you you encounter surprising gaps in some of the things they like talking about and which make them very very passionate um so again we'll come back and we'll talk about wild in particular on these fronts here but yeah let's first let me lay out this notion here oscar wilde like all the others is fascinated with tension between concrete and ideal uh with real and super real and all this kind of stuff and they tend to begin attaching the aesthetic values to the ideal um to the thing that the symbol represents and then they leave ethics kind of in the realm of the material and the concrete and the lived experience and kind of stuff like that and they kind of go to war with ethics for the sake of promoting aesthetics so there a common notion you'll hear them articulate in wild articulations in numerous points in his uh in his writings both his literature and also his more polemical writings like the art of lying where he talks about how the only proper job of art is beauty and if you try to force a didactic ethical tenor upon it it will crush and kill the work of art and so they actually following on from the symbolists here by the way oscar wilde is one of the great plagiarists of the 19th century he oftentimes gets credit for things that are not his and he doesn't correct anybody but in any event um disconnects with the artists in these movements courting ethical violations according to middle-class sensibilities precisely as a mark of honor to show how deeply committed they are to purely aesthetic non-ethical art and so often times you'll hear people say like elgin on in the play says you know who cares what the french really say as long as they say it beautifully that is a typical kind of polemical statement oscar wilde and walter peter and john ruskin and baudelaire and all the others would tend to say and harold bloom for that matter yes so beauty resides in the style with which a work of art is communicated and not in its content and if you can get your brain around that all of a sudden a lot of what the aesthetics are doing a lot of what the symbolists are doing and by way of extension a lot of what the modernists are doing in the future comes clear flo bear in prose form does the same sort of thing uh he used to like bragging because he's a writer who's rather contemporary with the symbolists here he used to like bragging that um his stories were about pure style of expression there were stories about nothing he boasted they're about nothing why are they about nothing so you don't get distracted by the content the style with which it's articulated on the other hand is where the aesthetic value is going to lay so let's put all the focus on that as powerfully as we can we'll evacuate our play of all content and to some extent we see that with this play that wild has presented us with here as well the things that occur are not dreadfully important these are not earth-moving gigantic epic tragic concerns as we're going to encounter in a shakespearean tragedy or a greek tragedy or something like this they're ridiculous people doing ridiculously small things but that's not an accident that's that's deliberate um i've got a lot more to say about this but let's come back and talk maybe a little bit about wild himself the symbolists and the assassins what's his arab first of all bill um i'm just going to put him in the uh the late 19th century i don't even want to call it the late victorian period well 1854 he dies in 1900 so he's a man of the 19th century but we don't tend to think of him that way yeah his influence on the 19th or on the 20th century is so powerful though that a lot of people will include him in literary surveys of 20th century literature and uh i think the right to do that i myself i do that uh because this doesn't seem very victorian does he no he's anti-victorian if whatever is typically victorian the astites including oscar wilde hate um they set up the great uh dichotomy yeah the great vilification of the victorians that's going to occur just after world war one by uh lit and strategy but we'll talk about that in later podcasts yeah you mentioned that last time though yeah so he's stretchy's has fertile ground with which to work because the astites and oscar wilde in particular have been busy for many many years before the great war actually takes place um there was another thing i was going to say there but went past me he's irish he's irish she's anglo irish though this is important as well um he does admit he's a notorious homosexual yes put on trial for it for that matter sort of and spend time in jail for it i think he spent two years in reading jail yeah and uh he died ultimately with meningitis yes um we'll get around to defense pretty horrible way to die i have to say it is awful it is awful uh and unfortunately most people who know about oscar wilde first and foremost know him as a famously controversial homosexual at a very pivotal time for that movement in western history yeah and they don't really know much about his philosophy such as it is they don't really know much about his art um you know that probably his highest quality piece of work is a picture of dorian gray i think so which is why i was unhappy with talking about being earnest but having said that i i understand the rationale for it wilde is a bright man so this is but i mean so what everything that we're saying about and and probably indicting about his aestheticism is not born of the the idea that that he's a shallow man or without any learning he he grew up learning and speaking french and german he studied greats because he at the time this is what we do in the 19th century so he studied greek and latin and and he was exceptional at that as well so his linguistic gifts are without dispute but he is he takes it in a direction and the study probably of the greco-roman world in a direction that would probably espouse the moralism of that period and in other words it's really in some ways a rejection of christianity christian mores yeah he's tied in also with a lot of um other movements and thinkers in england at this time so we talked about the symbolists and what's going on there we haven't really talked about some of the other figures oscar wilde is