Dorian's Error

26 Jun, 2026

“Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.” (David Foster Wallace)

Gay men have long been in the avant-garde of trash: transgression, excess, passionate extremes. The conjunction of eccentricity and catharsis stirs something deep within us. Our neural networks light up at the sight of unhinged expression, registering hysteria, tragedy, and delusion as forms of beauty. We revel in the spectacular self-possession of queenly figures high and low, for we know, somehow, the secret of their grandeur: it begins as self-aggrandizement. We thrill to this knowledge, hold it tightly like a promise. In performance lies the key to survival, to success – no, to a kind of power. We study the gleaming surface, the dramatic gesture, the well-placed barb. We take notes.

This knowledge forms the foundation for camp, on which is erected an entire worldview, one that is essentially committed to the ubiquity of play. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” This is from Sontag’s classic essay, in which she ambivalently presents the camp sensibility – a “certain mode of aestheticism,” a “mode of enjoyment” – as a subversive reaction to moral seriousness. “Camp,” she writes, “is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”

At its inception, this playfulness enabled urban gay men at the turn of the 20th century to negotiate their relation to polite society. It was a creative response to forced exclusion, a new way of seeing, which laughingly denigrated much that society held dear by fetishizing and developing its excesses. Drawing on Pater, Ruskin, and the French decadents, camp emerged as a post-Romantic aestheticism that embraced artifice and alienation, mobilizing the gap between representation and reality, between the mask and the “I.” Its critical force lay in its power to de-naturalize by pushing “natural” types to their limits, where they passed into artifice. This entailed delighting in exaggeration, in grotesque failures of seriousness, as well as producing new spectacles that knowingly brushed close against these failures. Camp thereby deflated the spirit of seriousness that gripped Victorians in England and Puritans in America. And what began as aesthetic autonomy expanded outward under the aegis of camp, subordinating or suspending all other forms of value.

Embedded in the fun was a plea for freedom, namely the freedom of the individual to express himself against the mawkish moralizing of the mass, to cultivate distance between self and society. The quintessential camp mood is thus seriousness misplaced or inverted: madness for the trivial, insouciance about the rest. Irony taken as a mode of social existence became a condition of freedom, a means of rebellion.

Camp rebellion arose in the interstices of an already fragile order beset by a spreading spiritual exhaustion. Early-20th-century modernists offered serious artistic responses to alienation and disorientation in works that were often received as depressing, sometimes apocalyptic. But camp, a subterranean current running beneath the culture, offered an alternative response, a way to make the most of alienation. Rather than shore oneself against ruin, camp induced one to dance, to sing, to play! – a species of decadence peculiar to the rise of industrial mass culture, a new season of cultural decline. Camp made this decline palatable. In the process, alienation was bifurcated into co-existing tendencies: on one hand, a growing sense of private dread, loneliness, and instability; on the other, the exhilaration of new social freedoms and their public performance. Elements of the camp sensibility, leaching away from the margins, thereby passed into the mainstream, though in dilute forms. Divested of its critical function, irony was used to leaven even the lowest kitsch. “Camp” offered a distance-giving wink that set one at ease, giving license to pursue and enjoy the pleasures that were beneath one’s intelligence but in line with one’s desire. With the rise of the culture industries, trash took the throne, and the law of the land was play.

In the mid-20th century, critics both approving and disapproving described this as the “new sensibility.” One of the disapproving critics, Irving Howe, wrote of the naïve Romanticism that underlies its worldview:

The new sensibility posits a theory that might be called the psychology of unobstructed need: men should satisfy those needs which are theirs, organic to their bodies and psyches, and to do this they now must learn to discard or destroy all those obstructions, mostly the result of cultural neurosis, which keep them from satisfying their needs.

According to the new sensibility, there is nothing worth considering outside the self, outside the now-time of enjoyment and thrill. The only legitimate imperatives are internal, arising from the self. Society, tradition, the past itself – these become storehouses of material that may be used or discarded according to the whims of self-expression. With no ground other than the self, all value devolves onto the individual’s needs and desires – and, ultimately, onto his pursuit of pleasure. In this way, Howe writes, “the new American sensibility does something no other culture could have aspired to: it makes nihilism seem casual, good-natured, even innocent.”

