No Purchase Necessary: Books and Ownership in the Writings of Oscar Wilde

Bristol Journal of English Studies, Issue 1 (Summer 2012) The Figure in the Watchtower: books and surveillance in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) Dewi Evans These are the letters which Endymion wrote To one he loved in secret, and apart. And now the brawlers of the auction mart Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note, Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote The merchant's price. I think they love not art Who break the crystal of a poet's heart That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat. Is it not said that many years ago, In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran With torches through the midnight, and began To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw Dice for the garments of a wretched man, Not knowing the God's wonder, or His woe?1 i In an intertext borrowed from Keats himself, the first line of Oscar Wilde’s sonnet ‘On the Recent Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters’ (1886) recasts the dead poet in the guise of the mythical ‘Endymion’, whose curse is to be consigned to eternal slumber, whilst at the same time remaining young and beautiful. The implications of using this name from mythology to refer to the dead Keats are manifold. It transforms the author into a symbol of eternal beauty that remains, as in 1 ‘On the [Recent] sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters’ [1886], Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Merlin Holland, 5th edn (London: Harper Collins, 2003), pp.870-1. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Wilde’s works are to this edition and are included within the body of the text. The sonnet was originally published in Dramatic Review under the title ‘Sonnet. On the Recent Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters’ on 23rd January 1886. The Figure in the Watchtower the opening words of Keats’s poem Endymion, ‘a joy forever’. Unchanging, the figure of the writer becomes his own legacy, immediately conflating him with the literary legacy of the works he has left behind. Such a move objectifies the dead writer. To view him through the filter of mythological precedent at once elides biographical details and renders the historical Keats voiceless – as an eternal slumber is bound to do. Endymion is a façade for the silenced poet, whose biography and personality are supplanted for a literary legacy whose beauty speaks not only for itself but for the poet whom it replaces. This elision of the author’s proper name constitutes a refusal to recognise the poet as a historical entity and a decision to focus instead upon the writing that remains. It invites a reading of the sonnet alongside Michel Foucault’s essay, ‘What is an Author?’ (1970). In that essay, Foucault argues that texts present their authors not as real historical personages pre-dating the works ascribed to them, but rather as a function within discourse. This works in conjunction with a Foucauldian idea of writing as ‘a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears’ – and from which he is perpetually reconstructed.2 The substitution in the sonnet’s first line similarly emphasises that the historical Keats is, in every sense, no longer with us. To speak of Keats’s letters as those which ‘Endymion wrote’ is to underline the historical Keats’s absence. Such a distinction (between the mythical façade of ‘Endymion’ and the historical reality of ‘Keats’) recalls Foucault’s insistence that the link ‘between the proper name and the individual named and between the author’s name and what it names […] do not function in the same way’ (‘What is an Author?’ 284). The author’s name, he argues, ‘performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others’: [T]he author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. […] As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the ‘author function’, while others are deprived of it. A private 2 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in The Book History Reader, 2nd Edition, ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 281-91 (281); all references are to this edition and are included within the body of the text. 2 Dewi Evans letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author [...] (‘What is an Author?’ 284). In Wilde’s sonnet, the situation is made more complex because a name other than the author’s is nevertheless employed to refer to the authorship of certain letters which, we know from the poem’s title, Keats wrote. In fact, while Wilde’s speaker seems to adhere to Foucault’s recognition of ‘the author’ as a function in discourse that ‘marks off’ a particular corpus of texts, his marking off is more inclusive than Foucault’s, taking in not only the poetical works, but also the letters – all are ‘Endymion’s’ and all are marked by the exquisite beauty of the mythical youth whose name is adopted to refer to that corpus. If the author can be defined as the function by which a certain corpus of works is taxonomised, its edges ‘marked off’, then the sonnet’s refusal to name Keats as the writer of the letters also marks off a different, more inclusive idea of the ‘author function’ than the one theorised by Foucault – it speaks of a refusal to ‘mark off’ the corpus in certain ways. The letters’ status as ‘poor blotted note[s]’ might suggest an unfinished, unpolished piece unfit for public consumption – but it does not prevent the speaker proclaiming them as, categorically, the product of a genius capable of producing beauty of ‘Endymic’ stature and longevity. The association of ‘Endymic’ beauty with ‘poor blotted note[s]’ demonstrates, therefore, the speaker’s willingness to bring the letters into an arena in which they might (like Keats’s poems) be considered incipient artworks of similarly enduring beauty. Yet, the sonnet also points to an act of ‘marking off’ on the part of the auction attendees, which is in opposition to the speaker’s own inclusive recognition of the letters as part of the body of Endymion’s ‘work’. Seeing the advent of Keats’s letters in the public domain as an excuse to turn from ‘art’ to ‘glare and gloat’ at the figure of the author, the ‘brawlers of the auction mart’ unconsciously and unthinkingly equate the letters with an historical Keats whom, they imagine, these writings will reveal. For the ‘brawlers’, it is Keats himself whom the letters define or ‘mark off’ from an art they ‘love not’. The comparison with Christ is especially resonant here. Both Christ and Keats are, in this poem, not mentioned by name; both are absent centres whose meanings are generated by the ‘wonders’ and ‘woes’ of which they are the authors. The purchasers, however, ignore the enduring beauty of that which these figures have written in favour of a focus on the physical relics of their existence as historical personages – turning not to Christ’s genius, but to his ‘mean raiment’, not to 3 The Figure in the Watchtower the beauty of Keats’s poetry, but to what his ‘poor blotted notes’ might reveal about the human being that wrote them. Like Foucault, therefore, Wilde’s speaker sees the ability to ascribe an author function as a sinister one, whose insistent tracing of textual meaning back to the figure of the author from whence it originally derived, facilitates a means of surveillance – a means to ‘glare and gloat’ not only at the writing itself but at the author whom it definitely expresses in discourse. By this means, the ‘ascription of discourse to an individual’ becomes a way of classifying not just texts, but also the individual named as their author, who becomes ‘a projection […] of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice’ (‘What is an Author?’ 286). By eschewing the use of Keats’s name and citing instead the letters written by ‘Endymion’, the speaker reveals the writings’ distance from the historical or biographical Keats: the way they have become subject to a Foucauldian vision of writing in which ‘the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence’ (‘What is an Author?’ 282). To emphasise the way in which Keats is now only present in and through the letters ‘which Endymion wrote’ is to provide a reminder that these are still the work of an author function (‘Endymion’), rather than of a writer (Keats). It announces that the historical ‘author’ is now only present as a discursive product of the writings left behind – which is, paradoxically, no presence at all. Thus, the elision of ‘Keats’ for Endymion eschews biography and offers the letters as autonomous expression: it eschews the author ‘function’, one might say, because it eschews the author. Ultimately, Endymion, standing in for Keats, stands also for a corpus of writing that speaks only of itself.

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