1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:09,540 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. 2 00:00:09,540 --> 00:00:12,960 I have put only my talent into my works. 3 00:00:12,960 --> 00:00:22,140 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, 4 00:00:22,140 --> 00:00:25,560 a tendency to emphasise the life over the works, 5 00:00:25,560 --> 00:00:32,970 to sometimes read the works as a kind of pathological expression of while others, the person and so on. 6 00:00:32,970 --> 00:00:40,680 And it was only really from the 1970s, 1980s onwards, that while it's been taken really seriously as a writer and a thinker, 7 00:00:40,680 --> 00:00:46,510 rather than the sensational kind of events of his later life taking over, 8 00:00:46,510 --> 00:00:51,810 there's also even once there's this sort of wider, more scholarly, serious take on his works, 9 00:00:51,810 --> 00:00:56,220 there's also same time been a tendency to read the works kind of through the 10 00:00:56,220 --> 00:01:02,010 life to see the key to a single reading of the works in details of his life. 11 00:01:02,010 --> 00:01:08,280 My favourite example of this is given by Stephen Fry in an article in The New Yorker just before he took on the 12 00:01:08,280 --> 00:01:14,550 role of just after it was announced that he'd taken on the role of playing Wilde in the film Julian Mitchell film. 13 00:01:14,550 --> 00:01:22,530 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. 14 00:01:22,530 --> 00:01:32,340 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. 15 00:01:32,340 --> 00:01:35,100 Apologies for my atrocious Irish accent. 16 00:01:35,100 --> 00:01:44,130 Dear Mr Fry Wilde's works, Winnie and Chiva with Victorian gay underground codes do not shirk the force of his sexual identity. 17 00:01:44,130 --> 00:01:50,340 Dear Mr Fry, Wilde's love of his wife and family is consistently overlooked by biographers. 18 00:01:50,340 --> 00:02:01,170 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. 19 00:02:01,170 --> 00:02:06,120 Dear Mr Fry, I draw your attention towards wild soul of man under socialism. 20 00:02:06,120 --> 00:02:12,180 Oscar's unique brand of libertarianism is scandalously overlooked by contemporary critics. 21 00:02:12,180 --> 00:02:18,090 Dear Mr Fry, Oscar Wilde was in reality a woman. 22 00:02:18,090 --> 00:02:26,490 This secret was passed onto me by my grandfather, who had a lesbian affair with her in June 1897. 23 00:02:26,490 --> 00:02:34,750 Dear Mr Fry, Oscar Wilde Soul entered my body on August the nine hundred sixty three and ends there even more to come. 24 00:02:34,750 --> 00:02:38,550 And then he ends by saying, I have spared you the weird ones. 25 00:02:38,550 --> 00:02:43,050 So it's a sense with everybody out there has their version of Wild, that particular version. 26 00:02:43,050 --> 00:02:47,490 And this actually extends into a lot of the critical writing world. 27 00:02:47,490 --> 00:02:56,100 So in that sense, you can find the Irish Wild Books by Michael Gillispie, Robert Pind, Declan Kibre, Jolliff Kaleen, Vicky Mahaffey. 28 00:02:56,100 --> 00:03:02,780 You can get Radical, Wild, Wild of Early Work by Ian Small work by George Woodcock by Rajinikanth. 29 00:03:02,780 --> 00:03:09,360 You can get conservative wild. Nobut Cole in some ways lately and small criticism you get wild. 30 00:03:09,360 --> 00:03:15,990 The serious scholar who spent his entire time in the Bodleian as offered by Michael Helfand and Philip Smith. 31 00:03:15,990 --> 00:03:20,700 Or you can get while belayed lazy plagiarist who wrote everything to make money and just sort of recycled 32 00:03:20,700 --> 00:03:27,010 himself constantly in the form of kind of Josephine gynae in Small's book on what's in that sense, 33 00:03:27,010 --> 00:03:34,680 you can get wild as if the mould is modernist while the Victorian is gay, bisexual plagiarists, professionality, you name it. 34 00:03:34,680 --> 00:03:42,610 There are different lines on Wilde and one of the questions I have is, is it necessary to choose between these? 35 00:03:42,610 --> 00:03:48,460 As Walt himself said, complaining of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis, 36 00:03:48,460 --> 00:03:54,820 he said you had not yet been able to acquire the Oxford temper in intellectual matters. 37 00:03:54,820 --> 00:04:03,850 Never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at the violence of opinion merely so. 38 00:04:03,850 --> 00:04:11,440 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, 39 00:04:11,440 --> 00:04:19,840 contradictions can be mutually true. The paradox is a central mode in both his thought and his writing and what I think 40 00:04:19,840 --> 00:04:23,110 is one of the most useful things that Walt ever wrote about literary criticism, 41 00:04:23,110 --> 00:04:30,010 which was surely you do not think that criticism is like the answer to a sum the rich of the work of art. 42 00:04:30,010 --> 00:04:37,480 The more diverse are the true interpretations. There is not one answer only, but many answers. 43 00:04:37,480 --> 00:04:44,560 I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production. 44 00:04:44,560 --> 00:04:54,740 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. 45 00:04:54,740 --> 00:04:59,900 They're often very, very mutable, very slippery, very open to different interpretations, 46 00:04:59,900 --> 00:05:04,070 and in that sense, you can find in wild what you're looking for. 47 00:05:04,070 --> 00:05:09,140 And one of the fascinating examples of this, have a look at Stefano Evangelist's book, 48 00:05:09,140 --> 00:05:13,130 Reception of Wild in Europe and a sense in which each country can acquire their own 49 00:05:13,130 --> 00:05:16,550 wild or the wild that suits them at that particular moment and their kind of literary, 50 00:05:16,550 --> 00:05:29,570 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. 51 00:05:29,570 --> 00:05:33,470 And that's something that runs all the way through his thinking and his art criticism. 52 00:05:33,470 --> 00:05:42,590 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. 53 00:05:42,590 --> 00:05:47,630 And I probably ought to warn you again, and this idea that we see in wild, what we project into it, 54 00:05:47,630 --> 00:05:53,780 my own you know, my thesis, my doctoral thesis on World with Oscar Wilde, anarchist, socialist and feminist. 55 00:05:53,780 --> 00:06:01,130 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. 56 00:06:01,130 --> 00:06:10,580 So just before I go on to world sort of biography and De Profundis, a further warning from his play, 57 00:06:10,580 --> 00:06:17,780 Saloma Insult Me Again, it opens with each character's response to the moon. 58 00:06:17,780 --> 00:06:24,350 As each character enters, they look at the moon and deliver an entirely different interpretation of the look at the moon. 59 00:06:24,350 --> 00:06:29,210 So the page of ideas says how strange the moon seems. 60 00:06:29,210 --> 00:06:33,560 She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She has it like a dead woman. 61 00:06:33,560 --> 00:06:38,720 One might fancy. She was looking for dead things. And this young Syrian responds. 