OK, here we go. What do you like to know, the great drama of my life, it is that I have put my genius into my life.
I have put only my talent into my works.
This is a comment that was made to Andre did, and it's one that dominated pretty much the first 60 or 70 years of world studies,
a tendency to emphasise the life over the works,
to sometimes read the works as a kind of pathological expression of while others, the person and so on.
And it was only really from the 1970s, 1980s onwards, that while it's been taken really seriously as a writer and a thinker,
rather than the sensational kind of events of his later life taking over,
there's also even once there's this sort of wider, more scholarly, serious take on his works,
there's also same time been a tendency to read the works kind of through the
life to see the key to a single reading of the works in details of his life.
My favourite example of this is given by Stephen Fry in an article in The New Yorker just before he took on the
role of just after it was announced that he'd taken on the role of playing Wilde in the film Julian Mitchell film.
And he describes the extraordinary onslaught of letters that arrived in his mailbox after it was announced that his take on the world, the role.
So dear Mr. Fry, I hope you will not be forgetting that the key the only key to Oscar is that he was and is first and foremost Irish.
Apologies for my atrocious Irish accent.
Dear Mr Fry Wilde's works, Winnie and Chiva with Victorian gay underground codes do not shirk the force of his sexual identity.
Dear Mr Fry, Wilde's love of his wife and family is consistently overlooked by biographers.
I trust you will not fall into the same error. Dear Mr Fry, Wilde's lifetime yearnings towards Roman Catholicism are central to any understanding.
Dear Mr Fry, I draw your attention towards wild soul of man under socialism.
Oscar's unique brand of libertarianism is scandalously overlooked by contemporary critics.
Dear Mr Fry, Oscar Wilde was in reality a woman.
This secret was passed onto me by my grandfather, who had a lesbian affair with her in June 1897.
Dear Mr Fry, Oscar Wilde Soul entered my body on August the nine hundred sixty three and ends there even more to come.
And then he ends by saying, I have spared you the weird ones.
So it's a sense with everybody out there has their version of Wild, that particular version.
And this actually extends into a lot of the critical writing world.
So in that sense, you can find the Irish Wild Books by Michael Gillispie, Robert Pind, Declan Kibre, Jolliff Kaleen, Vicky Mahaffey.
You can get Radical, Wild, Wild of Early Work by Ian Small work by George Woodcock by Rajinikanth.
You can get conservative wild. Nobut Cole in some ways lately and small criticism you get wild.
The serious scholar who spent his entire time in the Bodleian as offered by Michael Helfand and Philip Smith.
Or you can get while belayed lazy plagiarist who wrote everything to make money and just sort of recycled
himself constantly in the form of kind of Josephine gynae in Small's book on what's in that sense,
you can get wild as if the mould is modernist while the Victorian is gay, bisexual plagiarists, professionality, you name it.
There are different lines on Wilde and one of the questions I have is, is it necessary to choose between these?
As Walt himself said, complaining of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis,
he said you had not yet been able to acquire the Oxford temper in intellectual matters.
Never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at the violence of opinion merely so.
I would urge you to acquire the Oxford temper while you were here and to think about the ways in which in all of world works,
contradictions can be mutually true. The paradox is a central mode in both his thought and his writing and what I think
is one of the most useful things that Walt ever wrote about literary criticism,
which was surely you do not think that criticism is like the answer to a sum the rich of the work of art.
The more diverse are the true interpretations. There is not one answer only, but many answers.
I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production.
And in this sense, another thing to watch for is how far there's a tendency with wild works to invite you to find the world you're looking for.
They're often very, very mutable, very slippery, very open to different interpretations,
and in that sense, you can find in wild what you're looking for.
And one of the fascinating examples of this, have a look at Stefano Evangelist's book,
Reception of Wild in Europe and a sense in which each country can acquire their own
wild or the wild that suits them at that particular moment and their kind of literary,
social, political situation. And as Walt warns himself in the preface to Dorian Grey, it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors.
And that's something that runs all the way through his thinking and his art criticism.
The question of the role of the spectator in, in a sense, writing the subject matter of art quite apart from its meaning and interpretation.
And I probably ought to warn you again, and this idea that we see in wild, what we project into it,
my own you know, my thesis, my doctoral thesis on World with Oscar Wilde, anarchist, socialist and feminist.
And that's just so that you can then edit what I'm saying according to my particular take, and she would think that kind of thing.
So just before I go on to world sort of biography and De Profundis, a further warning from his play,
Saloma Insult Me Again, it opens with each character's response to the moon.
