“It was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was 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, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin…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. The heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows. (Page 98)
It’s a peculiar thing. Books. Few people read them in this increasingly technologicalized modernity, but media, by any means holds great weight. Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.” Good writing convicts and good conviction (whether right or wrong) causes change. This book, obscure in this story save one chapter, was the catalyst of the harum-scarum downward spiral into the corruption that was the rest of Gray’s all too short life. It was an intoxicating book, and thus the effects are equally intoxicating.
This book was, for me, what the yellow book was to Dorian. Besides the fact that they were both yellow which may or may not have been a coincidence, I felt that when Wilde wrote, “The heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming” it stated perfectly the response my soul had to the song it was hearing. I feel that this was more like a song than a novel, it was more ethereal, more extreme, more everything than a simple play of characters across a stage or a novel of static cast and predictable plot. It was rhythmical; I read it like poetry, not just with its elegance but with its suggestiveness. This book too, is poisonous, but I sincerely hope that I can use it almost as a vaccine to inoculate me into the world, but not poison me so much as to make me of it. Books allow you to experience things not possible in our minute life. To be on the sidelines of someone else’s life, to see how someone else would respond to the situations you go through.
I believe that Wilde wrote this book to share his personal opinions on life, on how one should live, what it means to live life to the fullest, on the soul, on guilt. The characters were merely vessels for his wisdom. This is what good writers do so splendidly and shallow readers read so poorly. This poor reading causes confusion, anger; disdain…the poison envelops them. The only way to read is either so complex as to not miss any messages in the book, or so unaware so as to just read a story. Ignorance is bliss.
The description give of what was in the book is quite short but overwhelming in its power. It is no coincidence I think that Dorian plays the young Parisian trying to live life through Lord Henry’s eclectic philosophies. This book is the psychological study of Dorian Gray, and once one understands that, the rest of the description falls perfectly in place. The lack of a plot, the plays and operas, how Dorian displays both the matchless innocence of youth hardly tarnished (as it seems), the wisdom of Basil, Lord Henry, Gladys, and Dorian drumming the cadences of every emotion, mood, and feeling timeless throughout history.
In this section on virtue, it should be noted that most men aren’t necessarily unwise, but they often speak unwisely, and they call their artificial rules and ‘morals’ virtue, while the wise sit so pompously on their towers of knowledge and philosophy that they can’t see the true and glorious meanings for the natural rebellions constantly occurring. Lord Henry representively justifies the natural rebellions that arise in the novel, giving them high honor and valor for their naturalness and the ‘glory’ of acting solely on visceral impulse and temptation. (This as clearly demonstrated after the death of Sibyl Vane when he glorified her death and justified Dorian, not by saying it wasn’t his fault, but that it was good that he reacted in that way lest she put forth bad art. That her death was her last work of art and you gave her something back that she had lost, when in actuality he had taken it away.) Also, I feel that artificiality too often represents virtue, instead of raw acoustic moral.
Lastly, the last phrase is such wonderful, if not curséd foreshadowing to the devastation so impending. To say something like that implies such avid involvement with the work that one is defined by it. Dorian became so engrossed in this book, so drunk with the reverie of its poison that he became so twisted in his mind; nothing was real, nothing was fake. It was insomnia of the brain. The creeping shadows haunt his future, but he’s too involved, to obsessed to change. I hope that this book does not inflict the same harsh results, but it has caused me to think, and for that I am most grateful.
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