The early novel, Last Testament, may not be the most complex or multilayered of Ackroyd's works, but it is a good starting point in my analysis, as it introduces many of the issues that Ackroyd constantly deals with in his fiction and which he has also given fuller treatment in his later novels. Thus its analysis here introduces and paves the way for the points about intertextuality, history and literature that I am also pursuing in my later chapters about Chatterton and Dan Leno. Consequently, in the first part of this chapter (2.1.) I shall draw my attention to these more general issues that are central to my thesis, and in the second part (2.2.) I shall illustrate what I feel is the most significant aspect of Last Testament: its accomplishment as a convincing literary ventriloquism.
Like most novels by Ackroyd, Last Testament is involved with the rewriting of English literary history, at the same time as it emphasizes the intertextuality of art and writing. It is a novel written in the form of a journal as if by Oscar Wilde himself in the last year of his life as an exile in Paris. Through the mouth of Wilde, Ackroyd goes through the life and works of the English writer, reassesses the value of his work, even traces his literary influences, and re-examines his place in the literary canon.
For decades this place was somewhat ambiguous. Convicted as a homosexual in 1895, Oscar Wilde suffered a serious blow to his reputation. He became known as the "obscene impostor" or the "High Priest of Decadence" (Thornton, 1983: 67), and with his trial and condemnation the whole Aesthetic or Decadent movement went down, since hardly anyone wanted to be associated with these literary movements after the scandal. In the eyes of later critics Decadence (1889-1896) was often seen as something to be forgotten, or it was merely seen as a curious interlude between Victorian literature and Modernism, and the name of Oscar Wilde was either pushed to the margins or achieved notoriety among traditional humanist literary critics. In the words of Ackroyd's Wilde, "I shall be remembered not as an artist but as a case history, a psychological study to be placed beside Onan and Herodias" (112), "At least I have the consolation that I shall not appear in Mr Walter Scott's 'Great Writers' series" (11). Even today Oscar Wilde is almost equally well known by his sexuality and 'flamboyant personality' as his literary output.
Obviously, these kinds of biases are injustices that Ackroyd's novel brings to our attention. Already in Notes for a New Culture (1976) Ackroyd has attacked the traditional humanism of much English literary criticism, which largely sees the importance of literature in the morality or 'experience' that is mediated by the author. In that essay Ackroyd warns us against judging literature by its morality, social use or the private meanings of the author, and instead emphasizes the autonomy of language and literature. Like all Ackroyd's novels, Last Testament can be seen to reflect these propositions - after all it was Oscar Wilde himself who, like Ackroyd, insisted on 'art for art's sake', or that "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book" (Dorian Gray: 21), and as Ackroyd shows in his novel, this kind of posture of Wilde, this Aesthetic stance that went against the grain of Victorian morality and repressed feelings, contributed to his downfall and ruin. Understandably, the idea of judging an author on moral grounds is an issue that conflicts with the principles laid out in Ackroyd's essay.
Consequently, Last Testament is partly a kind of confession in the vein of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Thomas De Quincey, where Oscar Wilde speaks candidly about his life and sexuality, but more importantly, it is also a self-defence of his career and work, directed against the nation who condemned him:
I was the greatest artist of my time, I do not doubt that, just as my tragedy was the greatest of its time. (...) I mastered each literary form. I brought comedy back to the English stage, I created symbolic drama in our tongue, and I invented the prose poem for a modern audience. I divorced criticism from practice, and turned into an independent enquiry, just as I wrote the only modern novel in English (170).
Of course this sounds like a typical Wildean exaggeration, but critical comments like these that are made throughout the novel enter and remain in the reader's mind.
Direct literary criticism of this kind is typical of Ackroyd's novels in general, which often blur boundaries between literature and criticism, fiction and non-fiction, fact and fantasy. 'Truth' and non-truth become problematic in Ackroyd's hands - it is hard to say which is which - and this has clear parallels with poststructuralism or deconstruction theory, which is suspicious of 'primary' and 'secondary' hierarchies, such as truth/error, nature/culture, speech/writing, literature/criticism, and which also questions established 'truths' that are taken for granted (Davis & Schleifer, 1991: 162, 166). In an interview Ackroyd himself has said that he does not see any great difference between writing a novel or a biography, for example: in both cases one has a vast and often conflicting material ahead of oneself, which merely has to be organized into a coherent unity. The only difference is that a biography has to appear plausible.
This kind of remark very much resembles the postmodern scepticism of 'truth', 'fact' or 'science', and just as Ackroyd's novels often include historical 'facts' and other somewhat unexpected material among his fiction, such as newspaper clippings (Last Testament: 95-6) or other annexations, so do his biographies often contain artful or dramatic, anecdotal or even moving, episodes that resemble novelistic conventions. In T. S. Eliot (232-4), for example, Ackroyd gives a sad account of Vivien Eliot's fate as she was committed to a mental asylum for the rest of her life, but immediately afterwards provides two pages of 'comic relief' by telling us what a "funny man" (234) T. S. Eliot could occasionally be. In Dickens, moreover, Ackroyd mixes clearly fictional interludes with the main text, and self-ironically comments through the mouth of Charles Dickens: "Oh, biographers. Biographers are simply novelists without imagination!" (Dickens: 754).
