Artists Must Be Outlaws

                            When freedom is outlawed only outlaws will be free – Tom Robbins

            The Artist is an Outlaw. Creativity is criminality. For art to break new ground it is necessary for artists to break the law. Old forms of art must be robbed of their valuables and murdered. Convention must be tortured and mutilated beyond recognition. It is in the nature of artists to revolt but that is never their conscious intention. It is not in trying to be disgusted with glorified mediocrity that poets find fresh forms. It is not out of sympathy with any political doctrine that artists terrorize the sleepily familiar structures, as “the poet is of no faction” (Baudelaire 20). It is because it is immoral, “to accept the standard of one’s age” (Wilde 88). Revolution in art results from artists tuning in to their rebellious natures and creating accordingly.
            Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are outlaws whose work inadvertently serves to shock their audience out of complacency. They do this by expanding into the realm of Decadence the accepted understanding of beauty and the locations in which aesthetically pleasing things can be found. Further, they challenge the belief that beauty in art is secondary to representations of morality. They offer alternative realities that cut directly against the grain of those in which society takes comfort. They rebel, each in their own way, against class distinctions that limit artistic expression. They oppose the oppression by religious law of human sensuality. They put forward the doctrine of honesty of vision. They accept mortality as a crucial aspect of beauty.
            Baudelaire portrays the grotesque as beautiful, not with the intention of jarring the reader but to jolt himself into expanding his own understanding of beauty.  He illustrates this in his poem “Une Charogne” in which he describes the “superb carcass” of a maggot clustered dog “as a flower coming into bloom” (Baudelaire 94). The allure he seeks is not inner, spiritual charm but rather an improved perception of the superficial. He searches for elegance in ugly places where “enchantment blossoms from fear of harm”. There he finds “bent and weary monsters” and urges the reader to “come love them!” (Baudelaire 341).  Wilde too harvests flowers from the grotesque, as his Dorian Gray discovers the beautiful Sibyl Vane in “a wretched hole" of a theatre "in a labyrinth of grimy streets" (Wilde 54-56). Indeed, if beauty arises from tragedy it is rendered more perfect (Wilde 40).

            Appearances are important to both Wilde and Baudelaire and each shows affinity with Théophile Gautier in this respect in being “one for whom the visible world exists” (Wilde 146) (Baudelaire 1). Because beauty is not only better than goodness (Wilde 83), it must replace it (Wilde 147) and if she is “Satan or God, who cares? Angel or Siren who cares” as long as she makes “the moments less grave and the world less repellent?” (Baudelaire 73).

            Wilde’s main method of outlawry is to play with opposites by taking conventional beliefs and arguing that the antithesis is true. He may not believe these reversals but in making them he toys with conventional wisdom to show that must not be blindly accepted. We must “test reality we must see it on the tightrope” and then “when the verities become acrobats we can judge them” (Wilde 44). Truths that cannot keep their balance prove themselves false and therefore must be deposed. When an honest person believes a lie it does not render that falsehood true (Wilde 10), and besides “the things one feels absolutely certain about are never true” (Wilde 245).  There is freedom in not knowing and it is also more conducive to learning.

            Wilde often uses characters as fifth columnists in high society that serve to tear down the temple of privileged mediocrity from within. These acts of sabotage frequently take place at dinner parties and assume the form of witty conversation between guests that lampoon the absurdity of classism without directly opposing it (Wilde 43-49).

Unlike Wilde’s Victorian Britain, post revolutionary France of the same era has no ridiculously elevated aristocracy to burlesque and so Baudelaire’s target is the far less remote bourgeoisie. As this is not so rarefied a class as English nobility they are not impenetrably barricaded and can be attacked head on. Additionally, Baudelaire’s assaults are more full and frontal because poems tend to use solitary voices that are not camouflaged by verbal intercourse and so he can address ennui personified and say, “You know him dear reader, that delicate monster / Hypocrite reader – my fellow man – my sibling" and be assured that he is reaching the bourgeoisie (Dear Reader).

            In societies where belief can influence the law, outlaw artists challenge the religious establishment and its cherished icons. Sometimes these acts of rebellion will elevate the traditional enemy of these figures to the status of worship. This is not done to establish an alternative faith but rather for the purpose of breaking down oppressive convictions. In response to the oppression of the Christian church, both Wilde and Baudelaire enthrone as heroic the figure of Satan, the ultimate outlaw of Judeo-Christian thinking because “when that high spirit, that morning star of evil fell from heaven it was as a rebel” (Wilde 215-216) In blatant mockery of the Roman Catholic mass Baudelaire composed “Les Litanies de Satan” in which he praises him as “You who know all, great king of underground things / Celebrated healer of human anguish” (Baudelaire 475).

