It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style. (“The Decay of Lying” 191) Brummell’s style does not signal his upbringing, his trade, or his desire to please a
superior class—it signals nothing more than his perfection of the art of dress. In this way, he claims for himself aesthetic autonomy, aligning him with the aesthetic experimentation of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though the dandy makes of himself a work of art, he is not in fact as autonomous as he would like us to believe. For while he eschews the influence of his social world, his identity is yet based on his presence in it—he turns away from public influence but is still involved with it. As we’ve already seen, public opinion swayed the way dandyism was both understood and enacted.
By mid-century the dandy and the ideal Victorian gentleman had become adversaries. This was still very much true by Wilde’s time: as Regenia Gagnier tells us, “the press’s vicious attacks on The Picture of Dorian Gray in many ways duplicated Fraser’s Magazine’s attacks on dandiacal literature a half-century earlier, but by 1891 the periodical arena was even more brutal in its competition to construct and undo public identities” (57). Gagnier suggests the uproar over Dorian Gray was the end result of “social tensions that had been brewing for decades” between dandies and gentlemen; it “exploded the conflicts of roles that Brummell had generated, that public schools had fostered, and that the press had popularized” (51, 98). The issues the press had with the book were not strictly moral in nature, but had to do with the unstable matrices of class and masculinity—in the case of the dandy this had to do particularly with the visual
markers of these identities. Gagnier claims that “the meaning of decadence in British literature of the 1890s is revealed in these tensions, rather than in any particular literary style,” but I argue that, on the contrary, these social roles are primarily enacted and the tensions generated through style (literary or otherwise)—in other words, the tension is a matter of who has the power to confer value to style and determine what it signifies. It is the purpose of this final section to show how styled pose becomes a tool in the tension-fueled critical narrative of Wilde’s novel. In short, just as the Brummellian dandy represents a cultural authority created not through birth or
political or economic power, but through style, Wilde seeks this authority-through-style for himself in a social world that has grown skeptical of that pose in favor of authenticity. The very impersonal quality of the dandy’s pose undermines this social value in order to achieve,
paradoxically, authenticity and social authority. The story of the dandy and Wilde’s style, in other words, is the story of a struggle over who, ultimately, has the authority to determine what the dandy’s style means.
We have only to look at Wilde’s own “Decay of Lying” to see how he felt about the sincerity that had become a token value in Victorian culture. In this dialogue, Wilde’s Vivian calls the “lost leader” of society a liar who is both “cultured” and “fascinating” (Artist 305).23 The creative impulse, “lying for its own sake,” is naturally counter-conventional (or anti- mimetic), and yet it is deeply informed by cultural history and grabs the attention of the public (318). The liar’s opposite, Life, is “poor, probable, uninteresting” (305). Life, or “society,” replicates the creation of the liar, or artist. This viewpoint is premised on the idea that, except for
23 With regard to Wilde himself, Arthur Ransome admits that his own project, two years after Wilde’s
death, of writing a critical study of Wilde’s work without considering the ill-fated biography of the artist was impossible. Ransome instead considers Wilde’s biographies and the testimonies of his friends so that he “might be so far from forgetting the spectacle of the man, vividly living his life and filling it as completely as he filled his works with his strange and brilliant personality” (17).
style, people are all fundamentally alike: “Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like” (297). Five out of six of these “accidentals” are synonymous with style.24 Artists create styles that the public absorbs, as we’ve seen with Brummell and the art of dress. The effect of the decline of lying as a practice and value in Victorian culture (which is, at least in part, a reaction to the excess represented by the dandy) is dullness—there is nothing to fascinate, to draw and hold attention. This suggests that there’s something in the (literal or metaphoric) visually attention-grabbing that holds a great deal of power for creating and maintaining relative social identity.
If generating relationships through artistic creation is the proper role of the artist, what exactly is the role of the critic? He is an “interpreter” of art, but he is also, as the title of another famous dialogue from Intentions declares, an artist. “The Critic as Artist” is “he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself” (Artist 374). This exhibition is effected by a re-creation of the original in a different medium: “the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative element.” The follower of Brummell is not a critic of Brummell precisely because he is simply recreating in imitation, but Pater is a true critic of Leonardo da Vinci in his translation of the Mona Lisa into words in The Renaissance. Creative description, with a purpose, is the work of the critic.
