Dorian's Quivering Cock: Will Self Does Oscar Wilde. posted by Richard Seymour

If there’s a word in the English dictionary that I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But Will Self probably does, and it is his dazzling prolixity as much as his bleak, cynical humanism that attracts legions of misfits, students, and drug addicts to his prose. In My Idea of Fun, the serpiginous Fat Controller detonates pleonastic bombs, sets off “lexical flashes”, irradiates his audience with blasts of sesquipedaleanism. The description appends just as well to Will Self. I can’t remember when I first started liking Self – perhaps when he interviewed Julie Burchill for the Independent in 1999 and tastefully tore her most prized writing to shreds without being unnecessarily vitriolic. He reserves, as always, his most scorching contempt for the political class, the authoritarianism of New Labour, and Blair, that “poetaster of the bland”. Still, it is refreshing to see just how willingly Self relinquishes his charitable sense when writing fiction, for fiction is mercenary – either one makes the kill or one does not deserve to be paid. So it is with Dorian, perhaps his best novel to date, and certainly his most recent.

Like Oscar Wilde’s original, Self’s Dorian is resplendent with paradox, replete with maxims, satirically cutting into bourgeois cant and liberal sanctimony with equal deftness. Unlike Wilde, however, Self isn’t afraid to be vulgar, disgusting even, as he reaches into the darkest, bloodiest recesses of the 1980s gay scene, and paints everything gloriously black. It is populated by a pantheon of upper-middle class aesthetes, running the full gamut from self-indulgence to self-pity, gold-digging doctors and junkie beggars. Dorian, in this re-telling, is an ingénue of aristocratic pedigree who has befriended Basil Hallward’s fidgety, rectally taut conceptual artist. Henry Wotton, no longer a lord, is an unsympathetic, ginger-haired, hard-nosed snob. He is despicable, cruel, and contemptuous – but retains the soulful philosophy and wit which made him so irresistible in fin de siecle Victorianism. Indeed, Self locates a curious confluence between the 1890s and the 1980s – moral panic, monarchical crisis, a lethargic political class with little distinction. And the 1980s saw not a few PT Barnum’s and Bill Cody’s make their bestial mark.

Melodrama is discarded in favour of the baroque, which suits the tale much better; fatalism is eschewed, and there is no tragic crescendo. What we get instead is the darkest of comedies, overlaid with some perfect Wildean ennui, decadent malaise and moral putrefaction. The sense of doom, which runs through Wilde’s original, is replaced with ironic farce. It is entirely fitting that Dorian should end his wild days as a New Labour marketing genius, inventing halos for useless turds, meeting and greeting solicitous, unctuous careerists. Degeneration climaxes in enervated emptiness and, like Wilde, an era that has surged forward on little more than its own giddying hubris collapses into depleted self-loathing, a wasted invert of its former self.

It is commonly thought, and Wilde contributed to this perception, that the strain of doom in The Picture of Dorian Gray presaged Wilde’s later trial and imprisonment. But then, Wilde was a man who stood in symbolic relations to his times, and it is not stretching the bounds of the credible to imagine that what was actually presaged was the collapse of bourgeois society - specifically, the reversion to barbarism during the Thirty Years War. World War I and its sequels introduced many unwelcome additions to our lexicon - stormtroopers, genocide, no-man’s land, lebensraum, Kristallnacht etc. Life imitates art, realising Leonardo Da Vinci’s helicopter several hundred years after its conception; repeating the tragedy of The Wreck of the Titan, an enormous, glorious ship stacked in a perfect replica of the Victorian social order, which sets off on a freezing April night and smashes into an iceberg. (The similarities are quite striking, right down to the dimensions of the ship, so definitely check that link). Wilde did not have such specific prescience, but I wonder if he didn’t overhear the dim roar of airborne death somewhere over the horizon.

Self may smell something in the offing, perhaps 20th Century tragedy reborn as 21st Century farce, but he doesn’t allow himself to become portentous. Madness is his forte, the point at which truth emerges from the secluded margins, and it is his autistic observer who keeps watch on the heaving, quaking world outside his tower block window. The AIDS virus is working its demonic magic on the nation, wiping out swathes of unbelievers, destroying the shibboleths of tolerance, turning a frightened and tired populace on its gay minority and unleashing a puritanical fervour even more vile and hypocritical than the kind that broke Oscar Wilde on the gaolor’s rock. And even as the Caring Nineties sweep Princess Diana, the Snow Queen of People’s Hearts, into hospitals and AIDS charity concerts all over the world, fundamentalism broods and multiplies under the social skin, waiting for resistance to weaken.

What is missing from this picture, of course, is socialism. Wilde’s libertarian socialism is behind his most scathing attacks on bourgeois society – when a charitable aristocrat expatiates on the immense problems in the East End, Lord Wooton cuttingly remarks that “The problem is slavery. And we are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves”. Self is himself on the libertarian left, but the 1980s marked a catastrophic decline in the fortunes of the international left, during which even great victories began to look hollow, as national liberation became postcolonial servitude. For Wilde, 1798 and 1848 are not distant memories. For Self, even 1968 looks decidedly quaint. The “sexual revolution” has already degenerated into a Thermidorian reaction, and what was hoped would be liberation has merely reinvented the old authoritarianism, pace Animal Farm.

Dorian, of course, remains transcendent, beautiful, a trembling narcissus, untouchable by time or trial. Except that if the revolution did come, such time-shattering moments of emancipatory upheaval would send Dorian fleeing across the pond, or perhaps across the Siberian plains, for he is thoroughly and completely a creature of bourgeois comfort. What novelty he might find in the asceticism of War Communism would quickly become a bore. Radical democracy would tire him, for he is a Nietzchean superman through and through. The subjugation of privilege to collectivism would reek of mediocrity for him. It is for that reason, and that most crucially, that he deserves his gruesome death – history would make him superfluous, and he could not bear that. Neither could Wilde.