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hockey-hoe-24-7 · 4 years ago

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Subtle, feat. Matthew Tkachuk

Warnings: Smut, Jealousy, Edging, Rough sex

Length: 3.1k

Inspiration: I was actually inspired by a line in @jasonmorgan96‘s Meet The Parents with Vince Dunn. I almost used Vince for this fic, but Matthew fit much better.

To say your boyfriend hated your neighbor was an understatement.

A major understatement

Like, a wow understatement.

But you couldn’t really blame him. They were exact opposites. While your apartment neighbor, Will, was clean and put together, Matthew was wild and untamed. Whereas Will had has hair clean cut and slicked back, Matthew let his curls run wild. Will strutted around in J. Crew and Banana Republic, Matthew lived in sweatpants and ath-leisure. The differences went on for ages.

But the biggest difference was that you were dating Matthew and not Will. And this was a difference Will seemed unwilling to accept.

See, you and Will were a lot alike: Academic, intellectual, scholarly types that didn’t take up a lot of room in front. Your boyfriend, on the other hand, was a loud, in your face, take up all the air in the room type of man. And you adored him for it. Your totally contrasting personalities fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. While you brought peace and serenity to his life, he brought intensity and fire to yours.

It was this intensity and fire you felt in your belly that Friday night, his fingers digging into your hips, his hips strong against yours, his teeth sharp on your throat. You giggled as you both stumbled into the elevator of your apartment building, his strength enough to keep you both from falling to the floor. Pulling his head up, you took his mouth in a kiss that quickly turned hot as he took control. The two of you collapsed back against the wall of the elevator, mouths still fused. It was when you felt his calloused hand pulling your floor-length dress up your thigh that you dragged yourself away.

“No, no, no. No, sir. We were late for the last event. We will not be late for this one.”

Matthew only hummed in feigned compliance as you wiggled out of his grip and leaned forward to press the lobby button on the control panel. You barely made the reach, as he still had his hands firmly on your hips, which were cradled back into his own.

“They’ll understand. Especially when they see you in this dress,” he purred against the shell of your ear. You rolled your eyes. “Of course they’ll understand. They’ll understand so well I’ll hear about it for the next two weeks.” You could practically hear Matthew beaming with pride behind you.

Before the elevator doors could close, a hand shot out from the hallway and they parted again. You immediately felt Matt stiffen behind you, his hands tightening on your hips as Will slid into the elevator, his eyes narrowed judgmentally. Since you believed in keeping peace with your neighbors, you cleared your throat and smiled cordially.

“Hi, Will.”

“Y/N. Where are you headed this evening?”

“Oh, the Flames are having an event.”

“Again?”

“Yes, they have quite a few.”

“How...humanitarian of them.”

Jesus.

A few months ago, Will would have been your type. But since you started dating someone as open and unashamed as Matthew, you could better see a guy like Will for what he really was: condescending, judgmental, entitled. He never missed a chance to remind you that he thought you could do “better.” Though he never said this in as many words.

You should come to this new cafe with me. I’m sure you’re long due for a stimulating conversation.

While I can’t push a puck around, I can read Shakespeare and Balzac.

No amount of money or fame can replace a college education.

Jackass.

You replied before Matthew got a chance. “Yes, I certainly like to think so. They love to give back. What are athletes without the people who support them? Oh, here’s the lobby. Have a good night, Will.”

Lacing your fingers through Matt’s, you all but dragged him out of the elevator toward the front door. He fell easily into step next to you, your fingers still laced together. “You should let me beat him up in the parking garage one day.”

You let out a very unladylike bark of a laugh and brought his hand up to kiss him on the knuckles. He responded with a kiss to the crown of your head and a not so subtle squeeze of your ass as you made your way to his waiting car.

By then end of the night, your boyfriend had you dying for him. Soft, teasing touches under the table, deep kisses snuck when no one was watching, and filthy words of promise whispered in your ear made you so on edge you were dragging him out the door by the end of the night. His hand rested dangerously high on your leg the entire ride back to your apartment, his fingers only just brushing the seam of your thigh. You fidgeted desperately, trying to pull his hand where you needed it, but he wouldn’t give in.

As soon as you were alone in the elevator he was on you, his hands shoving your dress up so he could grip your thighs and hoist you up between his body and the wall. You grunted when your back met the metal, but it was muffled by his mouth over yours. The kiss was deep and wild, everything you had been holding back the entire night. It was everything that was Matthew. The ding of the elevator at your floor had you pulling apart reluctantly. As you stumbled out of the elevator you ran right into Will rummaging through his satchel at the door to his apartment. He looked up, eyes narrowing at your unkempt appearances.

“Oh, hi, Will. How was your night?”

“It was good, thank you. Very productive. How was your night?”

“It was great.”

“Yes I can see that.”

Before you could reply, Matthew opened his big fat hockey mouth. “And it’s going to get a lot fuckin’ better. Good night, Billy.”

With that, he pulled your key out of your hand, deftly unlocked your door, and dragged you inside.

“Very subtle, Matthew,” you scolded him drily, hoping your voice relayed at least some displeasure at his childish behavior. Unfortunately, his hands at your waist and mouth at your neck were making it difficult to hold your ground.

“Wasn’t trying to be subtle, princess,” he murmured against your ear, his chest rumbling against your back as he squeezed your hips and guided you toward the bedroom. You groaned as his lips moved from your ear down your throat to nip at your shoulder. His hands were also roaming, skimming up your sides to tug at the back zipper of your dress.

“Actually,” he continued. “I don’t want to be subtle for the rest of the night.”

“Wha-”

You yelped as he twisted you around and shoved you not ungently onto your back on the bed. He was stunning as he towered over you, eyes hooded in the darkness of the room.

“I want you to be loud tonight. Can you do that for me?”

Unable to deny him anything, you wordlessly nodded, still speechless at the sheer sight of this man that was yours.

“Hmm, good girl.” With that, he dropped to his knees, hooked his arms beneath your legs, and dragged you to the side of the bed. Shoving your dress to your waist, he buried his face between your legs. The sudden heat and pressure of his mouth made you cry out and buck against the feel. Collapsing back, you arched into the touch. He hadn’t taken off your panties, and it was torture to feel the pressure of his tongue against you, but not inside of you.

Pleading his name, you shoved your hands through his curls, both pulling him closer and pushing him away as the pleasure built. When he finally pulled your panties aside and curled two fingers inside of you, his name was a sharp cry, your back arching off the bed. Just as you were about to tip over the edge, he pulled away.

“Not yet, princess. It will be so good when I let you come. So fucking good, baby.”

Whimpering, you reached for him, but he was shoving your hands away and grabbing at the neckline of your dress. He ripped it off in one quick motion, having unzipped it a few moments before. Your panties came with it and you were bare to his eyes. When you reached forward again, he let you make quick work of his own clothes, his hands just as urgent as yours as you tore open his shirt and shoved aside his dress pants.

As he stood naked before you, cock hard against his stomach, you couldn’t help yourself. Moving to the edge of the bed, you wrapped your arms around his waist and laid kiss after kiss over his chest, nipping here and there with your teeth, worshipping him. His hands were in your hair, pushing you closer as a loud moan of your name left his throat. You could imagine his face: head tipped back, tendons strong against his throat as his eyes fluttered shut and his mouth opened in pleasure.

You felt his cock twitch against the skin of your chest and his hand was suddenly at your neck and shoving you down onto the bed. You felt his grip on your throat trael between your legs and you nearly came, but his voice was pulling you away again.

“Not yet, baby. You come with me inside you.”

Before you could object, he was moving over you, a knee coming to the side of your head, the other coming up beneath your arm and under your shoulder. One of his hands had fisted his cock. “Suck me off, princess.”

You did as you were told, greedily accepting his cock in your mouth. He groaned long and loud, his body pitching forward until he had to catch himself with one hand against the bed. You ran your nails up his thighs to his hips, digging them in hard as you took him as far back as you could. This drew a long, strangled moan from his chest and you whimpered in need. His other hand went to the back of your head, digging a strong grip into your hair and forcing your head forward.

The pace was rough and desperate as he fucked into your mouth, his hips snapping forward until he was hitting the back of your throat at every stroke. You welcomed him every time, giving him complete control to take whatever pleasure he wanted from you. You could only hold on, let his hold on your head dominate every movement you made. Words of filthy encouragement dripped from his mouth and you opened your mouth wide as you felt his cock twitch.

But before he came down your throat, he was yanking your head back and pulling away yet again. You collapsed back onto the bed, gasping for breath. Before you could raise your head or even open your eyes, you felt the heat of his tongue lick a long path up your pussy. Groaning out his name, you thrust your hands through his hair in welcome. But he was gone again the next second, the strength of your hands incomparable to his.

“Do you have any idea how fucking gorgeous you are like this?” He purred against the mound of your pussy before laying a gentle kiss there. “So fucking wet and wrecked for me. God, such a slut for me.” You could only whimper in reply as he kissed his way slowly back up your body. Your pussy throbbed at the soft brush of his cock, but it was gone again in the next breath.

His next words were murmured against your throat. “Who does this to you, baby? Who makes you this fucking wet?”

It took a long moment to find them, but your words left you on a rush of breath. “You-you do, M-Mathew.”

He hummed in approval against your throat before taking your mouth in a rough tangle of a kiss. You groaned again and collapsed back against the bed, wrapping your legs tight around his hips. No matter what he did, how far he pushed you, the pleasure he dragged screaming from your body, his kiss felt like sanctuary every time. The two of you stayed like that for a long moment, relishing the warm intimacy of the kiss before he was flexing his hips and biting hard at your bottom lip. You yelped in pain, but then squealed in surprise when you were suddenly moving off the bed and through the air.

