Camille
Paglia, in Sexual Personae, makes the case that Oscar
Wilde has not been given his due as one of western literature’s
seminal figures, that literary criticism has failed to distinguish
between the production of great literature—which Wilde
did not produce—and being of great literary and historical
importance. Even though Paglia did 
not
fully grasp how the Wilde persona, as especially revealed
in his stage characters, would influence the 20th century
and beyond, her penetration into his sexual-psychological
makeup as it affected his writing (The Importance of Being
Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray) remains
unsurpassed, and since then it has become increasingly difficult
to overlook his authority.
Wilde,
through his literary personae, is largely responsible for
making explicit the attitude or comportment we refer to as
“cool,” which significantly predates the “birth
of cool,” attributed to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in
the 1950s. The archetypes of cool are Wilde’s theater
characters and, from The Picture of Dorian Gray,
pretty boy Dorian Gray and his mentor Lord Henry Wotton, whose
other-worldly nonchalance and studied detatchment introduce
the world to a state of mind (being cool) that functions like
a firewall against all manner of hurt and heartbreak, injustice
and prejudice.
From
ancient Greek tragedy to the late Romantic period, with few
exceptions, engaging theatre and literature depended on the
interaction of emotionally overwrought personages with whom
audiences would therapeutically empathize in order to better
grasp or sublimate their own emotional upheaval. The passions
were prized above everything else and the price paid (breakdown,
depression) was a matter of course and audience expectation.
Enter
Oscar Wilde, who dared to snub the conventional wisdom that
it was one’s duty to wear the emotions on the worn-out
sleeve. In Dorian Gray and his plays, Wilde’s
below-zero (cool) characters are able to run life’s
emotional gauntlets without suffering the usual hard knocks
and injury. What sets his characters apart is they are able
to rise and then remain above the fray, far from the madding
crowd, which is cool’s surprisingly easily won promise.
Audiences were immediately drawn to his personages for their
teflonic quality and preternatural ability to maintain their
equipoise in the most trying of circumstance. Attending a
Wilde play was like tuning into an instructional video on
how to be cool.
What
at once fascinates and distinguishes the main characters (souls
on ice) in The Importance of Being Earnest is their
aloofness, their unflappable calm and cool in response to
conflict or disappointment. Despite Wilde’s legendary
wit and epigrammatic brilliance, it’s not so much what
his characters have to say that argues for their importance
in the history of literature, but how they say it. Hurts and
insults bounce off his personages like arrows off a hard hat.
Once
entered into the public domain through his plays and novel,
Wilde’s manner of cool quickly became de rigueur, the
garment of choice. Everyone wanted to wear it, to be seen
in it. Its pharmaceutical properties created a demand that
has only increased in the present age.
Since
we have come to rely on especially the arts for glimpses into
future cultural and social developments and transformations,
it was almost inevitable that the visual arts, in the wide
wake of Wilde, would dramatically break with the past and
enter its version of cool into the cultural landscape.
In
the early 1900s, a mere 15 years after Wilde’s passing,
Picasso, Braque and Leger were systematically geometrizing
the curves and flesh of the human face and body. Cubist portraiture
features figures and faces drained of all emotional content
while flesh and body completely disappear in the 2-D flattening
out process. This trend achieved its apogee in Mondrian, whose
strictly geometrical art would eventually morph into minimalism
and monochromatic painting, forms that reject any content.
It might have taken 500 years from the wretched figure of
Christ cringing on the cross to Rothco’s “Orange
and Yellow” (1956), but with the advent of minimalism
(Rothko, Newman, Molinari) the emotions are totally purged
from the visual arts. Cool art now commands hot prices in
the volatile art market.
Art
goers seeking calm and repose were richly rewarded by minimalist
(content-free) art and looked for more of the same outside
the gallery. They found it in the music of Miles Davis in
the early 50s, and in the Hammond B-3 organ sound of Jimmy
Smith. With the aim of dramatically lowering the temperature,
both turned their backs on the frenzied, overwrought, angry
explosiveness that characterized Bee-Bop led by Charlie Parker,
Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Davis slowed everything
down to a walk and revived the ballads, while the steel, skyscraper-slick,
cold metal Hammond B-3 organ sound generated by Jimmy Smith
hit the brain like a drug. It didn’t take long to figure
out that with nothing but the clothes on your back for an
asset mix, Smith’s smooth, ice-glazed notes could make
you feel you were on top of the world for as long as the music
lasted.