As each character enters, they look at the moon and deliver an entirely different interpretation of the look at the moon.
So the page of ideas says how strange the moon seems.
She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She has it like a dead woman.
One might fancy. She was looking for dead things. And this young Syrian responds.
She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil and his feet sort of silver.
She is like a princess who has little white doves. Four feet one might fancy she was dancing.
And the page of her audience, who is enamoured of the young Syrian, corrects him that she is like a woman who is dead.
She moves very slowly. And then later on, when Salomé speaks up, she again offers a different version of the moon.
How good to see the moon. She is like a little piece of money, a little silver flower.
She is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin.
She has the beauty of a virgin. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself.
She has never abandoned herself to men like the other goddesses.
And then later on, Harold enters and Herod's version of the moon is entirely different yet again.
The moon has a strange look tonight, has she not? A strange look.
She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers.
She has naked too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them.
She shows herself naked in the sky. She rails through the clouds like a drunken woman.
I am sure she is looking for lovers, does she not a real like a drunken woman.
She is like a mad woman, is she not? To which his wife responds.
No, the moon is like the moon, that is all.
And what you've got here in the opening of the play, you've got every single character projecting on their own obsessions,
their own desires onto the moon seeing and it in a sense, a reflection of the insides of their own minds.
Their subjectivity of their vision is what you're getting rather than any sense of the world they're looking upon.
I mean, quite clearly, this is an impossible demand for any statement, any scene designer who wishes to make the moon into all of these things.
And in the same way, throughout the play, as they look upon Saloma herself,
there's a similar kind of projection of desire and a projection of onto the Princess Salemi of what they want her to be.
So to her mother, Haraldur, she's the obedient daughter to Herod, she's the object of desire who is available for purchase.
However, the price to Yochanan, she's a harlot and actually indistinguishable from her mother.
In that sense, there's a way in which everybody is shaping the world around them in response to their own ideas and obsessions.
And in that sense, the play is about subjectivity and how we remake the world ourselves.
Our individual vision moulds it and creates it almost rather than simply reflecting or distorting it.
It's also a play that rewrites the myth of the Medusa Medusa being the snake haired woman whose look,
if you looked on her, you were turned to stone and who was only killed by Perseus by he only looks at her reflection,
the shield in order to kill her and in a similar way in Saloma looks have the power to transform looks,
have the power to change, but so does being looked at in that sense.
Saloma tells Yochanan. If only you had looked at me, you had fallen in love with me.
And there's this danger how much you reveal and how you describe the world around you, how much you give away.
And it's exactly. This that lies behind Herot statement that neither at things nor people should
one look only in mirrors should one look four mirrors do but show us masks,
in other words, whereas we reveal ourselves to the outside world in looking at looking at it,
if we only look at ourselves in the mirror, then our performance is what we see back.
The only one that that the only way to reciprocally reinforce your own version
of yourself and reveal nothing is simply to look at yourself in the mirror.
Another kind of reversal of the usual idea of the mirror giving you self-knowledge, that kind of just look in the mirror kind of corrective.
So taking all of that, all of these warnings in different ways, the basic facts of wild life, what we do now.
So he was born 16th of October, 1854, though he did actually lie about his age and set his date of birth was 1856 in the trials.
It's the kind of sign of how far, you know, as Lady Bracknell says, it doesn't do to be quite accurate, but accurate about one's age.
But it was not a good way of established himself as a reliable witness in court.
So he was born in Ireland.
Son of Lady Jane Wilde, otherwise known as Speranza, was the pen name she wrote under when she was writing to a lot of nationalist verse and so on.
Supporter of Home Rule and son of Sir William Wilde, who was an eye surgeon and lived in the very posh area of Dublin, Merrion Square.
He went to Trinity College,
Dublin for his first degree and then came to Modelling College Oxford in 1874 for his to do a second B.A. this time course in classics in.
And while he was an undergraduate here in 1878, he won the Newdegate PRISE for his poem Rabina.
In 1881, he published his first volume of verse and he then went on, he was already kind of lecturing,
began lecturing and at one kind of huge amount of public notice through the press and so on for
saying so that when the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan Opera of Patients went on tour in America,
he went on tour, was paid with a publicist to go on tour together with it.
So he was an example of an aesthete lecturing on aesthetics in conjunction with an opera operetta which was taking the mickey out of aesthetics.
And these days it's a very interesting kind of very, very skilled at using the publicity machine.
And what he seriously meant in that sense is very, very interesting.
He also in the early 80s wrote his play Veera Author Nicholas and the Duchess of Padua sorry, two separate places.