Your back met the headboard so hard you grunted. Matthew’s body was hot and hard against yours, pressing you back until you could feel the tension of his muscles with every deep breath you took. You leaned forward to kiss him again, but he clapped his hand over your throat and shoved you back against the headboard.

“Matt...”

His hand gripped your hip and lifted your body up slightly. You gasped against his mouth as he pushed just the tip of his cock into you. Your pussy clenched reflexively, but he was pulling out again to the sound of your strangled sob.

“What do you need, princess?” he growled against your lips. “Tell me what you need.”

“Matthew, please. I can’t-”

You yelped again as he slapped your ass hard. “Tell me.”

You struggled to find words as he pushed in slowly again, only slightly deeper than before. You both inhaled at the pleasure, bodies moving as one.

“You, Matthew. I need you. Please. Please-”

He pulled out again, but was quick to push back again, his own need reaching a breaking point.

“What do you need? Tell me exactly what you need, baby.”

“I need to come, Matthew. I need you to come inside of me. Please. Please.”

He chucked against your mouth, shameless in his knowledge of your desperation.

“Whatever you want, princess. But be loud for me. Scream my name fucking loud.”

As he pulled out and slammed in to the hilt, you did just that, screaming out louder than you ever had before. His hands flew up and one of them manacled your own wrists to the headboard, dragging your body up until you had to sacrifice all control. His other hand went to the top edge of the headboard and held on tight. With every thrust against you, he slammed the headboard back against the wall.

Let that little prick hear whose name you screamed. Let him hear every slam of that headboard until he couldn’t think of anything else when he so much as saw you.

Your orgasm was shattering when you finally came, more powerful than any you had had before in your life. Your body sagged in his grip, but Matthew wasn’t done. He pounded into you until he reached his own climax, pulling out and thrusting in so deep you could feel him in your throat.

When he let go of your hands and let his own body relax, you sagged against him, collapsing as you struggled to catch your breath. He held you gently, murmuring praise into your ear as he stroked your hair.

When you finally regained some composure, you laid a hot, wet kiss to his throat, a silent thank you for the pleasure. He groaned and tilted his head to the side in compliance. When you felt his cock twitch in renewed interest, you flexed tight around him.

HIs next words came only after a strangled groan. “Not yet, baby. You did so good for me. We’re going to rest a bit.”

Before you could argue, he wrapped an arm tight around your waist and moved you both to lay down with your heads against the pillows, his cock still inside you. Your bodies more than enough heat without the blankets, you snuggled into him and let out a small noise of content and drifted off to sleep.

He woke you up twice more that night, dragging you on top to ride him and then putting you on your knees, head shoved into the pillows as he pounded into you from behind. The next morning, you could barely move, grimacing as you pulled yourself into an upright position.

“You okay?” Matthew’s voice was tired and raspy. You looked down at him and your heart fluttered like a teenage girl’s. He was beautiful next to you, unashamedly naked and taking up every inch of air in the room. You also didn’t miss the glint of concern in his eyes. Not being able to help yourself, you leaned down and pecked him on the mouth. “Yes,” you reassured him. “But you need to feed me.”

He grinned against your mouth and pulled his own body up and out of bed. You couldn’t help but glare at his retreating form as he sauntered to the bathroom. He was used to throwing his body around like a wrecking ball. You were not. You were going to feel last night for at least a week.

As you began to get ready to go out for breakfast, you caught a glimpse of the wall behind your headboard. You squawked in anger and disbelief as you took in the state of your wall.

“Matthew!”

He poked his curly head out from the hallway, his toothbrush hanging out of his mouth.

“What?”

“Look at my wall! It’s fucking dented!”

The cocky bastard didn’t even try to look ashamed. He looked unbelievably proud of himself. “We did good, babe.”

Grabbing the closet object - an UGG slipper on the floor - you lobbed it at his head. Of course, he ducked back into the bathroom just in time.

“You’re paying my security deposit,” you hollered over your shoulder as you stomped to the other bathroom.

When the two of you made it out of your apartment, who should you run into but Will. Who did not look happy. He got one glimpse of the two of you and his jaw set in an angry, judgmental line.

“Good morning,” he greeted you frostily.

“Mornin’,” Matthew replied, a wide smirk on his face.

You felt your own face flush a deep red. God, the two of you had been loud last night. And Will lived in the apartment right next to your bedroom wall. If you were rough enough to dent the wall, you were loud enough to keep him awake.

As Matthew was about to say something else, the three of you turned your heads as a tiny old lady hobbled out of the apartment. You and Matthew both stood in stunned silence.

“This if my widowed grandmother,” Will explained with a tight voice and a frosty glare. “She stayed with me last night.”

You gaped and looked up at Matthew, who had turned a concerning shade of white.

The little old lady took you both in before her face broke out in a big brilliant smile. She reached out and patted your cheek. “Good for you, sweetheart!”

Subtle.

#Matthew Tkachuk #Matthew Tkachuk smut #Matthew Tkachuk imagine #nhl imagine #nhl smut #nhl fic #smut #imagine #my work #hockey-hoe-24-7

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gilmoregirlsrevival2016 · 4 years ago

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Season 1 Gilmore Girls References (Breakdown)

Yay! All the season 1 references have been posted. Before I start posting season 2, I wanted to post this little breakdown for your enjoyment :) It starts with some statistics and then below the cut is a list of all the specific references.

Overall amount of references in season 1: 605

Top 10 Most Common References: NSYNC (5), Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (5), Taylor Hanson (6), Leo Tolstoy (7), Lucky Spencer (7), Marcel Proust (7), PJ Harvey (7), The Bangles (8), The Donna Reed Show (8), William Shakespeare (10)

Which episodes had the most references: #1 is That Damn Donna Reed with 55 references. #2 is Christopher Returns with 44 references

What characters made the most references (Only including characters/actors who were in the opening credits): Lorelai had the most with 237 references, Rory had second most with 118, and Lane had third most with 48.

First reference of the season: Jack Kerouac referenced by Lorelai

Final reference of the season: Adolf Eichmann referenced by Michel

Movies/TV Shows/Episodes/Characters, Commercials, Cartoons/Cartoon Characters, Plays, Documentaries:

9 1/2 Weeks, Alex Stone, Alfalfa, An Affair To Remember, A Streetcar Named Desire, Attack Of The Fifty Foot Woman, Avon Commercials, Bambi, Beethoven, Boogie Nights, Cabaret, Casablanca, Charlie's Angels, Charlie Brown cartoons, Christine, Cinderella, Citizen Kane, Daisy Duke, Damien Thorn, Dawson Leery, Donna Stone, Double Indemnity, Double Mint Commercials, Ethel Mertz, Everest, Felix Unger, Fiddler On The Roof, Footloose, Freaky Friday, Fred Mertz, Gaslight, General Hospital, G.I. Jane, Gone With The Wind, Grease, Hamlet, Heathers, Hee Haw, House On Haunted Hill, Ice Castles, I Love Lucy, Iron Chef, Ishtar, Jeff Stone, Joanie Loves Chachi, John Shaft, Lady And The Tramp, Life With Judy Garland: Me And My Shadows, Love Story, Lucky Spencer, Lucy Raises Chickens, Lucy Ricardo, Lucy Van Pelt, Macbeth, Magnolia, Mary Stone, Mask, Midnight Express, Misery, Norman Bates, Officer Krupke, Oompa Loompas, Old Yeller, Oscar Madison, Out Of Africa, Patton, Pepe Le Pew, Peyton Place, Pink Ladies, Pinky Tuscadero, Ponyboy, Psycho, Queen Of Outer Space, Rapunzel, Richard III, Ricky Ricardo, Rocky Dennis, Romeo And Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, Sandy Olsson, Saved By The Bell, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Schroeder, Sesame Street, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Sex And The City, Sixteen Candles, Sleeping Beauty, Star Trek, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, Stretch Cunningham, The Champ, The Comedy Of Errors, The Crucible, The Donna Reed Show, The Duke's Of Hazzard, The Fly, The Great Santini, The Little Match Girl, The Matrix, The Miracle Worker, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Outsiders, The Shining, The Sixth Sense, The View, The Waltons, The Way We Were, The Scarecrow, This Old House, V.I.P., Valley Of The Dolls, Vulcans, Wild Kingdom, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, Wheel Of Fortune, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, Working Girl, Yogi Bear, You're A Good Man Charlie Brown

Bands, Songs, CDs:

98 Degrees, Air Supply, Apple Venus Volume 2, Backstreet Boys, Bee Gees, Black Sabbath, Blue Man Group, Blur, Bon Jovi, Boston, Bush, Duran Duran, Everlong, Foo Fighters, Fugazi, Grandaddy, Hanson, I'm Too Sexy, Joy Division, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Kraftwerk, Like A Virgin, Livin La Vida Loca, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Man I Feel Like A Woman, Metallica, Money Money, My Ding-A-Ling, NSYNC, On The Good Ship Lollipop, Pink Moon, Queen, Rancid, Sergeant Pepper, Shake Your Bon Bon, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Sister Sledge, Smoke On The Water, Steely Dan, Suppertime, Tambourine Man, The B-52s, The Bangles, The Beatles, The Best Of Blondie, The Cranberries, The Cure, The Offspring, The Sugarplastic, The Wallflowers, The Velvet Underground, Walk Like An Egyptian, XTC, Ya Got Trouble, Young Marble Giants

Books/Book Characters, Comic Books/Comic Book Characters, Comic Strips:

A Mencken Chrestomathy, A Tale Of Two Cities, Anna Karenina, Belle Watling, Boo Radley, Carrie, David Copperfield, Dick Tracy, Dopey (One of the seven dwarfs) Goofus And Gallant, Great Expectations, Grinch, Hannibal Lecter, Hansel And Gretel, Harry Potter (book as well as character referenced), Huckleberry Finn, Little Dorrit, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Mommie Dearest, Moose Mason, Nancy Drew, Out Of Africa, Pinocchio, Swann's Way, The Amityville Horror, The Art Of Fiction, The Bell Jar, The Grapes Of Wrath, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Lost Weekend, The Metamorphosis, The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath, The Witch Tree Symbol, There's A Certain Slant Of Light, Tuesdays With Morrie, War And Peace, Wonder Woman

Public Figures:

Adolf Eichmann, Alfred Hitchcock, Angelina Jolie, Anna Nicole Smith, Annie Oakley, Antonio Banderas, Arthur Miller, Artie Shaw, Barbara Hutton, Barbara Stanwyck, Barbra Streisand, Beck, Ben Jonson, Benito Mussolini, Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Crudup, Bob Barker, Brad Pitt, Britney Spears, Catherine The Great, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Charles I, Charles Dickens, Charles Manson, Charlie Parker, Charlotte Bronte, Charlton Heston, Charo, Cher, Cheryl Ladd, Chris Penn, Christiane Amanpour, Christopher Marlowe, Chuck Berry, Claudine Longet, Cleopatra, Cokie Roberts, Courtney Love, Dalai Lama, Damon Albarn, Dante Alighieri, David Mamet, Donna Reed, Edith Wharton, Edna O'Brien, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Webber, Elle Macpherson, Elsa Klensch, Elvis, Emeril Lagasse, Emily Dickinson, Emily Post, Eminem, Emma Goldman, Errol Flynn, Fabio, Farrah Fawcett, Fawn Hall, Flo Jo, Francis Bacon, Frank Sinatra, Franz Kafka, Fred MacMurray, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, George Clooney, George Sand, George W. Bush, Harry Houdini, Harvey Fierstein, Henny Youngman, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Henry VIII, Herman Melville, Homer, Honore De Balzac, Howard Cosell, Hugh Grant, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Jaclyn Smith, James Dean, Jane Austen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Tandy, Jim Carey, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hoffa, Joan Of Arc, Joan Rivers, Jocelyn Wildenstein, Joel Grey, John Cage, John Gardner, John Muir, John Paul II, John Webster, Johnny Cash, Johnny Depp, Joseph Merrick AKA Elephant Man, Judy Blume, Judy Garland, Julian Lennon, Justin Timberlake, Karen Blixen AKA Isak Dinesen, Kate Jackson, Kathy Bates, Kevin Bacon, Kreskin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Leo Tolstoy, Leopold and Loeb, Lewis Carroll, Linda McCartney, Liz Phair, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed, M Night Shyamalan, Macy Gray, Madonna, Marcel Marceau, Marcel Proust, Margot Kidder, Marie Antoinette, Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, Mark Wahlberg, Marlin Perkins, Martha Stewart, Martha Washington, Martin Luther, Mary Kay Letourneau, Maurice Chevalier, Melissa Rivers, Meryl Streep, Michael Crichton, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Miguel De Cervantes, Miss Manners, Mozart, Nancy Kerrigan, Nancy Walker, Nick Cave, Nick Drake, Nico, Oliver North, Oprah Winfrey, Oscar Levant, Pat Benatar, Paul McCartney, Peter III Of Russia, Peter Frampton, Philip Glass, PJ Harvey, Prince, Queen Elizabeth I, Regis, Richard Simmons, Rick James, Ricky Martin, Robert Duvall, Robert Redford, Robert Smith, Robin Leach, Rosie O'Donnell, Ru Paul, Ruth Gordon, Samuel Barber, Sarah Duchess Of York, Sean Lennon, Sean Penn, Shania Twain, Shelley Hack, Sigmund Freud, Squeaky Fromme, Stephen King, Steven Tyler, Susan Faludi, Susanna Hoffs, Tanya Roberts, Taylor Hanson, Theodore Kaczynski AKA The Unabomber, The Kennedy Family, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Gummo Marx AKA The Marx Brothers, Venus and Serena Williams (The reference was "The Williams Sisters"),Thelonious Monk, Tiger Woods, Tito Puente, Tom Waits, Tony Randall, Tonya Harding, Vaclav Havel, Vanna White, Vivien Leigh, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, William Shatner, Yoko Ono, Zsa Zsa Gabor

Misc:

Camelot, Chernobyl Disaster, Cone Of Silence, Hindenburg Disaster, Iran-Contra Affair, Paul Bunyan, The Menendez Murders, Tribbles, Vulcan Death Grip, Whoville, Winchester Mystery House

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rosebudblog · 4 years ago

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¿POR QUÉ CINE NEGRO?

¿FUE ESTA LA PRIMERA?

¿O FUE ESTA?

EL HALCÓN MALTÉS

PERDICIÓN

EL SUEÑO ETERNO

EL TERCER HOMBRE

LA JUNGLA DEL ASFALTO

LAUREN

HUMPHREY

LAURA

SED DE MAL

FORAJIDOS

RETORNO AL PASADO

ATRACO PERFECTO

A veces los nombres de los movimientos artísticos tienen un origen no muy bien definido. En el caso del cine, el término CINE NEGRO tiene un origen dudoso como ocurre con términos artísticos como RENACIMIENTO o BARROCO.

La palabra Renacimiento no tiene un origen claro. Por una parte, hay quien responsabiliza al artista Giorgio Vasari en pleno siglo XVI la alusión al renacer de la cultura clásica tras la Edad Media por lo que utilizó la palabra Rinascita. (En arquitectura, en pleno siglo XVI se denominaba a las construcciones renacentistas como de estilo “a la romana”). Sin embargo, la mayoría de los autores opinan que fue Balzac quien utilizó la palabra Renacimiento por primera vez en su novela Le Bal de Sceau en 1829 y que ya era un término que se usaba en los círculos intelectuales. Por su parte la palabra Barroco también es de dudoso origen, aunque existe cierto consenso en por atribuirla al idioma portugués, más exactamente a la palabra Barocco que significa “perla irregular con deformaciones”.

En el caso del cine nos encontramos con un género cinematográfico denominado Cine Negro cuyo origen también se ha señalado como dudoso. Está claro que tiene un origen literario: la novela policial, pero sin embargo nadie ha calificado al género cinematográfico como Cine Policial. Es cierto que en los años 20 del siglo pasado aparecieron una serie de novelas con el calificativo de Serie Negra; de ahí al cine solo había un paso y pronto a las películas que podían encuadrarse en este género se les comenzó a etiquetar como Cine Negro.

Pero ¿quién usó por primera vez este término?: tampoco hay un acuerdo unánime, aunque parece que fue el crítico italiano Nino Frank el que utilizó el nombre film noire. El éxito de la denominación fue absoluto hasta el punto de que ese nombre fue asumido por Hollywood tras la II Guerra Mundial. Pero para ello el género literario adquirió una gran calidad en base a unos talentos creativos que han perdurado con el tiempo no ya como guionistas cinematográficos sino como auténticos maestros de este tipo de literatura. Así tenemos que citar entre los más conocidos a Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, William Riley Burnett, Jim Thompson, John Hadley Chase, Steve Fisher y especialmente para mí, a James M. Cain.

Por lo tanto y por extraño que nos parezca, el término procede de la literatura y no propiamente del cine y además tiene su origen, no en el lugar donde se desarrolló con más éxito y calidad artística este género, sino en la vieja Europa (aunque sería injusto no señalar la gran aportación europea al género con películas de grandes directores, especialmente franceses, como Claude Chabrol, Jean Pierre Melville, Louis Malle o Jean Luc Godard).

Pero ¿cuáles son las características esenciales que identifican el cine negro? Pues de nuevo no se puede hablar en términos absolutos, pero si hay acuerdo en algunos elementos técnicos y argumentales que pueden definirse como propios de este género:

1. Hay consenso generalizado en que el origen cinematográfico se debe buscar en el expresionismo alemán, un movimiento caracterizado por la existencia de luces y sombras y posiciones de la cámara (picados, contrapicados y angulaciones) que otorgan una atmósfera de dramatismo a la historia. Este movimiento surgió alrededor de 1920 y debemos citar El gabinete del doctor Caligari, Metrópolis o El Golem como algunas de sus películas esenciales. Un elemento destaca por encima de todo en estas películas: están realizadas lógicamente por su fecha de producción en Blanco y Negro (B/N). Esta va a ser también una característica del cine negro, al menos esencialmente en su época dorada: desde los años 30 hasta finales de los 50 del siglo pasado. No obstante, en años posteriores aparecieron numerosas películas de calidad que se pueden integrar en este género y realizadas ya en color. (De todas formas, es curioso cómo grandes creadores, cuando han abordado el cine negro en años recientes recuperan el B/N para su producción: es el caso de los Hermanos Coen cuando realizaron El hombre que nunca estuvo allí).

2. Otra característica más o menos general es el rol que asumen los personajes masculinos y femeninos en este género. Los masculinos se dividen entre los propios criminales y esencialmente los protagonistas, que conforman un perfil de “perdedores” con moral algo ambigua. Los máximos representantes de estos antihéroes son Sam Spade y Phil Marlowe, creaciones de dos de los grandes autores de este género: Dashiel Hammett y Raymond Chandler y que curiosamente fueron interpretados por un mismo y mítico actor: Humphrey Bogart. El cine negro supuso también la aparición de la mujer en un nuevo rol. Se pasó de una mujer débil e indefensa salvada por el héroe, a una mujer independiente y capaz de convertirse en asesina; en definitiva, aparece en el cine la representación de la femme fatale con ejemplos en personajes de Lana Turner, Lauren Bacall o Barbara Stanwick

3. La tercera característica es que el argumento incluya la denuncia, la crítica social, señalando la corrupción policial o el mal funcionamiento del sistema (este aspecto argumental estaba más claramente expresado en sus orígenes literarios, mientras que en el cine las críticas al sistema se dulcificaron en parte por miedo a la censura).

