Craft 1990

Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest
Author(s): Christopher Craft

Source: Representations, No. 31, Special Issue: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century
England (Summer, 1990), pp. 19-46
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928398
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CHRISTOPHER CRAFT
Alias Bunbury:
Desire and Termination
in The ImportanceofBeingEarnest
No living word relatesto its objectin a singular way: betweenthewordand its object,
betweenthewordand thespeaking subject,thereexistsan elastic environmentof other,
alien wordsabout thesame object,thesame theme,and thisis an environmentthatis
oftendifficulttopenetrate.It is preciselyin theprocessof living interactionwiththis
ic environmentthatthewordmay be individualized and given stylistic
specif shape.
-Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel"
Besides, now thatI knowyou to be a confirmed BunburyistI naturallywant to talk to

you about Bunbury. I want to tellyou therules.
-Algy to Jack in The ImportanceofBeing Earnest
A VAMPIRE'S IS NOT THE ONLY to initiate a transformation in

KISS
being. Consider the influential kiss both "suffered" and enjoyed by "H. C., Amer-
ican, aged 28, of independent means, unmarried, the elder of two children." As
case history 27 in Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, H. C.'s autobiographical nar-
rative tells the storyof what H. C. calls "my developing inversion," a process whose
early stages witness his puzzlement before the dawning recognition that women
are to him "as likable as ever, but no longer desirable." H. C.'s equivocation here
is historically poised:
Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about. The newspaper accounts of it,
while illuminating, flashed upon me no light of self-revelation; they only amended some
idle conjectures as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of. Here and there a
newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly clarified by an effeminate fellow-
student, who, I fancy now, would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce
practical illustration. I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar Wilde, scrutinizing them
under the unctuous auspices of this same emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my
interest in Oscar Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid curiosity
then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.
Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset me. The persons of
these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception:
I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me
with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated fellatio, an act verbally expounded shortly
before my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this dream disgusted me.'
REPRESENTATIONS 31 * Summer 1990 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 19
Oscar Wilde comes to this dreamer,as to his readers, neitheras "himself"nor
even quite as his "own" simulacrum.Situatedfromthe beginningwithin(indeed,
as) an oscillatingexchange of representations,OscarWildesurfacesin H. C.'s nar-
rativeas a precariouslyoverdeterminedsignifier.He emerges eitheras the dom-
inated subject of "the Oscar Wilde case," the very public object of political
subjugation, his body disciplined and his name appropriated as a new alias for
those nameless "mysticvices I had heard whispered of"; or else he emerges as
the volatilizingsubject of those uncannily"clarifying"photographs,themselves
the object of a bewildered"scrutiny"whose dreamingeyefinallydisclosesan agent
provocateur bringingliminal homosexual recognitionto oracular crisis.In either
case, each the palpable obverse or complementof the other,the signifierWilde
encodes not homosexual desire per se but rathera whole historyof tendentious
citation:"newspaperaccounts,"anonymouswhisperings,"idle conjectures,""unc-
tuous" explicationsby that"emasculateand blandiloquentmentor,"those fetish-
ized photographs. Caught in an enthrallingreciprocationof repudiation and
identification, desire and disgust,ignoranceand "self-revelation," Wilde's discur-
sivelyappropriated body circulatesin H. C.'s textas (in Michel Foucault'sidiom)
"the inscribedsurfaceof events(traced bylanguage and dissolvedbyideas)" and
"thelocus of a dissociatedself."2Thus the scene of fellation,as a kindof flickering
homosexual anagnorisis,marks H. C.'s assumptionof, and insertioninto,his cul-
ture'savailable narrativeof "self"-disclosure.In "fallingheir to inversion,"H. C.
inheritsnot so much the occulted truthof homosexual being (the "incubation,"
as he calls it, "of my perverseinstinct")as he does access to a historicallyspecific
narrativetrajectory.Soon afterhis dream,
The antipodesof thesexualsphereturnedmoreand moretowardthelightof mytoler-
tillnowstainedwitha slightrepugnance,
ance. Inversion, colorlessat
becameesthetically
retinted,
last,and thendelicately solelywithpityforitsvictims,
atfirst thecolor
butfinally,
deepening,withhalf-conscious inclination to attachitto myselfas a remotecontingency.
Thisrevolution,however, wasnotwithout external impetus.The prejudicedtoneofa book
I wasreading,Krafft-Ebing's PsychopathiaSexualis,byprompting resentment,led meon to
sympathy. Mychampioning, purelyabstractthoughit was to beginwith,none the less
involvedmylookingat thingswitheyeshypothetically inverted-anorientation forthe
of
sake argument. Aftera while, insensiblyand at no one moment,hypothesismerged into
wasinverted.
reality:I myself Thatoccasionaland fictitious inversionhad never,I believe,
superposedthistrueinversion;rathera trueinversion, thosemanyyearsdormant,had
simplyrespondedfinally to a stimulusstrongand prolongedenough,as a manawakens
whenhe is loudlycalled.3
This passage is remarkable for its ambivalentappeal to rhetoricand nature as
modes of identification;indeed, the workof the passage, as of the inversionmet-
aphor generally,is to subsume the formerunder the latter.Firsta revisionistor
"reverse"reading of dominantdiscourseyieldsa rhetoricalor tropological"inver-
sion" that subjects "the antipodes of the sexual sphere" to a chromaticslide, a
cognitive unanchoring motivatedby reason, reading, "pity,""sympathy."This
20 REPRESENTATIONS
politicalinversion,or "revolution,"implicitlyfiguressexual identityas tropologi-
cally grounded-and, therefore,as abstractable,manipulable, traversable: "It
involved my looking at thingswitheyes hypothetically inverted-an orientation
forthe sake of argument."But the remainderof the paragraph then dismantles
its own prior emphasis upon tropologicalinversion,displacingit witha counter-
fictionof authentic origination.Imperceptiblyand "at no one moment,"H. C.
inversion"miraculouslyopens onto a deeper
claims,"thatoccasional and fictitious
ontological ground, an occulted or closeted "reality":his "true inversion,these
many years dormant, had simply responded . . . as a man awakens when he is
loudly called." In this essentializingtransition,the motilityof tropologicalsex-
ualitysubmitsto the transfixingcall of a new name and a singular identity:"I
myselfwas inverted."In his analyticcommentary,Ellis quicklyaffirmsthisinter-
pretation: "A criticalreading of this historysuggeststhat the apparent control
over the sexual impulse by reason is merelya superficialphenomenon. Here, as
ever,reason is but a tool in the hands of the passions. The apparent causes are
really the result; we are witnessinghere the gradual emergence of a retarded
homosexual impulse."4
Wilde of course did not live long enough to savor the inadvertentsplendor
of that "tool in the hands of the ['retarded'] passions." Had he survivedto read
SexualInversion,he would no doubt have rejected the dehistoricizingmove that
Ellis and H. C. find so reassuring,so necessaryto the stabilizationof inverted
identity.He would have recalled to H. C. the same displacementthat H. C. had
stressedin his scene of fellation:the displacementthat"grounds"experience and
identityneitherin nature, nor in the disclosureof absolute origin,but ratherin
the dizzyingoscillationof personsand representations,as when,in TheImportance
ofBeingEarnest,babyJack is "quite literallyexchanged for writingin the cloak-
room of VictoriaStation,his absent-mindedgovernesshavingsubstitutedforhis
person a three-volumenovel which is described as being 'of more than usually
repulsive sentimentality.""In this farcical exchange of self and writing,the
authorityof the origin is punninglyabrogated, preposterouslyreversed,as the
sober Lady Bracknell makes deliriouslyclear: "Until yesterday,"she says as she
pauses beforethe scandal ofJack'snonoriginaryorigins,"I had no idea thatthere
were any familiesor persons whose originwas a Terminus."Like a deconstruc-
tionistbefore her time,a proper Derrida in late Victoriandrag, Lady Bracknell
exposes the irreduciblesecondariness of an origin that,in coming first,should
but cannot authorize all that comes after.Here, as in Derrida, the nonoriginis
originary:"The origindid not even disappear.... It was neverconstitutedexcept
reciprocallyby a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the
origin."
Lady Bracknell'sjoke (which is, as we shall see, cognate withthe pun moti-
vatingthe play'stitle)delegitimatesany claim of ontologicalauthorityor natural
reference:firstbecause it punninglyinstallsa death or terminationat the origin
Alias Bunbury 21
of male subjectivity, as when, forinstance,Oedipus murdershis fatherat a cross-
roads or terminusin order therebyto inherithis plagued adulthood; and second
because itinsinuatesintothe originneitherdatum nor "truth"but ratherthe self-
conscious play of termsand terminologies,textsand palpable fictions,of which
Miss Prism'striple-deckeris the appropriatelyfarcicalinstance.Once the origin
has been terminatedin thisway,its grave solemnitiesmockinglyredistributedas
the "trivial"pleasure traversinga pun on death and writing,no "serious"appeal
can be made to natural referenceor natural ground.7The verypossibilityof a
"trueinversion"grounded not in tropebut in natureis thuspunninglydismissed
by a play whose deepest insistenceis thatindividualand collectiveidentitiesare
based upon, and secured by,themostarbitraryof constructs:terms,terminations,
termini,terminologies.
Unlike H. C., Wilde writesagainst all essentialistnotions of being, inverted
or otherwise,and refuses to identifysubjectivity and sexuality,insistinginstead
on the irreducibledifferencebetween. That differenceis the object of Wildean
desire. For whatWilde seeks in desire is not the earnestdisclosureof a singleand
singularidentity,the deep truthof sex, but rathersomethingless and something
more: the vertigoof substitutionand repetition."The Creeds are believed," he
writesin "The Criticas Artist,"' "not because theyare rational,but because they
are repeated.... Do you wishto love?Use Love's Litany,and thewordswillcreate
the yearningfromwhich the world fanciesthattheyspring."8Nor would Wilde
curtail this plastic power of language and repetition;he activelyrecommended
the modificationof the flesh."I do not like your lips,"he told a youthfulAndre
Gide. "They are quite straight,like the lips of a man who has never told a lie. I
want you to learn to lie so that your lips may become beautifuland curved like
the lips of an antique mask."9With such false beautifullips, Wilde explores the
erotic velleitiesof "the secret that Truth is entirelyand absolutelya matterof
style."'0 Hence, I suggest,Wilde would have been thrilledto findthatH. C. should
experience his firstflashof homosexual recognitionin a dream thatdirectlythe-
matizesrepetition,a dream in which H. C. is fellatedbya labile representation-
by,we mightsay,the pictureof Dorian Graygone Wilde,"one of myphotographs
of him incarnate."Whateverthe annunciatoryenergyof thiswatershedexperi-
ence, the fellationitselfarrivesas a "buffoon"enactmentof a prior description.
It arrives "originally"as a figure of repetition,as a re-presentation-"an act
expounded shortlybefore by my oracle." Years before H. C. wrote,Wilde had
explicated the eroticsof repetition;in the firstof his lettersto thematizedirectly
"the love of thingsimpossible,"he writes:"Sometimeyou willfind,even as I have
found, that there is no such thingas romanticexperience; there are romantic
memories, and there is the desire of romance-that is all. Our most fiery
momentsof ecstasyare merelyshadows of what somewhereelse we have felt,or
of what we long someday to feel. So at least it seems to me."" Thus, pace Walter
Pater,even the most immediateshocks of sensationarrivein and as the wake of
22 REPRESENTATIONS
theirown nativity,arrive already mediate, caught indisseverablyin the dreamy
intersticesof power,discourse,repetition.
II
personwhoshowshisbehindtothePolitical
Thetextis (orshouldbe) thatuninhibited
Father.
-Roland Barthes,ThePleasureoftheText
If it goes withoutsayingthatThe ImportanceofBeing Earnest is straight

