In The Picture of Dorian Gray the writing
is very descriptive like a painter. Oscar
Wilde’s lavish writing style is like elaborate brush strokes, full of colour,
and texture. It is as if he imitating
portrait painting through prose. The
writing itself then becomes a commentary on portraiture. As a kind of portrait of the characters
develops out of the language Wilde uses.
Perhaps the era in which Wilde lived informed this florid writing
style. The camera was a new technology
and photography by extension a new art, but this technology made creating a
portrait more efficient than the previous method of painting. In order to paint a portrait with any
Realism, the artist had to possess the skill to take what nuances the eye could
perceive and translate them from imagination to brush stroke. It is a unique exercise in both perception
and coordination. Wilde’s writing verbalizes these nuances. He wraps the action within highly descriptive
settings. Two examples follow:
The wind shook
some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering
stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirrup by
the wall, and like a blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its
brown gauze wings.[1]
They rose up,
and sauntered down the walk together. Two green-and-white butterflies fluttered
past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of the garden a thrush began to
sing.[2]
An example
from The Rings of Saturn show
Sebald’s descriptive style.
My way from Dunwich took me at first by
the ruins of the Grey Friars’ monastery, through a number of fields, and then
to an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches and rampant gorse grew
so densely that the going was very hard. I was beginning to think of turning
back when all of a sudden the heath opened out in front of me. Shading from pale
lilac to deepest purple, it stretched away westward, with a white track curving
gently through its midst….[3]
The
functional relationship of the setting to the character development is very
different in both stories. I would argue
that Wilde’s descriptions are more gratuitous, where Sebald uses descriptive
language to guide the reader to a more specific image. Oscar Wilde’s describes what the characters
do not engage, with displaying the natural world carrying on in spite of them. In the examples from The Rings of Saturn, the description of the scenery is related to
what the narrator is directly encountering.
This is where I would describe Sebald’s writing as photographic. Photography has the ability to isolate a
narrative and create a new one simultaneously.
In practice, it is subject to the photographer’s inclinations, but without
context, interpretation remains open. When contrasted with Dorian Gray, the writing in The
Rings of Saturn is more towards the literal, and concise. The height of
description happens within the mini-narratives within the main plot. The narratives themselves are usually
historical in nature, which alludes to the journalistic and documentary
elements of photography. There is enough
to visualize what he is describing, but the connections between all the stories
with main narrative give a new meaning to the individual stories.
Perhaps Sebald chose to write in this fashion because
photographs follow some of the descriptions. The photo itself could have been
taken under contexts unrelated to the actual event of the narrative, and yet
become relevant because of its connection to the narrator.
Descriptive narrative is visual imitation is conveyed
through words. The like in language,
techniques of imitation are different in painting and photography. Painting realizes on how external elements
such as light and shadow can be re-created through the colours used on the
canvas. Photography, must surrender to
external elements like light or recreate them using artificial sources. Although, in painting, an artist might choose
to light artificially, the choice is not tied to the mechanics of painting in
the same way it is to the mechanics of a camera.
The parallels between the two narrative styles, the
art of portraiture and the art of photography, are that all work to establish a
framework of character and for action to live within.
Bibliography
Wilde, Oscar.
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Digital. London: Simpkin, Marshall,
Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., 1916.
Sebald, Winfried Georg. The Rings of Saturn.
Translated by Michael Hulse. London: The Harvill Press, 1999.
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