Irony is the only attitude that can survive the resulting moral chaos, an anarchy of individualisms. Inflated into the reigning sensibility, this anarchy turns into present-day camp. Yet irony and camp, on their own, make for very poor fare. As Emil Cioran laments, “Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being inconspicuous, occasional, is massive, automatic, at the antipodes of its essentially delicate nature.” Drowning in irony, thought becomes waterlogged. As a reflexive mode, irony loses its communicative and critical functions. It folds in on itself, reduces to cynicism, which, however amusing, however relieving, is always empty.

It was with all this in mind that, returning to The Picture of Dorian Gray more than a decade after a first reading, I was struck by the flatness and falsity of Lord Henry Wotton’s famed aperçus. Shimmering in the memory as a model of wit, this second encounter, and then a third, provoked irritation more than pleasure. What seems at first like playfulness, as it accumulates across the pages, quickly froths into a suffocating foam. Lord Henry turns out to be an unambiguously insidious force in the novel. Not amoral, but evil (a word that now seems outdated). Flaunting his command over language and ideas, prepared to pounce and parry with an improvised remark, he does not disrupt common sense so much as dazzle and distract his interlocutors from the effort to make any sense at all. Treating discourse as an aesthetic performance, as mere spectacle, Lord Henry uses words to frustrate rather than facilitate communication. He lacks moral maturity, or seriousness – by which I mean a kind of realism, a responsibility to the truth, to something outside the self. Lord Henry’s language lacks any relation to reality at all.

Yet many readers are taken in by the very fraud perpetrated on Dorian, excited by Lord Henry’s charm, his cool urbanity, those alluring epigrams and tossed off paradoxes. (This must be what a young Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared Dorian “a perfect and dangerous book.”) That Dorian actually constitutes a warning against worship at the aesthete’s alter is often lost on besotted readers and, consequently, excluded from our withering cultural memory. Won over by Wilde’s style, we often fail to wrestle with his meaning. But only in finally repudiating Lord Henry and breaking Dorian’s spell does the reader grasp the book’s real structure. From that vantage point it becomes clear that Wilde penned an indictment of the very cultural milieu, in vitro, that would misread his novel with enthusiasm – an image-addled culture in which personality trumps character, convenience displaces conviction, and quips stand in for ideas thought-through. He penned an indictment of us.

Only the most naïve acceptance of Wilde’s preface to the novel, and particularly his stand against didacticism, could prevent the reader from noticing that the plot clearly points us toward a lesson: taking Lord Henry seriously is a fatal mistake. The didactic thread is considerably thickened when we resuscitate the author and consider his own relation to the text. What does it mean for Wilde to warn against Lord Henry’s influence when Lord Henry is an avatar of Wilde himself? This relation forces upon us the tension between Wilde’s public image and his authorial voice, which can only be resolved through a synthesizing distance that refuses to take Wilde at his word. Happily, reading Wilde à rebours accords with his own aestheticist doctrine, which we catch in a familiar snag: Wilde consistently denigrates the value of sincerity, which necessarily casts doubt on the sincerity of the denigration itself. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” says Dorian’s narrator, curiously lapsing into first person. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.”

Through Dorian, Wilde successfully throws the irony of his own public persona into relief. The novel should therefore be read as an elaborate plea or confession, an insistence on the limits of aestheticism, a cry that escapes from behind Wilde’s bemused mask. For Dorian encapsulates its author’s contradictions; it is his fraught consciousness writ large, dramatizing the tensions and disjunctures between Wilde’s aesthetic and moral intuitions. The novel thereby reveals Wilde’s public ruse without disrupting his performance. The ruse in question is that of embracing aestheticism – a regime of value organized around the senses, surfaces, pleasure, individualism, the triumph of taste – as a totalizing practical philosophy, thereby conflating art and life.

