Thursday, December 11, 2003
And you can find shit in a silver spoon.
--Shel Silverstein, “Hamlet as Told on the Street”
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique,
For while they dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams.
--James Joyce, “The Holy Office”
Drama is the tension between inner and outer reality. It is the placement of one truth in direct opposition to another. The most frequent, convenient example of this is the aptly named Dramatic Irony, where the “inner” reality the protagonist knows does not jibe with the “outer” reality experienced by the audience. At the point at which these two separate but equally “true” realities can no longer coexist--which is, by definition, the moment they finally come into contact with one another--drama occurs. It is, to appropriate Oscar Wilde’s own words, the conflict between “surface and symbol.” And with that, let us segue into The Picture of Dorian Gray.
We admit to having slightly twisted Mr. Wilde’s words around; what he actually said was, “all art is at once surface and symbol.” But this is really not so different, as art is at its root drama, drama--or, alternately, conflict--being the sine qua non of art. He does, naturally, warn us that “those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” and that the same goes for those who “read the symbol.” Well, then. This is indeed a poisonous little book, isn’t it?
Clearly, Wilde is trying to kill us. He knows perfectly well that this book is wholly pointless (he might say, “useless”) unless the reader goes looking for, as Shel Silverstein said, the shit in his silver spoons.4 Thankfully--and this is the greatest tribute to the genius of Wilde--there is no shortage of it to be found, either.
For, as regards shit beneath the surface, the point is not flippantly made. Indeed, a serious point of criticism for any piece of art is the artist’s willingness to deal with the act and result of defecation, literal or figurative. For example, this author has long harbored a mild grudge against Virginia Woolf, as whenever he reads her, he imagines her meticulously wrapping her quill in a condom prior to setting it to paper, so wholly absent are all refuse and offal and plain old sex from her work. But we are not writing about Woolf. We are writing about Wilde (who, as will be shown, was at heart the opposite of Woolf in that sense), though to get there, we would do well to make a detour and head over to Milan Kundera, whose concept of Kitsch is of incalculable aid when considering the crafty poison of Dorian Gray. Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
"...I always felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image--and God has intestines!--or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus 'ate and drank, but did not defecate.'"
That is to say, the pure do not produce shit. The pure do not even think about shit. This is the lingering concept that Wilde lays waste to, as we will see shortly. In Dorian Gray, he affirms something that should be self-evident, and yet is a fact almost universally denied: like the book says, everybody poops.
Kundera continues:
"Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man."
With evil, we are given a choice. With shit, we are not. But in certain instances--and this, finally, is our thesis--it can be shown that the reflexive denial of shit leads to evil; in short, evil can be, and in Dorian Gray, is very much, entirely the fault of Pater Noster.
But we must let Mr. Kundera finish his definition of kitsch:
. "...Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch."
Shit is the reality. Kitsch is the representation.
"...Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."
Ordinarily, we would quite happily call Oscar Wilde the single kitschiest writer literature has ever seen. This is slightly off the mark: Wilde is actually writing about kitsch. If kitsch is a denial of the unacceptable, who can possibly deny that Dorian Gray himself is, as it were, the very picture of kitsch? But his sins cannot go unrecorded. So in the end, it is art which must assume that duty. This is Wilde saying very plainly that it is the office of the artist to observe the shit where others deny its presence. The artist is society’s toilet bowl.
We have promised, however, to show how denial of shit leads to evil. And so, we are now proud to present an epic of introspection. We call it Kitsch Kills:
After his first encounter with Dorian, Henry hastens to interrogate his uncle about Dorian’s parentage. The salacious and ripping good story of the youth’s conception only further stokes the fires of Henry’s infatuation with him. As he leaves his uncle’s, he recalls
"How charming he had been at dinner the night before, as, with startled eyes and lips parted in frighted pleasure, he had sat across from him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow..."
Wilde, now engaged in full free indirect discourse, thoroughly inhabiting the mind of Lord Henry Wotton (who is, it might as well be mentioned here, ostensibly the most superficial lead character in the novel), leaves an ellipsis at the end of that sentence, an indulgence he generally abstains from throughout the book. In the next sentence, Henry has rather shifted gears, though his thoughts have clearly derived themselves from the previous metaphor: “...there was something terribly enthralling about the exercise of influence.” He launches into a protracted and entirely logical rumination on the sensation of power and the thrill of control, all of which is meant to provide motivation for his activity in the remainder of the story. For it is at that point that Henry decides to make Dorian his--all his. He will turn Dorian into an extension of himself. It follows that everything Dorian does from that point forward is a direct result of Henry’s influence.
