1 00:00:00,210 --> 00:00:07,260 So art and morality, a few days after Wilde was convicted of being, quote, 2 00:00:07,260 --> 00:00:13,920 the centre of a circle of extensive corruption amongst young men of the most hideous kind, 3 00:00:13,920 --> 00:00:21,840 the following diatribe was printed against walls and artists of his kind in the Daily Telegraph. 4 00:00:21,840 --> 00:00:30,840 A nation prospers and profits by precisely those national qualities which these innovators deride and abjure. 5 00:00:30,840 --> 00:00:39,240 It goes swiftly to wreck and decay by precisely that brilliant corruption of which we have just had the exposure and demonstration. 6 00:00:39,240 --> 00:00:50,880 All the good literature and the noble art in our and other countries has been saying moral and serious in its object. 7 00:00:50,880 --> 00:01:02,040 Nor can life be wholesomely lived under the guidance of brilliant paradoxes and corrosive epigrams to those who know how to observe this man, 8 00:01:02,040 --> 00:01:08,640 Wild and the act of his defence condemned himself and his system by his vanity, 9 00:01:08,640 --> 00:01:15,780 egotism, artificiality and distorted perceptions before the judge and jury had pronounced upon 10 00:01:15,780 --> 00:01:21,120 him the indirect sentence which eliminates him from the society he has disgraced. 11 00:01:21,120 --> 00:01:30,910 We shall have purchased the pain and shame of such an exhibition at a price perhaps not too high if it lead the youth of our generation, 12 00:01:30,910 --> 00:01:37,860 on the one hand, to grave thoughts of duty and propriety and the public on the other, 13 00:01:37,860 --> 00:01:44,310 to a sterner impatience with those who, under the name of art or some other pretence, 14 00:01:44,310 --> 00:01:54,090 insidiously poisoned our stage, our literature, our drama and the outskirts of our press. 15 00:01:54,090 --> 00:02:00,270 If you note that the danger that Wilde and artists of his ilk are described as 16 00:02:00,270 --> 00:02:06,360 posing to the public is not here their sexuality or their sexual practises, 17 00:02:06,360 --> 00:02:13,500 but rather the danger of a literary style that is not saying a moral and serious in its object, 18 00:02:13,500 --> 00:02:19,920 but rather consists of brilliant epigrams and corrosive paradoxes and this particular 19 00:02:19,920 --> 00:02:25,890 voice of moral outrage and a moral outrage about literary style and approach. 20 00:02:25,890 --> 00:02:30,780 It was first loudly raised in response to the first publication, 21 00:02:30,780 --> 00:02:38,430 the Lippincott publication of The Picture of Dorian Grey, which appeared in Lipin Cuts monthly magazine in 1890. 22 00:02:38,430 --> 00:02:45,930 And again, the objections were not just to the subject matter, but very importantly to the style in which the book was written. 23 00:02:45,930 --> 00:02:53,280 So the following appeared in the Daily Chronicle, dullness and other features of Lippincott. 24 00:02:53,280 --> 00:03:03,180 This month, the element in it that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr. Oscar Wilde Story of the Picture of Dorian Grey. 25 00:03:03,180 --> 00:03:09,720 It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadence, a poisonous book, 26 00:03:09,720 --> 00:03:16,860 the atmosphere of which is heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction, 27 00:03:16,860 --> 00:03:24,300 a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be horrible and fascinating. 28 00:03:24,300 --> 00:03:33,540 But for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, 29 00:03:33,540 --> 00:03:39,480 its flippant philosophising and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, 30 00:03:39,480 --> 00:03:47,090 which is all over Mr. Wald's elaborate Wall Street aestheticism and intrusively cheap scholarship. 31 00:03:47,090 --> 00:03:51,080 So in both cases, what you have is an attack upon the style, 32 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:58,550 the literary style and texture and approach of both works flippancy, frivolity, insincerity, 33 00:03:58,550 --> 00:04:05,660 theatricality are what are being objected to, the sense in which there is not a moral and serious tone being adopted, 34 00:04:05,660 --> 00:04:09,230 that you can't read them in this clear, directed way. 35 00:04:09,230 --> 00:04:17,060 Now that this idea of purpose is a serious purpose of style as something dangerous and corrosive, 36 00:04:17,060 --> 00:04:20,810 it's actually there all the way through to the trials in nineteen ninety five. 37 00:04:20,810 --> 00:04:28,090 So in the first trial, which was not a trial of wild, but rather the trial of the Marquis of Queensbury. 38 00:04:28,090 --> 00:04:37,900 Prosecuted by Wilde for libel when he left the card addressed to Oscar Wilde, posing fundamental posing as sodomite and wild, 39 00:04:37,900 --> 00:04:43,150 ended up being rather than it being Queensberry under trial because the evidence that Queensborough and his lawyers brought forward, 40 00:04:43,150 --> 00:04:46,930 it was much more wild on the trial in that first trial already. 41 00:04:46,930 --> 00:04:55,180 And part of what Wilde was tried on was not just what he did, what perhaps happened in hotel rooms and restaurants and all sorts of things. 42 00:04:55,180 --> 00:04:56,980 But about his writings, 43 00:04:56,980 --> 00:05:05,470 most specifically the aphorisms and epigrams collected as phrases and philosophies for the use of the young and picture of Dorian Grey, 44 00:05:05,470 --> 00:05:14,740 both of which were used that Sir Edward Kosten Democracy Queen's defence lawyer tried to use these as evidence of wild. 45 00:05:14,740 --> 00:05:20,830 Having a project of trying to corrupt the young so that his literature was immoral. 46 00:05:20,830 --> 00:05:28,060 Was the argument within the court case just in the same way as he himself was supposedly going out to corrupt the corrupt, the young? 47 00:05:28,060 --> 00:05:30,970 So while trying to corrupt the young reader, 48 00:05:30,970 --> 00:05:38,360 and while the way in which Wilde fought back against these accusations are hugely useful, the transcripts of the trial, 49 00:05:38,360 --> 00:05:49,210 the collected together of that first trial under the fantastic title title of the Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquis, put together by Merlin Holland. 50 00:05:49,210 --> 00:05:57,310 And I'm going to give you a few snippets from that trial as an indication of how well fought back against these accusations of immorality, 51 00:05:57,310 --> 00:06:04,630 the grounds and the logic of what he was saying. So when asked about the possibility that his work might have an immoral effect on the reader, 52 00:06:04,630 --> 00:06:09,220 Wilde responded, I do my own work in writing a plot, a book and a thing. 53 00:06:09,220 --> 00:06:13,180 I am concerned entirely with literature, that is with art. 54 00:06:13,180 --> 00:06:19,930 The aim is not to do good or to do evil, but to try and make a thing that will have some quality of beauty that is to 55 00:06:19,930 --> 00:06:26,290 be attained or in the form of beauty or of wit or amount of wit or emotion. 56 00:06:26,290 --> 00:06:34,300 Now, and Carson, the prosecuting the defence attorney, goes on to ask him about his aphorisms in the face and philosophy. 57 00:06:34,300 --> 00:06:42,370 The young, such as wickedness, is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others and wealth in question. 58 00:06:42,370 --> 00:06:50,140 Do you think this is true while dancers? I rarely think that anything I write is true costs and says nothing you write 59 00:06:50,140 --> 00:06:55,900 is ever true and wild respons not true in the sense of correspondence to fact, 60 00:06:55,900 --> 00:07:03,940 to represent wilful moods, a paradox of fun, nonsense of anything at all, but not true in the actual sense of correspondence to actual facts of life. 61 00:07:03,940 --> 00:07:09,520 Certainly not. I should be very sorry to think it. And Coxsone carries on, he pushes. 62 00:07:09,520 --> 00:07:14,530 And it's very it's also useful for looking at the quality that what I said about Wilde compressing ideas into 63 00:07:14,530 --> 00:07:21,130 epigrams or using paradoxes while very precisely responds to different of these aphorisms in different ways. 64 00:07:21,130 --> 00:07:25,930 So challenged on religions die when they prove to be true. 65 00:07:25,930 --> 00:07:33,190 Waltz's I hold to that and says it is a suggestion towards the philosophy of the absorption of religion into science. 66 00:07:33,190 --> 00:07:35,710 It is too big a question to go into now. 67 00:07:35,710 --> 00:07:43,750 So that's an example of one where he's compressed the entire system of thought into one kind of witty epigram he's then challenged on. 68 00:07:43,750 --> 00:07:49,660 Do you think that was a safe axiom to put forward as a phrase and philosophy for the use of the young, 69 00:07:49,660 --> 00:07:51,850 to which Wilde replies, most stimulating of thought, 70 00:07:51,850 --> 00:08:00,430 I should say, if one tells the truth, one is sure, sure, sooner or later to be found out, which well describes as a very pleasing paradox. 71 00:08:00,430 --> 00:08:09,510 But I don't set any store by it as an axiom. And Carson pushes, do you think it was a good educational axiom for the young? 72 00:08:09,510 --> 00:08:16,620 And while replies, anything that stimulates thought in people of any age is good for them and nothing that stimulates thought, 73 00:08:16,620 --> 00:08:24,930 yes, anything whether moral or immoral thought is never either one or the other responds world. 