A Face without a Heart: Expression, Surface, and Temporality in Dorian Gray

While not entirely prepared to abandon the hermeneutic model of art as “at once surface and symbol,” Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray cautions the reader that “those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril” (Wilde 4). Exactly one hundred years later, Frederick Jameson  sees an evolving view of art in which “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces” as one of the constitutive elements of postmodern culture (Jameson 12). For both writers, this concept of art’s “surface” mobilizes a spatial metaphor in which the material aspect of an artwork enfolds or hovers above an interior meaning or moral. Since this spatial metaphor occupies a central place in Jameson’s discussion of depth as something absent from the postmodern, I was surprised to see the claim that “our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time” (16). In this post, I am interested in putting Wilde and Jameson in dialogue to more fully explore the roles of space and time in each writer’s conception of artistic expression, to ask if space and spatial metaphors inform Jameson’s discussion of the modern as well as the postmodern, and to suggest that “categories of time” and “categories of space” may in fact be mutually constitutive.

For Jameson, postmodern depthlessness results not only from the increasing superficiality of art – its increasing resistance to hermeneutic probing – but also from a “waning of affect,” or a decrease in emotional expression. This vanishing concept, Jameson explains, “presupposes some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’ is then projected out and externalized” (11). Like a work of art in a hermeneutic situation, an emotion becomes divided between an externalized surface, the human body (corresponding to the artistic medium), and the affect (meaning) that exists “within,” “inside,” - Wilde might add “beneath” - it.

Additionally, this description of expression shows that the division between surface and interior has a temporal dimension; the interior affect exists prior to being “projected out and externalized.” Earlier, in a discussion of Van Gogh’s shoes, Jameson suggested that the hermeneutic approach to art requires viewers “to reconstruct some initial situation of of which the finished work emerges” (7). Mixing this description of hermeneutics with the description of emotional expression above and applying the resulting (spatio-temporal) “depth model” to Munch’s The Scream, which is “a canonical expression” in both the artistic and the emotional sense, we as viewers might imagine that the subject of the painting (the screaming homunculus, or Munch himself) is in the process of emerging from an “initial situation” of “wordless pain,” punctuated now by the “moment” of cathartic expression captured on Munch’s canvas.

Of course, the temporality becomes fuzzy here, and not only because what is captured on canvas has no material past outside this one moment of expression. As viewers – hermeneutic readers – we actually experience the temporal movement of affect to expression backward. Working from the expression, the material surface in front of us, we would reconstruct the initial situation, the interior affect that inspired it. This movement backward in time is also a movement inward in space, from a (present) surface to a (past (and present?)) interior.

This proliferation of pasts and presents, surfaces and interiors offers an excellent door through which to introduce Dorian Gray, a character famous for hiding his ugly past behind a surface “of extraordinary personal beauty” (Wilde 5). Dorian represents the failure of expression in so far as his interior, his personal history of crimes and negative affects, fails to inscribe itself on the surface of his physical body. (Here, it’s important to note that nineteenth-century physiognomy would expect a body’s moral and personal history to manifest itself in the body’s physical appearance. Wilde’s novel relies on a highly literal understanding of the phenomenon.) Dorian Gray is also a classic example of discontinuity between “essence and appearance,” one of the depth models that Jameson believes has been eclipsed in postmodern thought.  Dorian’s essence, “the real degradation of his life” and “the hideous corruption of his soul” (118), has been separated from his bodily appearance in being transferred onto/into his portrait.

In fact, this classic reading of Wilde's text obscures what is potentially interesting about its engagement with the problematic of surfaces. Dorian’s essence and appearance are not divided between an interior and a surface, but between two spatially and temporally distinct surfaces – his body, suspended forever outside of a “moment of expression,” and the painted canvas of his portrait, which changes concurrently with each moment of Dorian’s personal history. In their identical qualities and temporalities, the spaces of Dorian’s interior essence and the painted surface collapse, until Dorian is able to say sincerely to the painter of his portrait “[my soul] is your own handiwork” (146). What fragments Dorian’s subjectivity is not a spatial division of interior/exterior, but a temporal split between one surface that is outside of, and one that is immersed in time.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, every bit as fascinated with questions of depth and surface as Jameson, suggests that both space and temporality shape “depth models” for subjectivity and expression; moreover, both space and time continue to produce difference in situations – Postmodern or otherwise - where “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces.” Neither term in the dialectic of depth/modernity/temporality and surface/postmodernity/space is, it appears, prior to or easily removed from the other.