NB: This is the author’s version of this article. The definitive version is copyrighted and can be accessed at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/695380.

ANDREA SELLERI

Oscar Wilde on the Theory of the Author

ABSTRACT: Throughout his career Oscar Wilde battled his contemporaries’ tendency to look at literary works through the lens of the author. He held that the practice of reading for the author misses the point of why we should turn to literature in the first place, and that it runs into a number of ethical, methodological and metaphysical problems. Here I reconstruct Wilde’s position from his various pronouncements in his essays, reviews, letters and fiction, and argue that the ideal of letting the work speak for itself which emerges from here should still be taken seriously by philosophers and scholars of literature.

I

That Oscar Wilde was a central figure for aestheticism needs no arguing; that he should

be taken seriously as an aesthetician is perhaps a less obvious matter. While much of his

work concerns itself with the traditional purview of aesthetics as a philosophical

discipline (art, beauty, appreciation, criticism), commentators have rarely granted his

writings that attention to ideas qua ideas that marks off a philosophical interest in a

writer’s oeuvre from other types of analysis (literary criticism, source hunting, cultural

history, etc.). A number of attempts to tackle Wilde’s pronouncements in a broadly

philosophical fashion have been made through the decades; [1] but most recent

scholarship has regarded Wilde as mainly, if not only, interesting in a socio-historical

key, most studies being concerned with articulating how his life and works interacted

with contemporary and later cultural paradigms of sexuality, Irishness and class, and

others with analysing them in the context of the contemporary publishing market.

In this essay, by contrast, I take Wilde seriously as a philosopher of literature.

Since this approach is not commonly practised with this writer, a preliminary

consideration of the objections to it seems to be in order. The two main arguments are

neatly encapsulated by two responses to the most recent book-length study adopting it

consistently, Julia Prewitt Brown’s Cosmopolitan Criticism. [2] Reviewing the book for

Victorian Studies, Lawrence Danson charged that the author had not “prove[d] to

everyone’s satisfaction that Wilde’s thinking amounts to a philosophy, or that it is any

the worse because it is not.” [3] Danson’s worry is that Wilde’s well-known off-

handedness about such essential components of the philosophical language game as

seriousness and consistency (“I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a

phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth”, as he himself put it) [4]

means that his views are not coherent enough for philosophical analysis. The second

objection was raised by Regenia Gagnier writing for English Literature in Transition:

contesting Brown’s decision to situate Wilde in a rarefied high-cultural environment

and to focus on ideas to the detriment of contexts, she queries: “Now that we know what

we do about the concrete socio-cultural environments of a Kant or a Kierkegaard, can

we really, as Brown would like, go back to philosophical aesthetics as pure idea?” [5]

Gagnier’s historicist objection is easier to answer, so I shall address it first:

philosophical analysis moves at a different level of abstraction from historical

scholarship; roughly put, it addresses concepts rather than facts. Thus, to address

literary and philosophical works “as philosophy” rather than as documents in social

history in no wise implies either denying that ideas spring from social contexts or (to

revisit an anathema of the Cambridge school of intellectual history) “presum[ing] that

there persists in ideas a stability of meaning and a continuity of coherence”; [6] it is,

quite simply, a different procedure. Danson’s comment gives one more pause, in that his

objection is not to the philosophical approach per se, but to its appropriateness to this

writer. It is undoubtedly true that Wilde contradicted himself a great deal; it is also true

that the temptation of concocting an illusory consistency by ignoring or downplaying

those features of the subject that do not fit one’s argument is a pitfall that besets all

kinds of expository prose, but perhaps especially one as invested in the ideal of

coherence as philosophy. That said, if one acknowledges that unsystematicity and

contradictoriness are key formal features of Wilde’s essentially Socratic way to

aesthetics, wherein “form itself is used as a creative medium more so than as an

instructional one” [7] and concepts are intended to provoke further thought rather than

close down discussion, then a philosophical approach to his writings becomes less a

matter of giving a definitive interpretation of their conceptual content than of exploring

the full range of suggestions that they offer, which is wide indeed. [8] To read Wilde’s

characters airily quipping about philosophical issues usually treated in a solemn tone

leaves one with a sense of intellectual adventure. Wilde-as-philosopher is someone who

is blithely willing to needle the high systematising pretensions of us academics, and to

look at the world afresh. To follow him in this endeavor seems to me an attractive

prospect.