74 00:08:24,930 --> 00:08:30,480 So very, very importantly, what he's doing here is separating what he separates throughout. 75 00:08:30,480 --> 00:08:34,680 For example, the preface to Dorian Grey, the aesthetic and the ethical. 76 00:08:34,680 --> 00:08:42,420 So the aesthetic is the therapeutic sphere. Beauty for art. Ethics is a sphere of morality and the two are different. 77 00:08:42,420 --> 00:08:47,670 They may overlap, but they are distinct. And you're not meant to use the standards of one to apply to the other. 78 00:08:47,670 --> 00:08:51,900 And very importantly, thought is different from action. 79 00:08:51,900 --> 00:08:58,110 You do not have morality in thought. Morality belongs to actions and possibly emotions, but not to thwart. 80 00:08:58,110 --> 00:09:04,620 Free range of thought is not in itself moral or immoral. 81 00:09:04,620 --> 00:09:12,870 And in that sense, while under cross-examination stands absolutely by the the axiom set forth in the preface to Dorian Grey, 82 00:09:12,870 --> 00:09:18,180 where, for example, he argues that there is no such thing as an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. 83 00:09:18,180 --> 00:09:22,410 That is all. In other words, you judge them by aesthetic, not by ethical standards. 84 00:09:22,410 --> 00:09:31,920 So similarly, Carlson again challenges him, saying a well-written book putting forth sort of mystical views might be a good book and wild replies. 85 00:09:31,920 --> 00:09:38,190 No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. 86 00:09:38,190 --> 00:09:42,090 There are no views in the work of art. 87 00:09:42,090 --> 00:09:49,980 And Carson Carrison tried to argue that picture of Dorian Grey could be seen as a sort of mythical book and Wild responds, 88 00:09:49,980 --> 00:09:55,290 well, the views of Philistines, people who are ignorant on art are utterly unaccountable and they may misinterpret things. 89 00:09:55,290 --> 00:09:59,250 And that's absolutely not my concern whatsoever, he says. 90 00:09:59,250 --> 00:10:05,280 What concerns me in my art is my view and my feeling and why I made it. 91 00:10:05,280 --> 00:10:09,210 I don't care to pentz what other people think about it. 92 00:10:09,210 --> 00:10:14,250 And Carson continues saying, The affection and love that is pictured of the artist towards Dorian Grey in this book of 93 00:10:14,250 --> 00:10:19,740 yours might lead an ordinary individual to believe it had a sort of mythical tendency, 94 00:10:19,740 --> 00:10:27,040 might it not, to which rather responds, I have no knowledge of the ordinary individual and Carson. 95 00:10:27,040 --> 00:10:33,660 Oh, I see. But you do. But you do not prevent the ordinary individual from buying your book and wild replies. 96 00:10:33,660 --> 00:10:38,500 I have never discouraged them of what you have impotently here throughout that. 97 00:10:38,500 --> 00:10:43,200 There's a kind of clear pattern, both the division of the aesthetic and the ethic ethical, 98 00:10:43,200 --> 00:10:49,590 but also the emphasis upon art being created by the artist for the artist, 99 00:10:49,590 --> 00:10:55,990 not with an intention upon the reader, not with the ability that the interpretation put upon. 100 00:10:55,990 --> 00:11:05,130 The work of art is entirely incalculable and reasonably random and not the concern of the artist the artist is creating for themselves. 101 00:11:05,130 --> 00:11:10,740 In that sense, that moral judgements, good, bad, corrupting, improving, ennobling, educative. 102 00:11:10,740 --> 00:11:18,120 And so while this is not valid criteria for art, they're not a way of judging it or or approaching it or valuing it. 103 00:11:18,120 --> 00:11:27,750 Exactly as he says in the preface. No artist has ethical sympathy's and ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. 104 00:11:27,750 --> 00:11:33,390 And very importantly, he separates himself with authorial responsibility for how a book is read. 105 00:11:33,390 --> 00:11:39,420 Now, on the basis of all of that, it might make the mistake of trying to type while very much as Carson did or the trials did, 106 00:11:39,420 --> 00:11:45,780 as an immoral or an amoral writer. Whereas actually, well, this hugely interested in morality. 107 00:11:45,780 --> 00:11:54,090 You could see his works as kind of debates around morality. But remember that what wild means by morality is not obedience. 108 00:11:54,090 --> 00:12:00,870 So the idea that morality means being obedient to the rules that have been established for your culture, 109 00:12:00,870 --> 00:12:07,490 for your society, for your tribe, world sees that as a form, as he has some. 110 00:12:07,490 --> 00:12:11,940 That's a very neat sort of description of this from Lord Henry Watson and Dorian Grey. 111 00:12:11,940 --> 00:12:16,350 Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. 112 00:12:16,350 --> 00:12:23,160 I consider that for any man to accept the standard of his age is a form of the greatest immorality. 113 00:12:23,160 --> 00:12:28,440 In other words, morality as well tends to put it forward in an active sense. 114 00:12:28,440 --> 00:12:37,060 Morality is the ability to think things through for yourself. To debate them to take an active interest in world where obedience is merely a form 115 00:12:37,060 --> 00:12:41,680 of passivity and again where Wilde is saying so much of his society is corrupt, 116 00:12:41,680 --> 00:12:47,530 to be obedient to that society is not necessarily to be good or to be moral. 117 00:12:47,530 --> 00:12:55,280 So, again, think of there are many societies you can probably think of where obedience towards them. 118 00:12:55,280 --> 00:12:58,610 Israeli collusion with another form of immorality. 119 00:12:58,610 --> 00:13:05,720 Now, how well does this this idea that what he does with his writings, debate on morality, is to destabilise moral certainties, 120 00:13:05,720 --> 00:13:16,130 to unsettle the reader, to challenge tradition's absolutes, precepts and so on, leaving the reader disoriented and forced to think for themselves? 121 00:13:16,130 --> 00:13:22,370 In this sense, world is very, very close, I think, to the method used by George Bernard Shaw, his kind of Irish contemporary, who, 122 00:13:22,370 --> 00:13:29,750 again, is very clearly seen as somebody who's trying to provoke a kind of active moral and political sense in his readers and audiences. 123 00:13:29,750 --> 00:13:38,840 While this is a whole range of different methods to achieve this one is writing a tale or a seed or a moment that seems to offer a very, 124 00:13:38,840 --> 00:13:48,550 very clear moral and then setting up another tale or scene that completely destabilises, that undermines and challenges it. 125 00:13:48,550 --> 00:13:53,830 So in that sense, you get tails with contradictory tales set up against them. 126 00:13:53,830 --> 00:14:01,360 Another is to couch his his essays and his plays and so on in dialogue form, one voice arguing against another, 127 00:14:01,360 --> 00:14:08,980 and where it's impossible to establish where authority lies, be very, very wary of finding an authorial voice in world works. 128 00:14:08,980 --> 00:14:12,190 It's no accident that he's using the dialogue form in that sense. 129 00:14:12,190 --> 00:14:17,740 Another one is where he doesn't use multiple voices, but he uses a very, very unstable voice, a very playful, 130 00:14:17,740 --> 00:14:25,510 provocative, exaggerated comic, ironic, satiric, shifting voice, which again makes it very hard to work out purpose. 131 00:14:25,510 --> 00:14:34,000 Exactly that voice that's condemned in those quotes I gave you earlier as theatrical, insincere, say, a frivolous insult. 132 00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:40,990 Another one he does is using this lack of closure look very significantly at the end of his works, 133 00:14:40,990 --> 00:14:47,350 the number of times they destabilise what seems to have been established already or they offer no kind of closure at all, 134 00:14:47,350 --> 00:14:54,210 a kind of lack of direction, a lack of sense of how you're meant to conclude upon it. 135 00:14:54,210 --> 00:15:01,680 And very importantly, the ways in which he undermines orthodoxy very often done through undermining genre and genre expectations, 136 00:15:01,680 --> 00:15:09,660 leaving you unclear on how you're meant to interpret. Now the works as well as the most often looked at as offering some kind of moral precepts. 137 00:15:09,660 --> 00:15:16,500 And, you know, clearly being moral tales tend to be the fairy tales, often with the idea that because they're written for children, 138 00:15:16,500 --> 00:15:21,240 they must be educative and they must be relatively simple and wild. 139 00:15:21,240 --> 00:15:30,050 Certainly described as fairy tales at different points as being written for children or being written, quote, for child like people from 18 to 80. 140 00:15:30,050 --> 00:15:34,340 Now, with world, I wouldn't take it from his version of children and sons and what he's seen of children, 141 00:15:34,340 --> 00:15:38,930 that writing for children means that it's simple and there are predictable interpretations. 142 00:15:38,930 --> 00:15:44,930 So one of my favourite tales from him is when he talks about his son Cyril at the age of something like eight, 143 00:15:44,930 --> 00:15:48,920 came up to him and said, what do you dream of? 144 00:15:48,920 --> 00:15:50,390 And well thought this was a moment for. 145 00:15:50,390 --> 00:16:01,160 So he sort of took a deep breath and he said, I dream of giants who live in castles and dragons with green scales and diamonds for eyes and legs. 146 00:16:01,160 --> 00:16:10,050 And he carried on like this. And the more extravagant he grew, the more uninterested Sarah looked so well, became more extravagant. 