Beyond the defiance of the young iconoclast—Wilde himself, of course—and the rather perfunctory curve of Dorian Gray to that gothic final sight , there is another, possibly less strident, but more central theme. That one is damned for selling one's soul to the devil is a commonplace in legends; what arrests our attention more, perhaps, is Wilde's claim or boast or worry or warning that one might indeed be poisoned by a book . . . and that the artist, even (...) the presumably "good" Basil Hallward, is the diabolical agent. Wilde's novel must be seen as a highly serious meditation upon the moral role of the artist—an interior challenge, in fact, to the insouciance of the famous pronouncements that would assure us that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book or that all art is "quite useless." Wilde's genius was disfigured by his talent: he always sounds much more flippant, far more superficial, than he really is. So one always say about Dorian Gray, with an air of surprise, that the novel is exceptionally good after all—and anyone who has read it recently replies, with the same air of faint incredulity, yes, it is exceptionally good—in fact, one of the strongest and most haunting of English novels. Yet its reputation remains questionable. Gerald Weales virtually dismisses it as "terribly fin de siècle " in a rather flippant introduction to the novel, and it would be difficult to find a critic who would choose to discuss it in terms other than the familiar ones of decadence, art for art's sake, art as "the telling of beautiful untrue things." Joyce Carol Oates has written, among others, Bellefleur, Childhood, a collection of short stories, Nightside, and Son of the Morning. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Jocoserious Joyce" and "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung". (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic—how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so serious (...) as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself." Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. . . . And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation.1 Harmony becomes organization. And Gerald dedicates himself to work, to feverish, totally absorbing work, inspired with an almost religious exaltation in his fight with matter. The world is split in (...) two: on one side matter , on the other side his own isolated will. He wants to create on earth a perfect machine, "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition"; a man of the twentieth century with no nostalgia for the superannuated ideals of Christianity or democracy, he wishes to found his eternity, his infinity, in the machine. So inchoate and mysterious is the imaginative world Lawrence creates for Women in Love that we find no difficulty in reading Gerald Crich as an allegorical figure in certain chapters and as a quite human, even fluid personality in others. As Gudrun's frenzied lover, as Birkin's elusive beloved, he seems a substantially different person from the Gerald Crich who is a ruthless god of the machine; yet as his cultural role demands extinction , so does his private emotional life, his confusion of the individual will with that of the cosmos, demand death—death by perfect cold. He is Lawrence's only tragic figure, a remarkable creation on a remarkable novel, and though it is a commonplace thing to say that Birkin represents Lawrence, it seems equally likely that Gerald Crich represents Lawrence—in his deepest, most aggrieved, most nihilist soul. · 1. All quotations from Women in Love are taken from the Modern Library edition. Joyce Carol Oates' works include the novels Childhood, Son of the Morning, and a collection of short stories, Night-Side. “Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung” is part of a larger work exploring tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Jocoserious Joyce" , and "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

Emily Dickinson is the most paradoxical of poets: the very poet of paradox. By way of voluminous biographical material, not to mention the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that we know everything about her; yet the common experience of reading her work, particularly if the poems are read sequentially, is that we come away seeming to know nothing. We could recognize her inimitable voice anywhere—in the “prose” of her letters no less than in her poetry—yet it is (...) a voice of the most deliberate, the most teasing anonymity. “I’m Nobody!” is a proclamation to be interpreted in the most literal of ways. Like no other poet before her and like very few after her—Rilke comes most readily to mind, and, perhaps, Yeats and Lawrence—Dickinson exposes her heart’s most subtle secrets; she confesses the very sentiments that, in society, would have embarrassed her dog . Yet who is this “I” at the center of experience? In her astonishing body of 1,775 poems Dickinson records what is surely one of the most meticulous examinations of the phenomenon of human “consciousness” ever undertaken. The poet’s persona—the tantalizing “I”—seems, in nearly every poem, to be addressing us directly with perceptions that are ours as well as hers. The poems’ refusal to be rhetorical, their daunting intimacy, suggests the self-evident in the way that certain Zen koans and riddles do while being indecipherable. But what is challenged is, perhaps, “meaning” itself: Wonder—is not precisely KnowingAnd not precisely Knowing not—A beautiful but bleak conditionHe has not lived who has not felt—Suspense—is his maturer Sister—Whether Adult Delight is PainOr of itself a new misgiving—This is the Gnat that mangles men— [1331, ca. 1874]1 1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson ; subsequent references in the text to the poems will cite the Johnson number and the date assigned by Johnson to each poem. Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and the author most recently of the booklength essay On Boxing. “Soul at the White Heat” will be included in her book of essays, Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, to be published in the spring of 1988. (shrink)