A couple of days ago I tried out a book club on the West Side of Cleveland. Here's their webpage on meetup.com: a ne{o}lit book club. The book club was great, and for my part (if you live in the Cleveland Area) I highly recommend coming to a meeting.
The book they were discussing was Oscar Wilde's famous, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). I've always loved this book! I find it really intriguing because, like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (a ghost story), it is a text that is generally categorized as "literature" while at the same time it has many genre or weird elements.
Intuitively, I jump to describe The Picture of Dorian Gray as a fantasy. Not a "second world fantasy" like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It's definitely a fantasy, though.
Consider the premise: there's a magical/supernatural painting the preserves and extends the youth of a young man. All of his horrible actions--all the stains on his soul--appear on the painting rather than on his body. The painting is a kind of "objectified soul" that Dorian can look on and meditate on. This is fantasy! Wilde has definitely deviated from the reality principle here.
It's so interesting, though, that folks rarely file this novel under the rubric of fantasy. This novel seems to announce itself as literature, as high literary art. In fact, the preface to the novel is often cited in anthologies of literary criticism and aesthetic philosophy as inaugurating or at least anticipating the highest of the high literary art: aestheticism or High Modernism. Very often, folks who believe in the importance of aesthetics and literature hearken back to this preface and cite it as a kind of articulation of first principles. Here's a link to the full manuscript of the preface: The Preface to Dorian Gray. See if you disagree with me.
I'd like to highlight a brief passage from this preface: "They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty." Why is this significant here? Well, genre literature--or "weird literature" (science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror)--has often been criticized and dismissed by literary scholars because of its apparent disregard of "literary beauty." Genre writers, the argument goes, write in a pulp style. Genre writers aren't concerned with form, only content. They don't experiment with literary aesthetics. Unlike High Modernists writers, genre writers aren't concerned with experimenting with the capacities of literary art (e.g. poetic language, narrative, genre, etc..).
I'll be honest. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. As much as I love weird literature, there's indeed something to this knee-jerk argument. There are lots of genre writers who just don't give a fig for literature as "art." Their project, their productions, the commitment is first and foremost to entertainment--to spinning a good yarn. To be more specific, genre writers seem more concerned with creating an emotion, what literary critics might call an affect (i.e. the fantasy stirs wonders, the horror stirs horror, the science fiction stirs feelings of the sublime or vastness).
The reason why I find The Picture of Dorian of Gray so interesting it that it seems to disrupt this clean framework: (1) genre writers are clumsy writers who aren't concerned with art; (2) high modernist writers are concerned with art and their concern with art can be glimpsed in their focus on language and form.
Dorian Gray is a fantasy, an example of what I like to call "weird literature." And yet--it tends to be framed in a way that runs contrary to how genre literature--fantasy, specifically--is often described, as aesthetically naieve, as pulp. Hmm...This is why I think it's "undecided."
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