Wilde’s Play as a Novel

Christopher Nassaar made a significant contribution to the revival of Wilde scholarship in the 1970s with Into the Demon Universe (1974); now he "revisits" The Importance of Being Earnest by turning Wilde's play into a novel. The project began, he tells us, when he decided someone else's attempt to do the same was unsatisfying because the result didn't contain "the rest of Wilde's wit—all those hilarious, sparkling statements and observations that made Wilde so attractive but did not find their way into Earnest." "To produce a work that would attract an audience in the 21st century as strongly as the original does," he concluded, the play "had to be expanded and rewritten as well" (v). Nassaar does the expanding largely by "taking witty statements from Wilde's other works and weaving them into the fabric of the play" (vi), though as he alerts us, he also invents material himself, as well as borrowing from other Wilde-like sources, such as Humpty Dumpty.

This is a project done out of appreciation for Wilde—Nassaar offers it as a "way of saying 'Thank you!'" to Wilde for his genius (iii)—with the goal of transmitting Nassaar's pleasure in Wilde to his readers in turn. Nassaar's remark above about attracting a twenty-first-century audience suggests readers needing acquaintance with Wilde's genius, apparently a wider acquaintance than the play alone could provide. The book may well attract such readers and give them this acquaintance. I'll put this audience aside, however, since it's not the audience of this journal and ask instead how students of Wilde are likely to respond.

At first glance, these readers may take Nassaar's project as an instance of Wilde's view that criticism should be creative itself, that a critical response to a work of art should be another work of art. I don't believe, however, that the novel is finally what Gilbert in "The Critic as Artist" has in mind when he elaborates this view because of the actual experience someone familiar with Wilde will have reading the novel, one aspect of which is the sense of participating in a game. Nassaar says he has incorporated "most of Wilde's wit" (vi) into the novel's dialogue, and even if that's an overstatement, he certainly ranges widely, borrowing material not only from the obvious candidates, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the two critical dialogues, and the social comedies other than Earnest, but also from Salomé, the short stories and the fairy tales, among other works. Part of the pleasure of the novel is first noticing almost subliminally that there has been an addition and then trying to identify the source: oh, that's what Harry says in Dorian or Mabel in An Ideal Husband or Vivian in "The Decay of Lying." It's a pleasure similar to what I imagine are the challenges and satisfactions of doing an acrostic. I admit there are passages marked in my copy that I'm still puzzling over, but I did recognize Lady Bracknell quoting "The American Invasion," a piece of Wilde's journalism.

This aspect of the reader's experience (asking "Where's this from?") quickly passes into another: in Nassaar's terms, is it "woven into the fabric of the play?" Does the new material really fit the speaker, fit the unfolding plot at this point, hold its own with the original wit of the play? The novel isn't a clear case of Gilbert's concept of creative criticism because these questions occupy so much of the reader's attention. One condition of creative criticism is that the critical work produced in response to the primary work of art be an artistic achievement in its own right. So Gilbert praises Pater's evocative meditation on La Gioconda while dismissing the question of whether what he sees in the painting corresponds to Leonardo's intention. Readers new to Wilde may read Nassaar's book for the qualities they seek in a novel and find them. My point is that readers acquainted with Wilde won't read the novel this way. Early in the dialogue, Gilbert makes the more modest claim that the critical faculty of judgment plays a necessary role in the creation of primary art because judgment decides what material to include in a work of art and how to shape that material to serve the work. As readers familiar with Wilde ask how well the material Nassaar borrows or invents functions in its new setting, they are retracing Nassaar's acts of judgment. When Gilbert later makes his more ambitious claim, the direction of his thought is from the critical to the creative: he tries to redescribe as completely as he can the critical realm in terms we associate with the creative realm. In the case at hand, the direction is the opposite: readers acquainted with Wilde encounter a creative form, a novel, and then reconsider the critical process implicit in producing it.

