Sunday, April 2nd | 3pm
YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (York, Maine)
YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (York, Maine)
Part I
The Picture of Dorian Gray with Introduction by Ron McAllister
Featuring Matt McTighe, Greg Trzaskowski, Alex Davis & David Newman
Part II
De Profundis with Helen Winebaum & David Newman
Discussion following the reading.
The Picture of Dorian Gray with Introduction by Ron McAllister
Featuring Matt McTighe, Greg Trzaskowski, Alex Davis & David Newman
Part II
De Profundis with Helen Winebaum & David Newman
Discussion following the reading.
A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true, Wilde wrote in 'The Truth of Masks.' And the object of life is not to simplify it. As our conflicting impulses coincide, as our repressed feelings vie with our expressed ones, as our solid views disclose unexpected striations, we are all secret dramatists. In this light Wilde's works become exercises in self-criticism as well as pleas for tolerance.
Helen Winebaum leads a distinguished cast in this performance of Wildean ironies and paradox. As the villainous hero in Dorian Gray remarks, The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for.
Helen Winebaum leads a distinguished cast in this performance of Wildean ironies and paradox. As the villainous hero in Dorian Gray remarks, The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for.
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A Soul's Progress – Director's Note:
When The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared (in 1890) the general opinion was that it was an immoral, prurient, unethical and dangerous book. But there was a nearly-hysterical outcry over the fact that an evil protagonist was allowed to escape the consequences of his actions by an easy death. (We did not include it in our reading, but Dorian dies mysteriously by stabbing his own portrait). To the Victorian reader, however, Dorian should have been forced to suffer many years with his horribly deformed face. Of course, Oscar Wilde had no idea, in 1890, that he himself would be punished with a terrible stigma which would last for the rest of his life. The irony of that fatal coincidence might explain why Wilde returned to the same theme in De Profundis that he had articulated in Dorian Gray. To wit: “The aim of the artistic life is self-development,” Lord Henry tells Dorian. “To realize one's nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” In De Profundis Wilde writes: “The artistic life is simply self-development... Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. That is all I am concerned with. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” So what does Wilde mean by “the artistic life?” And is his “self-development” in De Profundis the same as Harry's in Dorian Gray? Not quite. The artistic life that Lord Harry aspired to – and mistakenly believed that Dorian had achieved -- is described in the last lines of our playlet: “You have never done anything,” Harry moons, “never carved a statue or painted a picture, or produced anything outside yourself. Life has been your art.” The fact that Dorian's face never changes is proof that he has become a work of art... beautiful... and useless. Wilde's goal, in De Profundis, is to retake possession of himself: “What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.” What both works have in common is the absoluteness of the intention. “To realize one's nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” (Dorian Gray) And, “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” (De Profundis) In a strange way, one cannot truly understand what Wilde meant in either work without considering the other. Once again, from De Profundis: “I do not, for a single moment, regret having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.” |
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De Profundis... can seem petulant, vindictive, bathetic, indulgent, excessive, florid, massively arrogant, self-pitying, repetitive, showy, sentimental, and shrill...
