Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray
Tuesday
In my Theories of the Reader class last week I had my students look into the “art for art’s sake” philosophy, a late 19th-century movement that included such figures as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. I had them read Wilde’s preface to Picture of Dorian Gray and an excerpt from his Decay of Lying. We also read excerpts from the trial where Wilde was cross-examined by attorney Edward Carson about both the preface and Dorian Gray.
I find that art for art’s sake discussions invariably become hopelessly tangled. After all, can a love of beauty ever be entirely separated from the other reasons that attract us to a novel, poem or play? Aren’t we also interested in how relatable characters grapple with recognizable issues? Even if one argues that literature’s main goal is a transcendent joy, it can be argued that such joy itself is a pragmatic result, at which point the argument becomes circular.
As the author of a blog claiming that “great literature can change your life,” I must debate with aestheticists. In many respects, my implied antagonists are those who don’t think that literature can change a life—who think that either literature is irrelevant or, at best, should be relegated to a purely artistic realm of its own (which is the view of art for art’s sake proponents). In many if not most of my essays, I am having an implicit debate with “the noisy set of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen, the martyrs call the world.” I borrow the phrase from Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” where Yeats, like Wilde, is going after a narrowly pragmatic society that doesn’t value poetry.
I’ve concluded that valuing art for art’s sake is not a pure activity but a philosophy that can only be understood as relational or reactive. In other words, such a philosophy arises as a corrective to a society that has lost perspective. If society decrees that only narrowly pragmatic activities have value—that, say, making money is the only thing that is useful—then Wilde is justified in asserting, “All art is quite useless.” He sees art as a means to keep him from getting dragged into the cash nexus.
It’s worth noting that, if art does that, then it’s not useless after all. Wilde is playing with what we mean by useful.
Wilde also fought against art getting dragged into a narrow moralism. There were Victorians who, while they saw literature as valuable, did so only to the extent that it taught moral lessons. This is another kind of pragmatism and it too can damage the artistic enterprise. That’s why Wilde came up with another provocative maxim: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
I’ll discuss in a moment why Wilde doesn’t really believe this. But when he talks about well written books—in other words, beautiful books—he is not defining beauty as a thing in itself but as a counterweight to his crass, didactic, materialistic, industrial capitalist society. Similarly, when I allude, tongue in cheek, to a 1935 DuPont ad slogan in my blog title—“Better Living through Chemistry”—I create an apparent oxymoron that allows me to be pragmatic without being narrowly pragmatic (or so I hope). After all, the playfulness in the title is supposed to gesture towards the unpragmatic playfulness of literature.
Meanwhile, the society that I am addressing is one where students are eschewing the liberal arts, and especially the arts, for “practical” majors like nursing or business or engineering. Many parents want their kids to aim towards lucrative professions in their course selection, and I’m trying to use their own pragmatism against them–which is to say, to give literature a chance. I try to do this in a way that acknowledges the independence of literature, but I must acknowledge the danger that I will reduce literature to something with narrow use value.
The reason I believe Wilde’s pronouncements should be regarded as counterweights rather than as propositions in and of themselves is that Dorian Gray doesn’t bear out the philosophy of its preface. Carson saw Wilde as an immoral libertine for saying that there’s no such thing as a moral or immoral book—in other words, Wilde appeared to put himself above society’s morals—and he argued that Dorian Gray was an immoral book that corrupted young men. Dorian Gray, however, can be seen as having a powerful moral lesson. Indeed, it shows the soul-destroying consequences of trying to live an art for art’s sake lifestyle.
The proponent for such a life style in the novel is Sir Henry Wotton. Among his aphorisms are the following:
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.
And:
To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
This philosophy has a catastrophic effect on Dorian, who leaves a trail of broken lives and suicides in his wake.
In the trial, Carson read from both the preface and the novel in an attempt to cast Wilde as Sir Henry and young Alfred Lord Douglas as Dorian, the young man corrupted by an older. Wilde, however, saw himself in Basil, the painter who worships Dorian. Whereas for Carson, Wilde was a vile pervert who wanted sex with young men, Wilde saw himself as a soul who longs for beauty and found it in beautiful men. For him, it was Carson who had the dirty mind, and he sought out beauty as a defense. Thus his aphorisms for the preface,
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
And
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
In short, Wilde sought out beauty as a refuge against his sordid society. This may have seemed to be art for art’s sake—a transcendent realm that resided on another plane—but it was actually art for Wilde’s sake. He saw art as a means to keep himself from getting dragged down into the muck of Victorian sexual repression and crass materialism.
This is not the only function for art, however. Other periods have other needs and create other kinds of literature. Art for art’s sake, which seemed a soul saver in the 1890s, appeared as precious and overly refined to later audiences.