"Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe": A confession, a question, and one possible answer

"Fin de siecle," murmured Lord Henry. "Fin du globe," answered his hostess. (Wilde 171)

I have to confess that it took Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009) to show me that something was strange about historical time in The Picture of Dorian Gray. This prompted a realization about the novel that I have never been quite sure what to do with; this post is an attempt to make it productive.

The relationship between The Picture of Dorian Gray and its historical context may seem, at first, perfectly straightforward. As Robert Mighall writes in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “[the novel] is…a compendium of the beliefs of its period, and an exercise in literary decadence, conspicuous in its exotic and esoterica, and defining the Zetigeist of the so-called fin de siècle” (xxviii). From the “tussore-silk curtains” and disparaging comments about “the Grosvenor” and “the Academy” in the first pages to the “Java parrot” and  praise of “illusion” in the penultimate chapter, the language, anxieties, and material culture in Wilde’s novel seem consistently fin de siecle (5-6; 204). This temporal stasis is bizarre, however, because the events of the novel cover at least twenty years!1  Almost as much as Dorian himself, culture and society in novel seem trapped in the early 1890s, unchanging since the “particular day in June” with which the novel opens, even as decades pass on the calendar (28).

Despite having read the novel several times, I didn’t catch on to its strange temporality until I watched Oliver Parker’s 2009 film adaptation, Dorian Gray. Parker’s screenplay reinforces, by contrast, the strange stasis of the novel by dramatizing the societal and technological changes that Dorian would “actually” have encountered. Over the course of the film, the women’s costumes shift from lace and corsets to shirtwaists, narrow skirts, and sailor collars; automobiles appear in London’s increasingly sanitized streets; and Lord Henry’s daughter (an original character) agitates for women’s suffrage. My own interpretive epiphany, however, came two-thirds of the way through the movie, when a young boy asks Dorian if he has served “in the War” - to which Dorian responds, as any man born around 1870 would, “I was too old.” Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s quintessentially fin-de-siecle character, had just brushed against World War One, the conventional end-of-the-road marker for the Belle Epoque. He wasn’t just moving through time, he was moving across periods. I hadn’t looked critically at time in The Picture of Dorian Gray until the film raised the issue of WWI and with it, the issue of periodization. More precisely: without first being made aware of the narrative’s potential to cross time periods, I hadn’t been able to observe the non-passage of time in the novel.

Judging from a quickly-Google-searched handful of movie reviews, I’m not the only viewer to find WWI significant as a marker of the film's shift in period. This suggests a question: what does my not-entirely-idiosyncratic viewing experience suggest about the ways periodization influences our reading of texts, not only as artifacts "of" a particular period (as in Mighall's description of The Picture of Dorian Gray), but as narratives that themselves depict the passage of time?

Turning to Kates’ discussion in “Against Period,” I suggest that my viewing experience shows that concepts of period remain strong even when a text avoids the fallacy of  “contemporaneity,” or “an immediate simultaneity among all the historical concepts occupying the same swath of time,” one of the “two conceptual schemata” on which Althusser claims periodization depends (Kates 137). Parker’s film actually avoids this fallacy, staggering the emergence of different fashions, scientific inventions (automobiles) and political views (women’s suffrage); however, these emerging concepts did not signal the passage of time as strongly as the one event -- World War One -- conventionally used as a marker to separate time periods. Periodization not only creates a certain view of history in which it is acceptable to treat all the concepts of a given time period as simultaneous; it also generates a kind of reading in which, even where contemporaneity is shown to be a fallacy, the changes that occur over the course of a period do not appear as significant as those that occur across periods. This suggests a critique of period that is more explicitly political than Athusser’s (as depicted in Kates’s article): the issue is not merely that “the period” creates an inaccurate view of history, but that it leads to privileging certain kinds of events – in this example, a war – as more significant or more worthy of attention than others precisely because they mark the boundary between periods. 

What are other ways in which "the period" affects not only what we read, but how we read it?

________________________________________________________________

1. Dorian is just “over twenty” in the first chapter (13); in chapter twelve, Dorian murders Basil Hallward “on the eve of [Dorian’s] thirty-eighth birthday” (141); by chapter nineteen, Dorian is irritated to find that people are “still discussing poor Basil’s disappearance” (202). I should note quickly that I’m not in any way “blaming” The Picture of Dorian Gray for its odd relationship to the passage of time; Wilde could not, of course, have predicted the events that would occur in the decades after he published his novel.  