62 00:06:38,720 --> 00:06:45,380 She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil and his feet sort of silver. 63 00:06:45,380 --> 00:06:51,050 She is like a princess who has little white doves. Four feet one might fancy she was dancing. 64 00:06:51,050 --> 00:06:57,230 And the page of her audience, who is enamoured of the young Syrian, corrects him that she is like a woman who is dead. 65 00:06:57,230 --> 00:07:04,970 She moves very slowly. And then later on, when Salomé speaks up, she again offers a different version of the moon. 66 00:07:04,970 --> 00:07:10,760 How good to see the moon. She is like a little piece of money, a little silver flower. 67 00:07:10,760 --> 00:07:14,840 She is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin. 68 00:07:14,840 --> 00:07:19,940 She has the beauty of a virgin. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. 69 00:07:19,940 --> 00:07:24,620 She has never abandoned herself to men like the other goddesses. 70 00:07:24,620 --> 00:07:30,590 And then later on, Harold enters and Herod's version of the moon is entirely different yet again. 71 00:07:30,590 --> 00:07:34,880 The moon has a strange look tonight, has she not? A strange look. 72 00:07:34,880 --> 00:07:40,430 She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. 73 00:07:40,430 --> 00:07:47,450 She has naked too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them. 74 00:07:47,450 --> 00:07:52,910 She shows herself naked in the sky. She rails through the clouds like a drunken woman. 75 00:07:52,910 --> 00:07:57,380 I am sure she is looking for lovers, does she not a real like a drunken woman. 76 00:07:57,380 --> 00:08:01,190 She is like a mad woman, is she not? To which his wife responds. 77 00:08:01,190 --> 00:08:07,040 No, the moon is like the moon, that is all. 78 00:08:07,040 --> 00:08:12,350 And what you've got here in the opening of the play, you've got every single character projecting on their own obsessions, 79 00:08:12,350 --> 00:08:19,250 their own desires onto the moon seeing and it in a sense, a reflection of the insides of their own minds. 80 00:08:19,250 --> 00:08:25,010 Their subjectivity of their vision is what you're getting rather than any sense of the world they're looking upon. 81 00:08:25,010 --> 00:08:32,900 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. 82 00:08:32,900 --> 00:08:36,680 And in the same way, throughout the play, as they look upon Saloma herself, 83 00:08:36,680 --> 00:08:44,570 there's a similar kind of projection of desire and a projection of onto the Princess Salemi of what they want her to be. 84 00:08:44,570 --> 00:08:51,920 So to her mother, Haraldur, she's the obedient daughter to Herod, she's the object of desire who is available for purchase. 85 00:08:51,920 --> 00:08:57,770 However, the price to Yochanan, she's a harlot and actually indistinguishable from her mother. 86 00:08:57,770 --> 00:09:05,450 In that sense, there's a way in which everybody is shaping the world around them in response to their own ideas and obsessions. 87 00:09:05,450 --> 00:09:11,090 And in that sense, the play is about subjectivity and how we remake the world ourselves. 88 00:09:11,090 --> 00:09:17,210 Our individual vision moulds it and creates it almost rather than simply reflecting or distorting it. 89 00:09:17,210 --> 00:09:22,910 It's also a play that rewrites the myth of the Medusa Medusa being the snake haired woman whose look, 90 00:09:22,910 --> 00:09:29,780 if you looked on her, you were turned to stone and who was only killed by Perseus by he only looks at her reflection, 91 00:09:29,780 --> 00:09:37,520 the shield in order to kill her and in a similar way in Saloma looks have the power to transform looks, 92 00:09:37,520 --> 00:09:41,220 have the power to change, but so does being looked at in that sense. 93 00:09:41,220 --> 00:09:46,850 Saloma tells Yochanan. If only you had looked at me, you had fallen in love with me. 94 00:09:46,850 --> 00:09:53,510 And there's this danger how much you reveal and how you describe the world around you, how much you give away. 95 00:09:53,510 --> 00:09:59,760 And it's exactly. This that lies behind Herot statement that neither at things nor people should 96 00:09:59,760 --> 00:10:06,090 one look only in mirrors should one look four mirrors do but show us masks, 97 00:10:06,090 --> 00:10:11,610 in other words, whereas we reveal ourselves to the outside world in looking at looking at it, 98 00:10:11,610 --> 00:10:15,960 if we only look at ourselves in the mirror, then our performance is what we see back. 99 00:10:15,960 --> 00:10:20,610 The only one that that the only way to reciprocally reinforce your own version 100 00:10:20,610 --> 00:10:23,700 of yourself and reveal nothing is simply to look at yourself in the mirror. 101 00:10:23,700 --> 00:10:32,820 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. 102 00:10:32,820 --> 00:10:40,200 So taking all of that, all of these warnings in different ways, the basic facts of wild life, what we do now. 103 00:10:40,200 --> 00:10:51,840 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. 104 00:10:51,840 --> 00:10:58,140 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. 105 00:10:58,140 --> 00:11:03,060 But it was not a good way of established himself as a reliable witness in court. 106 00:11:03,060 --> 00:11:07,320 So he was born in Ireland. 107 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:16,260 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. 108 00:11:16,260 --> 00:11:25,500 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. 109 00:11:25,500 --> 00:11:26,850 He went to Trinity College, 110 00:11:26,850 --> 00:11:40,470 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. 111 00:11:40,470 --> 00:11:48,090 And while he was an undergraduate here in 1878, he won the Newdegate PRISE for his poem Rabina. 112 00:11:48,090 --> 00:11:55,890 In 1881, he published his first volume of verse and he then went on, he was already kind of lecturing, 113 00:11:55,890 --> 00:12:01,710 began lecturing and at one kind of huge amount of public notice through the press and so on for 114 00:12:01,710 --> 00:12:09,990 saying so that when the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan Opera of Patients went on tour in America, 115 00:12:09,990 --> 00:12:14,970 he went on tour, was paid with a publicist to go on tour together with it. 116 00:12:14,970 --> 00:12:24,660 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. 117 00:12:24,660 --> 00:12:30,930 And these days it's a very interesting kind of very, very skilled at using the publicity machine. 118 00:12:30,930 --> 00:12:35,700 And what he seriously meant in that sense is very, very interesting. 119 00:12:35,700 --> 00:12:44,190 He also in the early 80s wrote his play Veera Author Nicholas and the Duchess of Padua sorry, two separate places. 120 00:12:44,190 --> 00:12:50,670 In 1884, he married Constance Wilde and had two sons, Vivian and Cyril, born in 1885. 121 00:12:50,670 --> 00:13:00,180 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. 122 00:13:00,180 --> 00:13:02,850 He transformed the magazine from a kind of gossipy, 123 00:13:02,850 --> 00:13:09,960 mostly just fashion news and no intellectual content into a magazine that in many ways was ahead of its readership. 