In 1884, he married Constance Wilde and had two sons, Vivian and Cyril, born in 1885.
In 1886, from 1880, he wrote a huge amount of journalism through this period and from 1887 to 1889, he edited The Woman's World.
He transformed the magazine from a kind of gossipy,
mostly just fashion news and no intellectual content into a magazine that in many ways was ahead of its readership.
So in the very first edition, there are articles on professions for women,
on economics, on the fallacy of the superiority of man, etc. But after a year or so,
he pretty much bored of the job and the magazine's readership fell because not enough people were willing to read about professional for women.
And the fallacy this period here, man, rather than fashion stuff and what kind of petticoats he ought to be wearing or whatever else.
And he dropped the editorship. Then in 1888, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
In 1891, often described as a. mirabilis, is a year in which he published Intention's,
a collection republished from the periodical publish of his literary theory, criticism, things like the critic, US artist and the decay of Lying.
He also published the picture of Dorian Grey and the collection of stories, The House of Pomegranates.
And it was also in that year that he met Lord Alfred Douglas. Follow his after that follow his place.
Salemi was written in 1891 but not first performed in Paris in 1896 after while he was in prison.
But there follows Lady Windermere's Fan Woman, the importance and ideal husband and the being earnest between 1892,
in 1895 and then in 1895, the first of the trials, which is where he prosequi.
He was the one who prosecuted the Marquis of Queensbury for libel because Queensborough had
left a note in Wild's Club address to publicly address to Oscar Wilde posing of Sodomite.
He wasn't a very good speller. Well, at least his handwriting was pretty atrocious. So it looks like he wrote some of them.
But anyway, and Wilde brought a prosecution for libel on the basis of that and in the process of that trial.
Queensberry brought forward evidence of what were then criminal sexual activities to court
on the basis of which Wilde dropped the prosecution and was very soon after arrested.
So he chose not to flee the country if he had a chance in between that before he was, he was he himself was arrested.
The second trial was a trial of him for gross indecency, which ended with a hung jury.
He was being tried together with Alfred Taylor, a brothel keeper,
and the third trial that rather than leaving it on a hung jury and dropping the case, a third prosecution happened.
You know, he was prosecuted. And in that trial, he was then convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour,
which was the maximum sentence that could then be given, then follow the two years in prison.
In the course of which he wrote what we now know as De Profundis and as the prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas.
And after his release, he published The Ballad of Reading. Gaol then follows Exile.
He rapidly gets back together with the Lord Alfred Douglas.
His wife cuts off his allowance on that basis, and he spends the last year or so of his life in penury and died in Paris in nineteen hundred.
So this leaves us with this question of the search for the real true wild, the real meaning of his works, what's the key to them?
I would warn strongly against the idea of approaching world in that way.
So the idea of the true anyone,
the real secret to anyone is something that Walt himself challenges and undermines and a whole plethora of his writings.
So Wilde's writings constantly challenge any simple division between truth and lies, between self and mask, between reality and fiction.
Similarly, it's very the idea of taking the life as revealing a key to the works is very questionable because Wilde himself,
again in his literary criticism, is very strongly opposed to the idea of any kind of simple biographical reading of the works and
certainly the kind of pathological reading that kind of medicalize his world as the very early,
frankly, homophobic works on world tended to do, again, very clearly dubious.
At the same time as I'm not advocating setting the life aside completely,
because one of the large things that you have to take into account with well is how
far just as he broke down any kind of simple division between public and private,
there's a sense in which there was a sort of wild, in inverted commas, the public world that Wilde himself created.
As you can clearly see in that sort of employing a publicist in this lecture
tour of America together with an operetta that's parodying people like him.
He was absolutely expert at using that late Victorian publicity machine.
So whether it's the photographs you're probably all familiar with that were taken by Sironi and so on,
whether he actually draughted interviews with himself that, you know, kind of co-wrote them with Robbie Ross and had them published.
He's absolutely expert. He used the periodical press constantly and a whole load of ways, including his letters to newspapers.
He was very, very good at.
As soon as a Ferrari been whipped up about something, he'd jump in there and exacerbate it with another sequence of letters to the press.
And that sense, he's constantly about wrong, putting the readership.
He builds up versions of himself. He uses that. It's a very kind of public image.
And I think the important thing is to recognise this idea of performance itself
that not put performance and truth in a kind of contradiction opposite,
but rather look at what the idea of self performance means within so many of his works,
the ways in which a performance is not the opposite of a truth, but can be a version of a truth.
