Читать книгу Oscar Wilde’s Stories for All Ages - Оскар Уайльд, Stephen Fry, F. H. Cornish - Страница 9

I have a great affection for The Selfish Giant. Scenes of Oscar reading it to his sons Cyril and Vyvyan served as a kind of running thread through the narrative frame of the film Wilde, in which I had the impossible pleasure and imponderable honour of playing Oscar.

As with Wilde’s stories The Happy Prince and The Young King, we can discern a religious element in the conclusion to The Selfish Giant; in this case we are treated to the specific revelation that the sobbing boy the giant had handed up into the tree is in fact the Christ Child. Wilde’s famous lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol—‘each man kills the thing he loves’—are recalled when the child says of his scars, his stigmata, ‘Nay…but these are the wounds of Love.’

Wilde’s obsessions often shuttled between suffering and joy, pain and pleasure, love and death, each seeming to be necessary for the other. In his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, written in prison, he lays out a theory of suffering and a theory of Christ the Artist both of which repay careful reading, but it is in this sweet and lovely story that those ideas come together most naturally and easily.

Wilde himself could be thought of as a Selfish Giant, of course. He was a very large man in frame—well over six foot in height and surprisingly broad and strong for one whose reputation was that of a velvet-clad dandy whose greatest professed ambition was to be able to live up to his collection of blue and white china. He was a giant in intellect and a giant of his age in talent, fame and brilliance. Did he guiltily feel that his ‘garden’ was barren, that his neglect of his wife and children was not unlike that of the giant in his story? A religious person might note Wilde’s own deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism and draw strong parallels between this story and Wilde’s life. Happily the story is strong enough to stand without any such knowledge or belief, but there it is for you to consider just the same.