taken under the wing of walter pager a name fewer people know unfortunately uh who espouses many of these sort of uh esteems and john ruskin but john ruskin is a bit of a different animal in some senses um because john ruskin is very socially oriented he's very sincere oscar wilde goes out of his way to underscore the fact that he is insincere about absolutely everything he takes it to epic proportions his most famous essays the i think the full name is the decay of the art of lying which is riffing off of classical uh some classical essays and things like this as well um which makes for hair raising reading and i'm going to come over across with four points the four key points of that later on today but not right now uh he's also tied into another extremely important uh late victorian group um the pre-raphaelites people like the rossettis and so on um yes the painters and they too are very interested in decadence and um and presenting decadent content in exquisitely beautiful style again so you see how this is a light motif that keeps occurring even in different schools of thinking in the victorian period and there and they are devotees of keats so we've talked about something about the romantic inheritance here i think we have to acknowledge that there keats keats's philosophy is there in the aesthetics uh this aesthetic movement here as well without a doubt yeah this is where i trace the influence of the romantics onto the thinking cultural and artistic and literary thinking of the late uh the late 19th century i think it comes in primarily through that avenue there yeah and i should also mention here while we're talking about decadent content again this is not something the aesthetes invent providing really decadent disgusting content in beautifully uh articulate uh exquisite even forms so i can remember the first time i read baudelaire's uh um the corpse essentially is what it comes down to and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna reiterate what the phone talks about but oh my goodness what a schism between what's the discovery of a rotting corpse in the sun and the flies and the maggots and all these sorts of horrible things and the movements and develop it just gets worse from there but the mode of expression was of the opposite extreme so while the content evoked a responsive disgust deep visceral disgust the mode in which baudelaire talks about it is breathtaking it's beautiful it's cultured it's poised it's that's a typical symbolist and a state move now wild takes it in certain directions of his own for his own polemical reasons i should also say a little bit about that why is it that oscar wilde is oftentimes being sought out in sort of a cultish sense because you raised this point and it's a good point this is one of the ironic developments on the part of both interrelated schools of thinking they violently and ferociously reject the values of the middle class and try to discuss them and anger them and even provoke them and as i said before this is a mark of honor this is how deeply that committed they are to their principles as far as they're this powerfully and viscerally committed to their principles they come across as screaming of artistic integrity which makes them ironically figures of admiration by exactly those unlearned masses they now know that they don't know because they've been mocked for not knowing it and so they feel that they need to know more and where am i going to get my knowledge from from precisely the people who are provoking and insulting me and because uh the symbolists and especially the asthetes are very pedantic and as you already said or i already said narcissistic um this appeals to their ego and so ironically these people who are insulting the middle classes are being surrounded by middle-class people who are devotees of these figures and this becomes a pattern that you see into the 20th century it's not just oscar wilde there's a bunch of these people um who specialize in going on tour and insulting middle classes and being followed around slavishly by their worshipers oscar wilde so much that he literally monetizes that he goes first on one and then a second great american tour and the tour i think his first tour he starts in new york and then he starts lecturing on aestheticism and its principles this is why the philosophy is so important because it was literally lectured on by a celebrity but his lecture series in the united states is so successful commercially that they extend it to i think it was just about over a year before they let him go and he escaped back to the uh to england but he would return for a second speaking tour later on in life as well promoting the same sorts of ideas so the ideas aren't just being discussed in private salon amongst a few artistic elite they're being spread to the masses so the influence is coming from both levels here and i think that's also important to keep in view very interesting and and and he is on the i would say on the uh aggression as well so he uh we mentioned his homosexuality he had a lover um an aristocrat lord alfred douglas and wilde actually prosecuted his father for criminal libel um because his father objected to their relationship and so forth and and wilde accused him of libel of course uh the marcus of queensberry produced evidence that demonstrated that what he was saying was true and of course that ended up putting wild in prison but again there was a this not just he's not just a provocateur there's there's more to it than that uh there's almost there's an aggression about it and an anger um and uh and it really to some degree while and you presented this quite well an adherence and a devotion to beauty which cloaks uh a deep-seated ugliness and the picture of dorian gray is a good symbol of that because of course the picture of dorian gray's is beautiful youth but underneath that is this rotting horrible figure and again um and that we'll get into this in a bit i think this is what he displays rather well in the importance of being earnest with his two protagonists they have alter egos and it's something akin to uh dr jekyll and mr hyde they each have a mr hyde character who is an immoral disreputable individual in some