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Wednesday
For a light respite from the news, I report today on an article on the humor website McSweeney’s entitled, “I Started Reading Performatively, and It Turns Out Books Are Pretty Good.” Just as some people “dress to impress,” apparently others “read to impress.” Or pretend to read.
If you see someone’s nose buried in, say, Moby Dick on a commuter train or bus, these days one may suspect that the individual is performative-reading since who would read Melville’s long and challenging work? Actually, my son Darien really did read Moby Dick while commuting to his Washington, D.C. job, along with E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and other works. But, okay, he’s the son of a literature professor. The fictional author of the article, by contrast, posts a photo of Picture of Dorian Gray on her Instagram account to signal that she’s an interesting person—only to find a Reply Guy quizzing her about it.
Note: I had to look up what a Reply Guy is and learned that it is “an internet slang term for someone who excessively responds to social media posts, often in an annoying, condescending, or overly familiar or flirtatious manner.” No doubt my younger readers already know that.
Anyway, I can’t think of a better work than Dorian Gray for the McSweeney’s article since Instagram, Facebook, and other media sites invite us to present idealized versions of ourselves while hiding our corrupt inner souls (or whatever). As T.S. Eliot would say, we “prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.” So when a Reply Guy queries the writer about the book, she foresees her “carefully curated online persona” unraveling. As she puts it, “They might wonder if my bed really is made every morning, if that’s my real dog, or if I am even a good person.”
Here’s how the discovery that she fears is presented in the novel. Dorian has taken artist Basil Hallward to see it years after he painted, during which time Dorian has descended into a life of depravity. As I’m sure you know, the portrait registers all of Dorian’s sins, even as he himself remains unblemished:
Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. “My God! if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!” He held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
Who knows what hearts of darkness lie behind those engaging Facebook photos?
To her credit, our essayist does not cancel Reply Guy as Dorian cancels (stabs) Basil but instead figures that she should read the book:
Out of options, I read Oscar Wilde’s seminal work in one night, like an executioner was watching me. The book was actually relatable, even good. It made me… think. Perhaps the relentless pursuit of youth ultimately depletes our humanity? Or something. I told my Reply Guy this, and he said, “Nice.”
I love the ellipsis before “think,” as well as Reply Guy’s superficial response. He’s unaware that he has surprised her into depth. Having seen something interesting happen when she included a book in her Instagram post, the essayist decides to take the next step, which is performance-read on a bus. I love how she depicts Cervantes’s masterpiece:
I wasn’t sold on reading, but I did like feeling smart, and Don Quixote is like the Louis Vuitton bag of people with depth. I started bringing books with me onto the train, inside the bodega, to the park, just pretty much anywhere people could see me and wonder, “How can someone so conventionally attractive also have intellectual pursuits?”
What follows is another surprise:
But I could only fake flip the pages on the bus for so long without getting bored. It was easier to actually read what was on the page, and well, the rest is history. And science. And philosophy and romance and satire and fiction. I started to learn stuff, like did you guys know that Frankenstein wasn’t the monster? That women couldn’t get a credit card until 1974? Or that the Underground Railroad wasn’t underground like a wine cellar but underground like good music? Or that the CIA overthrew Latin American governments, and that’s where the term “banana republic” comes from?
Once you get hooked on reading, suddenly cute guys become not the goal but an irritant:
Soon, when a couple of the cute guys started chatting me up about the book, I got pissed and told them I was busy. Couldn’t they see I was at the climax? I’ve started going to the library, where I can be left alone. I’ve even got my own card now. And you don’t have to buy a nine-dollar latte to be there; they just let you sit down. How cool is that?
Pretty cool indeed.