147 00:16:10,050 --> 00:16:17,120 The Dragons are quite green and gold claws, and that until Cyril was looking openly bored, 148 00:16:17,120 --> 00:16:20,900 which point well turned around and said, Well, what do you dream of? 149 00:16:20,900 --> 00:16:30,800 And Cyril got this beatific expression of pure revelation on his face and he said, I dream of pigs. 150 00:16:30,800 --> 00:16:35,900 And while this is a tale against himself, that thing about the unpredictability of what a child values, 151 00:16:35,900 --> 00:16:38,120 that kind of deflation called keep that in mind. 152 00:16:38,120 --> 00:16:43,700 As you look at the fairy tales, I think it's a kind of useful tale to bring in bringing contact with them. 153 00:16:43,700 --> 00:16:48,740 So what you get this idea of the child audience in one side or the childlike audience, 154 00:16:48,740 --> 00:16:53,190 what you've got within, for example, that first collection, The Happy Prince and other tales. 155 00:16:53,190 --> 00:17:00,230 There are various tales there which seem to tell an absolutely straightforward moral, a moral of self-sacrifice, 156 00:17:00,230 --> 00:17:09,650 a moral of the inequality of wealth in that society and the importance of Christian self-sacrifice, 157 00:17:09,650 --> 00:17:17,960 of self-sacrifice and the rich giving up what they have or giving up some of what they have to help the poor and being rewarded in heaven. 158 00:17:17,960 --> 00:17:24,170 It works perfectly for essentially socialist [INAUDIBLE] in the Happy Prince, the title story, 159 00:17:24,170 --> 00:17:29,170 it works for The Selfish Giant, probably the tale of Wealth that's the most anthologised, its most straightforward. 160 00:17:29,170 --> 00:17:33,770 It's most like to be in in just about any anthology of world writings. 161 00:17:33,770 --> 00:17:38,810 But then look at some of the other tales next to those in that collection. 162 00:17:38,810 --> 00:17:45,710 So in the Nightengale in the rose, a young student is in love with a woman who won't take any notice of her love of him, 163 00:17:45,710 --> 00:17:51,800 and who says they will only listen to you if you can give me the most perfect rose and the nightingale hears this and feels very sorry 164 00:17:51,800 --> 00:18:01,300 for the lovelorn student and finds out the only way to make a perfect rose is to sing while piercing her her heart on the thorn. 165 00:18:01,300 --> 00:18:05,590 So the nightingale does that and produces, as she dies, 166 00:18:05,590 --> 00:18:10,490 produces the most perfect rose ever and the student finds this rose not realising 167 00:18:10,490 --> 00:18:14,530 it has anything to do with dead birds over there and presents it to his lover. 168 00:18:14,530 --> 00:18:19,150 And his lover goes, What do I want with a rose? This other love is offering me diamonds. 169 00:18:19,150 --> 00:18:23,500 I don't want it. It when Stephen goes, Oh God, women love, who cares? 170 00:18:23,500 --> 00:18:30,160 Back to my books and that the dead nightingale. So that makes self-sacrifice really worth it, doesn't it? 171 00:18:30,160 --> 00:18:39,280 And then you get another tale in that collection. The devoted friend in which little Hans gives up everything he has to the Rich Miller. 172 00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:44,500 He's completely selfless and gives up all his money and all these earnings and everything else. 173 00:18:44,500 --> 00:18:50,980 And he ends up dying of cold and starvation and all the rest of it and sacrificing himself to the miller. 174 00:18:50,980 --> 00:18:59,150 And not only does the mill not appreciate it, but the mill actually complains about little, hence its selfishness. 175 00:18:59,150 --> 00:19:08,050 And then just to further complicate the story, it's framed by the fact that it's been told by animals about humans. 176 00:19:08,050 --> 00:19:15,430 So in fairy tales are humans tell anthropomorphise stories about animals with wild instead has animals telling anthurium well, 177 00:19:15,430 --> 00:19:23,680 anthropomorphise, whatever the animal is telling stories about humans and the animal's responses are so the water rat. 178 00:19:23,680 --> 00:19:29,380 So the story's been told by the linnet and well said the wolf rat after a long pause. 179 00:19:29,380 --> 00:19:33,730 Well, that's the end, said the linnet. Well, what became of the Miller Ausable threat? 180 00:19:33,730 --> 00:19:41,810 Oh, I really don't know, replied the Linnett. I'm sure I don't care. It is quite evident that you have no sympathy in your nature, said the water rat. 181 00:19:41,810 --> 00:19:48,420 I'm afraid you don't quite see the moral of the story. Remarkable to limit what screen the water at the moral. 182 00:19:48,420 --> 00:19:52,480 Do you mean to say that story had a moral certainly set the limit. 183 00:19:52,480 --> 00:19:57,910 Well, really, said the water rat in a very angry manner. I think you should have told me that before you began. 184 00:19:57,910 --> 00:20:03,730 If you had done so, I would certainly not have listened to you. In fact, I should have said poo like the critic. 185 00:20:03,730 --> 00:20:10,300 However, I can say it now. So he shouted out poo at the top of his voice, gave a whisker of his tail and went back into his hole. 186 00:20:10,300 --> 00:20:14,710 And how do you like water rat? Ask the duck who came paddling up some minutes afterwards. 187 00:20:14,710 --> 00:20:16,210 He has a great many good points, 188 00:20:16,210 --> 00:20:22,690 but for my own part I have a mother's feelings and I can never look at a confirmed bachelor without tears coming into my eyes. 189 00:20:22,690 --> 00:20:28,480 I'm afraid I'm rather annoyed him answer the limit. The fact is, I told him a story with a moral. 190 00:20:28,480 --> 00:20:35,590 Ah, that is a very dangerous thing to do, said the duck, and I quite agree with her. 191 00:20:35,590 --> 00:20:42,330 That framed by the author that comes in at the end and says so, so what is the moral of that tale? 192 00:20:42,330 --> 00:20:44,370 So in that set and then you have right on the end, 193 00:20:44,370 --> 00:20:52,590 you've got then you've got the whole the remarkable rocket attack, which has such a sort of irony, satirical voice. 194 00:20:52,590 --> 00:20:57,330 Absolutely unclear what you're meant to gather from this and where the point of view is. 195 00:20:57,330 --> 00:21:05,280 So in that sense, if you look at all those stories together of a pro self-sacrifice or are they satirising self-sacrifice, 196 00:21:05,280 --> 00:21:11,070 some of them are framed where those who sacrifice for someone else are rewarded and if not on earth and in heaven, 197 00:21:11,070 --> 00:21:17,520 others, it seems to be about the foolishness and the emptiness of that and that sense. 198 00:21:17,520 --> 00:21:22,020 You can't you can read individual stories perhaps of the moral, but certainly not within a collection. 199 00:21:22,020 --> 00:21:26,440 And even reading them individually, different things within the tales can destabilise that. 200 00:21:26,440 --> 00:21:32,520 So, for example, one of the standard forms in which the tales are told is characters are relatively flat. 201 00:21:32,520 --> 00:21:37,170 They've got names like the Happy Prince, the young king, the devoted friend, the remarkable rocket. 202 00:21:37,170 --> 00:21:43,050 And otherwise they each get one adjective. They're pretty much uninterest interest, whereas the prose spends a huge amount of time, 203 00:21:43,050 --> 00:21:51,630 very often giving a very kind of jewelled, aesthetic sized, highly textured description of objects or things or moments. 204 00:21:51,630 --> 00:21:56,520 They're not built into some kind of psychologise deep feeling in that sense. 205 00:21:56,520 --> 00:22:02,610 So there's a difficulty on reading those stories with a sense of beauty coming in any sense, 206 00:22:02,610 --> 00:22:06,180 coming together with a sense of morality and a sense of human sympathy. 207 00:22:06,180 --> 00:22:12,720 Put that in contrast with, say, George Eliot or Dickens's ways in which he develops models where very, 208 00:22:12,720 --> 00:22:21,240 very closely a human sympathy fit in with the politics being advocated and aesthetic qualities of beauty and attractiveness 209 00:22:21,240 --> 00:22:27,750 and all the rest of it are very often brought together with how you're meant to be feeling in different ways. 210 00:22:27,750 --> 00:22:35,640 So, by contrast, often the aestheticism and wild stories is a kind of further complicating factor. 211 00:22:35,640 --> 00:22:39,270 So, for example, when the nightingale dies, 212 00:22:39,270 --> 00:22:48,840 so the nightingale creates this beautiful rose through self-sacrifice and the moment when the nightingale sings just as she dies. 213 00:22:48,840 --> 00:22:54,300 There's a moment when the nightingale gives out this gorgeous song which produces as she dies. 214 00:22:54,300 --> 00:23:02,220 And then she gave one last burst of music. The White Moon heard it and she forgot the dawn and lingered on in the sky. 215 00:23:02,220 --> 00:23:07,410 The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy and opened its petals to the cold. 216 00:23:07,410 --> 00:23:14,580 Morning air echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. 