ways or some and and they uh see they they they hide that individual to some degree or at least they mention that person but it's a fictitious person in that in this case whereas in the case of uh stevenson's novel it was actually the individual dr jekyll himself who was experimenting on himself with with uh with drugs and so forth but still this idea of an alter ego and and so there's something of a dramatic feature to this maybe we'll talk about this in a minute bill but uh that is almost shakespearean like there are two twins and they don't know of each other's identity well it's a variation on that and and what what wild does with this is to uh attack as you say middle class victorian values yeah it's yeah this is the the geminata um right this twinning notion here which runs way way back obviously right down into um classical mythology and things of this sort yes but you're right um oscar wilde there's no doubt that the play is a it's superbly crafted play whatever else you want to say about it it just and second of all this is something you and i haven't talked about oscar wilde is known with some reason as one of the wittiest writers who has ever written um and it's true the man is enormously clever you see lots of displays of wit by writers in the 19th century in particular but oscar wilde is right up there at the top of the list we talked about the wit of jane austen at the beginning of the century yes but here at the end of this century we encounter another enormously witty individual and this is one of the things that this play delivers so well but i want to i don't want to lose this idea that you mentioned here about the twinning it's not just twinning it's not just having an alter ego by the way plot spoiler coming up so if you haven't watched the play yet stick your fingers in your ears and yell la la la at this point um the alter ego of both men aren't just alter egos no they are moral and ethical alter egos one of them is good and virtuous and the other one is wicked and evil and this is that's why i mentioned dr john mr hyde and not just the shakespearean doubles yeah yes that's absolutely on the mark that is on target um so in the case of algenon he's got uh his friend bunbury who he's always having to yes and bunbury's getting himself into constant troubles why is he getting into constant trouble because he's a bad man that's why he gets into constant trouble and jack of course in the city is known as ernest and ernest can get up to all sorts of shenanigans and every now and again he has to jack in the country has to go back to see his alter ego and get him out of scrapes whose name is whose name is ernest and of course the one thing neither one of these guys is being is being earnest about his actual identity uh which of course goes to the title the importance of being earnest um so plays on words in other words yes very much this is a common wildinian kind of a tactic um but the men are how to put this here malamed the famous symbolist poet insisted that morals and ethics have nothing to do with aesthetics and beauty if you want to point to one guy who's actually split and divorced those two sets of values which had been wedded up to that point since the time of the ancient greeks then it's the symbolists i oftentimes hear nietzsche giving credit for this but nietzsche plays off of it here the symbolists really get this ball rolling malama is probably our number one guy here to do that and this is a talking point you hear raised in the 20th century again and again and again how can all these peoples who are so well educated and cultured in the arts and learning do such horrific things like they become death camp commandants and stuff like this yeah yeah fair enough clearly this just underscores the point that art has nothing to do with goodness and i think that is an enormously problematic assertion it's a false conclusion is what it is yes but it is however it is there is something correct about it which is that divorce of beauty from goodness does lead to those things now that i would say is a fair hypothesis at any rate that people who have divorced their aesthetics from their morality are less resistant to doing evil acts and they are they are incapable of indulging them without any any restraining moral objections any conscience because conscience no longer has any play it has no hold upon them and when you've done this and this gets picked up over and over now i really think it's interesting that you say that that beauty and goodness are seen to be unified or at least connected as far back as the ancient greeks this is not simply a christian invention although in the middle ages in the context of the university beauty truth and goodness are united in the person of god and he is the essence of these three things that's that's that's true but even the greeks acknowledge the importance of beauty and goodness each of them and both of them and their interrelation and that's presented in the liberal arts even so remember music is part of the quadrivium it's a science yes right so it's it's seen as objective and real uh connected with mathematics and the astronomy the way the heavens import themselves and so forth so this is a breach a significant breach not with the victorian period but with the whole of western history and not just christian history but the entirety of it so it is the great divorce and it's what c.s lewis writes upon when he writes the abolition of man that is really a treatise about education but he is precisely touching on um the rejection of moral value and aesthetic value as objectively true he says this is the repudiation of all education if we hold this view well when he says it it's now a standard uh for not only his error but at least since the time of wild for for people to gravitate towards this view yeah the aesthetes are a morally intoxicated by the good life and when they say the good life they mean the most refined aesthetic life they can possibly lead and ends yes and and its outplay is oftentimes decadence which they then flaunt both in their lifestyle and their art at the middle class is just to underscore the fact that their values are different a lot of people don't know that the ancient greeks