Wilde touched on many subjects pertaining to philosophical aesthetics in his

career. Here, for reasons of space, I shall limit myself to examining his engagement with

one of these: the theory of the author. Whether, how, and to what extent our

understanding of a work of literature should be inflected by what we know about its

author is an issue that has received a great deal of attention in both literary studies and

the philosophy of art over the decades, but I believe that to engage with the nineteenth-

century debates in which Wilde participated can afford us a fresh lens through which to

view it. My overall argument here is that Wilde fairly consistently called into question

one of the dominant tenets of his age’s literary culture, i.e. “authorialism”: i.e., the idea

that for the purposes of criticism the author and the work form a continuum. In contrast

to the dominant opinion of his time, in many of his pronouncements Wilde suggests that

as far as our understanding of literature is concerned “[t]he opinions, the character, the

achievements of the man [read: author] matter very little”, and puts forward a number

of arguments to that effect. [9] Viewed historically, Wilde can be seen as part of a

broader movement towards the articulation of an embryonic formalism in late

nineteenth-century literary culture, but my main purpose here is to catalogue Wilde’s

ideas on the subject, clarify their import, and assess whether they can still speak to us.

II

More is at stake in saying that a literary work has an author than the obvious point that

it has been conceived and/or executed by somebody. Theories and practices as diverse

as the Romantic expressive theory of poetry, philosophical intentionalism, biographers’

speculations about how works arise out of lives and poets’ continual concern to project

a certain image of themselves all come under that heading. Whatever the specificities of

the reading, however, to speak of literary works in terms of their authors (“I appreciate

Wordsworth’s spirituality”; “it’s just like Dickens to tack on that happy ending”) always

implies that the fact that the work has been made by a particular person is somehow

relevant to our understanding of it: that something of importance has been inscribed in

it by its quality of having been authored by that particular person. To the extent that a

literary reading takes this quality as relevant to one’s understanding of the work itself;

to the extent that the category of the “author” transcends a mere recognition of the

work’s empirical origin in a person’s mind and begins to engender interpretive

consequences that could not have been drawn from the work’s textual features alone: to

that extent, I call that reading “authorialist”.

Despite the significant methodological and ethical divisions within it, authorialist

criticism’s ontological presupposition that literary works are objects partly constituted

by their authorship creates a family resemblance between these otherwise very

different schools of thought. This type of criticism tends to feature the following:

1. Inference: works may be read through the writer’s biographical data, the writer’s

states of mind may be inferred from his or her works, etc.

2. Disambiguation: works tend to be viewed as utterances, in the sense of

containing something definite that is being said, implied or let slip through, and

the meaning of which it is the critic’s job to articulate through and against any

ambiguities at the textual level.

3. Selection: this is what Foucault famously calls the “principle of thrift within the

proliferation of meaning”. [10] Recourse to the figure of the author, that is, tends

to prune away those interpretations that are not felt to be compatible to one’s

idea of what its author must have meant.

I shall return to these briefly at the end of this essay; for the moment, I want to

register that, whatever its rights and wrongs, authorialism was the dominant

orientation in nineteenth-century literary culture. Among the most influential critics in

Wilde’s time was Edward Dowden, who in his Shakspere: His Mind and Art justifies his

“endeavour to pass through the creation of the artist to the mind of the creator” by

means of an argument invoking conversation as an ideal for the critic: when we

consider the man behind the work, “we are no longer surrounded by a mere world of

thoughts and imaginations which, in an almost selfish way, we labour to appreciate and

possess. We are in company with a man; and a sense of real human sympathy and

fellowship rises within us.” [11] For Dowden, criticism consists in recovering the

author’s intended meanings and in inferring his or her mental states while writing. At

about the same time in France Positivist critics such as Hyppolite Taine and Emile

Hennequin theorized that the effect of race, moment and milieu on the author

determined the characteristics of the literary work entirely. These critics formed a

somewhat uneasy alliance with the older generation of biographical criticism

epitomized by Sainte-Beuve: but while they disagreed on the importance of

individuality, they agreed that the literary work is a sign that points to a man. [12] Add

to this the flourishing of critical biographies and literary histories on both sides of the

Channel, for instance the Great Men of Letters series edited by John Morley, and the

result is a critical climate dominated by the idea that the author and the work form a

continuum whose intricacies it is the critic’s job to unravel.

