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Like all works of art, it [The Importance of Being Earnest] drew its sustenance from life, and, speaking for myself, whenever I see or read the play I always wish I did not know what I do about Wilde’s life at the time he was writing it—that when, for instance, John Worthing talks of going Bunburying, I did not immediately visualize Alfred Taylor’s establishment. On rereading it after his release, Wilde said, “It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that Tiger Life.” At its conclusion, I find myself imagining a sort of nightmare Pantomime Transformation Scene in which, at the touch of the magician’s wand, instead of the workday world’s turning into fairyland, the country house in a never-never Hertfordshire turns into the Old Bailey, the features of Lady Bracknell into those of Mr. Justice Wills. Still, it is a masterpiece, and on account of it Wilde will always enjoy the impersonal fame of an artist as well as the notoriety of his personal legend.
Frontal knowledge of Bunbury must be renounced at the outset. Bunbury is, by definition, a character “always somewhere else at present”: his person or being cannot be summoned, and knowledge of him can be sought only along the path by which his name emerges even as his body disappears. As a figure for what must not be represented, a figure thus sans figure, Bunbury is constituted within—not before or beyond—an irreducible oscillation of knowledge and ignorance, occultation and display. Neither liberating nor repressive in “essence,” given alternately or even simultaneously to lubricious slippage and disciplinary reversal, this oscillation enables both the unspecified pleasures of serious Bunburyism and the more enforcing binarisms operating in the Auden passage above.[15] That passage is remarkable not merely for the transforming knowledge it displays but even more so for its desire to abjure that knowledge, its volonté d’oublier: Auden would forget Bunbury. What he most emphatically desires in these lines is the retroactive advance of a prophylactic ignorance that would undo the knowledge empowering his nearly hallucinatory perception of Wilde’s play. The work of that ignorance would be to intermit the by now reflexive synapses (“whenever I see or read the play”) of his historicizing, homosexualizing reading, which immediately and unwillingly collapses the “proper” aesthetic space that, Auden implies, should intervene between “going Bunburying” and going to Alfred Taylor’s male brothel. This aesthetic transgression in turn excites its own fantasmatic “correction,” a recourse to disciplinary procedure, when Auden imagines that “nightmare Pantomime Transformation Scene” in which “instead of the workday world’s turning into fairyland,” fairyland is unmasked at the Old Bailey: two years’ hard labor for “gross indecency” with other males.[16] It is accession to this knowledge, transforming both the play and its beholder, that Auden would abjure. “I always wish I did not know what I do.”
Wilde of course had devised Bunbury to inhabit the conceptual and erotic interstices of precisely this ambivalence, whose subtle instruction is not so much that knowledge be voided as that knowledge perform its work along self-blinded paths of “ignorance,” nonrecognition, and misidentification. “In this light,” as D. A. Miller writes, “it becomes clear that the social function of secrecy”—and Bunbury is the secret subject of an open secret—“is not to conceal knowledge so much as to conceal knowledge of the knowledge.…Secrecy would thus be the subjective practice in which the oppositions of private/public, inside/outside, subject/object are established, and the sanctity of their first term kept inviolate.”[17] As Wilde’s parodic figure for this regime of knowing and unknowing, of knowing through unknowing, Bunbury remains a being or subject always otherwise and elsewhere: he appears nowhere on stage, and wherever his name is present he is not. Appeals to Bunbury yield only repetitions of his name: “Bunbury doesn’t live here. Bunbury is somewhere else at present.” But if Bunbury has been thus banished from the precincts of heterosexual representation, the need to frequent his secrecy has not, as Algy explains to Jack: “Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.” As these lines indicate, Bunbury operates within the heterosexual order as its hidden but irreducible supplement, its fictive and pseudonymous brother, the homosexual “excess” that it refuses to embrace but to which it continuously alludes, perhaps even aspires.