Similarly, Last Testament itself blurs boundaries: not only does it mix fact with fantasy or literature with criticism, but it also blurs the distinction between a biography and an autobiography. It could well be the former; indeed it very much resembles Ackroyd's biographies, but then again it is written in the form of a first person narrative. And it could easily be the latter, an autobiography or a confession written by Oscar Wilde, unless we knew it to be actually written by Peter Ackroyd. It is these kinds of tensions between the different possibilities or dimensions of the text that make the novel interesting: we read it as though it were Oscar Wilde's text, all the time aware that it is actually created by Ackroyd. The two authors in the text have a kind of dialogic relationship between each other - the two eras in a way reaching over the gap between them - and this dialogic interplay creates somewhat intriguing, and often ambiguous effects: whose text are we finally reading, Ackroyd's or Wilde's?
A radical interpretation would be to say that the text belongs to neither of the authors: not to Ackroyd since the text is not his 'own' style, and not to Wilde since it is not created by him. Perhaps the novel, therefore, affirms the autonomy of language suggested by Kristeva, according to whom any point of origin is impossible to trace:
Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and a poetic language is read as at least double. (Kristeva, 1980: 66)
In Notes (1976) Ackroyd adopts a similar view, when he calls for the impersonal and independent status of literature and, like Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" (in Image, Music, Text, 1977: 142-8), plays down the importance of authorship, emphasizing the priority of language over its individual users. It is significant, however, that later on Ackroyd has actually changed his views on intertextuality and authorship, giving up such an extremist position (see 3.1.), but in any case, arguments like these deconstruct the conventionally negative view of imitation in Western art theories, and thereby make it possible for writers like Ackroyd to employ pastiche and parody on a large scale, as is the case in Last Testament. Thus Ackroyd's use of imitation is another blurring of distinctions: those of 'individual' voices of the two authors, Wilde and Ackroyd. In Chatterton Ackroyd exposes the Romantic individuality in art as a myth, and in Last Testament he affirms this in practice.
Last Testament also contains a paradox: it is a novel, largely a work of fiction, which nevertheless has a strong feeling of 'plausibility', as of that of a historical document or an academic treatise. Like Ackroyd's biographies of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Dickens (1990) and William Blake (1995), Last Testament integrates a vast collection of historical 'facts' and literary sources, which are turned into a coherent and convincing narrative. The novel resembles Ackroyd's biographies in that it traces the development of the career of the artist and shows us the connection between his life and works - a quality which is in accordance with T. S. Eliot's criteria for a poet's biography: "the biographer of an author should possess some critical ability; he should be a man of taste and judgment, appreciative of the man whose biography he undertakes" (Colby, 1991: 6). Last Testament, of course, is such a favourable appraisal of Oscar Wilde, just as it occasionally criticizes his work as well. This, for instance, is what Ackroyd writes about Vera, Wilde's early play:
[It] was suitable for the ears of the deaf. I [Oscar Wilde] cannot think of that play without embarrassment. There was poetry in it, but unfortunately none of it was my own. One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines (46).
Whether Last Testament is a biography, autobiography, criticism or a novel - this at least is clearly a text of a critic; Ackroyd makes a fair comment about a bad play by skilfully using the kind of comic and epigrammatic style we would expect from Oscar Wilde.
Besides Shakespeare, Ackroyd provides a wealth of other suggestions about Oscar Wilde's literary tastes and influences - another confirmation of the intertextual view of art, which says that nothing is born in a vacuum. The fictional Wilde speaks fondly of Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson (172-3), for example; all three (like Wilde) prominent figures associated with English Decadence. Ackroyd also traces Wilde's education in Classics that he received in Trinity College (31) and moves to his Oxford years: "if at Oxford I learned from Ruskin the integrity of individual perception, it was from Walter Pater that I learned the poetry of feeling" (36). Further, we learn that Chatterton and Poe also "fascinated" Wilde (67), but it is especially the French influences that are emphasized throughout the novel: Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Gautier and others: "I worshipped Flaubert with my head, Stendhal with my heart and Balzac by my manner of dress" (62).
The list of literary influences is at least partly Ackroyd's own interpretation; besides the Greek and Latin authors, Oscar Wilde hardly admitted any influence other than Keats, Flaubert and Walter Pater (Dorian Gray, ed. Ackroyd, 1985: 12).
Ackroyd, however, does not leave it at that; he does not only point out the intertextuality, literary tastes and influences behind Wilde's writing, but he also comments upon other literature of the time:
'Why,' I asked, 'are you interested in that particular author [George Moore]?'