124 00:13:09,960 --> 00:13:14,580 So in the very first edition, there are articles on professions for women, 125 00:13:14,580 --> 00:13:21,300 on economics, on the fallacy of the superiority of man, etc. But after a year or so, 126 00:13:21,300 --> 00:13:28,800 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. 127 00:13:28,800 --> 00:13:37,800 And the fallacy this period here, man, rather than fashion stuff and what kind of petticoats he ought to be wearing or whatever else. 128 00:13:37,800 --> 00:13:44,930 And he dropped the editorship. Then in 1888, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales. 129 00:13:44,930 --> 00:13:50,690 In 1891, often described as a. mirabilis, is a year in which he published Intention's, 130 00:13:50,690 --> 00:14:01,220 a collection republished from the periodical publish of his literary theory, criticism, things like the critic, US artist and the decay of Lying. 131 00:14:01,220 --> 00:14:06,980 He also published the picture of Dorian Grey and the collection of stories, The House of Pomegranates. 132 00:14:06,980 --> 00:14:12,980 And it was also in that year that he met Lord Alfred Douglas. Follow his after that follow his place. 133 00:14:12,980 --> 00:14:20,390 Salemi was written in 1891 but not first performed in Paris in 1896 after while he was in prison. 134 00:14:20,390 --> 00:14:26,690 But there follows Lady Windermere's Fan Woman, the importance and ideal husband and the being earnest between 1892, 135 00:14:26,690 --> 00:14:33,370 in 1895 and then in 1895, the first of the trials, which is where he prosequi. 136 00:14:33,370 --> 00:14:38,510 He was the one who prosecuted the Marquis of Queensbury for libel because Queensborough had 137 00:14:38,510 --> 00:14:45,230 left a note in Wild's Club address to publicly address to Oscar Wilde posing of Sodomite. 138 00:14:45,230 --> 00:14:49,890 He wasn't a very good speller. Well, at least his handwriting was pretty atrocious. So it looks like he wrote some of them. 139 00:14:49,890 --> 00:14:58,140 But anyway, and Wilde brought a prosecution for libel on the basis of that and in the process of that trial. 140 00:14:58,140 --> 00:15:05,760 Queensberry brought forward evidence of what were then criminal sexual activities to court 141 00:15:05,760 --> 00:15:14,040 on the basis of which Wilde dropped the prosecution and was very soon after arrested. 142 00:15:14,040 --> 00:15:21,720 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. 143 00:15:21,720 --> 00:15:26,310 The second trial was a trial of him for gross indecency, which ended with a hung jury. 144 00:15:26,310 --> 00:15:30,960 He was being tried together with Alfred Taylor, a brothel keeper, 145 00:15:30,960 --> 00:15:38,910 and the third trial that rather than leaving it on a hung jury and dropping the case, a third prosecution happened. 146 00:15:38,910 --> 00:15:48,420 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, 147 00:15:48,420 --> 00:15:54,300 which was the maximum sentence that could then be given, then follow the two years in prison. 148 00:15:54,300 --> 00:16:00,870 In the course of which he wrote what we now know as De Profundis and as the prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. 149 00:16:00,870 --> 00:16:07,260 And after his release, he published The Ballad of Reading. Gaol then follows Exile. 150 00:16:07,260 --> 00:16:10,560 He rapidly gets back together with the Lord Alfred Douglas. 151 00:16:10,560 --> 00:16:21,730 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. 152 00:16:21,730 --> 00:16:29,860 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? 153 00:16:29,860 --> 00:16:34,090 I would warn strongly against the idea of approaching world in that way. 154 00:16:34,090 --> 00:16:36,670 So the idea of the true anyone, 155 00:16:36,670 --> 00:16:44,800 the real secret to anyone is something that Walt himself challenges and undermines and a whole plethora of his writings. 156 00:16:44,800 --> 00:16:54,340 So Wilde's writings constantly challenge any simple division between truth and lies, between self and mask, between reality and fiction. 157 00:16:54,340 --> 00:17:02,230 Similarly, it's very the idea of taking the life as revealing a key to the works is very questionable because Wilde himself, 158 00:17:02,230 --> 00:17:09,610 again in his literary criticism, is very strongly opposed to the idea of any kind of simple biographical reading of the works and 159 00:17:09,610 --> 00:17:14,230 certainly the kind of pathological reading that kind of medicalize his world as the very early, 160 00:17:14,230 --> 00:17:19,210 frankly, homophobic works on world tended to do, again, very clearly dubious. 161 00:17:19,210 --> 00:17:23,860 At the same time as I'm not advocating setting the life aside completely, 162 00:17:23,860 --> 00:17:27,010 because one of the large things that you have to take into account with well is how 163 00:17:27,010 --> 00:17:31,720 far just as he broke down any kind of simple division between public and private, 164 00:17:31,720 --> 00:17:37,480 there's a sense in which there was a sort of wild, in inverted commas, the public world that Wilde himself created. 165 00:17:37,480 --> 00:17:40,690 As you can clearly see in that sort of employing a publicist in this lecture 166 00:17:40,690 --> 00:17:45,610 tour of America together with an operetta that's parodying people like him. 167 00:17:45,610 --> 00:17:51,100 He was absolutely expert at using that late Victorian publicity machine. 168 00:17:51,100 --> 00:17:56,410 So whether it's the photographs you're probably all familiar with that were taken by Sironi and so on, 169 00:17:56,410 --> 00:18:03,610 whether he actually draughted interviews with himself that, you know, kind of co-wrote them with Robbie Ross and had them published. 170 00:18:03,610 --> 00:18:11,110 He's absolutely expert. He used the periodical press constantly and a whole load of ways, including his letters to newspapers. 171 00:18:11,110 --> 00:18:12,100 He was very, very good at. 172 00:18:12,100 --> 00:18:19,990 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. 173 00:18:19,990 --> 00:18:23,770 And that sense, he's constantly about wrong, putting the readership. 174 00:18:23,770 --> 00:18:28,510 He builds up versions of himself. He uses that. It's a very kind of public image. 175 00:18:28,510 --> 00:18:32,500 And I think the important thing is to recognise this idea of performance itself 176 00:18:32,500 --> 00:18:36,670 that not put performance and truth in a kind of contradiction opposite, 177 00:18:36,670 --> 00:18:43,300 but rather look at what the idea of self performance means within so many of his works, 178 00:18:43,300 --> 00:18:48,730 the ways in which a performance is not the opposite of a truth, but can be a version of a truth. 179 00:18:48,730 --> 00:19:00,110 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. 180 00:19:00,110 --> 00:19:05,920 The idea of getting to the truth self he undermines in all his works, including things like in the plays. 