Abstract
Wilde may have projected the impression of supreme confidence, but he also knew that some of his epigrams did not work. Underneath his carefully studied nonchalance, he was an exceptionally hardworking writer who often spent hours polishing a line of his prose or a verse of his poetry. “‘I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning,’” he reportedly complained to his friend and biographer Robert Sherard, “‘and took out a comma.’ ‘And in the afternoon?’ ‘In the afternoon? Well, I put it back again.’”1 He approached his epigrams in the same way: a number of them have been revised multiple times, sometimes so radically that their implied meaning changed entirely. While Wilde’s recycling of epigrams has occasionally been interpreted as a sign of laziness,2 it at the same time provides us with a very clear picture of the evolution of his technique. Wilde’s famous notebooks, for instance, not only enable us to trace the genesis of individual epigrams but are also a good indication of the efforts that went into producing the seemingly effortless Wildean wit.3 A closer look at a few of the “Phrases and Philosophies” that have undergone such a transformation is, in this sense, an indispensable component of a thorough study of the subject.
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Notes
Compare Josephine M. Guy, “Self-Plagiarism, Creativity and Craftsmanship in Oscar Wilde,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 41, no. 1 (1998): 8.
For a detailed account of this, see Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand’s edition of Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Sandra Siegel, “Wilde’s Use and Abuse of Aphorisms,” Newsletter of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 12, no. 1 (1986): 17.
Simon Joyce, “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties,” English Literary History 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 501.
Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs for the Use of Children (London: John Van Voorst, 1848), 86.
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Arkana, 1989), 94.
For instance, in Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humour, Attardo’s Linguistic Theories of Humor, and John Allen Paulos’s Mathematics and Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans., intro., and annot. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image, 1960), 194.
John Ruskin, Lectures on Art (New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1891), 84.
Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London: A. and C. Black, 1896–97), 10:260.
Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 11.
Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans., intro., and annot. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 2:394.
Michael C. Corballis, Human Laterality (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 122.
See, for instance, Samuel Keyser, “Wallace Stevens: Form and Meaning in Four Poems,” in Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London: Methuen, 1981), 114.
Robert Smythe Hichens, The Green Carnation (New York: D. Appleton, 1894), 18.
Ines Detmers, “Oscar’s Fashion: Constructing a Rhetoric of Androgyny,” in The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years, ed. Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie A. Hibbard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 114.
See Colin Cruise, “Versions of the Annunciation: Wilde’s Aestheti-cism and the Message of Beauty,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 170.
Quoted in Nicholas Storey, A History of Men’s Fashion: What the Well Dressed Man is Wearing (Barnsley, UK: Remember When, 2008), 161.
Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (New York: Continuum, 2009), 19.
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© 2015 Jure Gantar
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Gantar, J. (2015). Comma in the Afternoon. In: The Evolution of Wilde’s Wit. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483553_3
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