1 00:00:00,580 --> 00:00:09,670 Wild Victorian and modernised Wild was born in 1854 and died in nineteen hundred right at the end of the century, 2 00:00:09,670 --> 00:00:16,870 just a year before Queen Victoria, and there are many ways in which he kind of spans that area that we now know is the fantasy. 3 00:00:16,870 --> 00:00:22,390 That's where he has all his major works are published from the first works published in the 80s. 4 00:00:22,390 --> 00:00:32,770 His poems, his essays, Journalism very early plays through two major works in the nineteen nineties. 5 00:00:32,770 --> 00:00:36,670 So in that sense, he really bridges the gap between Victorian, 6 00:00:36,670 --> 00:00:44,590 the modernist and in many ways in rather than just seeing him as a Victorian east where the Victorian era kind of closes around nineteen hundred, 7 00:00:44,590 --> 00:00:49,930 it's much more helpful to think of him as part of a period that's now often recognised within literary studies, 8 00:00:49,930 --> 00:01:02,230 which is more 1880 to 1920, the way in which the 1881 1890 set up a lot of the experimentalism innovation and so on of early modernism. 9 00:01:02,230 --> 00:01:14,020 And at the time he was absolutely taken to typify fantasy at the end of the century and everything it meant decadence, decay, 10 00:01:14,020 --> 00:01:27,400 corruption, exhaustion, degeneration, or conversely, questioning, innovation, liberation, expansion, experimentation, exoticism, 11 00:01:27,400 --> 00:01:32,950 a huge number of different artistic schools from in some ways going all the way back to the 12 00:01:32,950 --> 00:01:38,380 Brotherhood and the so-called fleshly school of poetry all the way through to French symbolism, 13 00:01:38,380 --> 00:01:45,460 aestheticism, decadence, the kind of new drama that follows Ibsen and so on, 14 00:01:45,460 --> 00:01:51,280 while the epitome amidst this period, both for his admirers and for his detractors. 15 00:01:51,280 --> 00:01:59,800 So an enormously useful text for kind of illuminating his detractors, those who saw him while the great danger and a different kind of decadence, 16 00:01:59,800 --> 00:02:04,090 really useful text is the German max, no doubt, 17 00:02:04,090 --> 00:02:13,240 and Tottenham and Tartan being translated as the generation was written in 1892, translated into English in 1895. 18 00:02:13,240 --> 00:02:20,770 It went through eight editions in the first three years after its publication in 1895 in English. 19 00:02:20,770 --> 00:02:31,120 So it's hugely influential and hugely popular. And what Max no doubt offers in degeneration is a condemnation of all new movements in art 20 00:02:31,120 --> 00:02:38,560 as and new movements in society as symptoms of a social and indeed racial degeneration. 21 00:02:38,560 --> 00:02:47,160 And that's racial degeneration, as in a generation of the human species, the whole human race and particular kind of Western civilised human rights. 22 00:02:47,160 --> 00:02:51,340 So this is very much post Darwin and the idea of the evolution of species. 23 00:02:51,340 --> 00:02:56,650 But what he's saying is the danger of a degeneration and evolution that is not some 24 00:02:56,650 --> 00:03:01,810 kind of spin Syrian version of endless improvement and perfecting of the human race, 25 00:03:01,810 --> 00:03:10,180 but rather becoming cruder. And, you know, it's seen in things like the masculinisation of women, the new woman, 26 00:03:10,180 --> 00:03:16,450 the feminising of men in the forms of the kind of aestheticism and so on. 27 00:03:16,450 --> 00:03:27,940 And what you've got within and Tufton within the generation is wild offered as a sort of type of this, a perfect classic example of it. 28 00:03:27,940 --> 00:03:38,590 So no doubt inveighs against this genetically transmitted Dekay and physical degeneration and moral degeneration, 29 00:03:38,590 --> 00:03:47,710 which he sees as equally identifiable in the criminal and the artist in the so-called mentally defective and in the genius, 30 00:03:47,710 --> 00:03:53,680 they're all unnatural deviations from a healthy norm. 31 00:03:53,680 --> 00:03:57,670 So Max Nordahl defines the fantasy ekler. 32 00:03:57,670 --> 00:04:05,350 It means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force to the voluptuary. 33 00:04:05,350 --> 00:04:15,190 This means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man to the withered heart of the egoist disdain of all consideration for his fellow men, 34 00:04:15,190 --> 00:04:23,840 the trampling on the foot of all barriers which enclose the brute greed of Loukia and lust of pleasure to the timber of the world. 35 00:04:23,840 --> 00:04:32,260 It means the shameless ascendancy of base impulses and motives which were, if not virtuously suppressed, at least hypocritically hidden. 36 00:04:32,260 --> 00:04:39,010 To the believer. It means the repudiation of dogma, the negation of the supersensitive world, the descent into flat phenomena. 37 00:04:39,010 --> 00:04:42,820 Listen to the sensitive nature yearning for aesthetic thrills. 38 00:04:42,820 --> 00:04:49,300 It means the vanishing of ideals in art and no more pardners accepted forms to arouse emotion and to all. 39 00:04:49,300 --> 00:05:00,030 It means the end of an established order which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, foetid depravity and in every art matured something of. 40 00:05:00,030 --> 00:05:07,530 Beauty, so this is no doubt saying this is what's happening in every way to Western civilisation, 41 00:05:07,530 --> 00:05:12,810 and as within that book, he attacks all sorts of modern movements in art. 42 00:05:12,810 --> 00:05:21,480 So Zola's naturalism, Varner's music and operas, the open air painting of the impressionists, 43 00:05:21,480 --> 00:05:27,990 the poetry of symbolist, all of these are kind of degeneration of traditional artistic forms. 44 00:05:27,990 --> 00:05:36,490 And the example he offers of healthy art is wonderfully musical melodies, slapdash farces. 45 00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:49,110 And when it comes to fine art paintings depicting Munich beer houses, these are an example of healthy art, very much popular art. 46 00:05:49,110 --> 00:05:58,500 And what he's most interested in is this idea that underlying this is a deep seated belief in the benevolent force of tradition and the importance, 47 00:05:58,500 --> 00:06:02,760 the healthy importance of the norm of the average of orthodoxy, 48 00:06:02,760 --> 00:06:09,960 the idea that it's actually within the norm, within the average, that the health of the race lies. 49 00:06:09,960 --> 00:06:18,720 So tradition and being conventional and conforming becomes enormously important. 50 00:06:18,720 --> 00:06:29,610 And any deviation from this type can spell disaster, whether it's deviation towards the genius or towards the criminal or towards the idiot. 51 00:06:29,610 --> 00:06:36,160 All of those are pulling the race out into these unhealthy extremes, which will become exaggerated. 52 00:06:36,160 --> 00:06:43,200 And it's also fixed in this idea that what you're transmitting from generation to generation is not just genetic, but within behaviour, 53 00:06:43,200 --> 00:06:47,130 that the the genes will be altered by behaviour and then it will move further and further to 54 00:06:47,130 --> 00:06:54,490 extremes up until the human individual becomes incapable of fulfilling their function in the world. 55 00:06:54,490 --> 00:07:00,930 So some kind of sterility lies at the end of this, both from deviating from proper femininity and proper masculinity, 56 00:07:00,930 --> 00:07:07,080 but also if you do too much innovating and individualism. 57 00:07:07,080 --> 00:07:12,570 As you can tell, Wald's doctrine of individualism stands absolutely counter to this, 58 00:07:12,570 --> 00:07:21,540 and that's the use of no doubt explains the ways in which Wild's doctrine of individualism is actually very closely in conversation with very, 59 00:07:21,540 --> 00:07:29,490 very central ideologies of the times and how dangerous in many ways it was so old doctrine of individualism. 60 00:07:29,490 --> 00:07:35,310 It's absolutely about rejecting the standards of one's age, about thinking for yourself, 61 00:07:35,310 --> 00:07:42,110 about cultivating your own essential self, and in that sense, diametrically opposed to no doubts beliefs. 62 00:07:42,110 --> 00:07:48,000 So in degeneration, no doubt devotes almost an entire chapter to world. 