The only two things that can induce awe are nature and art, and only one of those can kill you. That one might make their life into art, expressing awe and other aesthetic emotions through an individual person, is a compelling possibility; the works of Oscar Wilde present many avenues, frameworks, and techniques that one might use to bridge the gap between imagination and our lives, but while Wilde presents life as a narrative art, I find the art of the self to better resemble the art of sculpture. This is a key differentiation because while life is far too chaotic for an individual to take full narrative authorship over it, the carving of a self into someone who represents certain ideas or motifs structurally reflects the task of self-development. The sculptor of a self takes on the role of Prometheus and of clay, and the fire of the ideal both lights and energizes the process.
There is a difference between something being tragic and something being a tragedy. Tragedies are a form of narrative with specific rules and structures; Aristotle tells us that they should involve a change in fortune for a character from good to bad as a result of some “great error or frailty” (Aristotle, 1907, sect. XIII). Central to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy was that this error or frailty must be the fault of the main character, rather than the result of another’s mistake or random happenstance (Lear, 1992, p. 323). The suffix -ic (“having some characteristics of” (Sjoerdsma, 2008)) used to modify the word tragedy to tragic can be used to describe sad events, natural disasters, losing one’s keys, or something resembling the tone or structure of a tragedy without fully matching it.
The tragedy/tragic divide is an example of a roadblock to accepting the notion that life can be a narrative art. While it seems clear that someone’s life can be tragic, a life fitting the strict narrative structure of a tragedy without one having to ignore significant portions of a particular life may be impossible. For example, Aristotle implies that a tragedy should not have a “multiplicity of plots” (Aristotle, 1907, sect. XVIII), whereas in life the storylines seem endless as chains of events come in and out of our attention; fitting a life into a singular plotline would require one to ignore too much of the life itself. This is also the case for other narrative forms, such as the hero’s journey, where the main character in a story is described as delving deeply into a singular unknown on a quest (Hartman & Zimberoff, 2009). Empirical psychology tells us that the brain evolved explicitly to deal with the unknown, and that these “delves” occur multiple times in a day as the brain faces prediction problems (Hughes, et al., 2014). One might project a hero’s journey onto leaving a hometown for college, the first few years of marriage, or a road trip to New York, but a singular hero’s journey cannot fit onto a whole life without ignoring important aspects of that life. As will be evidenced later, Wilde believed that art should be unified in idea and form; cutting out major portions of a life fails that criterion.
Because Wilde believed that the creation of art is the filling of form with content (Wilde, 1989, p. 1027), the fact that narrative forms may be incompatible with a life makes it difficult to accept the life as art notion. However, Wilde so well motivates the problem he is attempting to solve that it is tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt. His poem, “The Burden of Itys,” describes a student at Oxford, sitting near the banks of the Thames. As he ponders his surroundings his mind wonders as he compares his surroundings to Greek myth and Catholic imagery, eventually realizing that his thoughts are directionless and formed entirely by things he has been taught by others:
“’Tis I, ‘tis I, whose soul is as the reed
Which has no message of its own to play,
So pipes another’s bidding, it is I,
Drifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.”
(Wilde, 1989, p. 744)
In De Profundis Wilde presents us with a choice on this matter: either we can remain chained to the burden of being the creation of others, or we can forge our own path and create ourselves; he says it is rare for someone to manage this (Wilde, 1989, p. 926), but describes human beings as becoming the “realization of an ideal” (Wilde, 1989, p. 928) as a way to do so. In the same passage he compares this realization to the conversion of ideas into images during the process of art creation. If one is uncomfortable with being the product of their social environment, and Wilde’s offer of self-creation is viable, then pursuing Wilde’s method may be worthwhile. However, it is key to notice that the problem, as presented in ”The Burden of Itys,” is not that one’s life is the result of our surroundings, but that our characteristics are the result of our surroundings.
Considering that life is supposedly a “supreme” art (Wilde, 1989, p. 1016), it is strange that it is not automatically obvious which sorts of forms are compatible with human life. Poetry has haiku, epic, and limerick; film has action, horror, and B-movies; dance has religious, social, and ballet. Form, in this context, is an “outline or container” held together by a “unifying essence” (Loesberg, 2015, p. 10). There are many forms of art which are not life but which are about lives. Biographies give form to lives through structured descriptions of them. Poetry about a romantic partner takes a small piece of one’s experience of them and contains it in art. Sculptures and portraits have a special power not to depict or idealize a life, but to depict or idealize a self.
I once visited the Delphi Archaeological Museum, my spouse and I were to be married in Greece and we visited Delphi on our way to the venue. While browsing the displays we came into a room with several statues that had been brought in from the Louvre; my wife asked our guide a few questions and I wondered into a corner which was going to be ignored by the tour. In front of me was an ancient statue of Antinous, the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was deified by the Caesar after Antinous’s tragic and untimely death. Antinous was depicted as Osiris, the murdered god whose corpse was scattered in the same river in which Antinous drowned. I found myself emotionally overwhelmed in the moment, struck not by the love Hadrian had for the narrative life events Antonous experienced, but for the love Hadrian had for Antonius as a person. Wilde must have been similarly struck given that he mentions or alludes to Hadrian’s love for Antinous multiple times in his fiction and poetry (Wilde, 1989, p. 24; 225; 834).