Of course the gay specificity of such allusiveness was technically unspeakable—non nominandum inter Christianos. Refusing to chafe under this stricture against representation, Wilde inverts it by inserting Bunbury into the text behind the ostentatious materiality of an empty signifier, a name without a being, a pure alias whose strategic equivocation between allusion and elision had already announced, a century before Foucault’s formulation, “that the world of speech and desires has known evasions, struggles, plunderings, disguises, ploys.”[18] Speaking strictly, Earnest cannot admit or acknowledge the erotic force of the gay male body, which must be staged therefore as an atopic body, a body constitutively “somewhere else at present.” This accounts, at least in part, for the flickering presence-absence of the play’s homosexual desire, as the materiality of the flesh is retracted into the sumptuousness of the signifier, whether in the “labial phonemics”[19] of Bunbury, all asmack with death and kisses, or in the duplicitous precincts of the play’s most proper and improper name, Ernest: a name at once splayed by a pun and doubly referential, pointing with one hand to the open secret of the double life, pseudonymously enacted, and with the other to the brittle posturings of the Name of the Father, a figure whose delicate transmissibility has always required the strictest of heterosexual propaedeutics.
What then, more specifically, are the disguises and ploys of “serious Bunburyism?” Or, in Jack’s more exasperated intonation: “Bunburyist? What on earth do you mean by a Bunburyist?” But before we proceed, the hermeneutical rage of a Jack must be a little undone by the interpretive insouciance of an Algy: “Now produce your explanation, and pray make it remarkable. The bore about most explanations is that they are never half so remarkable as the things they try to explain.” In this spirit, some explanations. Bunbury represents or disseminates the following: (1) an actual person of no historical importance, Henry Shirley Bunbury, a hypochondriacal acquaintance of Wilde’s Dublin youth, one of whose letters to Wilde is still extant;[20] (2) a remote village in Cheshire that, appropriately enough, “does not even appear on most maps”;[21] (3) a tongue-on-cheek allusion to Wilde’s illegal “sodomitical” practices—“not only,” as Fineman puts it, “British slang for a male brothel, but…also a collection of signifiers that straightforwardly express their desire to bury in the bun;”[22] (4) a parody of the contemporaneous medicalization of homosexual desire (“Nor do I,” says Lady Bracknell of Algy’s visits to Bunbury, “in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.”); (5) a sly, even chipper, allusion to the thanatopolitics of homophobia, whose severest directives against disclosure only too axiomatically ensure that what finally gets disclosed will be, as in Dorian Gray, a corpse, homicide or suicide, upon whose cold or cooling flesh the now obvious text is for the first time made legible; (6) a pragmatics of gay misrepresentation, an incomparably nuanced and motile doublespeak, driven both by pleasure and, as Gide put it, “by the need of self-protection”;[23] and, as we shall see before we end, (7) a pseudonym or alias for the erotic oscillation within the male subject, his fundamental waffling between Jack and Ernest.
But more crucially than any of these, before and after any of these, Bunbury insists upon his “own” difference from himself and from whatever signification, as in (1) through (7) above, he may, by caprice or compulsion, assume. From his prone, if not quite prostrate, position just offstage (to know Bunbury is “to sit by a bed of pain”), “Bunbury” performs enormous representational work, but only, as his name implies, by way of a disseminal passage, a displacing tropism whose first effect is to expel the self-identity of the signified from the neighborhood of the signifier. It is typical of Wilde’s rigorously inverting wit that he should stage this expulsion as an act of ingestion, as an insistently oral practice, as a buttered and material pun on Bunbury’s cryptographic name. I refer here to the “luxurious and indolent” gluttony that, by axiomatically transposing sexual and gustatory pleasures (cucumber sandwiches, muffins, breads: buns—Banbury or Bunbury—everywhere),[24] operates as a farcical screen-metaphor for otherwise unspeakable pleasures. “There can be little good in any young man who eats so much, or so often.”[25] In this figural strategy the obscene becomes the scenic, as that which must not be spoken is consumed, before an audience, with incomparable relish and finesse. “Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.” The fastidious allusion to Wilde’s sexual practice here is exact—from hand to mouth: fondling “would be followed by some form of mutual masturbation or intercrural intercourse.…Finally, oral copulation would be practiced, with Wilde as the active agent [sic], though this role was occasionally reversed. It gave him inspiration, he said.”[26] Thus inspired—or more literally, inspirited—by “reversed” practices and reversible tropes, Wilde deploys a polite decorum (no danger to Algy’s cuffs) in order to display and displace a desire to bury in the bun. In this way, serious Bunburyism releases a polytropic sexuality so extreme, so mobile, so evanescent in speed and turn, that it traverses, Ariel-like, a fugitive path through oral, genital, anal, and aural ports until it discovers and expends itself in and as the displacements of language. It was Wilde’s extraordinary gift to return this vertigo of substitution and repetition to his audience. The inspiration he derived from fellatio he then redisseminated, usually sotto voce, through the actor’s mouth. “The ejaculation,” says Lady Bracknell in a line that did not survive the reviser’s knife, “has reached my ears more than once.”[27]
