Jottings - Slice of life - 436 ( Oscar Wilde’s 1891 masterpiece “The Picture of Dorian Gray” - a retrospective, and an appreciation)

It is one hundred and thirty years since Oscar Wilde’s enigmatic, mysterious, and beautifully written novella, (the only full-length work he ever wrote) “The picture of Dorian Gray” hit the English book stands after much controversy and criticism. In 1889, The editor of the Lippincotts monthly magazine, J.M Stoddart, met and requested two authors - Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, to write a novel each for his magazine. Conan Doyle was quick to oblige, and within months submitted the now famous “ The Sign of Four” — the first of the great Sherlock Holmes adventures, but Wilde dilly-dallied. When Wilde finally gave the manuscript of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to Stoddart in early 1890, the editor loved the writing but was appalled at the story and its implications. He begged Wilde to edit and rewrite some of its chapters. But Wilde refused to budge. The book was finally published in the June edition of the magazine, with an edit of only five hundred words, and nothing more. The response of England’s reading public was unanimous. They condemned it with everything they had. The story, they claimed, reeked of immoral behavior, contained explicit passages of sexual references, and more importantly, they added — it elevated and rationalized all known vices as a virtue. To Victorian eyes, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was nothing but written pornography. In every line, conservative readers read nothing else but an unbridled celebration of abnormal love and veneration of the senses, and its overwhelming deification in the hero of the story - Dorian Gray.

Oscar Wilde wasn’t done yet. Under tremendous pressure from the editor, and society clamoring for his blood, he condescended to revise the novel. The book was reissued in 1891 with a preface - which far from appeasing the offended critics and public, only managed to mock and equally justify his original work and the current revision, which wasn’t much anyway. The preface, unique in literary history and now famous in its own right for its audacity and format, was a set of twenty-four aphorisms, in the style of Taoist writings, with which Wilde was familiar at that time. The preface read more like a manifesto for an artist to express his creativity. It hardly contained a word of apology or detraction from the proud and confident author. It began with the declaration “The artist is the creator of beautiful things" and ends with “All art is useless”. Sandwiched between the two statements, Wilde expressed the imperative need for creative freedom in an artist, and sarcastically mocked at critic— whose own lack of creativity often makes them a willing agent of moral corruption by twisting art into different interpretations. The critics were enraged even more by this blatant provocation in the preface and decided to ruin his life; which they did. The story of Oscar Wilde's legal troubles, his incarceration in prison, his lengthy lament in the form of a letter “De Profundis” in which he poured his heart out in eloquent prose in defense of homosexuality, and his subsequent flight to Paris, where he lived the last days of life in relative obscurity — is a sad story in English literature of one of the greatest prose writers the language has ever known.

I remember reading “The Picture” for the first time in my teens. We had a thick hardbound omnibus edition containing all the collected works of Oscar Wilde. At that time, the story of Dorian Gray didn’t quite make an impression on me. The fact that the story is a metaphor about the dichotomy of the inner self, and not so much a murder story was not clear to me at all. Add to it, Wilde’s lush prose, with paragraphs and paragraphs of splendid description in the most ornate language possible, made the job of reading even more difficult. In fact, the truth is that the stories of Oscar Wilde attracted me as a teenager only because of some stray remarks attributed to him that were constantly in circulation, like “The best way to overcome temptation is to yield to it” and few others. During the formative years of adolescence, one actively seeks all the support and rationale to be able to commit freely to the cult of hedonism without chastising oneself, and I was hoping to find justifications for such an attitude in Wilde. I don't think I found what I sought, but the taste of Wilde’s writing lingered on. In the last three decades, I have read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at least five times, and each time, I have grown to like to book more than before. Like the story itself, there is something about this thin novella that is arresting and addictive.