obviously pre-christian greek education undergoes two phases according to modern historians and the first phase old school rather than higher education um it's centered on two things intellectual and physical training in the the gymnasium um and the intellectual training in old school greek education was primarily before we see the trivium and the quadrivium kind of take over under various individuals uh it is primarily concerned with the appreciation of beauty and a lot of my students find that shocking like really that's the thing they weren't teaching engineering they weren't teaching mathematics they weren't teaching it no they were teaching an appreciation for beauty why because you were going to have to be from 508 on in athens you were going to have to be a responsible citizen who was going to contribute to the the the good running the running the athenian democracy well you are a part of that you're part of the kratos you're part of the power of that and the number one thing they wanted cultivated in that kind of a voting democratic citizen was somebody who knew beauty and understood it at a deep rich level and we don't have time to explore why that is but it's a fascinating thesis on the good on a well-educated democratic citizen why is it that they insisted on that of all things because i guarantee you our current age would not come to any such conclusion and what's really interesting is that although plato plato agrees with this he just doesn't think that the demos is up to it he thinks it's the aristocrats alone who are able to uh pursue this goal but he doesn't dispute the importance of that goal he thinks this is vital yes that never gets undermined by any of the major greek contributors to greek education in some senses in philosophy that's a bit of a different discussion but you see this picked up again with this notion of plebeians and patricians in later roman uh the rise of the roman culture the patricians are the ones who are in charge of these sorts of uh the running of the race publica the republic and the plebians only over time begin to contribute to that after some outrages anyway uh to come all the way back here the divorce of goodness from beauty which i would argue happens in its most important phase right here in oscar why on oscar wilde's watch fair enough is what facilitates any number of horrors in the later 20th century and that's why i insist on talking about the estates in relation to modernism and post-modernism and all these sorts of things but you won't get that at the first remove if you read the importance of being earnest it's about two young men who are as you say decadent they are both of them esteeds um and of course this is being celebrated but they don't present themselves that they that way they present themselves as morally upright victorian gentlemen yes and the um the foil if we're talking about foils here the foil against which they do that to a large extent is the formidable and dragonish lady bracknell who is by the way superbly played in the 1952 version uh movie version of the play i would say in fact if you're going to watch any version of the importance of being earnest the one that does it most articulately the most artistically um the best is the 1952 technology okay i haven't seen it that's great it's yeah it's available on youtube it's part of the criterion collection and it is if you're a real connoisseur of such things it is great and it makes the two later movie versions of the importance of being earnest look incredibly crude knuckle dragging kind of garish ugliness anyway um the lady brackel as i said is superbly portrayed in the 52 version uh and she is all that is wrong with victorian middle class in this case pseudo-aristocratic sensibilities she is a hypocrite she is venal she is materialistic she is calculating but she nevertheless puts on a completely hypocritical air of being virtuous and honorable and philanthropic and all these other sorts of things when of course we discover as the play goes on to use anything but especially when it comes to negotiating bride prices if you like i got the sense that wilde hated this woman you know what he actually did she's based on a real woman she is based on the wife of the uh of the man who ended up taking him to court douglas murray's mother is a model for yes so the douglas murray's mother is the model for lady bracknell and that was explicitly acknowledged by oscar wilde and you are absolutely your instincts are absolutely on the money he loathed her um more than he actually uh loathed the marquis himself so there you go so the story itself predictably is about two four young men who are each of them in pursuit of a young woman who they seek to marry got cecily cardio on the one hand and we've got gwendolyn on the other hand also superbly portrayed in or acted in the 1952 version in fact all the acting in the 52 version is good actors were better than sorry it's just just that simple but of course nowadays i'm not sure people have the refined sensibilities to appreciate what they're looking at so yeah as eudora weltley later said in the 20th century we have to use loud screeching melodramatic forms because nobody will hear anything else anymore but in any event uh the 52 version does catch a lot of that subtlety and for reasons that are not fully explained both of the women are intent on only marrying a man named ernest so that's going to be a problem and both men try to get themselves re-christened while they're out at jack's place in the country there's a whole dichotomy between city mouse country mouse kind of thing going on because they are bad decadent men in the city but they are seemingly virtuous men in the country so there's a whole conversation waiting to start a start there i'm not going to get into it unless you get into it um and one of the things that wilde is responding to while does it mocks everything everywhere in every direction that he possibly can he's an aesthete it's one of the things they do and one of the things he's mocking is the dramatic form that he's responding to the victorian play and it's actually got a name it's the well-made play with all caps at the front that's his proper name the well-made play