Maurice was quite unabashed. 'I live by the café where he says he learned French, the Nouvelle Athenés.'
'Well, it is a disgrace that such a place is allowed to remain open. I shall speak to the authorities about it tomorrow.' (4)
Here we can also see the typical wit and derision of Wilde, and in a quite similar manner, as above, Ackroyd's Wilde mocks Bernard Shaw (5), and criticizes Matthew Arnold: "Of course, when one reads him, one always hopes that every word will be his last" (68). Wilde also remarks that Gide is "artistically...beneath me" (14) and calls Swinburne "farcical" (31). Further, he confesses that "I have never been interested in the work of my contemporaries, and I detest the critical mannerism that professes to find good in everything" (172). In the final pages of the journal, the fictional Wilde makes no less than an entire overview of his time:
[T]he only true artists of the period are now misty figures of the past. Pater and Ruskin are dead; Tennyson and Browning also, and I do not know if they will be able to survive their imitators. Swinburne and Meredith linger on, but in a half-light (172).
One of the last literary comments Wilde makes is that "like a dying star, English prose rose up in one last effort of glory before its fall - in myself, in Lionel Johnson and in Pater" (173).
This kind of criticism can be found in most of Ackroyd's novels: in Chatterton, English Music, Dan Leno and indirectly even in The Great Fire of London or Hawksmoor. Yet nowhere is it as visible or direct as in Last Testament. The novel gives a definition to a whole era - and on both sides of the Channel. It 'rewrites' the literary canon of the age from the point of view of the 'other' - the outcast, the exile. It touches upon both prose and poetry, and praises works and writers that at the time of Victorian hypocrisy were largely considered improper or even immoral. Especially French novels had a very bad reputation for immorality, and implicitly Last Testament gives more value to literary Decadence than is usually the case in literary canons.
However, one should be careful about giving this kind of criticism too serious an importance: after all, the novel is largely a work of fiction. But as I have argued, Ackroyd's works deliberately blur these kind of distinctions between literature and criticism, history and fiction, biographies and novels, as well as question all kinds of established hierarchies and conventions. And as Ackroyd writes about T. S. Eliot, already he acknowledged the "strong connection between the 'critical' and the 'creative' mind" (T. S. Eliot: 197), which is a quality that equally well describes Ackroyd: he was an established critic already before becaming a novelist. Yet Last Testament is at least ambiguous - it is hard to say whose criticism it contains: Wilde's or Ackroyd's. I think this question, too, is being blurred.
Last Testament, in other words, has qualities that very much resemble a biography, autobiography or straightforward literary criticism. As such it may be said to widen our view of what is seen as literature. Like other works by Ackroyd, it plays with various conventions and mixes them together. It blurs the boundaries between conventional forms in order to better examine literary history. Thus it extends our view of what a novel is, or what purposes a novel may have, while still remaining one: it is a fictionalized account of Wilde's life and thoughts in Paris; it has a strong illusion of time and place; and it even dramatizes some of the scenes of Wilde's life there - by means of recorded conversations, for example. It has a simple chronology of a journal, but the reminiscences and stories that Wilde recount prevent the narration from ever becoming boring. Even the delirium of Wilde's death-bed is included - taken down by Maurice Gilbert (184-5) - and at this moment of death, Ackroyd is able to create a feeling of loss.
As a novel Last Testament is remarkable for its wealth of historical detail and general 'accuracy', but it also goes beyond that. Like Umberto Eco's novels or other historiographic metafiction of the 1980s, it mixes fact with fantasy and "plugs the gaps" in the historical record (cf. Scholes, 1979: 206-9). It, for example, quite daringly provides details of Wilde's notorious sex life (e.g. 108), just as it shows us many other unrecorded scenes of his life. Wilde's childhood, for example, or his memories and emotions in general are more vividly portrayed here than in Ellmann's (1987) biography, for example, which - despite its impressive amount of factual details - cannot achieve the same immediacy as Ackroyd's Wilde's first person narrative. But then again, Last Testament is a fictional re-interpretation of Wilde's career, and at that it exceeds the conventional limits of history or biography writing. Like Hawksmoor or Chatterton, it itself is suspicious of historical 'truth':
'You cannot publish this [journal], Oscar. It is nonsense - and most of it is quite untrue.'
'What on earth do you mean?'
'It is invented.'
'It is my life.'
'But you have quite obviously changed the facts to suit your purpose.'
'I have no purpose, and the facts came quite naturally to me.' (160).
