0.1 Afterword  (Page 17/25)

Excavating the sphinx: towards an archaeological poetics

Henley was right to ask his readers to “conceive a largish quarto bound in white and gold…composed of some twenty leaves of fair,rough paper (many of them blank); ten designs…thirteen initials…all printed in a curious green; and eighty-five couplets…all printed in small caps.” For thematters that Henley enumerates force their attention upon readers of the 1894 text even before reading has gotten under way. The cover design alone is aconsummate work of art or design, as Gleeson White appreciated, and it bears the monogram of both Charles Ricketts, its designer, and Leighton, Son, and Hodge,the book’s binder. In gilt stamped onto white vellum boards, Ricketts’s “remarkably spare architectural composition” contains both representationalelements, suggested by the poem directly, as well as more decorative elements that “tease the viewer in the same way that the enigmatic sphinx withinfascinates and mystifies the poet” (Brooks, 312). In some ways, Ricketts’s binding is reminiscent of those bindings that operate powerfully upon theeponymous hero of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray . We are told in The Picture of Dorian Gray , for instance, of a binding “of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates” ( Dorian Gray , 304) or of another “powdered” with “gilt daisies” connoting the ownership and character of the book’s first owner( Dorian Gray , 208). Perhaps most famously, at a critical juncture within the plot of Dorian Gray , Wilde’s hero rebinds nine copies of the first edition of apowerfully “poisonous” work in different colors so that they might suit the ”various moods” and… “changing fancies” of his nature ( Dorian Gray , 276). Ricketts’s binding for The Sphinx is no less arresting than these fictive bindings, aggressively calling the eye into play and forcing the reader tolinger over its composition and material properties. Michael Brooks writes that the binding “perfectly exemplifies the style that Ricketts…forged for the whole”(Brooks, 312), while Giles Barber writes “the design is perhaps the high point of Ricketts’s art and stands at the watershed of the period” (Barber, 329). Inits “symbolism, its sparse decoration, and highly Japanese vertical lines and sliding doors,” adds Barber, “it harks back to Rossetti and the…seventies” while“equally its mystic symbolism and its architectural lines, where the curvilinear is demoted from pride of place, now look forward to the rectilinear stylepopular in Britain after 1900” (Barber, 329). As important, the binding’s gilt surfaces catch the light and glitter as the book is moved, throwing into reliefthe two-dimensional flatness of Ricketts’s “figures,” and suggesting a “mysterious lost-and-found quality” beyond the reach of “any normal tonal range”(Lamb, 137).

Like Ricketts’s decision to print the poem in Caslon capitals, Ricketts’s binding invites us to see the poem it contains as amonumental and wondrous thing . This is true of the book’s title page too, which defies all the usual expectations:where the title pages of trade books almost invariably occupy a right-hand or “recto” page, Ricketts’s for The Sphinx is printed on a left-hand or “verso” page, facing the poem’s opening; and itrelegates the book’s publication information, and even the author’s name, to the margins in order to concentrate our attention all the more forcibly on theelaborate vine-like composition occupying the center of the page, printed in rust-colored ink. The bibliographic details, including the title and author’s name, appear to have been an afterthought so far asRicketts personally was concerned. Ricketts’s original drawing for the title page (see The Turn of A Century , 18) does not contain or allow for these features, suggesting that it was originallyexecuted, like the other full-page “illustrations” in the book, merely as one of the ten “designs” specified in Ricketts’s contract with Wilde and Mathews andLane. In the resulting book, eight of these other “designs” occupy a full page, and one occupies a half page, though in each case they resist the accepted logicof illustration and demand to be treated as decorative, imaginative artworks in their own right. See also n. 11 above. In this respect, Ricketts’s designsoperate similarly to Aubrey Beardsley’s pictures to Wilde’s Salome , though whether Ricketts influenced Beardsley or vice versa remains a matter of conjecture. For Beardsley’s refusal to“illustrate,” see Frankel, Masking The Text , 153-89. Here, as with others of Ricketts’s title pages for Wilde’s books, See Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books , 120-23 and 143-45; also Masking the Text , 191-93. the reader is torn between conceptualizing the page as a representational entityand a purely decorative one. The juxtaposition of the figure identified as “Melancholia” with the semi-human “sphinx,” reaching longingly for fruitpositioned agonizingly just out of reach, invites us to read the design symbolically as a “representation” of insatiable desire and its consequences.But equally the page demands to be understood “decoratively” for the sheer exuberance of its curvilinear composition and for the sense of beauty exhibitedby its snaking, vine-like, forms. At this level, it exists only to be appreciated for its own sake, as the embodiment of what Wilde once called a“beautiful untrue thing” (“The Decay of Lying,” 320). Like the wallpapers, fabric designs, and book borders of William Morris, or the beautiful floralborder designs that Ricketts would himself print in later years for books emanating from his Vale Press, its “only excuse…is that one admires itintensely” (Preface to Dorian Gray , 236).