Читать книгу Oscar Wilde’s Stories for All Ages - Оскар Уайльд, Stephen Fry, F. H. Cornish - Страница 12

The Remarkable Rocket is written in the comic style Wilde made famous: it is a story crammed with satirical observations, paradoxes, epigrams and—if you’ll forgive the pun—squibs.

Hubris, pomposity, vanity, the glamour and egotism of youth, I suppose these could be said to be the subject and the targets of the satire, but it is all worn very lightly. Oscar’s unhappy trial, imprisonment and exile might lead some to think that he was a remarkable rocket himself—that meteoric rise, the brilliant shower of wit and then the shocking explosion and calamitous fall to the muddy ground. At the height of his fame and fortune Wilde knew all too well how much people would like to see him fail. He knew all too well how shallow and facile they believed him to be. He probably agreed that at times his life was shallow and facile. When writers write moral tales they write them chiefly to instruct not others but themselves, just as we are nearly always talking to ourselves when we give sage advice to our friends. I therefore like to think of Oscar as being both the subject and the object of this story.

Fortunately, Wilde’s sad, painful and lonely death was followed, as decade followed decade, by an increase in his reputation. The height he has reached since his death is greater and the trail in the sky clearer than ever they were in his short and blighted lifetime.