181 00:19:05,920 --> 00:19:13,120 So the plays, all the plays have these ideas of the revelation from the past, the truth, the dark secret of somebody. 182 00:19:13,120 --> 00:19:17,740 But they don't. So Mrs. Arbuthnot in a woman of no importance. 183 00:19:17,740 --> 00:19:22,510 So Robert Chilton and an ideal husband, Lady Lynne and Lady Windermere's Fan and so on, 184 00:19:22,510 --> 00:19:26,710 they've all got secrets revealed about them, but they don't fix them. 185 00:19:26,710 --> 00:19:34,510 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. 186 00:19:34,510 --> 00:19:39,190 They're not fixed. They're not answered. They're not revealed in that revelation of the past. 187 00:19:39,190 --> 00:19:47,780 They remain as mobile and mutable and unreadable in many ways as they were before that. 188 00:19:47,780 --> 00:19:56,660 And in that sense, a lot of what world is doing is complicating ideas of judgement, challenging ideas that you can fix people. 189 00:19:56,660 --> 00:20:05,660 And above all, asking questions, I think about the relation between individual identity and ideas, the public performance, 190 00:20:05,660 --> 00:20:14,330 how the individual relates or negotiates with socially constructed ideas of gender, of nationality, 191 00:20:14,330 --> 00:20:18,890 of class, etc. all of those there's a sense in which, just like with Ipsen, 192 00:20:18,890 --> 00:20:26,330 there's a very complex relation between the individual and society that within but in a world very often a kind of performative one. 193 00:20:26,330 --> 00:20:32,300 And that's also an enormously important key within much more contemporary study of world. 194 00:20:32,300 --> 00:20:37,430 The idea of the performative and the slippery in the multiple and all of the rest of it 195 00:20:37,430 --> 00:20:45,320 runs through contemporary criticism on what so they profundis it's often looked at. 196 00:20:45,320 --> 00:20:50,420 It's the present known as the prison letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas address Dear Bozie, 197 00:20:50,420 --> 00:20:56,060 his kind of nickname, the nickname that Douglas had written in prison. 198 00:20:56,060 --> 00:21:02,150 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, 199 00:21:02,150 --> 00:21:05,030 that treats it as this is the sincere wild, 200 00:21:05,030 --> 00:21:13,040 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. 201 00:21:13,040 --> 00:21:21,440 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. 202 00:21:21,440 --> 00:21:25,250 So it is not I would argue that at all. 203 00:21:25,250 --> 00:21:28,340 It's a far more complex and multiple text. 204 00:21:28,340 --> 00:21:39,200 It's absolutely typically wilder and above all, because it exploits drama and plays with genre and engages with it in incredibly ambiguous manner. 205 00:21:39,200 --> 00:21:46,610 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. 206 00:21:46,610 --> 00:21:55,180 And if his apology as accusation. Everything about it is complicated, including the very basic thing it is addressed there, 207 00:21:55,180 --> 00:22:02,070 Bozie, but it's very, very, very questionable how far it is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, 208 00:22:02,070 --> 00:22:09,900 whether that is the recipient, the desired recipient of it, in the sense that Wilde was allowed to write personal letters in prison. 209 00:22:09,900 --> 00:22:15,570 Therefore, he wrote a nearly 100 page letter addressed to Bozie. 210 00:22:15,570 --> 00:22:25,380 It seems to have been started probably around autumn of 1896 and was finished in the spring of 1897. 211 00:22:25,380 --> 00:22:30,150 Official prison rules were meant to mean that he didn't get to keep the manuscript at all. 212 00:22:30,150 --> 00:22:34,200 That rather, he was only given a paper to write on each day and it was taken away. 213 00:22:34,200 --> 00:22:38,640 Whereas actually the condition of the manuscript, which is now held in the British Library, 214 00:22:38,640 --> 00:22:44,340 seems to indicate a quite a large amount of fair copying so that he did actually get the manuscript back. 215 00:22:44,340 --> 00:22:50,610 And also passages that refer back to earlier passages which suggest he had access to earlier passages he was writing later ones. 216 00:22:50,610 --> 00:22:57,730 So it's very there's a sense in which he seems to have been given more lenient conditions than the prison rules dictated. 217 00:22:57,730 --> 00:23:05,040 Now, he wrote that and just before he left prison in 1897, in spring of 1897, 218 00:23:05,040 --> 00:23:13,530 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. 219 00:23:13,530 --> 00:23:21,300 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. 220 00:23:21,300 --> 00:23:26,130 And of course, Moradi, whom I also always include with you, have read it. 221 00:23:26,130 --> 00:23:31,290 I want you to have it carefully copied for me. There are many reasons why I wish this to be done. 222 00:23:31,290 --> 00:23:38,310 One will suffice. I want you to be my literary executor and would like you to have all my works well. 223 00:23:38,310 --> 00:23:46,020 If you are my literary executor, you must be in possession of the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behaviour. 224 00:23:46,020 --> 00:23:49,830 With regard to Queensberry and Alfred Douglas, when you have read the letter, 225 00:23:49,830 --> 00:23:57,930 you will see the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the outside seems a combination of absolute idiocy with vulgar bravado. 226 00:23:57,930 --> 00:24:02,400 I do not defend my conduct. I explain it also. 227 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:06,660 There are in the letter certain passages which deal with my mental development in prison and the 228 00:24:06,660 --> 00:24:11,550 inevitable evolution of character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place. 229 00:24:11,550 --> 00:24:19,230 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. 230 00:24:19,230 --> 00:24:29,390 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. 231 00:24:29,390 --> 00:24:39,550 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. 232 00:24:39,550 --> 00:24:44,990 Hated margined should be left for corrections. The copy done and verified from the manuscript. 233 00:24:44,990 --> 00:24:54,590 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. 234 00:24:54,590 --> 00:24:57,050 OK. 235 00:24:57,050 --> 00:25:06,950 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. 236 00:25:06,950 --> 00:25:11,210 Instead, he left prison with the manuscript, so he was allowed to send it off. 237 00:25:11,210 --> 00:25:12,170 He kept it with him. 238 00:25:12,170 --> 00:25:23,330 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. 239 00:25:23,330 --> 00:25:30,020 Ross did not follow the instructions that were in the letter, though it's possible that Wildcoast gave him a different written instructions. 240 00:25:30,020 --> 00:25:34,790 What Ross did was he got the letter copied and I'm going to call it the letter. 