farce,then converselyit has never been said thatthe object of the play'sderision
is heterosexual representationitself,whichWilde subjectsto a fierce,irrecuper-
able, but almost invisibletransvaluation.Positioned at the latterend of a great
traditionand written(1894-95) on the precipice of what W. B. Yeats called "the
belated textin whichthe venerabletopoi
catastrophe,"Earnest is a self-consciously
of comedy-the dispersion of lovers and theirultimatedistributioninto cross-
gender couples, the confusionand thenthe restorationof identities,the confron-
tationwithand the expulsion of errantdesire, the closural wedding sponsored
by the Name of the Father (here, specifically,Ernest John Moncrieff)-are
repeated, inverted,finelyperverted,set finallyto spin. In the ensuing delirium,
Wilde exposes these topoi as culturallyempowered cypherswhose particulardis-
tributionenforcesheterosexualnarrative.As Wilde stagesit,thisnarrativeentails
notjust points of departure (a "social indiscretion"in "a cloak-roomat a railway
station")and termination(heterosexualconjunctionunder the paternalsignifier)
but also sidelines of pseudonymous desire, here called, preposterously,"serious
Bunburyism."Bunbury,to be sure,willbe "quite exploded" byplay'send, but this
"revolutionaryoutrage,"as Lady Bracknellcalls it,willhave already ensured his
fragmenteddisseminationthroughoutthe text. In a parodic submissionto het-
erosexist teleology,Wilde does dismiss his lovers to the presumptiveclosure of
maritalbliss,but not untilhe has insinuatedwhatshould, bylaw and convention,
have been exiled as non nominandum:a jubilant celebrationof male homosexual
desire, a trenchantdissectionof the supposedly "legitimate"male heterosexual
subject,and a witheringcritiqueof the politicalidea, exigent in the 1890s, that
sexuality,invertedor otherwise,could be naturalor unnaturalat all.
That Wilde achieves these criticaleffectswithoutthe slightestbreach in het-
erosexual decorum is not theleast measure of a genius whose wileitwas to broad-
cast homosexual critique into the gay interspace of a pun. Here the play of
occultationand display,slippage and spillage, could be convenientlyhoused, as
is Ernest John, in two oppositional domiciles-or, as in a bedroom farce, two
closets-between whicha greatdeal of shuttlingwould be required. Transcoding
the emergent, dissymmetricalbinarism heterosexual/homosexualinto verbal
play,Wilde instantiateshomosexual desire as the secondary,punning other of a
AliasBunbury 23
dominant signification,therebysimultaneouslyaffirmingand subvertingthe
authorityof the norm. The inescapable duplicityof thisprocedure is historicalin
at least two senses: firstbecause it playswithand againstthe traditionof interdic-
tion by which celebrationof the homosexual possibilityhad been silenced; and
second because, as we shall see, it redeployscontemporaneousdiscourses on (as
H. C. puts it) "true inversion,"which repeatedlyformulatedhomosexual desire
as heterosexualdesire manque: in thecase of themale,animamuliebris virilicorpore
inclusa.
Recent work by Ed Cohen and JonathanDollimore has made it possible to
discern the homosexual countervalencesin Wilde's transparentlyheterosexual
texts.In a crucial essay on Dorian Gray,Cohen explores the waysin whichWilde
produced "new discursive strategiesto express concerns unvoiced withinthe
dominantculture."Examining"Wilde'snovel [as it]movesbothwithand athwart
late Victorianideological practicesthatnaturalizedmale heterosexuality," Cohen
indicatesjust how an ambidextrousWilde maintainsa protectiveheterosexual
patina even as he also "inscribesthe male body withinthe circuitsof male de-
Dollimore explicates
sire."'2 And in a parallel essay on Wilde's anti-essentialism,
the transgressivepower of the Wildean text,which,he asserts,operates withinthe
structuresof legitimationand dominationin order to release deviant vectorsof
desire, transverselines of critique: "Deviant desire reacts against, disruptsand
displaces fromwithin;ratherthan seeking to escape the repressiveordering of
the sexual, Wilde reinscribeshimselfwithinand relentlesslyinvertsthe binaries
upon which that ordering depends. Inversion . . . definesWilde's transgressive
3 As Dollimore suggests,Wilde deploys inversionnot as an occulted
aesthetic."'
sexual truthdisclosing effeminatedbeing but rather as a tropological strategy
whose primarydevices,reversaland repetition,could bringthe most uprightof
heterosexual normsto preposterousconclusion.
Hence the extreme formalismof heterosexualdesire in Earnest,its inspired
submissionto the rigorof the signifier.As the effectof prior performances,het-
erosexualityfor Wilde was both the a priori and the sine qua non of dramatic
representation;he could neither stage nor publish an uncloseted gay play. In
EarnestWilde transformsthis delegitimationinto a mode of enablement; for if
the heterosexual alignmentof desires and bodies were prerequisiteto represen-
tation,thenWilde would foregroundand expose itas such,as a conventionwhose
arbitrarinessexcited earnest celebration. The heterosexualizingmachineryof
Wilde's plot is too familiarto need much diagramming;clipped synopsiswilldo.
The play opens on two exuberant bachelors,John Worthing(the eponymous
hero of the play'seponymouspun) and AlgernonMoncrieff, each livinga "double
life" of undefined specificity. ("I hope," says Cecily Algy,"you have not been
to
leading a double life,pretendingto be wickedand being reallygood all the time.
That would be hypocrisy.") John is Jack in the country(where he is respectable)
24 REPRESENTATIONS
and his own dissolutebrother,Ernest,in the city(wherehe is not),and Algytakes
curious pleasure cruises to the countryto visitBunbury,about whom we know
nothingexcept thathis "permanentinvalid[ism]"elicitsfromAlgyan heroic suc-
coring. Our heroes are schematicallyaligned withrespectiveheroines:Jack with
Gwendolen, who believes him to be Ernestand willonlymarrya man so named,
and AlgywithCecilywho likewisewillonlymarryan Ernest."There is something
in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence,"as Cecily explains to a
bewildered Algy. And Gwendolen's explication suggestsaccess to a more than
nominal rapture: "It is a divinename. It has a musicof itsown. It produces vibra-
tions."The sheer arbitrarinessof this "feminine"desire for Ernest-nessunder-
scoresthe formalityof the play'smanifestheterosexuality;itrequiresnot so much
that the heroes seek women as that theyseek access to women, legitimacy,and
wealth through the assumption of an overdeterminedsignifier,a magical term
whose power lies in itscapacityto triggerfetishistic"vibrations."
The plot worksconventionally firstto obstruct and then to facilitatethe two
impending marriages,and the securingof the marriagesturns upon the elimi-
nationof twoimpediments.The firstis Lady Bracknell'sobjectionto the "roman-
tic story"of Jack'soriginsand to the consequent illegibilityof the Name of the
Father,and the second is John Worthing's(very patriarchal,very hypocritical)
insistencethatAlgy relinquishthe incomparablepleasures of "serious Bunbury-
ism." Wilde's great third act farcicallyachieves both conditions: in an offstage
parody of tragicsparagmos Bunbury is "quite exploded" ("I killed Bunbury this
afternoon,"says Algy murderouslyand casually), and the dispersions of Jack's
identityare "properly"integratedwithinthe (splayed) unityof the paternal sig-
nifier.When Jack discoversthatindeed he "naturallyis Ernest,"thisis a nature
whose authorityis grounded entirelyin letters,terms,texts: in a genealogical
appeal to writing,and notjust any writing,but "the Armylistsof the last forty
years"-the book, very simply,of the Names of the Fathers. Consulting this
august text,and reading there for the firsttime both his own and his father's
name, Jack discovershis denatured nature as repetition,quotation,division:
JACK: The ArmyLists of the last fortyyears are here. These delightfulrecords
should have been myconstantstudy.(Rushestobookcase and tearsthebooksout.)
M. Generals ... Mallam, Maxbohm, Magley-what ghastly names they
have-Markby, Migsby, Mobbs, Moncrieff! Lieutenant 1840, Captain,
Lieutenant-Colonel,Colonel, General 1869, Christiannames, ErnestJohn.
(Puts bookveryquietlydownand speaksquitecalmly.)I always told you, Gwen-
dolen, my name was Ernest,didn't I? Well, it is Ernest afterall. I mean it
naturallyis Ernest.
In these lines Jack "naturally"inheritsthe very same pair of signifiersthat all

along had structuredthe oscillationof his "double life."As if in reward for his
earnest lying,Jack discovershimselfto be, as indeed he had always been, both
Alias Bunbury 25
himselfand his own fictive(br)other.No longersplitbetween"Jack"and "Ernest,"
the split"Ernest/John" now installedas the law of his being,Jackinheritshimself
"afterall" as his "own" differencefromhimself.("But what own are you?" Gwen
astutelyqueries.) In thus assumingwhatJoel Fineman has aptlycalled "the unity
of his duplicity,"'4Jack'snow "natural"being is introjectedwiththe same oscilla-
tion thatthe play had just rituallyexpelled by"quite explod[ing]" Bunbury.Con-
densing these figures,and stressingtheirmore than casual relation,we may say
that the murder of Bunbury enables the pseudo-integrationof an irreducibly
divided male subject.
Wilde's farce thus discloses heterosexualclosure as the functionof two fa-
tallyinterlockedfigures:on the one hand, the formalexpulsion of Bunburyand
whatever unspeakable pleasures "serious Bunburyism"may entail and, on the
other,the "integration"of the "heterosexual"male subject under the Name of
the Father.At once crucialand arbitrary, thesepredicatesenable the heterosexual
order; theyalone secure the marriagesthatwill presumablyclose the otherwise
open circuitsof desire. (Algy,we should remember,refutesthisdream of closure:
"You don't seem to realize," he tellsJack,"thatin marriedlife three is company
and two is none.") And yetthese predicateshave alwaysseemed ridiculousor, in
Wilde's preferredterm,"trivial."What, we now need to ask, is the meaning of
this overdeterminedtriviality, itselffinallyindistinguishablefromthe equivocal
pleasure of the play'stitularpun? Who is "Bunbury"and whatare his filiations-
familial,erotic,conceptual-with "ErnestJohn"?Whymustdesire submitto such
arbitrarytermsand terminations?To begin answeringthese questions,we must
now confrontthe play's phantom self,itselfactuallyno selfbut rathera gnomic
signifier-a name, thatis, withouta being. I mean of course the nonexistentbut
omnipresentMr. Bunbury,upon whom (but thereis no whom) so much so curi-
ously depends.
III
Likeall worksofart,[The Importanceof Being Earnest] drewitssustenance