63 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:54,210 And he also types him so that a lot of degeneration is set up as one of those absolutely classic 64 00:07:54,210 --> 00:07:58,470 end of the 19th century texts where everything is put into a kind of genus and species. 65 00:07:58,470 --> 00:08:07,980 It's all categorised. And Nordahl can stand alongside people like Cezar Lombroso, who in his very influential book, 66 00:08:07,980 --> 00:08:10,800 Criminal Man, does all the different categories of criminal, 67 00:08:10,800 --> 00:08:16,740 all of whom can be recognised and typed, including by the shape of their earlobes or the size of their craniums. 68 00:08:16,740 --> 00:08:21,090 So there's very much this idea that you can identify the type and categorise them so 69 00:08:21,090 --> 00:08:26,850 wild is filed on the ego maniac and part of the way in which this is manifested, 70 00:08:26,850 --> 00:08:34,950 the way in which it's dying. He's diagnosed as part of this group by Nordahl is by his desire to dress unlike other people, 71 00:08:34,950 --> 00:08:38,340 which is a sign of a kind of pathological madness, that kind of egotism, 72 00:08:38,340 --> 00:08:45,240 lack of self-control, gone mad, indubitable proof of his central moral perversion and really important, 73 00:08:45,240 --> 00:08:51,780 the date at which and Tartine was written in 1892. It's three years before the world trials. 74 00:08:51,780 --> 00:08:57,390 So in that sense, what Max no doubt was responding to and world is very much the doctrine's. 75 00:08:57,390 --> 00:09:05,130 It's not the idea that while there's some kind of version of sexual degeneracy because he can identify his homosexuality, 76 00:09:05,130 --> 00:09:13,920 it's very much about everything else, about world, certainly the way in which Wilde is challenging all sorts of very specific gender divides. 77 00:09:13,920 --> 00:09:21,480 But it's not a specific sexual attack. That's not what's being seen specifically as dangerous about wild. 78 00:09:21,480 --> 00:09:28,080 So in this sense, it's very clearly the very fact that no doubt will spend some 20 pages on the subject of wild and how he dresses and what he does 79 00:09:28,080 --> 00:09:37,410 with his art and what he argues in his essays and so on shows how far Wilde epitomised what was threatening and new at this point, 80 00:09:37,410 --> 00:09:44,010 the challenge of the new to orthodoxy. It's also interesting if you think about the kind of typing that Nadal's doing, 81 00:09:44,010 --> 00:09:51,060 this categorising of individuals and artists, importantly, think about the ways in which Willes, 82 00:09:51,060 --> 00:09:56,460 with his idea of the performance self, with his idea of the mutability of the self and so on, 83 00:09:56,460 --> 00:09:59,220 everything I was saying about what he thought of performing within. 84 00:09:59,220 --> 00:10:04,000 And so last week, there are many ways in which a lot of wild doctrine of individualism, 85 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:07,930 but also his challenge to the idea of any simple division between self and mask, 86 00:10:07,930 --> 00:10:12,130 between truth and lies and so on, all this resistance to catagories is, again, 87 00:10:12,130 --> 00:10:19,420 absolutely contrary to that kind of late 19th century obsession with typology and so on. 88 00:10:19,420 --> 00:10:25,390 So my aim in this lecture is to place wild, not on both backwards within 19th century discourses, 89 00:10:25,390 --> 00:10:32,380 but also forwards within 20th century development of ideas and artistic movements. 90 00:10:32,380 --> 00:10:42,580 So pretty much all of world works are very, very closely located, very much in conversation with 19th century literary genres. 91 00:10:42,580 --> 00:10:49,090 So, for example, his poems actually faced huge number of accusations of plagiarism because they were so closely 92 00:10:49,090 --> 00:10:55,150 tied in in style and subject matter to works of the late romantic's works also works by Swinburne, 93 00:10:55,150 --> 00:10:58,870 by Keats, by Rossetti and so on. 94 00:10:58,870 --> 00:11:06,820 But if you come to his place, for example, each of them are in conversation with different contemporary dramatic genres. 95 00:11:06,820 --> 00:11:12,940 So, for example, of women's importance and Lady Windermere's Fan within the fallen woman genre, 96 00:11:12,940 --> 00:11:21,730 the one that's about the woman's sexual past being discovered in the question of how she should be expelled from society or judged or punished. 97 00:11:21,730 --> 00:11:29,320 In the case of importance of being earnest, it's very much in conversation with Victorian farce, 98 00:11:29,320 --> 00:11:38,500 so very close to a place like Filberts Engaged or sweetheart to Pioneros parties like magistrates and so on. 99 00:11:38,500 --> 00:11:45,400 There are heavy elements of melodrama within these plays and in conversation with Victorian melodrama in that sense, 100 00:11:45,400 --> 00:11:51,160 and even these really early plays, the Duchess of Padua, which in one sense a sort of four to five act. 101 00:11:51,160 --> 00:12:03,160 This drama is looking back to works by people like Tennyson and Browning and so on, and also people like Victor Hugo and his drama and so on. 102 00:12:03,160 --> 00:12:06,460 Also the role of the Nicolelis, another of his early plays. 103 00:12:06,460 --> 00:12:13,150 There was actually a whole genre of Russian Nicolas plays that were hugely popular at the beginning of the 80s. 104 00:12:13,150 --> 00:12:17,110 So in that sense, each of his plays can be kind of located within sort of dramatic genre, 105 00:12:17,110 --> 00:12:25,630 but not so much located in it as in conversation with it, in conversation with its conventions and audience expectations within that genre. 106 00:12:25,630 --> 00:12:33,070 In the same way, think about Dorian Grey, how far it's within that genre of late Victorian Gothic, 107 00:12:33,070 --> 00:12:39,910 but also it's the idea of doubles and what so many of those works are doing with doubles right the way back to Frankenstein, 108 00:12:39,910 --> 00:12:48,250 but going through to things like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And also remember, it was first published in Lippincott, which was where Sherlock Holmes, 109 00:12:48,250 --> 00:12:57,640 the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories were first published. So the sign of fall comes out in an issue right next to picture of Dorian Grey. 110 00:12:57,640 --> 00:13:04,600 Think about that conversation and what that does to the novel, just as I also think about what it does with the idea of selling your soul, 111 00:13:04,600 --> 00:13:11,210 the pact over the soul, going back to Dr Faustus, also going through things like Meld with the Wanderer and so on. 112 00:13:11,210 --> 00:13:17,740 There are a whole load of text that it's in conversation. And that sense his short stories or do you call them children's stories? 113 00:13:17,740 --> 00:13:22,180 All sorts of questions about their obviously in conversation with Irish folk tales, 114 00:13:22,180 --> 00:13:32,080 with the growth in specifically for children stories written at the end of the 19th century with fairy stories, 115 00:13:32,080 --> 00:13:37,530 but also with biblical parable, a kind of mixed in there, all sorts of different genres. 116 00:13:37,530 --> 00:13:44,200 The question of which one you fix them in massively affects how you read them and how you're understanding them. 117 00:13:44,200 --> 00:13:51,840 His essays collected together later on, his literary essays Collected Since Intention's is the title, a wonderfully difficult, 118 00:13:51,840 --> 00:13:59,800 sort of tempting title, which in itself references Walter Peters collection of essays, appreciations. 119 00:13:59,800 --> 00:14:03,070 So the very title indicates a kind of conversation with genre. 120 00:14:03,070 --> 00:14:07,630 They themselves part of the periodical press engaging with a huge number of contemporary debates. 121 00:14:07,630 --> 00:14:10,270 As I go through now this idea, 122 00:14:10,270 --> 00:14:16,960 I think it's one of the keys to studying world and looking at what Wild's doing is to put his works in conversation with other contemporary works, 123 00:14:16,960 --> 00:14:23,950 to see them as part of a long running debates. And that comes right down both the macro of what he's doing as a whole with his works, 124 00:14:23,950 --> 00:14:28,420 but also the micro down to the small detail of how he uses language. 