241 00:25:34,790 --> 00:25:42,470 But whether it's a letter is clearly another dubious question and sent the typed copy to Alfred Douglas, 242 00:25:42,470 --> 00:25:50,960 not the manuscript for which we are extremely grateful because Ross because Alfred Douglas then burnt what was sent to him. 243 00:25:50,960 --> 00:25:55,670 So at least this way we keep the manuscript. So the copy was sent to Douglas, who destroyed it. 244 00:25:55,670 --> 00:26:01,100 And in 1989, Ross gave that manuscript to the British Museum, 245 00:26:01,100 --> 00:26:08,270 which at that point contained the British Library with instructions that it should not be opened for 50 years. 246 00:26:08,270 --> 00:26:17,120 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, 247 00:26:17,120 --> 00:26:26,690 Robbie Ross published approximately half of the original manuscript under the title De Profundis. 248 00:26:26,690 --> 00:26:32,870 That version de Profundis had no indication that it was originally addressed to Alfred Douglas, 249 00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:37,760 so it wasn't published as a letter at all in that sense. OK, 250 00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:42,650 and the first point that the manuscript itself was taken out of the British Library 251 00:26:42,650 --> 00:26:49,700 was in 1912 when a critic called Arthur Ransom had written a book on world, 252 00:26:49,700 --> 00:26:53,510 which Alfred Douglas then prosecuted him for libel. On that, 253 00:26:53,510 --> 00:27:01,130 he spent a vast amount of time prosecuting people for libel after Walter died and Robbie Ross got the 254 00:27:01,130 --> 00:27:07,850 manuscript taken out of the British Museum and presented as evidence during the trial in defence of ransom, 255 00:27:07,850 --> 00:27:14,270 saying this wasn't libel, it was true. And Douglas left the courtroom rather than listen to any of it. 256 00:27:14,270 --> 00:27:21,800 OK, then there's a further version of that Scholten de Profundis that was published in 1949. 257 00:27:21,800 --> 00:27:23,900 And further, Douglas goes on. 258 00:27:23,900 --> 00:27:31,010 He writes a wonderful book in 1913 called Oscar Wilde Myself, in which he writes about he had no idea that Wilde was gay. 259 00:27:31,010 --> 00:27:34,490 And when it came to the trial, he was so shocked. 260 00:27:34,490 --> 00:27:40,760 There's a very interesting kind of history of Alfred Douglas and of what he writes and his unreliability in all sorts of ways. 261 00:27:40,760 --> 00:27:46,490 Now, the first point that what we know is De Profundis was first published in anything like the complete version. 262 00:27:46,490 --> 00:27:54,950 And as a letter was in 1962, which is when Rupert Daviss collected letters of Oscar Wilde was published, 263 00:27:54,950 --> 00:28:03,190 which then included De Profundis as the letter addressed to Douglas. 264 00:28:03,190 --> 00:28:08,380 There then a very few sort of things have been altered to that in the version that you'll now find 265 00:28:08,380 --> 00:28:15,220 in the complete letters edited by Mervyn Holland and Richard Hart Davis to further complicate this. 266 00:28:15,220 --> 00:28:25,480 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. 267 00:28:25,480 --> 00:28:34,540 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. 268 00:28:34,540 --> 00:28:40,540 But if I call it the thingy from now on, it's not going to make the lecture more coherent or more sensible. 269 00:28:40,540 --> 00:28:48,400 And just what further complications? One of I think was simply the truly brilliant edition of De Profundis comes in the form 270 00:28:48,400 --> 00:28:55,420 of Ian Small's new edition of it for the Oxford English text OEP edition of World Works, 271 00:28:55,420 --> 00:28:58,510 which are meant to be the definitive scholarly edition. 272 00:28:58,510 --> 00:29:07,120 He publishes data from this as two separate works, one, the shortened version that doesn't reveal that it's a letter, 273 00:29:07,120 --> 00:29:13,880 and the second one, which he titles a pistola enculturated vocalist's, which is a version of the full one. 274 00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:21,350 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 275 00:29:21,350 --> 00:29:26,450 was largely in response to some of the sections that while gives instructions to in different letters, 276 00:29:26,450 --> 00:29:33,220 to send to different people. So there's a sense in which this is a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, but it's also, 277 00:29:33,220 --> 00:29:37,330 as he said, a letter to Robert Ross and to Moradi and all his good friends, 278 00:29:37,330 --> 00:29:42,040 and you can expect it to form letters to other friends that he names like The Lady in Wimbledon. 279 00:29:42,040 --> 00:29:47,200 It's in that sense, it is it it's in that cover letter he sent to Ross. 280 00:29:47,200 --> 00:29:54,850 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. 281 00:29:54,850 --> 00:29:59,650 So it's a personal letter and it's a public letter to all his to many of his other friends. 282 00:29:59,650 --> 00:30:06,190 It's an explanation to the world. It's a defence of himself and it's a literary work. 283 00:30:06,190 --> 00:30:10,720 And I don't know how many of you have written, you know, kind of long letters to lovers or anything else. 284 00:30:10,720 --> 00:30:15,100 But you don't tend to publish that. You don't tend to write them to all your other friends publicly as well. 285 00:30:15,100 --> 00:30:23,410 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. 286 00:30:23,410 --> 00:30:26,420 After having said, can you see how complex this thing is sounding? 287 00:30:26,420 --> 00:30:35,830 So what is De Profundis to use the term which covers this umbrella of all these different versions and all this different content? 288 00:30:35,830 --> 00:30:40,900 And who's it written to? And with that, how do we read it? 289 00:30:40,900 --> 00:30:44,650 And one of the things that Wilde says repeatedly through so much of his writing 290 00:30:44,650 --> 00:30:50,590 is how far who you're writing to affects what your reading work is unstable. 291 00:30:50,590 --> 00:30:59,170 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. 292 00:30:59,170 --> 00:31:03,580 So this instability becomes absolutely central in different ways to the work. 293 00:31:03,580 --> 00:31:14,160 So what's in this wonderful multiple work? It's written to multiple different audiences and offers multiple different ways of reading. 294 00:31:14,160 --> 00:31:17,970 It has there are two main ingredients in De Profundis, 295 00:31:17,970 --> 00:31:24,390 they're kind of sandwiched between each other and kind of multilayered of M.V. of a literary work. 296 00:31:24,390 --> 00:31:31,440 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, 297 00:31:31,440 --> 00:31:37,110 his own inability to break out of it, and accusations of Douglas's mother, 298 00:31:37,110 --> 00:31:44,040 four different ways in which he again, kind of manipulated or exploited what the other layer is, 299 00:31:44,040 --> 00:31:50,760 a lengthy account of his own previous stature, of his stature as a writer and a vast amount of a kind of demonstration and 300 00:31:50,760 --> 00:31:54,840 action of his status as a literary critic as he offers kind of criticism of 301 00:31:54,840 --> 00:32:02,850 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. 