Wilde inscribed himself in a tradition of stances against author-based readings

which was itself quite varied, if still subdominant at that historical point. One idea in

this tradition, whose roots can be traced back to Kant’s notion of the artwork’s

“purposiveness without purpose”, was that the purpose of criticism was to analyse the

product and not to look at the producer. One form that this argument took in the

nineteenth century was that of Matthew Arnold’s dictum that one should strive to see

the object “as in itself it really is.” [13] As Aestheticism evolved, most of its proponents

were recognisably committed to arguing against relying on the author for critical

purposes; they did so by insisting on what the job of the critic is not: not to praise or

condemn the author, not to care about the mere soil out of which the flowers of poetry

grew, and so on. The only proper occupation for the critic was to examine the objet d’art

in its own sublime autotelicity. A corollary to this point was the idea that if readers see

(immoral or not, as the case may be) meanings in a literary work, those meanings are

not ascribable to the author’s deliberate volition. This was the cornerstone of the

defence in several prominent “literary” trials against controversial works such as The

Flowers of Evil, Madame Bovary, and of course in Wilde’s own trials. “The affirmation of

evil”, wrote the French critic Frédéric Dulamon in defence of Baudelaire, “is not a

criminal approval of it.” [14]

Finally, while the case against adopting intention as a normative category was first

fully articulated by later theorists such as Wimsatt and Beardsley, and the injunction to

activate all possible responses to a work of literature by considering it as a free-floating

“text” owes much to Roland Barthes, a number of nineteenth-century sources move

towards a conception of the text as verbal artefact which does not necessarily represent

the author’s states of mind. This was, for example, the key idea in A.C. Swinburne’s

angry intervention against his critics in his essay “Notes on Poems and Reviews”: “no

utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed as the

assertion of its author’s personal feeling or faith.” [15]

III

These were the main lines of argument against author-based readings at the time. In

what follows I aim to show that Wilde produced a number of innovative variations on

these arguments as he broached the subject at various points of his career, starting from

his activities as a professional book reviewer in the 1880s. One such argumentation is

the idea that “[a]rt […] is a matter of result, not of theory, and if the fruit is pleasant, we

should not quarrel about the tree”. [16] The artwork is the product of a process, but

what ultimately counts is the product, not the process. This idea was fundamentally

opposed to the dominant critical school’s relentless quest for the author’s intentions,

feelings, personal vicissitudes, as the key to the work, and in the course of his reviewing

he often complained against what he saw as a fundamental misconception on this point

on the part of contemporary critics and biographers. The aim of biography, as he saw it,

is not to give us vulgar facts about authors: “The real events of Coleridge’s life are not

his gig excursions and his walking tours, they are his thoughts, dreams and passions […]

[t]he goings-out and comings-in of a man […] are but idle things to chronicle if that

which in the man is immortal be left unrecorded.” [17] Whereas the significance of the

life of, say, a politician, lies in the factual realm, to approach the biography of an artist as

a collection of facts is to miss the really important parts of a creative individual’s life.

Wilde’s position hinges on a distinction between, on the one hand, the spiritual

qualities of artists, i.e. those creative features of their psyche (in Wilde’s language, their

“soul”) which make them worthy of having their life recorded in the first place, and on

the other those humdrum events which occur in any life but have nothing intrinsically

noteworthy in them. Perhaps the most striking of his dicta on this point is contained in a

little-known letter that he sent to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 on the subject of the

word “tuberose”. Against a contributor who had invoked the Latin etymology of the

word to argue that the word had three syllables, not two, Wilde produced the following

retort: “I am deeply distressed to hear that tuberose is so called from its being a "lumpy

flower." It is not at all lumpy, and, even if it were, no poet should be heartless enough to

say so. Henceforth there really must be two derivations for every word, one for the poet

and one for the scientist. And in the present case the poet will dwell on the tiny

trumpets of ivory into which the white flower breaks, and leave to the man of science

horrid allusions to its supposed lumpiness and indiscreet revelations of its private life

below ground” (Letters, pp. 255-6). Much contemporary criticism failed to live up to this

high standard, and Wilde accordingly regarded it as missing the point.

