I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Grey for the class in Celebrity, Commodity, and Culture that I'm taking this semester. While I have (I think) read all of Wilde's plays, I've never read this before, and it has suddenly struck me that, in some way, I'm in love with the idea of Oscar Wilde. (As was he, I think.) I mean, when I imagine my ideal witty dialogue, it sounds like Oscar Wilde. When I imagine ideal sophistication, it's Wildean. The romance of disipation I favor is an ironic Byronic -- i.e., Wilde-like.
I don't think I'm alone in this at all. If everyone isn't in love with the idea of being Oscar, then a significant portion of us are. There's this struggle beteween the desire to adore and the consicousness that nothing is really worth adoration; between intense emotion and the idea that knowledge always undercuts intensity that he particularly expressed, and in which I -- and, I think, so many others, particularly partake.
Or maybe it's not Wilde, exactly. Maybe it's the era, the cynicism of people who still in some sense believe in the Romantic, and who recognize both things -- cynicism and romanticism -- as transgressive.
Not, when I think about it, that that's unique either to 2006 or 1900. I felt that way about Tristam Shandy when I read it this summer. I also think it's present in, say Jonson's The Alchemist or Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Not, necessarily, in The Tempest, though. That play has moved beyond the adolescent conflict between earnestness and play, and recognizes them as necessarily congruent, perhaps.
So maybe what I'm saying is that Wilde perfectly expresses the way I feel when I am having difficulty reconciling what I want with what I do or who I am with who I like. Which is not necessarily a difficulty I want to -- or can -- abandon. As he consistently points out, it's really the most fun kind of difficulty to be in.
I don't think I'm alone in this at all. If everyone isn't in love with the idea of being Oscar, then a significant portion of us are. There's this struggle beteween the desire to adore and the consicousness that nothing is really worth adoration; between intense emotion and the idea that knowledge always undercuts intensity that he particularly expressed, and in which I -- and, I think, so many others, particularly partake.
Or maybe it's not Wilde, exactly. Maybe it's the era, the cynicism of people who still in some sense believe in the Romantic, and who recognize both things -- cynicism and romanticism -- as transgressive.
Not, when I think about it, that that's unique either to 2006 or 1900. I felt that way about Tristam Shandy when I read it this summer. I also think it's present in, say Jonson's The Alchemist or Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Not, necessarily, in The Tempest, though. That play has moved beyond the adolescent conflict between earnestness and play, and recognizes them as necessarily congruent, perhaps.
So maybe what I'm saying is that Wilde perfectly expresses the way I feel when I am having difficulty reconciling what I want with what I do or who I am with who I like. Which is not necessarily a difficulty I want to -- or can -- abandon. As he consistently points out, it's really the most fun kind of difficulty to be in.
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