When Lord Henry espouses this philosophy, he is both amusing and dangerous: amusing to those who laugh him off, but dangerous to Dorian. For Dorian fails to catch the wink, an error that leads to his ruin.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is, among other things, about influence, which is to say power. As Lord Henry’s declares, “All influence is immoral.” The aim of life is to “realize one’s own nature perfectly,” a deeply Romantic idea here transposed into a new key (later to resurface in the “new sensibility”). But no sooner has he denounced the immorality of influence than he sets about trying to influence Dorian – he is guided by aesthetic considerations, not moral ones:

Talking to [Dorian] was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.... There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims. … He would seek to dominate him… He would make that wonderful spirit his own.

Lord Henry’s influence provokes in Dorian the most disturbing inhumanity. The first major incident in Dorian’s descent is his cruel rejection of the young actress Sybil Vane, whom he has been courting. What Dorian initially values in Sybil – “worships” is not too strong a word – is her ability to shape-shift, to play so many diverse parts and imbue them beauty. “How different an actress is!” he says. “Why ­didn’t you tell me, Harry, that the only thing worth loving is an actress?” Unwittingly, Sybil is a competing influence on Dorian, much to Lord Henry’s displeasure. Dorian extols the way her performance provokes the humanity of her audience. “These common rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage,” Dorian says. “They sit silently and watch her. They weep and laugh as she wills them to do. She makes them as responsive as a violin. She spiritualizes them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one’s self.”

Suddenly inundated with Dorian’s amorous attention, Sybil falls in love; and this first encounter with love puts her in touch with a reality so vivid that acting becomes impossible. Her artfulness collapses, but she does not care. She is happy to abandon the actor’s role-playing art to settle instead into the reality of love with Dorian. But this is not in the cards. Watching from a private box, Dorian’s distraught to find his goddess turned mortal, her artifice sapped. When the torturous performance is over, he goes backstage and brusquely renounces her. It is a very squalid scene:

A fit of passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sybil Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

On stage, Sybil had frequently moved Dorian to tears; now, in her dressing room, Dorian is repulsed to find unseemly emotion instead of “emotion”. Regarding her devastation as merely an aesthetic phenomenon, an unattractive sight, it is as though Dorian cannot perceive anything beneath its surface, nothing hidden, nothing real. Just this thing on the ground before him, this vile body, an obstacle in his path. It turns out that his power to love, to care, stops abruptly at the veil. He elects to leave, and by morning she is dead. Upon learning of her suicide, it seems Dorian might reclaim his conscience – “I know now that conscience is the divinest thing in us,” he cries. But Lord Henry intervenes, reframing her suicide as a Romantic gesture, an aesthetic triumph to be remembered with pleasure. Dorian, he suggests, has done her a favor, saving her from a dismal, common fate by pushing her toward an extravagant act, immortalizing her, forever young and impassioned.

This is the first true test of Lord Henry’s influence, and Dorian either passes or fails depending on one’s perspective. The rest of the novel shows how this influence corrupts Dorian, driving him further into misery and shame. By the end, Lord Henry claims to be pleased with the results: “You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. … Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” At this point, Dorian has been responsible for several suicides and one murder, ruined the lives of multiple young friends, and become heavily addicted to opium, which he uses to stifle the memories that haunt him night and day. “I wish I could change places with you,” Lord Henry declares, looking upon a wretched, exhausted, spiritually sick, self-loathing Dorian on the brink of collapse.

But Dorian is engaged in a much broader critique of the modern age, aestheticism comprising but one register of a comprehensive turn toward surfaces. We should also, for example, read Dorian as a critique of 19th-century empiricism, then the leading philosophy of science. In fact, Lord Henry explicitly treats Dorian as an experimental subject, the narrator noting that “the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any sci­en­tific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results.”

Lord Henry approaches his experiment, quite naturally, with an empiricist attitude; for, taken at their word, empiricists, like aesthetes, attend solely to surfaces, to appearances, to sensory experience. At its Humean extreme, even the concept of “cause” is unjustified because it cannot be directly observed and, therefore, cannot be thought real. All the empiricist is prepared to attest to is the constant conjunction of events. Following this logic, as his experiment proceeds Lord Henry checks for outward signs of aesthetic progress, for visible results, wholly indifferent to the fate of Dorian’s soul. As far as he is concerned, both feet planted in the realm of the visible, the soul is merely fiction. Man is reduced to atoms and nerves, free will to illusion, conscience to shadow; humans are mere machinery for the expression of mechanical impulses. Consciousness, like conscience, trails behind the action. What really matters, the deeper but hidden real, is occluded.

