How great literature can change your life

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Wednesday

The Atlantic recently had a fascinating review of a recent one-person theatrical version of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. (The paywalled article can be found here .) Talya Zax observes that by having Sarah Snook perform all the characters, the Broadway production has the effect of turning parts of the novel into interior dialogues. It also shows how Wilde anticipates the way in which our own social media “has made the drive to maintain an idealized aesthetic more powerful than ever.”

Which is to say, we have more ways of crafting flattering public images of ourselves than ever before. Dorian needed a gifted painter to show his image to the world but now millions can use photoshop and Tik-Tok.

Zax calls Dorian “the most infamous narcissist in literary history,” and while I’d give Milton’s Satan pride of place in this assessment, I love one point that Zax makes that’s barely in the book. While Dorian, at the end, is appalled at how his portrait has become grotesque even as he remains young and beautiful, Snook’s Dorian takes delight in toggling between the two. This is done by Snook playing with filters: after first using her smartphone to broadcast her images to a giant screen, she first gives her face “an unsettling porcelain-doll perfection, then zooms out, cackling with glee as she strips the effect away to show her true face.” In doing so, Zax observes that

Dorian isn’t just thrilled by his supernatural ability to maintain a flawless visage; he’s also highly aware of—and titillated by—the gap between the false perfection he embodies and the truth of who he is. The act of deception has become, for him, not just a conduit to pleasure, but a source of pleasure itself.

After reading this, I wondered if Trump too takes a special glee in conning his supporters, convincing them that he is the second coming of Washington or Lincoln while knowing underneath that he is nothing but a two-bit grifter. “What a thrill,” Zax writes, “to be able to present yourself as perfect while knowing that you are, at heart, willfully ugly.” Meanwhile Trump’s growing list of sins, like Dorian’s, stain his soul more and more every day.

Zax notes that by playing all the characters, Snook effectively shows how a culture of superficiality is a poison that can spread to different parts of oneself. “One of the apparent costs of putting ourselves constantly on display,” Zax writes, “is the risk of flattening the complexity of what lies within.” This doesn’t only impact Dorian and his cynical friends, however, but also Sybol, the actress he is at one point in love with. Along with obliterating Dorian’s tender parts, the obsession with image also leads to Symbol obliterating herself. Because she can’t live up to the vision he initially has of her—a failure that leads him to reject her—she commits suicide.

Again, I think of those Trump supporters who take to heart his comments that they are better than everyone else, especially people of color. He makes them think they are special members of his club, not suckers and losers. Then, when they inevitably fail, they are filled with self-disgust. And while they usually don’t commit suicide, they often turn to racism to regain their dignity, convincing themselves that they are at least better than those people.

In a clever twist, however, Zax then adds complexity to her argument by reviewing a second one-person production, that of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. It’s not altogether bad to have both an inner self and an outer self. Zax says that actor Andrew Scott shows us that “there might be a way to express ourselves, to be in and of the world, without losing our interior richness.” In fact, doing so “can even be a form of liberation”:

You must be every part of yourself to be all of yourself, Scott’s sensitive exploration of these linked characters suggests. It is natural to have many different selves, and the ways they interact, when given the chance to speak honestly with one another—as Scott’s quiet, tormented souls so movingly do—can be powerful. 

The difference lies in speaking honestly. Dorian denies his humanity and, in the end—like the Faustus story on which the novel is based—is so appalled (the painting acting as his conscience) that he turns against the reminder of his loss, slashing the canvas. Chekhov, by contrast, creates such three-dimensional characters that, even when they falter and make mistakes, they never lose their souls. A superficial fixation on image can never match our dazzling DEI complexity.