Dorian Gray: Favorite one-liners?

The Picture of Dorian Gray being the only novel by this master of the aphorism, I found the book to be riddled with one-liners. What were your favorites?

"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

Note that this is a truism, with one word replaced by its antonym. This is also the formula Wilde (allegedly) used in: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing." In general, Wilde's one-liners seem formulaic to me. Just as (according to Monty Python) an argument is not the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes, wit requires more than the inversion of bromides.

“If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.”

I literally laughed out loud at that.

>2 cpg:

By the way, on the topic of Oscar Wilde, formulaic witticisms, and Monty Python, there's a Python sketch that starts out:

"The Prince of Wales: Ah, my congratulations, Wilde. Your play is a great success. The whole of London's talking about you.

Oscar Wilde: Your highness, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

(There follows fifteen seconds of restrained and sycophantic laughter)

The Prince of Wales: Oh, very witty, Wilde . . . very, very witty.

James McNeill Whistler: There is only one thing in the world worse than being witty, and that is not being witty.

(Fifteeen more seconds of the same)

Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that, Whistler.

James McNeill Whistler: Ah, you will, Oscar, you will.

(more laughter)

Oscar Wilde: Your Highness, do you know James McNeill Whistler?

The Prince of Wales: Yes, we've played squash together.

Oscar Wilde: There is only one thing worse than playing squash together, and that is playing it by yourself.

(silence)

Oscar Wilde: I wish I hadn't said that.

James McNeill Whistler: But you did, Oscar, you did."

I confess that—with all going on—I fell behind, and am only about half-way though.

But the aphorisms bugged from almost the get-go. Wilde is, of course, great at it. Even when I think his aphorisms are wrong-headed, I recognize they're brilliant. But it's not organic. It would be one thing if the narrative voice spouted aphorisms, or if one of the character did, but it seems as if EVERYONE spouts them. I have no absolute problem with that—Menander does it too! Shared peculiarities are allowed according to genre; in an opera everyone SINGS! But DG is—I think—supposed to be a realistic novel, and it undermines the realism of the thing if everyone talks oddly and also the same. It's like Mamet at his worst, where you wonder why everyone in this word has some sort of speech problem.

#5

But DG is—I think—supposed to be a realistic novel,

No, it really isn't. It is a morality tale wrapped in fable told in fantastic colours.

Have you read or seen Wilde's plays? Everyone talks in witticisms. The point isn't whether people "really" talk that way--the point is that that's Wilde's voice in print, as distinctive as that of, say, Shaw, Burroughs, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett: writers with a strong personal inflection, writers who don't sound like anyone else (well, Shaw sounds like Wilde on occasion... a mark of his admiration).

It's like complaining about pineapples being too pineapply--if you can't overcome the resistance, this particular fruit may not be for you.

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;)

>6 LolaWalser: Totally agree. Tim, you should see The Importance of Being Earnest.

That said, I can see how the constant stream of witticisms might be off-putting. But it's consistent with Wilde.

>6 LolaWalser:

I hear you. So, genre is complicated. Obviously it's a fable AND a realistic novel—and far closer to the 19th century realistic novel than La Fontaine. You can go through the hallmarks of the realistic novel and check most of them off. But not this one.

At the same time, the break is very partial. As with a realistic novel, DG requires you to watch what is said closely, entering into characters' intentions and emotions as if a real person were involved. You listen to what is said, how it is said, what could have been said, and what was NOT said. As you do so, you build up a detailed picture of what really happened. You build up a model of characters' motivations in the particular scene and overall, and thereby build up a psychological model of the characters as you go. And if you don't this in a realistic novel, the whys and wherefores of the thing sail past you--and the whole thing is a boring yammerfest. In all these respects, DG is apiece with other psychological novels, and far far away from literary genres like fable. I mean, if you approached it expecting it to engage the mental processes of a fable, and refusing to engage in the mental processes of a realistic novel, it would said over you entirely and bore you to tears.

