Levi reviewed Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
None
5 stars
Wow. Everything about this faustian story was an amazing ride.
First off, the beginning is absolutely fascinating. You have Dorian Gray, a perfectly innocent young man who God has gifted with extraordinary beauty, but hasn’t yet become self-conscious of it. You have Henry, the perfect embodiment of the devil, arguing quite eloquently for a new hedonism and corrupting him. And you have the artist Bazel, by which these other two meet.
Notice that the artist is the one person who is well acquainted with both the innocent and the devil. He seeks to shield one from the other but fails. And it is ironically his obsession with capturing beauty that causes Henry to meet Gray, and therefore Gray to become corrupted. That in and of itself has to be a deep metaphor.
There’s an exquisitely enjoyable dynamics between each pair of characters. It starts with Henry, the devil, interacting with …
Wow. Everything about this faustian story was an amazing ride.
First off, the beginning is absolutely fascinating. You have Dorian Gray, a perfectly innocent young man who God has gifted with extraordinary beauty, but hasn’t yet become self-conscious of it. You have Henry, the perfect embodiment of the devil, arguing quite eloquently for a new hedonism and corrupting him. And you have the artist Bazel, by which these other two meet.
Notice that the artist is the one person who is well acquainted with both the innocent and the devil. He seeks to shield one from the other but fails. And it is ironically his obsession with capturing beauty that causes Henry to meet Gray, and therefore Gray to become corrupted. That in and of itself has to be a deep metaphor.
There’s an exquisitely enjoyable dynamics between each pair of characters. It starts with Henry, the devil, interacting with the artist. It’s so funny to see people who are old friends interacting, but in this case they have a very asymmetric relationship; the artist recognizes the devil as being the corrupting influence he is, and yet is still friends with him. Meanwhile, Henry (the devil) enjoys the pleasures of the artist’s art but only from a sensual perspective, never valuing what is actually most valuable about that art, which is to say, its soul.
Then there’s the interactions between Henry and Dorian Gray. As he corrupts him, we are drawn into a sick fascination, as if watching a spider turn its prey from life to death. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion, but much sicker than that, because it’s a study in how to corrupt a young idealist, how to slowly warp his thinking into yours.
Henry has to be one of the most outstanding characters in all literature of all time. Never has a diabolical character been so convincing. I’m fascinated and impressed by his eloquence, his willful paradoxes, his soaring heights of perspective, his ability to cut through the marrow of life and bring together so many insights on the nature of men and life and living. Although I don’t agree with his main thrust of arguing towards hedonism, the fact is that in the process of him making his arguments, he says so many really, really good, quotable lines, that one can almost forget the source.
A few quotes follow. (Some of the following are paraphrases and as such are not in quotes.)
“The only cure for the soul is the senses, and the only cure for the senses is the soul.”
Beauty is a fact that needs no explanation, like the sun or the moonlight or a waterfall.
Forget about trying to make a moment last forever. The only difference between a caprice and the lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little bit longer.
“I would have objected to it this morning,” said Dorian Gray.
“This morning,” said Henry. “You have lived since then.”
Major spoilers to follow. The story is, of course, a profound tragedy. To see Dorian Gray start off so innocent and then to see him fall…oh, but for a while it is such a euphoric fall. I love a good old descent into madness. And if it's romantically aesthetic and morbid, so much the better! For a while it is so beautiful and intoxicating even.
But there’s a bitter sadness underlying it because we know where this is going. And as the story progresses towards the end, that sadness becomes stronger. The story culminates, of course, in Dorian coming very close to turning back to good, but then he commits a damning act, and plunges straight into perdition. The story ends, as any good tragedy has to, with his death.
The ending of this book progresses to the utmost logical extremes of Dorian’s newfound philosophy and the result is horrifying. It’s perfect in every way. I believe that great tragedies are great because they so perfectly illuminate, better than anything else, what we want to avoid at all costs in the most profound sense: moral decay, that falling that results in us regretting our entire life.
Stop everything. Read this beautiful, heart-rending book right now. And live differently for it.
