The Consolations of Writing by Zim Rivkah

Author:Zim, Rivkah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

“IT IS BY UTTERANCE THAT WE LIVE”

Like Bunyan’s persona in Grace Abounding, Wilde’s authorial persona recollected the past, mentally circling (again and again) his conflicts with the adversary, in order to reinvent the past, accommodate himself to its image, and finally inscribe that image in a new form. Few examples of prison literature in this self-memorializing mode show such marked separation of authorial from narrative personae as Bunyan’s and Wilde’s. In each case the prison experience was a catalyst for recalling and writing about events that had culminated in imprisonment. However, the crisis in Bunyan’s story arose earlier in his life, with the circumstances of his imprisonment providing both the incentive and the opportunity to describe and to recover its significance. Thus, whereas Bunyan’s prison writing confirms (and authorizes) his new self-awareness as testimony of the gift of divine grace, Wilde’s prison experience has a different relationship to his writing. Bunyan could expect his first readers to admire his sacrifices, since they testified to conflict between eternal forces of good and evil that had already been resolved in his case. In Bunyan’s Prison Meditations, prison is sweet because the prisoner is at peace with his conscience and his God. However, Wilde’s narrative is of events and emotions that led to what was seen by himself and others as a spectacular fall from moral and social grace. Thus, at the time, his inner turmoil arising from a consciousness of personal weakness in a sordid conflict of interests with another human being could only be considered pitiful. Yet, in relation to contemporary ideas and practices of penal servitude, Wilde’s statements from within the confines of a “penitentiary,” that his sufferings as a prisoner among prisoners had precipitated new self-knowledge and spiritual reformation, were as politically “correct” for his own time as Bunyan’s different statements, confirming his sense of God’s grace abounding, were for his first readers. Haunting memories make a virtue of necessity:

For me the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth, and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead. For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy. (pp. 101–2)

Nevertheless, when confession inscribed that self-knowledge which period convention required from the testimony of a penitent, imagination could displace sorrows and transform disgrace abounding into a famous literary monument. When Robert Ross finally published his edition of Wilde’s prison writing, as De Profundis in 1905, he drastically cut down the original manuscript by eliminating any personal matter that might provoke a new libel case. By the same means, he hoped that the text would “give many readers a different impression of the witty and delightful writer,” who knew himself to have been ruined by “the effect of social débâcle and imprisonment” (p. 312).56 Wilde’s claim that “prison life makes one see people and things as they really are” provided him with the opportunity to reform and change his own

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