217 00:23:14,580 --> 00:23:19,920 It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message out to the sea. 218 00:23:19,920 --> 00:23:26,970 So wonderful. So in that sense, that moment, it's not ionised. It's actually almost kind of orgasmically beautiful. 219 00:23:26,970 --> 00:23:33,660 So that moment of self for all the creation of the roads, becomes an incredibly beautiful moment in that tale, 220 00:23:33,660 --> 00:23:38,160 but not to any clear purpose within the rest of the framework of the tale. 221 00:23:38,160 --> 00:23:44,310 In other words, there are all sorts of different styles not working together towards one point, 222 00:23:44,310 --> 00:23:49,860 but working to produce the kind of very a huge unevenness and indeterminacy of tone. 223 00:23:49,860 --> 00:23:57,000 Similarly, if you look and once you get to the second collection of tales, when you get to the House of Pomegranates gets even more complicated. 224 00:23:57,000 --> 00:24:00,060 So House of Pomegranates was sold much more as an aesthetic work, 225 00:24:00,060 --> 00:24:04,860 much less with illustrations in book form and cover and so on to look like a work for children. 226 00:24:04,860 --> 00:24:12,180 Much more a kind of aesthetic work of a kind of expensive high end of the art market. 227 00:24:12,180 --> 00:24:18,930 And within those the tales collected there, some of them have a far more complex and almost sort of labyrinthine structure. 228 00:24:18,930 --> 00:24:22,380 So, for example, the fisherman and his soul, I mean, 229 00:24:22,380 --> 00:24:27,540 it breaks all those ideas of soul selling or doing a deal to lose your soul in the fisherman's 230 00:24:27,540 --> 00:24:32,610 soul is cut from him with the help of the witch because he's in love with the mermaid and can't, 231 00:24:32,610 --> 00:24:36,630 you know, go and join her with a soul. And then the soul having been cut loose, 232 00:24:36,630 --> 00:24:44,520 the soul goes off and has adventures and comes back and tries to corrupt the fisherman who cut the soul off from him. 233 00:24:44,520 --> 00:24:50,610 Have you ever come across that before? In other words, it kind of it doesn't fit with any of those kind of precepts and morals that you're used to 234 00:24:50,610 --> 00:24:55,920 within that genre of of separating soul from body or selling of soul or anything like that. 235 00:24:55,920 --> 00:25:02,490 Similarly, within those stories, there's a sense in which the Christianity and the magic, the paganism, 236 00:25:02,490 --> 00:25:09,090 the values of sympathy and human emotion, none of those come in to any kind of play, a combination at any point. 237 00:25:09,090 --> 00:25:15,930 That's sort of several value systems working in that tale, not directly against each other, but never joining together. 238 00:25:15,930 --> 00:25:23,040 So again, what moral scheme, what system of moral or sympathetic political human values argument to read that story within. 239 00:25:23,040 --> 00:25:29,280 Then on the destabilizer ending, you have a wonderful tale like the Starchild, which seems to have an absolutely clear moral. 240 00:25:29,280 --> 00:25:33,000 So the Starchild starts off mean beautiful. 241 00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:41,540 I mean, and then sort of. Which then turns the child ugly and, well, it's ugly, it learns to be more generous and kind and help everybody, 242 00:25:41,540 --> 00:25:47,510 and then it gets to be beautiful again and then it becomes king and and king. 243 00:25:47,510 --> 00:25:51,470 There is peace and plenty in the land. Yet he ruled not long. 244 00:25:51,470 --> 00:26:00,050 So great had been his suffering and so bitter, the fire of his testing for after the space of three years he died and he who came after 245 00:26:00,050 --> 00:26:08,540 ruled evely what's so what you've got is something where it's gone from the fairytale. 246 00:26:08,540 --> 00:26:12,770 OK, he's now he's beautiful. He's learnt to be good, everything's fine. 247 00:26:12,770 --> 00:26:17,840 But of course that seriously takes its toll on its constitution and therefore he dies 248 00:26:17,840 --> 00:26:23,630 early and then the next day his uncle or whatever comes in and completely messes it up. 249 00:26:23,630 --> 00:26:31,160 Do you see what I mean, and that comes right in the last sentence of the whole tale and it just leaves, 250 00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:35,450 are we working within a fairy tale world of the good things happening, the bad home happily? 251 00:26:35,450 --> 00:26:44,750 Or are we living in a working in a realistic genre of naturalistic cause and effect and physiological damage caused by early life suffering the two? 252 00:26:44,750 --> 00:26:49,640 Yeah. So he suddenly hops from one genre to another. 253 00:26:49,640 --> 00:26:55,010 And that destabilises all the assumptions you're working on as you're reading within one genre. 254 00:26:55,010 --> 00:27:05,420 He does this constantly. So particularly when you come to that's what a collected together is, the stories rather than fairy tales in particular. 255 00:27:05,420 --> 00:27:15,120 Look at Lord Arthur Savile's crime, which is subtitled A Study of Duty Now Within Law that assembles crime. 256 00:27:15,120 --> 00:27:23,190 What happens is young Lord Arthur Saville, who is engaged to a beautiful Sybil Merton, goes to a party and has his Palm read, 257 00:27:23,190 --> 00:27:31,500 and Pooja's the artist who reads his palm sees in it that he is destined to commit murder. 258 00:27:31,500 --> 00:27:35,730 And being a very noble and self sacrificing an honourable young man, 259 00:27:35,730 --> 00:27:42,390 he realises that it is his duty to commit this murder before he marries Sybil because it would be utterly 260 00:27:42,390 --> 00:27:48,210 unfair to marry her with this hanging over him so it might ruin her life or might ruin their marriage. 261 00:27:48,210 --> 00:27:57,510 So he is he knuckle down and selects a victim as a good young man and selects his ancient aunt, 262 00:27:57,510 --> 00:28:01,650 ancient second cousin or whatever, Lady Clare, and he goes to a poison. 263 00:28:01,650 --> 00:28:05,070 He finds out all about poison and he gets a little bonbon made. 264 00:28:05,070 --> 00:28:11,760 It looks like a little capsule, the gelatine capsule that will poison her and gives it to her in a little bonnier, 265 00:28:11,760 --> 00:28:18,930 little sweet box and tells of the next time she has heartburn, she should take it and he goes away and he kind of breaks off. 266 00:28:18,930 --> 00:28:27,660 He says his fiancee, the marriage must wait and he goes off and he waits and reads all the newspapers waiting to hear of his aunt's death. 267 00:28:27,660 --> 00:28:33,600 And finally, news of his death comes and he's greatly relieved and he's done his duty and all the rest of it and he comes back. 268 00:28:33,600 --> 00:28:38,820 But as he goes through and chief and gives him some money and her will and he feels very bad. 269 00:28:38,820 --> 00:28:45,210 But when he goes to visit her house, he finds the Bombadier with the sweet still in it. 270 00:28:45,210 --> 00:28:51,510 And he didn't kill her. She died of natural causes. So he has a terrible, terrible, you know, the world against him and all the rest of it. 271 00:28:51,510 --> 00:28:53,520 But being a really good young man, 272 00:28:53,520 --> 00:29:02,010 he nuckols down again and selects another victim and he decides it should be the dean of Chichester, another distant relative of his. 273 00:29:02,010 --> 00:29:12,090 And he goes off, he talks to some anarchist Russian friends of his and gets the address of a revolution, a maker of bombs. 274 00:29:12,090 --> 00:29:21,540 And he goes to see this maker of bombs and the maker of bombs asked him about his having cookoff is the name of this manufacture of explosives, 275 00:29:21,540 --> 00:29:28,620 and he asked him what his political causes and so on. And I assure you, said Lord Usera, there is nothing to do with the police at all. 276 00:29:28,620 --> 00:29:33,840 In fact, the clock he wants an explosive clock is intended for the dean of Chichester, the Army. 277 00:29:33,840 --> 00:29:39,390 I had no idea you felt so strongly about religion, Lord Arthur. Few young people do nowadays. 278 00:29:39,390 --> 00:29:45,570 I'm afraid you overrate me having Cookoff, said Lord Arthur blushing. The fact is, I know nothing about theology. 279 00:29:45,570 --> 00:29:49,830 It is a purely private matter, then a purely private having. 280 00:29:49,830 --> 00:29:51,900 Callcott shrugged his shoulders and left the room, 281 00:29:51,900 --> 00:29:58,080 returning a few minutes later with a cake of dynamite about the size of a penny and a pretty little French clock, 282 00:29:58,080 --> 00:30:04,800 surmounted by normally a figure of liberty trampling on the hydra of despotism. 283 00:30:04,800 --> 00:30:08,490 And he explains how the mechanism works and talked to him and all the rest of it. 284 00:30:08,490 --> 00:30:13,050 And then and now, said Lord Arthur, rising from his seat. Pray let me know how much I am in. 285 00:30:13,050 --> 00:30:18,030 Your debt is a small matter, Lord Arthur, that I do not care to make any charge. 286 00:30:18,030 --> 00:30:23,310 The dynamite comes to seven and sixpence. The clock will be three pounds ten and the carriage about five shillings. 287 00:30:23,310 --> 00:30:30,900 I am only too pleased to oblige a friend of movil off, but your trouble having cloth eyes is nothing. 