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radfrac_archive_full) wrote2006-11-04 01:43 pm
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2006-11-04 01:43 pm
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Wilde and Chesterton: The War of Paradox
Last week I acquired a Penguin 20th of The Club of Queer Trades, and I’ve been re-reading. It's my favourite Chesterton after The Man Who Was Thursday. The Club of the title (and didn't I pick it up for the title?) is made up of men who invent new and singular professions.
We're an odd couple, Chesterton and me. He's a Christian and a conservative, and there are moments of startling casual bigotry in his writing. It's strange in an author whose stories seem founded in an expansive, almost beatific theism, otherwise humourous, affectionate, and compassionate.
If you're looking, you can also find homophobia in his writing, in an undertone rather than explicitly; a gendered muttering that sometimes becomes an audible grumbling. I’m sure it's not tolerance but his time that makes Chesterton inexplicit: still, I’m not sure "homophobia" is quite the right word. Chesterton resents anyone who disrupts the order of things. He wants to eradicate that irregularity, not with violence, but with an apparent lightness that buoys very serious mockery, and by paradoxically proving it out of existence. Chesterton was, as Syme calls himself, a "poet of order." His universe is a fantastically intricate cuckoo-clock, jumping out and hooting at you at unexpected moments, but always with an ultimate reason and beauty. It seems to me that his aim is to prove that moral order is also aesthetic order, and for him Christianity is the most beautiful of religions.
The second story in Queer Trades, "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation", is illustrative of this desire to assert a simultaneous moral and aesthetic order. Chesterton’s detective/poet figure, in this case a retired judge, is sitting upstairs in a double-decker bus with his bland and nameless Watsonian authorial companion. He spies a man who makes him immediately hostile:
They follow the man to a party, and discover that his name is Wimpole and that he is a Wit who says things like, "I never talk tomfooleries without first knowing my audience."
Here we obviously have Wilde, effete, decadent master of the paradoxical epigram. "He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything... suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man." (39)
This attack seems almost irrationally vicious if we notice that the collection was first published in 1905, just five years after Wilde’s death in exile. I don’t know when the story was originally published, but its title cannot be an accident. It makes me want to gently shake Chesterton and say: the man was humiliated; he was driven into exile, and then he died. What more do you want?
For him not to have existed at all, naturally. Wilde was more than an ambiguous wit; he used the same tools of paradox that Chesterton favoured, but for an antagonistic purpose; to create, or display, through his paradoxes, the space where he and other queers existed within society.
In fiction, Chesterton has it his way. Our protagonists uncover the nature of Wimpole's pose. They corner the man Wimpole has been making fun of at the party, and discover that he is an actor who hires himself out to be the 'straight man' to would-be epigrammists.
Without his accomplice, Wimpole has nothing to say. His wit vanishes. He vanishes from the narrative: "the wickedest man in England", the very Moriarty of the tale, is shown not to exist, and the man who helped him pretend is treated indulgently:
Quite.
We never hear any more of Wimpole's evil, so it must have consisted entirely of his being dishonest about who he was. Chesterton is disgusted by the open love of artifice, of posing and posturing, in the decadent movement. This revulsion must be muddied by the consciousness, vague or certain, that there is something queer in the specific sense about what the aesthetes were doing.
This dislike of imposture seems forthright and charming of our author at first glance, doesn't it? Who can say that there’s something wrong with disliking dishonesty? With demanding directness and openness? We all hate posers, don’t we?
Of course, in Wilde and Chesterton’s society, those of us in the 'queer trades' were always lying, always posing as someone else, always having to be dishonest. Honesty wasn't going to do us any good. We could choose dishonesty and fear, or honesty and exile, imprisonment, and death. Being forthright would only have sent Wilde to Reading Gaol sooner.
For Wilde to openly portray himself as artificial was a brilliant act of revelation. He was allowing himself one step more honesty than he would normally expect: he was admitting to being an impostor.
He couldn't say that he was queer, but he could say, "this is all a sham; you don't know who I am, and I don't know who you are. We're all actors. Isn't it comic?" The assertion that it was all a sham both exposed and protected him. Think of the famous accusation that Bosie's father made -- that Wilde was posing as a sodomite.
Chesterton used paradox to reconcile apparent failings of the social order. Wilde used the paradox because he was a paradox, and could never be reconciled to the social order, whether he wanted to be or not.
Chesterton could not resolve the Wilde Equation in real life, but he could write him into harmlessness. Wimpole is dangerous so long as we don't know what he is, what part of him is pose and what might be a truly threatening (sexual) identity. If Wimpole/Wilde's wit, his weapon, is false, never existed, then he has no power to confuse and disrupt. He can safely be disposed of, and his accomplice reabsorbed into society.
Mr. Chesterton, I love you as a stylist, and your vision of divine aethetic order moves me, but you of all people ought to have known better than to be afaid of apparent contradiction.
Let's end with the words of another (formerly) ambiguous wit:
{rf}
[Sorry, forgot to cut-tag this the first time through]
We're an odd couple, Chesterton and me. He's a Christian and a conservative, and there are moments of startling casual bigotry in his writing. It's strange in an author whose stories seem founded in an expansive, almost beatific theism, otherwise humourous, affectionate, and compassionate.
If you're looking, you can also find homophobia in his writing, in an undertone rather than explicitly; a gendered muttering that sometimes becomes an audible grumbling. I’m sure it's not tolerance but his time that makes Chesterton inexplicit: still, I’m not sure "homophobia" is quite the right word. Chesterton resents anyone who disrupts the order of things. He wants to eradicate that irregularity, not with violence, but with an apparent lightness that buoys very serious mockery, and by paradoxically proving it out of existence. Chesterton was, as Syme calls himself, a "poet of order." His universe is a fantastically intricate cuckoo-clock, jumping out and hooting at you at unexpected moments, but always with an ultimate reason and beauty. It seems to me that his aim is to prove that moral order is also aesthetic order, and for him Christianity is the most beautiful of religions.