Although Last Testament is in many respects the most conventional of Ackroyd's works, this kind of self-reflexivity adds a layer of postmodern metafictionality, at the same time as the content of the conversation above reveals that Ackroyd acknowledges the postmodern textual view of history, which says that as soon as one writes down an event, it turns into a sort of fiction; after all, we are trapped in, what Jameson (1972) calls, the 'prison-house of language' and can never have an immediate contact to 'reality' through it. Signifiers only refer to other signifiers in an endless chain of signification process, where every point of origin is lost, and the relation to reality endlessly deferred (cf. Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play", in The Structuralist Controversy, 1972). Even a 'truth' about one's own life, Ackroyd seems to suggest, is impossible to attain, since it is always coloured by one's own subjective choices, omissions, partialities, ideologies, myths, etc. And this, of course, is especially relevant to Oscar Wilde, who himself tried to turn his life into a work of art. How, then, could such a person ever be able to write a 'realistic' account of his life?
The fictionality of the journal is also slightly foregrounded in the two versions that Ackroyd provides of the damaging of Wilde's ear in prison: either he fell on the ground in the exercise yard or knocked his ear against the plank bed, while seeing a hallucination of his dead mother (152). Even Wilde is puzzled about this; either he cannot remember what happened or then he cannot recall what he has already written (or invented) about his life. This kind of uncertainty, obviously, raises questions about the trustworthiness of the narrator, but it can also be seen as a safeguard on Ackroyd's part against naive accusations of possible historical 'inaccuracies' or even lack of 'realism' in the novel. I would argue that such measures actually enhance the feeling of credibility, at the same time as they mock any pretensions to objective truths. The acknowledgement of inaccuracies merely shows what all writing is: ambiguities and blurred 'truths'.
This, then, is the ultimate paradox: the novel questions the objective 'truth' of history writing, at the same time as it itself appears to be a convincing document - one still reads it as if it was by Oscar Wilde himself. This kind of inherent irony is typical of Ackroyd in general, whose works are full of paradoxes, serio-comic semiotic games, intertextual jokes, inexhaustible meanings, etc. On the surface Ackroyd's novels may look fairly conventional, but beneath are hidden all sorts of intellectual games and puzzles.
However, compared to other novels, such as Hawksmoor or Chatterton, Last Testament is still rather mild in its treatment of history (as well as the myths of Romantic originality and realism). Last Testament questions the validity of history writing, but it does not actually deconstruct it by questioning the so-called 'truth values'. Largely, it stays within the limits of our previous knowledge of Oscar Wilde and does not radically try to change it - it merely emphasizes some aspects of the author more than others. Unlike Hawksmoor, it does not change historical dates or people's names, for example, and unlike Chatterton, it does not provide multiple versions of the same events on a large scale. The reason for this, I would argue, is that deconstruction, whether of history writing or of established literary modes, is after all not the main purpose of the book: the ultimate aim and strength of Last Testament lies in its verbal mastery of Oscar Wilde's prose style - a major display of ventriloquism and a convincing act of stylistic imitation, which is later on thematized in Chatterton, and which needs to be further discussed in a section of its own.
So far through my discussion of Last Testament, I have sketched out some of the issues that I see as central to Ackroyd's works: intertextuality, rewriting and revision of literary canon, the blur of boundaries and the deconstruction of hierarchies as well as the questioning of the myths of historical truth, Romantic originality and literary realism. I have also touched upon the question of pastiche and parody, but I have not yet quite tried to elaborate the matter, which is a task I shall set out to do now.
Trying to give a clear definition of parody and pastiche is not an easy thing to do, however, since there are many conflicting ideas about the terms. For Linda Hutcheon (1989: 93) parody is almost synonymous with pastiche or intertextuality, but this, I think, oversimplifies the matter and does not adequately take into account the humorous or ridiculing possibilities of parody that would distinguish it from pastiche. Margaret A. Rose (1993) acknowledges the humorous side of the term but, unlike Hutcheon, tends to emphasize more the reconstructive than the deconstructive qualities of parody. Therefore, a kind of synthesis between these views might be fruitful: I would argue that parody contains both the critical and the humorous element, although it may also have an ambivalent status of both affirming and subverting the object of its ridicule. It is analytic, subversive mimicry, which is often "deflationary and comic" (Fowler, ed., 1973: 137).
Pastiche, in its turn, lacks this comic quality of parody. It is imitation without change: "it is made up largely of phrases, motifs, images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or less unchanged from the work(s) of other author(s)" (Fowler, ed., 1973: 138). It differs from plagiarism in that it does not try to hide anything or deceive anyone: "it is literature frankly inspired by literature" (ibid: 139). According to Fowler (139), it may be both "reverential and appreciative" but it may also be "disrespectful and sometimes deflationary", which is a view that again resembles Hutcheon's theory, although she claims that parody (or intertextuality or pastiche) is "not nostalgic; it is always critical" (Hutcheon, 1989: 93).