will find its way to teaching you didactically proper morals and ethics oftentimes from a breathtakingly crude perspective the well-made play will end well even if it is wildly improbable if the the happy ending is wildly improbable doesn't matter the well-made play doesn't care it's going to give you the happy ending uh the two heroes will embrace at the end the marriage will come out of this and you will have been taught several life lessons in the process of these plays excellent i've watched a couple of these and i will not watch a third i can tell you uh wild has a point uh they're well made come on while the irony of course is exactly in that uh they were well made according to middle class sensibilities um and you could probably come up with modern television and movie analogs to our own current version of the well-made play yeah via disney movie yeah and so recently so if you get to the end of the importance of being earnest and you think this is a wildly contrived happy ending what the heck is going on here um know that wild is responding to a long tradition of what he considers to be bad drama and he writes his bad ending precisely in order to send up the typical wildly improbable happy endings of the well-made play so that explains it for me there you go no you thought it was entirely contrived in a ridiculous ending you were meant to yes but i lacked the knowledge of the period to know that he was sending up uh his contemporaries in the process i don't know how important that knowledge is but you fall away sometimes garbage along with the good stuff so it's up there no it's good to know so um it does that it it makes me uh appreciate him a bit more because quite frankly i thought it it was wildly clever to pardon the pun but then when it came to the ending i thought this is this is such a terrible ending how it doesn't fit the play uh in its cleverness at least and uh at least this excuses it so this is another species of cleverness that even in the end the punch is the punch that he directs at his audience and his fellow playwrights there you go gotcha yeah there you are yes in case again more plot spoilers people um the character of jack is an orphan orphan who has been adopted uh on in a handbag he's found in a handbag and the 52 version is portrayed as a gladstone bag okay and uh his uh it was his nurse or his nanny miss tossable um so not mrs trust well miss prism it's mr trust in prism bring me that baby um that's a line from 52 by the way um and yeah his his nanny is writing a novel as middle-class women do they all read novels they all write novels everyone's writing a novel again oscar wilde is commenting back to current sensibilities he's mocking this notion that the novel is ridiculously middle class and primarily a woman's obsession there's been a misogyny on the part of oscar while people oh i think it's there all the time yeah and uh should just note that in passing um but she's got her manuscript in one gladstone bag um and she mixes things up and i think she puts the manuscript in the preambulator and she puts the baby in the handbag and then she takes the preambulator and forgets the handbag at the station and he's discovered on a railway platform and he's adopted by rich parents and so on and so forth of course he is of course he is is that also ridiculously melodramatic and contrived and over the top yeah is it also deliberate as a piece of satire and mockery on the part of wild yes it is is it clever as such yes i suppose i have to admit it is um so there's a lot of background knowledge you need to understand a lot of what wild is doing uh background context is so important for proper satire to function and so we need to resolve this as well satire above all it really is you you need that otherwise it doesn't bite and satire has to bite right so yes and if it's not if it doesn't fit your contacts then the satire misses its mark yeah and so what is the ultimate significance of the importance of being earnest um and i do get asked that by students what exactly was wild trying to do other than maybe mock some ridiculous tendencies in victorian middle class art and sensibilities and so on and so forth um and i would argue if you have to ask that question you've missed oscar wilde's entire point it's art for its own sake in fact oftentimes that's saying art for art's sake is accredited to oscar wilde himself in point of fact it's oscar wilde reiterating a symbolist uh notion by gautier i think it is uh art for its own sake it's always the french it's always the french um but typically when i hear people give credit for that slogan because it's a very famous slogan when they give credit for the slogan they give it to oscar wilde when right it's not oscar sorry but oscar knew that took credit for it and never corrected anybody so there you go there you go but the point is that the figures that represent duty and honor and victorian gentleman gentlemanly conduct are hypocrites so and of course we the audience are aware of that but the point of that is a performative gesture demonstrating wild's own convictions about precisely those things he's not just this is not just incidental it's it's almost a microcosm of uh wilds convictions about his contemporaries and about his audience for that matter and including those who are judging him and throwing them in prison for his conduct right angry it's an angry gesture done in the most uh most pleasing manner imaginable yeah you typify it as aggression and anger um and that's that's that's i think accurate i would take it a little bit further um to uh there's a there's a viciousness about oscar wilde that at times you know the smile of the satire seems to fade away and you're left with this flat expression and it's become sarcasm and it's become viciousness and there's there's a chilling side to oscar wilde and no mistake um he was married a lot of people seemed to forget that uh awkward fact he was married and he had two children uh he was so disgusted by the prospect of seeing the second birth or having anything to do with the second birth that this is where he began all sorts of uh extramarital affairs with young men i heard about that yeah and he effectively abandons his family