Wilde’s distinction between the banality of the living “man” and the distinction of

the creating “artist” who also happens to be a man was an innovative argument against

the dominant critical tradition. Perhaps the clearest articulation of his views on this

point is to be found in his review of a biography of D.G. Rossetti which had put much

emphasis on what Wilde regarded as trivial facts: “Better after all that we only knew a

painter through his vision and a poet through his song, than that the image of a great

man should be marred and made mean to us by the clumsy geniality of good intentions.

A true artists […] reveals himself so perfectly in his work, that unless a biographer has

something more valuable to give us that idle anecdotes and unmeaning tales, his labour

is misspent and his industry misdirected” (CW6, p. 147). The ideal of enacting a

conversation with an author through the latter’s work is reversed in a way that

prefigures Wimsatt and Beardsley’s contention that if an artist succeeds in realising his

intention in an artwork, then recourse to the notion of the author to elucidate the work

is superfluous. [18]

IV

Another aspect of the theory of the author, one that concerns biography rather than

intention, is the subject of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”, a novella with long essayistic parts

which details the protagonists’ search for the key to Shakespeare’s sonnets by

establishing the identity of the “fair youth”, whom they identify with one William

Hughes (to be identified with the “Mr. W.H.” who is said to be the “onlie begetter” of the

Sonnets in the opening page of the first edition). This hypothesis causes them to

produce elaborate speculations about events of his and Shakespeare’s life that went

unrecorded, and in particular about a portrait which turns out to be a forgery produced

by one of them in order to lend substance to the theory. One may be tempted to think

that this is the Dowden / Sainte-Beuve method with a vengeance, in that a principle of

coherence is found outside the work’s textual features and then applied to it, with the

great critical gain of discovering the identity of the youth for whom Shakespeare wrote

not only his sonnets but also his plays; but this first impression is belied by how the

story actually progresses. The protagonists are forced to forge materials to prove their

points, striving for a certainty that never materializes; the “Willie Hughes” theory

remains a tantalizing speculation. At the end of the story, after a number of

permutations, the narrator concludes on the ambiguous note that “sometimes, when I

look at [the forged portrait], I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the

Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” [19] Most Shakespeareans have

remained unconvinced.

Thus, what the story dramatizes is not the validity of the biographical method,

but rather the temptation exerted by the wish for finding a biographical explanation, its

allure for the characters (“I felt as if I had my hand on Shakespeare’s heart, and was

counting each separate throb and pulse of passion” (Stories, p. 171) and its ultimate

hopelessness. As Lewis J. Poteet cogently puts it, “the point of the allegation about Willie

Hughes is not that it is true (it is in fact probably false, as the narrator learns) but that it

is a piece of creative criticism that acts as a catalyst to insight. Like all biographical

readings of literature, it is ultimately unprovable.” [20] The point at which the story

comes the closest to articulating a moral is when the narrator makes an aside which

sounds a note very close to the one heard in Wilde’s reviews: “All art being to a certain

degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some

imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life,

to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem”

(Stories, p. 145). The “accidents and limitations” of real life are inessential; what really

counts is the artist’s (or the critic’s) imaginative life, which draws its value precisely

from the fact that it is not real.

We do not have to follow him there, although we may, according to whether we

choose to prioritize the result or the process. What we should not expect is for any

biographical material to provide us with the ultimate truth about the works. Ultimately,

“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is the alluring mise-en-scène of a positivistic critical procedure

which hopes to bestow unity and coherence to that which seems to lack it by having

recourse to an objective principle of coherence, but ends up enmeshed in a net of

fanaticism, falsehood, reciprocal influence – in short, of grounded and irrational human

will-to-power, whose ultimate effect is to make criticism even more arbitrary than

before. Which, of course, does not mean that we cannot enjoy the ride.

V

The intriguingly named Intentions is Wilde’s most sustained incursion into the genre of

expository prose, and it is there, understandably, that most critics’ efforts have focused

on, especially on his dialogues “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”. The last

paragraph of the essay “The Truth of Masks”, in which the presupposed unity of the

critic’s utterance is radically called into question, should also be mentioned here: “Not

that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I

entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic

criticism attitude is everything” (CW4, p. 228). Here as elsewhere, Wilde is concerned

with showing that “man” can be, as he puts it in his novel, a “complex, multiform

creature” whose modes of intellectual engagement with the world need not be univocal,

easily recoverable or indeed coherent to be stimulating.