It can be a possibility. It can be a desire. It can be it can be another aspect of self that's only discovered in the midst of performance.
The idea of getting to the truth self he undermines in all his works, including things like in the plays.
So the plays, all the plays have these ideas of the revelation from the past, the truth, the dark secret of somebody.
But they don't. So Mrs. Arbuthnot in a woman of no importance.
So Robert Chilton and an ideal husband, Lady Lynne and Lady Windermere's Fan and so on,
they've all got secrets revealed about them, but they don't fix them.
All of those characters and the plays in ways that are very, very it's very hard to know their true moral character is such a thing exists.
They're not fixed. They're not answered. They're not revealed in that revelation of the past.
They remain as mobile and mutable and unreadable in many ways as they were before that.
And in that sense, a lot of what world is doing is complicating ideas of judgement, challenging ideas that you can fix people.
And above all, asking questions, I think about the relation between individual identity and ideas, the public performance,
how the individual relates or negotiates with socially constructed ideas of gender, of nationality,
of class, etc. all of those there's a sense in which, just like with Ipsen,
there's a very complex relation between the individual and society that within but in a world very often a kind of performative one.
And that's also an enormously important key within much more contemporary study of world.
The idea of the performative and the slippery in the multiple and all of the rest of it
runs through contemporary criticism on what so they profundis it's often looked at.
It's the present known as the prison letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas address Dear Bozie,
his kind of nickname, the nickname that Douglas had written in prison.
It's often been read in the past in lots of ways as a kind of line of criticism that goes all the way back,
that treats it as this is the sincere wild,
this is the world with all that frivolity and game playing and everything else burnt off by suffering where he finally speaks from his heart.
It's the apology. It's the self defence, it's the truth. But since at last, forget that I am about to complicate that horribly.
So it is not I would argue that at all.
It's a far more complex and multiple text.
It's absolutely typically wilder and above all, because it exploits drama and plays with genre and engages with it in incredibly ambiguous manner.
So it is confession as an act of defiance. It is the writing of truth also presented as a shaping of a work of art.
And if his apology as accusation. Everything about it is complicated, including the very basic thing it is addressed there,
Bozie, but it's very, very, very questionable how far it is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas,
whether that is the recipient, the desired recipient of it, in the sense that Wilde was allowed to write personal letters in prison.
Therefore, he wrote a nearly 100 page letter addressed to Bozie.
It seems to have been started probably around autumn of 1896 and was finished in the spring of 1897.
Official prison rules were meant to mean that he didn't get to keep the manuscript at all.
That rather, he was only given a paper to write on each day and it was taken away.
Whereas actually the condition of the manuscript, which is now held in the British Library,
seems to indicate a quite a large amount of fair copying so that he did actually get the manuscript back.
And also passages that refer back to earlier passages which suggest he had access to earlier passages he was writing later ones.
So it's very there's a sense in which he seems to have been given more lenient conditions than the prison rules dictated.
Now, he wrote that and just before he left prison in 1897, in spring of 1897,
he wrote to his friend Robert Ross the following precise instructions on what to do with a manuscript that he was going to send him.
My dear Robbie, I send you in a role separate from this, my letter to Alfred Douglas, which I hope will arrive safe as soon as you.
And of course, Moradi, whom I also always include with you, have read it.
I want you to have it carefully copied for me. There are many reasons why I wish this to be done.
One will suffice. I want you to be my literary executor and would like you to have all my works well.
If you are my literary executor, you must be in possession of the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behaviour.
With regard to Queensberry and Alfred Douglas, when you have read the letter,
you will see the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the outside seems a combination of absolute idiocy with vulgar bravado.
I do not defend my conduct. I explain it also.
There are in the letter certain passages which deal with my mental development in prison and the
inevitable evolution of character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place.
And I want to you and others who still stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly and what mood and manner I hope to face the world.
Of course, I need not remind you how fluid a thing thought is with me, with us all, and of what an evanescent substance our our emotions made.
He then follows further instructions. I wish a copy to be done not on tissue paper, but on good paper, such as is used for plays and a wide rubric.
Hated margined should be left for corrections. The copy done and verified from the manuscript.
The original should be dispatched to add I, Alfred Douglas by Moore and another copy done by typewriter so that you should have a copy as myself.
OK.
Sounds straightforward, you then get so it now gets even more complicated, so Wild was not allowed to post the manuscript from prison as he had hoped.
Instead, he left prison with the manuscript, so he was allowed to send it off.
He kept it with him.