How do these definitions, then, work with Last Testament? If we accept the distinctions, then we have a good reason to assert that Last Testament is primarily a work of pastiche - imitation without subversive change. It is faithful to Oscar Wilde's prose style, it imitates his vocabulary and grammar, and it uses the kinds of phrases, motifs and images that we would expect Oscar Wilde to use as an exile in Paris, disillusioned and frank about his fate, slightly less jovial than in his heyday. The novel is not without some humour and irony - which would suggest parody - but then again this is difficult to distinguish from Wilde's usual wit and funny remarks that are often parodic themselves and in any case directed against other people or the prevailing notions of respectability. One may see a critical distance in Last Testament towards Wilde - he is portrayed as self-important and egoistic - but surely the novel is not disrespectful or deflationary, rather the opposite: as I have argued, it is very much appreciative of the writer, especially as an artist.
Whether the novel is nostalgic or not is slightly more ambiguous. Certainly it re-creates the atmosphere of Victorian fin-de-siecle, but then again, as I see it, this is not Ackroyd's main purpose: the verbal mimicry of the novel is first and foremost a defence of pastiche, which even in our times "has been underplayed by Romantic-influenced criticism with its stress on particularity and uniqueness in literature" (Fowler, ed., 1973: 139). In Last Testament Ackroyd shows in practice what he has articulated and defended elsewhere: "[Ezra Pound] was, both in his life and his work, an extraordinarily skilful mimic whose most concise perceptions were often best carried through another person's voice" (Ezra Pound and His World: 97), "[T. S. Eliot] was a good ventriloquist" (T. S. Eliot: 83), "Wilde was not one to shrink from open plagiarism, even plagiarism from himself, when the occasion warranted" (Dorian Gray, 1985: 12). And in Dickens (427-32) there is "A TRUE conversation between imagined selves":
Chatterton. Indeed not. The truest poetry is not the most feigning. It is that which is most borrowed, passed down from poet to poet.
Eliot. I originally entitled The Waste Land "He Do The Police In Different Voices". I took that line from Our Mutual Friend.
Wilde. You did not take it. You rescued it.
Dickens. I was perpetually being accused of stealing work from other novelists, but I did so without realising it at the time.
Wilde. That is the definition of inspiration. (427).
. . .
Dickens. ...All writing is a form of revelation, by which we can move into the shadowy world and borrow from there all the emblems and images which comprehend our state. If William Blake were here -
Chatterton. He will be joining shortly. (430).
Here in a concise, six-page postmodern parodic mini-play integrated into the biography (!), Ackroyd - through the voices of other writers - gives his best definition of what all writing is: intertextual. Indeed, in all of his works he speaks about imitation in positive terms, and is not afraid to do it himself. Even in his least literature-centred works, like Hawksmoor or The House of Doctor Dee, he imitates early 17th century and Elizabethan English, respectively, perhaps even overdoing it. The chapter 6 in Chatterton is convincingly written as if by Thomas Chatterton (although later on it is revealed as a forgery). In English Music, moreover, the central character has a number of dream sequences that echo more than ten different writers, including Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Blake, etc. The biographies themselves often sound like parodies of other biographies:
It was a hot summer, the summer of 1858. The Thames stank, and the sewage of three million people boiled under the sun in what was no more than an open sewer. In the public buildings along the banks of the river, blinds were soaked with chloride and tons of lime were shovelled into the water itself. Boiled bones. Horse meat. Cat gut. Burial grounds. All of them putrefying and fermenting in the heat. This was the climate in which Charles Dickens began his London readings in the second week of June, [etc, etc.] (Dickens, 831).
Whether a slightly grandiose passage like this is (self-)parodic or not, Ackroyd nevertheless has a remarkable ability to appropriate his style to different voices and mediums, even managing to sound quite Dickensian here (cf. the opening of Bleak House: 1-2). Yet even if Ackroyd uses imitation in all of his writing, nowhere is it better executed than in Last Testament. It is the most convincing act of ventriloquism he has yet managed to do, at least partly because of the extent of the enterprise: (almost) the whole novel is written in another writer's style. But how exactly does he do this?
Obviously, it is a matter of both form and content, and in most cases they are inseparable. Ackroyd adjusts his words to the style and subject matter that we are already familiar with Wilde:
You can do two things with the English - you can shock them, or you can amuse them. You can never reason with them, at least if the editorials in The Times are anything to go by. (LT: 48).
Ackroyd uses the formula of a typical Wildean aphorism that is at the same time witty and derisive. Compare it, for example, to this remark uttered by Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray (248):
Civilization is by no means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.
The form is the same: the statement, the elaboration in two parts, and the final punch-line, which often has an ironic twist to it. Ackroyd's versions are often not exactly the same as Wilde's - Wilde's derision, for example, is usually directed against the society, country people, marriage, morality and the English in general, whereas in Ackroyd the mockery tends to be slightly more centred against literature: "[Maurice] wished to begin Jude the Obscure, but I begged him not to. It would add a new horror to the death-bed" (LT: 176). As always, literature is the main concern of Ackroyd, but on the other hand, literary rebukes like these are by no means uncommon in Wilde either (cf. "The Decay of Lying" in Intentions, for example), and the stylistic illusion is effective enough to be convincing.