Of course, novels aren't mirrors of reality. I don't ask for that. Works of art set their own terms, and one must appreciate them according to them, or dislike them. It's no good rejecting a pineapple because you want a pear. But elements of style can assist or cut against what makes a work and a genre function; a pear with a spiky shell fails at the the pear's low fuss in eating and disposal, yet doesn't have the virtues of storage and portability of the pineapple. I'd go so far as to say that's practically the definition of success in art—success within a genre.

In this case, I feel that the aphorisms are so constant and so like-minded that one must "factor them out"—treat them as funny static—as one engages in the complex mental world- and mind-building that the realistic elements of the novel require, and without which this particular novel simply won't work.

#8

Sorry, can't begin to agree. There is truth in Dorian, but no realism whatsoever. None. Not an atom. Just the fact that there are people in it who walk on two legs, or streets, or London--all these things that apparently to you differentiate it crucially from a La Fontaine fable--do not begin to make it a realist(ic) novel.

The point is, Wilde isn't beholden to standards of what you or I or anyone might think is "realistic" speech or behaviour. Is Joyce's final monologue in Ulysses realistic? Who cares. Writers get to their aims in different ways. Dorian Gray isn't Middlemarch which isn't Anna Karenina which isn't Tristram Shandy which isn't Moby Dick which isn't Naked Lunch...

Since Loranne cued it so perfectly:

http://youtu.be/6NFQbeE9gkQ

This is a famous 1952 filmed version of The importance of being Earnest, with Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism... oh, and there's Michael Redgrave as Ernest and Joan Greenwood as Gwendolen.

I think it's pretty much the entire play, as published...

There is truth in Dorian, but no realism whatsoever. None. Not an atom. Just the fact that there are people in it who walk on two legs, or streets, or London--all these things that apparently to you differentiate it crucially from a La Fontaine fable--do not begin to make it a realist(ic) novel.

You seem hung up on genre labels, without engaging in how generic elements function—or don't.

A novel with two-armed people has that as a realistic element. A novel about two-armed people would fail on its own terms if, for no reason that makes internal sense, characters were seen to play piano four hands by themselves.

In this case, the novel includes mental realism. It telegraphs this by the fact that the characters behave as if they had complex minds, and their dialogue and action can be understood no other way. Failing to appreciate this--refusing, for example, to think through the dialogue as the product of complex minds in motion against each other—would be a failure to take the work within its genre. One doesn't need to read a Michael Crichton novel this way--indeed, you'd fail to appreciate it if you did. But you have to read this novel that way.

So, as I said, the novel requires mentalizing other minds—taking them seriously as models of minds. The aphorisms cut against that, casting doubt on the dynamism and otherness of the minds that is elsewhere presumed.

Without bringing to bear opinions as to the placement of aphorism in this meta-genre, a mixture which DG most certainly is (not forgetting, of course, its distinction as Gothic), I'm compelled to ask whether Wilde has adjusted his witticism to the image of his characters, as, I'm willing to say, he does in his plays.

Take Importance, for example: each adroit aphorism can be molded by the particular actor who delivers them--made humble, surprised, disdainful--and it's perhaps in this additional layer of performability per individual actor that one can perceive Wilde's talent as a playwright. Actors bring to bear their own personalities on their characters, at least in western culture--Wilde can be sure his tone will never be a flat one; a good humorous playwright is aware of the embodiment of his or her's characters on the stage. Especially in a play like Importance, whose characters mix and parody the easily personality-less characterizes of Classical Comedy, specifically middle-comedy (character types divided between acceptable behavior in city and country in life, all nonetheless funny, and certainly more dynamic in terms of personality than those found in Latin comedic typology).

It has been a while since I've read Importance, I've only watched it several times, so I cannot speak to the uniqueness of his one-liners on the physical page. I'll have to find some instances where Wilde has more or less deftly framed an similar aphorism in both.

Does Wilde bother with the aphorism-less in his novel? I think he does, if in a somewhat witless and doom manner (James Vane). Do his aphorism in DG simply float as unembodied, improperly distilled witticisms from his own authorial voice? If so, I don't think this is not to say that DG is anything less brilliant than it is--only that Wilde has extended too much of his own wit across DG's characters--though I have heard that precisely this, at least on the stage, is what Wilde does best. He satirizes the public as himself by way of his characters, more so than other authors, and in various shades.