The second story in Queer Trades, "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation", is illustrative of this desire to assert a simultaneous moral and aesthetic order. Chesterton’s detective/poet figure, in this case a retired judge, is sitting upstairs in a double-decker bus with his bland and nameless Watsonian authorial companion. He spies a man who makes him immediately hostile:
"[T]here is the wickedest man in England."
....He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase....
"What has he done?" I asked.
"I am not sure of the details... but his besetting sin is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan.... I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being themselves, he was not being himself."
They follow the man to a party, and discover that his name is Wimpole and that he is a Wit who says things like, "I never talk tomfooleries without first knowing my audience."
Here we obviously have Wilde, effete, decadent master of the paradoxical epigram. "He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything... suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man." (39)
This attack seems almost irrationally vicious if we notice that the collection was first published in 1905, just five years after Wilde’s death in exile. I don’t know when the story was originally published, but its title cannot be an accident. It makes me want to gently shake Chesterton and say: the man was humiliated; he was driven into exile, and then he died. What more do you want?
For him not to have existed at all, naturally. Wilde was more than an ambiguous wit; he used the same tools of paradox that Chesterton favoured, but for an antagonistic purpose; to create, or display, through his paradoxes, the space where he and other queers existed within society.
In fiction, Chesterton has it his way. Our protagonists uncover the nature of Wimpole's pose. They corner the man Wimpole has been making fun of at the party, and discover that he is an actor who hires himself out to be the 'straight man' to would-be epigrammists.
Without his accomplice, Wimpole has nothing to say. His wit vanishes. He vanishes from the narrative: "the wickedest man in England", the very Moriarty of the tale, is shown not to exist, and the man who helped him pretend is treated indulgently:
"[T]hat fellow ought to be in gaol!"
"Not at all," said Basil indulgently; "He ought to be in the Club of Queer Trades."
Quite.
We never hear any more of Wimpole's evil, so it must have consisted entirely of his being dishonest about who he was. Chesterton is disgusted by the open love of artifice, of posing and posturing, in the decadent movement. This revulsion must be muddied by the consciousness, vague or certain, that there is something queer in the specific sense about what the aesthetes were doing.
This dislike of imposture seems forthright and charming of our author at first glance, doesn't it? Who can say that there’s something wrong with disliking dishonesty? With demanding directness and openness? We all hate posers, don’t we?
Of course, in Wilde and Chesterton’s society, those of us in the 'queer trades' were always lying, always posing as someone else, always having to be dishonest. Honesty wasn't going to do us any good. We could choose dishonesty and fear, or honesty and exile, imprisonment, and death. Being forthright would only have sent Wilde to Reading Gaol sooner.
For Wilde to openly portray himself as artificial was a brilliant act of revelation. He was allowing himself one step more honesty than he would normally expect: he was admitting to being an impostor.
He couldn't say that he was queer, but he could say, "this is all a sham; you don't know who I am, and I don't know who you are. We're all actors. Isn't it comic?" The assertion that it was all a sham both exposed and protected him. Think of the famous accusation that Bosie's father made -- that Wilde was posing as a sodomite.
Chesterton used paradox to reconcile apparent failings of the social order. Wilde used the paradox because he was a paradox, and could never be reconciled to the social order, whether he wanted to be or not.
Chesterton could not resolve the Wilde Equation in real life, but he could write him into harmlessness. Wimpole is dangerous so long as we don't know what he is, what part of him is pose and what might be a truly threatening (sexual) identity. If Wimpole/Wilde's wit, his weapon, is false, never existed, then he has no power to confuse and disrupt. He can safely be disposed of, and his accomplice reabsorbed into society.
Mr. Chesterton, I love you as a stylist, and your vision of divine aethetic order moves me, but you of all people ought to have known better than to be afaid of apparent contradiction.
Let's end with the words of another (formerly) ambiguous wit:
A dreaded sunny day
so let’s go where we’re wanted
I’ll meet you at the cemet’ry gates
Coz Keats and Yeats are on your side
But you lose
Coz weird lover Wilde is on mine
{rf}
[Sorry, forgot to cut-tag this the first time through]
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I don't know the essays very well, which seems like a serious omission given that in his lifetime he was primarily known for his criticism; can you recommend the ones you are thinking of?
>The thing he is most guilty of is not looking beneath the surface of anything he regarded as alien.
So that I suppose he was most oblivious to what he most often warned other people about: his stories constantly assert not taking the apparently logical explanation for things.
I see what you mean about the puzzles: he sets the trap, he baits it, and he springs it himself. Though I get more from the stories than that, even with our massively divergent philosophies: it feels like the revelation in the story does sometimes succeed in giving me a leg up on other kinds of revelation.
I'm a formal reader, though, and clever structure is one of my greatest textual pleasures, so I may be overly thankful to anyone who attempts it, whatever their purpose.
Have you read A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll? I was, when I read it, somewhat ecstatic to find a non-Christian puzzle-novel with a spiritual purpose (among other goals).
{rf}
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I can't find the book. A friend must have it. Instead of the book, here's the original blogthoughts I had: http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/22829.html http://gillpolack.livejournal.com/2005/07/09/
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I have Mondaymorningitis
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I'm not sure about the hanging shoes, but I like the rest.
{rf}