And on his release on 18th of May 1897, he then met with Robert Ross and handed the manuscript over to Ross Ross at Dieppe on the 20th of May.
Ross did not follow the instructions that were in the letter, though it's possible that Wildcoast gave him a different written instructions.
What Ross did was he got the letter copied and I'm going to call it the letter.
But whether it's a letter is clearly another dubious question and sent the typed copy to Alfred Douglas,
not the manuscript for which we are extremely grateful because Ross because Alfred Douglas then burnt what was sent to him.
So at least this way we keep the manuscript. So the copy was sent to Douglas, who destroyed it.
And in 1989, Ross gave that manuscript to the British Museum,
which at that point contained the British Library with instructions that it should not be opened for 50 years.
Now, Alfredo's denied having received any copy and later said he'd thrown it in the fire together with a cover letter from Robbie Ross in 1995,
Robbie Ross published approximately half of the original manuscript under the title De Profundis.
That version de Profundis had no indication that it was originally addressed to Alfred Douglas,
so it wasn't published as a letter at all in that sense. OK,
and the first point that the manuscript itself was taken out of the British Library
was in 1912 when a critic called Arthur Ransom had written a book on world,
which Alfred Douglas then prosecuted him for libel. On that,
he spent a vast amount of time prosecuting people for libel after Walter died and Robbie Ross got the
manuscript taken out of the British Museum and presented as evidence during the trial in defence of ransom,
saying this wasn't libel, it was true. And Douglas left the courtroom rather than listen to any of it.
OK, then there's a further version of that Scholten de Profundis that was published in 1949.
And further, Douglas goes on.
He writes a wonderful book in 1913 called Oscar Wilde Myself, in which he writes about he had no idea that Wilde was gay.
And when it came to the trial, he was so shocked.
There's a very interesting kind of history of Alfred Douglas and of what he writes and his unreliability in all sorts of ways.
Now, the first point that what we know is De Profundis was first published in anything like the complete version.
And as a letter was in 1962, which is when Rupert Daviss collected letters of Oscar Wilde was published,
which then included De Profundis as the letter addressed to Douglas.
There then a very few sort of things have been altered to that in the version that you'll now find
in the complete letters edited by Mervyn Holland and Richard Hart Davis to further complicate this.
It leaves this sense of what is so I will from now on, use the Title de Profundis to refer to all of these different versions of the letter.
OK, and I'm going to call it a letter or an essay or a work or whatever. That's not to presuppose and not to deliver what genre it belongs to.
But if I call it the thingy from now on, it's not going to make the lecture more coherent or more sensible.
And just what further complications? One of I think was simply the truly brilliant edition of De Profundis comes in the form
of Ian Small's new edition of it for the Oxford English text OEP edition of World Works,
which are meant to be the definitive scholarly edition.
He publishes data from this as two separate works, one, the shortened version that doesn't reveal that it's a letter,
and the second one, which he titles a pistola enculturated vocalist's, which is a version of the full one.
So in that sense, he's saying we have two different works here and the way in which Ross had chopped down and produced De Profundis
was largely in response to some of the sections that while gives instructions to in different letters,
to send to different people. So there's a sense in which this is a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, but it's also,
as he said, a letter to Robert Ross and to Moradi and all his good friends,
and you can expect it to form letters to other friends that he names like The Lady in Wimbledon.
It's in that sense, it is it it's in that cover letter he sent to Ross.
He describes it as a letter. He describes it as a as a work. He says Ross is a solitary executor, so she should have all of his works.
So it's a personal letter and it's a public letter to all his to many of his other friends.
It's an explanation to the world. It's a defence of himself and it's a literary work.
And I don't know how many of you have written, you know, kind of long letters to lovers or anything else.
But you don't tend to publish that. You don't tend to write them to all your other friends publicly as well.
You don't send letters to a friend via another friend to be copied and accepted and with a wide margin for you to edit it in future.
After having said, can you see how complex this thing is sounding?
So what is De Profundis to use the term which covers this umbrella of all these different versions and all this different content?
And who's it written to? And with that, how do we read it?
And one of the things that Wilde says repeatedly through so much of his writing
is how far who you're writing to affects what your reading work is unstable.
In that same sense, if the if art is marrying the spectator and not life who the spectator is becomes crucial there, who's being addressed.
So this instability becomes absolutely central in different ways to the work.
So what's in this wonderful multiple work? It's written to multiple different audiences and offers multiple different ways of reading.
It has there are two main ingredients in De Profundis,
they're kind of sandwiched between each other and kind of multilayered of M.V. of a literary work.