But that ellipsis is telling. There is an interruption in the thought patterns of Henry Wotton: between a dazzled, entranced reflection on the beauty and innocence of Dorian Gray and the suddenly cold and frighteningly heartless intellectualization of his powers of influence, something happens. The former passage carries with it homoerotic overtones which no reader can can ignore, to say nothing of the tension between dominant and submissive. But those overtones would have to be smothered; this is, after all, the love that dare not speak its name. And so, in the moment of ellipsis, Wilde tactfully silences what amounts to a sublimation of the homosexual impulse into a controlling, dominative persona.
That is to say, Henry--not Wilde--denies that he has just produced shit. Homosexuality surely qualified as “unacceptable.” It is only natural for Henry to want to deny it. So he represents as the desire to dominate intellectually the reality of his desire to dominate physically. We hardly need to detail what follows; Dorian’s gradual spiritual dissolution, his affairs, his scandals--all of these are performed with the encouragement, direct or tacit, or the lustful Henry Wotton.
Let us return to the stated thesis. No reader ever blames Dorian much. By and large, the fault is laid somewhere between his circumstances and his mentor. But it is our opinion that even the latter is not to blame.
If it is to have any worth whatever, a work of art has to involve the reader; that is, it has to give the reader some agency, require something more than passive absorption. There are a host of way to do this; here, Wilde has opted to demand that, if he is to have any comprehension of Henry’s motives for the rest of the novel, the reader project his or her own persona onto Lord Henry Wotton. Wilde is quite deliberately foisting the burden onto the reader. The reader automatically recognizes that Dorian Gray is a victim, and not wholly responsible for his actions, but unless he goes digging for Henry’s motivation, he will find him one-sided and completely miss the fact that he, too, is a victim--a victim of the social mores of the age, mores with which was altogether too well acquainted. Henry is poisoned and poisonous. His is Wilde’s poison. Henry cannot allow himself--and moreover, society--to recognize that he defecates. Thus he represses it, and from that repression arises what we may call a sort of evil. The act of repression, the forcing down of an impulse, looks very similar to the act of forcing down the handle on a detonator. One sees Bugs Bunny do it all the time; he presses down the handle and the TNT explodes under poor old Elmer Fudd a few leagues over yonder. The same thing happens in Dorian Gray. Henry shoves down the impulse and the bomb goes Blam right under poor young Dorian. This is the sort of thing Wilde was talking about when he said, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Drama, as said before, is the tension between inner and outer worlds--in other words, representation and reality. The two naturally form a dialectic, and when they finally collide, a new paradigm (we hate that word, but sometimes we have no choice) is found to be standing amid the debris.
No man wishes to present himself as having a digestive system. When we first meet Henry Wotton, he presents himself as a heterosexual. The first, and catalytic, conflict of the novel comes when he sees Dorian for the first time. These are Henry’s first thoughts:
“Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.”
And they’re doomed. Those thoughts set in motion the dialectic between Henry’s exterior heterosexuality and decreasingly latent homosexuality. The process moves alarmingly fast, with the catastrophic collision occurring in the aforementioned ellipsis only two chapters later.
Dorian does not possess a digestive system. This is the point of Dorian: that he need neither eat nor shit, rather like everyone’s favorite martyr. As said before, “unspotted” Dorian is kitsch, therefore Wilde will have to kill him in the end, because that is the duty of the artist, to destroy the kitsch wheresoever he finds it. But let us not forget the fate of the painting itself: stabbed through the heart. So in closing, let us borrow once more from that lovely preface Wilde provided for us: “The 19th century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in the looking-glass.” That pretty much takes care of Dorian. Romanticism is kitsch. He explains why the painting gets it, too: realism was the anti-kitsch: “The 19th century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the looking-glass.”
It seems we demand reality from our art and art from our reality. This might explain why both rarely fail to disappoint.
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Joyce, James. “The Holy Office.”
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. trad. Michael Henry Heim. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984)
Silverstein, Shel. “Hamlet as Told on the Street.”
