Q&A: Jeff Nunokawa

Jeff Nunokawa, a professor of English at the University, recently wrote "Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire" which is set to be released in June. He has previously written "The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel."

'Prince' reporter Renata Stepanov asked Nunokawa about his new book in an interview last week.

'Prince': Can you tell me a little about your new book "Tame Passions of Wilde"? What were you trying to say and what do you think the significance of the book is?

Nunokawa: The book is an effort to describe a kind of utopian fantasy that is deeply ensconced in Wilde's work . . .

The fantasy is a very simple one, the idea that we cannot control our passions, our desires, but rather that they will be soft enough, benign enough that they will never hurt us.

If you can imagine desires without the generally dark or scary elements that we generally associate with desire — disease, ruin of a moral or physical sort — if it were as soft as the kind of affections we associate with a crush but with all the seriousness of a romantic passion. That's what I'm trying to get at . . .

The precise material of the study is the work of Oscar Wilde. It's the study of the work of Oscar Wilde in an effort to find versions of this passion in different parts of his work.

P: It reminds me of Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour".

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N: That's actually perfect. It helps to discover the persistence of the power of this fantasy . . .

One of the things that I think is powerful about Wilde is that he begins in one place and ends up someplace quite different. He begins with a project that is quite hallowed, quite old, indeed ancient, and it is the project of controlling our passions. It is the project of imagining that through hard work, through constant practice, one can learn how to not deny our desires but control them, regulate them . . .

What Wilde does is he makes a particular turn in the argument and that is to try to rewrite desire, redefine desire, spot new forms of desire which have mutated into far more benign strains so if we can't control it at least it won't kill us.

The obvious biographical context is Wilde's own life, which as everyone in the world knows was all about the tragedy and trauma of uncontrollable desire. It drove him to his death . . . While I'm very interested in that, I'm more generally interested in a broader social context.

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P: Do you see Wilde as a social critic?

N: Very much so. He was on one hand a social critic, but he also very much wanted to be a part of society. Both those things are true and he was the first to admit it. He would say something very incendiary and sort of communistic on one hand and then he would say — I wouldn't dare say this same thing to my friend the prince Regent . . . It's hardly unrecognizable for us now. Lots of people want to be thought of as politically radical on one hand and be in a fashion spread in "Vanity Fair." But he was one of the first one who fully inhabited the contradiction. He was way onto it. He got the problem — that there was a contradiction.

P: In writing about Wilde, do you think your own work is a work of social criticism?

N: I try to define my task as specifically as possible. It's a work of social criticism of sorts. I prefer to think of it as a work of literary criticism.

I'm interested first and foremost in figuring out the text of Wilde. A work of social criticism, yes, although I suppose part of what I'm up to in this book is to limit the claim that has been made on behalf of Wilde as a social critic.

It is a work of criticism but as much of anything else I think it is a work of criticism of social criticism. I don't think of Wilde simply as a revolutionary . . . He's someone who wanted to have his cake and eat it too. I think of my work in general and this book in particular as an effort to produce new knowledge more than social criticism, per se.

P: Who do you think would be better prepared to understand and appreciate your work, an Englishman or woman of the 19th century or a modern day follower of his literature?

N: Certainly a contemporary reader, no question about it. I think the goal or dream of anyone writing a book — at least my goal — is to reach as many people as possible. I've spent 10 years writing this book — much too long.

I've often come to think myself as having some kind of relationship with Oscar Wilde himself and thinking, I don't like him very much. Certain elements of his character I admire enormously but you hear the same jokes over and over again — it's nothing that funny.

But I've often wondered whether Wilde himself would like the book, whether he would like what I have to say. The reason why the question is in some sense easy to answer is that it is very engaged in conversation with critics and theorists of the moment, so I can't imagine anyone who wasn't involved in that conversation would be interested. But I'm megalomaniacal enough to hope, to fantasize that Wilde and Wilde's world would find something funny, get some of the jokes from the book.

P: You say that the things that attract and excite us are beyond our control, that it's a truth universally acknowledged. What goal or vision is exciting or attracting you at the moment? In what direction are your literary or intellectual interests taking you?

N: I'm going backward a little bit. I've become extremely attached in the past few years to novelists who wrote rather before Wilde did. In particular Dickens, George Eliot, Austen.

I've gotten really interested in what those writers have to tell us, to teach us about how and why people socialize, come together. Socialize in a kind of broad sense and also in a civil sense . . . What the novels do to illuminate the bonds that draw people together and also strangely enough how they describe the impulse to get away from other people — that's the topic of my next book, provisionally titled "Getting Away From Others." It's the subject of a freshman seminar I gave last semester . . .

The book will have chapters on Eliot, a chapter on Charlotte Bronte, on Thackeray's Vanity Fair, on Dickens, and probably a chapter on John Stuart Mill. Along the way in those chapters there will be discussions of Victorian poetry as well.

So on one hand I'm interested in Victorian novels and on the other hand in several generations of sociology, beginning with the foundational figures, Durkheim, Zimmel, and then through the 20th century.

I'm especially interested in the character several people have an interest in now, Irving Goffman. Someday I'd like to actually write a book about Irving Goffman, but that's down the line . . . He's become a favorite figure for me.

P: Despite your interest with more contemporary writers, are you fascinated mostly with Victorian literature?

N: Yes, actually, I suppose so.

P: How do you think you got so interested in Victorian literature?

N: I don't know, I guess I like to gossip a lot! I'm pretty addicted to gossip like most people if they're honest with themselves.

Victorian novels aren't just full of gossip. One thing that I think is at the secret heart of those novels is proving how important gossip can be. Gossip can be material for what Wordsworth calls the philosophic mind.

With George Eliot, gossip gets put into some sort of special irradiation machine, and it comes out as the clay, the raw material for philosophical art. But it's denying your own pleasures to deny that the fact that a lot of what we get out of those novels and a lot of the reasons why we keep going back to them is that they're so full of gossip. It's like, did she say that? He was married to her?

P: It's ironic that the Victorian era is known for repression yet you seem to find so much to say about the opposite.

N: That's exactly right, and there's so many weirdos that populate those novels. The characters are both so familiar and so odd that I can never imagine a time when they won't be a major part of my life . . .

The characters in this book, you feel like you get to know them better and better in life as you get older. And moreover you feel like they get to know you, too. I know that sounds weird, but you grow with these novels and these novels grow with you . . . These are books of wisdom.

P: Have you seen the movie version of "The Importance of Being Earnest"?

N: You know, I didn't see it. I find "The Importance of Being Earnest" almost unreadable because I know it so well. It's like someone that you know so well that you almost can't see them . . . Some of the lines, I could still make myself laugh quoting them. But he bugs me. I've spent too much time with him, or maybe I've always felt that way.

Maybe that's why I wrote this book in the first place. There are movies and people whom I think catch Wilde's sprit very well often without any explicit reference to Wilde . . . He was a kind of prophet of a lot of very, very funny attitudes in culture.