um they don't people tend not to talk about that either uh same thing with rousseau right yes never mind uh no it's it's it's all to a point is that there's a pattern here to be sure um let me give you very quickly also just to inform a little more of his art um the four main my four and four main takeaways from the decay of the art of lying yes talk about that you're going to get back to that i was going to you know so he says first of all art never expresses anything but itself it's a famous slogan of his that he would chant from the podium when he would give his talks and speeches and what have you um so is there any further meaning to what the art expresses no meaning is essentially circular it's aesthetic meaning and that is what it is what it is and because so many people no longer are making this distinction when he's lecturing especially in the united states between intrinsic value and instrumental value this sounds like brilliant stuff because intrinsic value is something which is valued for its own sake while takes that twists it and disconnects it from its context and uses it for his own purposes yeah that's interesting because i think uh uh terry eagleton characterizes the western tradition in precisely those terms at the outset of his his work on literary theory he says that is the tradition and of course that tradition um is nonsensical doesn't make any sense literally yeah quite right quite right so this is why people who come from this relatively aggressive progressive perspective for the perspective of the astites and sunday the avant-garde artiste this is why they tend to respond you know when somebody asks you know what's the significance of what's the meaning of this work of art this work of literature this painting this musical composition why they just look at each other and smirk in mockery because it doesn't express anything beyond itself and everybody knows that surely this person knows that no they don't so obviously they don't belong um connected to this here he has this assertion i'm quoting him here all bad art comes from returning to life and nature elevating this into ideals so when we return to reality that's how bad art happens that's where when we return to strict measurable truths that's where bad art comes from says oscar wilde so you think about that i'm not going to unpack that right now because there's so much to say there i don't know what where to even begin uh it just it's the repudiation of everyone who comes before him so repudiation also of reality yeah well that's why that's why yes yeah um by the way uh to speak back to an earlier point you made actually i thought it was a good point that yeah the importance of bringing earnest is a scathing send up of the hypocrisy of the main figures the hero figures or the at least the respectable figures of the play but understand that oscar wilde himself is a raging hypocrite and he knows it and in some senses yeah in so far as the mimetic impulse is being elicited by the action of the play in some sense one gets the feeling that we're supposed to admire the hypocrisy of algenon and jack and that you know just think about that just think about that in the context of where the word hypocrites comes from at least from uh i think the popular understanding of that which is a hypocrite is somebody who who's an actor he he pretends to be something that he's not yes it's a word that jesus uses of the pharisees right and it's a it's a moral indictment it's supposed to uh make the people being charged with hypocrisy recognize that they're doing something they ought not to do and to correct themselves not only does wild reject that he embraces hypocrisy as something which ought to be loved for its own sake now this is a so and and i cannot think of a precedent for this um in the history of ideas before this period i cannot see it so there's a degeneration that's that's happening at this point which is it's really unprecedented and it's not it's not exclusively connected to his homosexuality per se that's just a a part of it and that's the sort of the flash point but it's the because because again homosexuals are in the greek era as well and they're not going to hold to this position about the divorce of beauty from goodness and truth they're not going to do that but wild does so this is a this i i just wanted to emphasize that yeah we forget in when we read assertions like that and um and when we see this played out here the celebration the backhanded um the backhanded celebration of hypocrisy we have to remember that in his real life such as such a thing really exists to oscar wilde um he's living that at a very deep visceral level he's living a life of considerable hypocrisy and when the hypocritical veil is torn as it were um he's charged and he's sent to jail for a couple of years um and uh so hypocrisy is a real thing to oscar wilde and he seems to be celebrating it in the importance of being earnest and is tied up with his sexuality of course he's got two more assertions they're short they're simple they're punchy as they're meant to be because of course he's speaking from podiums for from speaking venues he says life imitates art more than art imitates life and that's become a a fighting slogan also in certain progressive artistic circles right through the 20th century which imitates which and of course many people especially if you are coming from a set of middle class victorian values of course your response is going to be no art is an imitation of life that's how the renaissance artists thought about it yeah i look around me i look at nature i look at created reality i look at my material circumstances in my theoretical context historical context and from that i build art that is the raw stuff of art well remember there is no raw stuff too much of the art of these individuals here it's all style it's all it is it's all artistic craft and cleverness and stuff like this um and so they adopt a reverse position here this again is a slogan meant to inflame sensibilities and anger um people in the late 19th century it's so if if you find it controversial then it's doing exactly what oscar wilde wanted it to do it's annoying you then it's doing its job and then finally