Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
Okay, as recently, I'm mopping up some titles from "To Read Short Fiction Lists", genre and lit, and as I'm in the W's....I had 3 pieces from Wilde on the list - I've previously read a *bit* of him (about 10 stories, mostly thanks to Dedalus Books Decadence series) but, for example, haven't tackled an obvious must-read like The Picture of Dorian Grey."Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is probably the most "Wildean" thing here, and in it one can see Wilde's black humor and some origins of a writer like Saki (in one direction) and P.G. Wodehouse (in another). British upper crust life had advanced to such a point, seemingly, that one could be terribly naughty by writing a deliberately lighthearted piece about cold-blooded attempted murder, poison and anarchist bombs. Shocking! That may sound like I'm being sarcastic but actually I'm not, it's just interesting to me how levels of privilege, culture, comfort and stability (timed historically differently, of course, across varied social and class strata) invariably give rise to an impulse like this, a turning inward, a jaundiced view of the status quo, satirically and cheekily expressed. So here we have a society party of humorous cartoons (lots of witty bon mots tossed around - "The world is a stage but the play is poorly cast.") where a nobleman (Lord Savile, natch) has his palm read and is told he will commit murder in the future. Being a good upstanding chap, and not wanting to ruin his intended nuptials, he sets about trying to figure out who the least important person is that he can murder in his social circle. Hilarity ensues as poison, bombs and drownings prove ineffective when chance steps in. Of course, part of the joke is that Savile never questions (and we should never expect him to question) the accuracy of such a prediction from a dubious source, because then the ultimate joke of basing your actions on dubious sources, and the empty trendiness of the moneyed classes (and possibly their coldness to human suffering) would be undone."The Star Child" is Wilde operating in his Fairy Tale Mode. In many ways it is a traditional fairy tale with an obvious moral - a poor family finds an abandoned baby and raises him to be a beautiful boy. But the boy is cruel, arrogant and hateful and despises the poverty around him, torturing small animals and displaying his ingratitude at every opportunity, so magically he is turned ugly and has to go forth in the world to learn humility - which he does, by trying to complete three impossible tasks, aided by animal servitors. The Wildean punch, when it comes, lies not so much in the classically-beautiful-but-cruel main character but instead in the short and oddly ominous last line of the piece, as if Wilde could not completely commit himself to the eternal awe and wonder of happily ever after."The Decay Of Lying" is an essay (presented as a dialogue) and, honestly, I'll probably need to give it another read and dissect it at my leisure at a later date because I was mostly in the wrong headspace when I read it. Essentially, it's Wilde's barbed answer to the rise of the Naturalist/Realist movement in literature (Zola, etc.), which eschewed imagination and flights of fancy for close observations of the real world and people. Wilde believes this idea is terrible and sketches out what he believes literature (and almost almost all art) should consist of, how it should proceed and what its goals should be. Sui generis, inventive and imaginative, essentially - "effective lying" is the ultimate creativity.Having recently codified my own approach to the arts (well, certainly literature) as that of a Generalist/Surveyist, I can't take an us/them, good/bad argument about literature *so* seriously. I find such screeds fascinating - not as an expression of "the truth" but as "one way of looking at things" (from a particular position, in a particular moment in time, given what has come before, what was happening then and what was to come) - even as my mind begins to undermine the argument (and, in case I haven't made my point, I'd have the same reaction to a po-faced essay about the obvious superiority of realism over imagination). These kind of essays/arguments *are* important - they *were* important that someone had them at various times and they *remain* important as records of thought processes as we try to move forward - except we don't seem to be moving forward very much and those records seem to be ignored, as we seem to JUST KEEP HAVING the same binary us/them, good/bad stupid/reductive arguments over and over again even centuries later (just recently, in my life in fact).I do believe the human mind is vast and can hold many ideas, some of them contradictory. I do not think there is only one way to "do art" or that the term "art" is pretentious, or that "entertainment" is below contempt for that matter, OR that a perfect blending of "art" and "entertainment" is the Ultimate Goal for THAT matter. I do think that different approaches yield different results and have different successes, achievements, failures and traps. This doesn't seem very hard for me at all and I wonder why people seem so driven into singular conceptions - perhaps it's the varied arrogance and insecurity underlying the desperately clung-to worldviews? So, for example, when I read this essay I find it fascinating - Wilde is witty (duh), charming, intelligent and erudite and his argument makes sense - until I remember that some realist novels have, in my life, packed just as much impact as the imaginative ones. I look at what he's saying and think "hmmm, interesting that the Decadents take *part* of his stance - invention and artificiality - and discard others - by focusing on the dregs and degradations of real life". I think of genre writers who bristle at being labelled escapist and regularly chalk up straight Lit as "boring" - thus placing them in Wilde's camp - yet Wilde would be appalled to find them worrying over research, realistic detail and promoting social causes and the underrepresented.But I'll have to reread it. There's a good argument to be made that Wilde is deliberately overstating his case so as to have a kind of unspoken criticisms of its excesses built right into the text. Still, lots of fun!
