From Chinese wisdom to Irish wit: Zhuangzi and Oscar Wilde.

In February 1890, there appeared an extraordinary review. Under the title of 'A Chinese Sage', it hailed the 'first complete English translation' by Herbert A. Giles of the works of Zhuangzi (or 'Chuang Tsu' as it was spelled under the old Wade-Giles system later replaced by pinyin). (1) The author was Oscar Wilde. How Wilde came to review this book is not known. His friend Wemyss Reid presumably had asked Wilde to write such a piece for The Speaker, a journal he had just founded, leaving the choice of book to Wilde. But what could have led Wilde to choose to review the thoughts of a man who lived more than two thousand years ago in a very distant country--and one separated by a virtual abyss in terms of civilization? And how can we, as readers, account for its impact on Wilde, evidently galvanized by this Chinese thinker who, in so many ways, contributed to his own evolving creed of the value of the useless, the obnoxious influence of do-gooders, and the importance of doing nothing?

Before the 1890 review of Zhuangzi, China never attracted Wilde's attention, but as early as 1882 he did consider following up his trip to America with one to Japan. (2) Japanese art was coming into vogue, and Wilde seized on it as an example of the new abstract style which would come to define the modern for painters such as his (then) friend James McNeill Whistler. Seven years later, in a key passage of his essay "The Decay of Lying', Wilde extols Oriental art for a rejection of naturalism so complete that, as his mouthpiece, Vivian, argues, the Western perception of Japan has been entirely formed by the art of that country. 'In fact', he concludes, with typical hyperbole, 'the whole of Japan is a pure invention'. (3)

As an early version of this essay was read to William Butler Yeats after Christmas dinner in 1888, a month before the Giles translation was actually published, Wilde's thinking could hardly be said to be influenced by it. Yet the tenor of the argument as well as its mischievous style is uncannily close to that of Zhuangzi's exposition of the ambiguities of 'the real'. From this instance we may surmise that, in reading Zhuangzi's work, Wilde discovered a fellow spirit, one who would, in the event, validate some of his boldest thinking. In fact the best evidence of the Chinese thinker's impact are the numerous echoes of Zhuangzi in Wilde's work after January 1889--occasionally given as direct quotations or as ideas attributed to a 'wise thinker'--but most often simply retailed as Wilde's own. However ascribed, once compiled, the list of parallel quotations, paraphrases, and echoes of Zhuangzi in Wilde's work proves to be as startling as it is long. (4)

But such a catalogue must be only the beginning of any examination of this surprising meeting of minds. No one who has read Zhuangzi and Wilde together at one sitting will miss the distinctive style which each shares: brilliant, unsettling, studded with epigrams which, as often as not, emerge as paradox or parody. Both Zhuangzi and Wilde resort to fables in order to illustrate complex intellectual stances. And both invent dazzling dialogues in which they turn entrenched social positions so completely inside out and upside down that eventually, as if by magic, they seem to be right side up.

As the witty exchanges of 'The Decay of Lying' amply demonstrate, Wilde did not learn these tricks from Zhuangzi. He adapted them, for the same reasons as Zhuangzi, as strategies by which to subvert a world which he had grown to oppose. In fact Wilde's review of Zhuangzi occurred at the very moment when his own philosophy was beginning to take shape. As we will see, in many ways Wilde was already thinking along the same general lines. Thus Wilde should not be described as a disciple of Zhuangzi, because, like Zhuangzi, he believed that 'A man who does not think for himself does not think at all'. (5) Likewise, Wilde shares Zhuangzi's sharp contempt for (as he put it in the review) "a man who is always trying to be somebody else, and so misses the only possible excuse for his own existence' ('A Chinese Sage', p.223). It should not surprise us, then, that Zhuangzi's lines, or concepts such as wu wei ('the principle of inaction', as it is sometimes translated), become transformed into something cognate, yet quite distinct, within the thinking of Oscar Wilde.

But surely there is something very odd about all of this. What indeed could have permitted an Irishman living in London in the late nineteenth century to be so keenly receptive to a Chinese sage reputed to have lived in the fourth century BC? Along with Laozi (to whom is attributed the Dao De Jing), Zhuangzi is revered as one of the founders of the Daoist school of thought. The works translated by Giles probably circulated in something like their present form from the second century BC. (6) Given their antiquity and origins in a civilization so distant, what would make the sayings of this Chinese thinker so attractive to Oscar Wilde?

In the broadest terms, both Zhuangzi and Wilde are what we might call 'contrarians'. This is a useful term for describing those who think against prevailing conventions in a way that appears to be systematically perverse, hence 'contrary' to the dominant discourse. Thus Wilde is often accused of merely inverting common epigrams in his own philosophical sayings, such as: 'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught' ('The Critic as Artist: Part I', p.1114)--a sentiment derived directly from the teachings of Zhuangzi, who tells the story of the wheelwright who, after many years as master of his craft, still could not transmit his skills to his son (Chuang Tsu, Chapter 13). (7)

Contrarians are at their most useful during those times when conventions have been raised to ideals, and when society is dominated by a consensus about these ideals. Thus Zhuangzi's main target was the literal overturning of Confucian sayings by stating them in terms of their opposite. Where Confucius preached the duty of right performance, Zhauangzi recommended doing nothing at all (the famous doctrine of wu wei), believing that man's perfection consisted in being, not in doing. In contrast to the instrumental morality of Confucius, Zhuangzi, with what Wilde identified as 'all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian systems' ('A Chinese Sage', p.222), preached the uselessness of useful things (Chuang Tsu, Chapter 4). Thus Zhuangzi's campaign may be understood as not merely perverse, but a way of loosening what he must have seen as the stranglehold of Confucian thinking in his own age.

Similarly, Oscar Wilde arrived in England at a time that late Victorian society had reached a kind of claustrophobic consensus about the values and norms of their own 'proper' society. So overwhelming was this consensus that it was even personified as an elderly, judgemental (and ugly) woman called Mrs Grundy--dressed completely in black and often pictured with a furled umbrella, by which, it was implied, she would beat anyone who deviated from her narrow standards. (8) Like Confucius, Mrs Grundy held to preoccupations that were overwhelmingly moral, rather than aesthetic or philosophical. In fact, the kind of society advocated by Confucius and that of high Victorian England had many similarities. Both preached the supreme value of Duty within a rigid male hierarchy whose ideal was exemplified by the image of the 'gentleman'. Both believed in subordinating the individual to the group, and art, as all other disciplines, to the service of morality. Thus one might risk the analogy that, as Confucius (9) was to Zhuangzi, so Mrs Grundy was to Oscar Wilde. Just as Zhuangzi baited the Confucian thinkers by inverting their dictates of right performance and duty, Wilde outraged the disciples of Mrs Grundy by turning their moral platitudes inside out, and thus making nonsense of them. (10)

Style was their agreed weapon. No one could ever be as serious as Confucius nor as oppressive as Mrs Grundy. So both Wilde and Zhuangzi resorted to the strategies of the frivolous. They …