302 00:32:02,850 --> 00:32:09,280 So these two these things are layered together all the way through it. 303 00:32:09,280 --> 00:32:16,150 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, 304 00:32:16,150 --> 00:32:23,620 you tend to get accounts that Walt gave of his relationship with Douglas, sort of just reproduced in film versions. 305 00:32:23,620 --> 00:32:30,610 But I think it's a much more problematic and slippery and complex, deliberately complex text than that. 306 00:32:30,610 --> 00:32:34,090 So just to start with the accusations of Alfred Douglas, 307 00:32:34,090 --> 00:32:43,960 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. 308 00:32:43,960 --> 00:32:46,450 He only had moods. 309 00:32:46,450 --> 00:32:57,850 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. 310 00:32:57,850 --> 00:33:03,310 For example, contrast to different dinners one had in the Savoy with Douglas, 311 00:33:03,310 --> 00:33:10,450 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. 312 00:33:10,450 --> 00:33:17,050 And that's contrasted with a three franc 50 centime dinner in a Soho cafe with Robbie Ross, 313 00:33:17,050 --> 00:33:22,960 in which he had the ideas that formed some of his literary dialogue, some of his essays. 314 00:33:22,960 --> 00:33:29,680 The trouble with that kind of simple contrast is the fact that so much time in day Profundis is spent on meals and drink. 315 00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:33,760 It's rather like if and if you've read Evelyn Ward's Brideshead Revisited, 316 00:33:33,760 --> 00:33:37,300 which is written post Second World War in the time of austerity and spends a vast 317 00:33:37,300 --> 00:33:41,170 amount of time on expensive restaurants and good brandy and things like that, 318 00:33:41,170 --> 00:33:49,930 there's a similar kind of lingering on physical details and lingering on luxury that isn't just regretful in that sense. 319 00:33:49,930 --> 00:33:57,910 So there's an extraordinary blow-by-blow enumeration of the bills and the meals and the costs incurred by Alfred Douglas that produces, 320 00:33:57,910 --> 00:34:07,150 as you read through a kind of inseparable and complex mix of emotional and material of financial and spiritual. 321 00:34:07,150 --> 00:34:13,690 So this idea that Ros's guilt that Douglas is guilty of having simply lived this 322 00:34:13,690 --> 00:34:19,420 kind of physical material life rather than an intellectual and spiritual one, 323 00:34:19,420 --> 00:34:23,080 simply breaks down in the sense that you can't divide them in the work. 324 00:34:23,080 --> 00:34:28,240 And it's also really important that in a lot of the literary criticism the world is offering and De Profundis, 325 00:34:28,240 --> 00:34:34,930 it's also about in some ways that inseparability of soul and body, well throughout his works, 326 00:34:34,930 --> 00:34:39,280 argues against what he sees as a kind of mediaeval separation of soul and body. 327 00:34:39,280 --> 00:34:44,230 And he complicates that constantly throughout his work. I mean, just think about the questions about the separation of body and soul. 328 00:34:44,230 --> 00:34:48,910 This sort of offered in the fisherman and his soul or in the picture of Dorian Grey. 329 00:34:48,910 --> 00:34:57,280 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. 330 00:34:57,280 --> 00:35:04,090 Now, he sandwiches within that, a portrait of himself, a portrait himself is unable, 331 00:35:04,090 --> 00:35:09,790 having given that in in small things, constantly unable to break away from Douglas in large things, 332 00:35:09,790 --> 00:35:19,630 having lost his own sense of himself, unable to take control of things as he puts it, sees himself, presents himself as a victim. 333 00:35:19,630 --> 00:35:26,170 Caught between Queensberry and Douglas blindly, I staggered like an ox in the shambles, 334 00:35:26,170 --> 00:35:34,270 the shambles being the kind of alleyways that lead to the slaughter house, the wonderfully kind of large and almost sort of baroque image. 335 00:35:34,270 --> 00:35:40,990 And he carries on to say, at the end of I was, of course, arrested and your father became the hero of the hour. 336 00:35:40,990 --> 00:35:49,180 More indeed than the hero of the hour. Your family now ranks, strangely enough, with the immortals for with that grotesqueness of effect, 337 00:35:49,180 --> 00:35:54,700 that is, as it were, a gothic element in history and makes Clio the least serious of all the muses. 338 00:35:54,700 --> 00:36:00,730 Your father will always live amongst the kind, pure minded parents of Sunday school literature, 339 00:36:00,730 --> 00:36:06,850 your places with the infant Samuel and in the lower stegmeier of Malabo Loog. 340 00:36:06,850 --> 00:36:16,960 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. 341 00:36:16,960 --> 00:36:24,880 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, 342 00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:29,810 but he's doing it himself. He's kind of presenting them and destabilising them simultaneously. 343 00:36:29,810 --> 00:36:36,010 It's not just about what's happened to him. It's about the arbitrariness and changeability of image itself. 344 00:36:36,010 --> 00:36:40,990 He goes on to say, I don't defend. In that letter. He said, I don't defend my conduct. 345 00:36:40,990 --> 00:36:49,420 I explain it. So what if we got humility or defiance, apology or accusation throughout De Profundis? 346 00:36:49,420 --> 00:37:00,220 He does apologise for his failings. His failings are generosity, empathy, sympathy, patience, kindness. 347 00:37:00,220 --> 00:37:08,920 I can carry on compassion, generosity, imagination, intellect, talent, originality, brilliance, etc. 348 00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:13,690 He does not apologise also in that he condemns society's laws. 349 00:37:13,690 --> 00:37:23,890 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. 350 00:37:23,890 --> 00:37:35,810 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. 351 00:37:35,810 --> 00:37:47,160 That he sees as the only real sin and error that he made to us as a society that he despised to protect him. 352 00:37:47,160 --> 00:37:53,070 De Profundis also contains the most extraordinary celebration you'll find if any of 353 00:37:53,070 --> 00:37:58,800 you writing the third year special author paper on World pretty much every year, 354 00:37:58,800 --> 00:38:08,910 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, 355 00:38:08,910 --> 00:38:15,690 all the art that he is ready for it. He is ready for a special author paper at Oxford on himself. 356 00:38:15,690 --> 00:38:25,020 So I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age, discussed the gods, 357 00:38:25,020 --> 00:38:32,580 had given me almost everything I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliance, the intellectual daring. 358 00:38:32,580 --> 00:38:38,430 I made art of philosophy and philosophy and art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things. 