ill Self's new novel Dorian is a modernization of The Picture of Dorian Gray, transplanting Oscar Wilde's characters and ruminations about art, youth and decadence to 1980s London. Sweeping and savagely funny, Self's update reads less like an "imitation" (as it's subtitled) and more like a tripped-out reincarnation. (Logical, when you consider that both authors were the media-anointed bad boys of Brit lit at the end of their respective centuries, social arsonists with an eye for the surreal and an appetite for anesthetizing drugs.)
Self's version begins in 1981. Dorian Gray is a beautiful Oxford graduate worshipped by two older men: Basil "Baz" Hallward, a video artist who immortalizes Dorian in an installation called Cathode Narcissus, and the drug addict Henry Wotton. All three are part of a tight gay circle where drugging and fucking are rampant. As AIDS wilts the daisy chain, Dorian remains radiantly healthy, screwing a swath through London and New York, trading vacuities with Mapplethorpe and Warhol. But in a scene that's arguably the book's highlight, the truth is revealed: Dorian's physical deterioration is apparent on the installation, which is stored in his attic.
Along the way, Self eviscerates gay and straight culture, the Thatcherite bourgeoisie, Princess Diana and the plasticity of the art world. Drugging is described in orgasmic detail, while the sex scenes are almost aggressively anti-erotic.
Self spoke with Hooksexup about Wilde's inspiration, his own gay experience and the less-than-crushing blow of being nominated for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Michael Martin



Hooksexup: What was it about The Picture of Dorian Gray that seemed relevant or worthy of updating?
Self: There is such a strong link between the 1880s and 1980s in metropolitan society in England. If you read Wilde's original closely, it takes place over sixteen years. It immediately occurred to me that one hundred years later, there were two significant 16-year spans that would be very interesting to insert the book into. One is the time period between the marriage of Diana and her death, 1981 to 1997. The second is far more important: the point from when the AIDS epidemic got started in the early '80s to the arrival of highly active retroviral treatments in 1996, 1997. The other aspect that interested me was Wilde's anticipation of what a liberated gay culture might be like. That lies behind the book in some way.

Why were you interested in writing about gay men who developed AIDS in the '80s?
I think there's a misconception in the world. There are several misconceptions. One is that the world believes that AIDS is over, and it very much isn't. It certainly isn't over in the West. People with HIV find that the virus mutates, or they have bad side effects to the treatments. But society at large believes it's a closed chapter. Despite the fact that statistics show that infection rates in some cases are higher, the existence of a "pill for the ill" shows that it's gone off the agenda.

Also, in the realm of the emotions, events that are contiguous are always interpreted causually: "I shout at my lover, then he or she runs out into the street and is killed by a bus, so I killed them." "I screw around a lot in a socially and culturally changed climate that makes it possible for me, as a gay man, to have sex and have many partners. However the wider society is still homophobic, and I've internalized some of that homophobia myself. Then a sexually transmitted disease comes along that decimates promiscuous gay men. Therefore, my sexual promiscuity caused AIDS. Not only that, there are people in the wider society who tell me that."

Everybody felt that way about AIDS, but it was not considered acceptable or P.C. to investigate those ideas. Those mechanics, and the atmospheres of denial surrounding the AIDS epidemic, interested me very much. And when it comes to writing a novel that's specifically set in a gay subculture, well, you know, whatever. I'll write about whatever takes my fancy.

Do you see yourself in Oscar Wilde? You're both invested in social satire, and you both had your vices.
Wilde was something of an opium man. I think he was probably what we moderns would term an addictive personality. Certainly, that would account for the consequences of his affair with Bosie, which, in a sense, he courted. It's quite an addictive trait not to see a block without putting your neck on it. But I think it would be invidious to compare myself to Wilde. I wouldn't really be tempted to do that. I think that Wilde uttered a truth about fiction, which is that it's always an emotional autobiography. Certainly, my Wooten and my Hallward and my Gray are aspects of myself. So there's some connection between Wilde and myself that comes through these fictional go-betweens.

How are the characters manifestations of yourself?
I took Wilde's fraudulent claim seriously, in the sense that Hallward is the best part of myself, particularly in that he wants to clean up from drugs. Wooten is about one-third me. But I've modeled him not only on Wilde's fictional character but also on people I actually knew. This is a milieu I actually inhabited in the early '80s. I had an angry exchange with the audience member at one of my readings recently. He came up to me and said, "I very much enjoyed the reading, but I think it's very stylized. I can't believe the gay, drug-addicted aristocrat you described would really exist." And I went completely off my temper. I said, "How many gay, drug-addicted aristocrats have you hung around with? Well, I fucking have, and I modeled him on one of them."

Did you write gay sex through memory or imagination?
It's mostly imagination. I slept with a man a couple of times when I was seventeen or eighteen. But that was twenty years ago. I can remember it, though, as you tend to. Yeah, it's mostly imagination.

What else were you doing in 1981?
I was at Oxford, studying philosophy and politics, doing a lot of drugs, hanging around with a mixed gang of people, from Wooten's crowd to post-punk, woolly-hat-wearing anarchists. It was a very interesting time. Britain was undergoing a very chill patch: unemployment was mounting astronomically, there were race riots in the cities and so forth.

In Cock & Bull, you explored sexuality in a very Kafka-esque way: a man and woman suddently grow genitalia of the opposite sex. Generally, your books tend to be somewhat supernatural. Is Dorian your attempt to look at sex and its unintended consequences in a more realistic way?
Well, I don't know that what happened in New York gay circles of the '80s what I call "a conga line of buggery" is necessarily most people's idea of normal sex. Where is this normal sex that you allude to?

 

Dorian is published by Grove Atlantic.

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To read an excerpt, Click here.

 

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