Wilde, Oscar. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. from Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
--Shel Silverstein, “Hamlet as Told on the Street”
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique,
For while they dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams.
--James Joyce, “The Holy Office”
Drama is the tension between inner and outer reality. It is the placement of one truth in direct opposition to another. The most frequent, convenient example of this is the aptly named Dramatic Irony, where the “inner” reality the protagonist knows does not jibe with the “outer” reality experienced by the audience. At the point at which these two separate but equally “true” realities can no longer coexist--which is, by definition, the moment they finally come into contact with one another--drama occurs. It is, to appropriate Oscar Wilde’s own words, the conflict between “surface and symbol.” And with that, let us segue into The Picture of Dorian Gray.
We admit to having slightly twisted Mr. Wilde’s words around; what he actually said was, “all art is at once surface and symbol.” But this is really not so different, as art is at its root drama, drama--or, alternately, conflict--being the sine qua non of art. He does, naturally, warn us that “those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” and that the same goes for those who “read the symbol.” Well, then. This is indeed a poisonous little book, isn’t it?
Clearly, Wilde is trying to kill us. He knows perfectly well that this book is wholly pointless (he might say, “useless”) unless the reader goes looking for, as Shel Silverstein said, the shit in his silver spoons.4 Thankfully--and this is the greatest tribute to the genius of Wilde--there is no shortage of it to be found, either.
For, as regards shit beneath the surface, the point is not flippantly made. Indeed, a serious point of criticism for any piece of art is the artist’s willingness to deal with the act and result of defecation, literal or figurative. For example, this author has long harbored a mild grudge against Virginia Woolf, as whenever he reads her, he imagines her meticulously wrapping her quill in a condom prior to setting it to paper, so wholly absent are all refuse and offal and plain old sex from her work. But we are not writing about Woolf. We are writing about Wilde (who, as will be shown, was at heart the opposite of Woolf in that sense), though to get there, we would do well to make a detour and head over to Milan Kundera, whose concept of Kitsch is of incalculable aid when considering the crafty poison of Dorian Gray. Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
"...I always felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image--and God has intestines!--or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus 'ate and drank, but did not defecate.'"
That is to say, the pure do not produce shit. The pure do not even think about shit. This is the lingering concept that Wilde lays waste to, as we will see shortly. In Dorian Gray, he affirms something that should be self-evident, and yet is a fact almost universally denied: like the book says, everybody poops.
Kundera continues:
"Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man."
With evil, we are given a choice. With shit, we are not. But in certain instances--and this, finally, is our thesis--it can be shown that the reflexive denial of shit leads to evil; in short, evil can be, and in Dorian Gray, is very much, entirely the fault of Pater Noster.
But we must let Mr. Kundera finish his definition of kitsch:
. "...Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch."
Shit is the reality. Kitsch is the representation.
"...Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."
Ordinarily, we would quite happily call Oscar Wilde the single kitschiest writer literature has ever seen. This is slightly off the mark: Wilde is actually writing about kitsch. If kitsch is a denial of the unacceptable, who can possibly deny that Dorian Gray himself is, as it were, the very picture of kitsch? But his sins cannot go unrecorded. So in the end, it is art which must assume that duty. This is Wilde saying very plainly that it is the office of the artist to observe the shit where others deny its presence. The artist is society’s toilet bowl.
We have promised, however, to show how denial of shit leads to evil. And so, we are now proud to present an epic of introspection. We call it Kitsch Kills:
After his first encounter with Dorian, Henry hastens to interrogate his uncle about Dorian’s parentage. The salacious and ripping good story of the youth’s conception only further stokes the fires of Henry’s infatuation with him. As he leaves his uncle’s, he recalls
"How charming he had been at dinner the night before, as, with startled eyes and lips parted in frighted pleasure, he had sat across from him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow..."
Wilde, now engaged in full free indirect discourse, thoroughly inhabiting the mind of Lord Henry Wotton (who is, it might as well be mentioned here, ostensibly the most superficial lead character in the novel), leaves an ellipsis at the end of that sentence, an indulgence he generally abstains from throughout the book. In the next sentence, Henry has rather shifted gears, though his thoughts have clearly derived themselves from the previous metaphor: “...there was something terribly enthralling about the exercise of influence.” He launches into a protracted and entirely logical rumination on the sensation of power and the thrill of control, all of which is meant to provide motivation for his activity in the remainder of the story. For it is at that point that Henry decides to make Dorian his--all his. He will turn Dorian into an extension of himself. It follows that everything Dorian does from that point forward is a direct result of Henry’s influence.
