I can say that. But immediate expectations don't always line up with theories.
So that was my image of Wilde, whether it made sense or not. And so I'm finding that reading his fairy tales - he wrote nine of them, in two small books very clearly as Improving Books for Younger Readers, which were, a century later, adapted by P. Craig Russell into a series of five slim volumes of comics - has been an exercise in expectations vs. reality. (See my first post, on The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, from about two months ago.) Wilde means what he writes in these stories: they are classic fairy tales, with a moral and everything, designed to impart important wisdom to an audience assumed to be young and pliable enough to accept that wisdom.
And I was not used to a Wilde writing without multiple layers of irony.
Most obviously: these are vaguely Christian, in a generally middle-Church Anglican way. There's a Jesus figure in one of the stories in the first book, and there's another one here in the second, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket. Reading Wilde almost a hundred and fifty years later, that was unexpected. It shouldn't have been - Wilde was both a man of his age and (I should have remembered) fond of Christ metaphors in De Profundis - but it was.
So, first off: Wilde's fairy tales, I think, are light and cutting, like much of his work - but essentially serious in aim, which his plays are definitely not. With that in mind, let's look at the two stories here, as adapted by Russell.
The Young King is the longer, more substantial piece, with a few elements (notably the Christ imagery) that echo The Star Child from the first book. Our title character is sixteen and it is the night before his coronation. He has an odd ancestry - child of a runaway princess and her goatherd lover, retrieved in later childhood as the only heir - that seems designed to make him clearly not the standard young prince type. Our lad loves Beauty, in a way that read to me as gay coding but may have been meant by Wilde as a less subtle way of saying he's obsessed by material things. By "Beauty" - I feel the need to capitalize it, as Wilde often does - the young man means the finest materials, the most exquisite jewels, the greatest workmanship: all of the luxuries that incredibly rich people, such as kings, are able to demand.
Anyway, that night before his coronation, this young man sleeps and has multiple dreams, which we are meant to take as true visions. He sees the grinding work and horrible conditions of the people who actually make the beautiful things for his coronation regalia, and so changes his mind: he will eschew all of the fripperies, and proceed to the cathedral in his old goatherd clothes.
Naturally, all of the nobles, the assembled throngs of peasantry, and even the Bishop who is to crown him are strongly opposed, but our hero Is Correct, and is bathed in the light of God at the appropriate moment. He becomes king, and the story quietly ends without trying to describe how he will actually rule with his new understanding.
The Remarkable Rocket is a simpler and shorter story, among the fireworks assembled for another royal celebration, the upcoming wedding of a prince and princess. One large rocket is incredibly self-centered, supercilious, hectoring, and nearly every other possible negative trait you can think of. He talks endlessly, boring the other fireworks, and then works himself into a fit of tears over a potential future he declares only he is sensitive enough to care about. Those tears mean he cannot be fired off as he's supposed to, which leads to his being discarded, and, eventually - after also boring a succession of barnyard animals and others - shooting off unnoticed and pointlessly.
The lesson here is clearly "understand your role in things," or, more generally, "don't be a self-centered ass." It's amusing in that extremely over-the-top way of really obvious fairy tales, the ones constructed so even the stupidest children in the room will get it.
As in the first book, Russell draws all of this with lightness and energy - he's particularly good with light in Young King, and his colors are superb throughout. He also incorporates a huge amount of Wilde's prose into his story, with long captions throughout both stories. As usual with Russell, it's a very thoughtful, close adaptation.
I still find the actual stories told here a bit obvious and flat, in that hectoring mode "for kids" that I disliked when actually a child and haven't warmed up much to since. But Wilde's language is precise and cutting, and Russell's art is beautiful and carefully poised, so this is an excellent presentation of the material...it's just that tend to think the material is poking me to stand up straight and fix my hair a bit more than I'd like.
No comments:
Post a Comment