Indexical Grids and the Construction of Identity in Wilde’s The Importance of Earnest

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Recommended: Critically analyse Wilde's characterization in The Importance of being Earnest

The Victorian Google: Indexical Grids and the Construction of Identity in Wilde’s The Importance of Earnest

This paper considers the indexical grid, those texts such as the railway time table, the army list, or the postal directory upon which the Victorians depended to manage the proliferation of information in the nineteenth century even as we use internet search engines such as Google today. Then as now the indexical grid surpassed its utilitarian function as simply a means of locating a person’s address or confirming a fact. It fundamentally altered the subject’s relation to the organization of knowledge, and, in so doing, provided possibilities for new modes of identity formation. This paper takes Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest as its case in point in order to argue for the productive function of the indexical grid, its capacity to disinter the subject from its organic rootedness in history, even while invoking history as the condition of this alternative model of subjectivity. In the modern world of information, it concludes, one discovers the “truth” of one’s being not in the experiential process celebrated by the bildungsroman, but in the depthless alphabetical arrangements of the archive.

Foucault’s The Order of Things describes the modern episteme as resulting from the breakdown of the taxonomic imperatives of Classicism. The exemplary form of such imperatives was the scientific table, the mathematical function of which was to link things together through external resemblances and differences that effaced their relation to history; in such an order, “the sequence of chronologies merely scanned the prior and more fundamental space of a table which presented all possibilities in advance” (218). By the nineteent...

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...d in the same way,” as Derrida notes, “is no longer lived the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codeteremined by the structure that archives” (18). The effect of this structure is not to arrest Jack within the space of order, but to affirm his identity an effect of its productive potential. In a world in which subjectivity seems more often to reside on the surfaces of an index card than in the deep recesses of the self, “[t]he truth,” as Algy says, “is rarely pure and simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature, a complete impossibility!”

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1996

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:

Vintage, 1973.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance f Being Earnest.

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