288 00:30:30,900 --> 00:30:39,420 It is a pleasure to me. I do not work for money. I live entirely for art. 289 00:30:39,420 --> 00:30:44,490 Lord Arthur lay down four pounds, two and six on the table and thank the little German for its kindness. 290 00:30:44,490 --> 00:30:48,660 And having succeeded in declining an invitation to meet some anarchists at to 291 00:30:48,660 --> 00:30:52,860 meet tea on the following Saturday left the house and went off to the park. 292 00:30:52,860 --> 00:31:01,380 So once again, he waits for a long time to sit here. Is this. The Dean has exploded as proper and he has committed this crime as he is meant to. 293 00:31:01,380 --> 00:31:09,870 But after. Well, there's no news in the papers at all. No news of explosions in Chichester and Lord of the Felt, the attempt must have failed. 294 00:31:09,870 --> 00:31:15,990 It was a terrible blow to him. And for a time he was quite unnerved. Having Cookoff, whom he went to see the next day, 295 00:31:15,990 --> 00:31:25,110 was full of elaborate apologies and offered to supply him with another clock free of charge or with a case of nitroglycerine at cost price. 296 00:31:25,110 --> 00:31:28,770 But he had lost all faith in explosives and having cooked himself, 297 00:31:28,770 --> 00:31:35,130 acknowledged that everything is so adulterated nowadays that even dynamite can hardly be got in a pure condition. 298 00:31:35,130 --> 00:31:39,120 The little German, however, while admitting that something must have gone wrong with machinery, 299 00:31:39,120 --> 00:31:42,360 was not without hope that the clock might still go off. 300 00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:49,020 And in the case of a barometer he had once sent to the military governor at Odessa, which though time to explode in ten days, 301 00:31:49,020 --> 00:31:56,610 had not done so for something like three months, it was quite true that when it did go off, it merely succeeded in blowing a housemaid to Athens. 302 00:31:56,610 --> 00:31:58,980 The governor having gone out of town six weeks before. 303 00:31:58,980 --> 00:32:07,950 But at least it showed that dynamite as a destructive force was when under the control of machinery, a powerful, though somewhat unpunctual agent. 304 00:32:07,950 --> 00:32:13,260 Lord Arthur was a little consoled by this reflection, but even here he was destined to disappointment. 305 00:32:13,260 --> 00:32:19,660 And a few days later. He received a letter from one of his cousins, the daughter of this dean of Chichester, 306 00:32:19,660 --> 00:32:26,020 which contains the following account, we have had great fun of a clock that an unknown admirer and papa. 307 00:32:26,020 --> 00:32:29,020 Last Thursday, it arrived in a wooden box from London, 308 00:32:29,020 --> 00:32:34,510 carriage paid and papa feels it must have been sent by someone who has read his remarkable servant. 309 00:32:34,510 --> 00:32:42,970 So Serban is Licence Liberty four on the top of the clock was a figure of a woman with what Papa said was a cap of liberty on her head. 310 00:32:42,970 --> 00:32:47,950 I didn't think it very becoming myself, but papa said it was historical. So I suppose it's all right. 311 00:32:47,950 --> 00:32:51,910 Parker unpacked it and Papa put it on the mantelpiece in the library and we 312 00:32:51,910 --> 00:32:55,180 were all sitting there on Friday morning when just this clock struck 12:00. 313 00:32:55,180 --> 00:32:58,960 We had a whirring noise, a little puff of smoke came out from the pedestal. 314 00:32:58,960 --> 00:33:02,770 The figure and the goddess liberty fell off a broken nose on the fender. 315 00:33:02,770 --> 00:33:07,330 Maria was quite alarmed, but it looked so ridiculous that James and I went off in fits of laughter. 316 00:33:07,330 --> 00:33:10,240 And even papa was amused. When we examined it, 317 00:33:10,240 --> 00:33:16,510 we found a sort of alarm clock and that if you set it to a particular hour and put some gunpowder in the cap under a little hammer, 318 00:33:16,510 --> 00:33:20,890 it went off whenever we wanted, Papa said. It must not remain in the library. 319 00:33:20,890 --> 00:33:27,500 It made a noise. So Reggie carried it away to the school room and does nothing but have small explosions all day long. 320 00:33:27,500 --> 00:33:32,560 Do you think Arthur would like one for a wedding present? I suppose they're quite fashionable in London. 321 00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:40,330 Papa said they should do a great deal of good as they show that liberty can't last and must fall down. 322 00:33:40,330 --> 00:33:50,470 Papa says liberty was invented at the time of the French Revolution. How terrible that seems and which point Arthur is completely devastated by this. 323 00:33:50,470 --> 00:33:53,920 All his good intentions coming to nothing. He got upstairs. 324 00:33:53,920 --> 00:34:00,520 He flung himself on the sofa, his eyes filled with tears. He had done his best to commit this murder, but on both occasions he had failed. 325 00:34:00,520 --> 00:34:06,940 And through no fault of his own, he had tried to do his duty. But it seemed as if destiny herself had turned traitor. 326 00:34:06,940 --> 00:34:13,330 He was oppressed with a sense of the business, of good intentions, of the futility of trying to be fine. 327 00:34:13,330 --> 00:34:22,840 And he then goes wandering alone through the night of London and all the rest of it until he bumped into the Carment Podger beside the embankment. 328 00:34:22,840 --> 00:34:32,530 It was Mr Pooja's the Kahraman artist. No one could mistake the fat, flabby face, the golden spectacles, the sickly feeble smile, the sensual mouth. 329 00:34:32,530 --> 00:34:38,410 Lord Arthur stopped. A brilliant idea flashed across him, and he still softly up behind. 330 00:34:38,410 --> 00:34:43,060 In a moment he had seised Mr Podger by the legs and flung him into the Thames. 331 00:34:43,060 --> 00:34:47,230 That was a course, a heavy splash, and all was still Lord. 332 00:34:47,230 --> 00:34:55,710 Arthur looked anxiously over but could see nothing of the car omontys but a tall hat pirouetting and an eddy of moonlit water. 333 00:34:55,710 --> 00:35:02,760 And there we are. The murder was committed, Lord Arthur Murray is simple matter and all ends happily. 334 00:35:02,760 --> 00:35:09,690 What you get from quoting him at length, you get that sense of how all that it moves from satire to human beings matter. 335 00:35:09,690 --> 00:35:15,570 Does that matter or not? Is a matter for comedy. Is there any sort of serious irony happening in the museum? 336 00:35:15,570 --> 00:35:22,560 And again, the sort of aesthetic qualities come in the ugly car is tends to destroy the beautiful eddy of water in the pirouetting cap. 337 00:35:22,560 --> 00:35:28,200 And that sense is an incredibly just excerpting for that and fantastically unstable narrative. 338 00:35:28,200 --> 00:35:31,980 Voice and fantasy unsayable the modes, the genres. 339 00:35:31,980 --> 00:35:37,470 It's moving between in that sense and that kind of close reading you could do with all of wild stories in that way. 340 00:35:37,470 --> 00:35:47,910 Look at the cannibal ghost again. It's a tale of the ghost who can't sleep, who's forever tortured but for the crime he committed in killing his wife. 341 00:35:47,910 --> 00:35:53,320 And yet all of the and it's a story in which materialism, spirituality is set up against each other. 342 00:35:53,320 --> 00:36:00,360 Virginia, the young American Puritan girl who commits some kind of sacrifice to redeem the ghost, 343 00:36:00,360 --> 00:36:04,050 who now goes to die to get finally get eternal peace again. 344 00:36:04,050 --> 00:36:09,090 What form this sacrifice takes kind of destabilises the story because she's always blushing at the mention 345 00:36:09,090 --> 00:36:15,900 of it and she can't tell her husband there's a kind of weirdly slight sexual kind of all around it. 346 00:36:15,900 --> 00:36:18,960 But there's also the fact that to try and read it as a Christian story, 347 00:36:18,960 --> 00:36:25,680 a story about sacrifice and Christian redemption and evil versus spirituality and things like that, 348 00:36:25,680 --> 00:36:30,480 all of the evil is presented in a kind of heightened theatrical way. 349 00:36:30,480 --> 00:36:35,850 So there's a point where the ghost thinks back on all the different people he's scared to death and all the rest of it. 350 00:36:35,850 --> 00:36:39,300 And it's absolutely in the language of nineteenth century theatre. 351 00:36:39,300 --> 00:36:45,330 So with the fantastically enthusiastic egotism of the great artist, he recalled to mind his last appearances, 352 00:36:45,330 --> 00:36:49,860 appearances, Red Ribbon or the strangled Babe, his debut as Gaunt Gibson, 353 00:36:49,860 --> 00:36:54,540 the bloodsucker of Blakesley Moore and the furore hit Excited When lovely June 354 00:36:54,540 --> 00:36:59,850 evening by merely playing ninepins with his own bones on the lawn tennis lawn. 355 00:36:59,850 --> 00:37:05,220 And again when he confesses to what he's done, the crime he's committed to Virginia. 356 00:37:05,220 --> 00:37:10,200 The young Puritan responds like this It is very wrong to kill anyone, said Virginia, 357 00:37:10,200 --> 00:37:14,940 who at times had a sweet Puritan gravity caught from some old New England ancestor. 358 00:37:14,940 --> 00:37:18,690 Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics response. The ghost. 359 00:37:18,690 --> 00:37:23,580 My wife was very plain, never had my roof properly starched. I knew nothing about cookery. 