Wilde has such a gift with phrasing, I always think about how parallel he seems to me with Ryan Adams. So many accolades so early, then such a fever to tear him apart.Here's a few quotes:A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.Biography lends to death a new terror.Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.Genius is born--not paid.I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.I am not young enough to know everything.I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.Illusion is the first of all pleasures.It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
What do You think about Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde (2003)?
http://2aughlikecrazy.wordpress.com/2...When I first read this I wasn't necessarily a fan of Oscar Wilde. I was just curious about his work and I realized the easiest and fastest way to read it all was just to buy the book and call it a day.Overall a very interesting and relatively quick read. Interesting in the sense that you're getting everything. You get background history, the fairy tales, plays, novel, essays. Quick in the fact that most everything in this book you can just breeze through with no real issue.The only problem for me was near the end of the book. The poems and the essays seemed to drag on and on. One reason is, I'm not really a poetry reader usually, so that was a little painful just due to the fact that it was poetry and I wasn't about to skip it since, it's my book and I don't like wasting money if I'm not going to read the whole thing. Secondly, most of the essay's seemed repetitious and some were just longer than necessary. I realize that they put everything that Oscar Wilde ever wrote, but this is just what I've learned and care to share. The only one of the essays that I didn't really mind reading was De Profundis. That was genuinely interesting since it was about the man who put him in prison and was written to him from prison.Otherwise I have no regrets in buying this book. It was definitely worth the $10 I put into it and I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in reading the whole kaboodle of Wilde's work.
—Shanna
This review is a work-in-progress. I'm reading this whole collection, but will be reviewing the individual reads separately as I go along, so don't be all confused by the otherwise seemingly random posting of Wilde stories and plays.I am going to skip reading The Picture of Dorian Gray because I read that just a few years ago. My review is behind that link; knock yourself out.Individual reviews will be linked here as I go along, just to really annoy everyone each time it pops up in their updates:Short StoriesLord Arthur Savile's CrimeThe Canterville GhostFables, Fairy Tales, and Other Really Really Short Pieces Filled with MoralsThe Sphinx Without a SecretThe Model MillionaireThe Young KingThe Birthday of the InfantaThe Fisherman and His SoulThe Star-ChildThe Happy PrinceThe Nightingale and the RoseThe Selfish GiantThe Devoted FriendThe Remarkable RocketPlaysThe Importance of Being EarnestLady Windermere's FanA Woman of No ImportanceAn Ideal HusbandSaloméThe Duchess of PaduaNext up... Vera, or The Nihilists.
—El
A must-have for every lover of literature. Oscar Wilde is a writer like no other. His words speak directly to one's heart, their soul, their subconsciousness.. He changed the way I understood writing and reading entirely, made me fall in love with his every word and get lost in his ideas, his thoughts, his world.I was 13 or 14 when I first picked up a paperback copy of his complete works on a whim. I remember feeling a little doubtful for buying such an expensive book from an author I had never heard of before. Needless to say, I'm so glad I did. It's a book to read, adore, and re-read a thousand times.
—outraged
