The Complete Short Stories

"I love all of the stories, but I’d select two for particular attention: ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr W H’. While many of Wilde’s stories are apparently simple but have a twist, these two are obviously and inescapably complicated. ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ goes wonderfully with Dorian Gray . The story partly resembles Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’: the fisherman falls in love with a mermaid and, in order to enter the sea and be with her, he has to cut his soul away. In a sense, it’s a version of the Faustian bargain. In Wilde’s rendition, the soul becomes another character in the tale once it has been cut away. It goes off and has these extraordinary adventures, and comes back and tries to tempt the fisherman with the experiences. The story gets variously interrupted. Contravening the straightforward trajectory of many fairy tales, there are hugely detailed descriptions of the exotic cities, merchants, and bands of vagabonds that the soul encounters on its adventures. These descriptions, like those in Dorian Gray , are just beautiful to read. They are there for their own sake. The story is framed by the priest, who refuses to bless the fisherman and the mermaid. But it’s impossible to read the story in any kind of straightforward Christian framework. There are witches, and the priest is proved wrong in all sorts of ways. In general, many of Wilde’s tales invite moral readings and then confound them. They offer versions of a simple moral that then doesn’t quite fit with the whole of the story. You are left unsure within which framework you are supposed to be reading them. To complicate matters further, the apparently simple morals of the various stories contradict each other. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ is difficult to read within any one genre. Is it a short story or is it actually a piece of literary criticism on Shakespeare’s sonnets ? It offers one of the earliest readings of homosexual desire within Shakespeare’s sonnets. It contains detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s imagery and how you might interpret the sonnets, but that’s all set within a story. Is this being offered as a serious reading or is it being offered as a mistaken reading? Is it a story about how Shakespeare’s sonnets are homoerotic? Or is it a tale about how that is a mistaken theory? How do you decide if any literary reading is true? It’s a sort of endless and recessive hall of mirrors in which what you ultimately see is yourself reflected. It’s wonderfully playful and phenomenally daring, particularly when you consider that it was published at the end of nineteenth century."