360 00:37:23,580 --> 00:37:30,990 So you've got that sense in which the narrative voice is distancing itself from Virginia's condemnation of the crime. 361 00:37:30,990 --> 00:37:40,440 There's a kind of satirising of her very moral seriousness in comparison to the ghosts aesthetic values, which they become kind of dehumanised values. 362 00:37:40,440 --> 00:37:45,960 So where's your point of view? What framework you meant to be reading this story within? 363 00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:52,830 Not keep that in mind when you move to Dorian Grey, because Dorian Grey is doing a lot of the same kind of destabilising, 364 00:37:52,830 --> 00:38:01,350 a lot of the same kind of multiple voices moving together. And a lot of the condemnation, as I said, of Dorian Grey was in the same terms as that, 365 00:38:01,350 --> 00:38:08,310 which greeted a lot of wild other writing, the idea that it was insincere, too theatrical, however wild. 366 00:38:08,310 --> 00:38:14,640 When he met this kind of criticism, he wrote, for example, the following letter, St James's Gazette, 367 00:38:14,640 --> 00:38:22,200 refuting the idea that the that the novel was immoral and instead by arguing that its flaw was it had too much morality. 368 00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:28,140 So he wrote the poor public hearing from the authority so high as your own that this is a wicked book 369 00:38:28,140 --> 00:38:33,690 that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory government will no doubt rush out to it and read it. 370 00:38:33,690 --> 00:38:37,560 But alas, they will find it is a story with a moral and the moral. 371 00:38:37,560 --> 00:38:42,420 Is this all access as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment. 372 00:38:42,420 --> 00:38:47,580 The painter Basil Hollywood worshipping physical beauty far too much as most painters do, 373 00:38:47,580 --> 00:38:53,190 dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. 374 00:38:53,190 --> 00:39:01,380 Dorian Grey, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience and at that moment kills himself. 375 00:39:01,380 --> 00:39:04,860 Lord Henry Watson seeks to be merely the spectator of life. 376 00:39:04,860 --> 00:39:10,260 He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it. 377 00:39:10,260 --> 00:39:17,430 Yes, there is a terrible moral injury and Dorian Grey, a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, 378 00:39:17,430 --> 00:39:21,390 but which will be revealed to those whose minds are healthy. It is. 379 00:39:21,390 --> 00:39:27,750 Is it an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book. 380 00:39:27,750 --> 00:39:35,100 So there you have the strong moral to Dorian Grey Basil who would wash Ortolan alone and dies by the hand of one whose 381 00:39:35,100 --> 00:39:42,570 who to whom he's given this exaggerated sense of the value of beauty dies by the one he's misled by his idolatry. 382 00:39:42,570 --> 00:39:50,610 Dorian Grey dies, trying to escape the consequences. In other words, consequences are inescapable and will come and get him in the end. 383 00:39:50,610 --> 00:39:59,540 And the idea that crimes leave this indelible mark somewhere. Then eventually are inscribed on Dorian Grey himself, so in that sense, 384 00:39:59,540 --> 00:40:08,210 he could read the book straightforwardly as having several moral frameworks and a very clear delivery of the bad end, unhappily. 385 00:40:08,210 --> 00:40:17,630 But I think a real problem in trying to read that novel morally in that it sets up a sequence of moral expectations and familiar moral frameworks, 386 00:40:17,630 --> 00:40:27,470 which it then collapses. So, for example, the whole thing with Sybil Bain and her family, the actress that he falls in love with and her brother, 387 00:40:27,470 --> 00:40:32,570 who promises that anybody who lies a finger on who makes her unhappy will die for it. 388 00:40:32,570 --> 00:40:40,670 And sure enough, Sybil Merton die, Sybil Bain dies, at which point the brother seems to turn into this kind of angel of vengeance, this kind of force. 389 00:40:40,670 --> 00:40:45,230 And it's very much within a melodramatic framework where that's the expectation. 390 00:40:45,230 --> 00:40:51,440 And then he got shot by mistake by somebody thinks he's a rabbit because that one goes. 391 00:40:51,440 --> 00:41:00,920 And then you have another expectation, another kind of framework of expected sort of justice coming, which is where Battle Hollywood finds out, 392 00:41:00,920 --> 00:41:06,980 sees the picture, finds out what Dorian's been doing and begs him to repent and says, let us kneel and say the Lord's Prayer. 393 00:41:06,980 --> 00:41:08,780 And it's in the schoolroom, you know, 394 00:41:08,780 --> 00:41:14,660 so we can think back on the young person he was and all the rest of it and then stabs him in the neck and gets rid of him. 395 00:41:14,660 --> 00:41:17,660 So that's another kind of framework of expectation. Then collapsed. 396 00:41:17,660 --> 00:41:24,710 And in that sense, you've got a sequence of those and then the expectation of repentance that comes at the end where Dorian goes off and says, 397 00:41:24,710 --> 00:41:28,830 no, I shall spare this young woman and I shall become good and all the rest of it. 398 00:41:28,830 --> 00:41:32,990 And you're thinking, oh, yeah, there's just space at the end of the novel for him to now make up for everything. 399 00:41:32,990 --> 00:41:39,170 And then he lets the woman off and goes back and sees the picture and it kind of looks cynical and calculating so that for a lot too. 400 00:41:39,170 --> 00:41:45,710 And that one goes. So in that sense, all of those familiar frameworks for sin and redemption or punishment and consequence, 401 00:41:45,710 --> 00:41:54,350 all of them are raised and then almost comically collapsed suddenly within the novel, which complicates that kind of a moral reading in that sense. 402 00:41:54,350 --> 00:42:02,060 And another sense, the other way, think about the difference between reading for a moral and reading morally. 403 00:42:02,060 --> 00:42:09,530 So if you're reading morally, you're reading with a set of sort of moral expectations or a moral framework in mind. 404 00:42:09,530 --> 00:42:15,110 Whereas Dorian Grey, the novel, there is no moral narrative through it. 405 00:42:15,110 --> 00:42:18,740 There's no narrative voice that says and then he does a dreadful thing, an awful thing, a horrible thing. 406 00:42:18,740 --> 00:42:21,740 Oh, it's it's nearly all from Darren's point of view. 407 00:42:21,740 --> 00:42:28,490 And it's morally neutral throughout, not only morally neutral, it actually asks the only way you can read that novel and enjoy it. 408 00:42:28,490 --> 00:42:33,110 It's actually kind of to enjoy the descriptions for their own sake. 409 00:42:33,110 --> 00:42:39,860 There's long passages about jewels and carpets and tapestries and everything else which readers objected to in the Lippincott version, 410 00:42:39,860 --> 00:42:44,540 and while then added in vast amounts more in the 1891 novel version. 411 00:42:44,540 --> 00:42:51,230 So I took it totally the opposite direction. You can't read those passages without enjoying them for their own sake. 412 00:42:51,230 --> 00:42:55,310 You can only, in a sense, read that novel aesthetically, not morally. 413 00:42:55,310 --> 00:42:59,240 And in that sense, think about that, that idea of how you're reading a world place on that. 414 00:42:59,240 --> 00:43:00,350 Absolutely. 415 00:43:00,350 --> 00:43:09,140 So one of its challenges that together with the idea of claiming there's this incredible moral to the book, he also one of his other counters. 416 00:43:09,140 --> 00:43:12,290 And it's really worth looking at these letters back to the press. 417 00:43:12,290 --> 00:43:18,020 One of the ways to read Dorian Grey, the two versions of Dorian Grey, and the preface is to read them as in a sense, 418 00:43:18,020 --> 00:43:24,980 a series of arguments with the provocations and responses on the subject of what is morality in literature. 419 00:43:24,980 --> 00:43:31,280 So you've got the first Lippincott version, followed by an exchange of letters with the press and the endlessly writes letters going, 420 00:43:31,280 --> 00:43:35,540 I'm writing this letter because I'm terribly, terribly, terribly busy and I've only got time for one quick letter. 421 00:43:35,540 --> 00:43:41,750 And he writes about five hundred, which begin like that. So he's kind of stirring up as much stuff as he's responding to. 422 00:43:41,750 --> 00:43:44,750 So you see him doing the letters to the press and then the preface, 423 00:43:44,750 --> 00:43:50,810 which is published individually and then more letters and then the 1891 version and then more letters. 424 00:43:50,810 --> 00:43:56,510 And in that sense, it's a kind of you know, it's like as soon as anything gets quiet, he prods them back into activity again. 425 00:43:56,510 --> 00:44:02,090 So he's one of Wald's responses in a letter to the editor of The Scots Observer. 426 00:44:02,090 --> 00:44:05,240 Your review as well, admitting that the story in question is, quote, 427 00:44:05,240 --> 00:44:11,090 plainly the work of a man of letters, the work of one who has brains and art and style, 428 00:44:11,090 --> 00:44:14,000 yet suggests and apparently in all seriousness, 429 00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:20,900 that I have written the work in order that it should be read by the most depraved members of the criminal and illiterate classes now. 430 00:44:20,900 --> 00:44:27,500 So I do not suppose that the criminal and the literate classes ever read anything except newspapers. 