Oscillating between verbal and seminal emissions, Lady Bracknell’s pun manifests the equivocation fundamental to the signifying practices of serious Bunburyism: an “illicit” signification could be insinuated into the text even as it was also withdrawn under the cover of a licit one, a procedure that sometimes imparts an odd resonance— the penumbra of a not quite legible importance—to certain of Earnest’s details. Via such strategic equivocation Wilde could introduce into Earnest both a parodic account of his own double life (the public thumbing of a private nose) as well as a scathing critique of the heterosexist presumption requiring, here statutorily, that such a life be both double and duplicitous. And that Earnest is such a text—sliding deviously between exposé and critique, saturating its reader/viewer with blinding disseminal effusions—is simply a Wilde fact whose closeting or imprisonment we must no longer forbear. In order to substantiate this claim, whose substance is in part a “subtextual” stance, I adduce in the numbered sections below a series of discrete indiscretions in which Earnest “goes Bunburying,” in which, that is, Wilde lifts to liminality a specific subcultural knowledge of “the terrible pleasures of double life.”[28] The examples to follow neither deplete the gay referentiality of Wilde’s text (other instances could be adduced), nor by any means exhaust the signifying practice it pleased Wilde to call serious Bunburyism; they are merely demonstrative exempla, intended to satisfy the positivist desire for proof in the pudding. In the following enumeration, I have drawn freely from both the three-act and four-act versions of the play.[29]
1. “It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case”; act 1, in both versions. In the trials of April–May 1895, Wilde would be compelled to submit again and again to such “ungentlemanly” exegesis. Cigarette cases, usually silver ones purchased in Bond Street, were a part (along with cash, other jewelry, food and drink) of Wilde’s payment to the male prostitutes he frequented. As the most durable material trace of Wilde’s illegal sexual practice, these cigarette cases (sometimes replete with inscriptions: “to X from O.W.”) would be repeatedly introduced into evidence by the prosecution throughout the second and third trials. Consider, for instance, the following exchange between Solicitor General Frank Lockwood, prosecutor at the third trial, and the defendant:
Did you ever give one [a cigarette case] to Charles Parker also? —Yes, but I am afraid it cost only £1.
Silver? —Well, yes. I have a great fancy for giving cigarette cases.
To young men? —Yes.
How many have you given? —I might have given seven or eight in 1892 or 1893.[30]
These cigarette cases are, for the following reasons, remarkably rich metonyms of Wilde’s sexual practice. First, they literally inscribe the condescension implicit in Wilde’s cross-class and cross-generational sexual activity. Second, they suggest Wilde’s ambivalent relation to the prostitution he repeatedly enjoyed: he preferred to think of the cases as “gifts” not necessarily related to the sexual services they nonetheless purchased. Third, as evidentiary deposits purchased and distributed by a very self-conscious “first-class misdemeanent,” as Jack describes Ernest, they bespeak a contradictory emotionality compounded of defiance, foolhardiness, and, it would seem, a certain desire to be caught. Fourth, they coyly and insistently point to the orality that was both Wilde’s sexual preference and Earnest’s primary trope of displaced representation. Henry Wotton, after all, had already explicated for Dorian Gray the evanescent perfection of a good smoke (“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”), and Edward Shelley, one of Wilde’s lovers, testified that he “had received a letter from Mr. Wilde inviting him to ‘come smoke a cigarette’ with him.”[31] Furthermore, while reporting the events of the first (that is, the libel) trial, the London daily Evening News (5 April 1895) printed the following:
The Old Bailey recoiled with loathing from the long ordeal of terrible suggestions that occupied the whole of yesterday when the cross-examination left the literary plane and penetrated the dim-lit perfumed rooms where the poet of the beautiful joined with valets and grooms in the bond of silver cigarette cases.[32]
As the affective verso to the recto of Earnest’s gay gaming with cigarette cases, the “recoil[ing]” and “loathing” specified in these lines indicate the precarious volatility of the Victorian male bonds so deftly manipulated by Wilde on “the literary plane.” A gentleman might offer his peer, or even his inferior in age or class, the benefit of a good smoke or the gratuity of a cigarette case, but only so long as the gift did not suggest a bond more intimate than “proper” gentlemanly relation or condescension. The performative success of Earnest’s oral insouciance lies in its capacity to tease the limit of the proper without seeming to violate it seriously. Prosecutor Lockwood’s “very ungentlemanly” reading of private cigarette cases reversed this rhetorical strategy by transforming the glissando of Wildean wit into that “long ordeal of terrible suggestion.”