Some of the suggestions put forward by Vivian, the main speaker in “The Decay of

Lying”, aim more explicitly at destabilizing the authorial voice. At one point Vivian puts

it to Gilbert that all utterances in a play are to be understood as a pure expression of the

relative characters, with the author never stepping up to deliver his own opinions:

Hamlet’s “art holding the mirror up to Nature” speech “is merely a dramatic utterance,

and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than the speeches of Iago

represent his real views upon morals” (CW4, p. 89). At several points in the dialogue the

dominant idea is that art moves at such a high spiritual level that empirical

circumstances such as authorship do not carry much weight in understanding it. Against

criticism’s quest for the ultimate wellsprings of the work of art in society and its effects

on the artist, Vivian rejoins: “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an

independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not

necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from

being the creation of its time, it is usually in opposition to it, and the only history that it

preserves for us is the history of its own progress” (CW4, p. 102).

A related line of argument is introduced when Vivian declares that “the highest art

rejects the burden of the human spirit and gains more from a new medium or a fresh

material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from

any great awakening of the human consciousness” (CW4, p. 96-7). Vivian has moved a

long way from Romantic theory, and his stances are indeed closer to the Modernist

notion of art as craftsmanship. As Wilde was later to put it, more trenchantly, in “De

Profundis”, “In art, good intentions are not of the smallest value. All bad art is the result

of good intentions.” [21]

The main difference between the position defended here and twentieth-century

formalisms is that Wilde is unwilling to articulate a forthright denial of the relevance of

the author for literary criticism, but is rather concerned with limiting its sphere of

application. His target is the criticism of his day, with its established ways of making

sense of literary works, foremost among them work-to-author inference. “All fine

imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing.

At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing” ( CW4, p.

143). The passage calls into question the practice of inference between author and work

because for it to work one needs a deterministic account of creative production, and

Wilde would have none of that. As Epifanio San Juan argues, for Wilde “[t]he artist

achieves universality when he, desiring to comprehend his age, abstracts himself from

it.” [22]

So, personality remains important for Wilde, but the relationship between the

author and the work is neither straightforwardly expressive nor deterministic. Nor can

it be accounted for by means of a too-straightforward intentionalism, as is conveyed by

this passage in “The Critic as Artist”, uttered by the main speaker Gilbert: “The highest

kind of criticism treats the work of art simply as a starting point for a new creation. It

does not confine itself – let us at least suppose so for the moment – to discovering the

real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the

meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks

at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it” (CW4, p. 157). Here the anti-intentionalism

edges over into a fully-fledged impressionism, but unlike the more extreme twentieth-

century versions of “reader-response theory” the starting point for the reader’s flights

of fancy remains the “created thing”, i.e. the artwork. Similarly, “[p]eople sometimes say

that actors give us their own Hamlets, not Shakespeare’s […] In point of fact, there is no

such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (CW4, pp. 165-6). Even if Shakespeare were alive,

there would be no point in consulting him to ask him how to go about representing his

plays. The words he wrote would still be all that is relevant for readers, actors,

producers and viewers. Against Dowden’s ideas that the critic’s task is to discover the

writer’s “secret” or overarching motive, and that by reading a work we should seek a

contact with a man, Gilbert indirectly retorts that criticism (not art) is “the only civilized

form of autobiography” (CW4, p. 154), adding that criticism is “in essence purely

subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another” (CW4, pp.

155-6).

Wilde’s preferred critical protocol and his ideas about the theory of the author did

not coincide entirely. The Romantic legacy was strong in him, and he remained invested

in the idea of expressiveness, as is clear from this passage from “The Soul of Man Under

Socialism”: “From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of

whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist and comes directly out of

it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality” (CW4, p.

133). However, he remained adamant that the critic’s job is not that of reaching a

definitive interpretation of this work, whether by invoking “personality”, or intention,

or any determinants acting on the author. According to Gilbert, the aim of criticism is as

follows: “The critic [...] will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province

to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of

men” (CW4, p. 164).

Further on the same character lays out his peculiar views on the nature of the

creative process:

[T]hose great figures of English drama that seem to us to possess an existence of their

own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis,

simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they were but as they thought they were

not; and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to

be, For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the

creator was not. Nay, I would say that the more objective a creation appears to be, the

more subjective it really is. […] Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give

him a mask, and he will tell you the truth (CW4, pp. 184-5).

