Monday, January 7, 2013

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Chapter 1

I decided to make a new post, so that my depressing diary entry written in third person isn't the first thing that people see.

Anywho, I was exceedingly bored in my German classes here, partly because I still don't fully understand the speech, and partly because I don't feel like they are trying to get me involved. So I spent my non-music classes today reading one of the only books in English I managed to find here, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

What I knew of Dorian Gray beforehand was basically that it's about a guy who tries to obtain eternal youth by selling his soul (I think, I haven't gotten that far yet) and his portrait ages while he remains youthful. This story always intrigued me, ever since I looked through the pictures in the Great Illustrated Classics adaptation of the book in grade school. The last illustration was of Dorian stabbing the portrait, him becoming the old man with the knife in his chest, and the portrait returning to its original, youthful state.

And since then, this story had always been in the back of my mind, periodically coming to the forefront whenever a reference is made (like at the end of this old MovieBob review, for example).

The novel opens with the painter, Basil, painting the titular portrait while his friend, Lord Henry, waxes philosophical like the smartass he is. Though, admittedly, he is so for the most quotable character because, A) I legitimately found some of the things he says interesting, and B) he's the one doing most of the talking. Literally whole blocks of text taking up most of the pages are dedicated to his views on the world. Either this character is the megaphone for Wilde's voice, or he just intended the character to be a smarmy intellectual.

Two of my favorite quotes:

"and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic."

"It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue."

Henry asks why Basil does not want to exhibit the portrait, despite it being one of his best works. Basil explains that he put too much of his own soul into the painting, saying, "We live in the age when men treat art as if it were meant to be an autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Someday I will show the world what it is."

Basil goes on to explain how he met Dorian, and how he has been the greatest inspiration for his art (in terms that only an artist would not find homoerotic, though, this is Oscar Wilde, so who knows).

And so the chapter ends right before Basil introduces Henry to Dorian.

I admit, as much as I ragged on about Henry's philosophizing, I do find him to be an engaging character. The way Basil describes Dorian made me imagine some sort of Jay Gatsby type of character, but that doesn't seem to be the case from what I've read in the second chapter, however that's a subject for a later blogpost.

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