When we reconsider Nassaar's choices, how well does he do? For this reader, his success is mixed. In many places, Nassaar's alterations work well. For instance, in what would be Act I of the play, just before Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen make their entrances, Nassaar has Algy ask Jack if he has seen Podgers lately. Jack replies that he has just come from him and reports, "He studied my palm and told me that I was going to fight a terrifying beast but that I will win after a long battle. I told him that the days of the dragon were over but he simply shrugged his shoulders. Murmured something about my not being who I am and said that I can look forward to a very happy future" (24). Nassaar is counting on us remembering that Podgers is the cheiromantist in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (and so the "specialist" audience of ELT readers is one of the intended audiences for the novel). This half borrowing, half invention isn't witty in itself, as, say, Nassaar's borrowings from Harry are, but it becomes witty in the instant that a reader calls to mind Jack's later description of Lady Bracknell as a "Gorgon," "a monster, without being a myth," a monster whom he does eventually defeat.

I doubt, however, that Lady Bracknell would say approvingly "that American children spend most of their time in correcting the faults of their elders" (33)—the slightly altered line from "The American Invasion." She certainly tries to maintain her own authority over her daughter—indeed over everyone else. Nassaar is truer to her decisive character when he has her cite a passage from Thucydides that a young Wilde copied in Greek into one of his Oxford Notebooks (she uses Rex Warner's translation): "The ability to understand a question from all sides means that one is totally unfitted for action" (163). This fits so well it functions as an interpretation of Lady Bracknell: it gives us an underlying rule of her behavior. More generally, Nassaar's additions make Lady Bracknell more of Dandy than she really is. In both the play and the novel, Lady Bracknell, made aware of Cecily's fortune, suddenly sees "distinct social possibilities" in Cecily's profile and counsels her that "Style largely depends on how the chin is worn." Nassaar allows Lady Bracknell to continue by citing an aphorism from "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young": "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered" (157). The aphorism separates the created realm of culture, "artifice," from the rest of life and recommends that we attend to that realm exclusively. Lady Bracknell does concede in the original that "we live in an age of surfaces," but her steady attention to the material realm of wealth that sustains the cultural world suggests she wouldn't endorse the aphorism completely. Here, and elsewhere, while Nassaar's additions may in a quantitative sense bring more of Wilde's wit before the reader, they don't blend smoothly with the integrity of the play.

Retracing Nassaar's judgments also eventually raises a question that connects the novel to a central topic in Wilde scholarship: how do Wilde's works relate to each other? It's a question Wilde himself forces on us: on the one hand, he left lasting achievements in a remarkable variety of genres (so various that one of my students asked as we took up Salomé late in the semester, "is this really written by Wilde too?"); on the other hand, reading his works, we keep encountering similar themes and even similar expressions of these themes. How do we reconcile so much difference with so much resemblance? (It's a topic given specific focus just now by Josephine Guy and Ian Small's sharply stated if unsettling claim that Wilde recycled himself to compensate for a modest talent.) Nassaar was already concerned with this issue in Into the Demon Universe. There he treats Earnest as Wilde's "self-parody" of his works to that point in his career: the play repeats elements of the other works to deflate them.

Even if one finds this view of the play dubious, Nassaar helps bring into view the data of the problem: the resemblances between different works that seem to require explanation. He makes an intriguing connection, for example, between the "baptism" that Lord Arthur undergoes in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime—Lord Arthur in his bath is a peripety in the story's plot—and Algy's and Jack's comic efforts to recreate themselves through baptism in Earnest. In the novel, the implicit relation between the play and Wilde's other works is resemblance: the play can be expanded by adding from those works. Here too Nassaar displays a keen ear for the echoes among Wilde's works. When an angry Jack scolds Algy for securing a meeting with Cecily through pretending to be Jack's younger brother Ernest, Nassaar has Algy defend himself by saying: "A false identity is an absolute necessity.… Give a man a mask, my dear Jack—the accent fell on the name—and he will tell you the truth" (101). Algy is quoting Gilbert who says "Give [a man] a mask and he'll tell you the truth" to capture the paradox that it's by speaking through a created identity that an artist reveals himself. What's shrewd on Nassaar's part is discerning a similar principle in the play's plot: it's by pretending to be someone else that Jack finds out who he really is. The question, again, is whether this is merely a repetition or whether the principle is being put to a new use.

By drawing out the implications of the book for Wilde criticism, I don't want to leave the impression that this is a critical book: it's a novel intended to convey the author's enjoyment in reading Wilde. The general method, expanding the play through borrowings and inventions, is uniform throughout, and so readers can determine fairly early on whether the book is for them. In this case, at least, the standard to apply is Harry's: "Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval."