All posts tagged aphorism

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

After the country setting of ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Wilde’s third social comedy is set firmly back in the heart of London’s High Society. The four acts alternate in setting between Sir Robert Chiltern’s House in Grosvenor Square and Lord Goring’s House in Curzon Street (0.4 miles and 5 minutes walk apart according to Google Maps) and the society it satirises and the values it mocks are just as circumscribed and limited. And it’s barely started before he is mocking his audience, London high society:

MABEL CHILTERN: Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

London ‘Society’ continues to be mocked and satirised by various characters but, despite the incessant raillery, ‘An Ideal Husband’, like all the other plays, fundamentally accepts this class and its values as the premise of the story and setting.

Plot summary

Act 1. The Octagon Room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square

Sir Robert Chiltern is a Member of Parliament (MP) and junior government minister and his wife, the upstanding Lady Chiltern, are hosting a party. Leading guests are the dandified Wilde avatar, Lord Goring, Chiltern’s sister Mabel, and other guests.

Storming into the party is the smooth-talking, suave but genuinely malevolent Mrs Cheveley. Lady Chiltern recognises her from her schooldays when Mrs C was expelled. Nothing has changed and she waits till she gets Sir Robert alone before bluntly blackmailing him. Mrs Cheveley and colleagues have invested in a blatantly fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Sir Robert has been notable for opposing any British involvement in it on the basis of a parliamentary report he’s commissioned (‘a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.’). Now Mrs Cheveley wants him to completely reverse his position, suppress the report and say he is in favour of the canal!

Obviously Sir Robert refuses to do so which is when Mrs C pull out her blackmailing threat. Turns out that Sir Robert’s vast wealth, name, reputation and influence all stem from a bad thing he did 20 years ago, back at the start of his career. He learned a Cabinet secret – that the British government was about to purchase the Suez Canal company and tipped off a stockbroker acquaintance of his, Baron Arnheim. The Baron bought shares which the British government then purchased at a much higher price, making the Baron three-quarters of a million pounds, of which he gave Sir Robert £110,000, enough capital to commence speculations of his own which brought him to his present dizzy wealth.

Anyway, Mrs Cheveley has a copy of Sir Robert’s letter to Arnheim, shows it to Sir Robert, and threatens to make it public unless he does what she wants. Not only will it ruin him, lose him his job in government, possibly lead to criminal proceedings – but will lose him the love of his life, his upright, morally unbending wife. He has no choice, he has to agree, and Mrs Cheveley leaves the party with his promise to suppress the report.

However, spurred on by Lady Chiltern’s earlier rudeness towards her, Mrs Cheveley cannot resist telling her (Lady Chiltern) about her husband’s sudden change of heart about the canal scheme. When the guests have gone and they are alone, Lady Chiltern confronts her husband with it and, blithely unaware of both her husband’s past and Mrs Cheveley’s blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert goes back on his promise to her. In fact she stands over him and watches him write the letter doing so which she then summons one of the servants to deliver to Mrs Cheveley’s hotel.

And here is the crux of the play: for Lady Chiltern her husband is ‘an ideal husband’, a model partner in both public and private life who she can trust and worship with no reservations.

Now so far I’ve given the impression that the play is a tragic melodrama but, of course, it’s anything but, seeing as how it’s festooned with witty banter and sparkling repartee, mostly thanks to the Wilde avatar in the play, witty Lord Goring, especially when he is sparring with Sir Robert’s sister, clever young Mabel Chiltern (very similar to the way the Wilde avatar in the previous play, ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Lord Illingworth, fenced with his female equivalent, Mrs Allonby).

In addition there are, as in the previous plays, three or four other guests, mostly older ladies – Lady Markby and Mrs Marchmont, generically referred to as ‘the dowagers’ – who are comic in their own right:

MRS CHEVELEY: Wonderful woman, Lady Markby, isn’t she? Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met.

LADY MARKBY: I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.

But these old buffers also act as foils to the ‘amoral’ and ‘shocking’ and oh-so-modern Lord Goring (‘Young people nowadays, I don’t understand a word they say’ etc). Plus the comic figure of the absurd Vicomte de Nanjac, French Attaché.

Back to the plot, towards the end of the party had been verbally sparring when she spots a diamond brooch one of the guests has left on the sofa. Lord Goring asks for it and puts it away in his pocket, explaining that he gave it to someone many years ago, and asking Mabel to inform him if anyone comes back to the house to retrieve it.

Aha! Could the lost brooch by any chance turn out to be the solution to Sir Robert’s dilemma?!

Act 2. Morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Next morning Lord Goring is round at Sir Robert’s house, being surprisingly earnest and supportive for such a ‘dandy’, telling him to fight Mrs Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. During the conversation Goring also reveals that he and Mrs Cheveley were once engaged, in a characteristically droll way:

SIR ROBERT CHILTON: Did you know her well?
LORD GORING: [Arranging his necktie.] So little that I got engaged to be married to her once, when I was staying at the Tenbys’. The affair lasted for three days…nearly.

He tells Lord Chiltern to telegraph the British embassy in Vienna (where Mrs Cheveley lives) to see if they know any dirt about her. But his efforts to persuade Lord Chiltern to do come clean to his wife fail – the latter is too afraid of losing the only woman he’s ever loved.

After finishing his conversation with Chiltern, Goring indulges in more flirtatious banter with young Mabel. Then, when she exits for some reason, finding himself alone with Lady Chiltern, Lord Goring does a very decent thing and tries to urge her to less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Since it’s the core of the play (and, possibly of Wilde’s work as a whole) it’s worth quoting in full:

LORD GORING: Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that . . . perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life. I think that . . . often you don’t make sufficient allowances. In every nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness. Supposing, for instance, that – that any public man, my father, or Lord Merton, or Robert, say, had, years ago, written some foolish letter to some one…
LADY CHILTERN: What do you mean by a foolish letter?
LORD GORING: A letter gravely compromising one’s position. I am only putting an imaginary case.
LADY CHILTERN: Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing.
LORD GORING: [After a long pause.] Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.
LADY CHILTERN: Are you a Pessimist? What will the other dandies say? They will all have to go into mourning.
LORD GORING: [Rising.] No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Lord Goring leaves, having offered both Lord and Lady Chiltern his help. After some comic chat between Lady C and Mabel about the man who keeps proposing to her, one Tommy Trafford, they are interrupted by the return of Mrs Cheveley accompanied by the bufferish Lady Markby. They finally get rid of Lady M, at which point Lady Chiltern coldly tells Mrs C it was she who made her husband write the latter the night before.

At which point Mrs Cheverley brutally exposes Sir Robert’s secret to his wife, telling her all about the act of betrayal and corruption which made him his fortune and began his public career – with the result that  Lady Chiltern orders the servants to more or less kick her out. Left alone, Lady Chiltern begs her husband to tell her it is not true:

LADY CHILTERN: You sold a Cabinet secret for money! You began your life with fraud! You built up your career on dishonour! Oh, tell me it is not true! Lie to me! Lie to me! Tell me it is not true!

But Sir Robert cannot tell a lie, tells her it is all true, this crushing her worship of him, thus wrecking their marriage, for she denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him. At which point Lord Chiltern delivers another iteration of the play’s moral:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.

Act 3. The library of Lord Goring’s house in Curzon Street

There’s a lot of hectic coming and going in this scene. It opens with Lord Goring doing the Wilde avatar thing with his monosyllabic manservant, Phipps.

LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring receives a letter from Lady Chiltern who, having learned about her husband’s error, wants to take him up on his offer of support. This letter is, however, ambiguously worded:

‘I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you. Gertrude.’

So he expects her to arrive at any minute and tells the servants to take her into his drawing room. Instead the master and servant banter is interrupted by the arrival of Lord Goring’s father, Lord Caversham. The old man makes a sustained attack on Lord G, telling him he must get married.

While he’s getting rid of his father, instead of Lady Chiltern, Mrs Cheveley arrives and, as arranged, is shown into Lord Goring’s drawing room. Lord Goring manages to get ride of his father but, on the doorstep of the apartment, as Lord Caversham is leaving, Sir Robert arrives. He has come to tell Lord Goring that his wife knows everything and beg for his help.

While Chiltern and Goring converse in another room, Mrs Cheveley finds Lady Chiltern’s letter open on a table before sneaking back into the drawing room. The two men come back onto the main stage and it is here that Sir Robert overhears a chair being banged in the drawing room and realises that someone is there! Someone has been eavesdropping while he pours his heart out! He makes Goring swear on his word of honour that there is no-one in there, but nonetheless storms in and, of course, sees Mrs Cheveley.

He comes out onto the main stage disgusted with Lord Goring who a) lied to him on his word of honour and b) he jumps to the conclusion is having an affair with the woman. Lord Goring, still under the misapprehension it is Lady Chiltern in the other room, makes a series of claims which are either comic or tragic, depending on how it is acted, claiming that the woman in there is blameless and loves him dearly.

Outraged, Sir Robert storms out at which point Mrs Cheveley enters the main room with a broad smile on her face. They revert to Wildean banter:

LORD GORING: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh! pray don’t. One should never give a woman anything that she can’t wear in the evening.

Lord Chiltern discovers Mrs Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced the two former lovers must be having an affair, he storms out of the house.

When Mrs Cheveley and Lord Goring confront each other, she makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Chiltern’s letter for Goring’s hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction. Also, he can only despise her for evilly wishing to ruin the Chilterns’ marriage.

Then two dramatic things. 1) Mrs Cheveley says she never went back to the Chilterns’ house to taunt Lady Chiltern, but simply to retrieve the brooch she thought she must have lost there. This reminds Goring that it is in his possession and he takes it out. He charmingly points out that it can also be used as a bracelet and slips it onto Mrs Cheveley’s arm where it clicks fast. It is now that he reveals his plan. He reveals that he recognises this brooch because ten years earlier he gave it to his cousin, Mary Berkshire. At a country house weekend it went missing, presumed stolen, and the finger of blame pointed at a servant who was sacked. Now he has the evidence that Mrs Cheveley stole it. He is going to get his servant to call the police and present Mrs Cheveley with the incriminating bracelet on her arm. Furiously, she tries to claw it off but Lord Goring says it has a hidden spring which only he knows how to operate. He will remove the bracelet if she gives him Sir Robert’s letter. At first she refuses but then gives up, hands it over, Lord Goring burns it and then unclips the bracelet. Phew. Everything sorted, right?

BUT 2) earlier Mrs C had spotted Lady Chiltern’s note to Goring and, while he is offstage instructing his servants, she steals it from his desk. When he returns, she announces that she has it and plans to take revenge on Lord G by presenting it to Sir Robert as a love letter from Lady Chiltern to Goring. Goring tries to grab it back but a servant enters and one does not argue in front of the servants. And so Mrs Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

Act 4. Back to the morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Lord Goring is at Sir Robert’s house, waiting to see any of the family but they are all busy.

His father arrives and 1) there is the paternal badgering of him to get married; Goring jokes that he will be engaged by lunchtime which his father doesn’t know is a joke or not. But 2) his father brings a copy of the Times which reports Sir Robert’s speech in the House of Commons the night before, a thundering attack on the Argentine canal scheme and modern finance in general.

Mabel Chiltern arrives from her ride in the Park, the one which Lord Goring absolutely positively promised to meet her for and she comically ignores him for a while before relenting into banter. He announces that he is finally going to propose to her which she turns into banter by pointing out that it’s her second proposition that morning since Tommy Trafford has already made one.

MABEL CHILTERN: It is one of Tommy’s days for proposing. He always proposes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during the Season.

Lady Chiltern appears, and Lord Goring tells her that Chiltern’s letter has been destroyed but that Mrs Cheveley has stolen her note and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. They are just planning how to get his secretaries to intercept the letter (written on pink paper) before it gets to Sir Robert when he enters reading it.

At that moment Lord Chiltern enters while reading Lady Chiltern’s letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee he is assuming it was meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two are reconciled. (To be honest I was expecting a lot more complication to be caused by this letter. All the possible complications it could have caused seem to be conveniently swept under the carpet.)

This leaves one last Big Issue, which is whether Sir Robert should remain in public life. He tentatively suggests to his wife that, although the evidence against him has been destroyed, maybe he should leave public life to which she replies: ‘Oh yes, Robert, you should do that. It is your duty to do that.’

With heavy dramatic irony it is at this moment that Lord Goring’s father, the egregious Lord Caversham appears again, having come hot foot from Number Ten bringing news that the Prime Minister has offered him a seat in the cabinet! He is astonished, thrilled and then…downcast, as he catches Lady Chiltern’s look. Very reluctantly he tells Caversham he will have to reject the offer and that he is giving up public life and goes into another room to write his letter of refusal.

Which, of course, allows Lord Goring to deliver a long speech saying forcing her husband to quit public life will not only ruin his life but kill his love for her, ruining both their lives. But he actually couches his argument in stupefyingly sexist terms:

LORD GORING: A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses.

Which is why she must forgive him, because women must forgive their men.

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

As I’m always saying, the provocative paradoxes in some of the banter, the slightly camp attitude of some of the men, none of that supposedly ‘transgressive’ discourse can hold a candle to the thumpingly sexist, gender stereotyping which the plots of the plays absolutely rely on. Suffice to say that when Lord Chiltern re-enters the room, Lady Chiltern has changed her mind and tells him to remain in public life directly quoting Goring’s ‘A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s’ speech.

Right. So everything’s sorted, is it? Not quite. One last issue. Lord Chiltern has barely finished thanking Lord Goring for saving his career and his marriage, when Goring follows up by asking for his sister (Mabel)’s hand in marriage. To everyone’s surprise Sir Robert refuses! Why? Because he still thinks that he discovered Mrs Cheveley in Goring’s rooms at 10.30 last night (the lateness of the hour is crucial and is referred to by all the characters as the clinching argument) because they are still in love.

When Goring denies this, Sir Robert doesn’t believe him. It takes Lady Chiltern to overcome her scruples and reticence and confess to her husband that it was she who planned to visit Lord Goring to ask his help about what to do in her marriage, and that Lord Goring honestly thought he had her waiting in his drawing room, which is why he said those absurdly inappropriate things about Mrs Cheveley. This has the incidental effect of making clear that the letter on pink paper wasn’t a loving reconciliation addressed to Lord Chiltern but a cry for help addressed to Lord Goring.

Anyway, this sufficiently explains Goring’s behaviour the night before and Sir Robert smiling relents and awards Goring his sister’s hand. So, to conclude:

  • Lord and Lady Chiltern are reconciled and now live on a new, more realistic basic to their marriage in which both recognise the frailties and fallibility of the other
  • Mabel and Goring are engaged to be married
  • Lord Caversham is delighted that his son is finally doing the right thing
  • and lunch is served, a pale echo of the feasts which ended comic plays from the time of the ancient Greeks

The old couple reconciled, the young couple newly engaged. What could be more thumpingly conventional?

The journey from rectitude to sympathy

The moral storyline is the same as the previous two. A woman of rigorous, unbending, inflexible moral rectitude is forced to realise, through her own suffering, that people are more complicated, more fallible, and more deserving of understanding, compassion and sympathy, than she previously thought.

In the ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’ the stern unbending female moralists were Lady Windermere and the young American, Miss Worsley. In this play it is stern Lady Chiltern:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Lord My wife! Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do – pitiless in her perfection – cold and stern and without mercy.

It is Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband. The author’s message is delivered by the Wilde avatar in the play, raffish Lord Goring.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

And:

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

When you know how his own marriage was wrecked by the trial which revealed his secret gay life, it’s is hard not to be distressed at how little the charity and forgiveness promoted in his plays were available in his own tragic fall.

Wilde avatars

In all of these stories there is one male character who echoes, mimics or acts as the Wilde surrogate, or as the figure Wilde would like to be, so I call him the Wilde avatar, avatar being a Sanskrit word which means ‘an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea’, and so the embodiment, in the plays, of the ideal Wilde protagonist:

  • in his 30s (and so younger than Wilde, who turned 40 in 1894)
  • a genuine member of the aristocracy
  • an unattached man-about-town with a reputation for ‘wickedness’ i.e. saying the most outrageous things (not actual wickedness)
  • rich and idle
  • overflowing with witty and ‘shockingly’ unconventional repartee

These avatars are:

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Lord Henry Wotton
  • Lady Windermere’s Fan – Lord Darlington
  • A Woman of No Importance – Lord Illingworth
  • An Ideal Husband – Lord Goring
  • The Importance of Being Earnest – Jack Worthing

Apparently, Wilde added the elaborate stage directions and character descriptions after the play had been premiered. He really goes to town with the description of Lord Goring at the start of Act 3:

Enter Lord Goring in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.

Apothegms, one-liners, facetious remarks and

As I worked my way through the third Wilde play it struck me that the banter sometimes descends to pointless wittering welded onto a plot of stock melodrama (husband’s dark secret revealed to noble wife), something many critics pointed out at the time (I particularly like the contemporary critic William Archer’s view that ‘An Ideal Husband…simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter’).

However, in a good production in the theatre, the welter of one-liners and bons mots – if well delivered – can carry the audience along, especially the repartee between witty Lord Goring and his sparring partner and beloved, clever young Mabel Chiltern.

Mocking their own high society milieu

LADY MARKBY: Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?
LORD GORING: Most pretty women do. But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.

Politics

LADY MARKBY: Sir John’s temper since he has taken seriously to politics has become quite unbearable. Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

LADY MARKBY: Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
MRS CHEVELEY: The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly.
LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it?

The importance of artifice

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: May I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Casual mockery of expected sentiments

In this case sending up the Victorian expectation of filial piety.

LORD GORING: Really, I don’t want to meet my father three days running. It is a great deal too much excitement for any son. I hope to goodness he won’t come up. Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.

Men and women aka gender stereotyping

As I’ve noted in the first two plays, it is ironic that this hero of the LGBTQIA+ movement (which has made such efforts to question, undermine and subvert gender stereotypes) relies so heavily in these plays on the stereotyping of men and women in both the plot itself and in the endless conversation gambits  based on sweeping generalisations about men and women, husbands and wives – what often feels like endless riffing off utterly conventional stereotypes, that there are two genders, that they behave like this, think like this, and so on.

MRS CHEVELEY: Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational?
MRS CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.

LORD GORING: No man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

MRS CHEVELEY: My dear Arthur, women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
LORD GORING: Women are never disarmed by anything, as far as I know them.

MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, there is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Husbands and wives

LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.
MRS CHEVELEY: Except their husbands. That is the one thing the modern woman never understands.
LADY MARKBY: And a very good thing too, dear, I dare say. It might break up many a happy home if they did.

You don’t have to be non-binary to find this kind of thing gets pretty wearing, pretty quickly.

Lord Goring, the Wilde avatar, posing as a wicked man

MABEL CHILTERN: How very selfish of you!
LORD GORING: I am very selfish.
MABEL CHILTERN: You are always telling me of your bad qualities, Lord Goring.
LORD GORING: I have only told you half of them as yet, Miss Mabel!
MABEL CHILTERN: Are the others very bad?
LORD GORING: Quite dreadful! When I think of them at night I go to sleep at once.

LORD GORING: My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

LORD CAVERSHAM: Do you always really understand what you say, sir?
LORD GORING: [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

A basic conceit repeated at:

LORD CAVERSHAM: Humph! Never know when you are serious or not.
LORD GORING: Neither do I, father.

Why this is tiresome is that Lord Goring perfectly well does know when he’s being serious. When he makes his plea to lady Chiltern to forgive her husband and let him continue his public career, he is very consciously serious. This ‘I never know when I’m being serious’ trope is just a joke or a pose, which is dropped the second it has to be.

Author’s message

Same message as in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’, in both of which the stern unbending moralist (Lady Windermere and Miss Worsley) is taught compassion and forgiveness by realising their own fallibility. In this case it is stern unbending Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband, who learns that love is not holding people accountable to the highest standards, but forgiving people for their weakness and sins.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Related link

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 14, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 14, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/14/an-ideal-husband-oscar-wilde/

Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde (1892)

Oscar Wilde’s hesitant career

In his introduction to Wilde’s Collected Short Fiction, Ian Small emphasises that for most of his literary career, Wilde struggled to make ends meet. He’d left Oxford with a double first in 1878 but struggled throughout the 1880s to establish himself as a writer and journalist in London. After returning from his year-long lecture tour of America (January 1882 to February 1883) he was pushed back into the world of book reviewing, before getting a job editing the periodical Woman’s World from May 1887 to 1889.

From early on he tried to become a playwright. As early as 1883 he had had a play produced, Vera, or the Nihilists, a serious treatment of Russian revolutionaries, which was premiered in New York but closed after just a week. It was to be eight long years before he had another play produced but in the meantime he had been refining his writing skills: journalism quickly teaches you what works and what doesn’t, how to get a point across pithily. And of course he had been perfecting his personal style of witty banter and epigram.

He had another go at the stage with The Duchess of Padua, a five-act tragedy in blank verse, which was handed to an American producer in 1883, rejected and not staged (in New York) until 1891, when it only lasted three weeks. William Winter reviewed it in The New York Tribune on 27 January 1891 and made a shrewd point:

The new play is deftly constructed in five short acts, and is written in a strain of blank verse that is always melodious, often eloquent, and sometimes freighted with fanciful figures of rare beauty. It is less a tragedy, however, than a melodrama…the radical defect of the work is insincerity. No one in it is natural.

Despite these setbacks Wilde didn’t give up his ambition to become a ‘serious’ playwright. In late 1891 he began writing Salome (based on the Biblical story) entirely in French, while living in Paris. (Salome was published in French in 1893, in English translation in 1894, but wasn’t produced (in Paris) until 1896 when Wilde was, of course, in prison.)

Even after the success of his first two social comedies didn’t appease his desire to write ‘serious’ drams and he started to write another heavily symbolic drama, again with a Biblical setting, La Sainte Courtisane, which he was never to finish and whose manuscript was lost.

But arguably Wilde’s conceptual breakthrough was to realise that he had to stop writing ‘serious’ works which contained occasional moments of artifice, turn this approach completely inside out, and write works which are nothing but artifice, in which all elements of so-called naturalism, of realism, have been utterly discarded in favour of the most upper of upper-class nonchalance and debonaireness.

Having made this conceptual breakthrough, Wilde wrote in quick succession four of the most brilliant  social comedies to grace the English stage:

  • Lady Windermere’s Fan, premiered February 1892
  • A Woman of No Importance, premiered April 1893
  • An Ideal Husband, premiered January 1895
  • The Importance of Being Earnest, premiered February 1895

Plot summary

‘Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About a Good Woman’ is in four acts. It was first performed on Saturday 20 February 1892 at St James’s Theatre in London.

The play is set among the toniest English upper classes. Lady Windermere is young, has only been married to her husband for two years, has a child who is just 6 months old. The play opens on the afternoon of her birthday, when she is planning to have a smallish birthday party that evening for a dozen or so guests from London high society.

But as the play opens she has begun to suspect that her husband, Lord Windermere, is having an affair with another woman, Mrs Erlynne. The main informant is the Duchess of Berwick, a gossipy old baggage, who drags her comically monosyllabic daughter around with her everywhere.

Stung by the Duchess’s accusations, Lady W checks her husband’s pocket book (kept in his desk) and is horrified to discover that he has been making large payments to this Mrs Erlynne.

When Lord Windermere enters, his wife confronts him with her suspicions. He angrily rejects them as unfounded and yet insists that she invites this Mrs Erlynne to her birthday party which, understandably, Lady W angrily refuses to do. Against her wishes, Lord W sends Mrs Erlynne an invitation and she duly attends the birthday party.

Now, running alongside all this there’s a secondary story which is that Lady W is being pursued by debonaire and drily humorous Lord Darlington – in fact the play opens with him visiting her for tea and, after a lot of flirtatious chat, openly declaring that he loves her madly, passionately. She refuses to listen, tells him to be quiet, and, referring to her Puritan upbringing as an orphan, insists that men and women are either Good or Bad and refuses to compromise.

Thus it is that when Mrs Erlynne sweeps into her birthday party, unwanted and resented by Lady W, she becomes so furious with her husband’s ongoing refusal to explain why this woman means so much to him, why he is going out of his way to help her into London society, and why he obstinately refuses to explain anything to her, that Lady W suddenly decides to leave her husband and go see Lord Darlington, maybe even run off with him.

I need to explain that throughout Lady W’s party Mrs Erlynne in fact continues a flirtation with the elderly divorcee, the puffing blustering Lord Augustus Lorton, making it fairly clear to the audience that she is not in a liaison with Lord W, in fact Lord Windermere is consistently rude and resentful in the little side chats they have.

Anyway, Mrs Erlynne accidentally comes across the note Lady W has written her husband explaining that she has gone to Lord Darlington’s rooms and realises with horror that this indicates she is going to run off with him. Her secret is revealed when she delivers a soliloquy explaining that she is Lady Windermere’s mother: 20 years earlier she ran off leaving her husband for a wastrel who soon after died and left her penniless. The husband she abandoned refused to have her back, raising their child as a single father, living long enough to tell young Lady W, with tears in his eyes, that her mother had died tragically, before he himself died of a broken heart.

In other words she is suddenly distraught at the possibility that Lady Windermere is about to make the same mistake that she, her mother, made when she was young, a fatal step which can ruin a woman’s whole life.

So Mrs Erlynne quickly takes steps: she takes Lord Augustus to one side and makes him swear to keep Lord Darlington delayed at their club while she takes a cab to his rooms in pursuit of Lady W.

She is shown into Lord D’s rooms by a servant to find Lady W there and there is a big confrontation scene in which Lady Windermere accuses Mrs Erlynne of having an affair with her husband while Mrs Erlynne  not only explains that is the last thing she would do but insists again and again and again that she must return to her husband, now, before it is too late, before she ruins her life.

But their standoff is cut short when they hear voices coming up the stairs and, in true farcical style, Lady Windermere hides behind the curtains at one side of the room while Mrs Erlynne hides in a closet.

Into Lord Darlington’s rooms blunder all the men from the party earlier, namely Lord Darlington, Lord Windermere, Lord Augustus, as well as three broadly comic characters, Mr Cecil Graham, Mr Dumby and Mr Hopper. These characters had provided comic relief earlier at the party, with comic exchanges of Wildean paradoxes and one liners. Now they are given 4 or 5 pages of the same kind of male banter, mostly revolving around the endlessly fascinating topic of the difference between men and women.

Eventually, as this is winding down, one of them spots on the table Lady Windermere’s fan. This has special significance because it was a birthday present from Lord W to Lady W (in the opening scene Lady Windermere had proudly shown it off to Lord Darlington).

When it is brought to the attention of the general party, Lord Windermere has a fit and accuses Lord Darlington of having an affair with his wife and hiding her somewhere and insists that he is going to ransack the place until he finds her, against Lord Darlington’s furious insistence that he has no idea what the fan is doing there (as, indeed, he hasn’t).

Anyway, Lord W is just about to start his threatened ransacking when out of the closet steps Mrs Erlynne, gobsmacking the rest of the company. She explains that she had come to see Lord Darlington on a secret assignation and must have foolishly got her own fan mixed up with Lady Windermere’s. Her presence there is so shocking to all the men that they accept her explanation at face value while Lady Windermere slips from behind the curtains and out through the door unseen.

So, Mrs Erlynne sacrifices her own reputation in London Society in order to preserve Lady Windermere’s. The last act opens the next morning with Lady Windermere at home with her husband and now their roles are reversed. Lord Windermere, shocked by the revelation of her immorality the night before, now accuses Mrs Erlynne of being a shameless immoral hussy etc, whereas Lady Windermere, still awed by the way the woman sacrificed her reputation for her sake, now speaks up on her behalf.

At which point Mrs Erlynne is announced and, despite her husband’s objections, Lady Windermere insists on seeing her. Mrs Erlynne has come to return the fan and to announce that she is going to leave London, where, in any case, her reputation is now ruined, and go abroad. Touchingly, she asks Lady Windermere for a photograph of herself and her small son.

When Lady Windermere is upstairs looking for a photo Mrs Erlynne reveals the full details of her story – running off with the lover shortly after Lady Windermere’s birth, being rejected by her husband, deciding to return to London and how she has been blackmailing Lord Windermere, both to give her money and an entrée back into London society, otherwise she would ruin Lady W’s innocent name by revealing all about her sordid story.

Lord Windermere regrets not having told his wife the whole story at once and resolves to tell her the truth now but Mrs Erlynne forbids him to do so, threatening to spread shame far and wide if he does.

Lady Windermere returns with the photograph which she gives to Mrs Erlynne and blustering Lord Windermere arrives. At first shocked to see Mrs Erlynne there after the shameful events of the night before he is quickly twisted round Mrs Erlynne’s savvy fingers, she spins a cock-and-bull story which he all too ready to believe, and he surprises the Windermeres by announcing that they are going to get married and live abroad.

All’s well that ends well.

Comments

Restoration themes

Men and women, husbands and wives. The absolutely obsessive, almost monomaniacal focus on stereotypical descriptions of men and women’s characters, on marriage and infidelity, remind me of Restoration comedy which had a similar obsession and a similar tone of jaded sophistication.

Morality

Similarly traditional is the need for drama to have a moral. Wilde went on about art being neither moral nor immoral, simply well or badly written, and yet everything he wrote did have a moral, often a very simple-minded and thoroughly conventional moral.

In this instance, the naively puritanical and narrow-minded Lady Windermere has her worldview completely changed, for two reasons. One, she discovers that a woman she thought was utterly Immoral and Bad etc turns out to make a huge sacrifice on her behalf. She is shamed by Mrs Erlynne’s selfless gesture. More profoundly, she discovers that she herself is more complex than she realised. After all, she was so angry with her husband that she, briefly, countenanced running off and abandoning both him and her baby with the dashing Lord Darlington. She discovers, within herself, that people are more complex and less easy to judge than she started the play thinking.

In a highly conventional way, the audience of the play accompanies her on her journey to broader moral sympathy and a larger vision of human nature.

The unexpectedly tragic

There’s a sprinkling of characteristically Wildean bon mots and one liners throughout the play, connected with the characters of dashing Lord Darlington and then the young bucks Cecil Graham and Mr Dumby. But what genuinely surprised me was the elements of melodrama in the play. Lady Windermere is portrayed as sinking into a mood of tragic melodrama, almost contemplating suicide, driven into genuine anguish by her husband’s behaviour, and then really seriously torn apart in her agonising whether to run off with Lord Darlington or not.

This is most definitely not funny at all, and completely at odds with the ironic Wildean comedy of the other passages. I suppose you could argue that in this, Wilde’s first social comedy, he hadn’t yet found a plot which was appropriate for his comic worldview. I found these tragic moments genuinely moving but tended to badly undermine the comic ones.

So although Lady Windermere’s Fan has plenty of the Wildean banter which struck audiences and critics of the time (many of whom disapproved), 130 years later what strikes me is how conventional and melodramatic it feels.

For the core of the play is that, when it comes to possible marital infidelity – or just a woman being by herself in a man’s rooms (as Mrs Erlynne is discovered in Lord Darlington’s rooms) – then all the superficial cynicism and drawing room banter fall away and the play turns into a Victorian melodrama. Under the superficial Wildean sheen is a total acceptance of Victorian values: woman alone in man’s apartments = unacceptable scandal and social ostracism. Wilde played with Victorian conventions but didn’t shift them in the slightest.

Success

Lady Windermere’s Fan was an immediate success. It is estimated to have earned Wilde £11,000, a huge sum in those days. It is packed with bon mots and witty paradoxes although these are not, as I’ve indicated, as fully integrated into the flow of the play as in the later works.

Oh, nowadays so many conceited people go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad.

You look on me as being behind the age.—Well, I am! I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.  People are either charming or tedious.  I take the side of the charming

I can resist everything except temptation.

LADY WINDERMERE: Why do you talk so trivially about life, then?
LORD DARLINGTON: Because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

LADY WINDEREMERE: Are all men bad?
DUCHESS OF BERWICK: Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.

