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86 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 1 Denotative Signifier [Wilde’s signifying codes] 2 Denotative Signified [Wilde’s personal social identity] 3 Denotative Sign I CONNOTATIVE SIGNIFIER [Wilde’s transgessive reinscription] III CONNOTATIVE SIGN [Homosexual social identity] Figure Connotative Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s legal inscription CONNOTATIVE SIGNIFIED [Name-of-the- Homosexual] Source: After the diagram by Kaja Silverman, Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 27. him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does ‘perform. (168) Wilde’s transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity, perceived as defused by transformation (through the forced mediation of a juridico-legal inscription) into the signifier of the sexological type and believed to be safely contained discursively by the frame of the name and physically by the frame of the prison, uncannily conforms to the process of ideological production outlined by Roland Barthes in his early work Mythologies. Barthes’s focus there was on the issue of connotation, or second-order signifying systems that are built upon already existing ones, a model which, though negatively critiqued in S/Z (6–7), is still one that he was unsure of rejecting completely, seeing in it possible applications for those texts “committed to the closure system” (7). Such a text is Wilde’s legal inscription which had for its goal a closure through containment and for which, in my opinion, Barthes’s early connotative model is still valid. Connotation is a signifying model within which the denotative signifier and the denotative signified join together to form the connotative signifier. In other words, the denotative sign…becomes in its entirety the starting point for the connotative process. The connotative sign consists of both parts of the denotative sign as well as the additional meaning or meanings which. they have helped generate. (Silverman 26–27) This additional meaning(s) is the site of ideology, which Barthes located as the connotative signified (1973:111–117). Wilde’s trials, when subjected to a connotative analysis, yield the following outline (Figure). The denotative signifier (Wilde’s signifying codes of dress, gesture, speech, text) and the denotative signified (homoerotic desire issuing from a named individual) join together to form the connotative signifier. The denotative sign (Wilde’s
UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 87 transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity) becomes in its entirety the starting point for the connotative process (the juridico-legal inscription). The connotative sign (the homosexual social identity) consists of both parts of the denotative sign (as connotative signifier) attached through inscription to the connotative signified (the Name-of-the-Homosexual). Because Wilde had finally succeeded in collapsing the distinctions between desiring and desired, he himself had forced the legal inscription into a secondorder signification by providing a readymade connotative signifier. The result was that the newly constructed homosexual sign had to mold itself in the image of Wilde. The only signifier available to the legal apparatus was composed of Wilde’s own personal identity and his idiosyncratic Delsartean code of signification. This was inevitable since the sign was constructed for the express purpose of cultural containment of both. It appears that it was Wilde who was still pulling the puppet strings in a bizarre manipulation that mirrored Basil Hallward’s self-immolation in Dorian Gray, a perverse will to immortality accomplished by transforming himself into a surface available for inscription and sacrificially offered up to the State. As Wayne Koestenbaum put it: Wilde discover[ed] the possibility of reading the Law against itself… opening up a rift within the Law and finding a sexual surprise. The surprise is Wilde’s resurrection: the persistence of his reputation and of the homosexual “type” molded in his image. (187) If we read Wilde’s containing inscription into discourse and his physical containment behind bars as the successful culmination of his efforts to construct a personal homosexual social identity, then a solution to one of history’s most perplexing psycho-mysteries can be offered. Between the close of his libel suit against Queensberry and his unavoidable prosecution by the state in the second trial, Wilde was given the opportunity to leave the country. He did not take it. Friends, relatives, his legal counsel, even Queensberry himself warned him to get out, and efforts were made to assist him (Croft-Cooke 202–203; Ellmann 1988:455–456, 466–473; Harris 140–141, 163–164; Hyde 1975: 224–225). Instead, he simply waited for the state to begin its inscriptory process. He allowed himself to be martyred. For almost fifteen years he had tried to achieve the construction of a homosexual social identity, and he needed the state to finish the job he had started. Wilde needed the state’s dominance, with its control over signification, in order to complete the project by linking his transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity to sexology’s homosexual type. In this regard, Michel de Certeau has propounded that “The name imposed by the other is…authorized by nothing, and that is its special trait. …The name is not authorized by any meaning; on the contrary, it authorizes signification” (39). This is in agreement with Anthony Giddens when he put it that “Structures of signification always
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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First published 1994 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of plates vi List of
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11 Richard Halverson as Lady Enid a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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2 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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1 PERFORMING “AKIMBO” Queer pri
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Page 54 and 55: Plate 1 Joan Jett Blakk, “The May
Page 56 and 57: Plate 3 Prince Rupert, from a broad
Page 58 and 59: Plate 5 Actor Robert Wilks, from Co
Page 60 and 61: Plate 7 Antinous and Dancing Master
Page 62 and 63: 2 NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE Textual ca
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Page 130 and 131: 112 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION pieces th
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 15
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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