125 00:14:28,420 --> 00:14:36,970 So one of the things that world's best known for are phrases like divorces are made in heaven during sorry work. 126 00:14:36,970 --> 00:14:43,450 It's the curse of the drinking class's disobedience is man's original virtue. 127 00:14:43,450 --> 00:14:49,300 Now, the fact that these look like to lots of the kind of critics who were not admiring of what they look like, 128 00:14:49,300 --> 00:14:53,830 cheap tricks, all you do is take a well-known phrase or cliche and turn it on its head. 129 00:14:53,830 --> 00:14:59,870 And they complain that you could turn these out by the dozen is terribly, terribly easy or these critics complain. 130 00:14:59,870 --> 00:15:02,870 And it gets cold, wet, and actually we could all do it. 131 00:15:02,870 --> 00:15:11,000 I really like Bernard Shaw's response to this complaint that it's terribly easy to do where he says in his review of an ideal husband, 132 00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:18,710 Mr. Oscar Wilde. New play at the Haymarket is a dangerous subject because he has the property of making his critics dull. 133 00:15:18,710 --> 00:15:26,180 They laugh angrily at his epigrams like a child who has been coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage in agony. 134 00:15:26,180 --> 00:15:30,170 They protest that the trick is obvious and that such epigrams could be turned 135 00:15:30,170 --> 00:15:35,810 out by the score by anyone light minded enough to condescend to such frivolity. 136 00:15:35,810 --> 00:15:44,960 As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will. 137 00:15:44,960 --> 00:15:54,020 The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances says much for the self-denial of our critics. 138 00:15:54,020 --> 00:15:58,910 In other words, it's not that easy because if it were, you'd all be doing it because it makes lots of money. 139 00:15:58,910 --> 00:16:04,920 Now, when Wilde turns those phrases on their heads, he's not just therefore playing a cheap trick. 140 00:16:04,920 --> 00:16:13,790 It's not just a case of playing. Let's reverse every cliche. Those sayings, things like divorces are made in heaven. 141 00:16:13,790 --> 00:16:19,150 Work is the curse of the drinking classes. Each of those reversals, the fact is the same. 142 00:16:19,150 --> 00:16:24,050 His work turned upside down. Reverse them and they still make sense. 143 00:16:24,050 --> 00:16:31,730 But they're always the the fact that you're aware of them is a reversal of a more familiar phrase means they're constantly in tension with it. 144 00:16:31,730 --> 00:16:39,410 They're in conversation with the original, but also they're showing up the assumptions that underlie the original. 145 00:16:39,410 --> 00:16:46,790 So work is the curse of the drinking glasses is an obvious reversal of drink is the curse of the working classes. 146 00:16:46,790 --> 00:16:51,830 Flip it around and it reveals how much the phrase working classes is. 147 00:16:51,830 --> 00:16:56,150 They're not functioning as a descriptor, as a kind of neutral term to describe something. 148 00:16:56,150 --> 00:17:04,260 It's actually reducing that to their function. So a whole load of people that function becomes to work and drink is like the kind of, 149 00:17:04,260 --> 00:17:09,680 you know, grit in the machine that stopping it working properly while reverse is it. 150 00:17:09,680 --> 00:17:14,420 And you get a sense of the people's own perspective, what their lives might be about. 151 00:17:14,420 --> 00:17:18,140 Do you see what I mean? So it's sort of in that flip. It's in conversation with it. 152 00:17:18,140 --> 00:17:24,830 But it also reveals a whole set of assumptions and ways of thinking, just as divorces are made in heaven. 153 00:17:24,830 --> 00:17:30,500 Now, it's an obvious one about how far divorce laws loosened up and made available in nineteenth century, 154 00:17:30,500 --> 00:17:32,660 but also for those who are desperate for divorce. 155 00:17:32,660 --> 00:17:38,360 Actually, it's not a case of marriage being sacred and God given necessarily through the nineteenth century. 156 00:17:38,360 --> 00:17:45,050 There's a sense in which perhaps divorce is, too, and then things like disobedience as man's original virtue. 157 00:17:45,050 --> 00:17:50,360 It's an obvious flip of, you know, the idea that obedience is man's original virtue. 158 00:17:50,360 --> 00:18:00,680 But it's also a crystallisation of all of wild arguments in essays like Solomon and Socialism about the importance of protest, 159 00:18:00,680 --> 00:18:05,000 the importance of challenging sceptred morality. 160 00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:07,010 Think about disobedience. 161 00:18:07,010 --> 00:18:16,970 It's man's original virtue in relation to civil disobedience and things like the campaign for the suffrage and things like in the 1960s, 162 00:18:16,970 --> 00:18:23,120 civil rights protests in the nineteenth and so on, those kind of thing, their disobedience. 163 00:18:23,120 --> 00:18:32,300 But they're also a challenge to establish morality. And a lot of what Wild's looking at there is the idea that progress is this sort of process 164 00:18:32,300 --> 00:18:37,490 of challenging established morality to establish a new and hopefully better morality. 165 00:18:37,490 --> 00:18:45,080 So in that sense, the idea that disobedience is man's ritual virtue makes perfect sense within a different kind of moral system. 166 00:18:45,080 --> 00:18:49,340 Yeah, so it's that thing. Look for Wild's doing in microcosm. Now, 167 00:18:49,340 --> 00:18:53,930 all of those are kind of dependent on the idea that this idea that in macro what 168 00:18:53,930 --> 00:18:59,510 Walt's writing is so often the real sense of it lies in contemporary debates, 169 00:18:59,510 --> 00:19:03,320 how far his works are engagement's in those debates, 170 00:19:03,320 --> 00:19:09,110 and that new layers of meaning and understanding and power come out of them once you insert them into those debates. 171 00:19:09,110 --> 00:19:20,030 And you can understand what Walt engaging with and arguing with. Now, give an example of this, the soul of man under socialism. 172 00:19:20,030 --> 00:19:28,730 I think it's a really wonderful essay by Walt, first published in the fortnightly review in in February 1891. 173 00:19:28,730 --> 00:19:35,780 Within the Solomon and Socialism. He advocates socialism as the only true way to individualism. 174 00:19:35,780 --> 00:19:40,940 So he argues that under the current capitalist system, late nineteenth century capitalist system, 175 00:19:40,940 --> 00:19:46,940 the ills of the capitalist system lead not only to extreme poverty for many and enslavement and 176 00:19:46,940 --> 00:19:52,760 the heavy drudgery of long hours degrading work where the few live off the products of that work. 177 00:19:52,760 --> 00:19:59,490 He argues further that the enslavement, the lack of individualism in that society goes all the way through to the. 178 00:19:59,490 --> 00:20:08,040 So those who are well-off still get their lives marred by the sight of poverty around them and within that society worshipping wealth and belongings, 179 00:20:08,040 --> 00:20:12,870 people have lost sight of being of, in one sense, 180 00:20:12,870 --> 00:20:18,270 more spiritual values, in another sense, whichever values they wish to go for, this sense in which the whole system, 181 00:20:18,270 --> 00:20:24,150 the imposition of power, corrupts those who impose the power as much as those it's imposed upon. 182 00:20:24,150 --> 00:20:28,530 So he's arguing that this is what you get through a system of control and capitalist control 183 00:20:28,530 --> 00:20:33,330 and violence and all the rest of it and possession money and the commerce and so on. 184 00:20:33,330 --> 00:20:40,680 And he argues instead not for state socialism or communism, but for a form of anarchism. 185 00:20:40,680 --> 00:20:46,200 So one in which there are no laws whatsoever in which you disperse all forms of authority. 186 00:20:46,200 --> 00:20:49,920 So you get rid of the legal system in the penal system, but you also get rid of the family. 187 00:20:49,920 --> 00:20:53,840 You also get rid of private property completely. And it's a very wild. 188 00:20:53,840 --> 00:20:57,180 And so, again, this kind of quoting and reversing things, 189 00:20:57,180 --> 00:21:05,010 Prud'homme had declared that property is theft while declares that property is simply a nuisance. 190 00:21:05,010 --> 00:21:11,490 So, again, it's that kind of being in dialogue with another state and that wild within the essay he does actually advocate. 