Retro-Victorianism and Art in Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation

Retro-Victorianism and Art in Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation

Will Self's novel, Dorian: An Imitation, serves as a postmodern reinterpretation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It explores themes of aestheticism, morality, and the relationship between reality and fiction in a contemporary context. The narrative delves into the impact of technology and simulation on art, reflecting the complexities of identity and representation in modern society. This analysis is particularly relevant for scholars and students interested in postmodern literature and Victorian influences. Self's work critiques the superficiality of contemporary culture while engaging with the legacy of Wilde's original text.

Key Points

  • Analyzes the intertextual relationship between Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  • Explores themes of simulation and hyperreality as articulated by Jean Baudrillard.
  • Discusses the impact of 1980s culture, including sexuality and drug use, on the narrative structure.
  • Examines the role of technology in shaping contemporary artistic expression and identity.
  • Considers the moral implications of aestheticism in the context of modern society.
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  • Matthew Chow
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Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 23 (2010): 231-247
Retro-Victorianism and the Simulacrum of Art in
Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation
José M. Yebra
University of Zaragoza
jyebra@unizar.es
ABSTRACT
This essay aims at exploring Will Self’s novel Dorian: An Imitation (2002) as a
postmodernist revision of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891). Exceptional for ones, immoral and shameful for others, Dorian: An
Imitation fosters an intertextual relation with the late-Victorian hypotext whereby
both texts are transformed out of a refractory process. Like its predecessor, Self’s
novel is primarily interested in aesthetic issues. In this light, my main concern
consists in analysing the artistic discourses that Dorian: An Imitation reflects and
deflects in the era of simulation. Likewise, I examine how the novel delves into the
problematic relationship between “reality” and “fiction”, original and simulacra.
At the turn of the millennium, when virtual reality/ies are generated by computers,
literature has a challenge which, in my view, Self’s novel deals with. Thus, from the
theories of simulation proposed by Jean Baudrillard and, to a lesser extent, Gilles
Deleuze, my essay confronts Dorian as a valuable text: it adapts the discourse of
new technologies to literary language; it goes into the postmodernist ontological
crisis; and, finally, it opens up the debate of aesthetic interaction between the canon
and new literatures.
In its process of re-telling, postmodernist literature has proved to be particularly interested in
Victorian fiction (Hutcheon, 2006; Llewellyn, 2008; Yates, 2009). In his comprehensive
analysis of this phenomenon, Christian Gutleben regrets the incapability of much of today’s
literature to overcome the anxiety of influence of Victorian classics (2001: 10). In his view,
worthwhile revisions are cast a shadow by mere pastiches of canonical works, making thus
the whole contemporary panorama rather discouraging. He closes his study suggesting that
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232
post-postmodernist literature is essentially synchretic. For other critics, like Vera Nünning
(2008: 373), it is realism and modernism that constitute the new targets of contemporary
English literature, especially from the nineteen nineties onwards. Instead of postmodernist
“telling”, an increasing number of new novels prefer modernist “seeing” (2008: 373). Should
we rebuke postmodernist writers for their anxiety of influence then, as Gutleben argues, or
should we see it as a retro-movement attempting to imitate earlier forms, as Nünning
suggests? In other words, is literature suffering from a lack of inventiveness that can only be
solved through former referents? Is this dependence on the literary canon an asset, or a
symptom of a new period of exhaustion? In my view, the problem arises from applying
scientific parameters to aesthetic discourses, disregarding art’s own logic. That is, the
developmental Oedipal logic that critics like Harold Bloom have used to explain and theorize
on the “evolution” of literature may be rather misleading. The interaction between texts is not
linear, but rather complex and multidirectional. This is especially so -or at least more evident-
in the case of postmodernism. The new literary discourses are made up of previous ones;
however, out of this interaction between hypertexts and hypotexts, both are transformed. This
is the core of the refraction theory postulated by Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben in
Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (2004). In more senses
than one, Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) can be considered as a refractory re-creation
of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Moreover, it can be argued that
the discourse of Self’s revision of the late-Victorian classic relies on Jean Baudrillard’s theory
of simulation and the hyperreal, Simulacrunm and Simulation (1981), and, very especially,
on The Conspiracy of Art (2005). With all this in mind, I will attempt to determine the
prevailing aesthetic discourse of Dorian: An Imitation and its role and standpoint with respect