(In addition to Lord Henry’s experiment, the novel itself may be seen as providing the experimental conditions in which to test Wilde’s aestheticism. What happens when aestheticism is pursued in isolation of other regimes of value, when senses and surfaces reign? Dorian is the canary in the coal mine; and by the end of the novel he has fallen silent.)

We also find this reduction to surface in the coeval ideology of the market economy, which posits people as generic rational actors competing with one another in pursuit of their respective individual interests, the only difference between them being the resources they possess. It is a picture that necessarily distorts reality, yet the distortion also falls into_reality. For market actors _are driven by objective economic interests; and in their transactions they do treat objects as formally equivalent commodities, their exchange-value – their system-internal value – entirely displacing their use-value. The real thing, the person, the object, the labor, is obscured by an abstraction that develops its own effective power, a fiction that breaks into the field of reality and competes with the real. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, this state of affairs spread outward: the mechanical anarchy of market forces took over and transformed social relations, pulling people into its gears, submitting them to its rhythms and demands, remaking them in its own image.

At the same time, market ideology was used to subtend the ideology of liberal democracy, in which again we find a field of formally equal actors, citizens brought into existence by abstracting from the real social conditions that restrict, enable, and influence their being and behavior. Citizens are the key atomic units; and, in theory, democracies, like markets, constitute unstable reflections of their individual conceptions of the good en masse, neither grounded nor fixed by an external authority. In fact, democracies and markets are thought to generate their own authority precisely because they cut away from reality and posit, through their rules and ideals, a fresh surface: a field of equals, the aggregated authority of which is conceived as “the people” or “the nation,” the basis of the modern nation-state. Obviously, these abstractions obscure the social inequalities that operate beneath their surface, the conditions of possibility for the triumphant image.

But more importantly for our purposes, the exterior, the “ideal” itself acquires its own real power. What is the aggregated authority of a field of equals but, in reality, the absence of authority, a flattening anarchy? It is this living ideal that radiates outward into other registers of social being and fields of experience. The individual unbound, ungrounded, is free – no gods, no masters, no authority but his own reason, feelings, and desires, no compass but that which points toward pleasure. However, this is merely the ideological aspect of a social reality that immediately undermines it. Subordinated to the market and the mass, individual freedom is circumscribed by the fluctuating whims of new authorities, subsumed by the flux of impersonal forces.

When aestheticism, empiricism, capitalism, and democracy – co-resonant ideologies of the modern age – are articulated together into a single totality, solid ground drops out from beneath our feet. For the only legitimate values across aesthetic, scientific, economic, and political domains are generated, from moment to moment, through their manifestation within a self-referential system. The real thus disappears, swallowed up by the plane of appearances: “If one doesn’t talk about a thing,” Dorian says in reference to Sybil Vane’s suicide, “it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.”

In these mutually reinforcing ideologies, truth and value devolve upon outward expressions of individual taste, experience, interest, and desire. This leads to a pervasive sense of un-reality, a shifting sea of surfaces that underlies a generalized alienation and disorientation, the modern condition, the “post-modern” condition, our condition today. And camp deprived of its critical powers – expanded into programmatic irony, cynicism, and nihilism in the guise of play – is our cultural and psychosocial response to this immense regression.

Lord Henry’s sophistic use of language is an alarming display of said regression, which Wilde vividly characterizes as a whimsical performance:

He played with the idea and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure… Facts fled before her like frightened forest things… It was an extraordinary improvisation.... He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible.

Lord Henry knows exactly what he’s doing: he makes discourse into artifice, capable of stunning his listeners into a kind of aesthetic sympathy by manipulating the material of language and meaning, indifferent to its truth. In other words, his talk is held together by the internal relations of the words and ideas themselves, cut loose from reality. And while his audience shrieks with delight, we find Dorian listening intently.