191 00:21:11,490 --> 00:21:17,040 So getting rid of all forms of authority, all notions of duty and so on. 192 00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:24,600 He wonderfully, he says, know not a case of state socialism because that again imposes authority upon everybody and enslaves in another way. 193 00:21:24,600 --> 00:21:29,400 But he does wonderfully, airily say everybody should have everything they need. 194 00:21:29,400 --> 00:21:34,860 The state should sort of produce things and everybody will get what they want. Don't know how it'll happen. 195 00:21:34,860 --> 00:21:44,460 And he goes on to say he absolutely recognises this is entirely utopian saying is this utopian a map of the world that does not include utopia. 196 00:21:44,460 --> 00:21:51,120 It's not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. 197 00:21:51,120 --> 00:21:56,820 And when humanity lands there, it looks out and seeing a better country set sail. 198 00:21:56,820 --> 00:22:00,390 Progress is the realisation of utopias. 199 00:22:00,390 --> 00:22:05,700 And if it looks as if it were practical, that would mean it was practical because it fitted in with the way society is now. 200 00:22:05,700 --> 00:22:09,120 And the whole value of it is it doesn't know. 201 00:22:09,120 --> 00:22:14,160 It's very easy from that to kind of dismiss the essay is therefore visionary, impractical, 202 00:22:14,160 --> 00:22:18,600 whimsical, maybe a kind of sheer display, which actually many of the reviews did at the time. 203 00:22:18,600 --> 00:22:23,040 So you'll find reviews at the time that said, well, if you meant seriously, oh my God, it be dreadful. 204 00:22:23,040 --> 00:22:31,800 But it's just a joke. Actually, that very which the point now you can look at it and dismiss it as simply a fairly visionary and utopian. 205 00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:37,690 Actually, that whole discourse of utopian versions. 206 00:22:37,690 --> 00:22:42,980 The future was a very, very strong political discourse at that time. 207 00:22:42,980 --> 00:22:49,820 Utopian anarchy was a strong influence on late 19th century politics and Wald's essays, 208 00:22:49,820 --> 00:22:57,710 you can absolutely see as a very informed engagement with a lot of the principles that are being debated and a lot of political writing at the time. 209 00:22:57,710 --> 00:23:06,830 So you can see a debt within the soul of man and socialism to William Morris and his utopian vision needs from nowhere. 210 00:23:06,830 --> 00:23:14,780 You can see the influence of Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Paul Kropotkin in there. 211 00:23:14,780 --> 00:23:17,150 As I said, you can see references to Prud'homme. 212 00:23:17,150 --> 00:23:24,770 You can look at there's also a line of the Daoism of Changsu, whose work he reviewed is very ancient Chinese sage Dagworth Sage, 213 00:23:24,770 --> 00:23:32,630 who while reviews his writings and that's another influence sort of running through the soul of man and socialism. 214 00:23:32,630 --> 00:23:36,530 It's a vision very close to William Morris's political vision. 215 00:23:36,530 --> 00:23:40,700 And very few people dismiss Morrises, therefore unimportant and so on, 216 00:23:40,700 --> 00:23:48,080 because the utopianism within it and it's also got a lot of very practical and of the moment revolutionary politics within it. 217 00:23:48,080 --> 00:23:53,540 So there's overt support throughout the essay, quite direct support for the Russian Nicolelis. 218 00:23:53,540 --> 00:24:01,250 So there's a revolution in protest against Tsarist rule in Russia. Now, if you look at contemporary newspaper reports in Britain at that time, 219 00:24:01,250 --> 00:24:07,850 there's some sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people under Tsarist rule, oppressive totalitarian rule. 220 00:24:07,850 --> 00:24:10,820 But there's absolute fear of the Russian Nilus. 221 00:24:10,820 --> 00:24:17,960 Any kind of revolution is something that scares the pants off the British public at that point to the British establishment. 222 00:24:17,960 --> 00:24:24,080 You get it all the way through to Lady Bracknell. The wonderful thing about to be born anyway sort of have to be that this happened to be 223 00:24:24,080 --> 00:24:31,160 born or any bred in a handbag seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decency, 224 00:24:31,160 --> 00:24:36,950 the family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. 225 00:24:36,950 --> 00:24:47,000 And we all know what that movement led to and instead to its sort of wobble, much as they might have done that brilliant film of it. 226 00:24:47,000 --> 00:24:53,480 And that sense that our world is doing that is mocking that fear of revolution itself, 227 00:24:53,480 --> 00:25:00,410 because he's actually allying himself absolutely clearly with armed insurrection behind the Russian nihilists. 228 00:25:00,410 --> 00:25:07,400 And in that sense, the essay is absolutely part of a kind of totally serious in many ways an important, 229 00:25:07,400 --> 00:25:12,920 intellectually valid, politically engaged discourse at the time and debate. 230 00:25:12,920 --> 00:25:20,570 The essay is not just Victorian politics. It's obviously Victorian, as well as being part of that popular periodical press. 231 00:25:20,570 --> 00:25:30,050 As I said last week, Wilders expert as his engagement with that popular press and the whole medium of publicising and self publicising and so on, 232 00:25:30,050 --> 00:25:35,480 everything from his lectures, his touring with D'Oyly Carte, 233 00:25:35,480 --> 00:25:40,520 his journalism, huge amounts of journalism and a whole range of periodicals through the 80s, 234 00:25:40,520 --> 00:25:45,350 even editing the women's world, having his photographs taken by Sironi and so on. 235 00:25:45,350 --> 00:25:47,210 Now he's also very canny. 236 00:25:47,210 --> 00:25:54,170 This is one of the things that I think has become a kind of issue amongst world scholars and about the last sort of 10 years, 237 00:25:54,170 --> 00:25:57,500 which is the way in which there's lots and lots of detail now available through great 238 00:25:57,500 --> 00:26:02,870 scholarship by Josephine Guyand in small on Wyles negotiation about his contract, 239 00:26:02,870 --> 00:26:08,150 how to get copyright on his works, but also how to get the maximum money out of what he's writing. 240 00:26:08,150 --> 00:26:14,090 And for some people, this equals he's therefore not politically engaged because he's very good at making money. 241 00:26:14,090 --> 00:26:20,510 Therefore, that's what he must be. Now, nobody says that of George Bernard Shaw, who's famous is one of the most engaged, 242 00:26:20,510 --> 00:26:25,400 politically engaged writers at that time who similarly is trying to work out 243 00:26:25,400 --> 00:26:29,480 just as well did how to get a percentage of box office returns for the place, 244 00:26:29,480 --> 00:26:34,160 he writes, and enormously involved in the establishment of the society of authors and 245 00:26:34,160 --> 00:26:39,730 trying to get maximal royalties and the best possible copyright on their work. 246 00:26:39,730 --> 00:26:47,270 So one of the interesting things is where money and the individualism of the artist, the freedom of the artist, come together. 247 00:26:47,270 --> 00:26:53,570 So the question about how to resist a marketplace that would like to dictate what you can write at the 248 00:26:53,570 --> 00:26:58,820 same time as exploiting a marketplace to make enough money to give you some kind of independence. 249 00:26:58,820 --> 00:27:02,120 So there's an interesting and complex negotiation going on there. 250 00:27:02,120 --> 00:27:05,990 And different critics have ended up not necessarily simplistically saying he's trying to make money. 251 00:27:05,990 --> 00:27:07,910 Therefore, that's all he's interested in. 252 00:27:07,910 --> 00:27:14,390 But how far he ends up falling into playing back to the marketplace what they want rather than challenging it. 253 00:27:14,390 --> 00:27:17,330 So that whole question about how he's working with genre, 254 00:27:17,330 --> 00:27:23,780 how far he's how he's working to a popular readership, but not necessarily giving them what they expect. 255 00:27:23,780 --> 00:27:32,630 It's quite a complex and subtle relationship. And it's one that importantly, you want to think about the way that aestheticism relates to that. 256 00:27:32,630 --> 00:27:37,340 So aestheticism as a protest against utilitarianism, market value and so on. 257 00:27:37,340 --> 00:27:42,460 So exactly what's expressed in the preface to Dorian Grey, there is no. 258 00:27:42,460 --> 00:27:47,770 No such thing as a moral or an immoral book, books are well written or badly written. 