The man waiting in the rain does not know for a moment his names and titles, which are not few. He appears on his baptismal certificate as Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty, two heroes of Irish mythology and a direct bridge to Annals of the Four Mastersthe famous chronicle of Ireland compiled in the seventeenth century; In life – and needless to say, in his work – he is simply Oscar Wilde; At the end of his existence, already in exile, he would use the alias Sebastian Melmoth in his honour. Melmoth the WandererFrom his great uncle, Charles Robert Maturin. But at the moment no one knows his identity; He’s just a man waiting on the central platform at Clapham Junction (London) on November 13, 1895, and passers-by laugh at him as they would at anyone in his circumstances, including the shackles and prisoner’s clothes.
After a few minutes the situation changes. Someone has the kindness to give people their names, and naturally, the laughter immediately turns into sarcasm. “Of all possible things, I was the strangest,” he declared deep When remembering what happened; It pains him more than the indignities he saw and suffered in Wandsworth Prison (see his letter to Daily Chronicle (March 23, 1898) and more of what he will experience at the end of that journey, which will lead to the emergence of one of his great poetic works, Reading ghoul song; It hurts him so much that it breaks his spirit, because he can’t believe that after everything he’s done he’s getting this reward. “we zannis From sadness – he writes -. “We are clowns with broken hearts.” For a year, he cries “every day at the same time”; Then he begins to feel sorry for the mob who laughed more at him than at himself, and he says very romantically: “For those who have not imagination enough to penetrate the mere appearance of things and pity, what pity must be shown to them but the pity of contempt?”
A few years ago, in The human spirit under socialismWilde wrote that all authority decays, and that the only good thing about it is that sometimes, when its character is particularly “violent, rude, and cruel,” it can create or contribute to creating “a spirit of rebellion and individualism which puts an end” to said authority. Of course, he was unlikely to remember that on that station’s platform, considering that what was before him was not the intelligence of our species, but one of its worst aspects: the collectivism of slaves, the privileged child of “the ideas of the ruling class” (German ideology(of Marx and Engels), which are always the “mainstream ideas”, of course; But there he was, waiting for the train that would take him to another cell, and without knowing it adding another five years and seventeen days to the date by which this Sunday should kindle the “spirit of rebellion” to which he was referring. After all, it has been one hundred and twenty-five years since his death, and if it is true that “names are everything” – Lord Henry’s phrase in… The Picture of Dorian Gray– What can we say about the names that still free us from the grave?
If anyone has any doubt about this, I will limit myself to remembering seven of his plays, because he did not have the opportunity to finish the other two (Florence Tragedy and Holy concubinewhich are however easy to locate): Vera or nihilists, Duchess of Padua, He admires Lady Windermere, An insignificant woman (It reads: “Everyone is born a king, and almost everyone dies in exile.”), Salome, The perfect husband and The importance of being called Ernesto. The world had to go badly for all of them, or at least some of them, not to be recognized, and even if they were, even the most ignorant people would surely know. Canterville Ghost, The happy prince, The Sphinx without a secret, Retract the lies Or that “wonderful painting” we mentioned earlier The Picture of Dorian Grayto use HP Lovecraft’s expression. They were liberated in their time, they liberate today, and they will liberate tomorrow as long as the reader or audience remains interested in being their necessary counterpart, because it is clear that “there is only art by and for others,” as Jean-Paul Sartre says in What is literature? But everything has a price, and the price some authors pay goes beyond their shadow.
You may know that during Oscar Wilde’s stay in Reading, his mother asked the British authorities to allow him to go to see her; She was dying, and Jane Francesca Agnes—the Irish poet, writer, and translator—wanted to see her son one last time. Naturally, the British authorities considered that neither she nor he deserved it, and because they were not happy with such a brutal act, they allowed her to end up being buried without a bad headstone indicating her name. Not even two months had passed since the sight of Wilde on Clapham Junction Pier, and it could not be denied that his life was like his old home in Tait Street, sinking into darkness. Freedom was as dear to him as it was to his family, and some say he never recovered. For my part, the only thing I believe is that he was very serious when he confessed to his friend Anne de Bremont: “My work is finished, and when I die, this work will begin to live.” Fortunately, literature is fairer than the law.