<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/rot-padraic-x-scanlan-book-review>
"In the first act of the wittiest Irish play of the nineteenth century, Oscar
Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest,” there is much ado about a shortage of
food. The fearsome Aunt Augusta is coming to tea, but we have watched the
feckless Algernon eat all the cucumber sandwiches prepared for her by his
manservant, Lane. The servant saves the day when the aunt arrives, expecting
her sandwiches, by lying: “There were no cucumbers in the market this morning,
sir. I went down twice.” Algy responds with high emotion: “I am greatly
distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready
money.”
The play, first performed in 1895, is subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious
People,” and this scene is an exquisite exercise in trivialization. Wilde is
imagining what a food crisis might look like if it were happening among the
English upper classes rather than in his home country. The panic and dread of
searching for nourishment and finding none is transformed into an airy nothing:
a fake story about the nonexistent dearth of a plant that has relatively little
nutritional value, and a charade of great distress. The comedy is so
wonderfully weightless as to seem entirely free from the gravitational pull of
the history that had preoccupied Wilde’s family, and of a place called Ireland,
where the unfortunately unavailable food was not the cucumber but the potato.
In 1854, when Oscar was born, his father was also engaged in the sublimation of
horror. William Wilde, a pioneering surgeon and medical statistician, was the
assistant commissioner for the census of Ireland that was conducted in 1851—the
one that recorded the disappearance from what was then the richest, most
powerful, and most technologically advanced country in the world, the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of some one and a half million people.
They had died in, or fled from, what the Irish poor called in their native
language An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, a catastrophe that was then continuing
into its sixth year.
The year Oscar turned two, William published the results of his immersion in
the minutiae of the famine as an official report of the British Parliament. The
two-volume work is called the “Tables of Deaths.” Because the census relied on
the information given by survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose
entire families had been wiped out or had left Ireland as desperate refugees,
it actually underestimated the number of lives lost in the Great Hunger.
William and his assistants were nonetheless able to build solid pillars of
data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to represent sexes, ages,
locations, seasons, years, and causes of mortality, which included starvation,
scurvy, dysentery, cholera, typhus, and relapsing fever. The tables of deaths
occupy hundreds of double-page spreads, laid out with exemplary clarity and
precision. They speak of order, regularity, the capacity of Victorian
governance for infinite comprehension. The staggering rise in mortality may
have demanded extraordinary efforts from the statisticians, but they were equal
to their task. They tabulated calamity, confined it safely within vertical and
horizontal lines on the pages of sturdily bound official tomes. There are no
names of human beings."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