But that ellipsis is telling. There is an interruption in the thought patterns of Henry Wotton: between a dazzled, entranced reflection on the beauty and innocence of Dorian Gray and the suddenly cold and frighteningly heartless intellectualization of his powers of influence, something happens. The former passage carries with it homoerotic overtones which no reader can can ignore, to say nothing of the tension between dominant and submissive. But those overtones would have to be smothered; this is, after all, the love that dare not speak its name. And so, in the moment of ellipsis, Wilde tactfully silences what amounts to a sublimation of the homosexual impulse into a controlling, dominative persona.
That is to say, Henry--not Wilde--denies that he has just produced shit. Homosexuality surely qualified as “unacceptable.” It is only natural for Henry to want to deny it. So he represents as the desire to dominate intellectually the reality of his desire to dominate physically. We hardly need to detail what follows; Dorian’s gradual spiritual dissolution, his affairs, his scandals--all of these are performed with the encouragement, direct or tacit, or the lustful Henry Wotton.
Let us return to the stated thesis. No reader ever blames Dorian much. By and large, the fault is laid somewhere between his circumstances and his mentor. But it is our opinion that even the latter is not to blame.
If it is to have any worth whatever, a work of art has to involve the reader; that is, it has to give the reader some agency, require something more than passive absorption. There are a host of way to do this; here, Wilde has opted to demand that, if he is to have any comprehension of Henry’s motives for the rest of the novel, the reader project his or her own persona onto Lord Henry Wotton. Wilde is quite deliberately foisting the burden onto the reader. The reader automatically recognizes that Dorian Gray is a victim, and not wholly responsible for his actions, but unless he goes digging for Henry’s motivation, he will find him one-sided and completely miss the fact that he, too, is a victim--a victim of the social mores of the age, mores with which was altogether too well acquainted. Henry is poisoned and poisonous. His is Wilde’s poison. Henry cannot allow himself--and moreover, society--to recognize that he defecates. Thus he represses it, and from that repression arises what we may call a sort of evil. The act of repression, the forcing down of an impulse, looks very similar to the act of forcing down the handle on a detonator. One sees Bugs Bunny do it all the time; he presses down the handle and the TNT explodes under poor old Elmer Fudd a few leagues over yonder. The same thing happens in Dorian Gray. Henry shoves down the impulse and the bomb goes Blam right under poor young Dorian. This is the sort of thing Wilde was talking about when he said, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Drama, as said before, is the tension between inner and outer worlds--in other words, representation and reality. The two naturally form a dialectic, and when they finally collide, a new paradigm (we hate that word, but sometimes we have no choice) is found to be standing amid the debris.
No man wishes to present himself as having a digestive system. When we first meet Henry Wotton, he presents himself as a heterosexual. The first, and catalytic, conflict of the novel comes when he sees Dorian for the first time. These are Henry’s first thoughts:
“Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.”
And they’re doomed. Those thoughts set in motion the dialectic between Henry’s exterior heterosexuality and decreasingly latent homosexuality. The process moves alarmingly fast, with the catastrophic collision occurring in the aforementioned ellipsis only two chapters later.
Dorian does not possess a digestive system. This is the point of Dorian: that he need neither eat nor shit, rather like everyone’s favorite martyr. As said before, “unspotted” Dorian is kitsch, therefore Wilde will have to kill him in the end, because that is the duty of the artist, to destroy the kitsch wheresoever he finds it. But let us not forget the fate of the painting itself: stabbed through the heart. So in closing, let us borrow once more from that lovely preface Wilde provided for us: “The 19th century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in the looking-glass.” That pretty much takes care of Dorian. Romanticism is kitsch. He explains why the painting gets it, too: realism was the anti-kitsch: “The 19th century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the looking-glass.”
It seems we demand reality from our art and art from our reality. This might explain why both rarely fail to disappoint.
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Joyce, James. “The Holy Office.”
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. trad. Michael Henry Heim. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984)
Silverstein, Shel. “Hamlet as Told on the Street.”
Wilde, Oscar. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. from Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
