|
Wilde Times and High Stars
Posted 12th May 2010 | Author: Gabrielle Hovedon
(Views: 41)
Back in the day – the early twentieth century, to be precise – you couldn’t have fame and celebrity without the written word. Newspaper stories created windows through which notorious figures could be seen and duly emulated or condemned, and Oscar Wilde’s petulant lover Lord Douglas famously remarked: “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.” The decadent displays of the early twentieth century were eagerly recorded, and with each account furthering the reputations of the famous and infamous it was painfully clear that “out of sight, out of mind” was not just a platitude. Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand, Philip Hoare’s reconstruction of London’s 1918 Billings Trial, gives an eyewitness account of decadent parties happening across Europe: “‘Night by night, during the summers of 1913 and 14, the entertainments grew in number and magnificence… One band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even. Electric fans whirled on the top of enormous blocks of ice, buried in banks of hydrangeas ... Never had there been such displays of flowers ... lolling roses and malmaisons, of gilded, musical-comedy baskets of carnations and sweet-peas ... huge bunches of orchids, bowls of gardenias and flat trays of stephanotis... mounds of peaches, figs, nectarines and strawberries at all seasons.’”
In addition to providing insight into famous people’s lives, though, the written word was also responsible for creating and destroying celebrities altogether. It was literature that put Wilde on a pedestal to be admired… and in a roundabout way, destroyed him as well. (He was left an insulting calling card by Lord Douglas’s father, and his attempts to seek legal retribution eventually led to his arrest for homosexuality.) Nowadays, visual art has largely taken over the dubious distinction of building up and tearing down celebrities, and just as it’s hard to imagine a Wilde unknown to the newspapers, it’s almost impossible to picture Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears without paparazzi flashbulbs in the background. Indeed, the only difference between Hoare’s account of decadent parties and modern day tabloids, other than the fact no one knows what a malmaison is anymore, is that tabloids are now accompanied by glossy pictures.
Given the absolute necessity of visual art in the present day, then, it’s interesting to note that the 2009 film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is entitled just “Dorian Gray.” Whether film executives thought a shorter title would better entice viewers, or whether some intern accidentally left off the first three words and it stuck, the title’s truncation is actually fairly significant. “The Picture” is symbolic of art in general, which, although famously called “useless” by Wilde himself, plays a huge role in the rise and fall of Dorian Gray. From the portrait that first makes him vain to the “poisonous book” from Lord Henry containing “metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour” that seals his downward spiral, art is just as important to Dorian Gray’s life as to Wilde’s.
Of course, leaving a few words out of a title isn’t the end of the world, and critics have said that “Dorian Gray” remains remarkably true to the novel elsewhere. It is worthwhile to remember that decadence cannot survive without art, though, be it literature or photography or film. Richard Le Gallienne, a twentieth-century British poet, was well aware of this significance when he wrote the following lines in “The Décadent to His Soul” (note the appropriately dissolute diacritic lounging atop that “e”):
“It is so good in sin to keep in sight
The white hills whence we fell, to measure by--
To say I was so high, so white, so pure,
And am so low, so blood-stained and so base…
First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire,
So shall the mire have something of the stars,
And the high stars be fragrant of the mire.”
Regardless of which medium portrays the stars and mire of the decadent world, art is ultimately integral to Wild(e)ness in all its guises.
user comments
|
etcetera.online