“Se solo Wilde fosse vivo per vederti”: la lunga ombra di Oscar Wilde sull’opera di James Joyce
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4454/syn.v4.905Keywords:
Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Exile, Art, IrelandAbstract
The ideal dialogue established by James Joyce with Oscar Wilde is not immediately obvious, but one feels bewildered when its hidden ‘borrowings’ are revealed, starting from “Telemachus”, the very first episode of Ulysses. How can one not feel puzzled when discovering that the famous “cracked mirror of a servant girl” referred to by Stephen Dedalus as “a symbol of Irish art” is not Joyce’s, but Wilde’s conception? Joyce drew on Wilde not only to talk about the fate of Irish art, as in the article he dedicated to him in Trieste’s Piccolo della Sera on 24 March 1909, but also to allude in his writings to the theme of homosexuality. As a matter of fact, Joyce’s entire work overflows with debts, references, allusions and quotations, more or less explicit, to Wilde’s texts. One need only mention Stephen Dedalus’s habit of speaking in aphorisms and epigrams, in apologies and parables. Their very common condition of exiles/artists would be enough to read their works and biographies in the light of some parallelism. If, in “Telemachus”, Joyce has Buck Mulligan proclaim that “We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes”, in this contribution I will try to show how far this is from reality. Wilde inhabits not only Ulysses, but also – and especially – Finnegans Wake, where Joyce thematises the topic of the ‘fall’ and traces the ultimate ‘portrait’ of a long series.
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