39. Oscar Wilde - 'The Selfish Giant' (1888)

'He's bought a building! He's bought a building! Great!
(Cassetteboy, 'I Am the Guv'Nor, You Deal with Me', Carry on Breathing, 2008)

'it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world.'
(Oscar Wilde, The Complete Oscar Wilde, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, p.292)

Not so much deployment of the paradox; little of the sophisticated wit of the kind one might expect of this writer. Instead, socialist - or even Communist - allegory with implicit, verging upon explicit, denunciation of the idea of private property.

The Selfish Giant erects in his garden a notice-board with the words : 'TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED' - shown centred on the page in a box. An ancient and modern mantra of those who would lay claim to land. Today, property ownership may be a smugly infantilised game - Channel 4's programmes such as Property Snakes and Ladders - and assumed 'right'. Meaning we are just as in need of Bertram Ingledew's astonished indignation and Cassetteboy's ingenious, hilarious and righteous Morrisian cut-ups.

The British obsession with owner occupation - leading often to a metaphorical lowering of the drawbridge against the world and other people - is a key part of why are a less civilised nation than, say, Germany. Also partly why we are so Conservative at the ballot box.

The sublimely sneaky, subversive 'A Sphinx without a Secret' is more redolent of the Wilde one expects from the plays and the life, with its piercing view of romantic rituals and bourgeois city life. This is more simple, on-the-surface rather than concerned with surfaces; there is an almost anti-Wildean simplicity at work, for example, 'He was a very selfish Giant' is indented as a paragraph on its own.

Grasping acquisitiveness gives way to generosity and nature; a vision somewhat in line with that of Hans Christian Andersen. The Wildean mark is clear in how he characterises the Giant at the beginning; he returns home after seven years staying with his friend the Cornish ogre: 'After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle.' (p.291) That he lacks conversational skills does not sit well with the convivial Wilde, whose table talk was legendary and often facilitated his creativity; it marks the Giant out as bad and limited, in comparison to the communal harmony of the children who he finds playing in his garden.

Typically for both allegory and the Wildean fairy tale, the elements and seasons are personified; Autumn, for example, acts to punish the giant by withholding her fruit from his garden: ' " He is too selfish," she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.' (p.292) This anti-realism reflects how rooted in tradition Wilde was; sometimes he subverts it, but always he draws upon it - for example, the deployment of tropes from Victorian Melodrama in his early plays.

Nature, as in Andersen, works to negate the evil in individuals, and provides for communality to re-assert itself at the end. Indeed, white blossom serves as a symbol of the Giant's moral ascension, described as covering his dead body at the close.

To get a true sense of Wilde, one must go beyond the plays; an understanding of them is to be enriched by perusal of his essays and short-stories - which reveal an ardent socialist and anti-Wienerite, brethren of William Morris and in line with other such currents in post-1850 literature and culture. While I prefer 'Sphinx' to this, it has to be stressed that they each inform the other; irreverent social satire and absurdity given the ballast of Christian Socialism, and vice versa.

8/10

35. Hans Christian Andersen - 'The Snow Queen' (1845)

‘Though I was brought up on both, Norse mythology has always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek; Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen and George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin were my favourite fairy stories and years before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did those feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.’

(W.H. Auden, 'I Like it Cold', House and Garden, December 1947)

"As the modern Danish critic Villy Sorensen has observed, Andersen saw the snow queen's icy world as the proper home for someone whose heart has been replaced by chilly reason--a category in which Andersen certainly placed many of his contemporaries" (169).

(http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/snowqueen/index.html)

This is, according to Auden, a story with more sophistication than is perceived in mere folk tales - that 'mere' will be examined in a forthcoming week of 'founding texts', where I will be tackling religious and mythical stories.

It is profound, it is a beautiful piece of work - with a certain stark poetry in its symmetries. The message is simple and profound; HCA warns us of cleverness for its own sake, shown leading to a hardness of heart - shatteringly expressed in the studied desolation of that image of Kay: 'And away flew the Snow Queen, leaving little Kay quite alone in the great hall which was so many miles in length; so he sat and looked at his pieces of ice, and was thinking so deeply, and sat so still, that any one might have supposed he was frozen.'

Then there is the gender issue; as the annotations suggest, there are eight strong female characters and only the lost, adrift Kay representing the masculine - a masculine susceptible to corruption and coldness. When Gerda finally locates him after her epic journeying, his reaction to her joy at finding him is non-existent:

'But he sat quite still, stiff and cold.

Then little Gerda wept hot tears, which fell on his breast, and penetrated into his heart, and thawed the lump of ice, and washed away the little piece of glass which had stuck there.'