4. Por último, un elemento esencial de estas historias es la violencia. Evidentemente remarcar la violencia en el cine negro de sus años dorados puede resultar un inocente ejercicio cuando en las últimas décadas la violencia explicita ocupa en gran parte toda película que se precie de contar una historia criminal (Tarantino nos presentó una violencia cínica y explicita cercana al gore y Lars Von Trier en La casa de Jack muestra una violencia extrema y provocadora). De cualquier forma, sigo pensando que, como decía Wilder respecto a su maestro en relación al sexo: “Lubisth enseña más con una puerta medio cerrada que los directores de hoy día con una bragueta abierta” o ¿es que la presencia de abundantísima sangre y larga escenas de tortura y crueldad puede superar a la violencia final de M, la violenta angustia de La noche del cazador o a la de La dama de Sanghai?

De forma más o menos general todos los críticos e historiadores coinciden en que el Cine Negro es un género que tuvo su mayor desarrollo en Estados Unidos entre 1930 y 1950. Pero todo es relativo en términos artísticos y hay quien considera que ya en 1903 se realizó la primera película de ese género: Asalto y robo al tren de Edwin S. Porter. Pero ¿qué película podemos citar como realmente la primera de ese género? Tampoco existe un acuerdo. Algunos historiadores sostienen que hay varias películas anteriores a la IIGM que pueden ostentar ese título de ser la primera ya que, sí por otra parte, varios creadores de ese género eran de origen alemán y huyeron a Estados Unidos cuando los nazis llegaron al poder, es normal que se identifiquen varias películas de su obra europea como cine negro. Se suele citar El desconocido del tercer piso (1940) de un también desconocido Boris Ingster como la primera, pero asimismo pueden ostentar ese galardón tres films anteriores de Fritz Lang: M (1931), Furia (1936) o Solo se vive una vez (1937).

¿Y cuando puede deducirse que tiene su finalización el género?: en un sentido estricto podríamos decir que no ha finalizado, aunque se tiene a Sed de mal de 1958 como la película que cierra brillantemente este género. ¿No hay cine negro posterior a estas fechas? Para la gran mayoría de críticos no, en todo caso hay un cine que podríamos denominar como policial, pero con alusiones de algún tipo al cine negro. De esta forma tendríamos que incluir a películas como Taxi Driver o A quemarropa en esta clasificación y directores como los Coen, Tarantino o De Palma como realizadores de películas con estas características mixtas. Personalmente creo que es una discusión gratuita pues el tiempo ha ido enmarcando cada obra en su correspondiente clasificación de género.

Derivada de la palabra thrill (emoción, estremecimiento) se ha generalizado el término thriller para designar un tipo de cine policial muy amplio, desde películas de suspense, hasta terror psicológico. Creo que se podrían etiquetar como THRILLER a las películas que se pudieran incluir como encasilladas en el cine negro pero que han sido producidas posteriormente a 1958 y generalmente en color, mientras que el término CINE NEGRO lo podríamos restringir a las realizadas en el periodo clásico de ese género, desde la década de los 30 hasta finales de los 50 del siglo pasado.

Por último, voy a señalar las que, bajo mi criterio, pueden ocupar los puestos más destacados en una supuesta lista de LAS MEJORES PELÍCULAS DE CINE NEGRO (lógicamente me olvido de algunas y entre otras, muchas de aquella modesta serie B que nos dejó grandes películas):

-M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

-Furia (Fritz Lang, 1936)

-Solo se vive una vez (Fritz Lang, 1937)

-El halcón maltés (John Huston, 1941)

-Perdición (Billy Wilder, 1944)

-Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

-La mujer del cuadro (Fritz Lang, 1944)

-Historia de un detective (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

-Perversidad (Fritz Lang, 1945)

-Alma en suplicio (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

-El sueño eterno (Howard Hawks, 1946)

-El cartero siempre llama dos veces (Tay Garnett, 1946)

-Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)

-La dalia azul (George Marshall, 1946)

-Forajidos (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

-Retorno al pasado (Jacques Tourneur, 1946)

-La senda tenebrosa (Delmer Daves, 1946)

-Cayo Largo (John Huston, 1948)

- La dama de Sanghai (Orson Welles, 1948)

-El abrazo de la muerte (Robert Siodmak, 1949)

-Al rojo vivo (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

-El tercer hombre (Carol Reed, 1949)

-El crepúsculo de los dioses (Billy Wilder, 1950)

-La jungla del asfalto (John Huston, 1950)

-Extraños en un tren (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

-Cara de ángel (Otto Preminger, 1951)

-Los sobornados (Fritz Lang, 1951)

-La noche del cazador (Charles Laughton, 1951)

-Atraco perfecto (Stanley Kubrick, 1951)

-Sed de mal (Orson Welles, 1958)

-Vértigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Volver a ver cualquiera de ellas supone una auténtica delicia cinematográfica.

17/1/2021

#CineNegro

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quelesboss · 3 years ago

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The Florida Project, Sean Baker, 2017 (unfinished review: March 15th, 4.32am)

À la recherche d’un film m’aidant à forger ma personnalité, suis-je retombée sur une recommendation soutenue par mon amoureux, un film que j’aimerais, The Florida Project.

Des fragments précieux de vie d’une jeune mère et sa fille Moonee vivant dans la galère au sein d’un motel de Floride. On y suit les amitiés de Moonee, virevoltant dans une enfance non-conventionnelle, où règne toutefois l��amour.

Essentiellement, dans toute sa cradeur cette œuvre célèbre la vie, en ses joyeux petits fragments ridicules. C’est très certainement ce vif contraste entre l’aspect pastel, très léger d’une enfance insouciante; et la réalité sociale dans laquelle Haley présente en elle tous les vices antithétiques au propre d’une maman, qui offre un reflet de la vie comme le socle de toute chose, galères et euphorie. Cet aspect presque dérangeant est mis en scène parfaitement lorsque Moonee appelle Haley “maman”, revenant d’une agression physique initiée sur sa voisine devant son propre fils. Brutal, presque viscéral, on y suit la diversité d’états bruts dans lesquels se trouvent nos protagonistes, tous enfants.

En outre, à la manière de Jacqueline Wilson, Sean Baker nous livre un doux récit où au-delà du manque de sous, l’amitié et l’amour maternel parviennent à égayer des enfances naviguant le monde des grands.

Parfaitement reflété par un décor coloré, parfaitement cadré, Baker nous donne l’impression d’un monde enfantin, protégé par Billy, qui fait figure de père. Bien qu’apparemment échouant à sa propre famille, le manager du motel se présente comme un affectueux médiateur entre deux mondes, celui de l’enfance, et de l’adulte responsable. En outre, c’est cette négation des responsabilités qui offre à Haley ce côté libérateur - bien que chaotique - soutenu à merveille par la fluidité des mondes dans lesquels évoluent nos trois gosses Moonee, Scooty et Jancey.

Impolis, Moonee et Scooty libèrent Jancey de sa rigueur maternelle, pour explorer le monde dans la quête primale d’amusements. On les voit s’y amuser à tout prix avec rien, le temps d’un été. Haley se trimballe sa gosse à droite à gauche, construire un salaire pour payer les factures, et ainsi ne se soumettant pas aux impératifs du 9-5 auquelle elle n’est visiblement pas adéquate. Il s’agit dans son creux, d’une pièce sur la famille, celle qui nous éduque, et celle qu’on choisit. Dans l’ambition finale de faire comprendre à l'auditeur que la vie rééelle est à trouver dans ses imperfections, dans la hess “You know why it’s my favorite movie? Cause it’s tipped over and still growing”.

Le réalisme de cette fantaisie en décalage avec le fantaisiste parc Disney Universal voisin, présente la double-face à tout, à la manière d’un roman de Balzac adapté en son temps moderne et lieu américain,.

Le confort réside en l’amour solidaire, ami et/ou famille. (trop fatiguée: jeu sur l’enfance dérouté (maturité, sensibilité, large définition de l’enfance, limitevicieux d’avoir de la sympathie pour Haley car on est rendus sensible à son amour imature pour sa fille)

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years ago

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Writing Report March 26, 2021

The first draft of my big (formerly) work in progress clocks in at 104,599.

I tend to write long and shaggy, repeating information, spelling things out in great detail, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

Final draft target length will be in the 80K range, but it’s not simply a matter of whacking stuff out.

I’ve come up with several scenes and bits of business I want to add. Draft two will incorporate them and try to make an appreciable dent in the word count, but the real paring down will be in the polish.

I differentiate between drafts and polishes this way:

The first draft gets the story laid out so I can see all the component parts.

The second draft works on those parts, rearranging them / trimming them / eliminating some.

The polish takes the final form and sands down the rough edges, slaps a smooth finish on it, and sends it out into the cold, cruel world.

For me, there shouldn’t be a third draft of the story.

You need your basics laid out in the first draft, the final structure in the second.

If you’re still facing structural problems in the third draft…well, to paraphrase Billy Wilder, the problem was in the first draft.

(This is not to say I haven’t written stories that have run into third drafts, just not third complete drafts. I can usually tell long before I finish draft one that it isn’t working and will abandon that approach and restart the effort from a different direction; call that one draft one-B. I have a story where it took me over two decades and two abortive false starts before I figured out the correct angle of approach and eventually I will write it now that I’ve figured out what the problem is.)