359 00:38:38,430 --> 00:38:45,570 There was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, 360 00:38:45,570 --> 00:38:54,840 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. 361 00:38:54,840 --> 00:39:00,000 Drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle, fantastic dialogue. 362 00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:05,610 Whatever I touched, I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty to truth itself. 363 00:39:05,610 --> 00:39:09,210 I gave what is false, no less than what is true as its rightful province, 364 00:39:09,210 --> 00:39:13,500 and showed that the false and true are merely forms of intellectual existence. 365 00:39:13,500 --> 00:39:18,540 I treated art as a supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. 366 00:39:18,540 --> 00:39:24,180 I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. 367 00:39:24,180 --> 00:39:30,540 I summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram. 368 00:39:30,540 --> 00:39:39,990 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. 369 00:39:39,990 --> 00:39:43,920 He demonstrates that he performs it. He performs it in the literary criticism. 370 00:39:43,920 --> 00:39:52,140 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. 371 00:39:52,140 --> 00:39:59,970 The essay is absolutely filled with comments on art, literary history, contemporary writing, the purpose, nature and function of art and so on. 372 00:39:59,970 --> 00:40:05,520 And he very much wants to look at De Profundis alongside essays like The Decay of Lying in the Critic as Artist 373 00:40:05,520 --> 00:40:13,620 and the Solomon and Socialism as part of his decade long dialogue about the function of art and the artist. 374 00:40:13,620 --> 00:40:22,620 So we have an essay which celebrates Welldone humility, leaving the obvious problem of how one celebrates one's own humility. 375 00:40:22,620 --> 00:40:32,520 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, 376 00:40:32,520 --> 00:40:41,640 some seven, six, seven years earlier. So in the Solomon Islands Socialism, he talks of sympathy with suffering as a perversion, 377 00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:50,760 sympathy of suffering as not as being as being ultimately pointless, a sort of vicarious, self-indulgent thing that blunts everybody. 378 00:40:50,760 --> 00:40:56,730 Now he recants this so that sympathy with suffering becomes a root to self-knowledge. 379 00:40:56,730 --> 00:41:03,900 So suffering and pain are no longer pointless as he presents them in Solomon on socialism, they become a route to self-knowledge. 380 00:41:03,900 --> 00:41:10,620 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, 381 00:41:10,620 --> 00:41:16,800 are gaining a superior emotional depth, a greater self-knowledge than those who have imprisoned them. 382 00:41:16,800 --> 00:41:22,950 Now that they are the ones who are who remember themselves through remembering their past sufferings, 383 00:41:22,950 --> 00:41:26,400 they have a depth and self-knowledge that the others lack. 384 00:41:26,400 --> 00:41:30,390 Look at The Ballad of Reading Gaol for that kind of contrast between the depth 385 00:41:30,390 --> 00:41:36,330 that we have as against the day of the prison governor and the doctor and so on. 386 00:41:36,330 --> 00:41:46,410 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. 387 00:41:46,410 --> 00:41:52,200 So in the Solomon under socialism, he describes Christ's doctrine not out as not as know thyself, 388 00:41:52,200 --> 00:41:57,780 but as be thyself and offers Christ as the ultimate individualist. 389 00:41:57,780 --> 00:42:04,590 Now he extends this in De Profundis, where Christ becomes not just the ultimate individualist, 390 00:42:04,590 --> 00:42:11,400 but Christ is in sympathy with the criminals and the outcasts and himself the ultimate artist. 391 00:42:11,400 --> 00:42:19,070 Wilde goes further than this. He also, by very, very clear implication, aligns himself with Christ. 392 00:42:19,070 --> 00:42:25,010 So he writes that paralleling so just as Christ is martyred by his society, 393 00:42:25,010 --> 00:42:33,770 so he parallels that society with his own as he writes, Christ's chief war was against the Philistines. 394 00:42:33,770 --> 00:42:37,430 That is the war every child of light has to wage. 395 00:42:37,430 --> 00:42:44,030 Philistinism was the notes of the Asian community in which he lived in that heavy inaccessibility to ideas, 396 00:42:44,030 --> 00:42:49,040 that dull respectability, that tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, 397 00:42:49,040 --> 00:42:56,750 their entire preoccupation with a gross materialistic side of life and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance. 398 00:42:56,750 --> 00:43:04,010 The Jew of Jerusalem in Christ Day was the exact counterpart of the British philistine of our 399 00:43:04,010 --> 00:43:11,840 own Christ mocked at the whited sepulchre of respectability and fixed that phrase forever. 400 00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:16,460 Now, just in case you think I'm going too far in saying that Wilde was paralleling himself with Christ here, 401 00:43:16,460 --> 00:43:21,350 I should add, he also very, very clearly and explicitly parallels himself with the Pope. 402 00:43:21,350 --> 00:43:23,960 So in his letter to Robbie Ross, 403 00:43:23,960 --> 00:43:30,380 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, 404 00:43:30,380 --> 00:43:34,670 he declares that if the copying is done at Honiton Street, 405 00:43:34,670 --> 00:43:39,170 the lady typewriter might be fed through a lattice in the door like the Cardinals 406 00:43:39,170 --> 00:43:43,790 when they elect a pope till she comes out on the balcony and can say to the world, 407 00:43:43,790 --> 00:43:48,980 How about moondust pistola? For indeed it is an encyclical letter. 408 00:43:48,980 --> 00:43:58,400 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. 409 00:43:58,400 --> 00:44:03,890 This is wild kind of playing some poor pope in that sense as George Bernard Shaw, 410 00:44:03,890 --> 00:44:09,800 who I would urge you to look at any kind of George Bernard Shaw writings on Oscar Wilde should read. 411 00:44:09,800 --> 00:44:16,250 They said it was only the edited version he first saw, and his comment was that it was not World de Profundis. 412 00:44:16,250 --> 00:44:20,810 It was wild. In excelsis Absolutely. 413 00:44:20,810 --> 00:44:24,980 At the peak of in control of things and all sorts of ways. 414 00:44:24,980 --> 00:44:29,570 Now that I think it's one of the keys in that how far in De Profundis? 415 00:44:29,570 --> 00:44:35,150 It's an act of wild taking hold of his life and moulding it as a work of art. 416 00:44:35,150 --> 00:44:38,150 And this image, the idea that he's not in one sense, 417 00:44:38,150 --> 00:44:44,600 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. 418 00:44:44,600 --> 00:44:51,080 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. 419 00:44:51,080 --> 00:44:57,140 And when he talks through what happened to him in the course of his relationship with Douglas and his fall, 420 00:44:57,140 --> 00:45:06,110 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. 