Blogs Gone Wilde
This is going to be a brief post; I feel I’ve earned a respite after the last three 450-word works.
Today’s topic is Oscar Wide, specifically his “Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray” which is on page 899 in our class textbooks. By the by, I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned what our book is, in case you’re not in my class and just happened to show up here. It’s The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2001. That’s just a quick note there. Back to Wilde.
If you remember back to my post “The Cleverist Pro-Pontiff, Pope” then you’ll know I have some degree of fondness for critics who write in the form of poems. The “Preface” is another of these texts. It also appeals to me because of the work it prefaces, The Picture of Dorian Gray. I loved that book in high-school, which I admit is kind of creepy, since it was a brilliant work of speculative fiction (perhaps even “horror” to some degree) which dealt with an interesting and driven character, which I like.
In any case, we better get onto the Literary Criticism stuff, since that’s why we’re all here, right?
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” I disagree with the first idea to some degree, and to the same degree with the second. I think there can be moral or immoral books. They may be rare, but I think they can exist. A book with the sole purpose of convincing people to kill themselves or other, written in such a way as to be persuasive on that account, would be (without odd extenuating circumstances) immoral. The second part, however, that books are good or bad based on the writing and just in and of themselves, I agree to as much as I can with reference to the first part. If some of you are yelling about the intentional fallacy, let me remind you that I don’t care about the intentional fallacy at all.
“All art is at once surface and symbol.” According to a number of folks I’ve read and that we’ve read for class, words take on new meanings and define reality. Look at Foucault for one well-worn instance of this. I agree with Wilde. No matter how shallow a work is, it can’t help but have multiple meanings. Most works are not allegories, but all works can be seen in different ways (see Wolfgang Iser).
“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Ah, yes, I agree. Life imitates art, but the interpretation of art mostly shows the person who is interpreting it. If I say that I like or do not like a text and state my reasons, it is not the text, nor life that you find out more about, but me and the preferences and ideas which I think about, support, or disapprove of.
“All art is quite useless.” Yup. Fair enough.
-AndrewTheory
p.s. By the way, yes, I realize that I said this was going to be a short post and yes, I realize the irony in that it is more than 500 words.
