Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Chapter 1. Oscar Wilde, Fashioning Fame

[ 19 OscarWilde, Fashioning Fame elebrities are more than brand names; they are irreproducible characters, imprimaturs, trademarked styles. The world’s first legal trademarked image, trademark number one of Britain’s Trade Mark Registration Act of 1875, is the red triangle logo that is found, still, on bottles of Bass Ale. This triangle filters into modernism through, as we will see, Edouard Manet and Joyce, and also makes appearances in works by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The image was filed as intellectual property on January 1, 1876.1 Eight years later, in 1884, photographs became copyrightable property, following a legal battle that was focused on the use of a picture of Oscar Wilde in a cigar advertisement—although Wilde did not himself own the rights to the image, as Michael North points out (“Picture” 185–187). That Wilde’s image should be at the center of a somewhat paradoxical legal battle during the early years of copyright is appropriate: for two years Wilde had been making discursive use of trademarking, creating a distinct persona showing the characteristics of a trademarked image. C ChaPter 1 20 ] Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity If twentieth-century celebrity has an originary moment, it occurred on January 3, 1882, when Wilde arrived at United States customs and announced , “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”2 This quip summarizes the major tropes of Wilde’s celebrity, which in turn establish a pattern for the cultural phenomenon that follows. Wilde invokes the idea of genius, usually thought of as an intangible quality residing inside a person , and represents it as an object, which he carries like luggage; it accompanies the body but is not necessarily housed within it. Wilde enters his exceptionalism into the public record; by declaring his genius, Wilde announces it as having such value that he cannot cross borders without drawing attention to it. Lastly, Wilde performs a trademark of both his writing and his public persona; his play with the meaning of the word “declare ,” his forming an epigram out of the institutional language of the customs office, demonstrates his ability to subvert conventional speech. Thus Wilde’s prototypal remark turns something supposedly interior, genius, into something exterior, and makes it a public matter that can function as both currency and an insignia of his persona. This moment effectively foretells much of the way Wilde’s lifelong brush with fame would paint his adult years and color his entire oeuvre. In this chapter I will read Wilde to show that, in his life and his writings , in his model of the individual and his treatment of literary form, he grappled with the implications of his self-creation as a celebrity, as an object on display whose value depends on its relation to others. While Wilde’s critics have engaged with the ways that his public image and selfpromotion reflect the composition and reception of his writings, they have stopped short of examining the model of celebrity Wilde was offering up, or how his writings would continue to rework its categories. Here I provide a reading of how the machinations of celebrity wormed their way to the core of Wilde’s aesthetic, specifically in his lone novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his last long work, De Profundis. Ultimately I argue that Wilde’s negotiations with celebrity produced a version of the subject that presages the construction of the author in literary modernism. The story begins with that arrival in the United States. It was on his 1882 lecture tour of America that Wilde encountered the logic of late Victorian celebrity, which treated images of the body as though they referred to an individual’s hidden, true, and natural identity. He set out to revise that logic. Wilde conceived of a new kind of individual, one whose distinguishing attributes—trademarks—are worn on the body, rather than concealed within it. Wilde disdained the division of exterior and interior, preferring—in a gesture foreshadowing much of twentieth-century celebrity —to view the individual as a public image that circulates on the mar- Oscar Wilde, Fashioning Fame [ 21 ket. By turning his insides out and wearing his subjectivity on his lapel, as it were, Wilde turned himself into a commodity. His subsequent life and work become intelligible within this system, which Wilde would retrace over and over. In Dorian Gray he invokes his reconception of celebrity, turning Dorian’s subjectivity...