Oscar Wilde and the precious perversity of genius

The drawback of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that we already know them by heart. The virtue of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that they are so significant and fascinating that you never tire of them and can return to them again and again, which transforms the inconvenience of knowing them by heart into a blessing, an incentive, and an advantage.

More or less everyone knows the plot ofThe Picture of Dorian GrayOscar Wilde's (Dublin, 1854-Paris, 1900) novel about a refined and charming young man who, in late 19th-century London, establishes a kind of diabolical alliance with the portrait painted by a friend who idolizes him. The novel's premise, with its supernatural undertones, is so powerful and presents so many symbolic possibilities that it is both striking and unforgettable: since Dorian Gray does not want to age, nor does he want to be disfigured by the marks of life's experiences, he himself manages to preserve himself exactly as he is—handsome, young, and attractive, morally corrupt, and with all the abscesses his debased soul accumulates. It is a premise that is at once perverse, suggestive, and brilliant.

In this sense, the magnificent edition published by La Casa dels Clàssics ofThe Picture of Dorian GrayThis first Catalan edition of the uncensored initial version of the work, with a substantial prologue by filmmaker Albert Serra, impeccable translation and afterword by Yannick Garcia, and the author's preface for the 1891 edition, serves to confirm something we tend to forget: that Oscar Wilde, beyond his explosive and colorful wit and his wise pronouncements full of insightful paradoxes, truth, and cynicism, is a great writer. He is an exuberant aesthete with a flamboyant style, a powerful intellect, a daring moral courage, and a deep and expansive soul.

This becomes clear in the novel's second chapter, when Wilde first introduces his trio of protagonists together: the young Dorian Gray, the painter Basil Hallward, and the brilliant Lord Henry, whose unscrupulous lucidity acts as Dorian's Faustian mentor. In this chapter, Wilde narrates and helps us understand, with exquisite rhetorical devices and without resorting to magical tricks, the exchange of personalities and emotional and ethical-moral energies that occurs between the Dorian in the painting and the real Dorian, as he contemplates his own portrait while simultaneously absorbing the hedonistic advice and incisive depravity. "As soon as you're dry, I'll varnish you, frame you, and send you home," the painter tells him. "After that, do whatever you like with yourself."

Leaving aside the bold argument and the precision and opulence of the language, The Picture of Dorian Gray It is also a novel that addresses central themes of literary and sociopolitical modernity: the relationship we humans have with our conscience; the management of evil and the notion of sin in a society sustained by hypocrisy and superficiality; freedom and the dangers of pleasure (homoeroticism in the Victorian era); the separation or symbiosis between life and art... Wilde himself sums it up: "All art is at once surface and symbol." Ah, but what a surface! And what a symbol!