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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

"The Grigsby Episode"

In my graduate seminar Friday I will be teaching "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde along with his "Phrases and Philosophies for the Instruction of the Young" and his defensive "Preface" to his novel Dorian Gray. The latter pieces are strings of gem-like paradoxes without any of the conventional scaffolding of evidence, inference, framing, transitions to elaborate their arguments. It is intriguing that this is the highly unorthodox form of argument with which Wilde chooses to defend his scandalous novel, given the stakes, and the vulnerability of this intriguing choice is all the more conspicuous when we consider the way the exactly equally paradoxically aphoristic "Phrases and Philosophies" were taken up by the prosecutors in Wilde's Socratic indecency trials and used against him at the witness stand (the most relevant trial transcripts are here).

In my reading of Wilde's "Soul of Man" we discern much the the same argumentative strategy, even if the piece appears more conventionally essay-like, and we discover at once Wilde's masterly deployment of paradox -- eg, "A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime"; or, "The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes" -- as well as the collapse of his larger argument (which begins by demonstrating that we are universally enslaved by the possessions we pretend free us but ends by re-erecting this same enslaving possessiveness in the relation of artists to their works) into a self-consuming paradox the moment Wilde's threatening queerness comes into the picture. (A rumbling in the background that only becomes fully evident in what otherwise might seem the anticlimactic last line of the essay -- "The new Individualism is the new Hellenism." -- but which in fact presses the key to the piece in our hands in the end.)

As with all the works of political economy and aesthetic philosophy we've been reading this term I've been assigning roughly contemporaneous mannered comedies for the seminar to read -- prosaic spectacles like "The Man of Mode" and "The Way of the World," created as of-the-moment documents of their time's conspicuous follies and foibles, focused as they are on social and cultural details that tend to zero in symptomatically on precisely the problems and anxieties attested to in the political and economic theory we are also reading, resonating with the emerging categories and recurring subjectivities of liberalism/neoliberalism.

The special pleasure for the seminar in reading Wilde is that for once the same author pens both the theory and the play (there are precursors, by the way, Congreve, Steele, but the seminar is moving too swiftly to more than scratch the surface of these details). Anyway, while preparing my lecture notes I came upon a YouTube clip from Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" in which the director has chosen to re-introduce a scene that is rarely but occasionally performed. You may know that Wilde's original four act play was subsequently re-written as the three act work we now know and adore. Many lines were cut, but almost none of them are especially to be missed. But one scene, known as "the Grigsby Episode" was somewhat more substantial and, more to the point, is playing with themes and legal details that matter to the way my seminar is reading mannered comedies as political economy and aesthetic documents, its frenetic farcical plots and character lampoons incarnating developing relations between aesthetics and politics as bourgeois capitalism and then postwar consumerism and corporate-military globalism emerge (the seminar moves on to Noel Coward, Joe Orton, and Jennifer Saunders as we move toward our own political quandaries).

Anyway, these are the things on my mind at the moment. Here is the clip from the production I mentioned including the "Grigsby Episode." If you don't know the play, I would actually recommend you acquaint yourself with the canonical version first, before enjoying this curious little supplement.

2 comments:

Mrs. Tenney said...

Gribsby is how Wilde spelled the name of the solicitor, I think.

Dale Carrico said...

You're right! The flabbergasting thing is that I've been misreading this since literally 1983.