fromlife,and,speaking formyself,whenever I seeorreadtheplayI alwayswishI did
notknowwhatI do aboutWilde'slifeat thetimehe waswriting it-that when,for
instance,JohnWorthing talksofgoingBunburying, I didnotimmediately visualize
AlfredTaylor's establishment.
On rereading itafterhisrelease,Wildesaid, "Itwas
extraordinary readingtheplayover.How I usedtotoywiththattigerLife."Atits
conclusion,I findmyself imagining a sortofnightmare Pantomime Transformation
Scenein which,at thetouchofthemagician's wand,insteadoftheworkday world's
turningintofairyland, thecountryhousein a never-never turnsintothe
Hertfordshire
Old Bailey,thefeaturesofLadyBracknellintothoseofMr.JusticeWills.Still,itis a
masterpiece,and on accountofit Wildewillalwaysenjoytheimpersonalfame ofan
artistas wellas thenotoriety
ofhispersonallegend.
-W. H. Auden, "An Improbable Life"'-5
26 REPRESENTATIONS
As a character"alwayssomewhereelse at present,"as a figurethussans
figure,Bunbury had been devised byWilde to inhabitthe eroticintersticesof the
double bind here representedby Auden's volonted'oublier, his drive to forget:"I
alwayswish I did not know what I do." The subtle instructionof such a double
bind is not so much thatknowledgebe voided as thatknowledgeperformitswork
along self-blindedpaths of "ignorance,"nonrecognition,and misidentification.
"In thislight,"as D. A. Millerwrites,"it becomes clear thatthe social functionof
secrecy"-and Bunburyis the secretsubjectof an open secret-"is not to conceal
knowledgeso much as to conceal knowledgeof the knowledge.... Secrecywould
thus be the subjectivepracticein whichthe oppositionsof private/public, inside/
outside, subject/objectare established,and the sanctityof their firstterm kept
6 As Wilde's slyfigurefor thisregime of knowingand unknowing,of
inviolate."'
knowingthroughunknowing,Bunburyremainsa being or subjectalwaysother-
wise and elsewhere; he appears nowhere on stage, and wherever his name is
present he is not. Appeals to Bunburyyield only his absence: "Bunburydoesn't
live here. Bunbury is somewhereelse at present."But if Bunburyhas been ban-
ished fromthe precinctsof heterosexualrepresentation,the need to frequenthis
secrecyhas not, as Algy explains to Jack: "Nothing will induce me to part with
Bunbury,and ifyou ever get married,whichseems to me extremelyproblematic,
you will be very glad to know Bunbury.A man who marrieswithoutknowing
Bunbury has a verytedious timeof it."Bunburythusoperates withinthe hetero-
sexual order as its hidden but irreduciblesupplement,the fictiveand pseudony-
mous brotherwhose erotic "excesses"will be manifestedonly by continual allu-
sion to theirabsence.
Of course the gayspecificityof such allusivenesswas technicallyunspeakable:
nonnominandum Refusingto chafe under thisproscription,Wilde
interChristianos.
invertsit by insertingBunbury into the textbehind the ostentatiousmateriality
of an emptysignifier, a punning alias whose strategicequivocationbetweenallu-
sion and elisionhad alreadyannounced, a centurybeforeFoucault'sformulation,
"that the world of speech and desires has known invasions,struggles,plunder-
ings, disguises, ploys."'7Speaking strictly,Earnestcannot admit or acknowledge
the eroticforceof the gay male body,whichmustthereforebe staged as an atopic
body, a body constitutively"somewhere else at present." Hence the flickering
present-absenceof the play'shomosexual desire,as the materialityof the fleshis
retractedinto the sumptuousness of the signifier,whetherin the "labial pho-
nemics"of Bunbury,'8all asmack withdeath and kisses,or in the duplicitouspre-
cincts of the play's most proper and improper name, Earnest:a name at once
splayed by a pun and doubly referential,pointingwith one hand to the open
secretof the double lifeand withthe otherto the brittleposturingsof the Name
of the Father-a figurewhose delicate transmissibility has always required the
strictestof heterosexualpropaedeutics.
What then,more specifically, are thedisguisesand ploysof "seriousBunbury-
Alias Bunbury 27
ism"? Or, in Jack'smore exasperated intonation:"Bunburyist?What on earth do
you mean bya Bunburyist?"But the hermeneuticalrage of a Jackmustbe a little
undone by the interpretiveinsouciance of an Algy: "Now produce your expla-
nation, and pray make it remarkable.The bore about most explanations is that
theyare never half so remarkableas the thingstheytryto explain." In thisspirit,
I offersome explanations. Bunburyrepresentsor disseminatesthe following:1)
an actual person of no historicalimportance,Henry ShirleyBunbury,a hypo-
chondriacal acquaintance of Wilde's Dublin youth;'92) a villagein Cheshire that,
appropriatelyenough, "does not even appear on most maps";203) a tongue-in-
cheek allusion to Wilde's illegal "sodomitical"practices-"not only,"as Fineman
puts it,"Britishslang fora male brothel,but . .. also a collectionof signifiersthat
straightforwardly express theirdesire to bury in the bun";2' 4) a parody of the
contemporaneous medicalizationof homosexual desire ("Nor do I," says Lady
Bracknell of Algy'svisitsto Bunbury,"in any way approve of the modern sym-
pathywithinvalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardlya thingto
be encouraged in others. Health is the primaryduty of life"); 5) a sly,even
chipper,allusion to the thanatopoliticsof homophobia, whose severestdirectives
againstdisclosureensure thatwhatfinallygetsdisclosedwillbe, as in DorianGray,
a corpse, homicide or suicide, upon whose cold or cooling fleshthe now obvious
textis forthe firsttimemade legible; 6) a pragmaticsof gay misrepresentation, a
nuanced and motiledoublespeak, drivenbothbypleasure and, as Gide put it,"by
the need of self-protection";22 and, as we shall see beforewe end, 7) a pseudonym
or alias forthe eroticoscillationwithinthe male subject,his fundamentalwaffling
betweenJack and Ernest.
But more cruciallythan any of these,Bunburyinsistsupon his "own" differ-
ence fromhimselfand fromwhateversignification(as above) he may,bycaprice
or compulsion,assume. From his prone positionjust offstage(to know Bunbury
is "to sit by a bed of pain"), Bunburyperformsenormous representationalwork,
but only byway of a disseminalpassage whose firsteffectis to expel the referent
fromthe neighborhoodof the sign: whereBunburyis, Bunburyis not. It is typical
of Wilde's invertingwitthathe should stage thisexpulsion as an act of ingestion,
as a buttered and material pun on Bunbury'scryptographicname. I mean the
"luxurious and indolent" gluttonythat,by axiomaticallytransposingsexual and
gustatorypleasures (cucumber sandwiches,muffins,breads: buns-Banbury or
Bunbury-everywhere),23operates as a screen metaphorforotherwiseunspeak-
able pleasures: "There can be littlegood in any young man who eats so much, or
so often."24In this displacement,the obscene becomes the scenic,as thatwhich
must not be spoken is consumed, before an audience, withincomparable relish
and finesse."Well, I can't eat muffinsin an agitated manner.The butterwould
probably get on my cuffs.One should always eat muffinsquite calmly.It is the
only way to eat them."The fastidiousallusion to Wilde's sexual practice here is
28 REPRESENTATIONS
exact-from hand to mouth: as H. MontgomeryHyde reports,fondling"would
be followedbysome formof mutual masturbationor intercruralintercourse....
Finally,oral copulation would be practiced,withWilde as the active agent [sic],
though this role was occasionallyreversed. It gave him inspiration,he said."25
Inspirited by "reversed" practicesand reversibletropes, Wilde adopts a polite
decorum (no danger to Algy'scuffs)in order to displayand displace a desire to
bury in the bun. In thisway,serious Bunburyismreleases a polytropicsexuality
so mobile,so evanescentin speed and turn,thatit traverses,Ariel-like,a fugitive
path through oral, genital,and anal ports until it expends itselfin and as the
displacementsof language. It was Wilde'sextraordinarygiftto returnthisvertigo
of substitutionand repetitionto his audience. The inspirationhe derived from
fellatiohe thenredisseminated,usuallysottovoce,throughtheactor'smouth."The
ejaculation,"says Lady Bracknellin a line thatdid not survivethe revisor'sknife,
"has reached myears more than once."26
Oscillating between verbal and seminal emissions, Lady Bracknell's pun
enacts the rhetoricalequivocationessentialto seriousBunburyism:an "illicit"sig-
nificationis broadcast into the texteven as itis also withdrawnunder the cover of
a licit one. In this way, Wilde duplicitouslyintroduced into Earnesta parodic
account of his own double life (the public thumbingof a privatenose) as well as
a trenchantcritiqueof the heterosexistpresumptionrequiring,here statutorily,
that such a life be both double and duplicitous.And thatEarnestis a textsliding
deviouslybetween expose and critique,a textsaturatingits reader/viewerwith
blinding disseminal effusions,is simplya factwhose closetingor imprisonment
we must tolerate no longer. To substantiatethis claim, I adduce below a brief
series of discrete indiscretionsin which Earnest"goes Bunburying"-in which,
thatis,Wilde liftsto liminalityhis subculturalknowledgeof "theterriblepleasures
of double life."27In providingthesefewexamples (othersare adduced in a longer
versionof the presentessay),I have drawn freelyfromboth the three-and four-
act versionsof the play.28
1) "It is a veryungentlemanlythingto read a privatecigarettecase" (act 1, in
both three-and four-actversions).In the trialsof April-May 1895, Wilde would
be compelled to submitagain and again to "ungentlemanly"exegesis. Cigarette
cases, usually silverones purchased in Bond Street,were part (along withcash,
otherjewelry,food, and drink) of Wilde's paymentto the male prostituteshe
frequented.As the most durable materialtrace of Wilde's illegal sexual practice,
these cigarettecases (replete withinscriptionssuch as "To X from0. W.") would
be repeatedlyintroducedintoevidencebytheprosecutionthroughoutthesecond
and third trials. Consider the followingexchange between Solicitor General
Frank Lockwood, prosecutorat the thirdtrial,and the defendant:
Did youevergiveone [a cigarette case] to CharlesParkeralso?-Yes, butI am afraidit
costonly?1.
AliasBunbury 29
Silver? -Well, yes. I have a great fancy for giving cigarette cases.
To young men? -Yes.
How many have you given? -I might have given seven or eight in 1892 or 1893.29
These cigarettecases are remarkablyrich metonymsof Wilde's sexual practice.

