0.1 Afterword  (Page 22/25)

So we find ourselves in the same position reading the 1894 book as the speaker reading the sphinx "in" the poem. The book too is" songless tongueless," "beautiful and silent "; and self-evidently it also " wake[s] in me each bestial sense. " Even before reading has gotten under way, aswe have seen, the poem disappears into the sheer mass of the book, and the reading process gets undermined by material signifiers that stare us in the faceat every turn of the page. Although the text is not actually illegible, the sheer variety of experimentation involved in its printing makes it extremelydistracting to read: on many pages, the poem’s lines have been pushed to the margins and, on others, the poem appears eccentrically spatialized by the page’soverall appearance of whiteness (or what Henley terms “blankness”). Illuminated capitals, illustrations, colored inks, isolated catchwords, and Ricketts’sstrict adherence to Whistler-esque principles of asymmetry in the book’s typography While commonly associated with Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés (Paris, 1897), the typographic asymmetry of The Sphinx derives largely from Ricketts’s absorption of principles developed in thepamphlets and books of the painter James McNeill Whistler. See Frankel, Masking The Text , 223-49 and Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books , 94-99. all call our attention to the print medium while possessing considerable visualartistry in their own right. The result is a visual phantasmagoria that makes it extremely difficult to concentrate on “the poem itself.” By the end, the bookhas become not merely the poem's vehicle; to all intents and purposes, it has become the sphinx itself , embodying an “archaelogical” decorativity that the poem can only attempt to grasp adequately.Clearly, this is what Stephen Calloway means when he says that the book is the “most harmonious” of all Ricketts’s productions and that it "precisely mirrorsthe exquisite and perverse text" (Calloway, 44) or what Percy Muir means by calling the book “an ideal setting for the artificiality of Wilde’s text” (Muir,193). As the Pall Mall Budget ’s reviewer had written in 1894, "the vellum binding, the various symbolic designs, thequaint rubricated initials and the general arrangement of the text, all by Mr. Ricketts' sympathetic art, are most subtly infused by the spirit of the poem"(“The City of Books,” quoted in Millard, Bibliography , 393).

Nonetheless, saying that the decorated book mirrors Wilde's text needs qualification, because the relation between book and poem is not one of simple parity orreflection. Rather, the decorated book poses in real and perceptual terms what the poem rehearses at an imaginative level. To this degree, the problems posedby the decorated book of 1894 lend the poem an urgency that it lacks when printed conventionally. In its 1894 edition, the poem demands to be seen in itsintegrity with Ricketts’s marvelous designs. To see it for anything more or less —to abstract the poem from the decorated book, on the assumption that the bookis immaterial—is to commit precisely the error that leads the poem’s speaker to his grotesque misconstrual of the relic that presents itself to his eyes,culminating in his eventual mysticism and breakdown.