DUMBY: I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly; but I don’t see any chance of it just at present.

There is a great deal of good in Lord Augustus. Fortunately it is all on the surface. Just where good qualities should be.

CECIL GRAHAM: My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people’s.

CECIL GRAHAM: Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.

LORD DARLINGTON: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

DUMBY: In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.

CECIL GRAHAM: What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

DUMBY: Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Oscar’s speech

At the end of the first night there were the usual calls of ‘author! author!’ and Wilde appeared in front of the curtains where he made what you imagine was a carefully prepared speech designed to ram home his concepts of artifice and irony:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen. I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.’

It was a high display of the ironically egotistical and counter-intuitive approach to the social niceties which he deployed across all his mature works, attributing it to characters in his novel, essays, the other plays and even in his wonderful fairy stories (for example, the comically inflated egotism of the Remarkable Rocket). But it alienated far more than it amused, and the number of the alienated and repelled grew steadily as Wilde’s publications proliferated and his profile rose and rose through the first half of the 1890s.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 9, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 9, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/09/lady-windermeres-fan-oscar-wilde/

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (1942)

It sums itself up as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. (p.7)

This volume consists of the long (100-page) essay about suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, which argues against despair and in favour of life – accompanied by five much shorter essays each exemplifying Camus’s healthy lust for living.

It’s worth remembering how young Camus was when he wrote these texts. Born in November 1913, he was just 23 when he wrote Summer in Algiers, 26 when France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the year he wrote The Stop in Oran, and so on. A young man just beginning a career in writing and still very much entranced by the pleasures of the flesh, sunbathing, swimming, eyeing up beautiful women (a constant theme in his works).

The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus’s preface sums it up. Written in 1940, in the ruins of the defeat of France, the text affirms that even in a Godless universe and a world awash with nihilism, there remain the means to defy and surmount that nihilism. If life is meaningless, the teenager is tempted ask, what on earth is the point of going on living? Why not commit suicide? That is the subject of the essay: it is an essay about suicide – about confronting suicide as the apparently ‘logical’ consequence of realising that we live in an Absurd world.

Camus’s answer is, that we shouldn’t commit suicide because it is more human and more noble and more in tune with a tragic universe – to rebel, to revolt against this fate. To face down the obvious absurdity of human existence and to enjoy the wild beauty of the world while we can.

Revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. (p.54)

Essayist not philosopher

Camus takes quite a long time to finally getting round to saying this. In reading Camus I am influenced by the comment of Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1945 interview where he pointed out that Camus is not an existentialist, and not a philosopher – he is much more a descendant of France’s 17th century moralists. He is a moralist, an essayist (as the essays later in this volume testify) and, unlike the philosopher, the essayist isn’t under any compulsion to produce a coherent sequence of argument. He can be quite content with an entertaining flow of ideas.

Camus certainly plays with philosophical ideas and references a bunch of big philosophical names – early on there’s half a paragraph each about Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger and Husserl – but this very brevity shows that he picks and chooses quotes to suit him, rather like Hazlitt or any of the impressionist Victorian essayists yanking in flowery quotes here or there to support their flow – and in order to create a rather meandering flow rather than a logical sequence of argument.

Camus himself explains that he is not ‘examining’ the philosophy of a Heidegger or Jaspers – he is ‘borrowing a theme’ (p.40), he is making ‘a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd’ (p.20). He is not addressing their philosophical arguments – he is bringing out their common ‘climate’.

Thus Camus is much more about impressionistic psychology than repeatable arguments, a point he makes repeatedly himself:

The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt…

If it would be presumptuous to try to deal with their philosophies, it is possible and sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is common to them…

Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted the absurd climate…

Never, perhaps, have minds been so different. And yet we recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such dissimilar zones of knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same way. It is evident that the thinkers we have just recalled have a common climate. To say that that climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay…

Climate. Zone. Landscape. Stifling sky. This is not an argument – it is impressionistic prose poetry.

This hell of the present is his [the Absurd Man’s] Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man’ s heart. (p.52)

This poetic meandering results in the sometimes obscure nature of the text. Camus has a reputation for being clear and lucid, but this book is often surprisingly turgid and difficult to understand.

If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. (p.23)

I understand what he’s saying: if any of us could discover a really unified theory underlying the world of phenomena how happy we, and mankind, would be. But you can see how this is not anything like philosophy: it is more a description of what philosophy feels like.

When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims: “This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can any longer become an object for me,” he is evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. (p.16)

Most of the book is like this. It is not a continuous philosophical argument, it is a series of psychological insights. He uses the Jaspers quote to create a poetic scenario using (aptly for the man of Africa) the image of a desert, and going on to describe how we ‘must’ stay out there, in the waterless desert of absurd knowledge, in order to study its peculiar features. (Camus uses the metaphor of the desert of human thought seven times in the book – but I don’t find human thought a desert; I find it a bounteous and infinite garden.)

When he says the thinking mind is ‘an inhuman show’ in which a dialogue takes place, you realise this is philosophy envisioned as theatre and from this point I became alert to the other metaphors of theatre and actors scattered through the text. Camus was, after all, himself a successful playwright and a section of the essay is titled Drama.

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter – these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable. (p.32)

By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the traveler. (p.75)

It is a vision obscured, rather than clarified, by the author’s habit of imposing histrionic metaphors wherever they’ll fit. Absurdity, hope and death in the final sentence have specific meanings: absurdity is the lucid knowledge of the pointlessness of existence i.e the absence of any God or external values; hope is the word he gives to the thousand and one ways people turn away from and deny the reality of life, hoping for a God or a political party or a cause or something to transform the absurdity of the world; and death is the resort some people take from absurd knowledge, either getting themselves killed for a cause or doing away with themselves.

This tripartite categorisation does make a sort of sense. What makes a lot less sense is to talk about how ‘tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show’ or ‘the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance’.

There is generally a discernible flow to the argument, but Camus’s writerly fondness for metaphors, similes, paradox, abrupt reversals and the counter-intuitive too often obscures rather than clarifies his meaning. This is what I mean when I say that he is not a lucid writer. He uses the word ‘lucid’ no fewer than 43 times in the text, and the continual chiming of this word may begin to unconsciously make you think he is lucid. But he isn’t. Sometimes his style descends into almost pure poetry, emotive, descriptive, incantatory.

‘Prayer,’ says Alain, ‘is when night descends over thought. ‘But the mind must meet the night,’ reply the mystics and the existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and through the mere will of man – dark, impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which remains lucid -polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the intelligence. (p.62)

Here is no argument, just rhetoric, poetry, a particular type of melodramatic and harrowing poetry. Some of it teeters on gibberish.

Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the
beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it. (p.18)

‘The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.‘

Every time I reread this sentence, it moves further away from me. Even when I think I understand it, it doesn’t really contribute to any logical argument – it is designed to create a similar climate or attitude in the mind of the reader. It is, thus, a form of attitudinising i.e. creating a mood through poetic means – for example, the way the ‘implacable visage’ is a melodramatic way of describing the Absurd, which is itself a melodramatic concept.

The text is designed to convert you to its histrionic (and theatrical) worldview. It is a pose. Every page is made up of this often hard-to-follow attitudinising.

It is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least for a time. From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has disappeared. This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its uselessness becomes evident. (p.21)

‘Under the fatal lighting of that destiny…’

The cumulative effect is to make you stop trying to elucidate what too often turn out to be spurious meanings.

Men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. (p.68)

Even before I begin to make the effort to decode what he’s saying, I know in advance it will not be worth the effort. Trying to understand a book about quantum physics or about evolutionary cladistics or memorising the different Chinese dynasties – that’s the kind of thing that’s worth making an effort for, because the knowledge is real and will last. But trying to decide whether this is a universe where ‘kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage’ strikes me as being a waste of time.

In the rebel’s universe, death exalts injustice. It is the supreme abuse. (p.85)

What? Here he is describing music.

That game the mind plays with itself according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman universe. (p.91)

An impressive display of rhetorical fireworks. But useful? Applicable? Enlightening? Memorable?

Quotable quotes

All this, the emphasis on rhetoric over logic, helps explain why it is much easier to quote Camus’s many catchy formulations in isolation than it is to remember any kind of reasoned argument.

An act like this [suicide] is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. (p.12)

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. (p.12)

Looked at from one point of view, the text is a kind of impenetrably turgid grey sea from which emerge occasional shiny wave crests, glinting in the sunlight.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. (p.13)

It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. (p.16)

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. (p.20)

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says. (p.80)

Seen this way, Camus certainly does fit Sartre’s description of a traditional moralist, whose text is just the glue which joins together the periodic sententiae or moral statements about life, these jewels being meant to be taken away and meditated on.

To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason. (p.38)

Great t-shirt material.

The Absurd

A bit like Sartre circling round and round his central concept of ‘freedom’, Camus circles round and round his central concept of the Absurd. The word occurs 316 times in the text, again and again on every page.

Put simply, the absurd is the mismatch between man’s deep need for a meaning/purpose/rational order in the world, and the world’s all-too-obvious lack of any meaning/purpose or order – the world’s complete indifference to human wishes. Again and again Camus defines and redefines and approaches and reapproaches and formulates and poeticises the same fundamental idea.

  • At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. (p.17)
  • That denseness and strangeness of the world is the absurd. (p.20)
  • The revolt of the flesh is the absurd. (p.20)
  • This discomfort in the face of man’ s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea’, as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd. (p.21)
  • What is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. (p.27)
  • The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (p.32)
  • The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. (p.33)
  • The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together. (p.34)
  • The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. (p.49)
  • [The absurd is] that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. (p.50)
  • [The absurd is] my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle (p.51)

The basic idea is disarmingly simple. It is the way he repeats it with infinite variations, under the lights of numerous metaphors and similes, included in sentences which evoke emotional, intellectual and existential extremity, suffering, endurance, and so on, which make it more a poetics of living than philosophy.

The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives. (p.65)

I’m not sure how you’d measure this but it seemed to me that, as the book progresses, the references to absurdity become steadily vaguer and more poetical and meaningless.

  • Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. (p.85)
  • All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. (p.87)
  • For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. (p.87)
  • In the time of the absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. (p.88)
  • The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. (p.90)
  • The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man. (p.94)

This impressionistic approach, this lack of a coherent logic, this mosaic of quotes from Great Thinkers or abstruse analyses of Great Writers, grandiose examinations of the Stage or the mentality of The Conqueror, interspersed with descriptions of everyday life – how, for example, a sense of the futility of life hits you as you look in the mirror to shave – this may account for Camus’s wider popularity than Sartre’s. His very patchiness, the way he’s less logical and consistent, more given to sudden flashes of insight which can be put on a t-shirt.

Thus even if a lot of Sisyphus is turgid and obscure, with much of it showing off or perverse paradox-making for its own sake, there are many other bits which suddenly leap out with great clarity and make you think ‘Yes’.

Sisyphus

It takes Camus a long time to get to the punchline which is that we must face the absurdity of the world and overcome it. We must be like Sisyphus who, in the Greek myth is being punished in hell by being made to roll a rock to the top of the mountain only for it to be dashed to the bottom again. Over and again.

That is how we must live. But we must do it with a smiling heart, happy in the knowledge that we do it because we will it. We want to live.

Teenage heroism

And it is not irrelevant to the book’s popularity, or the popularity of watered-down ‘existentialism’ that it helped promote, that throughout the book the person who holds this notion of the absurd, who doesn’t give in to false consolations or to the siren call of suicide, who faces the meaningless world without flinching – is considered a hero.

It is a heroic pose to be one man undaunted against an uncaring universe, walking a ‘difficult path’.

There is a profoundly adolescent appeal not only in the fascination with suicide but in the rather laughable descriptions of the bold, brave heroism required to outface the absurd, ‘fearlessly’ and stoically living with his bleak knowledge. Refusing consolation and false comfort, committing oneself to live under ‘this stifling sky’ in these ‘waterless deserts’, living a life of ‘virile silence’ and ‘solitary courage’. Sounds like a film noir hero, sounds like Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. Down these mean streets the ‘absurd man’ must go because, after all –

  • Sisyphus is the absurd hero

The essay is divided into three parts, the second of which is titled The Absurd Man. It’s heroic posturing is quite funny if read through the eyes of Tony Hancock or Sid James.

  • Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man. (p.69)
  • There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. (p.81)
  • There is thus a metaphysical honour in enduring the world’s absurdity. (p.86)

Around page 70, while taking a break on the internet, I stumbled over several comic strips devoted to taking the mickey out of Camus and Sartre. From that point onwards found it hard to keep a straight face while reading it. This is all so old, so 80-years-old, so much another time. It was passé in the 1960s, now it is ancient history. Old enough to have been satirised and parodied for generations.