Literallyinscribedwiththecondescensionimplicitin Wilde'scross-classand cross-
generational sexual activity, theysuggesthis ambivalentrelationto the prostitu-
tion he repeatedlyenjoyed: he preferredto thinkof the cases as "gifts"not nec-
essarilyrelated to the sexual servicestheynonethelesspurchased. As evidenciary
deposits purchased and distributedby a "first-class misdemeanant,"as Jack de-
scribes Ernest, they also bespeak a contradictoryemotionalitycompounded of
defiance, foolhardiness,and, it would seem, a certaindesire to be caught. And
finally,theyinsistently point to the oralitythatwas bothWilde'ssexual preference
and Earnest's primarytrope of displacement.HenryWotton,afterall, had already
explicatedforDorian Graytheevanescentperfectionof a good smoke ("You must
have a cigarette.A cigaretteis the perfecttypeof a perfectpleasure. It is exquisite,
and it leaves one unsatisfied.What more can one want?"); and Edward Shelley,
one of Wilde's lovers,testifiedthathe "had receiveda letterfromMr.Wilde invit-
ing him to 'come smoke a cigarette'withhim."30Furthermore,while reporting
the events of the first(that is, the libel) trial,the London dailyEvening News (5
April 1895) printedthe following:
The Old Bailey recoiled with loathing from the long ordeal of terrible suggestions that
occupied the whole of yesterday when the cross-examination left the literary plane and
penetrated the dim-lit perfumed rooms where the poet of the beautiful joined with valets
and grooms in thebond ofsilver cigarettecases. (Italics added)3'
As the affectiveverso to the rectoof Earnest's gay gamingwithcigarettecases, the

"recoilling]"and "loathing"specifiedin these lines indicate the precarious vola-
tilityof the Victorianmale bonds so deftlymanipulatedbyWilde on "theliterary
plane." A gentlemanmightofferhis peer, or even his inferiorin age or class, the
benefitof a good smoke or the gratuityof a cigarettecase, but onlyso long as the
giftdid not suggesta bond more intimatethan "proper" gentlemanlyrelationor
condescension. The performativesuccess of Earnest's oral insouciance lay in its
capacity to tease the limitof the proper withoutseeming to violate it seriously.
ProsecutorLockwood's "veryungentlemanly"reading of privatecigarettecases
reversedthisrhetoricalstrategybytransforming theglissando of Wildean witinto
that"long ordeal of terriblesuggestion."
2) "Fathers are certainlynot popular just at present.... At present fathers
are at a terriblediscount. They are like those chaps, the minor poets. They are
never even quoted" (act 1 in the four-actversions). Spoken by Algy,these lines
point underhandedly to the escalating filialwarfarebetween the Marquess of
Queensberry and Lord AlfredDouglas. This triangularnarrativeis too familiar
30 REPRESENTATIONS
to require recapitulationhere, except to say that the battlewas being engaged
even as Wilde was composingEarnest and thatWilde's failureto manage the sit-
uation adroitlyprecipitatedthe debacle of the trials,duringwhichQueensberry's
charge that Wilde had been "posing as a somdomite[sic]" would finda decisive
institutionalcontextin whichto be "quoted," at lengthand in detail. At the con-
clusion of the libel trial,thejury determinedthe Queensberry'scharge of sodom-
elaboratingthis
itical"posing" had been proved and thathis "Plea ofJustification"
charge had been "published forthe public benefit."
3) Canon Chasuble in response to Jack'sconcern that he is "a littletoo old
now" to be rechristenedas Ernest:
Oh, I am notbyanymeansa bigotedPaedobaptist.... You need haveno apprehensions
[aboutimmersion]....Sprinkling or indeed,I think,advisable....
is all thatis necessary,
I havetwosimilarceremoniesto perform.... A case of twinsthatoccurredrecently in
one oftheoutlying cottageson yourestate... I don'tknow,however, ifyouwouldcareto
join themat the Font.PersonallyI do notapprovemyselfof the obliteration of class-
(Act2 in the four-act
distinctions. versions;a truncatedversionof theselines,without
"Paedobaptist"and "theobliteration appearsinthethree-act
ofclass-distinctions," version)
The always serious Canon Chasuble repeatedlyfallsinto oblique and unwilling

licentiousallusion, as in these lines, whichinsinuatean outrageous chain of gay
metonyms:"Paedobaptist, "sprinklingis all thatis necessary,""in one of the out-
lyingcottages,""ifyou would care tojoin themat the Font,""the obliterationof
class-distinctions."If "Paedobaptist" (or "sprinklerof boys") was too blatantly
obscene to surviverevision,then the more subtlyinsinuated "outlyingcottages"
was not: only an elite audience would have known that by the late nineteenth
centurycottagehad currencyas a camp signifierfora trysting site,usuallya public
urinal. The word also had a more personal reference;Queensberry's Plea ofJus-
tificationclaimed thatOscar Wilde "in the year of our Lord One thousand eight
hundred and ninety-three[a year before the compositionof Earnest] at a house
called 'The Cottage' at Goring . . . did solicitand incite . . . the said . . . acts of
gross indecency."32Once these Bunburied significations are allowed to resonate
throughthe passage, once we recognizewithCanon Chasuble that"corruptread-
ingsseem to have creptintothetext,"the referencesto "sprinkling"and "joinling]
them at the Font" assume an "obscene" valence. Similarlywith"the obliteration
of class-distinctions,"which boisterouslypoints to the almost pederastic,cross-
class prostitutionWilde enjoyed.Justa fewlines earlier,Jack had the effrontery
to say,"I am veryfond of children,"a sentencedefinitelycourtingthe bourgeois
outrage of the thus "discounted"fatherswho pursued Wilde throughthe court
and into prison.
4) "The next time I see you I hope you willbe Parker"(act 3 in the four-act
versions).As has been "public knowledge"(howeverinert)forsome thirtyyears,
the most substantialrevisionof Earnest was the deletion (demanded by George
Alexander,who produced the play,and unhappilysubmittedto byWilde) of an
AliasBunbury 31
entire scene in which Algy,Bunburyingas Ernest,is almost arrested for dining
expenses incurred byJack,or ratherErnest,at the Savoy Hotel, the site of both
Jack/Ernest's"grosslymaterialistic"gluttonyand some of Wilde's sexual encoun-
ters.Jack, delighted that Algy should sufferfor extravagancesthat can only be
correctlycharged to Ernest, counsels his younger brother "that incarceration
would do you a great deal of good." Algyunderstandablyprotests:"Well,I really
am not going to be imprisonedin the suburbsforhavingdined in the WestEnd.
It is perfectlyridiculous." Ridiculous or not, Wilde would very soon sufferan
analogous imprisonment,but in "never-neverHertfordshire"(as Auden called
it) thisend is happilyremittedwhenJack,his "generositymisplaced,""pay[s] this
monstrousbill formybrother."
Two aspects of this scene merit emphasis. First,Algy's pseudo-arrest for
serious overeatingstrengthensmyargumentthatin Earnest"luxuriousand indo-
lent"gluttonyoperates as ajubilant screen metaphorforotherwiseunrepresent-
able pleasures. This cathexis of extravagantdining and sexual transgression
refersdirectlyto Wilde's double life;itwas hisregularpracticeto dine luxuriously
with his lovers prior to sex, therebyenjoyingin camerathe same metaphor he
would display on stage in Earnest.Often meetinghis assignationsin the private
chambers of public restaurants(Willis'sor the Solferinoor elsewhere),he would
dazzle them withopulence, language, and alcohol. Here is the testimonyof one
prostitute:
He [i.e., Alfred Taylor, Wilde's procurer] took us to a restaurant in Rupert Street. I think
itwas the Solferino.We were shownupstairsto a privateroom,in whichtherewas a dinner-
table laid for four.Aftera while Wilde came in. I had never seen him before,but I had
heard of him. We dined about eighto'clock. We all foursat down to dinner,Wilde sitting
on myleft.
Was the dinner a good dinner?-Yes. The table was lightedwithred-shaded candles.
We had champagne withour dinner,and brandy and coffeeafterwards.Wilde paid for
the dinner. Subsequently Wilde said to me, "This is the boy for me-will you go to the
Savoy Hotel withme?" I consented,and Wilde drove me in a cab to the hotel. He took me
firstinto a sitting-roomon the second floor,where he ordered some more drink-whiskey
and soda. Wilde then asked me to go into his bedroom withhim.
Witnesshere described certain acts of indecencywhich he alleged took place in the
bedroom.33
The witnessin thisexchange is Charles Parker,a sometimevalet,whose testimony

against Wilde seems alternatelyto have been purchased and coerced. It is the
name Parkerthat brings us to the last point regardingthe deleted arrestscene.
The scene commences with the deliveryof a calling card, which Algy reads:
"'Parker and Gribsby,Solicitors.'I don't know anythingabout them. Who are
they?"Aftertakingand reading the card,Jack facetiouslyspeculates: "I wonder
who theycan be. I expect, Ernest,theyhave come about some business foryour
friendBunbury.Perhaps Bunbury wants to make his will,and wishesyou to be
32 REPRESENTATIONS
executor."With these intimationsof Algy's forthcomingexecution of Bunbury
lingeringin the air, Messrs. Parker and Gribsbyare shown in by Merriman,the
butler.But "they,"it turnsout, are not exactlya theybut a he ("There is onlyone
gentleman in the hall, sir,"MerrimaninformsJack), and the one gentleman is
Gribsby"himself,"come eitherto collectthedebt or "remove"Ernestto Holloway
Prison, one of those "suburb[an]" facilitiesthroughwhich Wilde would be fun-
neled on his way to ignominy:"The surroundings,I admit,are middle class; but
the gaol itselfis fashionable and well-aired."(From the other side of the bars
Wilde would not findit so.) As these threatsof incarcerationand death are being
ventilatedin the text,Jack firstteases Algyforhis (thatis,Jack's)profligacyand
then "generously" pays Ernest's debt, therebyforestallingthe correctionthat
would, Jack says,have done Algy "a great deal of good." Having dispatched his
serious problem,Jack then luxuriatesin a littletrivialbanter:
JACK: You are Gribsby,aren'tyou? What is Parkerlike?
GRIBSBY: I am both, sir. Gribsbywhen I am on unpleasant business,Parker on
occasions of a less serious kind.
JACK: The next time I see you I hope you willbe Parker.
("Afterall," Wilde writesin a letter,"the only proper intoxicationis conversa-