to its main hypotext -Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray- and particularly to its own
aesthetic context.
A great number of the reviews on Dorian: An Imitation regret the sexual and amoral
explicitness of the novel. Unlike the indirectness that Wilde advocated in The Picture of
Dorian Gray, in Self’s novel “there is absolutely nothing vague and indeterminate about the
air of moral corruption surrounding the star of “Cathode Narcissus” [Self’s hero]” (Harrison,
2003: 6). Dorian: An Imitation is particularly overt as concerns (homo)sexuality and drugs.
For both Sophie Harrison and Bertrand Leclair, this novel comes to fill in the blanks left by
Wilde, though not always for the better: “Self can indulge in all of the thrusting and fixing that
his predecessor was obliged to leave out” (Harrison: 6). Likewise, Leclair points out that in
Self’s novel:
On retrouve, parfois violemment actualisé par l’usage de drogues et la revendication homosexuelle
qui restait dans l’original le grand secret impossible à assumer, les personages de Dorian, mais
aussi de Basil Howard […], du mentor Lord Henry Wotton et de sa femme Victoria, et encore de
l’infortunée Sybil Vane conduite au suicide. La fidelité à l’original va plus loin encore, puisque À
Rebours, de Huysmans, dont le titre n’était pas cité dans l’édition de 1890 […] se retrouve cette
fois à sa juste place de détonateur. (2004: 14)
It is obvious that Wilde’s novella is being recast. However, I think it would be particularly
problematic to assume that Dorian: An Imitation is putting into words what in the original
Retro-Victorianism and the Simulacrum of Art in Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation 233
could only be hinted at, as Peter Widdowson argues (2006: 505). The intertextual relation
between both texts is far more complex, and not merely re-productive, as Louisa Yates
suggests (2009: 205-206). Robert Douglas-Fairhurst contends that, despite its flaws, The
Picture of Dorian Gray maintains the equilibrium between “sharp-edged detail and soft-focus
vagueness, confession and reticence” (2002: 20). However, in his view, Self’s homage, parody
and critical commentary on Wilde’s masterpiece lacks the latter’s transgressive reticence, so
that:
[Dorian: An Imitation] is oddly lifeless […]. Most of this lifelessness can be put down to the
measured excesses of Self’s style, which from the start is so mired in blood, semen and the finicky
rituals of drug-taking that struggles to keep pace with Dorian’s descent into a life of depravity. […]
Will Self leaves so little to the reader’s imagination that he also leaves too little room for his own
imagination to work in. And that is a shame” (Douglas-Fairhurst, 2002: 20).
In my view, the critic’s discourse is concerned with and determined both by aesthetic and
moral aspects. That is, when dealing with explicitly gay texts, some critics feel particularly
uncomfortable and, therefore, censor what they consider morally objectionable under the
cover of aesthetic explanations. Harrison recalls -apparently with nostalgia- the words by
Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton, “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that
can make modern life mysterious and marvellous to us”. By contrast, in the critic’s view,
“stripped all mystery, the afterlife of Self’s Dorian is strangely prosaic” (2003: 6). On the one
hand, should we take Wotton’s words seriously if Wilde himself aimed at parodying
Decadentism and its followers? On the other hand, why should we necessarily long for the
secrecy that nineteenth-century politics imposed upon society in general and artists in
particular? All this said, it is debatable whether Self’s novel buries its satiric and witty
undertones under the excesses of the early nineteen eighties, constantly seeking provocation:
“The more ‘Dorian’ strains to shock, the less shocking it becomes: if pornography is the oldest
art, this is pornography’s oldest problem. As Self’s Wotton might have put it in his turn: it’s
a damn sight harder to épater le bourgeois than it used to be” (Harrison, 2003: 6). What the
critic seems to overlook is the “pornographic” character of contemporary culture and
literature, and Will Self seems a good practitioner. What I mean by pornographic relates,
among others, to Baudrillard’s concept of contemporary art, namely a precession of images
that devour each other without any apparent referent (The Conspiracy of Art, 2005).
A particularly harsh review of Dorian: An Imitation is an anonymous one in Times Online.
In the reviewer’s opinion, the novel “is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth
of shamelessness” (Anon., 2002). He accuses the novel of plagiarizing Wilde’s novella,
standardising gay culture, and trying to rouse the morally-concerned reader: “Self is a
provocative reader - unless you are a bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, racist aristocrat,
[Dorian: An Imitation] will make you sick” (2002). However, although I do not match this
definition, I enjoyed reading the novel. In my view, the reviewer’s politically correct stance
affects his analysis of the text and his assessment of potential readers. Although Dorian: An
Imitation deals with political issues -particularly Blairism in its twenty-page-long epilogue-
, it approaches the nineteen eighties from a rather metaphysical perspective, in spite of its
aforementioned explicitness. The orgy of sex and drugs the novel so aptly describes turns out
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FAQs of Retro-Victorianism and Art in Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation

What are the main themes explored in Dorian: An Imitation?
Dorian: An Imitation explores several key themes, including the nature of aestheticism, the relationship between art and morality, and the impact of technology on identity. The novel critiques the superficiality of contemporary culture, drawing parallels between the decadence of Wilde's era and the excesses of the late 20th century. Additionally, it examines the complexities of sexuality and the consequences of living in a hyperreal world, where images and representations often overshadow reality.
How does Will Self reinterpret the character of Dorian Gray?
In Dorian: An Imitation, Will Self reinterprets the character of Dorian Gray as a product of contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities of identity in a postmodern context. Unlike Wilde's Dorian, who is primarily concerned with aesthetic beauty and moral corruption, Self's Dorian embodies the excesses of the 1980s, including drug use and sexual liberation. This modern Dorian is portrayed as a figure caught in a web of images and simulacra, challenging the reader to consider the implications of a life lived through the lens of media and technology.
What role does technology play in Dorian: An Imitation?
Technology plays a crucial role in Dorian: An Imitation, shaping the narrative and the characters' experiences. Self incorporates elements of contemporary media, such as video installations and digital imagery, to explore the nature of representation and reality. The novel critiques how technology can distort perceptions of identity and art, suggesting that the proliferation of images leads to a loss of authenticity. This exploration reflects broader societal concerns about the impact of technology on human relationships and cultural values.
How does the novel engage with Baudrillard's theory of simulation?
Dorian: An Imitation engages deeply with Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation, particularly the idea that images and representations can become more real than reality itself. Self's narrative illustrates how characters navigate a world filled with simulacra, where the distinction between the real and the artificial blurs. This engagement prompts readers to question the nature of authenticity in art and life, as the characters' identities are shaped by the images they consume and produce.
What is the significance of the setting in Dorian: An Imitation?
The setting of Dorian: An Imitation is significant as it reflects the cultural and social dynamics of late 20th-century Britain. Self situates the narrative within a backdrop of political change and cultural upheaval, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. This context allows for a critique of contemporary values, including consumerism and superficiality, while drawing parallels to the Victorian era depicted in Wilde's original work. The urban landscape serves as a character in itself, influencing the actions and identities of the protagonists.
How does Self's Dorian: An Imitation compare to Wilde's original?
Self's Dorian: An Imitation can be seen as both a homage and a critique of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. While it retains the core themes of aestheticism and moral decay, Self's version is more explicit in its exploration of sexuality and contemporary issues. The narrative structure and character development reflect the complexities of modern life, contrasting with Wilde's more subtle approach. This comparison highlights the evolution of cultural values and artistic expression from the Victorian era to the postmodern age.
What critiques does the novel offer regarding contemporary culture?
Dorian: An Imitation critiques contemporary culture by highlighting its obsession with image and superficiality. Self examines how modern society prioritizes appearances over substance, often leading to moral ambiguity and existential crises. Through the lens of Dorian's experiences, the novel questions the value of authenticity in a world dominated by media and technology. This critique resonates with readers, prompting reflection on the implications of living in a hyperreal environment where the boundaries between reality and representation are increasingly blurred.

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