The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [97]
We notice the effect of words like now and at present, terms we have identified as shifters, words that can be understood only from their context. In such temporal markings—the now and at present of 1850—we can observe the history of presentism, its own inevitable repositioning as the past. Consider this pair of maxims from Oscar Wilde, both directly relevant to the question of seeing through contemporary eyes: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”35 In both cases, an age looks at itself, misrecognizing what it sees, or what it fails to see.
The maxims are part of the preface to Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray—a novel that takes as its central conceit its main character’s increasing debauchery and his wish, which is granted, that his portrait should age and become disfigured while he himself remains young and beautiful. After Dorian’s death, the portrait reverts to its original beauty, while his body bears all the signs of age and vice. The frame of this modern fable is a conversation between the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton and the portrait painter Basil Hallward, who are both taken with Dorian’s beauty. Wilde wrote to a correspondent, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”36
Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann points out that in “The Critic as Artist,” a critical dialogue written at the same time as the novel, Wilde argued that literature was superior to visual art. Because literature exists in time and not only in space, it can change—or, as Ellmann says, “it involves a psychic response to one’s own history.” In Dorian Gray, Wilde set out to write a fictional narrative that would embody this argument by allowing literature and painting to exchange their roles for a moment: the painting changes, the literary character appears to stop time, until the denouement, where, dramatically, each is restored to its intrinsic form. As he declared in “The Critic as Artist,”
[T]he secrets of life belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visual arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone.37
The Picture of Dorian Gray engaged the question of whether the present could see itself and whether it could face what it saw. Read variously as a Gothic novel, a fiction of the doppelgänger, an allegory of closeted homosexuality, and a narrative of aestheticism and its discontents, Dorian Gray is also the story of modern literature’s attempt to read itself reading, to see its own contemporaneity. One face or the other, the portrait or the man, could be seen or shown as it was, or as it seemed to be. The other face was occluded and would be seen only belatedly, after the fact.
We might compare the changing picture of Dorian Gray to another famous artifact embedded within a work of literature: the statue in the last scene of Shakespeare’s tragicomic romance The Winter’s Tale.38 For in that play, as in Wilde’s novel, the audience is confronted with an artifact that seems to have changed—the supposed “statue” that is, in fact, the living Queen Hermione, hidden away from her husband for sixteen years and presented to him