tion.")34Unfortunately,the next time Wilde saw "Parker,"Parker would be "on
[the] unpleasant business" of a reverse,or disciplinary,Bunbury.Appearing in
the Central Criminal Court under the guise of Gribsby, appearing, thatis, as an
agent of the law,Parkerwould testify to "actsof grossindecency"committedwith
Wilde in 1893 while Gribsby,apparently,was otherwiseand elsewhereengaged.
It could have come as no surpriseto thecreatorof "Parkerand Gribsby,Solic-
itors"thathe should findhimselfprosecutedforthe same sexual practiceshe had
been (con)celebratingjust beneath the lovelypellucid "heterosexual"skinof Ear-
nest.That, quite literally,his dirtylinen should be "well-aired"in court he had
alreadyanticipatedin thisdeleted arrestscene,whichI have onlybegun to discuss
here. Converselyand symmetrically, the extensivenewspaper coverage of April-
May 1895 would guarantee the dissemination of Lady Bracknell'salso deleted
line: a (somewhat expurgated) narrativeof his "ejaculation[s]" would indeed
reach respectable English "ears more than once." But there is nothinguncanny
in any of this. No mere prognosticatorforetellingthe doom that was about to
settlearound him,Wilde was instead a prevaricatorof genius,a polymathof the
pleasurable lie. As a person committedto homosexual practice,he was compelled
bylaw to inhabitthe oscillatingand nonidenticalidentitystructureof "Parkerand
Gribsby,Solicitors": a structurein which transgressionand law, homosexual
delightand itsarrest,are produced and reproduced as interlockedversionsand
inversionsof each other.
Writingfromthisambivalentand endangered position,Wilde stated witha
parodist'sclarityand a criminal'sobscuritythatthe importanceof being was nei-
Alias Bunbury 33
therX nor Y, male nor female,homosexual nor heterosexual,Parkernor Gribsby,
Jack nor Ernest. Being willnot be disclosed bythe descentof an apt and singular
signifier,a proper name naturallycongruentwiththe object it seeks to denomi-
nate. In contrastto H. C.'s essentialistmove, Wilde never heralds "a true inver-
sion" that "respond[s] finallyto a stimulusstrongand prolonged enough, as a
man awakens when he is loudlycalled." Belyingsuch notionsof truebeing,Wilde
suggestsinsteadthatidentityhas alwaysalreadybeen mislaidsomewherebetween
such culturally"productive"binarismsas those listedabove. Homosexual or het-
erosexual? Parker or Gribsby?Jack or Ernest? Which name should be "loudly
called"? "I am both, sir." (Both indeed, and thereforenot quite either: Wilde
emphaticallydoes notimplyrecourse to the compromiseformationof bisexuality
or, in Ellis's tellingcontemporaneous phrase, "psychosexualhermaphroditism";
for this formation leaves undisturbed the convenientlybifurcated gender
assumptions that it only seeminglyfuses. The component desires that, when
added together,comprise the "bi" remain afterall quite distinct:shot with the
masculineorfemininethroughand through.)Wildean doublingindicatesinstead
a strategyof lexical or nominal traversal,a skiddingwithinthe code and between
itssemanticpoles. In thisvertiginousshuttle,being itselfmustslip on a name, or
two. "But what own are you?" Gwen astutelyasks of Jackjust as he is about to
become ErnestJohn. "What is your Christianname, now thatyou have become
someone else?"
IV
theendofartis thebeginning.
I lovethelastwordsofanything:
-Oscar Wilde
Child!Youseemtometousewordswithout their
understanding propermeaning.
-Jack toCecilyin thefour-act
Earnest
In lieu of "serious" closure, and as if to deride even the possibilityof

formalsolutionto the fugitivity of Bunburyingdesire,Wilde terminateshis play,
farcicallyand famously,withan impudentiterationof his farce's"trivial"but cru-
cial pun; here, finally,"the confusionof tongues is no longer a punishment."35
ForEarnestmayclose onlywhenJack,in a slyparodyof tragicanagnorisis, "realizes
for the firsttime in [his] life the vital Importance of Being Earnest." At this
moment,as the last words of the play swallowthe firstwords of itstitle,itsorigin
thereforedutifullyassimilatedto its terminus,Jack "realizes" himselfin and as
his "own" doubleentendre: in and as, thatis, the differencebetween 1) himselfand
himself and 2) himself and the symbolicsystemthat seeks to determine his
"proper" name. Jack's punning "being,"such as it is, is thus located and dislo-
34 REPRESENTATIONS
cated-located as dislocated-in an experienceof radicalmeconnaissance,of verbal
and ontologicalslippage, thatin turnfortifies his alreadysupercharged"percep-
As he celebratesthe"vitalimportance"
tionof the extravaganceof the signifier."36
of being his own pun, so does Jack embrace, even as he is embraced by,the sig-
nifier'spower of perverse subsumption-by the delight it gives and takes as it
incorporates"deviant"vectorsunder itsnominallyproper head.
This extravaganceconstitutesboththe subjectand the subjectivity of the play,
theirverysound and sense; the plot is so devised thatthe play closes only when
Jack's"being"is absurdlyassimilatedto his,or ratherhis father's,name, a require-
ment thatenables Wilde both to acknowledgeand to deride the oedipal forceof
prior inscriptions.In response to the pseudo-urgentquestion of Jack'sidentity
("Lady Bracknell,I hate to seem inquisitive,but would you kindlyinformme who
I am?"), the play dutifullyanswerswiththe Name of the Father,but in doing so
repeats itsinsistenceupon the letter;in itsexpiringbreathEarnest
also insistently
resounds withJack'sother double name and so closes withan openness to what
JonathanCuller calls "thecall of the phoneme." Invokingthemateriality of sound
and its powers of startlingconjunction,the pun's "echoes tell of wild realms be-
yond the [semantic]code and suggestnew configurationsof meaning."37In such
wild realms,the pleasures of the homophone arrivejust as the differentiaeof the
hetero dissolve into sound and same. Culler continues:
Puns,likeportmanteaux, limnforus a modeloflanguagewherethewordisderivedrather

thanprimary and combinations of letterssuggestmeaningswhileat thesametimeillus-
tratingtheinstabilityof meanings,theiras yetungraspedor undefinedrelationsto one
another,relationswhichfurther discourse(further playof similarity can
and difference)
produce.Whenone thinksofhowpunscharacteristically demonstrate of
theapplicability
a singlesignifyingsequenceto twodifferent withquitedifferent
contexts, meanings, one
can see howpunsbothevokepriorformulations, withthemeaningstheyhavedeployed,
and demonstrate themutability
theirinstability, of meaning,theproduction of meaning
bylinguisticmotivation.Punspresentus witha modeloflanguageas phonemesor letters
combining in variouswaysto evokepriormeaningand to produceeffects of meaning-
excessiveness,
witha looseness,unpredictability, shallwe say,thatcannotbutdisruptthe
modeloflanguageas nomenclature.38
Culler here efficientlyformulatesthe duplicitous operations by which the pun

opens in language a counterhegemonicor revisionaryspace, a plasticsitein which
received meanings ("language as nomenclature") may be perverselyturned,
strangelycombined, or even emptied out. Because they"both evoke prior for-
mulations,withthe meanings theyhave deployed, and demonstratetheirinsta-
bility,the mutabilityof meaning," puns discover in prior formulationsthe ho-
rizon of a freshpossibility.As a figurethatitselflimns the liminal,sportingon
the hazy border where tongues of sound and sense intermingleas in a kiss,the
pun broadcasts a faintlyscandalous eroticpower,a power of phonemic blending
AliasBunbury 35
and semanticbending, whose feintingextensionsReason alwaysdoes its best to
reign in; as when, forinstance,Samuel Johnsonfamouslyquibbles withpunning
Shakespeare:
A quibbleis thegoldenappleforwhichhe willalwaysturnasidefromhiscareer,or stoop
fromhiselevation.A quibble,poorand barrenas itis,gavehimsuchdelight,thathe was
contenttopurchaseitbythesacrifice
ofreason,propriety,and truth.A quibblewastohim
thefatalCleopatra
forwhichhe losttheworld,and wascontenttolose it.39
Wilde's genius implicitlysubmitsJohnson'scritiqueto a dizzyinginversion.Ear-

