Abstract
There are few commonplaces in studies of Oscar Wilde as widely accepted as the power of performatives, but this version of performatives is usually extruded through a narrow set of poststructuralist concerns for language as a form of constraint, where uncertainty affords liberation. This narrow picture excludes much of the value of the theory first envisioned by J.L. Austin. I argue for a more faithfully Austinian approach to Wilde, and I show how the poststructuralist picture of linguistic uncertainty ignores the role of contexts and conventions of use that allow structurally unstable language to produce sensible and pragmatically fixed meanings. For Wilde (and for Austin), certainty and truth remain viable and useful in many contexts, and the constraints of language must be understood through the constraints individuals and societies impose.
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Notes
- 1.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde v. 8. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993) p. 30.
- 2.
Terry Eagleton, “Saint Oscar: A Foreword,” The New Left Review 1.177 (1989), p. 125.
- 3.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche: Writings from the Early Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), p. 257.
- 4.
John Kucich argues in The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) that many Victorian fiction writers rejected dominant cultural values of plain-speaking, earnestness, and truth-telling, imbuing lies with positive cultural values such as moral sophistication, expression of desire, resistance to power, and individuation from damaging social norms (especially gender norms).
- 5.
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited INC (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 13; hereafter abbreviated “SEC.” I would like to avoid the rather nasty debate between Derrida and John Searle (though I agree with many of Searle’s issues with Derrida’s interpretation of Austin), focusing instead on what can be done with Austin. For an explanation of the fundamental differences between Austin and Derrida, see Stanley Cavell’s “What Did Derrida Want of Austin?” Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 42–65; hereafter abbreviated “WDD.”
- 6.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 179; hereafter abbreviated GT.
- 7.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 26, 44.
- 8.
Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 51; hereafter abbreviated “HL.”
- 9.
Critics argue that Wilde’s literary representations and his representations in public media played a role in the creation of a homosexual identity in late-Victorian society. See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); hereafter abbreviated WC.
- 10.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), p. 118; hereafter abbreviated HTD.
- 11.
J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” Philosophical Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 130; hereafter abbreviated “PE.”
- 12.
Although in “SEC” Derrida criticizes Austin for excluding “non-serious,” “parasitic” (read literary) uses of language from his theory, Austin’s interest in action explains why he excludes them. Literary language, for example, does not mean something different from other kinds of language, but the ways it constitutes action and invites audiences to react are significantly different. For philosophical treatments of ordinary language philosophy and literature that acknowledge this position, see John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), Bernard Harrison, What is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), and David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).
- 13.
Austin calls this sort of word a trouser-word because its negative “wears the trousers,” like “real” in the phrase “not a real duck.” See J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 70.
- 14.
Douglas Robinson’s Introducing Performative Pragmatics (New York: Routledge, 2006) is a rare exception to this trend. Robinson analyzes Wilde’s manipulations of Gricean maxims in “The Decay of Lying” and The Importance of Being Earnest.
- 15.
Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 11; hereafter abbreviated AW.
- 16.
William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 198; hereafter abbreviated SS.
- 17.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 297; hereafter abbreviated IBE.
- 18.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Scribner, 1969), p. 79; hereafter abbreviated MWM.
- 19.
Michael Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 94.
- 20.
Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlett Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 207; hereafter abbreviated IPSM.
- 21.
See Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 26.
- 22.
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated PWH.
- 23.
Kevin Ohi, Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 109. Despite his pragmatic conclusion, Ohi maintains a typically poststructuralist distrust of fixing, dictating, or delimiting meanings in tidy conceptual containers. He urges critics to avoid seeking a pedagogical message in Wilde, and instead “consider our perpetual failure to remain baffled, our perhaps inevitable move to recuperate as tendentious insights the exquisite seductions of our bafflement” (p. 139).
- 24.
Christopher Schaberg, The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 1.
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Mueller, L. (2022). Bunbury Could Not Live, That Is What I Mean: Austin’s Performative Speech and Truth in the Case of Oscar Wilde. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Literature and its Language. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12330-6_3
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