"Your picture has taught me that" - Dorian Gray and the Contexts of Human Readers

It is the spectator, and not life, that art truly mirrors. -Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Claire Colebrook situates her call for a return to theory in a very precise historical moment, a moment when the potential of texts to be preserved materially in “a posthuman world” from which their “‘original’ context[s] of reading [have] disappeared” seems increasingly imaginable (702). While post-humanism (which is, as Colebrook herself might note, “itself an historical event” (714)) supplies the ethos for Colebrook’s argument, it also produces an image of context as something perpetually evaporating. The exciting flip-side of context’s necessary tenuousness – the idea that new ‘contexts’ and new potentials for reading are continually emerging – appears only in a summary of Deleuze and Guattari, who, Colebrook writes, “are concerned not with what a text might be reduced to, but with what a text enables” (704).

What I would like to consider, thinking the implications of Colebrook’s argument through Wilde’s The Picture of  Dorian Gray, is how a text enables certain unanticipated forms of communication across time – how a text’s circulation in new contexts (new concepts) results in the accumulation of meaning, rather than meaning’s disappearance. I should clarify here the idea of a text’s meaning exceeding the context of its production is present in Colebrook’s article, but the turn to post-humanism – “the various ways in which the human reading brain…may be disappearing” (703) – renders it redundant. For me, the question isn’t what theory might do in the face of a post-human world, or even what theory makes possible for human readers, but what human readers and their ever-expanding bricolage of concepts make possible through and with theory.

From its first chapter, The Picture of Dorian Gray dramatizes the capacity of texts to exceed the meanings available in the contexts of their production. Basil Hallward’s portrait of Dorian comes in contact with new readers who put new concepts into circulation around the painting, opening it to new meanings. For Basil, the painting exposes the “curious artistic idolatry” (Wilde 14) with which he regards Dorian Gray; Dorian’s portrait contains both the suggestion of “an entirely new manner of art” (13) and “the secret of [Basil’s] soul” (9). Lord Henry Wotton, the consummate aesthete, brings a different context to his interpretation of the painting, in which he sees a “brainless, beautiful creature” (7), “a wonderful creation” (23) that has remained so far unexposed to the influence of the world. This is the interpretive context that Henry creates for Dorian himself - “You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray” (24) – so that, when Dorian first sees his completed portrait, “the sense of his own beauty came upon him like a revelation” (27).

The context of the portrait’s production, Basil’s “artistic idolatry” of Dorian that he fears “the world might guess” merely from looking at the picture (14), does seem to have disappeared from contexts of Henry and Dorian’s readings. But more significantly, these new readers’ new contexts have generated an unexpected range of meanings around the painting. The painting enables these meanings, even though they were absent from the context of its production (that is, from Basil’s conception of the portrait). Yet the introduction of new meanings relies equally on human readers – like Lord Henry, with his obsessive concern for beauty – who can place the concepts that shape their specific context in contact with the text. 

Knapp and Michaels’ metaphor for the experience of reading that theory enables seems to have gotten things backwards. It’s not that readers have been lucky enough to find intelligible English sentences washing up on the beach, but that human readers have stumbled upon marks in the sand and, astonishingly, been able to make sense of them – to use the concepts circulating in our present and, in many ways, highly individual contexts to generate meaning from inanimate materiality. This very human reading is what theory enables, and if theory is called for on the brink of a post-human world, it isn’t because theory itself is somehow posthuman (do computers generate concepts?). Rather, theory suggests that as long as texts and human readers are coming into contact, a text’s meanings can never be exhausted. If the “human reading brain” is disappearing (Colebrook 703), it seems imperative to make as much sense as we can out of the marks in the sand before we readers, not the lines of poetry, are washed off of the beach.