nestly"sacrific[ing]reason, propriety,and truth,"Wilde works his trade, trans-
coding golden apples into cucumber sandwiches and fatal Cleopatra into vital
Ernest. (Indeed, gender transpositionof the objects of male desire was Wilde's
characteristicmode of gayfiguration:"I do notinterestmyselfin thatBritishview
of morals thatsets Messalina above Sporus.")40
But it was not againstjust any gendered signifierthat Wilde directed the
splayingcall of the phoneme. He expresslytargetsthe most overdeterminedof
such signifiers-the Name of the Father,here Ernest John Moncrieff-upon
whose lips (if we may borrow a figurefromthe good Canon Chasuble) a whole
cultural disposition is hung: the distributionof women and (as) property,the
heterosexistconfigurationof eros, the genealogyof the "legitimate"male subject,
and so on. Closing witha farcicalpun on the father'sname, Wilde discloses,in a
single double stroke,the ironic cathexis(and the sometimesmurderous double
binding) by which the homosexual possibility is formally terminated or
"exploded" ("Oh," saysAlgy "airily,""I killed Bunburythisafternoon")in order
that a familiarheterosexualizingmachinerymay be installed,axiomaticallyand
absurdly,'at last." So decisive is the descent of the father'sname, so swiftits
powers of compulsion and organization,that (at least seemingly)it subdues the
oscillationsof identity,straightensthe bywaysof desire,and completes-voil!-
the marital teleologyof the comic text.All three couples, "afterall," are swept
away ("At last!" "At last!") in the heady and "natural"rush toward presumptive
conjugal bliss: a rush so heady thatit peremptorilydismisses,for instance,both
Cecily'sexigentdesire foran "Ernest"and Algy'sown earliercaution against the
exclusionaryeroticsof heterosexistintegration:"Nothingwillinduce me to part
with Bunbury, and if you [i.e., Jack] ever get married, which seems to me
extremelyproblematic,you willbe veryglad to knowBunbury.A man who mar-
ries withoutknowingBunburyhas a verytedious timeof it."Forgettingthisbrief
dissertationon interminableBunburyism,Algy fairlyleaps toward marriage,
therebyfulfilling,as if by amnesia, the comic topos which dictatesthat marital
conjunction, or its proleptic image, shall close the otherwiseopen circuitsof
desire.
And yet the closural efficacyof this compulsoryheterosexual sweep, espe-
ciallyany gestureit mightmake in the directionof the "natural"("I mean it nat-
36 REPRESENTATIONS
urallyis Ernest,"as Jackassures Gwen), is rendered instantlyabsurd-or, as Algy
puts it, "extremelyproblematic"-by, first,its hypertrophictextualityand, sec-
ond, by Wilde's insistenceupon both the sovereignityof the signifierover its sig-
nifiedand the signifier's"liability"to indiscreetslippage, its exorbitantappetite
for signifieds.Not only mustJack seek his "natural" or "proper" identityin an
antic succession of texts (he "rushesto bookcaseand tearsthebooksout,"reads the
stage direction),but in an earlier version this scene of franticreading had in-
cluded, besides "the Army Lists of the last fortyyears,"an allusion to Robert
Hichens's TheGreenCarnation(1894), a contemporaneousparodyof Wilde'saffair
withDouglas.4' Perusingthistextfromher unimpeachable altitude,Lady Brack-
nell emitsan evaluation: "This treatise,the 'Green Carnation,'as I see it is called,
seems to be a book about the cultureof exotics.It containsno referenceto Gen-
erals in it. It seems a morbid and middle-classaffair."42 Afterthisand other pre-
posterouscitations(Canon Chasuble, forinstance,is handed a Bradshaw railway
guide "of 1869, I observe"),itis of course thebook withthe"referenceto Generals
in it" that brings home the prize and so surprisesJack with his now naturally
punning self.
In any case, the paternallysanctioned "being" that Jack's reading hereby
secures entails a literalreinscriptionof the same pseudo-opposition(Jackversus
Ernestor ErnestJohn)under which his double lifehad all along been conducted,
except thatthe order of the termshas been inverted:wherecognomenwas, there
pseudonym shall be. In thisinversion,the closural move thatwould repairJack's
splayed identityand terminatethe shuttleand slide of Bunburyingdesire dis-
closes again, discloses "at last,"neitherthe deep truthof essentialbeing nor the
foundationalmonad of a "real" sexuality.In contrast,forinstance,to the memoirs
of H. C., whose sexual identityis definitively secured once he is "loudlycalled" by
his "true inversion,"Earnestdeploys inversion as a tropological machine, as a
mode of eroticmobility,evasion, play.Hence Wilde terminateshis farcewithter-
minological play on the terms-in-us:witha punning recognitionof, on the one
hand, the determinativeforceof prior inscriptionsand, on the other,the trans-
valuing power of substitution.Thus Earnestdoes not terminateat all but insis-
tentlyrelays and repeats the irreducibleoscillations,back and forth,frothand
buck, of verymuch the same eroticbinarismthatwould soon be definitelycon-
solidated in the violent counterframingof homo- and heterosexualities(two
termsthat,by the way,appear nowhere in Wilde's lexicon).
But Wilde's is a crucial, a crux-making,repetition-crucial not merely
because he deploysrepetitionto makea difference,but also because the difference
he makes he thenmakesaudiblein and as the disseminalexcesswithwhichhe laves
his pun, and throughhis pun, his audience, his readers. At once titularand clo-
sural, originaryand terminal,Wilde's pun practicesthe eroticsof repetitionthat
Barthes,collatingSade and Freud,would latertheorizeso compactly:"Repetition
itselfcreatesbliss . . . to repeat excessivelyis to enterintoloss,intothe zero of the
AliasBunbury 37
signified."43Because in Earnestthe object of this zero targeting,the site of this
obsessional emptying,is nothingless than the marriageablemale subject (let us
say,anachronistically, the integraland heterosexualmale subject)whose strength
and legitimacyare sanctionedby the frailtransmissibility of his father'sempow-
ering names, Wilde effectively empties both name and subject of their natural
contentand naturalizingforce.In doing so he reopens withinbothan eroticspace
thathad been prematurelyclosed-foreclosed, precisely,as nonnominandum.
Wilde opens thisspace througha subtledilationupon the irreduciblyambiv-
alent eroticsof the pun. On the semanticlevel,puns workpreciselybecause they
presuppose and reaffirma receiveddifference between (at least) two objects, con-
cepts, or meanings; "evok[ing]prior formulations,withthe meanings theyhave
deployed" (Culler), puns operate as the semanticconservatorsof the hetero; in
thissense, theypolice the borders of difference.(It is, forinstance,onlybecause
ejaculationmay mean abruptlyemittedspeech thatLady Bracknellmay properly
ejaculate on the subject of ejaculations.) But on the phonemic level thiswork of
differentiation is quite undone. When referredto the ear, to the waitingbody of
the reader/listener, punning becomes homoeroticbecause homophonic. Aurally
enactinga drive towardthe same, the pun's sound cunninglyerases, or momen-
tarilysuspends, the semantic differencesby which the hetero is both made to
appear and made to appear natural,lucid, self-evident.Differenceis repeated
until differencevanishes in the ear. (The ejaculation, Lady Bracknell is rightto
insist,"has reached [our] ears more than once"; repetitionguarantees a certain
saturation.)And when differencevanishestheresultis a correlativeplosion at the
mouth,the peal of laughtermarkingpreciselythe vanishingpoint at whichgood
sense collapses into meltingpleasure, or even bliss. This explains in part the dis-
taste with which a homophobic criticaltraditionhas regarded puns, an affect
usuallyattributedto the "cheapness"of the thrillstheyso dearlyprovide. (In and
out of school, it seems, serious pleasure requires stillharder exactions.) No sur-
prise, then, that heterocentricculture should disdain the linguisticprocess by
whichthe verypower of the hetero-the power to differentiate among signifieds,
objects,beings-is, on the phonemic level at least,so laughinglydisdained.
Understandingall of thisprecisely,Wilde harnessed the eroticambivalence
of the pun for the affinedpurposes of pleasure, transvaluation,critique. "I am
sending you, of course, a copy of mybook,"Wilde wroteto a friendin 1899 after
Sebastian Melmoth had received copies of Earnest'sfirstpressings."How I used
to toywiththattigerLife! I hope you willfinda place forme amongstyournicest
books.... I should like it to be within speaking distance of Dorian Gray."44
"Amongstyour nicestbooks" but still"withinspeaking distance of Dorian Gray":
thisironicjuxtapositionverynicelyglossesthe urbane duplicitywithwhichWilde
insinuated the revisionarydiscourse of an "Urning"-the term of gay self-
referencedevised by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs some thirtyyears before,a termof
38 REPRESENTATIONS
whichWilde was verywell aware-into his criticalpun on Earnest, and through
withinthe pun
thispun, intothe "nicest"of his texts.The intrinsiccross-switching
of hetero- and homosexualizing impulsions provided Wilde with the perfect
instrumentfornegotiatingan impossiblydifficult discursivesituation.Writing"at
large" fora respectablystraight(not to say heterosexist)audience whose sensibil-
ities he could affordto tease but not transgress,Wilde necessarilypenned to a
double measure. While mimickingthe dramatic conventions of heterosexual
triumph, he inserted within them the "unspeakable" traces of homosexual
delight:insertedthemwhere theywould be leastwelcome-in thevocables of the
paternal signifier,itselfthe guarantorof heterophallicorder. The Urning,to put
it wildly,would hide in Ernest,therebypun-buryingand Bunburyingat the same
time. ("Everything,"Derrida says,"comes down to the ear you hear me with.")45
Of course, as Wilde insisted,his titularpun is "trivial,"and it is so in the
technical,etymological-and punning-sense of theword. Trivialnot onlymarks
whatis "common,""ordinary,"and "ofsmallaccount"but indicatesas well a cross-
roads or terminus "placed where three roads meet" (OED).46 Etymologically
speaking, the trivialis the locus of a common or everydayconvergence: a site
where paths (of meaning,of motion,of identity)crossand switch,a pivotin which
vectors(and babies) enter in one directionand exit in another.The textrepre-
sentsthisnotionin twoways:materiallyand mechanically,in VictoriaStation,the
terminuswhere the "romanticstoryof [Jack's]origins"begins,where witha little
help fromMiss Prism (whose name, by the way,refractsan ocular versionof the
same idea) babyJack entersas Ernestand exitsas John; and, audibly and obses-
sively,in the pun on e(a)rnest,whichoperates exactlyin the manner of a railway
terminal.There should now be no difficulty in specifyingthe three paths that
cross and merge here to such preposterouseffect:1) a plain and proper name
(ultimatelydisclosed as the Name of the Father) that,forobscure reasons, "pro-
duces vibrations";2) the esteemed high Victorianqualityof moral earnestness,
of serious fidelityto truth,an attributespecificallygendered as "manly" and
repeatedlyderided by Wilde; 3) a pun-buriedand coded allusion (and here two
tongues,German and English,mingle)to a specificallyhomosexual thematics,to
the practicesand discoursesof the "Urning"and of "Uranian love." (That Wilde
was familiarwiththe specialized vocabularyof the "Urning" is beyond dispute:
"A patriotput in prison forlovinghis countryloves his country,and a poet put in
prison forlovingboyslovesboys.To have alteredmylifewould have been to have
admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble-more noble than
otherforms.")47In thislaughinginversionof proprietyand authority, Wilde puts
homophilicimpulsionof the pun (itsdrive,at the phonemiclevel,
the intrinsically
towardthe erasure of difference)to historicallyspecificuses; not untilthe 1890s
would the term Urninghave been sufficiently diffusedinto English to operate
withinWilde's punning trivium.48
AliasBunbury 39
Thus submittinghis play to the deliriumof the signifier, Wilde manages to
achieve what Barthes would later call subtlesubversion,by which he means that
which"is not directlyconcernedwithdestruction,evades the paradigm,and seeks
some otherterm: a thirdterm,whichis not, however,a synthesizingtermbut an
eccentric,extraordinaryterm."49In TheImportance ofBeingEarnest,I am arguing,
Wilde inventsjust such an extraordinary term: a third,ternary,and trivialterm
in which oppositional meanings are not synthesizedor sublated so much as they
are exchanged, accelerated, derailed, terminated,cross-switched.Indeed, he
inventsthistermtwiceover,inventsitin duplicate,so thatit emerges onlyunder
alias, submittedto an originarymasquerade of twofarcicalpseudonyms.The first
of these is Bunbury,the second is ErnestJohn. The interchangeability of these
twoterms(in exile Wilde even referredtoEarnestas Bunbury)suggestsan irreduc-
ible isomorphismbetween the technicallyunspeakable homoeroticsof intermin-
able Bunburyismand the structuralbifurcationof the nominallyheterosexual
male subject, a point upon which Algy exuberantlyinsistswhen he explains to
Jackwhy"I was quite rightin sayingyou were a Bunburyist":"You have invented
a very useful younger brothercalled Ernest,in order that you may be able to
come up to town as oftenas you like. I have inventedan invaluable permanent
invalid called Bunbury,in order that I may be able to go down into the country
wheneverI choose. Bunburyis perfectlyinvaluable."In the four-actversionAlgy
is even more concise; responding to Cecily'sclaim thatUncle Jack "has got such
strictprinciplesabout everything.He is not like you,"Algydisagrees: "Oh. I am
bound to say that I thinkJack and I are verylike each other.I reallydo not see
much differencebetween us."50Given this invincibleparallelism,and the obvi-
ously reversibleeroticsof "comingup" and "going down,"Jack fullyqualifiesas
"one of the mostadvanced BunburyistsI know."
And yetwe recall thatthe hetero-closureof the plot is predicated upon the
formalexpulsion of Bunbury,who is consequently"quite exploded" at play'send.
But even as Bunburyis eliminatedfromthe text,his (non)being therebyformally
remanded to the closet fromwhich at least his name had emerged, so also is he
posthumouslydisseminatedinto the redoubled being of Wilde's earnest hero, in
whose equivocal name Bunburymaybe said to succeed his own surcease. Passing
awayonlyto be passed on, Bunburyis buried,and buried alive,withinthe duplic-
itous precinctsof the titularly"natural"male subject. With this irreduciblyam-
bivalent movement-partly homicidal,partlycarceral, partlyliberatory-Wilde
closes his great farce, submittingto the heterocentricconventionsthat his pun
thereaftercontinuesto exceed and deride. That pun, withitsgay shuttling,con-
stitutesWilde's bequest to a posteritythatis onlynow learninghow to receive so
rare a gift:one whose power of posthumous critiqueis conveyed in and as an
excess of signification,pleasure, even bliss. In Earnest,thisexcess is never laid to
rest. Not everyexplosion, howeverterminal,implies a death. In Bunbury'send
is ErnestJohn'sbeginning.
40 REPRESENTATIONS
V
None of us survive[s] culture.

