Oscar Wilde and Subjectivist Criticism

218 OSCAR WILDE AND SUBJECTIVIST CRITICISM By Bruce Bashford (SUNY at Stony Brook) Literary critics and teachers of literature are showing considerable interest these days in developing approaches to literature that somehow recognize the individuality of the reader. As Murray Krieger has suggested, this is possibly a reaction against the way the reader was ignored during the reign of the New Criticism;! or perhpas it is due to a realization that many of our students, though they did not know that old regime, simply refuse to forget their real-life "selves in order to concentrate on the "text itself." Whatever the reason for this interest, developing appropriate critical methods is difficult partly because there are so few models to consult in the history of English literary criticism. In this essay, I will examine one of those models, that presented by Oscar Wilde. I hope to show that in Wilde a subjectivist perspective is elaborated into a genuine theory of criticism - a status those apprehensive about subjectivism often doubt that it can attain. In the latter part of my essay, I will compare Wilde with an influential proponent of the familiar view that literary works do have a determinate character, Northrop Frye, in order to illustrate the significance of the current shift in critical perspective.2 By saying that Wilde presents a subjectivist theory of criticism, I mean that he believes form in art must always be.understood in relation to the individual who perceives or creates that form. Wilde holds a strong or extreme version of this doctrine; that is, he does not merely believe that different people see things slightly differently - a weak version: he believes that forms have no existence independent of the individuals who create or perceive them. Among the many signs of this doctrine in this work are his attitudes toward nature, the active life, and public opinion. Rejecting the notion that' artists copy forms in the natural world, he complains of "Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition."3 We commonly speak of the figures active people cut in life, but for Wilde events are so unpredictable, so intransigent a medium that they never retain the impress of the individual, and he condemns action as "a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim" (CA 359)· Lastly, he predicts: "Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see» They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything" (DL 316). Forms are always someone's forms; for Wilde, the phrase "public vision" is self-contradictory. I realize that explaining the sense in which Wilde was a subjectivist critic by referring to his ideas on form might sound odd: for many modern critics an interest in form has been accompanied by an aversion to subjectivism. But Wilde is, 219 in fact, both a subjectivist and a formalist. The "basis of life," he claims, "is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which the expression can be attained" (DL 311). It is important to fix the relation between expression and form, for it is the basic principle of Wilde's criticism. His rejection of the subjective/ objective distinction is helpful on the point: "those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they were, but as they thought they were not, and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be." And in the same passage: "the objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" (CA 389). The distinction breaks down because the subjective and the objective are linked in a reciprocal, or better perhaps, reflexive relation. The artist's subjective desire for expression issues in an ostensibly...