2. “I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact”; act 1, in both versions. In these lines, Wilde ventriloquizes Lady Bracknell in order to allude, obliquely and across gender, to a then notorious transvestite/homosexual scandal, in which two men, Frederick Park (aka “Fanny”) and Ernest Boulton (aka “Stella”) were arrested in drag in front of the Strand Theatre and later prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit a felony”—the felony being of course sodomy. Argued before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, the case of Regina v. Boulton and Others opened on 9 May 1871, lasted for six days, aroused immense public interest, including extensive newspaper coverage, and resulted, thanks to a paucity of evidence, in acquittal. Along with the “Cleveland Street Scandal” of 1889, the Boulton and Park case was Victorian England’s most prominent homosexual “discursive event” prior to the Wilde trials of 1895. That Wilde knew of both scandals, as Lady Bracknell certainly did not, is beyond question; and no doubt it pleased Wilde immensely, and teased his imagination, that Boulton was a minor transvestite actor, appearing both on and off stage in elaborate and convincing feminine dress, so convincing in fact that a witness “named Cox, who gave evidence at the preliminary policy court proceedings but died before the trials (where his disposition was read),” was thoroughly taken in: “I kissed him, she, or it, believing at the time it was a woman.”[33] But Wilde’s reference to “the dear Duchess of Bolton” is also a little more than a Bunburied allusion to these “real” events; that the Duchess and Lady Bracknell “work together, in fact” suggests that propriety and impropriety, norm and transgression, are inversely conjoined in a single system whose passionate oppositions embrace, sometimes fatally, that “same list” “of eligible young men.”
3. “Fathers are certainly not popular just at present.…At present fathers are at a terrible discount. They are like those chaps, the minor poets. They are never even quoted”; act 1 in the four-act version. Spoken by Algy, these lines refer emphatically to the escalating filial warfare between the Marquess of Queensberry and Lord Alfred Douglas. The details of this triangular narrative are too familiar to require recapitulation here, except to say that Wilde’s failure to manage the situation adroitly precipitated the debacle of the trials, during which Queensberry’s charge that Wilde had been “posing as a somdomite” (sic) would find a decisive institutional context in which to be “quoted,” at length and in detail. At the conclusion of the libel trial, the jury determined that Queensberry’s charge of sodomitical “posing” had been proved and that his “Plea of Justification” elaborating this charge had been “published for the public benefit.”
4.
Lady Bracknell.Lady Bloxham? I don’t know her.
Jack.Oh, she goes about very little. She is a lady of considerably advanced years.
Lady Bracknell.Ah, nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability of character.