The reality purged from this world of surfaces is concentrated in Dorian’s portrait. At the beginning of the novel, the painter, Basil, all but confesses to Lord Henry that he is in love with Dorian, cares deeply about him. He sees in him the perfect harmony of body and soul, an inspiration for an entirely new school of art, which he inaugurates in the portrait. He pleads with Lord Henry to leave him be. Lord Henry smiles and proceeds.

The portrait brings the soul into the visible realm; and from the time that Lord Henry begins to exert his influence, it functions as an index of Dorian’s moral degradation, the face of his conscience: “His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment.” When Dorian understands what the portrait has become, he locks it away in his old nursery. But even there, out of sight, his knowledge of the portrait continues to haunt him. Dorian is able to forget the portrait for weeks at a time, to enjoy “his passionate absorption in mere existence,” his pursuit of diverse pleasures. But inevitably that which lies beneath or beyond “mere existence” reasserts itself. He maintains his youth and beauty, his angelic surface, in spite of his debauched life; but the portrait, his soul, though unseen, becomes a throbbing source of shame, his terrible secret, the dark object at the center of his experience. The novel is thus organized around the repression of the soul and its consequences. But, as Dorian learns, and as Wilde’s novelistic experiment reveals, the repressed always returns: “The soul is a terrible reality.”

To repress the soul is to repress the past, another affliction of the modern age. If at first amnesia feels like freedom, it soon becomes its own awful prison. The past still bears down on us, but we no longer know what it has to do with us. In Dorian, pleasure appears and disappears in the moment, existing only in its fleeting realization, or in the anticipation of a future pleasure. But the soul bears the accumulated traces of past action. When Dorian’s prayer is answered – that he should remain forever young, that the portrait rather than he should decay – the picture becomes the external bearer of the visible stains of time and consequence, rapidly accumulated through Dorian’s relentless pursuit of sensory experience. Outwardly sheltered from time, he is transformed into the abstract subject of pleasure, the purest subject of aestheticism.

Even as the novel progresses, the evidence of Dorian’s sins, the traces of his own past, gradually disappear. People die: Sybil Vane kills herself; Dorian murders Basil, disposes of his belongings, has his body dissolved; the man who does the latter deed soon commits suicide; and, finally, Sybil’s brother, James Vane, who has located Dorian for vengeance, is shot dead. But even in the absence of evidence, Dorian’s memory attests to his crimes: “Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.” This drives Dorian to opium dens, looking to “buy oblivion” night after night, to stifle his memory. By the end of the novel, only the portrait remains: Dorian’s soul, the only reality, the one enduring thing.

Dorian’s desperate attempt to destroy the portrait, to expunge this last trace of his past, results in his own death. It is an ending that points to the deep entwinement of the sensual and the spiritual, body and soul. To subordinate one to the other is to distort the mysterious tension that defines human being as such. This final insight is the key to the novel. For all the remedial merits of aestheticism, the partial truth it recovers, it cannot displace the “spiritual” dimension of humanity, that which exceeds and resists our material nature. (Caveat lector, Wilde has something metaphysical in mind; I resolutely do not.) Simply put, aestheticism is not a comprehensive doctrine. For any worldview divorced from the depths of the real is enclosed upon itself, ignorant of its own conditions of possibility and, therefore, insensible to its own limits.

Cut off from the unseen, beauty is severely disfigured, warped into unrecognizable forms. The aesthete risks evil, risks, as is said of Dorian, “look[ing] on evil simply as a mode through which he [can] realise his conception of the beautiful.” To render evil in aesthetic terms – to flatten it into a surface, reducing it to an additional color with which to paint – is to lose the perception of good and evil as such, relinquishing precisely what T.S. Eliot rightly called “the first requisite of spiritual life.”

As Dorian’s fate indicates, Wilde – the real Wilde, discernible only in the novel’s dialectic – is committed to redeeming the spirit, to salvaging the soul. Dorian’s error is to take his mentor’s “seamless, unremitting irony” as an end in itself – to take it at face value, to take it “seriously.” He worships la lettre and ignores l’esprit.