259 00:27:47,770 --> 00:27:52,930 That is all the moral life of man forms, part of the subject matter of the artist. 260 00:27:52,930 --> 00:27:58,420 But the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. 261 00:27:58,420 --> 00:28:03,640 No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. 262 00:28:03,640 --> 00:28:11,890 No artist has ethical sympathies and ethical sympathy, and an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. 263 00:28:11,890 --> 00:28:20,410 No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything thought and language, art of the artist, 264 00:28:20,410 --> 00:28:27,940 instruments of an art vice and virtue art to the artist, materials for an art. 265 00:28:27,940 --> 00:28:39,880 All art is quite useless. Now, time and time again, I've had students take these as though they are dictates, as though they are absolute statements. 266 00:28:39,880 --> 00:28:42,580 All art is quite useless. 267 00:28:42,580 --> 00:28:50,020 At which point said students then argue back that actually this this art happens to serve this purpose and therefore it's not useless. 268 00:28:50,020 --> 00:28:56,170 So the three volume novel can form a very good doorstop. 269 00:28:56,170 --> 00:29:00,920 You could light a fire with a sonnet. You can I mean, no art can manage to be. 270 00:29:00,920 --> 00:29:06,670 Obviously, there are logical flaws in that. It's very hard to dictate your art shall be useless. 271 00:29:06,670 --> 00:29:12,940 What Wilde is not doing is offering these as instructions, as dictators, absolute statements. 272 00:29:12,940 --> 00:29:22,660 What those statements do is defy you reject any other other way of valuing art. 273 00:29:22,660 --> 00:29:30,210 So to say all art is useless is a way. Its way of rebutting art is to be judged by its usefulness. 274 00:29:30,210 --> 00:29:33,520 OK, it's a rebuttal of utilitarianism. It's a rebuttal. All of that. 275 00:29:33,520 --> 00:29:36,850 Put those two together. Look at the preface to Dorian Grey. 276 00:29:36,850 --> 00:29:45,170 And it's a rebuttal of the idea that art is to be valued by its commercial value, its market value, by its educative function. 277 00:29:45,170 --> 00:29:46,780 But the idea that it makes you better, 278 00:29:46,780 --> 00:29:54,970 people buy the idea that it enlarges your sympathies or the idea that it's the function of cementing together civilisations of any of the things, 279 00:29:54,970 --> 00:29:59,290 for example, that Nordahl believes art ought to be doing OK. 280 00:29:59,290 --> 00:30:05,950 Art is to be judged by aesthetic criteria alone. OK, that's what Wilde is offering. 281 00:30:05,950 --> 00:30:12,670 So aestheticism as art for art's sake, like Dandyism with its emphasis on style and not usefulness. 282 00:30:12,670 --> 00:30:18,100 And so it's a way of responding to that heavily commercialised marketplace. 283 00:30:18,100 --> 00:30:23,350 It's a way of responding to a demand for art to be morally good and improving. 284 00:30:23,350 --> 00:30:26,320 And all the rest of it ought to be functionally useful. 285 00:30:26,320 --> 00:30:34,660 It's one that clears space for art to be valued for itself in a different way, not as a soapbox, not as a moral vehicle. 286 00:30:34,660 --> 00:30:43,300 And that fits in with world constant throughout his work, sort of mockery of the idea of art as a simple educative model. 287 00:30:43,300 --> 00:30:51,880 This idea of the idea of sort of moral improvement through art, through things like poetic justice, the good ends happily, the bad unhappily. 288 00:30:51,880 --> 00:30:56,440 That is what fiction means. It reduces the whole of poetic justice. 289 00:30:56,440 --> 00:31:01,270 The idea that that teaches you about good and bad to one kind of wonderfully compressed, 290 00:31:01,270 --> 00:31:06,730 ludicrous phrase from prison, just as Miss Prisons response to the news of Ernest death. 291 00:31:06,730 --> 00:31:11,590 What a lesson. I trust he will profit by it. 292 00:31:11,590 --> 00:31:17,200 That whole kind of the sense in which that kind of morality is also incredibly vicious in its own 293 00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:23,650 way and completely ludicrous is a way of improving people or mocking Victorian sentimentality. 294 00:31:23,650 --> 00:31:33,190 So Wilde's response to the news of the death of Little Nell, it would take a man with a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. 295 00:31:33,190 --> 00:31:37,570 He's always kind of pushing back against those kind of models of literature. 296 00:31:37,570 --> 00:31:41,740 And in that sense, look at the last section of the Solomon Islands socialism. 297 00:31:41,740 --> 00:31:49,180 It's a whole, in a sense, manifesto devoted to attacking public opinion as a valid force over art. 298 00:31:49,180 --> 00:31:54,490 So, again, absolutely opposite to where no doubt locating art and its value. 299 00:31:54,490 --> 00:31:59,230 The artist instead in world opinion is the supreme individualist. 300 00:31:59,230 --> 00:32:04,180 Any association, he asserts, between the work of art and the artist is invalid. 301 00:32:04,180 --> 00:32:09,910 You cannot judge the artist by the work of art that's produced instead. 302 00:32:09,910 --> 00:32:16,750 And any kind of criticism of the work of art in moral or health terms as things like morbid, 303 00:32:16,750 --> 00:32:20,710 unhealthy, exotic, all of those kind of terms, common critical terms. 304 00:32:20,710 --> 00:32:30,040 At that point, moral disapproval are all invalid and are seen as wild as simply expressing fear of the new fear of innovation, 305 00:32:30,040 --> 00:32:33,700 fear of moving beyond established guidelines and traditions. 306 00:32:33,700 --> 00:32:41,260 And in that sense, there's a way in which you can read the Solomon and Socialism as basically a manifesto for modernism. 307 00:32:41,260 --> 00:32:42,750 Listen to this. 308 00:32:42,750 --> 00:32:52,140 The one thing that the public dislike is novelty, any attempt to extend the subject matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public. 309 00:32:52,140 --> 00:32:58,920 And yet the vitality and progress of art depend in large measure on the continual extension of subject matter. 310 00:32:58,920 --> 00:33:06,540 The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mood of individualism and obsession on the part of the 311 00:33:06,540 --> 00:33:10,890 artist that he selects his own subject matter and treats it as he chooses. 312 00:33:10,890 --> 00:33:19,410 The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. 313 00:33:19,410 --> 00:33:27,780 Therein lies its immense value. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of art. 314 00:33:27,780 --> 00:33:34,980 They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of beauty in new forms. 315 00:33:34,980 --> 00:33:42,270 They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter, why he does not paint like someone else. 316 00:33:42,270 --> 00:33:48,240 Quite oblivious to the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind, he would cease to be an artist. 317 00:33:48,240 --> 00:33:53,940 And that they think about the response to the impressionist at the post-Impressionist Cubism, 318 00:33:53,940 --> 00:33:59,190 the works of Picasso, Matisse, and some think of the music of Bogner, Stravinsky, Kandinsky. 319 00:33:59,190 --> 00:34:05,970 I mean, there are so many of these ones and that kind of response of fear and discussant anger that greeted a lot of their work. 320 00:34:05,970 --> 00:34:12,090 That's what wild arguing for the freedom to innovate and to move away from classical established forms. 321 00:34:12,090 --> 00:34:20,640 Now, the work of worlds most clearly bridges this sort of gap, conceptual gap in many ways, artistic gap between the Victorian era in the modern era, 322 00:34:20,640 --> 00:34:25,600 between what we see as Victorian art and work and modernist art and work is probably his place. 323 00:34:25,600 --> 00:34:30,990 Salomé, it's one very, very clearly has a foot in both camps. 324 00:34:30,990 --> 00:34:36,340 It was inspired by literary movements and works of the 80s and 90s, 325 00:34:36,340 --> 00:34:44,610 and it massively inspired a whole host of experimental, innovative works going into the 19th into the 20th century. 