Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's Of course it's all paradox, don't you know. . .it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch . . . Tame essence of Wilde.
--James Joyce, Ulysses
SYMPATHY WITH HELLENISM
AT THE HEART of this book is an abandoned aspiration, a "longing" so "wild" that it is hard even to discern, except to dismiss, a scheme to alleviate the risk and pain of desire, an aspiration to lessen the damage it does by altering, without abbreviating, its nature.1 The chapters that follow seek to excavate fragments, more or less submerged, of this grand project in the work of Oscar Wilde, a project utopian and anxious in equal parts, as optimistic as any plan of escape, and as frightened as any fear of what awaits in the case of its failure. This book finds Wilde hard at work cultivating and celebrating strains of passion, attraction, fascination, as absorbing as any, but freed--as if by the wave of a wand, a sudden cure, or the turn of night to day--from the hazards routinely regarded as part and parcel of such vicissitudes, like the menace to life and limb that give the edge to any thrill; the peril, say, that gives teeth to a feast with panthers.2 Sometimes earnestly, sometimes not, the manageable desires that Wilde heralds approximate the depth of feeling attached to the more driven kind, with none of its darkness. There are, for starters, attractions powerful enough to threaten the progress of the wedding-march, but thin enough to evaporate before they ever actually do so. On the other hand, there are "life-long romances" that, constitutionally disinclined to end at the altar, end instead before dawn, and therefore long before those entanglements that draw the slave of a more persistent kind of such love to his doom, "staggering like an ox to the shambles."3 There are incurable hungers of the heart as endurable--more than that, delightful--as they are enduring, yearnings quite unlike the kind of hunger bound to haunt an Irish man, no matter how far removed from the homeland, born in the century of the Famine, the ghost of starvation from which those more glamorous hungers take their form and take their flight. Finally, there is the casual eye for the crowd that displaces and disperses the gaze caught in the act of looking at someone dazzling enough she seems to draw within the compass of her own radiance everything about the crowd that the eye could care to see.
A vision of a desire both safe and sensational is surely worthy to be seated amongst the grand alliances that Wilde contrived with all his heart and mind to arrange. At its most audacious, this is a reconciliation of antinomies, a treaty of opposites no less ambitious, no less paradoxical, surely, than his more famous plans to make synonyms of truth and fiction, art and society, work and play, ethics and aesthetics: at its most audacious, this is a desire untouched by the long arm of what he called the "tyranny of Want."4 The very idea: after all, the sense that the things that attract and excite us are beyond our control is as near as we have now to a truth universally acknowledged, so much so that it's hard to imagine that a species of desire under the thumb of its subject as one worthy of the name. Falling in love without the fall: what could it be but a denial of the real thing, an evasion, an inversion, of the awful truth? What is the notion of a desire governed by its subject but a dream of departure from the strain of desire that we all know all too well, the strain of desire that bears all the force of necessity, the strain of desire that rather governs him?
Or comic relief: so immodest is Wilde's proposal to remove the element of compulsion from the chemistry of the erotic that it could only be passed off as a joke. And, of course, Wilde himself phrased it as such in his most popular work, that "trivial comedy for serious people." Consider how far he takes the gag in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the most basic law of desire is bent beyond recognition, the fundamental rule that we cannot help whom or how we love; that we may want what we choose, but that we never choose what we want. Here the government of desires by the subject who experiences them goes well beyond the usual tactic of the double-life, beyond the power of discretion that allows him to decide when, where, or even if he will submit to them; here the very character of the desire is concocted by the subject herself. There is the "irresistible fascination" for the name at the head of the play, less like the force of an inherent proclivity than the design of a fashion statement, an "irresistible fascination" that bears all the marks of the choice to be fascinated.