Present in both versions, this “lady considerably advanced in years” alludes (again across gender) to an “undergraduate of strange beauty,” John Francis Bloxham, who, as Philip Cohen notes, “edited the one and only issue of The Chameleon: A Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances (December 1894) and authored ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’,” a story, misattributed to Wilde, blending apostasy and pederasty.[34] To this Oxford undergraduate magazine, cited repeatedly at the trials, Wilde contributed, apparently at Douglas’s request, “a page of paradoxes destined originally for The Saturday Review” (Letters, 441). Douglas himself contributed what Wilde at the first trial overgenerously called two “exceedingly beautiful poems,” “In Praise of Shame” and “Two Loves,” both vaguely pederastic and the latter containing the line “I am the Love that dare not speak its name,” which Wilde appropriated for brilliant rhetorical effect at the second trial. In a letter to Ada Leverson, Wilde alludes to “Lady Bloxham” and her literary productions (the coded allusion here to “Dorian” refers to John Gray, one of those unquoted minor poets, renowned in Wilde’s circle for the beauty, especially, of his profile):
Dear Sphinx, Your aphorisms must appear in the second number of the Chameleon: they are exquisite. “The Priest and the Acolyte” is not by Dorian: though you were right in discerning by internal evidence that the author has a profile. He is an undergraduate of strange beauty.
The story is, to my ears, too direct: there is no nuance: it profanes a little by revelation: God and other artists are always a little obscure. Still, it has interesting qualities, and is at moments poisonous: which is something. Ever yours
OSCAR
5. Miss Prism, speaking of dissolute Ernest just before Algy arrives, Bunburying as same: “I should fancy that he was as bad as any young man who has chambers in the Albany, or indeed even in the vicinity of Piccadilly, can possibly be.…I trust that unhappy young profligate will never desecrate with his presence the quiet precincts of this refined home. I would not feel safe”; act 2 in the four-act version. As both Miss Prism and the trial reports very clearly indicate, the semiotics of the double life were predicated upon the diacritical separation of spaces: on the one hand, the homosexualized space of (in Wilde’s case) private “chambers in the Albany” or Savoy Hotel; on the other, the domestic and presumptively heterosexual “precincts of this quiet home” (in Wilde’s case, his family residence at 16 Tite Street, Chelsea). Between those two spaces, a third and prophylactic space, a differentiating distance, is presumed to intervene; this is precisely the distance that, while permitting Miss Prism to “feel safe,” also enables the oscillations of “serious Bunburyism,” as when Jack/Ernest shuttlecocks between town and country. As Wilde very well understood, this fictive third space was readily traversable, so much so that its differentiating functions sometimes collapsed. At the second trail, for instance, Alfred Wood—prostitute, thief, blackmailer—testified to the events of an evening in January or February 1893:
Here, as also in the play, where Algy is about to arrive as Ernest, Miss Prism’s worst fears are realized: a “young profligate will…desecrate with his presence the precincts of this quiet home.”After dinner I went with Wilde to 166 [sic], Tite Street. There was nobody in the house to my knowledge. Mr. Wilde let himself in with a latchkey. We went up to a bedroom where we had hock and seltzer.
Witness then stated that an act of gross indecency took place on this occasion.[35]
6. Canon Chasuble in response to Jack’s concern that he is “a little too old now” to be rechristened as Ernest: “Oh, I am not by any means a bigoted Paedobaptist.…You need have no apprehensions [about immersion].…Sprinkling is all that is necessary, or indeed, I think, advisable.…I have two similar ceremonies to perform…A case of twins that occurred recently in one of the outlying cottages on your estate.…I don’t know, however, if you would care to join them at the Font. Personally I do not approve myself of the obliteration of class-distinctions”; act 2 in four-act versions; a truncated version of these lines (sans “Paedobaptist” and “the obliteration of class-distinctions”) appears in the three-act Earnest. The always serious Canon Chasuble repeatedly falls into oblique and unwilling licentious allusion, as in these lines, which insinuate an outrageous chain of gay metonyms: “Paedobaptist…sprinkling is all that is necessary…in one of the outlying cottages…if you would care to join them at the Font…the obliteration of class-distinctions.” If “Paedobaptist” (or “sprinkler of boys”) was too blatantly obscene to survive the play’s revision into three acts, then the more subtly insinuated “outlying cottages” was not: only an elite audience would have known that by the late nineteenth century “cottage” had currency as a camp signifier for a trysting site, usually a public urinal. The word also had, it would seem, a more emphatically personal reference; Queensberry’s “Plea of Justification” claimed that Oscar Wilde “in the year of our Lord One Thousand eight hundred and ninety-three [a year, that is, before the composition of Earnest] at a house called ‘The Cottage’ at Goring…did solicit and incite…the said…acts of gross indecency.”[36] Once these Bunburied significations are allowed to resonate through the passage—once we recognize with Canon Chasuble that “corrupt readings seem to have crept into the text”—the references to “sprinkling” and “join[ing] them at the Font” point, directly and indirectly, to seminal experience. Similarly with the phrase “the obliteration of class-distinctions,” which boisterously points to the almost pederastic, cross-class prostitution Wilde repeatedly enjoyed. Just a few lines earlier, Wilde had had the effrontery to make Jack say “I am very fond of children,” a sentence definitely courting the bourgeois outrage of the thus “discounted” fathers who pursued Wilde through the court and into prison.