421 00:45:06,110 --> 00:45:08,870 So in that sense, he says things like that. 422 00:45:08,870 --> 00:45:15,440 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. 423 00:45:15,440 --> 00:45:19,520 There's the narrative, he tells. It's one of the sort of most painful bits in the province. 424 00:45:19,520 --> 00:45:25,520 He tells of how changing trains between prisons on the way to read in jail. 425 00:45:25,520 --> 00:45:33,230 He was left. He was caught standing on the platform. Clapham Junction with the waters around him became a spectacle. 426 00:45:33,230 --> 00:45:37,790 So huge crowd gathered around him to mock and jeer. 427 00:45:37,790 --> 00:45:44,090 And he says every day for months afterwards, at exactly that time of day, he would burst into tears remembering that. 428 00:45:44,090 --> 00:45:48,920 And there's a sense in which in that someone else is staging him, he's not in charge of himself. 429 00:45:48,920 --> 00:45:52,010 He's being set up as a spectacle by somebody else. 430 00:45:52,010 --> 00:45:58,550 Suddenly he writes about himself and all the other prisoners as the zanies of sorrow thanks to their prison dress. 431 00:45:58,550 --> 00:46:05,240 In that sense, though, they're both costumed and staged in a way that undermines their human dignity, 432 00:46:05,240 --> 00:46:10,550 their sense of themselves, their control over their own life. 433 00:46:10,550 --> 00:46:17,300 And walled in De Profundis takes control of this again, in a sense, not ultimately Mould's it. 434 00:46:17,300 --> 00:46:18,830 It's a work in progress. 435 00:46:18,830 --> 00:46:26,510 But he talks quite precisely about the idea of returning to control exactly that re manipulation of the image you could call it. 436 00:46:26,510 --> 00:46:30,980 So he says, I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. 437 00:46:30,980 --> 00:46:36,920 There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try to make into a spiritual ising of the soul. 438 00:46:36,920 --> 00:46:41,570 I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply without affectation, 439 00:46:41,570 --> 00:46:49,610 that the two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison. 440 00:46:49,610 --> 00:46:54,350 Now you can read De Profundis the work as a whole as a performance of this. 441 00:46:54,350 --> 00:47:00,980 It's a wonderful rather than wild sort of in in victimhood, crushed by the world, exiled. 442 00:47:00,980 --> 00:47:06,680 And so there's a sense in which wild stages and de profundities himself taking hold of his own narrative, 443 00:47:06,680 --> 00:47:14,030 again, turning himself as a work of art that he's repossessing and remoulding in front of the reader. 444 00:47:14,030 --> 00:47:21,530 It's a kind of performance, a wonderfully self-contained performance, that sense in which the letter is addressed to all these audiences. 445 00:47:21,530 --> 00:47:29,450 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. 446 00:47:29,450 --> 00:47:33,560 It has many meanings. It turns into many works of art in different ways. 447 00:47:33,560 --> 00:47:40,850 And in that sense, you can see De Profundis as a multiple as any of his other works of works of art. 448 00:47:40,850 --> 00:47:50,750 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. 449 00:47:50,750 --> 00:48:01,910 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, 450 00:48:01,910 --> 00:48:06,680 a manifesto that is a declaration as much as it possibly could be viewed as an apology, 451 00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:14,570 a work of art that's extraordinarily complex and difficult and multiple. 452 00:48:14,570 --> 00:48:22,130 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 453 00:48:22,130 --> 00:48:29,390 self creation before he leaves them at the end of the work with the work of self and the work of the literary work, 454 00:48:29,390 --> 00:48:35,000 they profundis unfinished. So he finishes, do not be afraid of the past. 455 00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:39,020 If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. 456 00:48:39,020 --> 00:48:46,760 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. 457 00:48:46,760 --> 00:48:51,950 Time and space succession and extension are merely accidental conditions of thought. 458 00:48:51,950 --> 00:48:57,830 The imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. 459 00:48:57,830 --> 00:49:07,790 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. 460 00:49:07,790 --> 00:49:13,780 See the dawn coming over the hill. I see the Sons of God shouting for joy. 461 00:49:13,780 --> 00:49:17,590 What seemed to me to the world and to myself, my future, 462 00:49:17,590 --> 00:49:27,370 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. 463 00:49:27,370 --> 00:49:35,500 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. 464 00:49:35,500 --> 00:49:40,000 This I cannot do by ignoring it or slighting it or praising it or denying it. 465 00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:47,620 It is only to be done fully by accepting it fully as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character, 466 00:49:47,620 --> 00:49:53,620 by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered, how far I am away from the true temple of soul. 467 00:49:53,620 --> 00:49:57,370 This letter, in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, 468 00:49:57,370 --> 00:50:03,070 its aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations shows you quite clearly. 469 00:50:03,070 --> 00:50:08,440 So what you have there is a life as work in protest as well as this. 470 00:50:08,440 --> 00:50:13,750 And in that sense, the life is work in progress. It's in process of being created. 471 00:50:13,750 --> 00:50:24,030 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, 472 00:50:24,030 --> 00:50:27,190 if I talk of De Profundis as all these editorial possibilities, 473 00:50:27,190 --> 00:50:33,520 all these letters to different people as a work of art, as something still to be corrected with a wide lubricated margin. 474 00:50:33,520 --> 00:50:40,480 In that sense, Walt himself knows this work of art is also unfinished, ready for me, moulding, ready to become multiple different things. 475 00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:45,340 So there's a wonderful kind of consonance between the complexity and stability of 476 00:50:45,340 --> 00:50:51,040 De Profundis itself and of what was talking about that coming together of the two. 477 00:50:51,040 --> 00:50:55,960 So in that sense, and that's also worth holding in mind in lots of ways towards other works. 478 00:50:55,960 --> 00:51:01,960 The question of how far they reach one stable finishing point or they remain as multiple possibilities, 479 00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:05,800 most obviously, in the case of the place, because they're there for performance, 480 00:51:05,800 --> 00:51:13,750 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. 481 00:51:13,750 --> 00:51:17,530 I simplified this for you. Not next week. 482 00:51:17,530 --> 00:51:24,864 It's wild as Victorian, a modernist. Thank you.