Christa Giles

une rêverie essentielle et des parfums d’âme
les plus étranges s’est fait son orage.
Redevenir poignant à travers l’inouï
raffinement d’intellect, et humain, et unie
pareille perverse atmosphère de beauté, est
un miracle que vous accomplissez et selon
quel emploi de tous les arts de l’écrivain!
…Ce portrait en pied, inquiétant, d’un Dorian
Gray, hantera, mais écrit, étant devenu livre
lui-même. 476
181
For the portrait functions in the novel in part to blur the
dividing line between art and life, and indeed symbolically
enters into the realm of life. It is this paradox which
subsumes all of Wilde’s and Huysmans’ work, as according
to them both, it is only through the artifice of art that we
can experience life intensely. Thus Sibyl Vane’s Ophelia is
more real than Sibyl Vane herself. Inversely, to ˝treat life in
the spirit of art˝ 477 also became the ideal. For life treated in
aesthetic terms was endowed with coherence and structure.
And decadent art, although it was concerned with self-
parody and multiplying complexities, was also an overall
controlling structure, a way of creating order from chaos.
Manifestly, then, subject matter was not as important as the
material used. The style of the artist – his creativity – lay in
his ability to ˝créer avec des matières nouvelles un art