Wilde's only novel "The Picture of Dorian Green", made into a film Renamed "Dowling Green". There are already quite a few literary and film critics about this work, analyzing the various ideas expressed in the work from different angles. Whether it is from Wilde, from aestheticism or romanticism, or from the perspective of imagery to analyze the meaning behind each character, it is relatively professional and academic. I remember that when I was reading British and American Drama Appreciation, I also wrote a small article to cope with classwork, and I never analyzed the emptiness and depravity of the upper class in Dorian Greene's works.
I suddenly reunited with this work today, and I want to talk about some of the contents of the work from another angle. Don't dig deeply into the doctrine or drama theory involved, and don't talk about what kind of image expression each character is loaded with. Talking about this work, the most obvious and one element that runs through from the beginning to the end is beauty.
The beauty in Dorian Gray is not the kind of beauty that we can understand in the usual sense of truth, goodness and beauty. That kind of beauty requires first of all the purity and beauty of the appearance, but also requires the characters to sublimate it morally. We all know that the white lady in "The Legend of the White Snake" is beautiful, but the centipede is not beautiful. The female protagonist and male protagonist of the Mary Sue Jake Su TV series that are almost on the line are beautiful, and the villain with a vicious heart may be 2.2 meters tall, but if you ask if she is beautiful, I hesitate. This stems from a masked characterization of beauty in our culture over the years: beauty, not only beautiful, but also good. And some purer, single-element cultural expressions, or more complex, more multi-element cultural expressions, to a large extent, have been deliberately ignored. The reason is simple, we want to be able to teach our children that if you want to be beautiful, first be good. This is good, it is the simplest way to comply with social ethics. It looks boring, but it's ingrained. Every child knows the fairy tales of "Snow White" and "Cinderella", and knows that the last thing the prince likes is the beautiful and kind heroine. Why doesn't the prince like the stepmother of the beautiful princess or the beautiful black swan, because they are not good enough. So it's a fairy tale, but not the truth. This also leads to our understanding of the element of beauty, which is mixed with too many other moral aspects.
Stripped of these other things of morality, this beauty is an element of Dorian Gray from beginning to end. Young Dorian Gray possesses this so-called beauty, which at the beginning of the story, is incomplete. It has two factors, first, the heyday of life activities (that is, youth), and the second is the perfection of the body (that is, our young boy Dorian Gray is handsome enough and in good shape, and his health is not troubled). But here is a small amount of one level. Let's talk about it later. And most of the people at the beginning of the story have absolute admiration and affirmation for the degree of this beauty, so they have decided to leave a portrait to preserve this beauty.
In fact, at the beginning, Dorian Gray's understanding of the beauty he had was only so far. He has not thought about why he has this trait (of course, as far as the first two levels are concerned, being born is the reason, and he does not need to think too much), what it means to him to have this trait, through this trait, What else can I pursue, even, is the pursuit of beauty itself a real desire of my own? For him, when everything just started, it was vague.
Then there is a question here, whether the element of beauty is absolute or relative. If it is absolute, whether it is a perfect superposition of specific objective factors, it can be copied and frozen. Or it is relative, only in cooperation with more abstract inner temperament and character, can it be expressed more purely, in the passage of time, can it be fully expressed, once fixed, it will become meaningless and soulless. thing. It's like a hand playing the piano, so moving, but once it's cut off and placed on a tray, it's just a broken piece of meat. The hand is still the hand, the body has not changed, but the loss of other more abstract things it carries causes the soul to be pulled away. Dorian Gray himself, is an absolute and fixed element of beauty. But the more it develops, the harder it becomes to be convincing. Just like this severed hand, even if it is cryopreserved, in Henry's eyes, it is "a monster".
When the young Dorian Gray was faced with a perfect portrait, he was initially attracted by the figurative and fixed-frame beauty. At the same time, he also believed that the youthful appearance would eventually disappear with time, or it would be extremely fragile and easily broken. I am willing to use my soul to make a deal with the devil and keep this beauty. In fact, at this moment, the author hints that the third layer of beauty is the abstract spiritual force behind the figurative body.