Italicized

Cucumber sandwiches anyone?

anyone who thinks DG is a realistic novel has a very warped sense of realism indeed. DG is a Decadent novel, which incorporates elements of realism to be sure. It also incorporates elements of the Dramatic: the opening scene is not really a scene from a novel, but a scene from one of Wilde's plays: the dialogue takes precedence over the descriptive writing. when descriptive writing take precedence over dialogue, as it does in other parts of the novel, they are not really, convincingly, realistic, but descriptions of Decadent images.

As a contrast, check out Gissing's two novels The Nether World, and New Grub Street written the year before DG and the year after, respectively, for an idea of what a realistic novel contemporary with Wilde's might look like.

The fact that aphorisms are scattered throughout the novel and not fixed to one character is a typical Decadent ploy, in which the word takes precedence over the sentence, the sentence takes precedence over the page, the page takes precedence over the whole work, to paraphrase Nietzsche's description of the Decadent.

anyway, interesting conversation.

#11

No, there isn't any requirement for your "mental realism" in ANY novel. You are picking a totally arbitrary standard, perhaps one that you personally need satisfied before you can understand or enjoy a novel--but get this, it is by no means an absolute, universal standard.

No, there is not a prescribed way for characters to sound before we can "believe" in them, and there is no obligation to create "believable" characters. Dickens dealt in cartoons, Pynchon and Heller in satirical figures, nouveau roman created a subject-less novel, and Barthelme wrote a novel about a doorknob. Different novels can have different aims. I was hoping that my quick examples of idiosyncratic authorial voices and some diverse works would illustrate that point sufficiently.

Yes, everyone in Wilde sounds like Wilde. This is a thing you may like or dislike, but it is not automatically a failing. Yes, perhaps it is unlikely that ten people might talk amongst themselves in aphorisms. The important thing is what they are saying, not whether they are "real". (But I urge you to take a look at the link to the movie I posted, to see how well Wilde's style of talk reflects real personalities, how easily it flows, how charming it sounds and how rich in meaning it is.)

This is important to understand before anything: Dorian Gray is a novel of ideas. The characters are symbols and vehicles for articulating a sensibility and a point of view which is Wilde's, not theirs. Wilde even breaks into the narrative in several places, in first person!

He didn't set out to write the Brothers Karamazov. There are some startling psychological insights in it (I forget who it was that said Wilde was the only "paradoxer" who was almost always right--Gide?), but DG isn't and was never conceived as a psychological study. Wilde himself in one letter described it as "an essay on decorative arts"--but as Matthew usefully notes, there is in Wilde (always) self-satire, self-mockery--and, I add, modesty.

Let us not despise this "decorative arts" phrase. For one thing, it's funny, for another, it's the absolute truth. Wilde writes in the wake of Swinburne and in the sign of Pater, he is forever weighing aesthetics, the science and love of beauty in all its plastic and abstract forms, against morality, the need to live a ethical life. This is the main plot of Dorian Gray, its crucial (overt) interest. The central character is important only as a symbol and a representation, not as an individual psyche. Dorian Gray stands for an attitude and a philosophy of life.

#13

We are saving those for Aunt Augusta!

Camille Paglia, in two chapters in Art and Decadence, gives a brilliant reading of DG. She argues that Dorian is an Apollonian androgyne corrupted by the Dionysian. She notes:

Basil is increasingly dismayed by Dorian's adoption of Henry's Cycnisim, style and sophisticated epigrams…. Dorian becomes Lord Henry, the beautiful boy turned Decadent aesthete….

…. which might be one way to interpret the fact that aphorisms are not restricted to one character.