A similar danger awaits readers of Dorian who fail to catch Wilde’s wink, which gives a warning, not cover for guiltless enjoyment. Lord Henry, the avatar of Wilde’s public persona, embodies a critique of modern society insofar as he adopts its logic and takes it to its limits. He is precisely the inhuman character that our culture presupposes and produces, the real figure of modernity acting through its vapid fictions. He prefigures in performance, through the metonymic use of aestheticism, the entire Zeitgeist’s tendency toward spiritual emptiness. To some extent, the people who interact with Lord Henry – all but Dorian – understand this. Throughout the novel, they call attention to his insincerity, as when Basil says to him, “You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”

We should read Wilde’s own public persona in much the same way: in playing the cynic, Wilde involves himself in a productive hypocrisy, distilling society’s practical cynicism into a performance that exposes the erosion of the spiritual values that he, in fact, holds dear. His own preening amoralism is a pose, a mirror. “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame,” Lord Henry says. Wilde knew, of course, that Dorian was such a book, illuminating the moral dullness of a world comprised of surfaces. Wilde’s genius is to briskly shuck society of its sentimental fantasies, exposing the lies that adorn and obscure its decay.

More startlingly, despite all appearances, when shorn of its own pretensions, vaunted aestheticism – art for art’s sake, etc., clearly embodied in Lord Henry’s “wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories” – is revealed to be aligned with this world rather than a triumph over it. Aestheticism is just utilitarianism in a higher register: a utilitarianism of strictly useless pleasures. The highbrow enthronement of pleasure is therefore a track parallel to other forms of degradation, an abstraction and inflation of the aesthetic beyond its proper limits – a charming solipsism, indifferent (or insensible) to its own fraudulence.

If Lord Henry and Wilde perform such a character in public, Dorian becomes its living embodiment. There is no ground for his irony to stand on, nothing behind the mask but a soul in pain. This is why Lord Henry praises Dorian as living in the spirit of the times: “A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.” In this sense, Dorian is a forerunner to the kinds of critique advanced by Andy Warhol and, even more so, by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Through his art, Wilde ruthlessly presents the spirit of his time, hacking away at mystique and moralism until the cold surface is made visible. In just the same way, Warhol played the dispassionate Dorian of shallow consumerism and celebrity, while Ellis’s Patrick Bateman is Dorian sans portrait, without even a soul to imperil.

As Wilde writes in Dorian, “There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.” This is a distillation of the novel’s raison d’être. Outraged condemnations of Wilde’s “immoral” novel, like those against Warhol and Ellis, were directed against the surface, thereby falling into the very failure these artists tried to limn: the visible can only be understood in relation to the invisible, the actual in relation to potential. The same charge can be made against admirers of Wilde who adopt his poses as their own: they mistake his surface for truth, taking up Lord Henry’s epigrams as elements of a practical philosophy as spiritually degrading as the society it disdains.

VII.

Dorian’s error has been generalized in the past century, the entire culture having moved into the hollowed-out shell of camp aestheticism. As Philip Rieff observed in the 1980s, “the type Wilde created, not least in himself, has been reproduced in very popular form.” Lord Henry’s irony, like Wilde’s, their “brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible” discourse, was intended to shock and delight an audience freighted with Victorian seriousness, akin to the later modernist techniques that were meant to disrupt the stupor of the audience.

These weapons have since changed hands. Speed, shock, irreverence – these are techniques in an industrialized war for attention, waged with technologies that keep our minds attuned to a shifting surface, to images streaming behind the glass. As the world is increasingly reduced to an aesthetic phenomenon, irony has become the dominant mood of the age instead of its critical adjunct, a defense against reality rather than a torch with which to illuminate it. Hypocrisy has devolved into cynicism as ideology pulls reality into its own twisted forms. Under these conditions, Wilde is reduced to a prophet unarmed, the context for his peculiar genius having been liquidated and forgotten.

What happens when there are no more idols left to smash? What happens when the last remaining value, the only value taken seriously, is the paltry individualism of self-expression? When, as Eliot feared, blasphemy is no longer possible? Wilde’s unyielding irony, his aestheticism, his glib insincerity – it was all a theater to indict the philistine culture of his time. But a different intervention is required today. In a culture consumed by camp, the only subversive force is seriousness, commitment to reality, responsibility to truth. As Dorian demonstrates, the soul atrophies in the absence of seriousness. And to eliminate the soul is to eliminate the human.