INDESCRIBABLE

The human disaster of the Irish famine.

- BY FINTAN O’TOOLE

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 man-servant, 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.