Chapter XI- The Labyrinth

At the end of “The Invisible Flaneur,” Elizabeth Wilson describes the heroic act by which the flaneur and flaneuse survive the “disorienting space” space of the city through an act of creating meaning.  Dorian Gray attempts this early in the story in his relationship with Sybil Vane, but their engagement to her proves fatal to both Sybil and to any heroism in Dorian; their relationship becomes fatal the moment he actually gets to know her.  Sybil, the person whom Dorian imagines he understands better than anyone else, is far from the person that Dorian imagined her to be.  In revealing her personhood, she becomes a stranger, destroying the meaning that Dorian built up around her.  This causes Dorian to lose faith in his ability to find meaning in the city.  Beginning from this point, the story of Dorian Gray is one of self-destruction.

With the loss of Sybil Vane, Dorian must find different ways to cope with the city.  He falls into the trappings of the flaneur that Wilson describes.  She says that in the labyrinth-like obscurity of the city, the flaneur’s life loses meaning:

Life ceases to form itself into epic or narrative, becoming instead a short story, dreamlike, insubstantial or ambiguous [ . . . ] Meaning is obscure; committed emotion cedes to irony and detachment; Georg Simmel’s ‘blasé attitude’ is born.  The fragmentary and incomplete nature of urban experience generates its melancholy—we experience a sense of nostalgia, of loss for lives we have never known, of experiences we can only guess at (Wilson 107-08).

Dorian’s detachment from life as narrative is strongly emphasized through the book the Henry Wotton sends to him after the death of Sybil vane.  The book itself is very much like the dreamlike existence of the flaneur.  The book is “a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own” (Wilde 106-07).  The focus on a Parisian obviously compares Dorian to the French flaneur, but more telling is the plotness nature of the novel.  Years pass in Chapter XI, which focuses on Dorian’s symbolic obsession with (descent into?) the book.  When we find him again in Chapter XII, Dorian is suddenly thirty-eight years old, but still looks as though he is in his early twenties.  His life has become one with Lord Henry’s book; time passes in the world, but no time passes for Dorian.  He is stuck in a single moment in time and the plot ceases to move forward.  The focus of Lord Henry’s book is also indicative of Wilson’s focus on nostalgia and experience.  Wilson’s flaneur is incapable of accessing the narratives of life; in the case of the Parisian in Wotton’s book, this leads to a life removed from his own life.  Such is Dorian’s fate; he seeks out new sensations and passions, but once he has “caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, [he would] leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament” (112).  This sensational wandering leads him to indulge in Catholicism, the study of perfumes, the study of jewels, clothing, and more.  However, he has no real attachment to any of these things, and even the deeply spiritual is reduced to aesthetics.  Dorian becomes lost in the labyrinth of the city and, it seems, hardly bothers with finding his way out.

            The effect of this eleventh chapter is profound.  It is a chapter that draws us into Wotton’s book and, living up to the reputation of the book, it is a chapter in which nothing happens.  The experience of reading chapter XI is incredibly blasé.  I found myself as bored with life as Dorian Gray himself.  In fact, even though Dorian becomes far from heroic in his surrender to the labyrinth, Wilde’s writing in this chapter makes me feel a certain degree of sympathy for Dorian.  After inching my way through seventeen pages that stretch across what seems like a decade, I can say with certainty that Dorian’s fate is far worse than Sybil’s.  Leave it to Wilde to make an artwork of even the blasé experience.