7. “The next time I see you I hope you will be Parker.” As has been “public knowledge” (however inert) for some thirty years, the most substantial revision of Earnest was the deletion (demanded by George Alexander, who produced the play, and unhappily submitted to by Wilde) of an entire scene in which Algy, Bunburying as Ernest, is almost arrested for dining expenses incurred by Jack, or rather Ernest, at the Savoy Hotel, the site of both Jack-Ernest’s “grossly materialistic” gluttony and some of Wilde’s sexual encounters. Jack, who is delighted that Algy should suffer for extravagances that can only be correctly charged to Ernest, counsels his younger brother “that incarceration would do you a great deal of good.” Algy understandably protests: “Well, I really am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for having dined in the West End. It is perfectly ridiculous.” Ridiculous or not, Wilde would very soon suffer the analogous imprisonment and ridicule that “fate” and the state had in store for him. But in “never-never Hertfordshire” (as Auden called it) this end is happily remitted when Jack, his “generosity [hilariously] misplaced,” “pay[s] this monstrous bill for my brother.”
Two aspects of this scene merit further emphasis. First, Algy’s pseudo-arrest for serious overeating secures the argument that in Earnest “luxurious and indolent” gluttony operates as a jubilant screen-metaphor for otherwise unrepresentable pleasures. This cathexis of extravagant dining and sexual pleasure/transgression refers directly to Wilde’s double life; his regular practice was to dine luxuriously with his lovers prior to sex, thereby enjoying in camera the same metaphor he would display on stage in Earnest. Often meeting his assignations in the private chambers of public restaurants (Willis’s or the Solferino or elsewhere), he would dazzle them with opulence, language, and alcohol. Here is the testimony of one prostitute:
The witness in this exchange is Charles Parker, a sometime valet, whose testimony against Wilde seems alternately to have been purchased and coerced; it is the name “Parker” that brings us to the last point regarding the deleted arrest scene. The scene commences with the delivery of a calling card, which Algy reads: “ ‘Parker and Gribsby, Solicitors.’ I don’t know anything about them. Who are they?” After taking and reading the card, Jack facetiously speculates: “I wonder who they can be. I expect, Ernest, they have come about some business for your friend Bunbury. Perhaps Bunbury wants to make his will, and wishes you to be executor.” With these subtle intimations of Algy’s forthcoming execution of Bunbury lingering in the air, Messrs. Parker and Gribsby are shown in by Merriman, the butler. But “they,” it turns out, are not exactly a they but a he (“There is only one gentleman in the hall, sir,” Merriman informs Jack), and the one gentleman is Gribsby “himself,” come either to collect the debt or “remove” Ernest to Holloway Prison, one of those “suburb[an]” facilities through which Wilde would be funneled on his way to ignominy: “The surroundings, I admit, are middle class; but the gaol itself is fashionable and well-aired.” (From the other side of the bars Wilde would not find it so.) As these threats of incarceration and death are being ventilated in the text, Jack first teases Algy for his (that is, Jack’s) profligacy and then “generously” pays Ernest’s debt, thereby forestalling the correction that would, Jack says, have done Algy “a great deal of good.” Having thus dispatched his serious problem, Jack then luxuriates in a little trivial banter:He [Alfred Taylor, Wilde’s procurer] took us to a restaurant in Rupert Street. I think it was the Solferino. We were shown upstairs to a private room, in which there was a dinner-table laid for four. After a while Wilde came in. I had never seen him before, but I had heard of him. We dined about eight o’clock. We all four sat down to dinner, Wilde sitting on my left.