These ideas cannot easily be reconciled to any of the prevalent positions, and perhaps to

one another. The distinction between the mere man and the masked artist is once again

asserted; its consequence here seems to be that the relationship between the author

and the work is removed to an unreachable spiritual plane. Gilbert does not assert that

the author has nothing to do with creation; but he does say that the relationship need

not be within reach. One is struck with the similarity of this passage to Wilde’s famous

letter about the relationship between himself and each of the three main characters in

The Picture of Dorian Gray: “[The book] contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what

I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian what I would like to be – in

other ages perhaps” (Letters, p. 585). These passages can be read in a number of ways,

ranging from an assertion of what George Stavros calls “an extreme ontological

idealism” [23], to a twist on the Romantic theory of expression, to a prescient foretaste

of the postmodernist concern with the performativity of identity, and it is not clear that

they argue for any one position cogently; the pars destruens, however, is clear enough:

although the nature of creation is deeply subjective, the nature of the process is

complex, mediated or otherwise unpredictable, so that the dominant practice of

inferring data from text to writer and vice versa is arbitrary and simplistic.

VI

In the context of contemporary criticism and of Wilde’s reactions to it some of the

familiar pronouncements in the 1891 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray reveal a new

range of resonances. Although Wilde asserted elsewhere that “[t]he name one gives to

one’s work, poem or picture […] is the last survival of the Greek Chorus. It is the only

part of one’s work in which the artist speaks directly in his own person” (Letters, p.

856), the Preface is obviously meant as a guide to interpretation. While the immediate

target were the journalists who had attacked the author for allegedly promoting

immoral practices through his work, the theoretical stakes were broader. For Wilde to

say that “[t]he artist is the creator of beautiful things” [24] meant to shift the interest

away from the origin of the artwork in the creator’s mind to the work itself – a

presciently Modernist and indeed New Critical move, as becomes clear when one

compares it with Cleanth Brooks’s assertion that “the poet is a maker, not a

communicator. He explores, consolidates and “forms” the total experience that is the

poem.” [25] In a related vein, to assert that “to reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s

aim” (CW3, p. 167), alongside the assertion that criticism (rather than art) is a form of

autobiography, was a swipe not only against Positivism’s scientism, but also against all

other methods aimed at recovering the author’s feelings, intentions or biographical data

from a literary work. For Wilde to declare that “[n]o artist has ethical sympathies. An

ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style” or that “[n]o artist

desires to prove anything” (CW3, p. 167) was a jab not only at didactic writers, but also

at those critics who assumed that the author must have meant to send the world a

definite message through his work. The Preface is, in short, a stylish plea to read for the

work, not for the author.

VII

As is well known, these ideas did not deter the likes of Edward Carson, the head of the

Marquess of Queensberry’s legal team at Wilde’s trials, from attempting to prove that

the composition and publication of the novel proved that the author was a homosexual,

or at least that he endorsed homosexuality. In so doing he presupposed the validity of

the dominant critical protocol of the time.

The first plea of justification for the Marquess stated that Wilde had published an

“immoral and obscene book”, “designed and intended by [...] Wilde and understood by

the readers thereof to describe the relations intimacies and passions of certain persons

of sodomitical and unnatural tastes habits and practices.” [26] One can note the

doubleness of the claim, partly referring to the author’s intention and partly

conjecturing about readers’ reactions (one can also note the assumption that the

depiction of something on the part of an author implies his/her endorsement of it). Sir

Edward Clarke, the head of Wilde’s legal team, shifted the terms, aiming to disprove that

the book was “guilty of describing and encouraging sodomitical practices” (Trials, p. 40;

emphasis added). Clarke, who had consulted with Wilde, held (treading the same

ground as Baudelaire’s defence in 1857) that that the mere description of or allusion to

a criminal act was not enough to suspect the author of having committed or encouraged

the same crime, but that there needed to be an explicit endorsement. He argued that this

was not the case because the book may have hinted at, but in no way encouraged, the

offence.

Carson then cross-examined Wilde on the subject of the novel, referring to the

author’s own words to The Scots Observer: “What Dorian Gray’s sins are, no one knows.

He who finds them has brought them” (Trials, p. 78). Carson suggested that the “real”

meaning of the novel, beyond its ambiguities, could plausibly be read as “sodomy”, and

that the author’s intention had been to convey just that: “Then, you left it open to be

inferred, that the sins of Dorian Gray, some of them, may have been sodomy?” (Trials, p.