431 00:44:27,500 --> 00:44:32,180 And on the broad question of why a man of letters writes at all, let me say this. 432 00:44:32,180 --> 00:44:37,190 The pleasure one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal pleasure. 433 00:44:37,190 --> 00:44:43,130 And it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates the artist's works with his eye on the object. 434 00:44:43,130 --> 00:44:47,690 Nothing else interests him. What people are likely to say does not even occur to him. 435 00:44:47,690 --> 00:44:51,590 He is fascinated by what he has in hand. He is indifferent to others. 436 00:44:51,590 --> 00:44:54,620 I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic. 437 00:44:54,620 --> 00:45:01,940 Pleasure to write, if my workplace is the few, I am gratified, if it does not, it causes me no pain. 438 00:45:01,940 --> 00:45:07,820 As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. 439 00:45:07,820 --> 00:45:15,350 It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of the story to surround Dorian Grey with an atmosphere of moral corruption. 440 00:45:15,350 --> 00:45:19,280 Otherwise, the story would have had no meaning. And the plot no issue. 441 00:45:19,280 --> 00:45:24,950 To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story. 442 00:45:24,950 --> 00:45:33,590 I claim that he has succeeded. Each man sees his own crime and Dorian Grey what Dorian Grey sins are. 443 00:45:33,590 --> 00:45:38,830 No one knows he who finds them has brought them. 444 00:45:38,830 --> 00:45:44,470 It's a once again, just as he does in the trials and so on, he denies and importantly, 445 00:45:44,470 --> 00:45:49,180 as he does in the critics artist, the idea that a book if you've got a sequence, 446 00:45:49,180 --> 00:45:58,600 which is author, work, audience reader, there's not the idea that the author is working upon through that work of art, 447 00:45:58,600 --> 00:46:02,440 trying to do something to the audience. He severs that connexion. 448 00:46:02,440 --> 00:46:07,670 The author works the artist's works on that work for purely for their own satisfaction. 449 00:46:07,670 --> 00:46:12,440 And it's a completely separate equation, that of consumption interpretation, 450 00:46:12,440 --> 00:46:16,220 it's an utterly arbitrary one in many ways, it's separate from the author. 451 00:46:16,220 --> 00:46:21,080 The author has no intention upon the reader or audience, but, well, takes it even further than that. 452 00:46:21,080 --> 00:46:28,230 So it's not only that reception of the work of art is not determined by the author, the artist, but rather by the audience themselves. 453 00:46:28,230 --> 00:46:30,620 It's not only the reception, but actually the work of art itself. 454 00:46:30,620 --> 00:46:37,190 While God is it's the audience or the reader that is actually writing the content of the novel. 455 00:46:37,190 --> 00:46:45,320 So the more corrupt you think Dorian Grey is, the more disgusting you think his crimes are, the nastier your mind is. 456 00:46:45,320 --> 00:46:46,190 It's you, the drink. 457 00:46:46,190 --> 00:46:52,950 And think of the way that, say, Conrad's Heart of Darkness is constructed, the way they're what Kurtz has done and why Kurtz has done it. 458 00:46:52,950 --> 00:46:56,600 What is the Heart of Darkness is very much about you as a reader and what you're putting there. 459 00:46:56,600 --> 00:47:05,600 Again, it's wild writing. It's only four years, four or five years before sorry, nine years before Heart of Darkness. 460 00:47:05,600 --> 00:47:09,980 But there's a similar kind of way in which it becomes self reflective upon the reader. 461 00:47:09,980 --> 00:47:16,310 It's a kind of trap for the reader in the sense that while it's constructed and in that sense, where the morality is, 462 00:47:16,310 --> 00:47:23,030 where the moral lies, it's right back on the reader in that sense and a huge instability to the text. 463 00:47:23,030 --> 00:47:30,320 And that problem of how do you read Dorian Grey without letting go of your moral judgement and what framework do you read it in? 464 00:47:30,320 --> 00:47:36,470 And again, think about that huge number of readers who want to turn it into a more conventional novel than it is. 465 00:47:36,470 --> 00:47:42,380 So I've had so many people talk about the idea that Dorian repent at the end 466 00:47:42,380 --> 00:47:47,210 or that there's a sort of act of suicide involved in stabbing the painting. 467 00:47:47,210 --> 00:47:54,170 That is not prefigured in any shape or form. It's utterly arbitrary that stabbing the painting equals stabbing himself and it all switches around. 468 00:47:54,170 --> 00:47:55,460 And again, think of the Starchild, 469 00:47:55,460 --> 00:48:02,990 that story where in the very last few seconds it flips around in the same way it's the same proportion to Dorian Grey. 470 00:48:02,990 --> 00:48:09,320 No repentance, no punishment, no consequences. Dead bodies disappear as nothing more than a smell. 471 00:48:09,320 --> 00:48:15,980 And this is the same time. This is exactly consonant with the times that the Sherlock Holmes detective stories are coming out. 472 00:48:15,980 --> 00:48:19,550 So the first Holmes detective story from the fall comes out. 473 00:48:19,550 --> 00:48:26,120 And Lippincott, in addition, right next to Dorian Grey, that kind of constantly each other. 474 00:48:26,120 --> 00:48:30,380 And in Sherlock Holmes, it's all about consequences, traces. 475 00:48:30,380 --> 00:48:36,050 Everything has recurrences. Nothing has in Dorian Grey until that very, very last second. 476 00:48:36,050 --> 00:48:39,210 So is that enough to make it a moral book? 477 00:48:39,210 --> 00:48:46,650 Where's the connexion between what's a do you proportion you can also different ways in which you can try and read the novel morally, 478 00:48:46,650 --> 00:48:50,100 you could read it as a lesson on the dangers with the aestheticism. 479 00:48:50,100 --> 00:48:56,100 So it can seem to be a response to, for example, Peter's conclusion to studies in the history of the Renaissance, 480 00:48:56,100 --> 00:49:03,330 which Peter saw as potentially very dangerous and actually took off the second edition of studies and history and put it back on. 481 00:49:03,330 --> 00:49:07,530 It's the famous passage about to burn always with a gem like flame. 482 00:49:07,530 --> 00:49:13,980 Is success in life about cramming as much into your moments as they go in the short day before darkness and midnight? 483 00:49:13,980 --> 00:49:19,470 The idea that you live intensely, you cram everything into every moment, you experience everything. 484 00:49:19,470 --> 00:49:28,230 Now, you could read that as a version of the kind of moral that the dangerous doctrine that's preached by Lord Henry Watson. 485 00:49:28,230 --> 00:49:29,910 And he can read Darrion as an aesthete. 486 00:49:29,910 --> 00:49:38,160 So the idea that he gets taught to only appreciate life is in terms of beauty and ugliness, to treat real life as though it's a work of art. 487 00:49:38,160 --> 00:49:46,860 And he fails in seeing consequences and seeing things within a Christian framework or within a more serious framework or whatever else. 488 00:49:46,860 --> 00:49:53,010 That's one way you could try reading the novel. But then this problem is Dorrian, a failed aesthete. 489 00:49:53,010 --> 00:49:58,920 How far? He doesn't appreciate art for its intensity of moment, but he kind of collects it, like taking it off a list. 490 00:49:58,920 --> 00:50:03,630 How far? He's not a moral original. He's not a Morrisson. He's actually morally very conventional. 491 00:50:03,630 --> 00:50:07,080 It just he goes through all the good things and then does all the wicked things according 492 00:50:07,080 --> 00:50:11,710 to a sort of conventional list of have done all the good and that will do all the wicked. 493 00:50:11,710 --> 00:50:17,400 So there's a sense in which you could see him as a flawed aesthete, not as an aesthete at all. 494 00:50:17,400 --> 00:50:25,890 So it's very complex and how you might relate it in relation to aestheticism, just as there's a very close consonance between, 495 00:50:25,890 --> 00:50:35,310 for example, what Lord Henry Watson preaches to Dorrian and a number of things that Wilde writes about in Souleyman on socialism. 496 00:50:35,310 --> 00:50:40,140 But again, Lord Henry preaches one doctrine about self realisation and so on, 497 00:50:40,140 --> 00:50:44,970 but then doesn't follow it through in the sense of he very deliberately influences Dorien. 498 00:50:44,970 --> 00:50:53,610 So self individualism is about self realisation, then influencing another and moulding them as Lord Henry does this about the greatest crime you 499 00:50:53,610 --> 00:50:57,750 can commit against individualism because it's refusing to let an individual be themselves, 500 00:50:57,750 --> 00:51:05,130 it's moulding them instead. So in that sense, there's a and then take this idea that the crime that's committed is seeing real life. 501 00:51:05,130 --> 00:51:13,530 Is art the failure to see Sybil Vaine as a real human being and instead only seeing her as a kind of life as art, 502 00:51:13,530 --> 00:51:18,210 and this kind of turned her into an artistic work and appreciate her as an artistic work? 503 00:51:18,210 --> 00:51:25,380 All sounds very fine, except for the fact that throughout the novel it's incredibly difficult to separate art and life. 504 00:51:25,380 --> 00:51:31,140 Right from the opening description, the very first paragraph, you have a description, for example, 505 00:51:31,140 --> 00:51:38,940 of the heavy perfumes and so on from the garden, the perfume from real flowers coming in in a kind of highly stylised, artificial way. 506 00:51:38,940 --> 00:51:45,090 Further, you then got a flock of birds flies past with the sun behind them, producing a shadow on the curtains. 