It’s also one of the glories of English prose. the voice he created in De Profundis was Biblically robust, propulsive, resonant, and rich. Five years after Wilde’s early death, his friend Max Beerbohm marveled in the pages of Vanity Fair that in De Profundis “one does not seem to be reading a written thing.” As Wilde himself put it, “that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals.” The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882—thirteen years before he’d serve the famous criminal sentence that produced De Profundis,he’d committed to a nine-month lecture tour of America. During his stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, he was taken to visit the local penitentiary. The warden led him into a yard where, Wilde later wrote, they were confronted by “poor odd types of humanity in striped dresses making bricks in the sun.” All the faces he glimpsed, he remarked with relief, “were mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.” By 1889, Wilde’s judgments about prison had become less snobbish, if no less flippant. Reviewing a volume of poetry by Wilfred Blunt “composed in the bleak cell of Galway Gaol,” he agreed with the book’s author that “an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.” And yet the idea that prison was basically common, a strengthening exercise for the lower classes, still attracted him as a dark, wicked opportunity to conflate the awful with the trivial. As late as 1894, he could have the mischievous, debt-ridden Algernon insist midway through The Importance of Being Earnest that “I am really not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for dining in the West End.” When Algernon hears from a threatening solicitor that “the gaol itself is fashionable and well-aired; and there are ample opportunities of taking exercise at certain stated hours of the day,” he answers indignantly: “Exercise! Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise.” I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! In those lines, you can hear Wilde discovering a tone far from the snide, pithy one on which he relied in Nebraska. It would eventually become the tone of De Profundis. Certain passages in De Profundis seem to credit prison with strengthening and deepening their author’s nature, but only to the extent that, by subjecting him to intolerable, constant, and thoroughgoing misery, it gave him something against which to muster all his creative energies and all his verbal powers. “The important thing... the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days... is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear or reluctance.” At Pentonville, in London, prisoners were masked to prevent them from recognizing one another outside their cells: contemporary engravings look like a grim masked ball. At Reading, there were separate, walled-off booths in the chapel, and a silent exercise hour in the yard. Richard Ellmann, Wilde’s biographer, tells the story of C.3.3. hearing C.4.8. mutter, “Oscar Wilde, I pity you because you must be suffering more than we are.” Wilde replied, “No, my friend, we are all suffering equally.” They both got two weeks’ punishment, but Wilde later told the poet André Gide that it was this interaction that stopped him from wanting to kill himself. The consensus is now that an untreated ear infection took advantage of his ruined health, swelled into meningitis, and killed him in 1900: a cruel irony for the son of a pioneer of modern ear, nose, and throat surgery. Wilde wrote De Profundis between January and March of 1897, near the end of his internment in Reading prison. His health had improved slightly since his early time in Pentonville, where he suffered miserably from dysentery and malnutrition. Sentenced to hard labor but ruled too weak for truly back-breaking work, he’d initially been ordered to pick oakum—a mind-numbing job involving the unraveling of rope into strands—alone in his cell. After his transfer to Reading, he was put in charge of distributing books from the prison’s limited library. When he eventually won the right to compose a letter in his cell, it was with the stipulation that each day’s pages be collected at nightfall. (Wilde only had occasional chances to read over the manuscript in full.) De Profundis... is a curious document: part apologia, part aesthetic discourse, part religious testimonial, part retort to religion, a letter from Wilde to himself. Accustomed to speaking from a position of effortless superiority, Wilde is conscious of how vulnerable his style looks against a background of abjection. "the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed grotesque or lacking in style" Art is the conversion of the imaginary into real existence; it is also a way of infusing matter with spirit. This process Wilde must bring to his own experiences. "There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul," No ideas but in things: for Wilde that is Christ's conception of the beautiful (DP, 77). Christ's actions are beautiful because they give figure and form to his ideas. The repentance of the sinner is beautiful because it transforms action into the lineaments of the soul: in a verb that Wilde consistently literalizes, the sinner "realizes" what he has done. Perhaps most appealing for one kept in constant reminder of the reasons for his punishment, this process might strip the sinner of reason for regret; the mistakes of the past become the soil for new growth. As the soul changes, so does the meaning of the events that led to this state. Repentance is "the means by which one alters one's past" (DP, 93) What emerges in the final measure from Wilde's text is his sheer will, his determination to make from abjection itself the material for aesthetic transformation — on one side a heartening gesture of faith in the enduring grace of art, and on the other side a reminder, as a reflection of the condition he endeavors to flee, of the depth of his unhappiness. Vertical Divider
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Quotes from DP:
"With us time does not progress," he says. "It revolves. It seems to circle round one's center of pain" "There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life," Wilde writes. "For the secret of life is suffering” “The most terrible thing about sorrow is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.” “To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” 
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.” “The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” "Art only begins where Imitation ends.” “To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” 
“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.” “Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.' “The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.” “God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.” 
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