78) Wilde had a relatively easy time replying that it was within the possibility of readers

to give their own interpretation to an issue that in the book was left ambiguous, but that

he took no responsibility for “what misinterpretation of my work the ignorant, the

illiterate, the foolish may put on it” (Trials, p. 81). Things began to go badly for Wilde

when Carson drew the court’s attention to the fact that certain passages in the magazine

version had been altered, or, as he put it, “purged”, when the novel was edited for

publication as a book: the changes, he stressed, had in common the tendency to tone

down the possible homoerotic implications. The author, then, was conscious of the

plausibility of such an interpretation and had changed the passages accordingly in order

to conceal his aim. Wilde answered that indeed it had been pointed out to him that one

of these passages “was liable to misconstruction” (Trials, p. 79). Carson insisted and got

Wilde to admit that the passage in its original form could “convey the impression that

the sin of Dorian Gray was sodomy” (Trials, p. 79), and therefore (in Carson’s

interpretation) that the author had altered it in order not to make the “real” meaning of

the novel too obvious.

So, for the Marquess’s prosecution, as for many critics both Victorian and

modern, interpretation was a matter of unearthing (or constructing) just the posited

coherence between “life” and “work” that Wilde had called into question in much of his

work. All ambiguities had to be resolved with reference to the author, whether through

the category of intention or that of biography. It would take some more years for

Wilde’s ideas to become accepted critical currency.

VIII

Since I have proposed to take Wilde seriously as a philosopher of literature, let me

conclude in philosophical fashion by attempting to articulate the nature of his overall

contribution to the theory of the author. Five main “arguments” can be extrapolated

from the various pronouncements gathered above:

1. The teleological argument: the aim of criticism is to help us realise the beauty of

the works of art with which it deals. Insofar as any notion pertaining to the

author can heighten our understanding and appreciation of the work, use may be

made of it; if the critic moves on to investigate the author as a person, criticism

has overstepped its proper mark.

2. The argument of realized intention: Criticism should be concerned with the work

first and foremost; so, if the artist manages to realize his or her intention so that

it is brought across in the work, then we do not need to know what the intention

was; if the intention is not realized in the work, it is likewise not the critic’s

concern.

3. The argument of the arbitrariness of biographical speculation: Whether or not art

arises deterministically out of its context, we can never know enough about a

person’s circumstances to be able to posit a one-to-one correspondence between

the external events of the artist’s existence and the elements of which the work

consists.

4. The mimesis argument: literature is a staging of ideas, feelings, events, the

relation of which to the author’s own ideas, feelings and circumstances is

variable; therefore, we cannot assume that the author speaks for himself or

herself through the mouths of any of his or her characters.

5. The argument of the nature of artistic creation: the artist is a self-conscious

maker of things, not an expresser of emotions or an endorser of opinions; so, we

should not assume that the artist is either trying to say something definite or

pouring aspects of his or her personality or individual circumstances onto the

page.

If all this sounds suspiciously like the formalism of Beardsley, Wimsatt and Brooks, it is

because Wilde anticipated many of its tenets. Some of these arguments are made

explicitly in his essays and letters, others are implied in the plots of his fictional works,

and I am aware that especially in the latter case there is an element of arbitrariness in

my procedure of extrapolating neat positions out of an oeuvre as playful and varied as

this writer’s. Nonetheless, I hope I have made the case that Wilde’s views on this matter

are actually fairly consistent. Some of his ideas introduce innovative elements in the

lines of argument put forward by the other thinkers of his time who wished to sever or

at least loosen the knot between the author and the work, and several of these prefigure

twentieth-century theories.

Can Wilde’s ideas still speak to us? To answer this question let me take a broader

view of literary interpretation by recalling my account of authorialism in Section 2.

Authorialism, I argued, is characterized by its implementation of procedures of

inference, disambiguation and selection of interpretations. What all these procedures

have in common is their reductionism: that is, they presuppose that the complexities of

any work can and should be reduced into coherence by an externally imposed principle.