Besides witty remarks or aphorisms, subversion of 'common truths' is another typical feature of Wilde, who in general was a great lover of artifice: "There is one principle you must understand (...): an artist's life is determined by what he forgets, not by what he remembers" (LT: 69). Paradox is another common characteristic employed by Ackroyd: "in those days I was never more serious than when I was using melodrama" (LT: 64). And obviously, satire is also typical of Wilde: "I had heard of America, unfortunately, before it had heard of me" (LT: 52). Like Ackroyd here, Wilde had in a similar way ridiculed the Americans in "The Canterville Ghost", (in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 45-73):
'I don't think I should like America.'
'I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities', said Virginia satirically.
'No ruins! no curiosities!' answered the Ghost; 'you have your navy and your manners.' (63).
The Ghost's answer is a deliberate misunderstanding, and it is yet another feature of Wilde's wit and humour that Ackroyd is able to pick up in his novel:
'Please, Bosie, do not violate our friendship with words of scorn.'
'Our friendship, as you call it, was violet from the beginning.' (LT: 8).
But humour, whether in the form of aphorisms, irony, parody, satire, word play, etc., is only one quality in the repertoire of Wilde's language that is used by Ackroyd.After all, Wilde did not merely write comedies and funny dialogue, but he was also a master of melodrama and childen's stories as well as being able to provide pathos and suspense (e.g. in Dorian Gray), or passages of beautiful description (e.g. in "The Fisherman and His Soul"). Likewise, Last Testament, even with its humorous elements, is largely a serious book, imitating the more sombre side of Wilde's writing. It has qualities of sadness and decay in it, even world-weariness and ennui - exactly as we would expect from a man whose life and career has been ruined, a man who can only look backwards in his life and contemplate his destiny with grief mixed with wounded pride: "I had appealed to the world to save my reputation, and it crushed me" (138). Ackroyd, in other words, is able to re-create not only the humour but also the poignancy that is so characteristic of Wilde.
Ackroyd himself comments upon Wilde's language. He draws our attention to its artificiality as well as points out the fact that it was a conscious creation:
[I]n those days we assailed each other with extravagant phrases, and often carefully examined them. 'No, Oscar,' Frank would tell me, 'don't say, "It is a terrible thing that..." That sounds like an Irish expression. Simply say, "It is terrible that..." He was immensely helpful to me. (41).
This means that Ackroyd, in fact, mixes imitation with criticism: he foregrounds his own style, and cleverly brings our attention to it, at the same time as he critically examines Wilde's:
[I]ndeed I have always attempted to express in my own tongue the languor and the eroticism of the French writers. Their sentences are like flowers pressed tightly together: no light can pass them which is not dazed by colour and infected by scent. (62).
Ackroyd's metaphor both precisely captures and describes the atmosphere of Wilde's prose. Ackroyd here not only copies Wilde's style and content but also interprets it, and in both ways catches an essential quality of Wilde's writing. We only need to compare it, for example, to the opening paragraph of Dorian Gray (23), which in a similar way combines sensuality with languor, flowery scents with erotic colours:
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Oscar Wilde's passage paves the way for one of the homoerotic scenes of the book. Homoeroticism is what Ackroyd also employs, but with more frankness than Wilde ever did. With Ackroyd we do not simply get vague suggestions of romance, as in Dorian Gray, but quite candid descriptions of Wilde's sex life. There are at least two reasons for this: on the one hand Ackroyd knows that this added explicitness will make rather interesting reading in our increasingly voyeristic age, but on the other, this is also quite justified in the fact that now as an exile, Wilde has nothing left to hide any more. Since he has already lost his reputation, he can just as well reveal everything (even if still hoping for forgiveness). And are not confessions, like Last Testament, moreover, always intended to be more or less revealing anyway?
However, Ackroyd's pastiche, as usual, is not mere imitation or recycling of the old material; it also contains strong elements of pure invention, written in the spirit of playful emulation. The three stories that the fictional Wilde recounts are good examples of this: The first is about a poet who loses his gifts as soon as he faces the reality of his life (62-3). The second tells the story of a young prince who commits suicide after trying to escape from his beautiful, but sterile, palace into the real world where Poverty and Sorrow as well as Passion and Joy could be found (84-7). The third is about a young man who deserts his betrothed girl in order to slay the king whose face is stamped in the coins that he finds; he dies as an old man, when he realises that the wrinkled face in the coins is his own (146-9) - almost like in Dorian Gray. All these stories could well have been written by Oscar Wilde. They may not be as good as Wilde's own children's stories, but then again the fictional Wilde complains that "All powers of imagination have deserted me now" (11) - again an apt safeguard on Ackroyd's part against accusations of 'poor plots'.