One of them is the accusation of Alfred Douglas accusation of all the ways in which he betrayed and exploited well on account of their friendship,
his own inability to break out of it, and accusations of Douglas's mother,
four different ways in which he again, kind of manipulated or exploited what the other layer is,
a lengthy account of his own previous stature, of his stature as a writer and a vast amount of a kind of demonstration and
action of his status as a literary critic as he offers kind of criticism of
a whole load of contemporary texts and ideas about romanticism and the Renaissance and the Bible as literature and all sorts of things tied into that.
So these two these things are layered together all the way through it.
Now, there's a real problem in taking De Profundis, as it has on has been taken in, especially in any film version of world,
you tend to get accounts that Walt gave of his relationship with Douglas, sort of just reproduced in film versions.
But I think it's a much more problematic and slippery and complex, deliberately complex text than that.
So just to start with the accusations of Alfred Douglas,
so Alfred Douglas is guilty of according to a lack of spiritual qualities and a lack of intellectual qualities as well, said he never had motives.
He only had moods.
He failed to appreciate Wilde work and wealth status as a writer, and he treated him simply as a financial provider and prevented him writing so well.
For example, contrast to different dinners one had in the Savoy with Douglas,
which cost over 20 pounds and in which too much was eaten and too much was drunk and nothing remained in the memory apart from the regret of that.
And that's contrasted with a three franc 50 centime dinner in a Soho cafe with Robbie Ross,
in which he had the ideas that formed some of his literary dialogue, some of his essays.
The trouble with that kind of simple contrast is the fact that so much time in day Profundis is spent on meals and drink.
It's rather like if and if you've read Evelyn Ward's Brideshead Revisited,
which is written post Second World War in the time of austerity and spends a vast
amount of time on expensive restaurants and good brandy and things like that,
there's a similar kind of lingering on physical details and lingering on luxury that isn't just regretful in that sense.
So there's an extraordinary blow-by-blow enumeration of the bills and the meals and the costs incurred by Alfred Douglas that produces,
as you read through a kind of inseparable and complex mix of emotional and material of financial and spiritual.
So this idea that Ros's guilt that Douglas is guilty of having simply lived this
kind of physical material life rather than an intellectual and spiritual one,
simply breaks down in the sense that you can't divide them in the work.
And it's also really important that in a lot of the literary criticism the world is offering and De Profundis,
it's also about in some ways that inseparability of soul and body, well throughout his works,
argues against what he sees as a kind of mediaeval separation of soul and body.
And he complicates that constantly throughout his work. I mean, just think about the questions about the separation of body and soul.
This sort of offered in the fisherman and his soul or in the picture of Dorian Grey.
You can't do simple formulas on that. So those kind of, you know, this kind of criticism of Douglas in many ways doesn't work.
Now, he sandwiches within that, a portrait of himself, a portrait himself is unable,
having given that in in small things, constantly unable to break away from Douglas in large things,
having lost his own sense of himself, unable to take control of things as he puts it, sees himself, presents himself as a victim.
Caught between Queensberry and Douglas blindly, I staggered like an ox in the shambles,
the shambles being the kind of alleyways that lead to the slaughter house, the wonderfully kind of large and almost sort of baroque image.
And he carries on to say, at the end of I was, of course, arrested and your father became the hero of the hour.
More indeed than the hero of the hour. Your family now ranks, strangely enough, with the immortals for with that grotesqueness of effect,
that is, as it were, a gothic element in history and makes Clio the least serious of all the muses.
Your father will always live amongst the kind, pure minded parents of Sunday school literature,
your places with the infant Samuel and in the lower stegmeier of Malabo Loog.
I sit between the Reds and the Marquis de Sade is a wonderful extravagance that I think not just a sort of bitter irony, but also humour.
There's a kind of grotesque exaggeration in those images that isn't just about the irony of how the world creates these images around him,
but he's doing it himself. He's kind of presenting them and destabilising them simultaneously.
It's not just about what's happened to him. It's about the arbitrariness and changeability of image itself.
He goes on to say, I don't defend. In that letter. He said, I don't defend my conduct.
I explain it. So what if we got humility or defiance, apology or accusation throughout De Profundis?
He does apologise for his failings. His failings are generosity, empathy, sympathy, patience, kindness.
I can carry on compassion, generosity, imagination, intellect, talent, originality, brilliance, etc.
He does not apologise also in that he condemns society's laws.
He says the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.
He says the only real sin he committed is when he turned to a law and a legal system he despised to seek protection from Queensbury.