lying the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art says oscar wilde this is why he's talking about that is that a truth statement or yeah you can say uh we we have no access to truth according to oscar wilde so repeat that again bill yeah um lying comma the telling of beautiful untrue things comma is the proper aim of the artist or is the proper aim of art lying is the proper aim of art yeah and he's borrowing of course he's hoping perhaps that we don't haven't read our plato i was going to say yeah he's riffing off of plato like a number of other writers in the late 19th century um nudge nudge wink wink edgar allan poe there's enormous amounts of unacknowledged borrowing here and i don't think it's being done in the same sort of sense of a polymath like samuel taylor coleridge or somebody else like this he just doesn't remember where his thinking ends and somebody else's begins they these guys on the other hand seem to be deliberately covering up any uh ability to trace it back to a lot of the roots of their ideas so again uh this is typical oscar wilde um so we talked about the rebellion against goodness the divorce of beauty from goodness here it's the divorce of beauty from truth there's that too yes that's that's just part of the lying postulate and art is you know is predicated on lying this is again it's an extraordinary statement to make um and is it calocles and the gorgeous i can't even remember where this this statement comes by plato um but but it certainly is almost a sophistic claim of the sofas and and again socrates strongly advocates the uh really what ends up being the western position on this and everybody after socrates is going to agree with socrates pretty much against the sulfus up until wilde who i get i would say is it's fair to say is a softest then i i would go further i would say he is a sophist with bells on and uh at an epic level and he is he knows it and he celebrates it and he rolls in it and he glories in it um all there is is sophistry at the end of the day according to oscar wilde um but note that you said following wild there is an inheritance that follows it and we i trace it all the way to harold bloom who is the last representative of the aesthetic tradition and and and ironically fought against the post-modernists in his day the schools of resentment as he called them the feminists the post-colonialists all these things who weren't interested in beauty and were interested more in political agendas he wanted nothing to do with that okay but this the aesthetic position that he represented was already a political position against the establishment yeah when oscar wilde and walter peter and to a lesser extent john ruskin and the rossettis and all these people when they are invading against crude middle class moralizing art um this is something which passes on an inheritance here and as you say in with the rise of post-modernism uh literature begins to get increasingly preachy again increasingly didactic again yes is not a surprise for to me for a second that harold bloom would take issue with this as an an aesthete um they always take issue with preachy art of any sort and part of it doesn't have to be a christian it would have been christian early on in bloom's career and it was but by the 80s it was against the preachiness of the modern left and this and to some extent i'm sympathetic to what bloom is saying and in a different backhanded way i am sympathetic to what the aesthetes are saying because art has a tendency to oscillate between either extremism on the aesthetic side purely divorced from all judgments of character and ethics and goodness and all that kind of stuff and then it will oscillate oftentimes in a compensatory way to the opposite extreme and it's all nothing but super preachy and of course you and i are living in an age like that right now a lot of the art most of you are being turned out and celebrated is over-the-top super preachy art yeah so it's it's ironic that we have to draw people's attention to that to the idea that uh literature is beautiful and it's the features of that that recommend it and that's the that is actually the distinctive mark of literature is that it has beauty as its main aim uh to delight as well as to teach yes and that has dropped out of the discussion at the moment that it ought to delight as well as to teach it's just to teach yes up to the and i'm generalizing again up till about the middle of the 19th century um most learned men and women knew that you cannot divorce these two things and uh valorize one at the expense of the other you have to be aware that ethical value and aesthetic value come as a package deal and things get very problematic around art if you divorce them if you separate them so now you and i are having to talk about beauty and aesthetics nowadays because we're trying to compensate for the extremes of ugliness in our day yeah ethical preaching um which is the only job of art um moralizing plus ugly modern art is unbelievable when i say modern contemporary art is unbelievably ugly yes it has no aesthetic value by any normal human never mind historical traditional sensibility um and at the same time it's preachy it's enormously preachy it's sanctimonious it tends to be oftentimes breathtakingly simplistic there's nothing like being lectured by a [ __ ] um says he sneers down his nose at you and you just have to take it and endure it um but if if i'd been living in an earlier age where the aesthetics were completely owning the field of discussion and artistic endeavor i'd probably be pushing back in the care not so much the the direction of ethics but i would argue in the direction of character which of course is connected to ethics but my point here is that in order to have a solid wholesome approach to art you need to hold these two forms of value in mind and look at how they are inextricably linked in a good work of art and that is something we've lost over the last 150 years or so i would argue yeah no i would agree and it's been testified to by again i mentioned c.s lewis's work the abolition of man he talks directly about that issue that it begins with the idea of the waterfall somebody says that it is sublime and or beautiful