I forget which writer said it (Voltaire? Honore de Balzac? I seem to remember it being a French author), but there’s a quote about a writer needing to tell the story three times:

First to tell it to yourself.

Then to discover what the story is really about.

Finally to figure out how to tell it to the reader.

I’m taking about a six week break from my first draft to work on some other projects, then will dive into re-reading / re-editing / re-writing what I need to for the second draft.

God willin’ an’ th’ crick don’t rise, I hope to have it ready by the end of summer.

#writing report #writing #how this writer's mind works

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noctambulatebooks · 5 years ago

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Reading 2020

6-January-2020: Beaumont, Matthew, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015, England)

9-January-2020: Otsuka, Julie, When the Emperor was Divine (2002, USA)

12-January-2020: Lehmann, John, In a Purely Pagan Sense (1976, England)

12-January-2020: Modiano, Patrick, Little Jewel (2001, France)

19-January-2020: Dickens, Charles, Hard Times (1854, England)

20-January-2020: Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005, USA)

28-January-2020: Hunt, Laird, In the House in the Dark of the Woods (2018, USA)

2-February-2020: Hardy, Thomas, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872, England)

5-February-2020: Lehman, David, One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (2019, USA)

15-February-2020: Oshinsky, David M., “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow (1996, USA)

17-February-2020: Zola, Émile, His Excellency Eugène Rougon (1876, France)

22-February-2020: King, Dean, Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival (2004, USA)

29-February-2020: Graves, Robert, They Hanged My Saintly Billy (1957, England)

8-March-2020: Wyndham, John, The Day of the Triffids (1951, England)

14-March-2020: Ginsberg, Allen, South American Journals (1960, USA)

29-March-2020: Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall (2009, England)

5-April-2020: Butler, Octavia, Parable of the Sower (1993, USA)

12-April-2020: Butler, Octavia, Parable of the Talents (1998, USA)

15-April-2020: O’Brien, Glenn (ed), The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground (2013, USA)

16-April-2020: Moravia, Alberto, Agostino (1943, Italy)

19-April-2020: Ross, Lillian, Picture (1952, USA)

25-April-2020: Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (1962, USA)

3-May-2020: Mantel, Hilary, Bring Up the Bodies (2012, England)

6-May-2020: Duras, Marguerite, The Lover (1984, France)

10-May-2020: Ma, Ling, Severance (2018, USA)

14-May-2020: Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (2020, USA)

17-May-2020: Kadare, Ismael, The Traitor’s Niche (1978, Albania)

20-May-2020: Saikaku, Ihara, Comrade Loves of the Samurai (Anthology) (1687, Japan)

14-June-2020: Mantel, Hilary, The Mirror and the Light (2020, England)

20-June-2020: Ballard, J. G., The Kindness of Women (1991, England)

25-June-2020: Orikuchi, Shinobu, The Book of the Dead (1943, Japan)

27–June-2020: Jefferson, Margot, Negroland: A Memoir (2015, USA)

30-June-2020: Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845, USA)

5-July-2020: Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (1952, USA)

6-July-2020: LeCarré, John, Call for the Dead (1961, England)

11-July-2020: LeCarré, John, A Murder of Quality (1962, England)

14-July-2020: LeCarré, John, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963, England)

18-July-2020: LeCarré, John, The Looking Glass War (1965, England)

24-July-2020: LeCarré, John, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974, England)

1-August-2020: LeCarré, John, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977, England)

7-August-2020: LeCarré, John, Smiley’s People (1979, England)

10-August-2020: Pendarvis, Jack, Cigarette Lighter (Object Lessons) (2016, USA)

14-August-2020: Greenwell, Garth, Cleanness (2020, USA)

29-August-2020: Perlstein, Rick, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 (2020, USA)

4-September-2020: Burnside, John, A Lie About My Father (2006, Scotland)

6-September-2020: Massini, Stefano, The Lehman Trilogy (2016, Italy)

7-September-2020: Tevis, Walter, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963, USA)

9-September-2020: Thompson, Kara, Blanket (Object Lessons) (2019, USA)

11-September-2020: Howard, Jennifer, Clutter: An Untidy History (2020, USA)

15-September-2020: Tuan, Yi-Fu, Landscapes of Fear (1979, USA)

29-September-2020: Balzac, Honore, Lost Illusions (1843, France) (reread)

7-October-2020: Bowen, Elizabeth, Eva Trout (1969, Ireland)

14-October-2020: Gary, Romain, The Company of Men (1949, France)

24-October-2020: Brontë, Charlotte, Villette (1853, England)

24-October-2020: De Lillo, Don, The Silence (2020, USA)

30-October-2020: Krúdy, Gyula, The Adventures of Sindbad (1917, Hungary)

3-November-2020: Kehlmann, Daniel, Tyll (2017, Germany)

8-November-2020: Undset, Sigrid, Olav Audunssøn, Vol 1: Vows (1925, Norway)

15-November-2020: Pullman, Philip, The Secret Commonwealth (2019, England)

23-November-2020: Baker, Nicholson, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act (2020, USA)

27-November-2020: Kempowski, Walter, All for Nothing (2006, Germany)

29-November-2020: Ainsworth, William Harrison, Auriol (1844, England)

29-November-2020: Modiano, Patrick, Pedigree (2005, France)

1-December-2020: Liming, Sheila, Office (Object Lessons) (2020, USA)

13-December-2020: Baker, J.A., The Peregrine (1967, England)

18-December-2020: Allain, Marcel and Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas (1911, France)

23-December 2020: Szerb, Antal, The Queen’s Necklace (1942, Hungary)

23-December-2020: Leys, Simon, The Death of Napoleon (1986, Australia)

25-December-2020: MacLeod, Alistair, No Great Mischeif (2000, Canada)

27-December-2020: Chateaubriand, François-Rene, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (1846, France)

29-December-2020: Anonymous, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities (1554, Spain)

30-December-2020: Stifter, Adalbert, Rock Crystal (1846, Austria)

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edwardsgarage · 7 years ago

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Alberta's Balzac Billy made his seasonal prediction! He did not see his shadow, which means Albertans will have an early spring! Thank goodness! I thought we were going to have to switch to this Weather Forecasting Bear! 😂

#Balzac Billy #Groundhog Day #2018 #Alberta #Canada #Groundhog #spring #prediction #early spring

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love-nessuno · 5 years ago

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E così voi credete nella realtà!… Mi affascinate, davvero. Non vi avrei mai supposto ingenuo a tal segno. La realtà! Avanti, parlatemene, di questa realtà! Sottraetevi a queste candide fantasie. Suvvia! Siamo noi che la creiamo, la realtà... (citato in A. Billy, Vie de Balzac, Flammarion)

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narrativewatch-blog · 5 years ago

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The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer

by Camille Paglia

Oscar Wilde, a master of mass media, projected himself internationally as the ultimateaesthete. He synthesizes a half century of French and English Decadent Late Romanticism and joins itto the great tradition of English comedy. Wilde criticism is cautious and oddly solemn. One reason isthat a male academic specializing in Wilde still risks being judged both queer and frivolous. Thuscritics drift toward apologia, tediously extolling Wilde’s humanity or morality, things utterlynonexistent in his best work. The time is past when it was necessary to defend a homosexual genius.As an advocate of aestheticism and Decadence, I feel no need to disguise Wilde’s cruelty andimmoralism.Wilde is an Apollonian conceptualizer in the line we have followed from Egypt and Greece throughBotticelli and Spenser to Blake, Gautier, and Rossetti. In him we see that brilliant fusion of theaggressive western eye with aristocratic hierarchism, created by the Old Kingdom Pharaohs. Wildewas not a liberal, as his modern admirers think. He was a cold Late Romantic elitist, in theBaudelairean manner. Arrogantly turning life into public theater, Wilde became drama’s ancient ritualscapegoat. Apollonianism is objectification, a radical pagan materialism. Wilde uncannily,compulsively literalized or materialized his own ideas, bringing about his spectacular tragic fall.Wilde’s two supreme works, a novel and a play, are energized by the western dynamic ofcompetitive sexual personae. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91) is the fullest study of theDecadent erotic principle: the transformation of person into objet d’art. Wilde shows the strangesymbiosis between a beautiful boy and a painting, that is, between a charismatic androgyne and hisportrait. I noted that the artist’s hierarchic submission to a glamourous personality ischaracteristically western, as illustrated by Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Shelley andEmilia Viviani. In Wilde, as in Baudelaire and Rossetti, the relation is a Decadent ritual ofsadomasochistic enslavement. The artist Basil Hallward is “dominated” by Dorian Gray. But Dorianhimself is to be dominated by his own entrancing mirror-image, the art work recording Basil’simaginative submission.Dorian Gray opens with a perceptual pyramid, like the public unveiling of Cellini’s Perseus. Basiland Lord Henry Wotton sit looking up at “the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinarypersonal beauty.”1 This triangulated scene dramatizes the new nineteenth-century authority of art,with its coterie audience. Romanticism freed art from society and Christianity; photography freed itfrom realism. By the late nineteenth century, the art work was more separate and elevated than it hadever been. The picture of Dorian Gray stands alone in its hierarchic command. It is imperious as aByzantine icon but divorced from any collective value system. Wilde’s painting, beginning in aposition of spiritual preeminence, actually increases in power as the novel goes on. We see the artwork steadily escaping into independent mastery. What Gautier undertakes as an amusing fantasy inThe Mummy’s Foot, with its rude, refractory object-life, becomes Wilde’s nightmare vision of matteravenging itself on imagination. Basil’s painting, like Balzac’s boudoir a masterpiece of civilizedartifice, will generate the most savage barbarities. The artist himself will be butchered at its feet, hisbody dismembered and dissolved in acid.Wilde systematically charts the painting’s ritual sequestration. Basil refuses to exhibit it. Dorianaccepts it as a gift but, as it starts to change, conceals it behind a screen, then a drapery, and finally ina locked attic room. The painting becomes holier and holier as it becomes more and more daemonic.The novel proceeds by a daemonization of the Apollonian, my principle of Decadent art. The paintingis the precious monstrance of a cult of the beautiful boy, modelled on pagan prototypes. Wildecompares Dorian to Adonis, Narcissus, Paris, Antinous. With his “crisp gold hair” and Greek name,Wilde’s hero represents the Aryan absolutism of the Dorian invaders, whose blondeness I found inSpenser’s Amazons. He belongs to the Billy Budd category of ephebic androgyne, retaining theadolescent bloom into adulthood. Dorian is half-feminine, with “finely-curved scarlet lips” and a“delicate bloom and loveliness.” He has a “rose-red youth” and “rose-white boyhood,” like a fairy-talemaiden. Lord Henry tells him, “You really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. It would beunbecoming”—as if Dorian were Scarlett O’Hara forgetting her parasol. Images of flowers supportDorian’s identification with Adonis. Lord Henry experiments with a male vampirism, transplanting his temperament into Dorian, who ispossessed by him in both the sexual and daemonic sense. Basil is increasingly dismayed by Dorian’sadoption of Henry’s cynicism, style, and sophisticated epigrams. The Apollonian androgyne has novoice of its own; therefore, once its impermeability is breached, it begins to speak with the voice ofanother. Dorian, like the Delphic oracle, is under the mediumship of a hidden god. In his review of thebook, Pater calls the portrait Dorian’s “Döppelgänger.”16 I see a second doppelgänger pattern inHenry’s relation with his protégé: Dorian becomes Lord Henry, the beautiful boy turned Decadentaesthete. The transformation is complete when Wilde attaches the word “languidly” to Dorian,Henry’s emblematic epithet from his first appearance.17 An act of homosexual generation hasoccurred, a hermaphroditic cloning of sexual personae. Teaching again as an erotic transaction: we seethe candlelit courtship, the sexual initiation and insemination, and the Decadent fruition. DominantLord Henry spawns the remade Dorian from his cold ivory brow.Dorian himself dominates Basil, by the artist’s own admission. Basil recalls the origin of hissubordination, at a crowded London soirée. It resembles the moment of cathexis when Balzac’sSarrasine falls under the spell of the singing castrato.I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned halfway round, and sawDorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curioussensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose merepersonality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, mywhole soul, my very art itself.Homosexuals, now as then, recognize each other by a mysterious hard meeting of the eyes, a trope ofwestern aggression. The source of this passage is in Plato’s Phaedrus. Basil’s paleness and terror arethe “shudder,” “awe,” and “fever and perspiration” afflicting the philosopher who encounters a humanembodiment of “true beauty”: “Beholding it, he reverences it as he would a god.”18 HomoeroticPlatonism is overt in Basil’s later confession:Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence overme. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnationof that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshippedyou.... I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face.19Ordinary sexual desire is not the issue. Greek idealism is a glorification of the eye, not a glut of thesenses. Apollo lives by day, Dionysus by night. Basil seeks not to sleep with Dorian but to paint hispicture. The portrait is not sublimation but conceptual perfection. Painting, an iconic Apollonianmode, preserves Dorian’s hierarchic command and the aesthetic distance symbolizing the LateRomantic’s contemplative submission to the eroticized object. Subordination to the person as objetd’art explains the androgyny of all aesthetes. Such subordination is intolerable, we saw, toSwinburne’s masculine Sappho, whose admiration of Anactoria’s beauty escalates into sadism.Basil and Dorian’s first meeting also invokes one of the primary Romantic principles, vampirism.In the middle of a party, Basil senses someone looking at him. Dorian’s gaze is palpable, like the oneGautier’s Queen Nyssia tries to wash from her body. It has an eerie extrasensory effect on Basil,because it is an expression of sudden hierarchic assertion, casually exercised by an agent stillunconscious of his powers. When their eyes meet, Basil feels Dorian is “so fascinating” as to “absorb”him. At this moment of visual fixation, Dorian, like a vampire, dominates the plane of eye-contact.Basil, mesmerized, actually grows “pale,” like the vampire’s bled victim. But Wilde gives thedaemonic an Apollonian setting. Basil somehow grasps Dorian’s “personality” without a word beingspoken. He only sees Dorian; he does not hear him. There is an unpleasant intensification of ambientsound in the room. Enlightened consciousness flows into the visual. Basil’s revelation occurs in atemenos of muteness, into which noise can pierce only by becoming more grating. We witness one ofEnglish literature’s great Apollonian epiphanies. The Apollonian is a mode of silence: Dorian’spersonality, like Belphoebe’s at her glittering entrance into The Faerie Queene, is conveyed byentirely physical, visual means. This is a representational law of pagan sexual personae.Wilde calls Basil’s painting a “portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty.” Personal:what other kind of human beauty could there be? This homoerotic locution means Dorian has beautyof personality, but not personality as normally understood. At his first trial, Wilde sparred with hiscross-examiner, who read aloud from Basil’s confession to Dorian:Edward Carson: Do you mean to say that that passage describes the natural feeling of one mantowards another?Wilde: It would be the influence produced by a beautiful personality.Carson: A beautiful person?Wilde: I said “a beautiful personality.” You can describe it as you like. Dorian Gray’s was a mostremarkable personality.20Carson’s formulation, “a beautiful person,” has a moral inflection that Wilde is quick to correct. Hisown phrase, “a beautiful personality,” is morally indifferent. For Wilde, personality is a fact, a given.It is not character, shaped by education or ethics. Personality for him is immanent, belonging to apreordained rank in the great chain of being of authority and glamour. It is a visual construct. I spokeof the externality and theatricality of the Greco-Roman persona, a public projection, metaphoricallyvisual. Wilde, the most self-dramatizing of English writers, makes this metaphor literal. JoiningGreek idealism to Late Romantic connoisseurship, he imagines personality as a radiant icon ofApollonian materiality, the godlike summation of the visible world.Personality is central to Wilde’s literary theory, where it is the measure of both artist and critic. Hesays: “It is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality andwork of others. ... As art springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it can berevealed.”21 The idea comes from Pater. But there is a great difference between Pater’s“temperament” and Wilde’s “personality”: the first is misty and receptive, the second hard anddominant. The Importance of Being Earnest is a spectacle of this hardness of Wildean personality.Dorian Gray makes personality hierarchic in the Greek way, but it also promotes a Romantic view ofthe mystery of sex and power. Only Coleridge’s Christabel surpasses Dorian Gray as an analysis ofthe occult operations of fascination.No word appears more often in Dorian Gray than “fascinating.” It refers to a person, an experience,a drug, a book (A Rebours, by which Dorian is “poisoned”). The fascination theme belongs to thenovel’s romance of hierarchy. An unanswered question of history is how one individual can controlmasses of people. Freud speaks of the “fascination” of very beautiful, narcissistic women: narcissismhas “a great attraction” for others because of that “self-sufficiency and inaccessibility” shared bychildren and cats.22 Narcissistic politicians induce the investment of mass emotion by a process offascination.I compared the charisma of Lord Byron and Elvis Presley to that of the opportunistic first Duke ofBuckingham. Max Weber sees charisma as “an extraordinary, supernatural, divine power” that mustbe manifested by a warlord in heroic deeds or by a prophet in miracles.23 I question this definitioninsofar as it makes charisma dependent upon acts or external effects. Early Christianity first uses theGreek word charisma (“gift, favor, grace”) for the gift of healing or speaking in tongues. But I viewcharisma as completely pre-Christian. Athena gives charisma to Achilles when she sheds “a goldenmist around his head” and makes his body emit “a blaze of light.” She gives charisma