Existential Comics – Camus

There is also something specifically comical in the way a writer decides, at the summary of his masterwork about the meaning of life in a godless universe and so on, that the highest possible calling for the Absurd Man is to be… a writer! The section titled Absurd Creation is not much about music or art, but mostly about other writers. It is rather bathetic that a writer decides,after much cogitation, that being a writer is the pinnacle of the kind of lucid courage required to face The Absurd!

Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. (p.104)

So – as the Existentialist Comic puts it – these bookish guys sitting around in cafés and apartments writing novels, plays and essays all agree that the true Resistance to the Nazis and the true heroes of their time must, logically, according to their ‘lucid’ and ‘precise’ philosophy — be bookish guys sitting around in cafés and apartments writing novels, plays and essays.

Guys just like them, who can therefore congratulate each other on their ‘self-mastery’, their ‘revolt’, their  dignity and their strength. How to be a Hemingway hero without even stubbing out your Gauloise!

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his
naked reality. (p.104)

‘Ordeal’. ‘Overcoming his phantoms.’ Outfacing ‘naked reality’. Braving the deserts of ‘lucid thought’. Mingling ‘intelligence and passion’. Summoning ‘diligence, doggedness and lucidity’ (p.106). Facing up to this ‘difficult wisdom’ (p.106). ‘Unceasing struggle’.

Wow. Never before or since has sitting at a typewriter smoking a fag been so heroic!

Brief discussion

When I was an over-intellectual 17 year-old these thoughts and Camus’ attitude helped to reassure me and calm me down from my own nihilistic panic. My family didn’t understand me, my friendships were superficial, I had no job, no wife, no children and little experience of the real world of work and effort. Looking back I can see why I was subject to panic attacks.

But now I’m a fifty-year-old family man with deep commitments, children to care for, bills to be paid and meals to be cooked – I find it impossible to recapture the mood of teenage hysteria which permeates all Camus’s books.

I go to the gym and watch, on the bank of TV screens, pop videos showing half-naked young men and women partying in the city or frisking on beaches, under waterfalls, in tropical islands around the world. My kids jet off to exotic destinations I could only dream of back in the 1970s. They text, Instagram and Facebook with friends in America, Spain, the Middle East, even China. The world just no longer is the limited world of one-town boredom and dull routine that Camus describes. Rather than a crushed, defeated, broken, humiliated culture as was the Nazi world of 1940 or the post-war ruins of the 1940s – my kids live in a vibrant, shiny world alive with music, movies, clothes, festivals, travel round the world and futuristic technology: they think life is great.

Looking back, Camus’s writings are really a kind of prose poetry which repeats pretty much the same idea from a thousand angles, expressed in countless metaphors and images, laced with wit and paradox in the typical French tradition, but essentially static.

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations. (p.25)

The ‘appetite for conquest’, the ‘poisoned peace’, ‘fatal renunciations’?

You either enjoy this kind of poetry or you don’t. I can feel my way into it as I feel my way into the harsh world of the Icelandic sagas or the sweet humour of Chaucer’s poetry or the gargoyle world of early Dickens or the bumptious jingoism of Kipling. Those writers, also, have their truths and their insights, create internally consistent imaginative universes, generate quotable quotes which I may or may not apply to myself or others or the world in general.

But whereas I carry Chaucer and Kipling out into the world, remembering their best lines and beauty to enrich and colour my life, when I closed The Myth of Sisyphus I could remember almost nothing of it. — Some people find life absurd and it drives a tiny minority to suicide but it’s best, on balance, to face up to the meaninglessness of a godless universe and to create your own values and purpose within it.

The absurd man catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.

Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. (p.61)

The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man. (p.62)

OK. I get it. Most people nowadays do that anyway, and don’t need a laboriously over-written, obscure and attitudinising text to help them.

Why is absurdity negative?

My son’s just got an ‘A’ in his Philosophy A-level. He didn’t study Camus (who is, after all, not a philosopher) though he did spend a lot of time on Martin Heidegger, the grand-daddy of 20th century existentialists.

I explained Camus’s notion of the Absurd to him i.e. the mismatch between the human wish (it’s always translated as nostalgia; maybe it means ‘longing’ as well) for order and meaning in the world and the lack of any such order – and the way it is always presented by Camus as a challenge, a trial, an ordeal, a desert under a hostile sky that only the strongest can face up to and confront, and my son said – ‘Why?’

He understood the idea of the mismatch, he got the absurdity of looking for meaning in a ‘godless universe’. OK. But… why does it have to be negative? Why does this mismatch have to have a value? Why can’t it just be… a mismatch, and up to each of us to make of it what we will, to give it a value? Where does all the horror and anguish come from? The absurd can be funny. In fact all of us know that absurdity often is funny in everyday life. The horror and the anguish which Camus describes aren’t logically entailed in the concept of a mismatch. They are a value imposed on the situation.

My son suggests that the entire climate, to use Camus’s word, of Sartrean existentialism and Camusian Absurdity, the rhetoric of anguish and despair and futility (in Sartre) and being an alien, an outsider in arid deserts under a stricken sky (in Camus) reflects the grim situation of 1930s and 40s France – the political chaos of the 1930s, the crushing humiliation of defeat by the Nazis in 1940, and the even worse humiliation of liberation by the hated Anglo-Saxons in 1944.

Very few people at the time followed the ‘logic’ of the existentialists’ arguments (where a ‘logic’ could be discerned) but everyone grasped the way their negativity crystallised into words and ideas the vast, continent-wide, wartime destruction and the collapse of all established social values, the loss of so many friends and family, hecatombs of corpses, which really did spread an atmosphere of anguish and despair through an entire generation.

There was no existentialism in Britain because we never underwent this national humiliation and collapse of values.

The last few pages of the book describe the Greek myth of Sisyphus and the text gives way to an orgy of rhetoric and poetic prose. Sisyphus is condemned in Hades to roll his rock up a hill and then watch it be tumbled back to the bottom, and forced to go back down and start rolling it up again – for all eternity. And yet Camus sees him as a positive figure, the epitome of the Absurd Man who sees the futility of life but sets himself to live it, regardless. All this is expressed with rhetoric not reason.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. (p.110)

In its way, and taking into account its very different context, this stirring rhetoric is as full of moral uplift as a speech by Churchill.

Credit

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was published in France in 1942. This translation by Justin O’Brien was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1955, and as a Penguin paperback in 1975. All quotes & references are to the Penguin paperback edition (which I bought in 1977 for 75p).

Related links

Reviews of other Camus books

Reviews of other Camus books

Reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Battle of France

Algerian war of independence

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 13, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Essays, France, French literature, Philosophy
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 13, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/the-myth-of-sisyphus-albert-camus/