For Wilde to deny their legitimacy meant to suggest that literature should be allowed to

determine its own meanings, or leave them undetermined, without being trammelled by

external factors; simply put, that we should read the work for what it is. The dominant

orientations in today’s literary studies, although they do not normally invoke the

category of the author explicitly, are deeply invested in reductionist procedures: it could

be argued that “criticism” as practised in the present day could not exist without such

procedures, in that they allow the critic to construct a thesis by reducing the amorphous

rhetorical economy of literary works to a pre-determined principle, usually historical in

nature. Or perhaps there is an inherent bias towards coherence in all criticism (to which

this essay is not immune), which always leads us to select certain elements and

overlook others, with only a veneer of professional scruple to curb our desire to solve

the work’s equation by ignoring all the elements that do not fit in. That said, if we

consider the recent renewal of a scholarly interest in literary form against the

relentlessly disambiguating tendencies of new historicism, I trust I am not alone in

believing that something valuable is left out when we allow extrinsic considerations

(whether authorial, historical, or theoretical) to limit our assessment of a complex

cultural artefact such as a literary work. For those who agree with this final point, Wilde

articulates a compelling case for what has been lost, and what could be regained by

reversing the trend.

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Notes

[1] Besides those I touch on: George Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Wendell Harris, “Arnold, Pater, Wilde, and the Object as in Themselves They See It,” Studies in English Literature 1 (1971): 733-47; Bruce Bashford, “Oscar Wilde and Subjectivist Criticism,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 21 (1978): 218-34; Ian Small, “Semiotics and Oscar Wilde’s Account of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (1985): 50-6; Guy Willoughby, “Oscar Wilde and Poststructuralism,” Philosophy and Literature 13 (1989): 316-24; Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (eds.), Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Peter Lamarque, “The Uselessness of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (2010): 205-14.

[2] Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (London: The University Press of Virginia, 1997)

[3] Lawrence Danson, Review of Cosmopolitan Criticism, Victorian Studies 42 (1998): 185-7 [187]

[4] Oscar Wilde (Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis eds.), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 478. Hereafter abbreviated Letters.

[5] Regenia Gagnier, Review of Cosmopolitan Criticism, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 41 (1998): 472-75 [473]

[6] John Patrick Diggins, “Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (January 2006): 181-208 [184]

[7] Edward E. Watson, “Wilde’s Iconoclastic Classicism: The Critic as Artist,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 27 (1988): 225-35 [226]

[8] On this point, see also Herbert Sussmann, “Criticism as Art: Form in Oscar Wilde’s Critical Writings,” Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 108-21

[9] Oscar Wilde (Josephine Guy ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 4. Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 125. Hereafter abbreviated CW4.

[10] “ L’auteur est le principe d’économie dans la prolifération du sens.”. My translation. Michel Foucault (Daniel Defert and François Ewald eds.), “Qu’est-ce que est un auteur ?” Dits et écrits 1954-1988, 4 Voll. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 811 (fn.)

[11] Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (London: Kegan Paul, 1901 [1875]), p. 5

[12] For an overview, see Roger Fayolle, La Critique littéraire (Paris: A. Colin, 1964) or Jean-Thomas Nordmann,: Taine et la critique scientifique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992)

[13] Matthew Arnold, “The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time”. The National Review 1 (1864), p. 230

[14] “[L]’affirmation du mal n’en est pas la criminelle approbation.” My translation. Frédéric Dulamont: “Les fleurs du mal, par Charles Baudelaire”. Le Présent (Jul. 23, 1857)

[15] Algernon Charles Swinburne (Kenneth Haynes ed.), Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon (London: Penguin, 2000 [1866]), p. 404

[16] Oscar Wilde (John Stokes and Mark Turner eds.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 7. Journalism II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 24. Hereafter abbreviated CW7.

[17] Oscar Wilde (John Stokes and Mark Turner eds.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 6. Journalism I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 136. Hereafter abbreviated CW6.

[18] William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468-88

[19] Oscar Wilde (Rupert Hart-Davis ed.), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (London: Methuen, 1911), p. 196. Hereafter abbreviated Stories.

[20] Lewis J. Poteet, “Romantic Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Mr. W.H.’,” Studies in Short Fiction 7 (1970): 458-64 [460]

[21] Oscar Wilde (Ian Small ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 2. De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 133

[22] Epifanio San Juan, The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 84

[23] George Stavros, “Oscar Wilde on the Romantics,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 20 (1977): 35-45 [37]

[24] Oscar Wilde (Joseph Bristow ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 3. The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 167. Hereafter abbreviated CW3.

[25] Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 74-5

[26] Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 290. Hereafter abbreviated Trials.