-Oscar Wilde5"
It is one of the bleaker ironies of English literaryhistorythateven as

Earnestwas brashlydelightingaudiences at the St. James' Theatre, where it had
opened on 14 February1895, itsauthorwould be subjectedto a fierceand dogged
institutional"correction,"the prosecutionand persecutionof the famoustrialsof
1895. For a brieftime (from5 April when Wilde was arrestedfor "acts of gross
indecencywithanother male person,"until8 May when George Alexander was
compelled by public opinion to removeEarnestfromthe boards), the two specta-
cles ran concurrently:the one all blithe insouciance, the other pure bourgeois
retribution;the one a triumphof evanescent,if not quite indeterminate,signifi-
cation,the othera brutaltravestyin whichtheauthorwould be nailed to his "acts."
So juxtaposed, the two spectaclescompose an almosttoo ready diptychof crime
and punishment,as in Auden's "nightmarePantomimeTransformationScene in
which . . . the country house in never-never Hertfordshire turns into the Old
Bailey,the featuresof Lady Bracknellinto those of Mr.JusticeWills."The very
facilityof these transpositions-Auden's and my own-suggests the volatile
reversibilityof the sexual and verbalinversionsthatWilde delightedin practicing
and perfecting.Precariouslyambivalent,Wildean pleasure had always flirted
with its own disciplinaryrelapse, a danger that no doubt honeyed the already
honed edge of Wilde's enjoyment.The advent of the trialsmarkedan implacable
shiftto an institutionalcontextin whichthewarmlubricitiesof interminableBun-
buryismwould be frozen less by the cold face of Gradgrindianfactthan by the
chillingimplementationof a legal, a statutory, homophobia. This definesthe dif-
ferencebetweenWildean courage and the ease of a criticwho maywithimpunity
celebrateBunburyat the cool distanceof a hundred years.Wilde tookchances,and
Wilde paid. Neither the least nor the last of his humiliationscame in his second
year of incarceration,when his wifeConstance successfullypetitionedto deprive
him of guardianshipof his sons, Cyriland Vyvyan,and to change theirsurnames
(along withher own) to her maiden name of Holland.52This ironybites.As if to
chastise Wilde for triflingwith the patronymin Earnest,the state rescinded his
rightto propagate the Name of the Father.
Notes
I am happy to acknowledgethe influenceand assistanceof the followingpersons who