It's also worth noting that the epigrams and humour come from a long English tradition of stage comedy: Congreve, Goldsmith, Wycherley, Sheridan, Etherege, to name a few, whose characters also spout epigrams regardless of individual characterisation. Wilde was the inheritor of this tradition guite consciously, in both his prose and plays. The remarkable rocket short story by Wilde also has a plethora of epigrams scattered throughout, this time it's rockets talking. so much for realism.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. DG

15>
He didn't set out to write the Brothers Karamazov. There are some startling psychological insights in it (I forget who it was that said Wilde was the only "paradoxer" who was almost always right--Gide?), but DG isn't and was never conceived as a psychological study. Wilde himself in one letter described it as "an essay on decorative arts"--but as Matthew usefully notes, there is in Wilde (always) self-satire, self-mockery--and, I add, modesty.

Let us not despise this "decorative arts" phrase. For one thing, it's funny, for another, it's the absolute truth.

Yes. Wilde himself says the same thing in the aphorisms at the front of the novel, which, incidentally, tell us much that we need to know about how to read the novel:

all art is at once surface and symbol.

Ah, never mind.

perhaps one that you personally need satisfied before you can understand or enjoy a novel

This is pretty much how any conversation with you goes. I won't speculate what needs it satisfies.

#19

That's all you got?

Won't speculate what deficiencies that exhibits.

I was annoyed in #20. Sorry I let the annoyance show.

Tim, it seems to me you are--again--reading more into my words than I put there. What I was saying above was that your complaint is subjective. We all have preferences and quirks. In terms of psychological veracity, I find the classical English novel more unbelievable than Ionesco. Dostoevsky's people seem real to me--plenty of others find them perfectly unreal.

But another question is WHEN is this important. I submit that it is less important that characters in DG convince you that you could run into them in a grocery store (or, more likely, a gala at the opera) than it would be for characters in a kitchen-sink drama or a "slice of life" novel. I've said this before and you keep mentioning "genre", but I'm talking about style.

And, contrary to what some seem to have got out of it, the wallpaper is of highest importance. The décor is a major character.

So, I get that the stylized, undifferentiated dialogue is an obstacle to you (and not just you, of course). But try to shift your attention away from that. We don't need to weep for Dorian or execrate Lord Henry or pity Basil, as we would real people or realistic characters. We just need them to help us philosophise. The pathos is in the ideas, not the characters.

It seems to me that Oscar Wilde was really writing a novel where he could string together discussions and witticisms about whatever was interesting him at the time, rather than seriously writing a horror novel. A bit like American Psycho doesn't seem to me to be anything but an an attempt to discuss music, business cards, etc. within a broader fantasy/horror novel.

WOW, based on this discussion I'm almost afraid to finish reading American Gods and try to discuss that one . . . Did some of you skip the preface to Dorian Gray? (see below) The thing I most love about reading books (listening to music, viewing art) is that there are so many ways to interpret/understand any particular book. (The main reason I never majored in English is that I didn't want to be graded on my particular interpretation.) Anyway, I was just reading this discussion to see how the OLOB discussions tend to go. Is this level of arguing typical? I can't say I find it very helpful, but OW does see it as an indicator of something :).

So, for those of you who skipped it, here's the preface. It seems rather relevant (to me) to the discussion above:

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless."

-- OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface

No, fortunately some of the posts in this thread do not seem to be the norm for discussion. I've thought the discussion of this particular book has gone very oddly -- not as much input by as wide a variety of readers as for The Circle, and some rather...uhm...interesting comments, some of which seemed rather mean and gave me a feeling that I am perhaps an inferior reader.

I enjoy differences of opinion. I don't enjoy actual arguments.

how many of the statements in the introduction do you believe are true? Some seem true to me, on one level or another, while others do not.

I suspect the specific set of statements from the introduction I "believe" would reveal quite a lot about how I interpret the rest of the novel.

this one I believe: "The highest and the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. ". as well, this one: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. ". (they are much the same statement, I think).

this one I do not believe: "No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. " nor this one: "No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. " (in addition, these two items seem opposed to one another, for whatever that is worth).

I do particularly enjoy the last statement: "All art is quite useless".

I do feel much of what I do is quite useless but I do "admire" it, or at least take pleasure from the doing of it.