"Rome fell for other, less interesting reasons."

These are several pages from my senior essay, excerpted for convenience. If you came here from this Pomocon post, you want the last three paragraphs ("Wilde's desire to read his own fate as tragic" and forward).

For Wilde, “what is dumb is dead.” Tragic circumstances become a proper tragedy only when they are expressed, and so the desire to put his tragedy into a narrative overwhelmed him. After all, it is remarkable that he would write a letter to Douglas in the first place, since Wilde seemed to believe, at least at the time De Profundis was written, that any further communication between them could only be poisonous. Still, Wilde felt compelled to make Douglas understand the gravity of what he had done, and the stubborn refusal of Lord Alfred Douglas to do so is an example of a larger problem: Wilde’s pain is essentially inexpressible to any man except himself. “The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God,” he writes, “but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher.”

Where Wilde finds Douglas unwilling and himself helpless, the figure of Christ provides him with an ideal narrator and an ideal audience. No human man could possibly have the experience, the compassion, and the artistic genius to express the pain that hard labor wreaked on a man of privilege and the humiliation that the philistine public heaped upon a man of genius. Christ, being divine, “took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece.” Christ is unique in this way, even among gods, and so Wilde must either give up the desire for his life to fit a grand and comprehensible genre or accept Christ as his “external mouthpiece.”

Ironically, Douglas was faced with a similar need for a better narrator than himself when he tried in later years to dispel the rumors of impropriety that surrounded his relationship with Wilde. He imagined that he could enlist medical evidence as proof that he had never engaged in sodomy: “If I had ever allowed anyone (either Wilde or any other single person) to treat me in that way, surely a medical examination would reveal the fact.” When the medical profession proved to have no such expertise, Douglas experienced for himself the futility of possessing a truth he could not tell convincingly.

Wilde’s desire to read his own fate as tragic rather than simply unfortunate is more than vanity and an affinity for aesthetics. The genre of tragedy, in his understanding, is transformative. To give continuity to a chronicle of misfortunes is to establish some connection between instances of wickedness and suffering, and between suffering and redemption. By placing sin and contrition within a single story, the two events are connected and the latter redeems the former. Wilde put it this way: “Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about this — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swineherding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.” It is not quite the sacrament of the Host, but this notion of redemption through tragedy (made possible by Christ’s narration) places Christ as the mediator between mankind and salvation, which is in its own way eucharistic.

In his earlier writing, Wilde had expressed skepticism that life’s tragedies could ever possess the transformative or even the descriptive significance of art’s tragedies:

The evil faces of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme civilization, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons.

Under the reasoning expressed here in Intentions, it is possible for an artist to create a symbolic representation of his age, as the sculptors who animated the busts of emperors with a spirit of decay did, but the symbol of an age does not necessarily give a master clue to its history. The vices of Tiberius express the spirit of a decadent empire, but ultimately Rome fell for other, less interesting reasons.

De Profundis suggests a reversal of this position. It mentions an instance when Alfred Douglas used an overly precious pseudonym to communicate with an imprisoned Wilde, and, according to Wilde, “your seemingly casual choice of a feigned name was, and will remain, symbolic. It reveals you.” Even non-artists have the ability to live with symbolic meaning: “I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life.” Belief in a meaningful connection between symbolism and reality, as well as the admission that such symbolism is within the reach of such ordinary men as might be found in Reading Prison, enabled Wilde to accept Christianity’s offer of a redemption through tragedy that he might earlier have thought impossible.