Disinterest and Disruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Modernist Aesthetics of the Obscene

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Cet article étudie les aspects du Portrait de Dorian Gray qui font du récit de Wilde une possible préfiguration de l’esthétique de l’obscène dans une acception moderniste ; en effet, comme nombre d’œuvres modernistes, l’écriture de Wilde subvertit déjà, à sa manière, le principe de contemplation désintéressée qui est caractéristique de l’esthétique kantienne. L’article tente de montrer que ce n’est pas dans la représentation d’actions ou de gestes tabous que réside le jeu de l’écriture wildienne avec l’obscénité, mais dans sa tentative de faire entrer une corporéité non sublimée dans la sphère de l’art et de la culture noble.

This essay explores to what extent Wilde’s novel can be considered a proto-modernist text in its adherence to an “aesthetics of obscenity” and its rejection of Kantian disinterestedness. I argue that Dorian Gray, while not explicitly describing taboo acts like modernist works such as Ulysses, is nevertheless modernist in its attempt to introduce the un-sublimated body into the realm of high art. My discussion will focus on Wilde’s exploration of the tension between the body and aesthetic representation, which in the novel are symbolized by the two main characters, Dorian and Lord Henry, and literalized through the painting that records Dorian’s “obscene” acts. I suggest that the text’s metacommentary on the relation between obscenity and the aesthetic, between corruption and morality, makes Wilde’s novel a paradigmatic modernist text. My reading of Wilde’s work also analyses the nature of the obscene, which, as I argue, is not essentially the explicit representation of bodily functions or sexual acts, but the “thing” that ultimately resists representation, remaining “offstage,” frustrating any attempt at appropriation and thus disrupting the basic parameters of social and subjective existence.