There is a Christianity at work; the song sung by Gerda refers to a 'Christ-child' and the story ends with their grandmother imparting a moral from the pages of the Bible. Yet, it is an approachable, welcoming Christianity ending symbolically with the scene of 'warm, beautiful summer'. Andersen conveys a warmth all the more potent for the delineation of what it is to be cold, with that stark image of Kay alone and unresponsive, locked in his pitiless games of logic. As with Blake, this is a consideration of Innocence and Experience, and an interpretation of Christianity more persuasive than found in the institutions or perhaps even the Bible itself. This is, intriguingly, fused with a rather pagan usage of shamanistic tropes and motifs throughout, clearly rooted in the northern culture.

There is an interesting, if inevitably partial, parallel to be drawn with Trollope and later British writers who opposed 'sophisticated' ways and cleverness: '“That boy will be very clever; he has a remarkable genius.” [...] His games, too, were quite different; they were not so childish. One winter’s day, when it snowed, he brought out a burning-glass, then he held out the tail of his blue coat, and let the snow-flakes fall upon it. “Look in this glass, Gerda,” said he; and she saw how every flake of snow was magnified, and looked like a beautiful flower or a glittering star. “Is it not clever?” said Kay, “and much more interesting than looking at real flowers. There is not a single fault in it, and the snow-flakes are quite perfect till they begin to melt.”'

Indeed, this can be said to anticipate the revulsion that traditionalists feel and have felt for the modern world, with mass production and easy reproduction of images and goods. The didactic message seems to be that such things distract us and divert us from our common humanity; Andersen indicts the scientific and rational: 'Kay’s fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of glass still sticking in his eye.' This is indeed the anti-Defoe in many ways; whilst HCA uses details to make symbolic, moral points, veracity does not become an issue. Such was the impression on Auden that the central image of Kay's pity and emotions locked

The values are traditional - for good or ill - and it can certainly be imagined what the arch-libertarian leftist Grant Allen, author of The British Barbarians (1895), would make of such moralising: Gerda throws away her red shoes, which denote sin, showing HCA's adherence to societal taboos. However, the William Morris view - not far from GA's - can be said to accord in its essential purism regarding landscape and work. It is on the question of the freedom of the enlightened individual where Allen / Morris / Chesterton place a greater emphasis - Andersen shows a traditional social order that is stable barring the threat from Reason. They define that term 'reason' slightly more stringently than Andersen, and Victorian etiquette and mores come under assault as well as industrialisation.

But then Andersen is not writing a 'Hill Top novel', but establishing a northern mythology - designed to influence and inspire the young. In the strict terms of what is communicated and the imagery used, this is presumably peerless in its field, and also bears comparison with 'adult'-targeted poetry and prose which asserts and contrasts pagan and Christian themes. It is indeed worthy of Auden - it formed him - and should concern and inform us all.

One of the poet's greatest poems is informed by Andersen's stark imagery; Kay's affliction mirrored in the state of Europe in 1939:

'In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.'

(W.H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', February 1939; The English Auden: Poems, Essays, & Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Faber and Faber, 1977)

10/10

11. Angela Carter - 'Flesh and the Mirror' (1974)

'there had been a displacement of mail reminiscent of the excesses of the nineteenth-century novel, such as it is difficult to believe and could only have been caused by a desperate emotional necessity to cause as much confusion as possible.'

(Angela Carter, Fireworks, Virago, 1988, p.79)

We have a classic portrayal here of self and not of society; surely the imprint of the 'Me Decade' being felt. It is of couse a lot more complex than a simple reading that 'the post-war British political consensus was crumbling and greater individualism' was making itself apparent', but that interpretation is definitely valid in itself.

Carter's story is quintessential seventies, but in the transnational, postmodernist sense; very little British television or music was as cosmopolitan, as fundamentally rootless as this is. 'Flesh and the Mirror' is rooted in the ambiguities of language itself and in a transnational literary tradition. It is the perspective of the literary European experiencing Asia, and Tokyo in particular, being frankly unable to comprehend its effect: 'You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen.' (p.79) As is textbook for the postmodern of this time, there are references both to High (Flaubert - the first-person narrator experiences 'Bovary syndrome', p.79) and Popular Culture: self aware role-playing: 'My demonstration of pertubation was perfect in every detail, just like the movies.' (p.83)

I wouldn't say, overall, that this delicately wrought tale has quite the force of Jean Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929), as an aestheticised vision of games and personae. However, it is very much in this esteemed company, in its deft marshalling of the dream mode of life as experienced by this individual adrift in the world's largest city - a puppeteer aiming for chaos rather than stringent order. 'passionate sensibilities' ' romantic spectacle' 'existential lacunae' 'accidental-on-purpose misreadings of train timetables' - Carter conveys the non-sense of this state of love; of love and lover as imagined creation, of love as an offshoot of self, not as a coming-together. The ending deploys a bathos that shatters the illusion; the 'palimpsest' that has been her 'love' laid bare. (p.88)

8/10