326 00:34:44,610 --> 00:34:51,930 Salemi was first written in French in 1891 with a biblical subject matter, and it's highly stylised. 327 00:34:51,930 --> 00:34:56,520 It was refused a licence on that basis of the biblical subject matter. 328 00:34:56,520 --> 00:34:59,850 It was refused a licence for public performance in nineteen ninety three. 329 00:34:59,850 --> 00:35:09,240 So there was a performance plan, a production plant with Sara Banhart in the lead role of Salome, but it was refused a public licence for performance. 330 00:35:09,240 --> 00:35:17,460 It's written as a symbolist work strongly inspired by the work of Baudelaire, LeFleur Dimel with its atmosphere of exoticism, 331 00:35:17,460 --> 00:35:27,240 sinister beauty, its challenges to conventional morality, and also the ideas of correspondence of the correspondence between smells, 332 00:35:27,240 --> 00:35:38,760 colours, sounds, sights, music and the rhythms of poetry and images and the idea that they all of these can not just converge and merge, 333 00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:47,670 but actually have equivalencies between them. That's a huge those theories were huge of synaesthesia and correspondance were a huge influence on, 334 00:35:47,670 --> 00:35:53,490 for example, the opera and works of Bachner and the painting of Kandinski. 335 00:35:53,490 --> 00:36:02,370 So Wild's absolutely joining in with some of the fundamental artistic theories and some that lie behind early and late modernism. 336 00:36:02,370 --> 00:36:07,110 The work is also hugely influenced by the theatre of Maurice Maeterlinck, 337 00:36:07,110 --> 00:36:14,460 Belgian playwright who wrote Le Princess, Malen Pelleas, Emeli Sande, Lantus, Lederberg, 338 00:36:14,460 --> 00:36:19,710 their kind of minimalist, very highly stylised language, poetic works, 339 00:36:19,710 --> 00:36:25,200 which are huge influence in lots and lots of later theatre through singing and all the way through to Beckett. 340 00:36:25,200 --> 00:36:27,150 There's a great book on that, 341 00:36:27,150 --> 00:36:34,020 The Irish Drama of Europe by Catherine Werth that looks at the way in which Maeterlinck kind of helped shape 20th Century Theatre. 342 00:36:34,020 --> 00:36:39,900 Other influences on Salemi reaching back into the 19th century flowerbeds A.D.s one of his two account, 343 00:36:39,900 --> 00:36:45,060 three tales that were collected, which is a sort of short story, very jewelled, 344 00:36:45,060 --> 00:36:52,050 exotic, full of archaism and different ways, and a huge emphasis on style for its own sake, 345 00:36:52,050 --> 00:36:57,390 a kind of intensity of language that's almost emotionally detached from its subject matter. 346 00:36:57,390 --> 00:37:02,370 That's a huge it becomes enormously important on lots and lots of later writing. 347 00:37:02,370 --> 00:37:09,840 And Wald's kind of clearly paying homage to that as he is to Malamud's poem, Diat, 348 00:37:09,840 --> 00:37:14,400 which is another very clear influence, especially in the kind of characterising of Salomé within the poem. 349 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:19,890 And Walt himself address Malama as share. Metcher Dear Master. 350 00:37:19,890 --> 00:37:22,260 So that's very kind of clear homage going on there. 351 00:37:22,260 --> 00:37:28,350 And the other thing that the play's rooted in is a thought systems of thought behind French symbolism, 352 00:37:28,350 --> 00:37:33,150 a lot of which were about the primacy of imagination over reality, 353 00:37:33,150 --> 00:37:42,110 of a physical reality, the importance of the life of the imagination and the mind, the importance of subjectivity, illusion. 354 00:37:42,110 --> 00:37:50,630 Projection, the internal life of passion is being more important than the external life of physical fact and the style of the French symbols, 355 00:37:50,630 --> 00:37:59,390 obscurity, language which becomes opaque, not translucent, where description is transformation rather than a neutral delivery. 356 00:37:59,390 --> 00:38:03,710 And that's something I want to give to give you a sense of what I'm talking about. And let's hope it works. 357 00:38:03,710 --> 00:38:14,500 Supposedly, I just have to play. Is it going to work? 358 00:38:14,500 --> 00:38:23,500 Just listen to this excerpt, if you can hit the lights at the back, that probably really help. 359 00:38:23,500 --> 00:38:39,250 Thank you. I believe else hit the snooze button. 360 00:38:39,250 --> 00:38:51,660 I not. This looks like the mountains of data and down into the. 361 00:38:51,660 --> 00:38:57,890 And the with green of the I know white. 362 00:38:57,890 --> 00:39:06,000 Number is on the screen right now. You know. 363 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:10,940 We. John. 364 00:39:10,940 --> 00:39:18,760 The man on the. And she might. 365 00:39:18,760 --> 00:39:35,330 Brassed. There is nothing in the. 366 00:39:35,330 --> 00:40:09,280 Let me. My woman came into the world speaking out to me, I would not listen to me, I listened to the voice of the Lord God, I love that it was that. 367 00:40:09,280 --> 00:40:16,320 It is time now to go with my friend and grow. 368 00:40:16,320 --> 00:40:37,070 School kids that made their nests so. I could possibly have some things desirable, my body, it is the horrible. 369 00:40:37,070 --> 00:40:47,690 The. I am an. 370 00:40:47,690 --> 00:41:01,680 Is that. And the of mass graves like these in the land of the Aevermann. 371 00:41:01,680 --> 00:41:10,910 I. This is a. 372 00:41:10,910 --> 00:41:15,700 Like. The case of the. 373 00:41:15,700 --> 00:41:24,480 The decision to deny. And for the brothers who attacked this day. 374 00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:31,360 You know, that night. I would say. 375 00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:39,450 Star. And not so. 376 00:41:39,450 --> 00:41:48,280 Some. It was on the floor. It's not so. 377 00:41:48,280 --> 00:41:58,040 There is nothing in the world. Lynette. 378 00:41:58,040 --> 00:42:14,210 The. But don't touch me, notes Griffin Temple of the Lord God. 379 00:42:14,210 --> 00:42:25,930 Of. It is lexigram. 380 00:42:25,930 --> 00:42:32,570 Not public servants privately run by net. 381 00:42:32,570 --> 00:42:43,780 No, no. It just by design and. 382 00:42:43,780 --> 00:42:49,570 There you get the message, if you have the lights again at the back, that would be brilliant. 383 00:42:49,570 --> 00:42:55,690 Thank you. You see what I mean about a language that's not translucent. 384 00:42:55,690 --> 00:43:01,370 It's a language that's transformative. That's kind of an object in itself. 385 00:43:01,370 --> 00:43:05,230 If you see it to me, it's duelled. It's encrusted solid. 386 00:43:05,230 --> 00:43:13,210 It's about itself. It's about the act of seeing and transforming. It's not illustration or representation. 387 00:43:13,210 --> 00:43:15,490 It's language itself in that form. 388 00:43:15,490 --> 00:43:22,360 And also see that in conversation with all sorts of issues with modernism about the possibility of language being representation, 389 00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:26,590 the whole fundamental challenge to realism that's contained in modernism. 390 00:43:26,590 --> 00:43:30,920 And that sense, French symbolism is one of the major stepping stones towards modernism, 391 00:43:30,920 --> 00:43:34,840 one of the major contributors to the development of a lot of modernist theories. 392 00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:38,740 And you get that idea, that obscurity, the transformative gaze and so on. 393 00:43:38,740 --> 00:43:45,280 It's all there. It's part of French symbolist theatre and it's there in world's own directions for how the play should be produced. 394 00:43:45,280 --> 00:43:48,910 So he's got a whole load of ideas. He talks about about how it should be done. 395 00:43:48,910 --> 00:43:55,360 One is that all the characters should be in different forms of yellow from pale yellow to orange. 396 00:43:55,360 --> 00:44:00,400 Another is that the different characters and play should be a different kind of representative colours. 397 00:44:00,400 --> 00:44:05,890 So, for example, Salame should be dressing green like a poisonous green lizard. 398 00:44:05,890 --> 00:44:09,700 And one of my favourites is the idea that for each emotion in the play, 399 00:44:09,700 --> 00:44:16,420 there should be braises of perfume down at the front, which will release the different perfume for each emotion. 