507 00:51:45,090 --> 00:51:48,300 That looks exactly like a Japanese art design. 508 00:51:48,300 --> 00:51:56,580 So right from the beginning, it's not just stylised prose, but art and life design and the natural a kind of blending seamlessly. 509 00:51:56,580 --> 00:52:01,050 Then there's the fact that Sybil Vaine is frankly utterly uninteresting. 510 00:52:01,050 --> 00:52:04,590 She's only interesting when she's acting not only Dorian, but actually, frankly, 511 00:52:04,590 --> 00:52:09,970 to the reader, she and her family, they're straight out of some kind of Victorian melodrama. 512 00:52:09,970 --> 00:52:16,740 So her brother, James Bain is nothing, but he could have stepped off the Black-Eyed Susan or one of those other Victorian nautical melodramas. 513 00:52:16,740 --> 00:52:25,160 So to see him as real life, in contrast to Dorian's version of an aesthetic, it's very, very, very hard to do. 514 00:52:25,160 --> 00:52:32,810 So you can falsify the novel trying to assert the real against the artificial, but actually the whole novel is about that artificial itself. 515 00:52:32,810 --> 00:52:37,910 So then also lots of questions about how you judge exactly what Wild's emphasising in 516 00:52:37,910 --> 00:52:43,500 the trials about the idea that thought and art are completely different from life. 517 00:52:43,500 --> 00:52:46,560 That it's about the free reign of thought within those genres, 518 00:52:46,560 --> 00:52:50,790 which is different from what you may or may not do within life and the consequences of it, 519 00:52:50,790 --> 00:52:55,770 and in that sense, the novel is destabilising all sorts of assumptions. 520 00:52:55,770 --> 00:52:56,730 It's challenging them. 521 00:52:56,730 --> 00:53:02,850 It's putting back on the reader on how you're meant to interpret, how you're meant to read it, how you're meant to understand it. 522 00:53:02,850 --> 00:53:04,530 I want to leave you with just one example, 523 00:53:04,530 --> 00:53:13,530 an example of what I'd say is Wilde's ultimate sort of moral writing in the sense of writing that's about more or less is writing. 524 00:53:13,530 --> 00:53:22,200 That's absolutely seriously about questioning, undermining, destabilising, looking at if you say moral writing, in essence, 525 00:53:22,200 --> 00:53:29,630 what Wilde throws back on you, it's a question of is something moral because it is written with a moral intent. 526 00:53:29,630 --> 00:53:39,110 Is it moral because you read it in a moral way or is it moral because it carries a moral as a message, 527 00:53:39,110 --> 00:53:45,790 or is it moral because it makes you act in a certain way afterwards because of its consequences? 528 00:53:45,790 --> 00:53:50,500 Now, all of those are not necessarily the same thing they might be, 529 00:53:50,500 --> 00:53:54,010 but what tends to emphasise in this arbitrariness of interpretation and 530 00:53:54,010 --> 00:53:58,300 consequences that he plays with so often that they can be very different things. 531 00:53:58,300 --> 00:54:07,490 So the doer of good, I'll just give you the good as very obviously intention with certain. 532 00:54:07,490 --> 00:54:14,000 Biblical texts and again, in day profundity, he refers to the Bible as those poems in prose. 533 00:54:14,000 --> 00:54:16,700 That's how he describes the New Testament, the Gospels, 534 00:54:16,700 --> 00:54:22,130 and he's always talking about the Bible in these kind of aesthetic terms so that they will have good it 535 00:54:22,130 --> 00:54:28,940 was Night-Time and he was alone and he saw a fire off the walls of around city and went towards the city. 536 00:54:28,940 --> 00:54:29,930 And when he came there, 537 00:54:29,930 --> 00:54:36,680 he heard within the city the tread of the feet of joy and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud noise of many loots. 538 00:54:36,680 --> 00:54:37,730 And he knocked at the gate. 539 00:54:37,730 --> 00:54:44,540 And certainly the gatekeepers opened to him, and he beheld a house that was of marble and had four pillars of marble before it. 540 00:54:44,540 --> 00:54:50,720 The pillars were hung with garlands and within and without. There were torches of Seada and he entered the house. 541 00:54:50,720 --> 00:54:54,080 And when he has passed through the whole of Charleston the day and the whole of 542 00:54:54,080 --> 00:54:59,210 Jasper and reach the long hall of feasting he saw lying on a couch of Sea Purple, 543 00:54:59,210 --> 00:55:04,550 one whose hair was crowned with red roses and whose lips were red with wine. 544 00:55:04,550 --> 00:55:09,560 And he went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to him, Why do you live like this? 545 00:55:09,560 --> 00:55:16,580 And the young man turned around and recognised him and made answer and said, But I was a leper once and you healed me. 546 00:55:16,580 --> 00:55:22,100 How else should I live? And he passed out of the house and went again into the street. 547 00:55:22,100 --> 00:55:28,070 And after a little while he saw one whose face and Raymont were painted and his feet were shot with pearls, 548 00:55:28,070 --> 00:55:33,230 and behind her came slowly as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours. 549 00:55:33,230 --> 00:55:39,530 Now the face of the woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the eyes of the young man were bright with lust. 550 00:55:39,530 --> 00:55:45,200 And he followed swiftly and touched the hand of a young man and said to him, Why do you look at this woman? 551 00:55:45,200 --> 00:55:52,340 And in such wise? And the young man turned around and recognised him and said, But I was blind once and you gave me sight. 552 00:55:52,340 --> 00:55:54,350 What else should I look? 553 00:55:54,350 --> 00:56:02,360 And he ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and said to her, Is there no other way in which to walk safe the way of sin? 554 00:56:02,360 --> 00:56:07,010 And the woman turned around and recognised him and laughed and said, But you forgive me, my sins. 555 00:56:07,010 --> 00:56:11,390 And the way is a pleasant way. And he passed out of the city. 556 00:56:11,390 --> 00:56:17,570 And when he had passed out of the city, he saw seated by the roadside a young man who was weeping. 557 00:56:17,570 --> 00:56:24,380 And he went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and said to him, Why are you weeping? 558 00:56:24,380 --> 00:56:28,850 And the young man looked up and recognised him and made answer. 559 00:56:28,850 --> 00:56:33,080 But I was dead once and you raised me from the dead. 560 00:56:33,080 --> 00:56:42,930 What else should I do but weep? It takes moral certainty and renders it uncertain. 561 00:56:42,930 --> 00:56:51,240 It doesn't reject the morality, it unsettles it. It offers an interrupt between intention and effect. 562 00:56:51,240 --> 00:57:01,160 It raises problems of responsibility, questions of intention and consequences, you can't commit an immoral tale. 563 00:57:01,160 --> 00:57:06,530 But it's rather deeply moral, it's in some ways deeply serious, but not in a delivering a serious message, 564 00:57:06,530 --> 00:57:14,420 but asking serious questions, it leaves it's up to you as readers to work out what it's doing, what it means, how you put it, 565 00:57:14,420 --> 00:57:21,410 just like, as I said, those paradoxes and precepts that are in conversation and debate and tension with cliche, 566 00:57:21,410 --> 00:57:27,500 with established tales, with established romance in the same way it's in tension, in debate with its biblical original. 567 00:57:27,500 --> 00:57:35,300 And in that sense, what it does, just like the paradoxes and those misquotation three quotations, it doesn't destroy the original. 568 00:57:35,300 --> 00:57:40,520 It reveals the assumptions underlying it and offers alternative possibilities. 569 00:57:40,520 --> 00:57:44,030 It makes you aware of the frameworks within which you're working. 570 00:57:44,030 --> 00:57:53,750 It makes you aware of your moral assumptions and your moral values, and then asks you to decide actively where to resettle having been unsettled. 571 00:57:53,750 --> 00:57:58,730 And in that sense, that's what I'd offer you as the kind of way in which world is working in morality. 572 00:57:58,730 --> 00:58:03,110 That idea of stimulating thought, it stimulates thought in the young. 573 00:58:03,110 --> 00:58:09,590 And in that sense, look back at wild and look at the ways that the structures work, the debates work, all the rest of it. 574 00:58:09,590 --> 00:58:15,620 Not as immoral, not as amoral, but as morally engaged in that sense. 575 00:58:15,620 --> 00:58:20,960 I mean, your problem is to work out what moral, if at all, you think the writings offer. 576 00:58:20,960 --> 00:58:26,120 Now, obviously, what I've kind of elided here, what I've left on the side is with Dorian Grey in particular, 577 00:58:26,120 --> 00:58:31,370 is Wilde's treatment of sexuality and the role that's playing. And that's what I'll be talking about next week. 578 00:58:31,370 --> 00:58:35,692 Cheers.