helped along the way: Stephen Booth, Ed Cohen, Joel Fineman,CatherineGallagher,
Wayne Koestenbaum,D. A. Miller,and Alex Zwerdling.This essayis dedicated to the
Alias Bunbury 41
memoryof Joel Fineman, in whose work I discoveredthe baffledoriginsof myown
thinkingon Wilde.
1. Havelock Ellis, SexualInversion(Philadelphia, 1931), 175. H. C.'s narrativeoffersfur-
therevidence of the powerof Wilde'sfictionsto determinethereal. One eveningH. C.
is escorted by a fellowreader of Psychopathia Sexualisto "several of the cafes where
invertsare accustomed to foregather."At one of these "trystingplaces," he meets a
youthwho answerssome of his "book-begottenqueries": "The boy-prostitutes gracing
these halls, he apprised us, bore fancifulnames, some of well-knownactresses,others
of heroes in fiction,his own being Dorian Gray.Rivals,he complained, had assumed
the same appellation, but he was the originalDorian; the otherswerejealous impos-
ters"(177).
2. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,"in The FoucaultReader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York, 1984), 83.
3. Ellis,SexualInversion,175-76. 4. Ibid., 179.
5. Joel Fineman,"The Significanceof Literature:TheImportance ofBeingEarnest,"October
15 (1980): 79.
6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri ChakravortySpivak (Baltimore,
1976), 61.
7. The pseudo-oppositionbetween "trivial"and "serious,"withwhich I play repeatedly
in thisessay,is Wilde's own; the subtitleof TheImportance ofBeingEarnestis "A Trivial
Comedy for Serious People." That Wilde intended a pseudo-binarismsubject to pa-
rodic reversalis emphaticallyindicated by the subtitleof an earlier draft:"A Serious
Play forTrivialPeople."
8. Oscar Wilde, "The Criticas Artist,"in Intentions (London, 1891); reprintedin TheArtist
ofOscarWilde,ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago, 1969), 399.
as Critic:CriticalWritings
9. Andre Gide, OscarWilde:A Study,trans.StuartMason (Oxford, 1905), 30.
10. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying,"in Intentions; reprintedin Artist
as Critic,305.
11. Oscar Wilde, TheLetters ofOscarWilde,ed. Rupert Hart-Davis(New York, 1962), 185.
12. Ed Cohen, "WritingGone Wilde: HomoeroticDesire in the Closet of Representation,"
PMLA 102, no. 5 (October 1987): 801-13. During thewritingand revisingof thisessay
I benefitedenormouslyfrom Cohen's generous conversationregarding Wilde, the
trialsof 1895, and the historyof homosexuality.
13. Jonathan Dollimore, "DifferentDesires: Subjectivityand Transgressionin Wilde and
Gide," TextualPractice1, no. 1 (1987): 56; reprintedin Genders2 (Summer 1988): 24-
41.
14. Fineman, "Significanceof Literature,"79.
15. W. H. Auden, "An Improbable Life,"inForewords andAfterwords (New York,1973),323.
This eway,a reviewof Hart-Davis'sedition of Wilde's letters,appeared originallyin
the New Yorker, 9 March 1963; it is also available in Richard Ellmann,ed., OscarWilde:
A CollectionofCriticalEssays(Englewood Cliffs,N.J., 1969), 116-37.
16. D. A. Miller, The Noveland thePolice (Berkeley, 1988), 207. Miller's landmark essay
"Secret Subjects,Open Secrets,"fromwhichI quote here, has informedmythinking
throughoutthese pages.
17. Foucault, "Nietzsche,Genealogy,History,"76.
18. Fineman, "Significanceof Literature,"83.
19. For more on Henry ShirleyBunbury,see WilliamGreen, "Oscar Wilde and the Bun-
burys,"ModernDrama 21, no. 1 (1978): 67-80. I disagree withGreen emphaticallyon
the importanceand functionof Bunbury,to wit:"Even allowingforthe possibilitythat
the termmayhave existedin the formof a privatejoke, Wilde had ample opportunity
42 REPRESENTATIONS
to avoid using it in the play if he suspected it had any homosexual connotations which
might have drawn attention to him.... Wilde could have substituted another name
for Bunbury."
20. Ibid., 71. The English colloquialism for buttocks is of course not bun but bum,but the
frail consonantal difference distinguishing the two terms remains always liable to eli-
sion, especially in performance, whether in a slip of the actor's tongue or in the laby-
rinth of the auditor's ear. Bun, as I argue above, points immediately to Algy's serious
overeating and mediately to Wilde's sexual practice, which, his biographers agree, was
primarily oral. In this regard we should remember that Wilde was not, as is often
assumed, convicted of sodomy; rather he was prosecuted and convicted under section
11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized all "acts of gross
indecency" committed between males, whether in public or private. For an analysis of
the conceptual shifts entailed by this legislation, see Ed Cohen, "From Sodomy to
Gross Indecency," South AtlanticQuarterly88, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 181-217.
21. Fineman, "Significance of Literature," 89.
22. Andre Gide, TheJournals ofAndre Gide, trans. Justin O'Brien, 3 vols. (New York, 1948),
2:410.
23. The OED citation for Banbury reads: "A town in Oxfordshire, England, formerly
noted for the number and zeal of its Puritan inhabitants, still for its cakes." Cf. also
the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross." The pho-
nemic and imagistic affinitiesbetween Bunbury and Banbury proved too much for at
least one of the typistsworking from Wilde's handwritten manuscripts. In a typescript
of the play dated " 19 Sep. 94" by Mrs. Marshall's Type Writing Office, Bunbury repeat-
edly appears as Banbury. Wilde, whose careless, looping handwriting no doubt encour-
aged the error, patiently restored the us.
24. This line, spoken by Miss Prism about Ernest (whom, of course, she has not met),
does not appear in the three-act Earnest with which most readers are familiar, but can
be found in the various manuscript and typescript drafts of the so-called "original"
four-act version. A brief explanation of the textual confusion surrounding Earnest is
in order. When in 1898, apres le deluge, M. Melmoth sought to publish Mr. Wilde's
farce, his only recourse to "the play itself" was to a truncated copy text, George Alex-
ander's prompt copy, that had provided the basis for the short-lived 1895 production.
Since Wilde's own drafts and copies of Earnest had been auctioned off in the bank-
ruptcy proceedings following his imprisonment, "Alexander's manuscript," as Wilde
called it, was for all purposes the only extant text upon which to base the published
version of 1899. The problem with Alexander's typescript is that it contained sub-
stantial cuts, some authorial and some not, including, most famously, the excision of
an entire scene in which Algy is almost arrested for Ernest's outstanding debts; this
cut was essential to the structural reorganization of four acts into three. That Alex-
ander's emendations were significant there can be no doubt; upon seeing the play
on opening night, Wilde (whom Alexander had dismissed from rehearsals) is re-
ported to have remarked: "My dear Aleck, it was charming, quite charming. And,
do you know, from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself,
called THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST"; quoted in A. E. W. Mason,
Sir George Alexander and the St. James Theatre (New York, 1969), 79. Not until the
1950s would the various working manuscripts and typescripts of the "original" four-
act versions begin to surface, so that, by way of a temporal inversion that Wilde
surely would have delectated, Earnest is a work whose lost origins postdate its publica-
tion by some fiftyyears. Throughout this essay I refer both to the familiar three-act
Alias Bunbury 43
versionand to the antecedentfour-actversionswithoutworryingthe issue of textual
authority.Unless otherwisespecifiedall referenceshere to the four-actversionare to
TheImportance ofBeingEarnest:A TrivialComedy forSeriousPeopleinFourActsas Originally
Written byOscar Wilde,ed. Sarah Augusta Dickson, 2 vols. (New York, 1955); Miss
Prism'sline as quoted above can be found in Dickson,Earnest,1:77. See also TheDefin-
itiveFour-ActVersion ofTheImportance ofBeingEarnest,ed. Ruth Berggren (New York,
1987), 23-41.
25. H. MontgomeryHyde, OscarWilde(New York, 1975), 187.
26. Dickson, Earnest,1: 146. This line occurs during a wonderfulbit of stage business in
which,whileJack and Lady Brancaster(as she is called in the four-actversions)are
discussing"the painful circumstancesof [Jack's]origin,"Algy and Cecily are hiding
"behind [a] screen ... whisperingand laughing." As the good lady speaks, Algy's
attemptsto silence or "hush" Cecily interrupther discourse; annoyed by these intru-
sions, Lady Brancastercomplains: "It is clear thatthere is someone who says 'Hush'
concealed in thisapartment.The ejaculation has reached myears more than once. It
is not at any timea veryrefinedexpression,and itsuse, when I am talking,is extremely
vulgar,and indeed insolent.I suspect it to have proceeded fromthe lips of someone
who is of more thanusuallylow origin."In thissadlyexcised tableau,Wilde compactly
stages the sociopolitical operations of Bunburyingrepresentation,in which a dis-
course of social rectitudeis interruptedby an "ejaculation"thatcan be heard but not
seen. As the screenbehind whichCecilyand Algyare sportingverynicelymaterializes
the strategyof visual occlusion,so does the transpositionof "hush" and "ejaculation"
make audible, as laughter,the Bunburyingoperations by whicha secreteroticsmay
be mouthed but not quite bespoken. We should note in passing,too, thatWilde here
anticipatesthe more-than-audibleejaculation withwhich Roland Barthes closes The
PleasureoftheText,trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975). Cinema, Barthes writes,
"succeed[s] in shiftingthe signifieda great distanceand in throwing,so to speak, the
anonymousbody of theactorintomyear: itgranulates,itcrackles,itcaresses,itgrates,
it cuts,it comes: thatis bliss"(67).
27. Oscar Wilde, ThePictureofDorian Gray(Oxford, 1981), 79.
28. See note 24 above.
29. Anonymous,OscarWilde:ThreeTimesTried,2 vols. ("Paris,"n.d.), 389 (the twovolumes
are consecutivelypaginated). This text, which appears to be a pirated edition of
another book issued anonymously under the same title by the Ferrestone Press
(London, 1912), claims to be the most "complete and accurate account of this long
and complicatedcase. Special care, itwillbe seen, has been devoted to the elucidation
of abstruse legal points.... The evidence of witnesses,togetherwiththe prolonged
cross-examinationof Wilde in each of the threetrials,is givenas fullyas possible,with
due regard to discretion."
30. ThreeTimesTried,355.
31. I encountered this passage while reading Ed Cohen's Talkon theWildeSide: Towarda
GenealogyoftheDiscourseon Male Sexuality(Ph.D. diss., StanfordUniversity,1988), to
which I remain indebted. I quote withpermissionof the author.
32. Queensberry's "Plea of Justification" is reprintedas appendix A in H. Montgomery
Hyde, The Trialsof Oscar Wilde(New York, 1962), 323-27. The 1843 Criminal Libel
Act,the statuteunder whichWilde sued Queensberryforaccusing him of "posing as
a somdomite [sic],"permittedthe defendant (i.e., Queensberry) to place before the
court a document, or "Plea of Justification," supportingthe allegation for which the
libel suitwas being prosecuted.
33. ThreeTimesTried,191.
44 REPRESENTATIONS
34. Wilde, Letters,749. Conversationis itself a pun, referring doubly to interlocution and
intercourse.
35. Barthes,Pleasure, 4. 36. Ibid., 65.
37. Jonathan Culler, "The Call of the Phoneme," in Culler, ed., On Puns: The Foundation
ofLetters(New York, 1988), 3.
38. Ibid., 14.
39. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in Poetryand Prose, ed. Mona Wilson
(London, 1970), 500; quoted in Culler, "Call of the Phoneme," 6-7.
40. Wilde, Letters,594.
41. Robert Hichens's travesty of the Wilde-Douglas affair was originally published anon-
ymously (London, 1894); for Wilde's bemused response to The Green Carnation, see
Letters,373.
42. Dickson, Earnest, vol. 2, facsimile typescript of act 4, p. 34; also Berggren, Earnest, 190.
43. Barthes, Pleasure, 41.
45. Jacques Derrida, "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the
Proper Name," in The Ear oftheOther,ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 4.
46. The pun thus also slyly alludes to our culture's paradigmatic instance of "trivial"
meeting: the terminal convergence of father and son at the crossroads called Phokis,
where Oedipus meets his father and his fate. "If I understand you," says a darkening
Oedipus to his mother Jocasta, "Laios was killed / At a place where three roads
meet." Trivial indeed. Against the background of these tragic resonances, we may read
Wilde's earnest and trivial pun as a gay countersign to the murderous seriousness of
oedipal heterosexuality; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitz-
gerald (New York, 1969), 37.
48. It is crucial to note here that the Ernest/Earnest/Urning pun did not originate with
Wilde; it made its literary debut two years before Wilde began work on Earnest, and
Wilde stole-or, as literary critics like to say, "appropriated"-the pun for the trans-
valuing purposes of his own genius. More than a merely private joke, the wordplay
first appeared in a volume of poetry called Love in Earnest (London, 1892) by the
Uranian writer John Gambril Nicholson. A collection of sonnets, ballads, and lyrics,
Love in Earnest included a poem of pederastic devotion entitled "Of Boys' Names":
Old memories of the Table Round

In Percival and Lancelot dwell,
Clement and Bernard bring the sound
Of anthems in the cloister-cell,
And Leonard vies with Lionel
In stately step and kingly frame,
And Kenneth speaks of field and fell,
And Ernest sets my heart a-flame.
One name can make my pulses bound,
No peer it owns, nor parallel,
By it is Vivian's sweetness drowned,
And Roland, full as organ-swell;
Though Frank may ring like silver bell,
And Cecil softer music claim,
They cannot work the miracle, -
'Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.
AliasBunbury 45
Cyril is lordly, Stephen crowned
With deathless wreaths of asphodel,
Oliver whispers peace profound,
Herbert takes arms his foes to quell,
Eustace with sheaves is laden well,
Christopher has a nobler fame,
And Michael storms the gates of Hell,
But Ernest sets my heart a-flame.
ENVOY.
My little Prince, Love's mystic spell
Lights all the letters of your name,
And you, if no one else, can tell
Why Ernest sets my heart a-flame.
Quoted from Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest (London, 1970), xviii; Smith's
book, a study of the Uranian poets, derives its title from Nicholson's.
Nicholson's book did not go unnoticed among gay readers and interlocutors. I
think it self-evident that Wilde knew of it; the joke quoted above about "those chaps,
the minor poets [who] are never even quoted" is likely Wilde's oblique acknowledge-
ment of Nicholson's priority,although no doubt Wilde would have happily expatiated
upon the (merely belated) originality of his own deployment of the pun. And certainly
John Addington Symonds, who died a year beforeWilde began composing his farce,
caught the pun's gay valence. In a letter of 2 July 1892 Symonds wrote to a friend:
"Have you read a volume of sonnets called 'Love in Earnest'? It is written by a School-
master in love with a boy called Ernest." That "Wilde's" pun predates his own use of it
would thus seem incontrovertible.
49. Barthes, Pleasure, 51.
50. Dickson, Earnest, 1:111.
52. H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1975), 333.
46 REPRESENTATIONS

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Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest

Author(s): Christopher Craft

Besides, now thatI knowyou to be a confirmed BunburyistI naturallywant to talk to

A VAMPIRE'S IS NOT THE ONLY to initiate a transformation in

REPRESENTATIONS 31 * Summer 1990 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 19

If it goes withoutsayingthatThe ImportanceofBeing Earnest is straight

In these lines Jack "naturally"inheritsthe very same pair of signifiersthat all

Likeall worksofart,[The Importanceof Being Earnest] drewitssustenance

These cigarettecases are remarkablyrich metonymsof Wilde's sexual practice.

As the affectiveverso to the rectoof Earnest's gay gamingwithcigarettecases, the

The always serious Canon Chasuble repeatedlyfallsinto oblique and unwilling

The witnessin thisexchange is Charles Parker,a sometimevalet,whose testimony

("Afterall," Wilde writesin a letter,"the only proper intoxicationis conversa-

In lieu of "serious" closure, and as if to deride even the possibilityof

Puns,likeportmanteaux, limnforus a modeloflanguagewherethewordisderivedrather

Culler here efficientlyformulatesthe duplicitous operations by which the pun

Wilde's genius implicitlysubmitsJohnson'scritiqueto a dizzyinginversion.Ear-

None of us survive[s] culture.

It is one of the bleaker ironies of English literaryhistorythateven as

I am happy to acknowledgethe influenceand assistanceof the followingpersons who

Old memories of the Table Round

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