ABSTRACT
Almost a full century after the height of aestheticism, French theorist Michel Serres seems to channel the aphoristic exuberance of Oscar Wilde when, early in his book The Five Senses, he pauses to praise the Greeks. In “their exquisite wisdom,” Serres writes, the Greeks “combined order and adornment in the same word, the art of adorning and that of ordering. ‘Cosmos’ designates arrangement, harmony and law, the rightness of things: here is the world … but also decoration … ornamentation is as vast as the world” (32). Through a close reading of Wilde’s critical essay, “The Critic as Artist,” with some interpolations from “The Decay of Lying” and key citations of Walter Pater’s famous description of La Gioconda in The Renaissance, Becker-Leckrone’s chapter explores two key ways in which the Greek concept of cosmos, as Serres helpfully outlines it, plays out in Wilde’s text. There has been much analysis of Wilde’s affinity for artificiality, lying, and insincerity. The most tired, cartoonish versions of these critiques (Max Nordau’s, in Degeneration, among others) have largely been put to rest. Still, critics have not fully accounted for the radicality of Wilde’s rejection of the mimetic assumption: the notion that art is, or should be, representational. Matthew Potolsky has usefully called this process of repetitive, close-knit citation “mimetic canonization.” But Becker-Leckrone prefers the term cosmesis because it stresses the anti-mimetic gestures within this canonization. Wilde’s subversions of Enlightenment/Romantic individualism (that art should be “original”), the chapter argues, are still more poorly understood. The sense of cosmos as making, not copying, an existing world is an important rebuke against nineteenth-century Realism, which Wilde’s criticism consistently attacks. But so too is it a rejection of the individual genius in favor of the generative creative community—cosmos as an aesthetically conceived cosmopolitanism. Together, these propositions form the aesthetic foundations of the “cosmopolitan criticism” Wilde posits at the end of “The Critic as Artist,” and imagines for the future, two kinds of aesthetic world-ing, so to speak.