To understand why this resonated and to figure out how to articulate an artistic form compatible with the self, it will be helpful to break down what Wilde stated about the forms which are helpful or problematic in the creation of art. Realistic forms, devised from the examination of day-to-day life, were anathema to Wilde’s vision for art (Wilde, 1989, pp. 972; 978-979; 991). Wilde celebrated ambition in form to the point where if the ideal which unifies a form is ever fully realized, the form is dead and is at best an avenue for critique (Wilde, 1989, p. 1031). Inversely, the forms that shape art or self should be larger-than-life, imaginative, and just out of our grasp, just like Antinous qua Osiris.
The problem with life as a narrative art is that we are not the authors of our own lives. Fate, entropy, the law, etc., take on that role as much or more as our own wills. I have often found myself engrossed in a tragic or dramatic moment in my life, fully committed to the feeling, only for something ridiculous and comedic to occur and ruin my brooding. This is in contrast with how sculpting works as a metaphor for making the self into art. The transforming of self into art is a slow, iterative, process; while both sculpture and portraiture are both able to describe a similar process for self-as-art, the fact that sculptors work with hard materials that are much more difficult to shape better reflects the tough task of altering the self. This act of sculpting might be a mundane reflection of nature, which Wilde warns against, or it may be infused with ideas worthy of the artistic task. When seeing Antinous, it was not the story of his life that struck me, but the obvious impact that his personality had on Hadrian; the sculptures of Antinous qua Osiris were merely an artistic expression of how Antinous had already shaped himself.
An example of a unifying idea in a formal sculpture which aligns with Wilde’s ambitious take on form is that of the mythic archetype. Archetypes are high-level concepts of human beings which are symbolically charged, have a set of traits associated with them, and which can be exemplified by mythic or fictional characters who embody the archetype, or humans who attempt to come close to it. For example, the archetype of WARRIOR-KING is an individual who exudes power and authority, has a weapon given to them from the gods, spouts laconic wisdom, and is exemplified by deities like Zeus or Thor, or historical figures like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. These humans can be judged by how they express the archetype which best describes their selves, both in terms of where they embody the ideal and where they fail; Wilde himself clearly wanted to be judged through the archetype of the TRAGIC HERO, and I suggest we honor him by examining his successes and failures through that lens.
Transitioning to the notion of self-sculpture from life-narrative can better solve the problem presented in “The Burden of Itys.” If the life-narrative were the central artistic problem to solve, nothing occurring within the poem would necessarily be an issue. The young man, lost in a sea of conformity, would simply be an event in the central plot. The poem does not complain that the main character does not have narrative momentum, but that his character is not crafted by himself. To fix this is not to project a structure onto one’s life, but to grab a chisel and make active decisions about how to shape one’s character.
By conceptualizing our appearance and character through the lens of sculpture, the individual is not asked to plot the day-to-day events of their life, but instead to become an artist of the self. Whereas life narratives try and falsely impose order onto the chaos of life, the shaping of the self is a task which reflects the truth of self-development. This self-development must then be framed by Wilde’s theory of art and beauty, pushing oneself towards wonderful and impossible ideals; trying to lose a few pounds might is the job of a self-sculptor who lacks the ambition of a great artist, but the attempt to embody the TRAGIC HERO by Wilde is a fantastic expression of such a project. In this task of self-creation, the moment of success is clear: to shape oneself to the point where one can look in the mirror and have an awe-filled experience as striking as looking into the eyes of Antinous one afternoon in Delphi, right at the GOD OF FERTILITY AND DEATH.
References
Aristotle. (1907). Poetics (4th ed.). (S. H. Butcher, Ed.) London: Macmillan and Co. Limited.
Hartman, D., & Zimberoff, D. (2009). The Hero’s Journey of Self-transformation: Models of Higher Development from Mythology. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 12(2): 3- 93.
Hughes, C. M., Baber, C., Bienkiewicz, M., Worthington, A., Hazell, A., & Hermsdörfer, J. (2014). The application of SHERPA (Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach) in the development of compensatory cognitive rehabilitation strategies for stroke patients with left and right brain damage. Ergonomics, 58(1): 75-95.
Lear, J. (1992). Katharsis. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (pp. 315-340). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Loesberg, J. (2015). Wildean Interpretation and Formalist Reading. Victorian Studies, 58(1): 9- 33.
Sjoerdsma, R. D. (2008). -Al, -ic, -ical. Journal of Singing, 64(3): 269-271.
Wilde, O. (1989). De Profundis. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 873-957). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). “The Burden of Itys.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 736-745). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). The Critic As Artist. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 1009-1059). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). The Decay of Lying. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 970-992). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). The Picture of Dorian Gray. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 17-167). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). “The Sphinx.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 833-842). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilde, O. (1989). The Young King. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 224-233). New York: HarperCollins.
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