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[Throws rocks at scabs and Albert Camus]
And it wasn't unknown for some of the original discussions to devolve into fisticuffs and the occasional duel.
Alright, fine, I didn't write that at all. What I did write was: from "Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again" (1987) Since [Richard] Ellmann [author of Four Dubliners] had already written magisterial works on two of the four, symmetry and sympathy plainly drew him to a third; hence, this latest biography of Wilde, this last biography of Ellman, our time's best academic biographer. Although Ellmann was unusually intelligent, a quality seldom found in academe or, indeed, on Parnassus itself, Wilde does not quite suit his schema or his talent. Aside from the fact that the four Dubliners [Yeats, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett], as he acknowledges, "were chary of acknowledging their connection," I suspect that the controlling adjective here is "academic." To an academic of Ellmann's generation, explication is all. The problem with Wilde is that he does not need explication or interpretation. He needs only to be read, or listened to. He plays no word games other than that most mechanical of verbal tricks: the paradox. When he rises to the sublime in poetry or prose there is so much purple all over the place that one longs for the clean astringencies of Swinburne. On those occasions when Wilde is true master, the inventor of a perfect play about nothing and everything, we don't need to have the jokes explained. One simply laughs and wonders why no one else has ever been able to sustain for so long so flawlessly elegant a verbal riff. I would not like to rise in the academic world with a dissertation on Wilde's masterpieces and I suspect (but do not know) that hardly anyone has tried, particularly now that ever-easy Beckett's clamorous silences await, so temptingly, tenure seekers. --- Now that I'm dead, my memory ain't what it used to be. Sue me.
Few academic discussions of Wilde? On what planet? Maybe, if you can't find it under Literary Criticism, try Queer Studies. I doubt there's anything he wrote on, short of a bar napkin, that hasn't been studied by some academics. I'm sure you'll find PLENTY there...and they will also have stuff about Gore Vidal, too (e.g. his The City and the Pillar).Mostly, it was because what would you do, write a book explaining the jokes? (In retrospect, he may have said there weren't many discussions of his comedies, I don't recall.)I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement. [Shrugs] The essay was probably from before the advent of Queer Studies. I was a f#@!ing trailblazer, I was.
I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement. Mostly, it was because what would you do, write a book explaining the jokes? (In retrospect, he may have said there weren't many discussions of his comedies, I don't recall.)
I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?
....Recently I was sent an academic dissertation. Certain aspects of Baum's The Land of Oz had reoccured in a book of mine. Was this conscious or not? (It was not.) But I was intrigued. I reread The Land of Oz. Yes, I could see Baum's influence. I then reread The Emerald City of Oz. I have now reread all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I have also read a good deal of what has been written about him in recent years. Although Baum's books were dismissed as trash by at least two generations of librarians and literary historians, the land of Oz has managed to fascinate each new generation and, lately, Baum himself has become an OK subject, if not for the literary critic, for the social historian.... ...Lack of proper acknowledment perhaps explains the extent to which Baum has been ignored by literary historians, by English departments, by....[in original]As I write these words, a sense of dread. Is it possible that Baum's survival is due to the fact that he is not taught? That he is not, officially, Literature? If so, one must be careful not to murder Oz with exegesis.... The introduction to Moore's book [Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land by Raylyn Moore, 1974] is written by the admirable Ray Bradbury in an uncharacteristically overwrought style. Yet prose far to one side, Bradbury makes some good points: "Let us consider two authors" (the other is Edgar Rice Burroughs) "whose works were burned in our American society during the past seventy years. Librarians and teachers did the burning very subtly by not buying. And not buying is as good as burning. Yet, the authors survived." The hostility of librarians to the Oz books is in itself something of a phenomenon. The books are always popular with children. But many librarians will not stock them. According to the chairman of the Miami Public Library, magic is out: "Kids don't like that fanciful stuff anymore. They want books about missiles and atmoic submarines." Less militaristic librarians have made the practical point that if you buy one volume of a popular series you will have to get the whole lot and there are, after all, forty Oz books. Bradbury seems to think that the Oz books are disdained because they are considered "mediocre" by literary snobs (the same people who do not take seriously Science Fiction?). But I think that he is wrong. After all, since most American English teachers, librarians, and literary historians are not intellectuals, how would any of them know whether or not a book was well or ill written? [Hee hee!] More to the point, not many would care. Essentially, our educators are Puritans who want to uphold the Puritan work ethic. This is done by bringing up American children in such a way that they will take their place in society as dilligent workers and unprotesting consumers. Any sort of literature that encourages a child to contemplate alternative worlds might incite him, later in life, to make changes in the iron Puritan order that has brought us, along with missiles and atomic submarines, the assembly line at Detroit where workers are systematically dehumanized. It is significant that one of the most brutal attacks on the Oz books was made in 1957 by the director of the Detroit Library System, a Mr. Ralph Ulveling, who found the Oz books to "have a cowardly approah to life." They are also guilty of "negativism." Worst of all, "there is nothing uplifting or elevating about the Baum series." For the Librarian of Detroit, courage and affirmation mean punching the clock and then doing the dull work of a machine while never questioning the system. Our governors not only know what is good for us, they never let up. From monitoring the books that are read in grade school to the brass handshake and the pension (whose fund is always in jeopardy) at the end, they are forever on the job. They have to be because they know that there is no greater danger to their order than a worker whose daydreams are not of television sets and sex but of differently ordered worlds. Fortunately, the system of government that controls the school system and makes possible the consumer society does not control all of publishing; otherwise, much imaginative writing might exist only in samizdat. |