Furthermore, the critic is credentialed. “The Critic as Artist” begins with a
pronouncement on the causal relation between memory loss, popularity, and boringness: modern memoirs are “generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of
24 The implications for the only non-stylistic accidental, religious opinion, do not escape notice. Wilde
their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it” (Artist 341). For Wilde, there is something about the myopic focus on the present time that not only eases the public but is dreadfully boring. On the other hand, the liar-Artist is “cultured,” just as the “true critic” is someone “who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations” (230). In his reading of “The Critic as Artist,” Lawrence Danson calls Wilde’s many allusions to other writers and texts his “literary bricolage,” out of which Wilde “creates a world and then takes personal possession of it” (129). Wilde does this to “[harness] the prestige of culturally remarkable individuals … in order to empower the self-credentialled aesthetic critic” (130). Wilde’s contra-public pose in this essay is established through both his provocative remarks on the public’s interests and his studied knowledge of literary history. It is also established by his strong assertion of individuality. Norbert Kohl recalls the growing attention paid to Wilde’s criticism over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with Richard Ellmann’s The Artist as Critic and Stanley Weintraub’s Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde in 1969. Contrary to Danson, these and the new editions that followed were justified, according to Kohl, because the essays themselves were “astonishingly varied” (68). This “independence and originality” is, for Kohl, what “entitles [Wilde] to pre-eminence amongst late-nineteenth-century critics.” Already we see here how Wilde’s own characterization of the similarities between criticism as art—as generated by the tension between deep knowledge of literary tradition and the value of newness and originality—lend themselves to readings of his own qualifications as a critic and literary writer.
Intentions, the collection in which “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” appear, came out a year after the serialization of Dorian Gray and the same year as the
prior. The four essays that make up Intentions are said to elucidate both the aesthetic views asserted by Wilde’s only novel—the supremacy of the surface and the autonomy of art—and his ideas regarding the practice and purpose of criticism.25 That these both happen in the same body of work is telling—his aesthetic and critical practices are so closely aligned as to be almost indistinguishable. In “The Decay of Lying,” the liar and Art are equated, as are society and Life, and “life imitates art”—this is similar to the autonomous Brummell and the public he eschewed but sought to lead (307). But Wilde here only considers the artistic event and its effect in the subsequent mimicry, not public reaction or interpretation as an artistic, stylistic act in its own right that is outside the artist’s control. If, for Wilde, the critic is he who is credentialed through internalized cultural history, whose criticism involves the interpretation and translation of a work of art into another form, the power of the bastardized response of an uncultured public, or, at least, the popular press that is in some respects its mouthpiece, must be alarming. Important to remember is that the nature of Wilde’s incitement of the popular press’s negative response was not (or not exclusively) his oppositional stance. The public reacted so strongly to Dorian Gray because, according to Jamie Hovey, the novel “emphasized the perversity of looking,” and “gestur[ed] to this perversity as a shared social practice” (20). In “The Decay of Lying” and Dorian Gray, Wilde suggested that the public creates truth out of the “lie” of art, and he depicted a practice against which the public is putatively opposed. The public is fascinated by that which condemns them for being fascinated. Through intrigue, they are implicated in the challenge to their own conventions, morals, and norms.
*
25 Wilde was a prolific critic prior to Intentions. Stanley Weintraub claims that “Wilde’s major critical
works, ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist,’ were in part spill-overs from his book-reviewing phase, then in its waning months. Their perspectives parallel the earlier reviews, while also reinforcing earlier judgments about particular authors” (xxii).
In thinking of the entanglement of influence between art work, critical work, and public, we can’t forget that Wilde of course is writing under the strong influence of and in direct
response to Walter Pater. Just as Brummell’s influence on his admirers immediately caused his autonomous ethos to become affectively entangled in a public world, so Pater “is ultimately inseparable from and even dependent on his disciples, partly because their responses to his teaching inevitably erode divisions between public and private worlds” (Parkes 47). John Paul Riquelme suggests that Dorian’s murder of Basil mirrors the way in which Wilde critiques Pater by having his corrupt Lord Henry Wotton recite sentences written by Pater, often poorly (“Oscar Wilde” 613). Both Wilde and Dorian (symbolically or actually) “murder[] the man who, like a father or mentor, has contributed in a significant way to making him what he is.” The
representation of Pater is split between Basil, author of the painted ideal Dorian, and Lord Henry, spouter of bastardized Paterisms and author of the degenerate Dorian who will eventually kill the painter. This reading of split selves is nothing new in this novel, but I’m interested here in the way this demonstrates the complicated development of critical response from teacher to student and into modernism. The heart of both Wilde and Pater’s aesthetic philosophies is the power of making and receiving impressions. I will here end by taking a closer look at this inextricability of the significance or meaning of an impression from style’s role in implicating and entangling a variety of actors in a struggle for the authority to confer that meaning.
Baudelaire described dandyism as “a modern thing, springing from causes completely new” (qtd. in Moers 274). The dandy artist of whom Baudelaire writes in The Painter of Modern Life was a man always “looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call
‘modernity’” (Baudelaire 215). Pater also focuses on the modern, but he characterizes “modern thought” as the “cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute’…. To the modern
spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions” (Appreciations 65). For Pater, impressionism is an investigation of the world by turning inward. This theory of the impression challenges the easy correspondence between modes of representation and physical reality in realist art and literature by intervening with the subjective experiencing consciousness. His criticism is wholly determined by this—he seeks to judge an artwork, for example, by investigating his own sensations of it, an effect of reception. Pater’s impressionism points us forward to modernism’s use of style to engage through confrontation. But why did this “yearning for something new” take shape in such a way that the relation between autonomous individual—this personal voice or perspective conflicting with convention—and style become so emphasized?
