Inventing Ireland (8 page)

The psychologist Ashis Nandy observed these tendencies at work in occupied India, whose citizens often sought to become more like the British, either in friendship or in enmity. A martial ethos was cultivated, ostensibly to threaten the occupiers with violent insurrection; but this was really a subtler form of collaboration with the British culture. The new muscular Indians came, nevertheless, to view the feminized Indian male as one whose identity was nullified by these self-cancelling polarities, a victim of a pathology even more dangerous than that of femininity itself.
³⁸
Hesitant European well-wishers like
E. M. Forster would provide in a character like Or. Aziz a portrayal of the Indians lack of manly fibre, as if secretly willing the nationalists to open revolt. A
liberationist reading followed, rejecting the either/or polarities of male and female, England and India, and embracing instead an alternative both/and mode of thought, which opposed male or female to the ideal of androgyny, English or Indian nationalism to the ideal of liberation.
³⁹

This was at once the occupiers' darkest fear and deepest need: that "instead of trying to redeem their masculinity by becoming counter-players of the rulers according to established rules, the colonized will
discover an alternative frame of reference within which the oppressed do not seem weak, degraded ..."
⁴⁰
This led Indian subjects to see their rulers as morally inferior and, with their new-found confidence, to feed that information back to the British in devious ways. This was also Wilde's mission in London, a place (he said) of intellectual fog, where only thought was not catching. "Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped", he wrote: "The only thing that can cure it is the growth of the critical instinct".
⁴¹
That instinct was not always welcomed: two weeks before Wilde's first trial, a versifier for
Punch
magazine called for the extradition of such colonial androgynes:

If such be "Artists" then may Philistines
Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore,
And sweep them off and purge away the signs,
That England e'er such noxious offspring bore.
⁴²

Indians like Nandy came to see Wilde as embarked on the attempt to save England from the deforming effects of industrial pollution. "I would give Manchester back to the shepherds and Leeds to the stock farmers",
⁴³
Wilde proclaimed as a young student of Ruskin; but years later, he sensed that a psychological repair-job was called for as well. The colonial adventure had led not only to suffering and injustice overseas, but had corrupted domestic British society to the core. The projection of despised "feminine" qualities onto Celts or Indians had led, inexorably, to a diminishment of womanhood at home. Wilde's first act on taking up the editorship of the
Ladies' World
was to rename it
Woman's World,
and in his plays he argued for those feminine qualities deemed irrelevant to a thrusting industrial society.

The hierarchical view of humankind, on which imperialism justified itself, led to a purely instrumental view of the English working-class, but that class would never rise in revolt, since the empire also
reduced
class tensions by opening up careers overseas to talented members of the lower orders. Nandy held that Wilde's effeminacy thus threatened a fundamental postulate of the colonial mentality
in Britain itself.
⁴⁴
Certainly, Wilde seemed at all times anxious to feed back his most subversive ideas to the ruling class, as when he published his essay "
The Soul of Man Under Socialism" in the upmarket
Fortnightly Review
(1891). In such feedback may be found the essence of that carnival-esque moment towards which each of his plays moves: when the wit and laughter of the low rejuvenate the jaded culture of the high, and
when polyphonic voices override the monotones of perfunctory authority. "Rather more than a socialist", Wilde described himself with real accuracy as "something of an anarchist".
⁴⁵

What is canvassed throughout
The Importance of Being Earnest
is nothing less than the revolutionary ideal of the self-created man or woman. Even the odious Lady Bracknell finds herself inadvertently proposing a
Nietzschean idea: that if nature hasn't equipped you with a good father, you had better go and manufacture one: "I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible".
⁴⁶
Jack, therefore, has to create himself
ex nihilo,
inventing the tradition of himself. Born and first bred in a railway station, he appears to have defied all notions of paternity (or what Lady Bracknell calls "a recognized position in good society"). In Edward Said's terms he exemplifies
affiliation
(the radical creation of one's own world and contexts and versions of tradition) rather than conservative
filiation.
Lady Bracknell has no doubts as to where all this is leading: to the break-up of family life into its individual units and to "the worst excesses of the French Revolution".
⁴⁷
Revolution is a spectre which she raises when the education of the lower classes is mentioned: if successful, it may lead to a home-grown uprising and acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

The politics and psychology of the play are quintessentially republican: Bunbury must not be interred in England but in Paris, home of European radicals and Fenian exiles. All this is scarcely surprising from the pen of one whose mother had determined to "rear him a Hero perhaps and President of the future Irish Republic";
⁴⁸
from one whose first play
Vera: Or The Nihilists
was deemed too republican for the London stage and performed instead in the United States; from one who told an American audience after the Phoenix Park killings in 1882 that England was "reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice"
⁴⁹
and who said that England would only be fully saved when it too became a republic. Wilde's
republicanism was a declared feature of his agenda in London from the outset. In 1881, he sent a political pamphlet by his mother to the editor of
Nineteenth Century,
adding "I don't think age has dimmed the fire and enthusiasm of that pen which set Young Irelanders in a blaze".
⁵⁰
Contrary to many aesthetes who yearned for Renaissance-style patrons, he asserted that the republican form of government was the one most favourable to art.
⁵¹

The debate about republicanism had been very much in the air during Wilde's teenage years. In 1871 a radical politician named
Charles Dilke had called for the abolition of monarchy at a meeting
of working men: for this he was ostracized and his subsequent gatherings broken up. The London
Times
editorialized: "these are evidently improper points, to be handled, and that with little candour or delicacy, before an assembly of working men".
⁵²
Prime Minister Gladstone assured the queen on 21 December 1871 that "it could never be satisfactory that there should exist even a fraction of the nation republican in its views";
⁵³
and together they both ran a nationwide campaign for royalism. So successful was this that the subject was not widely debated again until 1922–3,
the
years immediately following Irish independence, when the matter was raised at
Labour Party meetings in the north-east of England.
⁵⁴
This gives some sense of Wilde's daring
as a thinker, as well as illustrating that the so-called Irish question was truly parabolic, a device by which British radicals could explore contentious topics at a somewhat safe remove. For example, some years after Wilde's fall from grace the question of homosexuality was raised once again in a charged Irish context, by the allegations surreptitiously circulated during the trial of
Sir Roger Casement in 1916. The Irish question was merely the sounding-board for unacknowledged English questions.