400 00:44:16,420 --> 00:44:24,160 Now this wonderful, extravagant design concepts absolutely fit with cutting edge avant garde theatre at that time. 401 00:44:24,160 --> 00:44:30,940 So and pull Ford's Theatre, there was a production of the Padar in 1891. 402 00:44:30,940 --> 00:44:34,630 There was production of the song of songs and you can hear the echo of the song 403 00:44:34,630 --> 00:44:39,070 of songs just in that excerpt there in the language and in that production, 404 00:44:39,070 --> 00:44:41,470 it was an experiment in synaesthesia. 405 00:44:41,470 --> 00:44:49,720 So there were different letters, different colours, different sounds projected simultaneously together with different scents. 406 00:44:49,720 --> 00:44:53,560 But you can work out the fundamental problem in the whole Brayshaw perfume thing. 407 00:44:53,560 --> 00:44:58,900 You can imagine if we were if there were an emitting for each different, I don't know, 408 00:44:58,900 --> 00:45:04,990 paragraph subjects in this lecture, I let out a different smell from my braziers of perfumes. 409 00:45:04,990 --> 00:45:09,040 They would mingle extremely efficiently in the lack of air conditioning and this 410 00:45:09,040 --> 00:45:15,640 lecture theatre and you end up with one mulch was exactly what happened in the dark. 411 00:45:15,640 --> 00:45:20,980 There is a certain problem to using perfume as a part of your production concept. 412 00:45:20,980 --> 00:45:27,130 Now, the legacy of salumi, the production history. Salimi absolutely fits with this kind of experimentalism. 413 00:45:27,130 --> 00:45:30,700 So think through some of the most famous images connected with the place, 414 00:45:30,700 --> 00:45:36,070 which are the illustrations done by Obree Beardslee and that kind of minimalist art. 415 00:45:36,070 --> 00:45:40,780 Look at the illustrations both for the idea of the figure of wild that you see in the 416 00:45:40,780 --> 00:45:45,520 moon in there and you see as the master of ceremonies within Beardsley's illustrations. 417 00:45:45,520 --> 00:45:52,360 There's a lot there about that idea of the self-consciousness of the art form, the conversation about where the author's located in relation to it. 418 00:45:52,360 --> 00:45:57,940 Also the ways that between representation design in those illustrations, 419 00:45:57,940 --> 00:46:05,410 it's pretty much impossible to separate the two just as the post-impressionist start moving to this kind of blending of representation and 420 00:46:05,410 --> 00:46:13,120 design and a challenge to any kind of differentiation between them and then performances of the play in 1896 with the first performance, 421 00:46:13,120 --> 00:46:18,820 I mean, even the very earliest, the 1893 performance that was planned was very clearly no naturaliste in lots, 422 00:46:18,820 --> 00:46:22,750 where Sara Banhart was 49 when she was meant to be playing. 423 00:46:22,750 --> 00:46:30,070 So it's obviously about the transformative gaze in lots of ways when you've got her as the Young Princess 1896, 424 00:46:30,070 --> 00:46:34,750 the first performance was put on in Paris by Loonier Po and the delivery. 425 00:46:34,750 --> 00:46:39,310 And again, it's one of the absolute cutting edge avant garde theatres of Paris. 426 00:46:39,310 --> 00:46:41,650 In nineteen eighty eight, 427 00:46:41,650 --> 00:46:51,190 there was a Russian production of Salomé at the Komisarjevsky Theatre in St Petersburg with a stage set resembling a vast vagina in 1995. 428 00:46:51,190 --> 00:46:56,830 You have Richard Strauss's opera Salome based on the play 1917. 429 00:46:56,830 --> 00:47:01,780 There was a production at the Kermani Theatre in Moscow with cubist designs and costumes. 430 00:47:01,780 --> 00:47:08,860 Again, absolutely cutting edge. One of my favourites nineteen eighteen Maud Allen. 431 00:47:08,860 --> 00:47:14,320 It was a huge sensation in London with her modernist freeform dance, The Dance of Salomé, 432 00:47:14,320 --> 00:47:21,310 which she did in the kind of pearl jewelled bra and so on, and a sign of how far the sexuality the play continued to be troubling. 433 00:47:21,310 --> 00:47:25,660 A guy called Pemberton billing an MP called Pemberton Billing inveighed against 434 00:47:25,660 --> 00:47:30,160 the sort of sexual display that was included in Saloma and argue this is 1918, 435 00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:39,460 that it was part of a kind of German Fifth Column attempt to undermine the morals of English society and kind of thereby win the war. 436 00:47:39,460 --> 00:47:48,360 And he wrote this this article in the. About the idea that more Allen was part of this sort of German fifth column under the title cult, The Clitoris. 437 00:47:48,360 --> 00:47:52,480 She brought a prosecution for libel and part of his defence. 438 00:47:52,480 --> 00:47:57,440 What was the idea that saying he'd libel said by calling her a lesbian and all the rest of it? 439 00:47:57,440 --> 00:48:03,570 The defence was that if she knew what a clitoris was, then she must be a lesbian. 440 00:48:03,570 --> 00:48:10,860 The whole thing is fantastic. And just as the icing on the cake, Lord Alfred Douglas was part of an billing's defence. 441 00:48:10,860 --> 00:48:19,020 So the whole thing is just too good to be true. In 1977, there was the Lindsay camp's famous all male production of the play. 442 00:48:19,020 --> 00:48:27,120 And this one, what you've got. What I was showing you is 1988 Stephen Burkhoff production, the play in which pretty much everything is mined. 443 00:48:27,120 --> 00:48:30,810 So it was all played at half speed, as you can tell, with that very jewelled language, 444 00:48:30,810 --> 00:48:36,450 but also everything from Saloma Dance as a kind of mime striptease in which no clothes 445 00:48:36,450 --> 00:48:40,140 are revealed through to her holding the head where you can absolutely see the head, 446 00:48:40,140 --> 00:48:48,660 but it's just her hands held out. So it becomes about the imagination of the audience, your projection into that space as much as anything else. 447 00:48:48,660 --> 00:48:53,610 And in that sense, Sellami absolutely crosses this divide supposed divide. 448 00:48:53,610 --> 00:48:58,960 And that's true of all of Wilde's essays, The Critic as artist, although the critic is artist, 449 00:48:58,960 --> 00:49:04,500 the decay of lying, pen, pencil, the poison, the truth of Moss, all gathered together in this collection called Intention's, 450 00:49:04,500 --> 00:49:10,320 a wonderful collection of essays in which it is impossible to determine what their intentions are. 451 00:49:10,320 --> 00:49:15,330 Impossible. They're written so many of them, either in a paradoxical form or dialogue form, 452 00:49:15,330 --> 00:49:22,290 in a way that discovering what they're meant to mean, where to locate authorial view becomes pretty much impossible. 453 00:49:22,290 --> 00:49:28,170 All sorts of deceptive things are happening or complicated things that in that sense are about engaging with contemporary dialogues, 454 00:49:28,170 --> 00:49:34,410 but also in dialogue with you, the reader. So one of the things you're having to do is negotiate the form. 455 00:49:34,410 --> 00:49:40,890 Now, just as an example of one way in which those essays are engaging with contemporary debates and 456 00:49:40,890 --> 00:49:46,540 absolutely right down to the kind of references and quotations and words and so on get into them. 457 00:49:46,540 --> 00:49:55,680 I just want to give you one example, which is the critic is artist, first titled The True Function and Value of Criticism A Dialogue. 458 00:49:55,680 --> 00:50:04,660 Now, that essay advocates criticism as an expression of the critics personality as more creative than creation as is bewildered. 459 00:50:04,660 --> 00:50:12,090 So it's argued. But when I say the essay argues, what I mean is Gilbert within the essay argues and Earnest responds to. 460 00:50:12,090 --> 00:50:18,390 So be very, very careful of taking it that Gilbert is wild in that sense and that the essay argues that. 461 00:50:18,390 --> 00:50:28,200 So the essay stages an argument that whether the essay itself is arguing, it is a simplifying of that process and the form that it's taking. 462 00:50:28,200 --> 00:50:32,910 So the bewildered Ernest sums up his friend Gilbert's argument. 463 00:50:32,910 --> 00:50:39,510 You have told me many strange things tonight, Gilbert. You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, 464 00:50:39,510 --> 00:50:46,050 and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world. You have told me that all art is immoral and all thought dangerous. 