rather and coleridge of jackson says that it's sublime and there's a there's an objection or that this is quibbling about in it at the end of the day these are merely subjective preferences that are being expressed by the audience etc and the educators agree with this that these are this is a statement that has no objective validity whatsoever and it's irrelevant let's get down to brass tacks here and there these are educators this is an at stake lewis says is the entirety of the whole soul of education yep and this is one of the reasons we're doing this series in pidea today i think is to try and recover the great tradition of literature and in its myriad of forms and also to trace a i would say an enrichment uh over time because of christianity largely i would say and also that now the decadence and decline from those uh great flourishing human works um and now we're in the 20th century largely i think we're not going to see a great deal to recommend it largely because it's of the milieu that comes out of what we've just talked about today this art for art's sake yeah i mean we start off with that distinction influentially at least as early as kant and kantian distinctions about beauty being in a uh purely the provenance of the subject and the subjective and so on and so forth it's in the eye of the beholder and so on and so forth and then you have this oscillation back and forth between these two extremes and yeah i think sadly i think future generations are going to look back at where we are right now with what we're turning out in our literature turning out in our music turning out in our our um uh painting and stuff like this architecture look at the architectural monuments of our day are there any yeah and um they're going to look at us a little bit like we look at the hellenistic era you know there was a lot of pedantry in there but you know in terms of work of of artistic or intellectual genius it's a lot of sound and fury yeah it's people would rather talk about art than actually talk art um and uh you know we're kind of living in an age like that now i think but of course obviously i'm in the age so i'm not terribly qualified to say so even so um anything more you want to say about yeah let me leave you with a quotation and this doesn't come from wild it comes from um an influence on wall i've already mentioned his name this is gautier you're the guy who coined the art for art sake or la palat um he says quote and this is obviously in translation nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless now you and i course can immediately understand what he means by that it's intrinsic value that's the nature of art it's not an instrument but he takes it in a different direction every day useful is ugly if it expresses a need and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting like his poor weak nature so we have a ringing condemnation of human character um the most useful place in the house is the lavatory there you go yeah so not even the kitchen not even the kitchen it's the lavatory and uh marquis de sade would say the bedroom but no it's the lavatory it's the lavatory we can go lower if you follow this school of thinking they can always go lower yeah um so is that to say that one should not read oscar wilde no you certainly should read your oscar wilde he's important um the picture of dorian gray will probably benefit you more than watching the importance of being earnest but the value of the importance of being earnest is that it will also give you some degree of entertainment value in my view so it's a in some senses it's a different investment of your time rather than necessarily better dr madison anything else you wanted to add to no i think that's good i mean we wanted to open season four with uh wild and particularly with the foundation for what we think follows wild which is obviously given its inauspicious beginnings not going to be a delightful foray we're going to be talking about works that we think are important at times brilliant in in some ways and there are obviously contradictions to the general tender but the general tenor is this is a dark period which we're going to try and catalog and to expose and to some degree enlighten our audience on yes we were joking beforehand that we we've been singing the praises of many authors before this and we've been going on through season after season where in the main that that's what we're doing we're trying to help people see the value of these great authors in the great conversation but as we move into season four you and i are going to increasingly become grumpy old men which of course comes natural to some of us is true now luckily it's not all companies we've got some we've got some absolutely wonderful authors in the 20th century that we want to look at as well yeah but not all of them can be described thusly no it's not the dominant strain for sure at any rate um so next week we are going to look at houseman and hardy and then we'll move on through authors like conrad and auden and elliott and orwell and yates and flannery o'connor and so forth i've just mentioned a few and i think it will be hopefully enlightening and it will certainly come closer to home for our audience but anyway that was us for today once again i mentioned our website the website should be coming soon pidea today.com and uh hopefully it'll be up soon and then we'll be able to talk to you more about what we're planning for days ahead but that's us for today and this episode of paideia today i'm dr scott mason with my colleague bill friesen that's uh for now and see you next week take care everyone [Music]

Channel: Dr Scott Masson

Views: 304

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Art for art’s sake, Baudelaire, French symbolists, Mallarme, The Abolition of Man, algernon moncrieff, character analysis, comedy of manners, jack worthing, oscar wilde (author), oscar wilde the importance of being earnest, ten great writers of the modern world, the importance of being earnest (book), the importance of being earnest (play), the importance of being earnest analysis, themes analysis

Id: 1iCjbsNTd7k

Length: 69min 37sec (4177 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021