ENGA10H3

LECTURE #1

- Literature registers things that go unrecorded.

- Things that are not facts.

● The 20th Century was a time where there was a belief that there would be many
answers.
● Shift from religion as a dominant discourse to science (major theme)
● Religion and the Age of Faith was more so eclipsed than replaced by science.
● Science became more dominant than religion in explaining things.
● No more monolith of christianity
● Many poets often describe the 19th century as the Age of anxiety (the shift of faith to
science, the individual moves into the space between religion and science which is
anxiousness because you are not sure if there is an all-being god, but you are also not
sure than science can explain everything
● 19th to 20th century: loss of transcendence. There is a certainty that transcends
everyday matters. You can make mistakes, there is something omniscient and
omnipotent that keeps score
○ In a religious paradigm this is the relationship between the individual soul and an
omnipotent god.
● In the move from the age of faith to the age of science, individuals find themselves in the
age of anxiety looking for certitude because there was that loss of a guaranteed
transcendental certitude and replaced by scientific discourse.
● There is a lot more knowledge in the age of science, but in the age of faith it didn't matter
because everything was up to god, we don't know everything and we aren’t meant to
understand everything
● In the faith age, we tend to have a soul in relation to an omniscient power. When you
lose the connection of having a transcendent power, the soul isn't very useful all of a
sudden, because first it was trying to keep you in sync with something beyond this world.
○ Without this or without acknowledging this power, the soul somewhat loses its
purpose . Doesn’t have a function. Translates into ‘self’.
● The self is a more practical secular way of organising your experiences.
● Issues of self improvement. Self doubt. Self is a very hyphenated word because self is a
seeking construct. Nothing except what you can make so. No presumption of the
omniscient who has already worked out the pattern. If you don’t find a way to make it
happen, nothing is happening.
● Some ways this increases anxiety, in other ways it can be exhilarating. The cult of
individualism tends to celebrate the positive side of self which is self determination
● The self puts a lot of emphasis on being individualistic to the extent it obscures the
extent to which we are interrelated and connected.
● We can start to either ignore or deny that what we do affects others. (at the heart of
dorian grey)
● The plot of dorian grey is a vehicle for exploring other deeper issues.
● Ideas of hedonism (form lord henry)
● This devolves into the vampiric relationship from self to other - either use others for
pleasure or get used for pleasure. Everyone tries to get what they can. Not cynical, just
practical
●
● We are very much in a youth culture. Anti wrinkle cream. Anti ageing products.
● implications that you can pause or reverse age
● This leads us to a primary source of anxiety in the 21st century - we don't have a way of
dealing with mortality
● In the age of faith, it's just that this is one form of us, when we die we go somewhere. Or
something spiritual. That was a way to organise our relationship with mortality. No matter
how much science, science fact is that no one is immortal. Science can help you stay
healthy and live long but cannot eliminate mortality.
● You are left with no clear idea of what it all means when you die.
● Dorian Grey would “give his soul” to make sure that his portrait would age instead of him.
● Lord Henry is not a conventional type of devil. He is devil-like. Modern devil. He is a
tempter. But also, he is not trying to trick Dorian grey, but truly believes what he says.
● Dorian Gray’s panic and anxiety causes him to make a deal with the devil and essentially
give up a life in which you try to figure out your relationship with and to others as well as
to your own mortality. How the fact that you will die affects the way you choose to live
● The painting starts to get ugly when Dorian Gray starts to pursue pleasure.
○ At people’s expense.
● What do we do with our soul? Confessions dn forgiveness make sense in the age of faith
because you feel accountable to someone bigger than you but that's all gone when you
don't believe in a higher power that absolves all of your sins.
○ That is something Dorian gray didn’t have access to until the very end but even
then he cant bring himself to confess and ask for forgiveness. He doesn’t feel the
effects of how his treatments have affected others, he is just tormented by the
painting getting uglier.

● He used and discards Sibyl Vane and then she takes her own life
○ At first he feels and makes up his mind to go apologise but then lord henry
comes over and tells dorian that shes dead
○ This puts Dorian in an uncomfortable position because now he cannot easily
undo what he did.
○ So he allowed lord henry to persuade him that it didnt matter that sybil vane died
and he didn't kill her and therefore it doesn't matter.
○ Nothing to think about or worry about
○ Not necessarily cynical but directionless and hopeless of the destruction dorian
gray is perpetuating
● To get a better understanding of yourself, you look at how others perceive you.
○ But dorian grey locks up the portrait in the attic and will not let anyone see it
○ This cuts him off from any capacity to build compassion, empathy or sympathy
 ○ These emotions can only be generated by hurting someone but more so being
hurt and reflecting on it. Or just decide that you won't be the victim but the doer
■ Vampiric
■ Eat or be eaten (lord henry either you use people or people will use you)
● In a moment of panic, Dorian Gray sells his soul for eternal youth. The portrait in the attic
somewhat corresponds with facebook
● Written in 1893- considered light at the time (wasn’t like a shakespearean tragedy or
anything)
○ But it has aged beautifully especially into pop culture
● Crisis in the 20th century in terms of value (arguments of digital pessimists)
● New media doesn't have a transcendent source at which we all agree. All sorts of
discourse.
● On facebook we post pictures and edit/engineer them ina way to look like a modern
portrait
● Tinder and Dorian Gray; idea of catfishing
○ T.S. Elliot, “We prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet”
● A leading cause of depression is hiding behind a mask, a facade
○ The facade gets so attenuated and so disconnected that people cant reach in to
help you and you cant reach out and ask for help
○ “The Bell Jar”
○ Dorian Gray arrives at that, all he has sought is sensation and he he has no idea
who he is beyond that or who others are beyond being a source of sensations
○ There are many ways to seek sensation but virtual popularity (look at the amount
of celebrities in rehab). Maybe that kind of popularity creates loneliness

● We are in a world where sensation is substituted for significance.

