I don’t like starting a piece of writing with a disclaimer but I think this post deserves one. My topic is one which I should have used for a final paper in a literature or art class. But alas, I don’t have that opportunity, while the opportunity and duty to blog sits right in front of me. So I will endeavor to cover much more ground than I probably should and make many claims that are based on less research than they should be. But all of it flows from a few stories and ideas that have captured my imagination and I hope they will capture yours as well. The stories are those of four men, two real and two fictional, whose lives share a common trajectory and are interestingly intertwined.
I was first introduced to Oscar Wilde about 6 years ago in a literature class. His 1891 novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is a fascinating story in many respects. It follows a beautiful young man named Dorian Gray, who is having his portrait painted. One day, vain Dorian wistfully remarks that he wishes the portrait would bear the signs of aging and that his youthful good looks would always stay the same, rather than the other way around. Of course, his wish comes true. The remainder of the book chronicles Dorian’s life experiences and how the painting, which he has hidden deep inside his house, is altered by them. In effect, the painting becomes an image of the state of Dorian’s soul.
At one point in the story, Dorian’s friend Lord Henry sends him a book. Dorian describes it as “a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own... The life of the senses was described in terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. … For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of the book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.”
This poisonous French novel, Wilde acknowledged, was a “fantastic variation” of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 novel “Against the Grain”. The main character of Huysmans’ book, Jean Des Esseintes, had lived an extremely decadent life in Paris but became disgusted with it. He decided to retreat to a house in the countryside and spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. His experiments are bizarre and varied, including a famous scene where he sets gemstones in the shell of a tortoise, who subsequently dies from the extra weight on its back.
Eventually, Des Esseintes’ isolated and self-centered life renders him so ill that his doctor insists he must choose between returning to Paris or dying there alone. “Des Esseintes dropped into a chair, in despair. ‘In two days more I shall be in Paris,’ he exclaimed; ‘well, all is over;…Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! –Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling of the ancient hope.” Thus, Des Esseintes experiment in fulfilling his every whim ended not with satisfaction but with intense despair.
A similar pattern occurs in Dorian Gray’s life, as he follows the example set forth in this book. He begins to delight and indulge in every sort of pleasure and endeavors to uncover a “new spirituality”, characterized by the “spiritualizing of the senses” and the development of a “fine instinct for beauty”. “Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.” And so Dorian devotes himself to perfumes, music, fashion, jewels, tapestries, and embroideries, becoming completely obsessed with each one by turn.
Dorian’s pursuit of the sensual and exciting also leads him into the dark sins of lust and greed, which spawn out into lying, deceit and even murder. While Dorian continues to appear as an innocent young man, the portrait portraying the effect on his soul grows uglier and more terrible by the day. Dorian attempts to do just one good and selfless deed to save his soul, only to discover that he had done it out of vanity. He laments to himself, “Ah! In what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendor of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities,’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.”
Both of these novels strikingly display how despair and hopelessness follow directly from self-indulgence. The honesty in these accounts comes in part from the fact that both Wilde and Huysmans experienced this despair, even if they didn’t immediately realize or admit it. While the stories of Jean Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray end in complete hopelessness, the stories of the authors do not finish at the same point.
Oscar Wilde was a successful journalist, writer and popular playwright, who enjoyed being part of the fashionable cultural and social circles in London. He is also remembered as a persecuted homosexual, who was jailed for his affair with a younger man. Convicted of sodomy and forced to work two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol, Wilde spent his free time reading and writing, striving to find meaning in the suffering he endured. His thoughts at the time are revealed in this excerpt of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, which he wrote while in prison.
“Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?”
Once released from prison, Wilde immediately applied for a six-month Jesuit retreat but was denied. When he heard the news about his denial, he wept. Just three years later, on his deathbed and accompanied by a priest and his good Catholic friend Robbie Ross, Wilde was received into the Catholic church.
Huysmans’ conversion was equally long and drawn out, as he writes so eloquently in the preface to the 1903 rerelease of Against the Grain. “ There was no doubt at the date when I was writing ‘Against the Grain,’ a shifting of the soil, a delving of the earth, to lay the foundations, of which I was all unconscious. God was digging to lay His wire, and he was at work only in the darkness of the soul, in the night. Nothing was visible on the surface; it was only years after that the spark began to run along the wires. Then I could feel my soul stirred by the shock; as yet it was neither very painful nor very distinct. The Church offices, mysticism, art were the vehicles and the means; it occurred mostly in churches…where I used to go out of curiosity, for lack of other things to do. I experienced as I watched the services only an inward tremor, the little shiver one feels on seeing, hearing or reading a fine work of art; but there was no definite movement, no positive impulse to come to a decision.”
He continues, “Only, little by little, I was shaking myself loose from my shell of impurity; I was beginning to have a disgust of myself, but at the same time I kicked against the articles of the Faith. The objections I raised in my own mind seemed irresistible; and lo! one fine morning when I woke they were solved,--I never knew how. I prayed for the first time, and the catastrophe was over.”
Huysmans credits only one man with truly seeing and understanding his spiritual predicament upon reading Against the Grain. In an 1884 review of the book, Barbey d’Aurevilly, who had no acquaintance with Huysmans, wrote, “After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.”
Almost ten years later, Huysmans replied simply, “The choice has been made.”
By Ruth
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