It's not that Lin has fallen, so he has no spiritual power. As I said at the beginning, this kind of spiritual power has nothing to do with moral elements. But this kind of spiritual power is a kind of soul feeling reflected from the inside out after all the expressions, temperament, thoughts, and even the personality of the whole are integrated. In the beginning, Dorian Gray could not say that he was kind, but that he was simply ignorant of the world. In the later stage, he could not be defined as evil. He still had a certain distance from evil. Some of the glitz and depravity of the upper class are on the moral level and are not evaluated. So his biggest problem is that without a unified spiritual force, he is empty. Without a complete and powerful, or even comprehensive spiritual force to support it, what he showed to people was an empty shell. I don't know where to go, I don't know where to go. From start to finish, I didn't know what I was chasing.
Many people will think that what he pursues, or the ultimate pursuit, is beauty itself. That said, it's still lacking. For Dorian Gray, at the moment of freezing, he no longer needs to pursue his first and second level elements. Of course he can continue to pursue the third level, which is spiritual power, but he doesn't. It's like a person suddenly has a lot of money and doesn't know what to do with his life in the future. When the beauty he possesses becomes an absolute, an absolute value that no longer needs to be expressed by time, he stops the growth of his spiritual power. After that, all the indulgence and enjoyment are good, the more lively, the more it expresses how empty this empty shell is. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve beauty as the ultimate pursuit, but there are indeed a few people who can rely on a strong sense of belief to pursue the beauty that we usually understand in their entire life, such as Rodin, but after careful analysis, we can find that Rodin The ultimate pursuit of beauty is not beauty itself, but the expression of beauty in art, which also loads other carriers for the pursuit of beauty. If a person, the pursuit of beauty is to hope to obtain some common understanding of the world in return, such as money, status. Or something more positive, such as a good social relationship or a happy and fulfilling life, then this pursuit has a more ultimate purpose. And if you are just beautiful for the sake of beauty, attracting for the sake of attracting, running and jumping for the sake of being chased, you are only pursuing a piece of foam, which looks glorious, but actually has nothing.
In fact, if you understand this work from different angles, you can see the interpretation of different themes. For example, it expresses a sense of nothingness. It expresses the eternal beauty of this body through a perfect body. It is meaningless when it is separated from time and soul. Whether it is a book or a movie, at the end, it gives people the feeling of a huge sense of annihilation. This tossing for half a lifetime is a farce. What I like is that it takes the rare but classic theme of "Broken Beauty" from a new angle. This theme is mainly expressed in the Japanese film Helter Skelter. What kind of beauty, and how to collapse step by step. What the heroine pursues is a kind of perfect and absolute beauty, which is difficult to achieve in reality, and she has it through medical and aesthetic means, thinking that she can stand on the top of the pyramid for a long time by virtue of this. But I don't want to be followed by newcomers. What's even more ironic is that this newcomer, played by Mizuhara Kiko, does not have the kind of beauty that the heroine understands. In the same way of understanding, the heroine has the elements of the first and second layers of beauty, but also lacks the third layer. Under the absence, it is difficult to support, so it is destined to collapse. The newcomer played by Mizuhara Kiko has a beauty that is not understood by the heroine in terms of appearance, but more importantly, has a strong third layer of spiritual power. Dorian Gray, in his empty heart, hoped to find something to make him live in vain, but found that he had lost the meaning of finding a life in vain under the setting of immortality. He tried again, and tossed again, in the end, he found that it was just a game. What is left behind is a deeper and greater emptiness and silence after the hustle and bustle. Perhaps this is what is often said, inadvertently inserting willows and willows to create shade, when you focus on the pursuit of a higher level, and your body and mind are united, at this moment, it shows an irresistible beauty. Perhaps it is because at this moment, the harmony between man and nature, the coordination of body and mind, the peace of mind, the absence of confusion and confusion, the absence of trembling and trembling, the sense of belief from the inside out, and the imperfect appearance can still express uniqueness. beauty. Perhaps when the third layer is strong enough, the first and second layers will be crossed and sublimated. This is also why we think that many old faces are still beautiful, and many imperfect appearances can still be soul-stirring.
A work is a good work, and a movie is a good movie. Wilde's only remaining novel is worth reading.
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