465 00:50:46,050 --> 00:50:50,460 That criticism is more creative than creation and that the highest criticism 466 00:50:50,460 --> 00:50:54,900 is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist had not put there, 467 00:50:54,900 --> 00:51:05,370 that it is exactly because the man cannot do a thing that is the proper judge of it and that the true critic is unfair, insincere and not rational. 468 00:51:05,370 --> 00:51:16,410 Now, while here is engaging with Matthew Arnold's essay, the function of criticism at the present time, Arnold had said in that essay, 469 00:51:16,410 --> 00:51:26,520 Arnold argues for the importance of the critic being disinterested, being fair, being unbiased, being precise, being a subjective as being objective. 470 00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:30,720 So in a phrase which Wilde quotes later, in effect, 471 00:51:30,720 --> 00:51:34,770 Matthew Arnold argued first in on translating Homer and then repeats it in his 472 00:51:34,770 --> 00:51:38,880 essay on the function of criticism that the primary purpose of criticism is, 473 00:51:38,880 --> 00:51:42,540 quote, to see the object as in itself. 474 00:51:42,540 --> 00:51:48,870 It really is a novel and refers with confidence throughout this essay to universities at the university, 475 00:51:48,870 --> 00:51:53,280 recognisable absolute values of truth, excellent wisdom. 476 00:51:53,280 --> 00:51:57,600 The best that is there is in thought and art often capitalised as well. 477 00:51:57,600 --> 00:52:00,450 Now this is taken up by Walter Pater. 478 00:52:00,450 --> 00:52:10,050 So Walter Pater, in his work studies in the history of the Renaissance, often just known as the Renaissance, refers back. 479 00:52:10,050 --> 00:52:13,080 He again theorises what it is to be a critic. 480 00:52:13,080 --> 00:52:23,430 And instead of arguing for objectivity and impersonality, he offers a different version of what it is to respond to the world around him. 481 00:52:23,430 --> 00:52:27,450 So he says, experience already reduced to a group of impressions, 482 00:52:27,450 --> 00:52:34,290 is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voices ever pierced us 483 00:52:34,290 --> 00:52:41,120 on its way to us or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without every one of those impressions. 484 00:52:41,120 --> 00:52:44,580 This the impression of an individual in his isolation, 485 00:52:44,580 --> 00:52:50,880 each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner and his own dream of a world, and he concludes, therefore, 486 00:52:50,880 --> 00:52:54,540 because you're imprisoned in itself and this wall of personality, 487 00:52:54,540 --> 00:53:04,650 that the closest you can get to knowing the object is to know one's own impression, as it really is now, while deliberately references that debate. 488 00:53:04,650 --> 00:53:11,940 So what you've got is one critic answering another critic. Wald's reference response to that is the idea of, as I sum it up, 489 00:53:11,940 --> 00:53:19,560 have a look at the the quote is to sum up the critics job as not to attempt objectivity despite this wall of personality, 490 00:53:19,560 --> 00:53:24,180 but rather to see the object as in itself, it really is not. 491 00:53:24,180 --> 00:53:29,190 So he's read. So to me, that's a quote that's like disobedience as man's original virtue. 492 00:53:29,190 --> 00:53:34,590 It's a quotation. That's a quotation that misquotation distortion, a quotation, 493 00:53:34,590 --> 00:53:43,620 a statement that's in tension with other statements that in dialogue with it, just as the essay is in dialogue form itself. 494 00:53:43,620 --> 00:53:49,440 And so he talks about the fact that to see the object and that in itself, it really is as this as Matthew Arnold, 495 00:53:49,440 --> 00:53:58,680 he references in a wonderfully kind of florid way as having trodden the to fields and so has misunderstood what criticism is about, 496 00:53:58,680 --> 00:54:05,340 which is in its essence, purely subjective and seeks to reveal its own most seek its own secret and not the secret 497 00:54:05,340 --> 00:54:10,620 of the other for the highest criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive, 498 00:54:10,620 --> 00:54:16,860 purely, not bit, and only being more creative and creative and to see the objects then it's really it's not. 499 00:54:16,860 --> 00:54:20,670 But also that the work, the crux of the critic, 500 00:54:20,670 --> 00:54:29,490 the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. 501 00:54:29,490 --> 00:54:37,800 The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes and see in it whatever one chooses to see. 502 00:54:37,800 --> 00:54:46,380 And the beauty that gives to creation is universal. An aesthetic element makes the critic creator in his turn and whispers a thousand different 503 00:54:46,380 --> 00:54:51,480 things that were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel. 504 00:54:51,480 --> 00:54:57,600 Think about this. What this does, it's a celebration of individualism and individualism at the absolute heart of modernism. 505 00:54:57,600 --> 00:55:01,800 Each mind is a different world. Think of George Orwell's A Hanging. 506 00:55:01,800 --> 00:55:09,180 Think of the celebration of multiple points of view that's there in Joyce's Ulysses and Wolves to the Lighthouse in Conradin, 507 00:55:09,180 --> 00:55:16,530 Nostromo, all of those and comrades, we live as we dream alone, which is a kind of slightly pessimistic rewrite to Peter. 508 00:55:16,530 --> 00:55:22,590 And that sense, many look at the look at the decay of lying as a challenge to realism, a challenge to realism, 509 00:55:22,590 --> 00:55:28,500 where he critiques things like soulless naturalism and so on, is a reduction of imagination to facts, 510 00:55:28,500 --> 00:55:38,340 is doing what literature is not meant to be doing, not in a kind of conservative reactionary back to the idea that that shouldn't 511 00:55:38,340 --> 00:55:42,120 be dealing with the drunken and the poor and all the sordid aspects of life. 512 00:55:42,120 --> 00:55:48,630 Well, always argues that everything is a subject matter, for there is nothing that art is not allowed to describe, 513 00:55:48,630 --> 00:55:53,430 but rather the idea that this whole project of realism is fundamentally flawed. 514 00:55:53,430 --> 00:56:02,040 It's there and that we transform the world. We look at that life imitates art more than art imitates life, in other words, 515 00:56:02,040 --> 00:56:08,190 that it's art that actually conditions the way we see the world and how wonderfully exaggerates back to the 516 00:56:08,190 --> 00:56:14,190 idea that sun and myths and all the rest of it never occurred until the Impressionists painted them and so on. 517 00:56:14,190 --> 00:56:17,670 So it's a wonderful kind of [INAUDIBLE] always take his ideas to the point of absurdity, 518 00:56:17,670 --> 00:56:24,210 which is where you as a reader have to actively start thinking you cannot be a passive reader of what he works on, 519 00:56:24,210 --> 00:56:30,630 a kind of dialectical method all the way through with the reader, not just in the dialogue between them. 520 00:56:30,630 --> 00:56:37,020 Wonderful statements. And Solomon on socialism are one duty to history is to rewrite it. 521 00:56:37,020 --> 00:56:39,750 Think about the statement. So it's perfect. 522 00:56:39,750 --> 00:56:45,990 It's absolutely perfect description of the method that's there in T.S. Eliot tradition and the individual talent. 523 00:56:45,990 --> 00:56:50,310 It's there in Virginia Woolf's kind of subversive pageant of history. 524 00:56:50,310 --> 00:56:56,520 At the end of between the acts it's there in Ulysses is rewriting of Irish myth and history. 525 00:56:56,520 --> 00:57:03,480 It's there in so many of the modernist sense that they can rewrite the past as much as refiguring it through the vision of the present. 526 00:57:03,480 --> 00:57:13,200 In that sense, what I'd argue with Wald's essays is that what you have there is wild as a kind of midwifed modernism is absolutely about preparing, 527 00:57:13,200 --> 00:57:23,460 offering, validating so many of the ideas that are absolutely central to all of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. 528 00:57:23,460 --> 00:57:30,390 It's waled as casting off the shackles of the Victorian era and opening it out to the iconoclasm, 529 00:57:30,390 --> 00:57:36,660 the intellectual freedom, the innovation and the individuality that's at the heart of modernism. 530 00:57:36,660 --> 00:57:39,916 And you.