Still, these stories clearly echo Wilde's own fairy tales. The second story, for example, about the young prince is a kind of negative reversal of "The Young King" (in Savile: 85-98), with its unhappy ending and its name of the palace, Sans souci, ironically alluding to that of Wilde's story, Joyeuse. There is also veiled social criticism included - in the typical Wildean manner:
'What are these things I have dreamed of, Poverty and Sorrow?' The courtiers were quite astounded, since they could not imagine how he had discovered such things in his beautiful chamber. 'They are vulgarisms, your Highness,' the Lord Chamberlain replied, 'invented by the common people. They are not known in Society.' (LT: 85).
Ackroyd's story, in other words, replicates the same sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden that pervades such stories as "The Young King" or "The Happy Prince".
However, the three stories are not just playful emulations of Wilde's fairy tales; beneath the surface can be found deeper symbolic meanings, too, that reflect the situation in which Oscar Wilde now finds himself (as in fact there are deeper symbolism in Wilde's own fairy tales; they are not just surface 'stories'). The poet in the first story, for example, is clearly Wilde himself: he sought inspiration for his art at the expense of his wife and family, and when the reality of the world was finally revealed to him in prison, he largely lost his impersonal creativity, becoming increasingly autobiographical in his De Profundis and The Ballad of the Reading Gaol. The two other stories in a similar way parallel Wilde's wish to escape the norms of society (84-7) and reflect his belief in the inevitability of destiny (146-99), which already was a central theme in "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime", for example. All these stories in Last Testament, moreover, are more pessimistic in tone than Wilde ever wrote, but this is clearly a mere indication of his desperation as an exile.
The symbolism of the stories can also be seen to reflect Wilde as an Aesthete. Just as these stories mirror Wilde's life, so did he in reality try to turn his own life into a work of art. Art and life, indeed, have always been strangely intertwined in Oscar Wilde, and this is a point that Ackroyd also very much utilizes in his novel for effects of successful imitation. In "The Decay of Lying" (in Intentions: 31-1) Oscar Wilde wrote that "Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life (...) A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in popular form..." Consequently, Ackroyd's Wilde constantly confirms these ideas: he has adopted the name of Sebastian Melmoth (as he did in real life) and compares his situation to that of Faust or Jesus, Stupor Mundi or the Anti-Christ (48). He sees himself as "Zeus and Athene all at once" (33) and says that he "could weep for [his children] longer than Niobe, who wept for ever, and mourn more bitterly than Demeter ever did" (78). About his marriage he comments that
Constance and I were like characters out of Modern Love. I do not suppose that anyone had experienced marital discord until Meredith invented it, but nevertheless it was a ridiculous posture - to be reduced to a poem (78-9).
Similarly, at one point the fictional Wilde sees his life as a classical tragedy and at another a cheap melodrama (79). The relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in Last Testament, moreover, is largely modelled upon that of Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray (e.g. LT: 127), and in all these similes and comparisons to literature can be seen the kind of reading and experience that we can assume Oscar Wilde himself had gathered. The comparisons to classical mythology and contemporary literature reflect his literary tastes throughout.
In fact, it is interesting to notice here that Wilde's idea of life imitating art, expressed in 'The Decay of Lying' and applied in Last Testament, anticipates our postmodern ideas about the human 'self': we, like Oscar Wilde in Ackroyd's novel, see ourselves through the light of the texts that we encounter in our lives, rather than create meanings by virtue of our 'innate' reason, as Descartes once believed. The human subject, as Wilde, too, realised (before the postmodernists), is not an independent Cartesian unity as such, but is actually intertextually defined, always subjected to language, culture, texts and art (cf. Saariluoma, 1992). In Last Testament Ackroyd matches this poststructuralist intertextual view of the 'self' to Wilde's very similar ideas about life and art, and uses the two views simultaneously, without contradiction (as is the case in Dan Leno, too, where Ackroyd makes the intertextual 'self' one of his central themes. See 4.3.). Thus, by drawing our attention to the fact that Wilde's idea of the self resembles our postmodern view of the 'self', Ackroyd makes us realise that Oscar Wilde was ahead of his time: intellectually Wilde was closer to our time than the puritanical age into which he was born. (Ackroyd in general shares close artistic and intellectual affinities with Oscar Wilde and obliquely makes this clear in his novel.)
So far I have illustrated some of the aspects that not only highlight Ackroyd's gift of literary ventriloquism but also speak for his profound understanding of his subject. Without going into deeper linguistic details, I have drawn attention to those aspects of Wilde's writing that I consider most salient and important, and which I feel Ackroyd has managed to utilize particularly well in his imitation. This has comprised aspects of humour and seriousness, general atmosphere and style, as well as connections to Wilde's personal life, fairy tales, Symbolism and Aestheticism. There is, however, one more aspect that cannot be avoided but needs to be, if only briefly, further discussed here and that is Decadence.