The story of Dorian gray is a simple one. A young man with the looks of an Adonis, and the innocence of a child, finds himself in the company of the painter Basil Hallward, and his intellectual friend Lord Henry. The painter is consumed by the form and beauty of Dorian, pours himself into painting a portrait of the young man, distills the essence of youthful innocence in his creation, and when done, gifts the picture to Dorian for his safe keeping. In the studio of Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry for the first time, and both of them strike a good friendship. To Lord Henry, Dorian is the perfect prey for his philosophy of excesses. The young Dorian, is naturally attracted to the intellectual seductions of Lord Henry, to whom nothing in life is sacred, and everything worth only in terms of sensory gratification. Conversing with Henry, and listening to his lilting arguments, Dorian is mesmerized by the reasoning and persuasive language of sensual pleasure and slowly starts slipping down the precipice of his own moral standards. Henry’s hedonistic views on love, art, idealism, honesty, beauty, religion and morals, slowly begin to infiltrate the idealism of Dorian, and the young man strays away from his course. Unable to counter Henry’s overwhelming rationale against living a life of ideals, Dorian gradually becomes callous, arrogant, selfish, murderous, and much more, and with each change in intention, act, and demeanor, the picture on the portrait painted by Basil bears the brunt of his moral collapse. While the body of Dorian himself never ages and never shows signs of his evil deeds, the picture does. Every selfish act committed by the young man leaves an indelible mark of shame on the painting. Awed at first by the miraculous transference, and then horrified by this strange phenomenon, Dorian decides to hide the painting in the darkness of his attic. With the painting out of sight, and no more a moral compass of his deeds, Dorian gives himself completely to debauchery with the realization that no matter what he does, it is the painting that will suffer the consequences of his actions, and not he. This descent into madness reaches its nadir when he commits the murder of someone close to him. With this act, the transformation of Dorian Gray is complete. The sensitive young man at the beginning of the story has now become a dangerous caricature of himself. There are no limits now to his selfishness. The reader is progressively drawn into the vile life of Dorian until we reach a startling climax - an end that stays with the reader forever. In a matter of few paragraphs, Wilde draws the different strands of his tale together into one horrific conclusion. A century later, readers and critics still debate the nature of this conclusion, and what it means?

A decade after the publication of “The Picture” in 1900, Sigmund Freud would unravel for the western world the secrets of the mind, and establish definitive terminologies for the role of the unconscious, conscious, and the conscience with human personality. In the novella, Wilde preempted Freud’s ideas a bit and imagined a conscience that is objectified in the form of a painting; an alter-ego of Dorian Gray. The Novel is unsettling to readers even today because there lies within each of us two selves: one that acts, and the other that mirrors, censures, or rationalizes the act. We grow up with indoctrinated standards of what is good, right, beautiful, and moral, and throughout our lives, we are asked to measure each living experience against an unchanging background - something similar to the picture of Dorian. Our inner struggles are often rooted in this dichotomy between what we wish to do, and what should we do? It is a rare man who finds absolute integration between the thought and the deed. As Wilde points out in his climax, the only way to reconcile the inner voice and the outer deed is to face the issue headlong and come out of it one way or the other.

I cannot conclude an essay on “The picture of Dorian Gray” without mentioning the beauty of its prose. I don't think there are many books in the English language that can surpass Oscar Wilde’s capacity to describe things and people. The sentence flow like honey, dripping with sweetness and richness. There are times when I read a passage a few times, simply for the pleasure of its structure and art. It is a book that should be savored in small doses, and come back to it again and again for refreshment. Whether one agrees with Oscar Wilde’s premise or philosophy, none can ever close the book without a refreshing feeling of a great magisterial symphony of words and sentences washing over one's soul. If you are not yet a lover of English literature, The Picture of Dorian Gray will make you one.

Buy yourself a nice hardbound, annotated Modern library edition of the book with its crisp printing and silky pages. Read the preface written by Oscar Wilde, not once, but twice or thrice, and then begin the novel. Keep a pencil in hand and a notebook, and deliberately pause at passages when Lord Henry eases himself into a monologue expounding his philosophy of an epicurean life, and make notes of those dozens of brilliant insights that are sprinkled throughout the book like nuggets of gold. Even one of them can transform your life for the better or worse. And most importantly, forget not to keep a dictionary beside you. By the time you finish “The Picture of Dorian Gray” you would have picked up scores of delicious words and expressions, along with the infinitely precious art of writing clear, rich, precise, and meaningful prose.

What more can we ask of literature?

God bless...

yours in mortality,

Bala