In
his time, there were good reasons Wilde would be attracted
to the cool, meticulously carapaced, desexed personae we meet
in his plays. In the late 19th century, Wilde was a homosexual
in a time when one would have liked “not to be.”
For appearance’s sake, he married and fathered two children
so he could more easily comply with his outlaw nature in the
face of public censure and homophobia. To an uncertain extent,
he was able to live life on his own terms until 1895 when
he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years of humiliating
hard labour from which he never recovered. He died a broken
man in 1900 at the age of 43.
But
if Wilde was unable to escape the Bible-backed, set-in-stone
moral constrictions of his time, his most famous character,
Dorian Gray, from the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
discovers that he can do whatever he wants with impunity since
it’s his portrait that suffers the excesses.
Wilde,
through his alter-ego, is yet another example of the abused
becoming (sublimated through literature) the abuser. Pretty
boy Dorian, charming, irresistible to both sexes, treats his
conquests with the contempt of indifference. Nothing gets
under his skin. In pursuit of beauty, pleasure and power,
he shrinks the parameters of empathy to absolute zero: “What
people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can
multiply our personalities.”
Transferring
the hurt and ostracism he endured in real life to the painting,
Wilde (Dorian Gray), now authors the pain while remaining
deviously disengaged, as cold as the ice that runs through
his veins. And if towards the end of the book Gray vacillates
between being cool and stung with remorse, Lord Henry (Harry),
whom the protégé worships, stays the course
and quietly earns top billing as cool’s crowning achievement.
In the crucible of his callousness, he transmutes every tragedy
into a joke or witticism. Lord Henry is so composed we’re
not sure if we’re dealing with a living person or a
computer-generated avatar. Either way, whatever it is that
he’s got, it registers as cool, and everyone who comes
in contact with it (if only subconsciously) wants it. If we
measure charisma by the number of people caught in its net,
Dorian Gray and Lord Henry (the cool they underwrite) are
easily among literature’s most charismatic personality
types. With a half-nod to de Sade, whose coolness took on
monstrous proportions, Wilde’s articulate, intelligent,
gentlemanly characters make cool respectable (marketable).
And be as it may that his characters are not so much flesh
and blood as literary devices or projections of the author
looking to remake the world in his own image, their over-the-top,
immaculate style creates the necessary conditions for the
birthing of cool and its subsequent influence on world culture.
Since
Wilde, cool has evolved into a universal coping mechanism
used to combat all manner of adversity and indignity. In the
area of consumption, very few products can be successfully
marketed without making major 
concessions
to cool. Nike without the endorsement of the world’s
top (cool) athletes would be a non-descript running shoe.
The same with celebrity
fashion.
In
the 21st century, relationships, more and more of which are
conducted digitally, are in particular vulnerable to the promises
of cool. In McLuhan speak, and predicted by the path of least
resistance principle to which humans are easy prey, it is
much easier to conduct a cool (digital) relationship, than
a hot (person to person) one.
Like
any powerful pleasurable drug, once tried, it’s hard
not to try it again. As a way of dealing with the judgmental
gaze of the other, cool is the perfect retort to the often
punishing and debilitating effects of self-consciousness.
Cool is synonymous with reversion to animal unselfconsciousness
and it shares the same end-game as drugs and alcohol, which
suggests that human beings, existentially, are simply not
constituted to be human day in and day out. Or, in Freudian
terms, all of us entertain an unacknowledged
death wish or “wish to return to the inanimate.”
More
than anything and in answer to his deepest yearnings, Wilde
wanted to escape the world that would eventually crush him.
Since “we cannot offend nature” he writes “art
is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place.” So while Wilde, the founding father
of cool, could not save himself through his art, his late
19th century “walk on the wild side” prepared
the world for the walk that would change the world. Cool not
only survives him but has found a permanent home in the modern
psyche.
There
isn’t a person in the world who wouldn’t rather
be rich and powerful, attractive and intelligent—and
to those non-negotiables we now add “cool.”