That he sees as the only real sin and error that he made to us as a society that he despised to protect him.
De Profundis also contains the most extraordinary celebration you'll find if any of
you writing the third year special author paper on World pretty much every year,
some of what I now read will appear as a question because world provides the best possible exam quotes on himself and in that sense,
all the art that he is ready for it. He is ready for a special author paper at Oxford on himself.
So I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age, discussed the gods,
had given me almost everything I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliance, the intellectual daring.
I made art of philosophy and philosophy and art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things.
There was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I took the drama, the most objective form known to art,
and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation.
Drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle, fantastic dialogue.
Whatever I touched, I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty to truth itself.
I gave what is false, no less than what is true as its rightful province,
and showed that the false and true are merely forms of intellectual existence.
I treated art as a supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me.
I summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram.
Fantastic, isn't it? So what you have there and within that essay within De Profundis, he doesn't just talk about his literary brilliance.
He demonstrates that he performs it. He performs it in the literary criticism.
He does it, performs it in his analysis of the relation between art and life on the idea of the role of the artist in society and so on.
The essay is absolutely filled with comments on art, literary history, contemporary writing, the purpose, nature and function of art and so on.
And he very much wants to look at De Profundis alongside essays like The Decay of Lying in the Critic as Artist
and the Solomon and Socialism as part of his decade long dialogue about the function of art and the artist.
So we have an essay which celebrates Welldone humility, leaving the obvious problem of how one celebrates one's own humility.
There is only one recantation in De Profundis and that is a recantation of what he said in the soul of man and socialism some eight or nine years,
some seven, six, seven years earlier. So in the Solomon Islands Socialism, he talks of sympathy with suffering as a perversion,
sympathy of suffering as not as being as being ultimately pointless, a sort of vicarious, self-indulgent thing that blunts everybody.
Now he recants this so that sympathy with suffering becomes a root to self-knowledge.
So suffering and pain are no longer pointless as he presents them in Solomon on socialism, they become a route to self-knowledge.
And that's also a way in which he and the other inmates, he and the other criminals suffering, he and the other condemned in prison,
are gaining a superior emotional depth, a greater self-knowledge than those who have imprisoned them.
Now that they are the ones who are who remember themselves through remembering their past sufferings,
they have a depth and self-knowledge that the others lack.
Look at The Ballad of Reading Gaol for that kind of contrast between the depth
that we have as against the day of the prison governor and the doctor and so on.
Now, the other thing that he does in the Solomon and Socialism, which he doesn't recant on, is that he uses Christ as an image of the ultimate artist.
So in the Solomon under socialism, he describes Christ's doctrine not out as not as know thyself,
but as be thyself and offers Christ as the ultimate individualist.
Now he extends this in De Profundis, where Christ becomes not just the ultimate individualist,
but Christ is in sympathy with the criminals and the outcasts and himself the ultimate artist.
Wilde goes further than this. He also, by very, very clear implication, aligns himself with Christ.
So he writes that paralleling so just as Christ is martyred by his society,
so he parallels that society with his own as he writes, Christ's chief war was against the Philistines.
That is the war every child of light has to wage.
Philistinism was the notes of the Asian community in which he lived in that heavy inaccessibility to ideas,
that dull respectability, that tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success,
their entire preoccupation with a gross materialistic side of life and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance.
The Jew of Jerusalem in Christ Day was the exact counterpart of the British philistine of our
own Christ mocked at the whited sepulchre of respectability and fixed that phrase forever.
Now, just in case you think I'm going too far in saying that Wilde was paralleling himself with Christ here,
I should add, he also very, very clearly and explicitly parallels himself with the Pope.
So in his letter to Robbie Ross,
in which he gives instructions on what to do with De Profundis or that's what that's being the title that Robbie Ross gives it to it,
he declares that if the copying is done at Honiton Street,
the lady typewriter might be fed through a lattice in the door like the Cardinals
when they elect a pope till she comes out on the balcony and can say to the world,
How about moondust pistola? For indeed it is an encyclical letter.
And as the Bulls of the Holy Father are named for their opening words, it may be spoken of as the pistola in culture at Winkle's.
This is wild kind of playing some poor pope in that sense as George Bernard Shaw,
who I would urge you to look at any kind of George Bernard Shaw writings on Oscar Wilde should read.
They said it was only the edited version he first saw, and his comment was that it was not World de Profundis.
It was wild. In excelsis Absolutely.
At the peak of in control of things and all sorts of ways.
Now that I think it's one of the keys in that how far in De Profundis?