to Odysseus onPhaeacia: he becomes “taller and sturdier”; his hair thickens like “the hyacinth in bloom”; he is“radiant with comeliness and grace.”24 Xenophon says the beauty of a victorious athlete, like “thesudden glow of a light at night,” “compelled everyone to look at him”: “Beauty is in its essencesomething regal.”25 Charisma in classical antiquity meant exactly what it does in the pagan massmedia: glamour, a Scottish word signifying, as Kenneth Burke points out, a magic “haze in the air”around persons or things.26 Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flowsoutward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is graciousaccommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interactionof male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine forceand severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowingwith presexual self-love.Wilde gives Dorian Gray pure charisma. Dorian is a natural hierarch who dominates by his“fascinating” beauty, drawing both sexes toward him and paralyzing the moral will. The narcissism ofthis beautiful boy has disastrous consequences: suicide, murder, vice. Dorian excites a mesmericfollowership among his well-born companions, but one directed toward no public aim, not eventyranny. Basil demands:Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? ... You have filled them with a madness forpleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there. Yes: you led them there,and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now.... They say that you corrupt everyone with whomyou become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of somekind to follow after.Seduction literally means “leading astray.” Paterian influence has become entrancement andcompulsion. Dorian daemonizes his followers, deconstructing the social order. He is a Late Romanticrather than Renaissance androgyne, bound by the public good. As a homosexual Alcibiades, Dorianfrustrates dynastic continuity. He is ostracized by the elder archons, who formally demonstrate theirdispleasure by leaving the room of a club whenever Dorian enters it. He creates a seditiousheterocosm within society, a colony of pagan idolatry. Wilde says of one of Dorian’s ill-fatedadmirers, “To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful andfascinating in life.”27 Extreme male beauty, like a siren song, lures toward destruction.Dorian effects these multiple cathexes by pagan magic. In the London netherworld, he is called“Prince Charming,” a cliché we are meant to hear in its oldest occult sense. Hierarch as sorcerer,Dorian has a “strange and dangerous charm.” He enchants not by words but by visible charisma. Mr.Hubbard, the “celebrated frame-maker,” comes instantly at his bidding: “As a rule, he never left hisshop. He waited for people to come to him. But he always made an exception in favour of DorianGray. There was something about Dorian that charmed everybody. It was a pleasure even to see him.”The young shop assistant reacts similarly: “[He] glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder inhis rough, uncomely face. He had never seen anyone so marvellous.” Like the star of film or popularmusic, Dorian draws heterosexuals into bisexual responses. Depressed, he wanders into CoventGarden: “A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, and wondered why herefused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly.”28 The man makes a mutepagan offering to Dorian’s remarkable beauty, stirred by an emotion he could not explain.Dorian is attractive, in the original meaning of the word. He aligns the imagination of otherstoward himself by inborn magnetic power. Wilde told a fable to Richard Le Gallienne, ostensiblyabout the problem of free will, in which a magnet infiltrates the consciousness of a group of talkativesteel filings, who are mysteriously swept toward it. Wilde often speaks of the “attraction” ofpersonality. For example: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curiousattractiveness of others.” He means that the good are ruled by abstract systems, ethical and social,while the not-good are ruled by personality alone, their “intensification of personality,” as he puts itelsewhere, generating a seductive glamour.29 This is clear in the original script of The Importance ofBeing Earnest:Miss Prism. I highly disapprove of Mr. Ernest Worthing. He is a thoroughly bad young man.Cecily. I fear he must be. It is the only explanation I can find of his strange attractiveness.30Elsewhere Wilde remarks: “All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”31They are spoiled because their altar is heaped with spoils, the gifts of the multitude. Divine charismaseparates the hierarch from communality by a zone of privilege. Lord Henry says of Dorian: “I neverinterfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expressionthat personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” The narcissistic personality, like the psychotic,lives by its own laws. As Basil murmurs uneasily, “Dorian’s whims are laws to everybody, excepthimself.”32The Picture of Dorian Gray departs from its Greek sources in this perilous pattern of LateRomantic fascination. Submission to the beautiful personality leads to degradation and death. InPlato’s and Shelley’s hierarchic relationships, there is no sadomasochistic pleasure in suffering. Onthe contrary, the imagination is exalted, perfecting and purifying itself in Apollonian contemplation.Remember the speed with which Shelley dumped Emilia Viviani when she no longer served hisartistic purposes. In Decadent Late Romanticism, however, eroticism is terminally obsessive. Basil,admitting to Dorian, “I worshipped you too much,” is slain before his masterpiece, the symbol of hisDecadent enslavement.33Dorian Gray is also Late Romantic in having a male rather than femalefascinator. Since the beautiful boy is anti-chthonian and since aestheticism is predicated on a swervefrom nature, the female impinges only weakly on the emotional world of Wilde’s novel. No goddessloves this Adonis. Sibyl Vane is a sentimental, ill-drawn caricature. My principle of psychoiconicism:feminine Sibyl and her mother, like Christabel’s Sir Leoline, lose their fictive energy to the dominantandrogyne. Wilde’s writing, like Pater’s, has but one cruel chthonian woman, Salomé. Dorian Gray isgoverned by triumvir. The three male leads tolerate the feminine only as a component of their ownhermaphroditism.One frequently encounters the misperception that Dorian Gray was modelled on Wilde’s lover, theboyishly handsome Lord Alfred Douglas. But Wilde did not meet Douglas until after The Picture ofDorian Gray was published. Dorian was conceived a priori. He is the beautiful boy of antiquity givencomplex modern form. Wilde writes to Douglas of “the soul of the artist who found his ideal in you,of the lover of beauty to whom you appeared as being flawless and perfect.”34 Therefore Wilde’s firstencounter with Douglas after the release of Dorian Gray was a Platonic fulfillment, exactly likeShelley’s with Emilia Viviani, stunning incarnation of the Hermaphrodite of his just-completed Witchof Atlas. But Shelley wrote a greater poem afterward, Epipsychidion, for there were no sexualrelations between himself and his self-foretold hermaphrodite deity. Wilde, forgetting the abstinenceof Socrates with Alcibiades, made the fatal error of copulating with his representational ideal. Byron’scrazed Manfred leaps into the same demeaning literalization. In Dorian Gray, Wilde correctlyportrays the beautiful boy as a destroyer. Douglas drew Wilde into Late Romantic infatuation andfascination, disordering his mature judgment and ending his career at the height of his fame andartistic power. Wilde later wrote to him, “The basis of character is will-power, and my will-powerbecame absolutely subject to yours.”35 Douglas childishly goaded Wilde to file an ill-advised lawsuitfor libel against his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, first of a rapid series of events leading toWilde’s conviction and imprisonment for homosexuality, from which he never recovered. He diedprematurely three years later, at forty-six. Wilde was already guilty of a sensual materialization ofPaterian doctrine in Lord Henry’s swerve from contemplative to active. His affair with Douglas wasthe gravest of his materializations, for which he was forced to undergo in painful, public reality thatapocalypse prophesied for half a century by Late Romantic catastrophe theory. Wilde’s fall in 1895ended aestheticism and Decadence.The beautiful boy is never deeply moved by the disasters he brings on his admirers, since he isscarcely aware of anything outside himself. His ruthlessness is an Apollonian apatheia, Stoicemotionlessness. In a long, bitter letter to Douglas from prison, later expurgated and synopsized as DeProfundis, Wilde dismisses as preposterous the charge that he was a bad influence on animpressionable youth. He asks: “What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I couldinfluence? Your brain? It was undeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yetborn.”36 Why, it might be asked, was Wilde ever drawn to so contemptible a man? The true aesthete isalways a lover of narcissistic beauty. Wilde’s list of Douglas’ defects is neither strident nor rhetorical.It is absolutely consistent with the long western history of the beautiful boy, who is a thing, an objetd’art. Wilde, seething in prison, has simply switched perspective on the same unchanging fact.After Basil’s confession of adoration, Dorian Gray drifts into thought, wondering “if he himselfwould ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend”: “Would there ever be someone who wouldfill him with a strange idolatry?” As the oblivious beautiful boy, he can fall in love with no one—except himself. What fills him with “a strange idolatry” is his own mirror-image. Dorian falls intoerotic subordination to Basil’s painting. Seeing it finished, he declares, “I am in love with it.” Theautoeroticism is blatant: he later kisses the “painted lips,” like Narcissus “almost enamoured of it.” Asthe painting degenerates, “He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty.”37 The picture ofDorian Gray is the fetish of a Romantic cult of self-love.Magic pictures are a traditional romance motif. In Poe’s The Oval Portrait, an artist’s paint drainsthe vitality of his bride, who dies the instant her portrait is completed. But never is there the fanaticalintensity of connection Dorian has with his portrait. High Romantic harmony of man and nature hasbecome Late Romantic enslavement of man by art work. The picture of Dorian Gray resembles SnowWhite’s magic mirror, which the witch-queen, like Dorian, constantly consults. Dorian in fact calls thepainting “the most magical of mirrors.” But Snow White’s mirror has a personality quite distinct fromthat of its owner, to whom it makes bold and unpleasing remarks. There is a “horrible sympathy”between Dorian and his portrait, “atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity.”38 Man andpainting are bound by Dorian’s self-divinizing autoeroticism. The phrase “secret love” is from Blake’s“Sick Rose,” whose hermaphrodite convolutions Dorian enacts: he stands with a mirror before hispainting in the locked room, looking from one face to the other in solitary self-absorption. The threesequestered Dorians recall the triple females of Blake’s Crystal Cabinet, complacently self-propagating. The tableau also recalls the dialogue of Byron’s effeminate Sardanapalus with his mirror.Elsewhere, Wilde says, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.”39 In his secretpagan cult, Dorian is god, priest, and devotee, worshipping at his own graven image.The iconicism of the art work is far more developed in Wilde than in Poe. The picture of DorianGray is an idol, heavy with mana. Relieved at its departure from his studio, Basil remembers “theintolerable fascination of its presence.” The painting is a sinister vampire-object, invading theconsciousness of its human servants. Basil’s premonition that Dorian’s personality will vampirically“absorb” him is redramatized in Dorian’s relation to his portrait. The picture absorbs Dorian’s mentalenergy to the point of obsession. He cannot stop thinking about it. It interferes even in his pleasures: athis country house, “he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door hadnot been tampered with, and that the picture was still there.”40 The portrait literally captivates Dorian,controlling him by a magnetism mimicking his glamourous