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@ppoli611674629039 · 21 Nov 2020

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

#wilde #decadentism #poetry  #books


For it always ran riot -

Like a tangled sunbeam of gold:

These things are old.

I remember so well the room,

And the lilac bloom

That beat at the dripping pane

In the warm June rain;

And the colour of your gown,

It was amber-brown,

And two yellow satin bows

From your shoulders rose.

And the handkerchief of French lace

Which you held to your face -

Had a small tear left a stain?

Or was it the rain?

On your hand as it waved adieu

There were veins of blue;

In your voice as it said good-bye

Was a petulant cry,

'You have only wasted your life.'

(Ah, that was the knife!)

When I rushed through the garden gate

It was all too late.

Could we live it over again,

Were it worth the pain,

Could the passionate past that is fled

Call back its dead!

Well, if my heart must break,

Dear love, for your sake,

It will break in music, I know,

Poets' hearts break so.

But strange that I was not told

That the brain can hold

In a tiny ivory cell

God's heaven and hell.

And here we are at The Ballad of Reading Gaol, from 1898, which was born from a deep and felt pain. The theme is the impression aroused in prison by the arrival of a man sentenced to death, a soldier who killed his woman in his sleep because he was drunk. The images and atmosphere are reminiscent of Coleridge's romanticism. Here Wilde breaks away from decadent selfishness - which considers life as an experience of personal refinement - in favor of a feeling of solidarity.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss.

The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,

And some when they are old;

Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

Some with the hands of gold:

The kindest use a knife, because

The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,

Some sell, and others buy;

Some do the deed with many tears,

And some with a sigh:

For each man kills the thing he loves

Yet each man does not die.

The author oscillates between the overcoming of common morality and the feelings of guilt also linked to the fear of death.

Wilde has also written many fairy tales, born with his children, in the quiet years of marriage, before trial and prison. Here too the eternal conflict between aesthetics and ethics is debated. The Happy Prince narrates the unnatural but very pure love between a swallow and a statue. The Nightingale and the Rose is also based on the love-death marriage, so dear to the decadent - as well as to the Italian Scapigliati, including the almost forgotten Igino Ugo Tarchetti. Love, Wilde tells us, cannot exist without sacrifice. In The Selfish Giant there is a sense of morbidity that is linked to an excessive interest in children found in the Victorian period.

According to Wilde, in literature there is a need for fantastic power, in his essays he is opposed to realism and criticism by Émile Zola.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

Life imitates art and not the other way around, it is shapeless, order is conferred upon it only by the artistic activity of man. Art expresses nothing but itself. Criticism is more creative than creation, the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist did not put there.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.

The difference between romanticism and decadence is that the ideals have been lost in the second. Gautier, Pater, Baudelaire, Mallarmè, Morris, Ruskin, Rimbaud, Huysman, with their poisoned, nervous and corrupt fin de siècle sensitivity, constitute the second romantic-decadent flare, which opposes the sadness of a petty and monotonous life, based on Schopenhauer's pessimism. Man is moved by an immanent and evil will, and lives a bad reality that must be replaced with a good lie. Nature is the genetic makeup that is imposed on us, the artifice our free choice.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray is an almost gothic horror novel, perhaps absorbed by the frequentation of Le Fanù and Maturin. The portrait represents old age and the turpitude of the soul. The story tells of Dorian Gray, an innocent, beautiful and sensitive young man, who meets the corruptor Henry Wotton, cynical, debauched, tired of life and pleasures. The corruption operated by Wotton on Gray, from the Wildian point of view, is an initiation into the life of the senses, to the knowledge of the world through pleasure. The mood of the protagonists is expressed through sensations: exhausting smells, sounds, languid, suffocating but not unpleasant atmospheres, like in D'Annunzio's Il Piacere. In the preface Wilde states:

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The whole Dorian Gray is a dangerous symbol for those who intuit it, a decadent message of refined hedonism. How far, the author wonders, can an esthete reach before becoming a monster like the portrait? Henry Wotton's library is an Art Nouveau paradise, Dorian discovers Wagner and is overwhelmed. Henry Wotton is struck by Dorian's candor, so ready to be molded, initiated into the “new hedonism”, the joy of living, the rediscovery of the body, the Hellenist renaissance. Wotton is tired of physical pleasures and wants to enjoy through Dorian's fresh senses and through the plagiarism of the soul of others.

The harmony of body and soul - what immense value is in it! We in our foolishness have separated the two and invented a realism which is vulgar and an idealism which is empty.

Henry lashes out against the respectable, Victorian, industrialized society, he understands that it is the environment that inhibits Dorian, repressing him. The work of corruption is also revelation. Where realism is soulless and romanticism too ideal, hedonism starts from the exaltation of the senses and reaches the overcoming of the dualism of spirit and matter which alienates man. The “new edonism” resembles Renaissance Neoplatonism with the added pessimism of Schopenhauer. Through the refinement of the senses it leads to the ideal. There is no good or bad but only beautiful or ugly. You can heal the soul with the senses - and the senses with the soul - pleasure leads to a knowledge that no religion and no philosophical doctrine can offer.

The whole novel is a tangle of contradictions that represent Wilde's torn mind, a gymnasium of eternal conflicts between immorality and consequent sense of guilt. When an esthete, an egoist, makes a good gesture, he does it to experience a new sensation - and this is part of hedonism - or because he recites the comedy of goodness to complete the artistic creation of his life.

The plot of the novel is Faustian. Marlowe's Faust signed his pact with the devil out of thirst for knowledge, Goethe's for love, Wilde's for pleasure. But the consummation of the loving act (eros) leads to guilt and therefore to atonement through death (thanatos). Dorian Gray's life is not happy, there is always something that curbs and spoils the tasting of earthly pleasures, he is cold and icy. He does not become a true esthete because he never has a body and a soul at the same time. The new hedonism fails.

The surface of the novel is made up of the plot, the elegance of the style, the homosexuality that hovers undeclared. The symbol is an invitation to break with the puritan conventions of society, to enjoy the fruit of life beyond good and evil. This hedonistic doctrine, however, does not hold up, it leads to brutality, unhappiness, to the monster that, in the end, dies like all the monsters of the gothic novel. The language is overloaded, refined, suffocating, suggestive.

We conclude with The Portrait of Mr W.H., a 1989 story. Mr W.H. he is the one to whom Shakespeare dedicated his plays, probably the boy he was in love with. Wilde connects him to his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. In common with Dorian Gray's Portrait we have the triangle of men who move in an atmosphere of morbid friendship tending towards homosexuality, and the central figure of the handsome fatal young man, capable of unleashing a hurricane in the artist's love life.