Was the dinner a good dinner? —Yes. The table was lighted with red-shaded candles. We had champagne with our dinner, and brandy and coffee afterwards. Wilde paid for the dinner. Subsequently Wilde said to me, “This is the boy for me—will you go to the Savoy Hotel with me?” I consented, and Wilde drove me in a cab to the hotel. He took me first into a sitting-room on the second floor, where he ordered some more drink—whisky and soda. Wilde then asked me to go into his bedroom with him.
Witness here described certain acts of indecency which he alleged took place in the bedroom.[37]
(“After all,” Wilde writes in a letter, “the only proper intoxication is conversation” [Letters, 749]). Unfortunately, the next time Wilde saw “Parker,” Parker would be “on [the] unpleasant business” of a reverse, or disciplinary, Bunbury. Appearing in the Central Criminal Court under the guise of “Gribsby,” appearing, that is, as an agent of the law, Parker would testify to “acts of gross indecency” committed with Wilde in 1893 while Gribsby, apparently, was otherwise and elsewhere engaged.Jack.You are Gribsby, aren’t you? What is Parker like?
Gribsby.I am both, sir. Gribsby when I am on unpleasant business, Parker on occasions of a less serious kind.
Jack.The next time I see you I hope you will be Parker.
It could have come as no surprise to the creator of “Parker and Gribs-by, Solicitors” that he should find himself excoriated in the Old Bailey for the same sexual practices he had been (con)celebrating just beneath the lovely pellucid “heterosexual” skin of Earnest. That, quite literally, his dirty linen should be “well-aired” in court (whose officers, jury, and gallery were exclusively male) he had already anticipated in this deleted arrest scene, whose self-consciously transgressive erotics I have only touchingly glossed here. Conversely and symmetrically, the extensive newspaper coverage of April–May 1895 would guarantee the dissemination of Lady Bracknell’s also deleted line: a (somewhat expurgated) narrative of his “ejaculation[s]” would indeed reach respectable English “ears more than once.” But there is nothing uncanny in any of this. Wilde was no mere prognosticator, foretelling the doom that was about to settle around him. He was instead a prevaricator of genius, a polymath of the pleasurable and necessary lie. As a person committed to homosexual practice, he was compelled by law to inhabit the oscillating and nonidentical identity structure of Jack and Ernest or “Parker and Gribsby, Solicitors.” Within this structure transgression and law, homosexual delight and its arrest, are produced and reproduced as interlocked versions and inversions of each other.
Writing from this endangered position, Wilde stated with a parodist’s clarity and a criminal’s obscurity that the importance of being was neither x nor y, male nor female, homosexual nor heterosexual, Parker nor Gribsby, Jack nor Ernest. Being will not be disclosed by the assumption or descent of an apt and singular signifier, a proper or class name naturally congruent with the object or objects it seeks to denominate. In contrast to H.C.’s essentialist move, Wilde never heralds “a true inversion” that “respond[s] finally to a stimulus strong and prolonged enough, as a man awakens when he is loudly called.” Belying such unproblematic notions of true being, Wilde insists that identity has always already been mislaid somewhere in the lane lying between such culturally “productive” binarisms as those listed above. Homosexual or heterosexual? Parker or Gribsby? Jack or Ernest? Which name should be “loudly called?” “I am both, sir.” Both indeed, and therefore not quite either: this ambivalent locution emphatically does not imply recourse to the compromise formation of a (perhaps residual) bisexuality, or in Ellis’s more telling contemporaneous phrase, “psychosexual hermaphroditism,” for this formation is manifestly content to leave undisturbed the conveniently bifurcated gender assumptions that it only seemingly fuses. The component desires that, when added together, comprise the “bi” remain in fact quite distinct, shot with the masculine or feminine through and through. Wildean doubling (“I am both, sir”) refers instead to a strategy of lexical or nominal traversal, of skidding within the code and between its semantic poles. In the shuttle of self-representation, being itself must slip on a name, or two. “But what own are you?” Gwen asks of Jack just as he is about to become Ernest John. “What is your Christian name, now that you have become someone else?”