Arquivo de literature | Page 100 of 111

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

I opened The Picture of Dorian Gray with great expectancy. The reason is that Oscar Wilde was one of the most intriguing personalities in history. I remember the words of Carpeaux: “His life was the work of genius; and to genius society has always paid dearly for the uniqueness of his nature”. So I opened the book, eager for the manifestation of genius. I found it. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that can only be written by a great artist. To begin, with the plot: the story is instigating from the first to the last chapter. The three main characters in the book are very well developed; friends, they represent conflicting faces of a genius mind. Morals are put to the test, art in evidence, social relationships in check and psychological dramas in spark. Basil Hallward, like few others, portrays the personality of an artist. Lord Henry Wotton is a character with impressive vivacity. And Dorian Gray develops into an ingenious arc drawn by Wilde. The work is characterized by courage and psychological acuity: the author does not write in chains, he does not fear rejection. And so he manages to express himself with sincerity and power, delivering unique and real characters. It is obvious: Oscar Wilde will remain slandered forever. But he will never cease to be what he was: a great artist.

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The Rhythm of the Letters

In prose the punctuation, the extension of periods, the chaining of paragraphs; in poetry, besides punctuation, the distribution of tonics, the extension of verses and their relationships: these are the markers of the rhythm of the letters. As for the rhythm: sandy, treacherous terrain; indomitable beast; marvelous and irresolvable enigma; visible perfection but distant, very distant…

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The Fate of the Intellectual

The intellectual must be unpredictable, or he will not be worthy of the epithet. If the reader, in contact with the title of a work or a chronicle, can predict its content, then the author will be dead, plunged into disinterest. I say the obvious, is to confront the examples… Single-subject chroniclers remain, novelists with blinkers are majority. And if they achieve, these or those, the desired effects ever, the insistence only exposes their limitations. The intellectual must be dynamic, varied, unpredictable and comprehensive; otherwise, he should stop speaking…

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Style Is Abundance of Expressive Resources

The goal of every great artist should be to erect, in the long run, a complex and multifaceted monument. That is why minor artists are the ones who, annoyingly, only repeat the same processes. To do so, to seek emphasis on the same idea, the same impression or the evocation of the same feeling, is not, as some suppose, a demonstration of style, but evidence of a limited creative horizon. Style is expressiveness, power, conciseness, rhythm… Style is abundance of expressive resources, exactly the opposite of the artist’s capacity to repeat to exhaustion the same processes.

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