Necropolitics at a Distance

Last week, Aaron raised an interesting question about the link between necropolitics and killing that takes place at a distance (temporal, spatial), proposing that “perhaps it’s possible to consider the necropolitical in relation to killing that occurs in belated or temporally discontinuous contexts.” The suggestion that “killing at a distance” may still be usefully included under the rubric of the necropolitical enables me to draw a connection between Mbembe’s work and The Picture of Dorian Gray and to see necropolitics at work in in the deaths of two lower-class characters: Sybil Vane, the actress who commits suicide when Dorian breaks off his engagement to her, and James Vane, her brother, who dies in an accidental shooting at Dorian’s hunting lodge.

In what way are these deaths, which the text uneasily names as murders -- “‘So I have murdered Sybil Vane,’ said Dorian Gray, half to himself, ‘—murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife’” (96) – properly necropolitical? They illustrate, in a way that admittedly strains the terms of Mbembe’s argument, a “power” that “refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy” in order to establish and maintain a right to kill (Mbembe 16). Dorian and Lord Henry justify rhetorically, post-facto, the deaths of Sybil and James by framing both lower-class characters as potential dangers to Dorian’s existence: “If you had married [Sybil] you would have been wretched,” Henry suggests (97), and after seeing James’s corpse, Dorian weeps with relief, “for he knew he was safe” from any attempts by James to avenge his sister’s death (199). While the need to kill Sybil and James was not present while they were alive, Dorian is able to conjure it afterwards to assuage the guilt he feels for his role, however accidental, in their deaths.

This rhetorical slight-of-hand is helped by a preexisting right to kill that the upper class holds over the lower class, in practice if not in law, illustrated chillingly by Alan Campbell’s reaction to Dorian’s confession of the murder of Basil Hallward: “Murder!...I shall not inform upon you. It is not my business” (161). That is, while the lower class is not always framed as a dangerous enemy that needs to be killed in order for the upper class to survive, it is still constructed as a population that is eminently disposable. (This may go some way to explain Lord Henry’s ghoulish reduction of Sybil and James’s deaths to their aesthetic value, as “a wonderful scene [from a play]” (100) or “an annoying subject” (196), respectively.)

Also, to reconnect these murders-at-a-distance to Aaron’s example (the radioactive fallout to which “low-use segments” of the population were subjected as a result of nuclear testing), we can see that in both cases, while the deaths of specific subjects are unintended, the killing act was itself an assertion of the state/upper class’s right to kill. Testing nuclear bombs is itself an assertion of the right to use them in acts of war; on a smaller scale, the firing of guns at animals -- and the lower-class employees (beaters) whose job it is to drive them into the path of the upper-class hunters – is an act that asserts the right to kill, and it takes place in a setting (the hunting lodge’s extensive grounds) that symbolizes Dorian’s economic and political power. In both cases, a demonstration of power results in actual deaths.

What may bar these deaths from being usefully included in a consideration of necropolitics is not the distance between the act of killing and physical death, but in the missing intention to kill; here, murder is not the “primary and absolute objective” of the characters’ actions. Nevertheless, the characters’ assertion of the right to kill is the condition of possibility for the deaths, however casually unrelated the two events may appear, and the deaths therefore result from a kind of necropolitics.

Does extending an understanding of necropolitics to include the accidental or not-directly-intended deaths of disposable populations in addition to the deliberate murders of threatening ones – to include letting die as well as killing – assist or obscure our attempts to follow the operations of necropolitics in the world? Does the unpredictability of killing-at-a-distance point to a fatal flaw in necropolitical sovereignty? Or does it make such sovereignty appear all the more capacious and inescapable? 

Desiring Networks in Dorian Gray

As a novel deeply concerned with attributes – with appearances, associations, material possessions, and influence – The Picture of Dorian Gray invites an understanding of its characters, and particularly its protagonist, as actor-networks. Dorian sees himself as “a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion,” influenced and corrupted by art and literature, by his friends, and by the actions and even the personalities of his ancestors (Wilde 137). If corruption is one of the “action[s]…to be redistributed” (Latour 2) through the actor-networks in the novel, desire is another: Dorian is an object of desire for both Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, however differently these two characters express it. For me, one of the many interesting questions prompted by thinking of characters (and Dorian Gray in particular) as actor-networks is, what does it do to view an object of desire as an actor-network? How is the desire directed at an ostensibly self-contained object redistributed - or not - to the other entities networked with that object?