            The Satanic figure in The Picture of Dorian Gray is Lord Henry, who is dubbed by Dorian as "Prince Paradox" (Wilde 220). Lord Henry represents the outlaw artist in the novel, as he is the voice of decadence and rebellion. Lord Henry’s satanic credentials are established at the beginning as he sits in the Eden-like setting of the artist’s studio of his friend Basil Hallward, who is symbolic of the god-creator (Wilde 1). The opening scene is a metaphor depicting the larger metaphor of Satan and God as good friends sitting in the Garden of Eden and discussing “god's” greatest creation, which is Adam in the form of his painting of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2). When we are introduced to the portrait’s model, it can be seen from the beginning that, like Adam, Dorian Gray is clay, in that he is a tabula rasa. Two works of art then come into being in the studio, as Basil effectively creates an externalized immortal soul for Dorian Gray (Wilde 243-244) while Lord Henry sculpts the mind of Dorian Gray by feeding him in the form of paradoxical statements such as “cure the soul by means of the senses and the senses by means of the soul” the fruit of good and evil. This fruit also takes the form of a book that Henry later gives to Dorian (Wilde 141-142), the description of which is uncannily similar to Joris-Karl Huysman’s À rebours, “Against the grain” (Wilde 261). This is an appropriate gift from the Satanic Lord Henry, as it becomes for Dorian his Bible of Decadence.

            Made jealous by Lord Henry of the eternal youth of Basil the creator’s painting of him, Dorian wishes for the eternal youth of his body and for his externalized soul to age instead. But not only does the painting accumulate Dorian’s years, but also his sins, as the painting becomes Dorian’s conscience (Wilde 253). The artwork becomes a reflection of Dorian’s inner darkness and so Dorian becomes a metaphor not only of the father of mankind but also of humankind itself.

            Dorian Gray is not an artist but rather a living artistic masterpiece. He has no free will to create beauty but merely becomes the slave of an appetite for it (Wilde 215). His criminality is not expressive like that of the outlaw creator but rather a form of destructive vulgarity (Wilde 242) He forgets Lord Henry’s lesson that “one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner” (Wilde 242). Those that break the law in secret are merely criminals like the murderous failed poet Pierre François Lacenaire whose dead but still-violent hand haunts him as it is described by Gautier, “With depraved curiosity / I touch it despite my disgust / that it is still stained with cruelty / this cold flesh with its down of rust // Mummified and yellow / like the hand of a pharaoh / Stretching faunlike fingers / as if temptation lingers" (Wilde 185) (Gautier 22) (Christian).

            As a living art form Dorian lasts too long. He is a style that becomes taken to the saturation point. His flaw becomes his obsession with beauty and he not only turns internally ugly to maintain it but also begins to confuse that ugliness with beauty (Wilde 165). His desire to be forever beautiful runs counter to the code of the artistic outlaw. His concentration on surface aesthetics without time limits and without change makes him the embodiment of a failed artistic genre. Dorian becomes the very thing that outlaw artists like Baudelaire and Wilde need to kill.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Translated by William Aggeler, Roy Campbell,

Geoffrey Wagner, Kenneth O. Hanson, David Paul. Creative Commons, 2008, pp. 1-341.

Christian, Christian. Translation of “Au lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire,

            University of Toronto. 2019, lines 39-40. Unpublished manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Hymne à la Beauté”. by

Charles Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 25-28. Unpublished

manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Les Litanies de Satan”. by

Charles Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 7-8. Unpublished

manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Une Charogne”. by Charles

Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 13-20. Unpublished manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Lacenaire” by Théophile Gautier

University of Toronto. 2019, lines 5-12. Unpublished manuscript.

Gautier Théophile. Selected Lyrics. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro, Margellos World

republic of Letters, 2011, pp. 23-25. pdf.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Notes by David Wayne Thomas, Modern

Library, 2004, pp 1-261.

Une Charogne

And the sky regarded that superb carcass

as a flower coming into bloom

The stench was so strong that there on the grass

You believed that you might swoon

Flies swarmed and buzzed on its putrid belly

From which emerged dark grey brigades

Of maggots that were flowing like thin jelly

Along the threads of living rags

Les Litanies de Satan

You who know all, great king of underground things

Celebrated healer of human anguish

Hymne à la Beauté

If you’re Satan or God, who cares? Angel or Siren

Who cares, if you make, Fay with eyes of velvet,

Rhythm, perfume, glimmer, my royal sovereign!

The moments less grave and the world less repellent?

Lacenaire

With depraved curiosity / I touch it despite my disgust / that it is still stained with cruelty / this cold flesh with its down of rust // Mummified and yellow / like the hand of a pharaoh / Stretching faunlike fingers / as if temptation lingers