It's an act of wild taking hold of his life and moulding it as a work of art.
And this image, the idea that he's not in one sense,
he seems to be talking about himself as a victim of fate as all the things that were done to him and his own loss of agency in it.
But in another sense, he's talking about the idea that you are the author and creator of your own life and what he suffers from.
And when he talks through what happened to him in the course of his relationship with Douglas and his fall,
is that somebody else took over as director of his life, as author of his life, not in the sense of what they made him to do, but how they edited it.
So in that sense, he says things like that.
He had always seen his own life as a comedy, but then it turned out to be a tragedy, its kind of switch genre on him.
There's the narrative, he tells. It's one of the sort of most painful bits in the province.
He tells of how changing trains between prisons on the way to read in jail.
He was left. He was caught standing on the platform. Clapham Junction with the waters around him became a spectacle.
So huge crowd gathered around him to mock and jeer.
And he says every day for months afterwards, at exactly that time of day, he would burst into tears remembering that.
And there's a sense in which in that someone else is staging him, he's not in charge of himself.
He's being set up as a spectacle by somebody else.
Suddenly he writes about himself and all the other prisoners as the zanies of sorrow thanks to their prison dress.
In that sense, though, they're both costumed and staged in a way that undermines their human dignity,
their sense of themselves, their control over their own life.
And walled in De Profundis takes control of this again, in a sense, not ultimately Mould's it.
It's a work in progress.
But he talks quite precisely about the idea of returning to control exactly that re manipulation of the image you could call it.
So he says, I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me.
There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try to make into a spiritual ising of the soul.
I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply without affectation,
that the two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison.
Now you can read De Profundis the work as a whole as a performance of this.
It's a wonderful rather than wild sort of in in victimhood, crushed by the world, exiled.
And so there's a sense in which wild stages and de profundities himself taking hold of his own narrative,
again, turning himself as a work of art that he's repossessing and remoulding in front of the reader.
It's a kind of performance, a wonderfully self-contained performance, that sense in which the letter is addressed to all these audiences.
It's also addressed to no one but himself in other ways. Now, the idea absolutely challenge the idea that a life has one meaning.
It has many meanings. It turns into many works of art in different ways.
And in that sense, you can see De Profundis as a multiple as any of his other works of works of art.
It ends with this SustainX celebration of the power of art and fits in with his essays all the way from the early intention's right the way through.
And in that sense, in 1897, in disgrace, bankrupt in prison, deprived even of contact with his children, he actually offers a manifesto, an art,
a manifesto that is a declaration as much as it possibly could be viewed as an apology,
a work of art that's extraordinarily complex and difficult and multiple.
And in that sense, he creates himself before the audience of the reader and takes the reader through each of the moves in that process of
self creation before he leaves them at the end of the work with the work of self and the work of the literary work,
they profundis unfinished. So he finishes, do not be afraid of the past.
If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.
The past and the present and the future all but one moment in the sight of God in whose sight we should try to leave to live.
Time and space succession and extension are merely accidental conditions of thought.
The imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences.
Things also are in their essence. What we choose to make them a thing is according to the mode in which one looks at where others, says Blake.
See the dawn coming over the hill. I see the Sons of God shouting for joy.
What seemed to me to the world and to myself, my future,
I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking action against your father, had, I dare say, lost it really long before that.
What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes to make the world look on it with different eyes.
This I cannot do by ignoring it or slighting it or praising it or denying it.
It is only to be done fully by accepting it fully as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character,
by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered, how far I am away from the true temple of soul.
This letter, in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness,
its aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations shows you quite clearly.
So what you have there is a life as work in protest as well as this.
And in that sense, the life is work in progress. It's in process of being created.
It ends with yet more to be done. And in that sense, that fits that idea of what, while talking about life as work of art fits very neatly with,
if I talk of De Profundis as all these editorial possibilities,
all these letters to different people as a work of art, as something still to be corrected with a wide lubricated margin.
In that sense, Walt himself knows this work of art is also unfinished, ready for me, moulding, ready to become multiple different things.
So there's a wonderful kind of consonance between the complexity and stability of
De Profundis itself and of what was talking about that coming together of the two.
So in that sense, and that's also worth holding in mind in lots of ways towards other works.
The question of how far they reach one stable finishing point or they remain as multiple possibilities,
most obviously, in the case of the place, because they're there for performance,
which always means reinterpretation in every way, but actually there with pretty much all of his works and all sorts of different ways that you go.
I simplified this for you. Not next week.
It's wild as Victorian, a modernist. Thank you.