magnetism over others. Like a jealousparent or lover, it summons him back from the outside world to its airless cell. And Dorian is nevertranquil except when there. Between him and his portrait is a ghostly umbilical link, like theincestuous bond between Romantic twins.Late in the novel, Dorian complains, “My own personality has become a burden to me.” He has sointensified his personality in the Wildean manner that he has animated his mirror-image. Now hisdouble, drunk with power, tries to usurp the identity of its human original. The painting feeds onDorian, until in desperation he murders Basil, a propitiatory blood-sacrifice before an objet de culte,from whose bondage he fights to be free. But the painting will be satisfied with no other victim butDorian. The finale is one of the uncanniest moments in literature. Killing Dorian, the paintingachieves its ultimate vampirism, triumphantly regaining “all the wonder of [its] exquisite youth andbeauty.”41 The painting finds the elixir of eternal youth by shedding Dorian’s blood.A peculiar mystical act occurs. Dorian stabs the painting but is found with a knife in his heart. Onerecalls Balzac’s Sarrasine, who attacks a living art work only to be slain himself; or Balzac’smarquise, who succeeds in her knife assault upon the sequestered precious object because she is afemale androgyne of chthonian force. Or Poe’s William Wilson, who traps his antagonist in a smallroom and skewers him, only to find he has murdered his “mirror” likeness and therefore his moralself. How does Dorian’s knife end up in his own heart? We do not ordinarily ask naturalistic questionsof magical fictions. Dorian’s death is simultaneous with the blow he strikes. But if we were to expandthat point of time into a cinematic sequence—and Wilde’s novel encourages the deformation of timeby imagination—I think we would see the portrait standing like a cruel, laughing god, plucking theknife from its body like an arrow caught in midflight, and hurling it back into the heart of its impiousassailant. The Picture of Dorian Gray ends in a spectacle of perverse animism.Many admirers have felt Dorian Gray’s punitive finale uncharacteristic of Wilde and an evasion ofthe decadence of the whole. In a letter to the editor defending the book against scandalized reviewers,Wilde says, “Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience,and at that moment kills himself.” His qualification that this moral is “an artistic error” exempts usfrom taking him seriously on the question of conscience. But if he believed what he said, the man whowrote that letter did not understand what he had written in Dorian Gray. No great work of Romanticimagination has anything to do with conscience. Dorian Gray is a web of Romantic fascination, aforce field of Apollonian and daemonic charisma, heir to Christabel in its dark vision of sex andpower. We need no moral axioms to interpret it. Dorian commits certain forbidden acts and ispunished for them. But he operates under ritual rather than ethical proscriptions. The Bible, forexample, begins the human story by granting access to all trees of Eden but one. The mystery ofdivine law appears throughout the world in arbitrary rituals of prohibition or avoidance. By hishubristic defiance of time, Dorian wanders into an infrahuman realm where he is at the mercy ofpitiless daemonic agents. He is devoted to his portrait: I use the word as in classical Latin, where“devotus” means bewitched, enchanted, cursed, consecrated, dedicated to divine service, and markedfor slaughter. Dorian Gray is about not morality but taboo. The ending shows not the victory ofconscience but the destruction of person by art work. Dorian says: “There is something fatal about aportrait. It has a life of its own.”42 The painting, like all hierarchs, makes its own laws andsubordinates reality to its will. Pater speaks of “the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty,whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit and isolating.”43Dorian Gray isabout the amorality of beauty and the fascism of the western objet d’art. It is about the magic of art inthe magic of person.Dorian Gray is like the ritual scapegoat of Aztec festival. Frazer says a young man, chosen for “hispersonal beauty,” served as the double of the god Tezcatlipoca. For a year, the youth was “apparelledin gorgeous attire” and “trained to comport himself like a gentleman of the first quality, to speakcorrectly and elegantly, to play the flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a dandified air.”When he walked through the city, people flocked to see and honor him. At the end of his time, “thisbejewelled exquisite” was butchered on the temple steps, his breast sliced open and his heart tornout.44 Dorian Gray, in “the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life,” is also adandy, a connoisseur, a man of leisure smoking Lord Henry’s cigarettes, a charismatic beautyattracting attention and veneration in the streets.45 Like the Aztec scapegoat, he is privileged butdoomed, destined for execution at the feet of an idol, his heart pierced by a knife. The painting is hisdivine double, the god who allows him to live like a prince but, thirsting for blood, demands hissacrifice.Another anthropological parallel: the picture of Dorian Gray is like Meleager’s brand in that aman’s life term resides in an enchanted object. I examined Swinburne’s play on this subject. InWilde’s version, there is no longer a nature-identified female custodian of the precious relic, since thenovel’s women are few and puny. The ancient Meleager legend belongs to a complex of primitivebeliefs about the soul. Frazer says the savage thinks of life as “a concrete material thing of a definitebulk, capable of being seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised, fractured, orsmashed in pieces.” This entity can be removed from a man’s body yet “still continue to animate himby virtue of a sort of sympathy or action at a distance.” If it is destroyed, he dies. Totemistic culturesbelieve in “the possibility of permanently depositing the soul in some external object—animal, plant,or what not—, ... just as people deposit their money with a banker rather than carry it on theirpersons.”46 In Dorian Gray, Romanticism’s tidal dynamic of regression makes art revert toprimitivism. Aestheticism concretizes the invisible world, allowing Dorian to deposit his soul in anexternal object, which affects him, in Frazer’s words, by “sympathy or action at a distance.” WhenDorian tries to destroy it, he dies. In Dorian Gray, a malevolent totem lures a sophisticate into an actof savagery, Basil’s grisly murder. The novel supports my definition of decadence as sophisticationwithout humaneness or humanism.Wilde’s assumptions are normally Apollonian. In The Critic as Artist he says: “Form is everything.It is the secret of life.... Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not berevealed to you.”47 Praising Pre-Raphaelite painting, he condemns Impressionism as “mud andblur.”48 He follows Blake in preferring the clarity of the Apollonian incised edge. Even in Monet’sstudies of flickering light, western painting is Apollonian in its stasis, fixity, and sharp outer borders.What is odd about the picture of Dorian Gray is that it is in Dionysian metamorphosis. The changingpainting insults beauty and form: Dorian calls it “the misshapen shadow,” “the hideous painted thing,”“this monstrous soul-life.” Nature and art war for supremacy in it. Painting is invaded by a daemonicform-altering power, because Wilde has tried to make nature surrender her authority. He opens TheDecay of Lying: “The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us isNature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinishedcondition.”49 Wilde has gotten this from Baudelaire via Huysmans. But in assigning a superior valueto art, Baudelaire never disguises nature’s violent power. And Huysmans’ dreaming hero is terrifiedby primeval nature’s choking abundance. In Wilde, however, nature lacks archetypal force. His fewnature descriptions are pretty and minor. In Dorian Gray, nature, denied entry, seeps into the portrait-double and corrodes it from inside out: “It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horrorhad come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating thething away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.”50 Internality, liquidity,chthonian murk. Apollonian painting is dissolving and putrefying in Dionysian fluidity.The locked attic room, Dorian’s bower of art, recalls the tower where the incestuous doubles meetin Byron and the turret where the maiden poses for her artist-husband in Poe. The room is also amausoleum, for it is the dusty playroom of Dorian’s boyhood, preserved like Miss Havisham’s bridalhall in Dickens. Hence Dorian’s portrait is like the ka or double of the deceased in Egyptian tombs,heaped with toys and furniture. The horrified discoverers breaking into the chamber are likearchaeologists finding the king’s mummy thrown on the floor by grave robbers. Becoming a corpse,Dorian reaches his ultimate objectification. As the novel opens, the painting is still incomplete. Basilfinishes it as Dorian begins to change, contaminated by Lord Henry. After Sibyl’s maltreatment, thepainting never stops changing until the end. Dorian has assumed Basil’s role as his own portraitist,working on the painting by telekinesis. The painting finally achieves permanent form only with thedeath of its model, whose beauty it reclaims for itself. Hence Dorian Gray is like Woolf’s To theLighthouse, which I suspect it influenced, in the way that a painting and a novel are coterminous,developing in tandem, with the last brush strokes applied to the canvas in the last paragraphs.As a self-portraitist, Dorian is a Neronian life-artist, making perverse autobiography out of thesufferings of others. The first maxim of Wilde’s preface to Dorian Gray, imitating Gautier’spolemical preface, is, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” But Dorian, who makes life into awork of art, is a creator of ugly things: his hideous self-portrait and then Basil’s corpse, a “thing” witha “grotesque misshapen shadow,” a “humped back, and long fantastic arms.” In artistic style, Dorian isprophetically Expressionist. The brutality of Basil’s murder is in deliberate contrast to Dorian’sexquisite connoisseurship. It is as if Dorian is overcome by a paroxysm of daemonic force, eruptinginto the Apollonian world of perfect form. We saw a similar effect in Euripides’ Medea, whereprincess and king sink beneath a tarry wave of fire. The morning after the murder, Dorian mustreconstruct his Apollonian persona by Paterian rituals of discrimination. He dresses “with even morethan his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarf-pin, andchanging his rings more than once.” Selecting Gautier’s Enamels and Cameos, he admires the bindingof “citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates.”51 Returned fromhis descent to Hades, the barbaric chthonian realm, Dorian restores himself to normality by focusingon the Apollonian separateness of objects in the aesthete’s visible world, numbering them bycognitive palpation.Wilde constantly talks about “Art,” but his actual commentary on the visual arts is sparse and inert.I think that, as a primarily verbal intelligence, he had little feeling for painting. Whistler made sometart remarks about Wilde’s trespass into his territory. Wilde’s stage directions to An Ideal Husbandare full of allusions to art, comparing the characters to paintings by Van Dyck, Watteau, Lawrence.There is a chatty superficiality or name-dropping: “Watteau would have loved to paint them.”52Paintings are being seen vaguely and generically. But Wilde’s only novel is a supreme artifact ofaestheticism, taking a painting for theme. The most potent art work in all literature belongs to the ageof photography, which allowed painting to shift toward the strange and irrational. It is to Wilde’scredit that he sensed and exploited this. The objet d’art resumes its archaic religious function. Wilde,without real knowledge of the visual arts, creates a great book about a painting because of his dualityof vision: he is Apollonian in his worship of form but Romantic in his instinct for the daemonic.Together, these principles produce the despotic art work of Dorian Gray. Nature and art, in their ritualcombat in the painting, duel to a draw and separate, leaving the marred beautiful boy as their LateRomantic victim.

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