One answer that The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes to this question is that actor-networks redistribute the desire directed at one node of the network to other nodes. For Lord Henry, for example, desire for Dorian becomes a desire for knowledge about Dorian’s family history (conceivably, Dorian’s “network of production”). Henry demands of his uncle: “I want you to tell me about [Dorian's] mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? […] I am very much interested in Mr Gray at present” (Wilde 34). Henry’s uncle obligingly relates a tragic history of forbidden marriage, contracted murder, and death in childbirth, and Henry responds to this story with something strangely like desire: “So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage…it stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance” (37, my emphasis).

The novel also suggests that desire for an object includes a desire to integrate that object into one’s own network of ideas and associations (one’s own “network of production). Lord Henry becomes obsessed with the idea of “influencing” Dorian, imagining that “the most satisfying joy” left to the present (Victorian) age is “to project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment” (37) – an act not overtly sexual, but still strangely intimate, embodied, and penetrative. All the moments in which Henry introduces Dorian to the people, locations, and actions that form nodes in his (Henry’s) own network are too numerous to review here; a memorable example is “the yellow book,” which once exerted its “poisonous” influence on Henry, and which Henry then presents to Dorian (121). Indeed, Henry seems so obsessed with the thought of merging his and Dorian’s networks that he retroactively incorporates attributes of Dorian’s actor-network, such as Dorian’s fiancé Sibyl Vane, into his own: “It was through certain words of his [Henry’s]…that Dorian  Gray’s soul has turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her” (57). For Henry, desire seems to focus not solely on an entity but on an entire actor-network.

But The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a third possible relationship between desire and networks, and that is a refusal, like Basil Hallward’s, to understand an object of desire as an actor-network. Basil’s desire for Dorian hinges on an image of Dorian as a monolithic totality, remarkably unfragmented and unconnected. To Basil, Dorian is a “mere personality” with the potential to “absorb my [Basil’s] whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (10). Significantly, Basil is introduced to Dorian Gray by a woman who “quite forget[s] what [Dorian] does” and is “afraid he – doesn’t do anything” (11); Dorian’s lack of attributes is what leads “one [to feel] he had kept himself unspotted from the world” – to which Lord Henry adds, “No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him” (19). Just as Henry is obsessed by the thought of influencing Dorian, Basil is obsessed with keeping Dorian uninfluenced; he becomes “angry” when Henry begins to mention the social circles in which Dorian circulates, and ends by begging Henry: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him” (16). Later, as their friendship breaks under the strain of Henry’s influence, Basil confesses to Dorian: “I wanted to have you all to myself” (110). Predicated as it is on a fantasy of Dorian as an isolated and self-contained object, rather than an actor-network, Basil’s desire for Dorian is doomed to failure.

Based on this text alone, I can't propose any over-arching pattern or broad insight that might arise from recognizing objects of desire as actor-networks. I think such a recognition does emphasize the idea that objects of desire are fragmented, not self-contained, and it suggests that desire is necessarily redistributed – though how much and in what ways remains ambiguous – to other entities in the actor-network. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this. In what ways is it useful or productive to think of desire as existing not between subjects and objects, but between actor-networks?

"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. 

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. 

All art is quite useless.

The primary text I’ve chosen to work with this quarter is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, known outside of English departments as a disturbing image in the Art Institute of Chicago and an allusively metaphoric descriptor for everything from microbes to stock options. 

This blurb comes from the chapter “Monsters of Self-Destruction” in Barbara T. Gates’s Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories:

Like Tennyson's fictional Camelot, Wilde's portrait of fin de siècle England is of a land reeling back to the beasts, but with no hope for a second coming of a King Arthur to save it. The fantasy of Dorian Gray's portrait is not a Faustian story of a hero giving up life for knowledge, but a black fairy tale in which a spoiled boy gets his one wish — endless youthfulness and sensuality — and becomes a suicide because he cannot handle its implications. Wilde may have deserved the harsh criticism of his contemporaries, but like other Victorian creators of fictions and fantasies about monstrous selves who will to die, he discerned something deeply disturbing about his own culture. His Hallward, Dickens's Nell, Le Fanu's Jennings, Stevenson's Dr, Jekyll, and Tennyson's Balan all had "a little shadow that went along with them." That shadow was a dark, distorted other self, "a hideous hunchback," to use Matthew Arnold's paraphrase of Dr. Posey, "seated on [their] shoulders and which it was the main business of [their] lives to hate and oppose." (Arnold, 481) Often that subversive hunchback was beckoning them on toward death.