Decadence in the English context is a somewhat vague term, but if such a movement ever took place, then Oscar Wilde, with his public and private life as well as his works such as "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime", The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Salomé, became an essential part of it. Oscar Wilde took aestheticism as far as it would go and so gave 'decadence' an English definition (Gilman, 1979: 121). Thus Last Testament itself can be seen as a Decadent novel with the 'decadent' Oscar Wilde as its central character. (Also some aspects of Hawksmoor and The House of Doctor Dee are clearly decadent.) According to Malcolm Bradbury (1993: 401) this reappearence of Decadence in late twentieth-century British fiction in general parallels the same apocalyptic mood of fin-de-siecle that was so tangible one hundred years ago as well. According to him (401), this return to the mood of Decadence in the 1980s and 90s was a more widespread phenomenon in British and American literature than just in Ackroyd, although he was certainly one of the first to do it.
Thus some features of Oscar Wilde's Decadence, affirmed by Ackroyd in his novel, include his egomania ("I enjoyed praise, I admit it. I like to be liked", LT: 89); his admiration for immorality, sin and crime ("I succumbed to strange sins...and made a philosophy out of insincerity", LT: 89); his central glorification of art ("the only matters of any importance were Art and the things of Art", LT: 65); and his despising of popular opinion ("Of course I knew that my plays were potboilers - exquisite potboilers - and I disowned each one as soon as it was successful", LT: 88) (cf. Thornton, 1983: 66). Also words like world-weariness, self-indulgence, ultrarefined, overcivilized, debauchery, effeteness, depravity, hedonism, luxuriousness, decay, degeneration and retrogression (Gilman, 1979: 24) very much describe the portrait of the artist painted here. Further characteristics of Ackroyd's Wilde are his hatred of the modern age (cf. Gilman, 1979: 100) and nostalgia for more robust and dramatic ages; his examination and cultivation of the forbidden, the tainted (ibid, 91); his dandyism and elegance in dress, as well as his retreat from reality into the spirituality created by art (Bradbury, ed: 1979: 28). Also neurasthania ("In my state of nervous hysteria, I thought I would go mad", LT: 155); excess, richness and corruptness ("I was drinking so excessively that even my friends began to whisper about me", LT: 118); as well as sexual perversity ("My real joy was to watch two boys together in the various acts of love and pleasure myself as they did so", LT: 118) (cf. Gilman, 1979: 103) are included, as indeed are countless other Decadent features, such as boredom as an excuse for corrupt sensuality (ibid, 83); degenerated Roman Catholicism and lack of Christian faith (ibid, 103); the slight mysticism of colours (Thornton, 1983: 66); the idea of the "fatal book" corrupting its reader (such as Huysman's A Rebours) (Dowling: 1986: 170-3); the admiration of style above content in language and literature (Bradbury, ed: 1979: 20), etc.
This list could be continued, but perhaps these examples are enough. My point with Decadence is that Ackroyd has researched his subject well and turned his knowledge into a pastiche that integrates a vast material of historical and cultural information, with Oscar Wilde as the mouthpiece of this information, so that the overall impression begins to resemble consummate ventriloquism, a perfect replica of Wilde's 'voice'. With these aspects of Wilde's personality and demeanour Ackroyd more or less affirms the picture of Wilde we have already gathered from other books, but at the same time he goes beyond them by fictionalizing and dramatizing his subject. The effect of this combination of scholarly historical research, pure imagination and stylistic imitation is that now we - paradoxically again - not only get a better view of history than in history books, but we also have a strong illusion of reading a text that could well be by Oscar Wilde.
This is not a small achievement, and it is a venture that could easily go wrong. But I think Ackroyd has managed to retain the illusion more or less complete throughout the novel. It is a display of intertextuality in practice; it is a stylistic tour de force, which is in accordance with the propositions laid out in Notes: literature is always about other literature, even when it tries to hide it; therefore, the proper subject of literature is literature itself. Ackroyd's Wilde himself has something to say about this: "The first law of imagination...[is]...that in his work the artist is someone other than himself" (LT: 131), "almost all the methods and conventions of art found their highest expression in parody" (50). And this, of course, is what Ackroyd has more or less done in Last Testament: he has imagined himself into a position of someone else, while creating a work of art that is about other literature almost to the point of parody. It confirms its own logic of being a convincing literary enterprise in its own right - indeed, it is almost a 'realistic' novel - although this 'realism' is rooted in the skilful use of language that is foregrounded, not made 'transparent' as in literary realism. Ackroyd draws our attention to language as such and makes us appreciate it for its own sake, rather than pretend that language is a mere vehicle for depicting the outside world, as the realist school professes to do. Thus in Last Testament Ackroyd has proved his skills as a literary stylist in practice; in Chatterton he continues with this subject and deals with it in theory, by making imitation and forgery one of his central themes.