Certain questions recur in each of Wilde's plays, and so also do certain observations.
Lady Windermere's Fan,
for instance suggests that England has no room for the "heart", which it invariably breaks. The most vital character on stage, Mrs. Erlynne, chooses to emigrate, taking with her Lord Augustus Lorton; and he feels set free of his country rather than deprived of it. Imperialism has, apparently, sapped English society of two elements, the creative and the criminal, leaving only dull suburban types. What life there is in it comes from the outside, from the visiting Mr. Hopper of Australia, who takes the one unattached young woman in the play back with him. Wilde's implication is prophetic of the end of empire: for while Britain wins further victories overseas through such innovators, it will be in a state of terminal decay at home. A society which has no place for its dissidents, its creators or its youth is a society in trouble. Wilde knew this only too well, since he came from such a place: Ireland. And he said that the remedy was for England to adopt some Irish qualities while shedding Irish territories.

If the English used Ireland as a laboratory in which to test their society, Wilde was happy to use England as a testing-ground for Irish ideas and debates: for, in his mind, the two could not be separated. Though it was never viewed as such in Ireland, he saw his own art as part of the
Irish Renaissance, jokingly telling Shaw that their mission was to dispel English fog so that it could make way for the "Celtic School".
⁵⁵
What he meant by the latter phrase, he explained in "The
Critic as Artist": "it is the Celt who leads in art. . . there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not be almost as mighty in its way as mat new birth of art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy".
⁵⁶

But this did not mean that Wilde could write directly of the Ireland of his youth. That would have entailed him in the bad faith of reproducing an environment which he knew he should be contesting; and that is something which no radical author could countenance (unless, like Shaw, he wrote of the contrast between how the land was and how it should be). Ireland in the nineteenth century was a confused and devastated place, suspended between two languages; and Wilde was committed to sketching the lineaments of no-place, otherwise known as Utopia, something which Ireland or indeed England might yet become. Where Arnold had hoped to see the object in itself as it really was, Wilde wished to see it as it really was not. At a time when the Irish were often accused by the English of mischievously changing the question, Wilde was thinking farther ahead than either side in the debate. So far from responding to the questions posed by the epoch, art (for him) offered answers even before the questions had been asked.

There is a further reason why, in order to deal with Ireland, a play such as
The Importance of Being Earnest had
to be set in England. Wilde had discovered that an Irishman only came to consciousness of himself as such when he left his country. Wearing the mask of the English Oxonian, Wilde was paradoxically freed to become more "Irish" than he could ever have been back in Ireland. "It is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality . . ."
⁵⁷
Identity was dialogic; the other was also the truest friend, since it was from that other that a sense of self was derived. A person went out to the other and returned with a self, getting to know others simply to find out what they think of him or herself. This seeing of the entire world through the others eyes was an essential process in the formation of a balanced individual; and so Wilde
loved England as genuinely as Goethe loved the French. He quoted Goethe on the point: "how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?"
⁵⁸

That was a universal theme: the persons who gave its name to France were indeed Germanic Franks, for a culture could only be surveyed and known as such from the outside or, at least, the margins. Identity was
predicated on difference, but the colonizers of the 1880s and 1890s were conveniently forgetting that fact in their anxiety to make over the world in their image; and they would have to be reminded. A somewhat similar jolt must also be given to those national chauvinists who were too eager to deny any value to the occupier culture; and Wilde, by announcing the Irish renaissance with works which appeared to be set in England, administered that rebuke. One says "appeared to be set in England", of course, for a reason which must be finally explained.

English literature had a liberating effect on Wilde: it equipped him with a mask behind which he was able to compose the lineaments of his Irish face. This was to be a strategy followed by many decolonizing writers; and, as so often, it was the
Argentinian,
Jorge Luis Borges who gave the fullest account of the method. He described the insistence that Argentine artists deal with national traits and local colour as "arbitrary" and as a "European cult" which nationalists ought to reject as foreign. There were no camels in
The Koran,
he said, because only a falsifier, a tourist or a nationalist would have seen them; but Mohammed, happily unconcerned, knew that he could be an Arab without camels. Borges, indeed, confessed that for years he had tried and failed to capture Buenos Aires in his stories, but that it was only when he called Paseo Colon the rue de Toulon and only when he dubbed the country house of Adrogue Fiste-le-Roy that his readers found the true Argentine flavour. "Precisely because I did not set out to find that flavour, because I had abandoned myself to a dream, I was able to accomplish, after so many years, what I had previously sought in vain".
⁵⁹
Wilde advanced the same argument when he said that the more imitative an is, the less it expresses its time and place: what compels belief in a portrait is not its fidelity to the subject so much as its embodiment of the spirit of the artist. Borges, for his part, found that being Argentine was either a fate or a mere affectation: if the former, then it was futile to try consciously for an Argentine subject or tone, and if the latter, then that was one mask better left unworn, for it could only be donned in the degrading pretense that the mask actually was the face.