The intermingling of contradictory interpretations of the visual was always a part of Impressionism. The movement got its name in 1872 from a disapproving reviewer, Louis Leroy, who borrowed it from the title of a painting by Monet. The satiric suggestion quickly became a sincere moniker. Jesse Matz explains that Leroy counted on his public’s ability to recognize the term’s absurdity: “‘Impression’ would connote transient, insubstantial, passive sensation; ‘ism’ would imply some systematic, doctrinal, activist idea” (12). Leroy did not anticipate that in visual art sense perception was becoming doctrine, an aestheticized idea—style, that formal element most associated with both the “insubstantial, passive sensation” and with the impression of the visual left on the viewer, was becoming a more self-consciously active entity. From the beginning this was a movement defined by conflicting aesthetic perspectives.
Impressionism’s treatment of the impression stems in part from the skeptical philosophies of Hume, in which perception is divided into two parts, impression and idea—the idea arises out of the experience of the impression. While this translation of the visible into the ideational made
sense in visual art (you see an artwork and have a thought about it), Matz goes on to explain that this contradiction between sensation and idea was never so easily resolved in literary
impressionism—“Literature, it seems, means ideas, reflection, and judgment, and so it has no place for the merely perceptual impression” (12). Rather, for the early twentieth century’s key literary writers, “like aesthetic experience, [the impression] pitches consciousness between sense and reason” (13). The impression points to the machinery involved in the translation of outward to inward, and back out again—the individual consciousness which we are tempted to identify as the origin of a style (“Wilde’s style,” the trace of his particular perspective).
In one definition listed by the OED, impression is “the effective action of one thing upon another; influence; the effect of such action.” Adam Parkes points to a reactionary reception of impressionist paintings in nineteenth-century France to demonstrate that the resulting “effect of such action” is not mere passive shock: “Frequently seen as an assault on the audience,
impressionist art itself was the target of stinging attacks. But the painters themselves deliberately contributed to this contentious atmosphere” (10). The move from visual to literary impressionism decades later in England carried with it this association with conflict: “To link the terms
‘literary’ and ‘impressionism’ was to revive precisely those anxieties … about porous borders and defiance of ‘rule and culture’ that had been aroused by impressionist painting in the 1860s and 1870s” (11). From the beginning, impressionist aesthetics were shaped by a conflict between the artist and his social context in which both sides play the role of aggressor: if the impressionist artwork, like the Brummellian wardrobe, was designed to incite or intrigue, it carries with it the mark of the culture it seeks to attack, and public opinion does a lot to sway how, exactly, a work leaves its impression. Consider, again, the Victorian appropriation of the dandy’s narrative and the carefully documented ignominies of Brummell’s later life.
I wish to extend these theories of impressionism to modern stylistics more generally—the destabilization of form and content through a style of aggression and implication emerged with the dandy’s hyper-stylization and is compounded by Wilde’s resistance and engagement of the reader. Wilde ran with the lessons of Pater to clear the way for the rooting of literary critical authority in the practice of art itself. His critical views were not only explicitly at odds with the mainstream press, his critical authority was generated out of that opposition. Like Brummell, and unlike the sincere Victorian gentleman, he fascinated.
To return to my question of why a particularly confrontational style (rather than a style generated by confrontation) takes the stage in the transition to modernity: it is as the meeting place of the subject’s indeterminate inner life or meaning and the subject’s social context—its public face—that the stylistic surface plays a crucial role in radically questioning the relation and redrawing the boundaries between the private and the social. Social structures retain a dependence on visual cues to identity, but as the nature of identity itself becomes more ambiguous, style becomes a tool used to effect or explain social relations; it is not an essence displayed. As we have seen, the Regency dandy, a hyper-stylist, occupies a curious place in the transition of style from essence to tool—he famously does not do anything, does not have any use for his style—he is the art that is quite useless. But far from being the detached autonomous artwork aesthetes would strive for, his identity depends on his being on display and the authority of his critical judgments come from that identity. The dandy enacts the foray of a subjective ambiguity into a social world in which that ambiguity cannot ultimately abide—the public which experiences the work of art will always be compelled by possibility, will code meaning into the work as potentially hidden, will thrill to seek it out. Herein lies the influential power, the implication of the modernist’s style—he incites his audience.
Chapter 2:
Duplicitous Style in Early Modernist Spy Fiction
For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such men and such deeds, romantically, whole-heartedly and with the fervour of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice. To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very