Book Watch

I've been writing my thesis in recent weeks so apologies for the long hiatus. I'm back with the long-promised look at Oscar Wilde's famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

It's a fabulous novel and a great introduction to the enigmatic Mr. Wilde and his unique style. Any new reader will especially be struck by his use of aphorisms, which are all deeply thought provoking, linguistically clever, and delightfully irreverent. The story of Dorian Gray itself is a fascinating study of duality, sensuality, sin, and the nature of creativity. Criticism of Dorian Gray tends to fall into two camps: the moralist reading, whereby the ending of the novel offers a kind of censure to a life that is utterly aestheticized. The other camp rejects this view, in favor of a less didactic reading of the text. I'm rather inclined to fall somewhere in the middle. Overall, this novel is easy to read but not necessarily easy to understand. I recommend it to everyone.

I'm applying to PhD's in Comparative Literature next semester and indeed, my mind seems drawn to it. As I was reading Dorian Gray, I began to think about more contemporary studies of similar themes. What have I concluded? The movie Fight Club. It's by no means a water tight comparison, but I think there are some interesting convergences: the theme of duplicity, in Dorian as painting, in Fight Club, schizophrenia; rebellion against conventionality, so excellently symbolized in Fight Club by IKEA furniture; and the quest for sensation above all things - in Dorian Gray this sensation is firmly rooted in the aesthetic and is suggestively (homo)sexual, in Fight Club this has been replaced with violence, an ultimate attempt to experience pain, agony, physical suffering. Fight Club is so interesting because it offers this kind of reverse hedonism, very Freudian death-drive.