● Innumerable forms of addiction replace stability once sought for in rituals and traditions.
○ This is a consequence of the shift form the age of faith to science
○ We are endlessly trying to find a thing to make the self feel complete but it is like
a bucket with a whole in it.
○ Vampiric practice and feeling
○ The difference between addiction and ritual is:
○ Ritual is doing something over and over again to get a better understanding of
yourself whereas addiction is doing something over and over again to avoid
understanding yourself

● Dorian Gray gets addicted to people; he uses them up so he doesn’t have to know who
he is.
○ It doesn't help him and he uses them more and more as if they were heroin.
○ He needs more and more and feels less and less.
○ Spiralling down in addiction.
● A ritual is more of a circle of life; things dying and getting reborn. Some idea of yourself
gets damaged, but with the ritual, phoenix-like, you rise out of the ashes
○ If you are struggling in real life and your rituals are intact, some people get out of
it stronger

● Funerals are for people the dead person has left behind
○ Dorian Gray didn’t attend Sibyl vanes funeral so he lost the opportunity to partake
in a ritual that would leave him being better than before.
● Even if you don’t know a person really well, you still attend their funeral, to make
someone else who is more devastated feel better
○ With the cult of individualism you would not be very sympathetic with the death
nor would you attend the funeral or care about the others there or feel any sort of
responsibility towards them
○ “What's in it for me?”
○ Some things can't be monetised, qualified or quantified or profited.
○ These days money is the only value system

● Does this thing generate profit? That’s the only thing that matters
○ But Vincent Van Gogh didn't sell any of his paintings. (Except for 1: sold for 10$
to a woman who wanted to patch up the ceiling of her chicken coop)
● But money isn’t always a good indicator of value because it doesn’t correspond to the
essence of anything.
○ What something is worth in terms of money is not necessarily what its worth in
terms of intrinsic constitutive structure
○ “You can’t buy love” and the inverse of that “Love won’t pay the rent’.

● Money acts like it is equivalent of the actual value of whatever it's attached to but there's
no real relationship
○ E.g you get a C+ for a grade. You get it, but that is not who you are. You are not
a C+. It is just a grading that gets put on your very socially constructed idea of
importance GPA. Reflects 0 of what you know or feel or express.
● Answers have less and less credibility in a more and more subjective world
● Architects of the 20th century (architects of modernity)
○ All of them talk about how the unknown influences the known
○ What you know and what you see is actually the facade of something else behind
it.
■ Darwin
■ Marx
■ Freud
 ■ Nietzche

● We use nature as a resource and not a source of us; leads to pollution, global warming
● commodities= sensation but it has no intrinsic value and just becomes waste
● Commodities (sensations) are consumed at a ferocious rate, not because we need all of
these things but consuming it makes the self feel more complete.
● The object of your desire is not what you want but tis what makes you want and wheny
ou get what you want, you don't want it anymore you want something else
● Nothing you buy satisfies you because there is so much more to consume
● Some sort of psychological addiction

● In the same way you can use the law to do bad things, e.g slavery, Dorian Gray uses the
law of attraction to diminish and destroy others in a way that never seems to touch him.
● Freud and the conscious and the unconscious mind. He suggested the unconscious was
so unacknowledged and in a way more powerful than the conscious mind.
○ Dorian gray was written 7 years before Freud wrote about this but it essentially
predicts Freud
○ Dorian’s portrait is his unconscious mind.
○ While you try to lock up your subconscious in your attic, it will eventually get so
full and really overwhelm you and burden you because now you don’t even
understand your own behaviour.
● Nietzche in his work “God is Dead”
○ God is dead, we have killed him, what fools we are
○ Age of faith to science
○ Chastising humanity for its incredible arrogance in this shift
○ Religion helps us be moral, science helps us be legal

● Intimacy is is much sought after in our time but it's also much feared and most of the
time we don’t even realise how much we fear this intimacy that we feel we want because
it's much easier to want intimacy than experience it because intimacy is indistinguishable
from vulnerability.

● In a way Dorian, by hiding his portrait is hiding his soul

● Most people hide their soul and wear masks
● When we interact with people its two masks interacting with each other
● In order to have true intimacy one must take off the mask.
○ Both people have to take off the mask because if only one does youre going to
be in love with them and they will be indifferent to you
● This example can be seen in sibyl vane who opened herself up to dorian but he
preserved it from her. He only wanted her mask. Or he thought her mask is her soul
● If you aren't interested in the securities of another person, you're not interested in them
at all. Intimacy is a shared vulnerability.
 ● But we have this vampiric relationship of our self to others and it's hard to have intimacy
so we keep ourselves locked up.
● The cycle of addiction begins with emotional pain and then a craving for relief and then
you get more preoccupied with that relief. However that relief just becomes a distraction
and then numbness. Because we aren't actually dealing with the source of our pain,
there are negative consequences. More pain from lower self esteem from addictive
behaviours you are engaging in
● Short term relief is an illusion and when it fades, we have double the emotional pain.
● You would move toward a ritual from emotional pain and it would support you through
navigating the source of your pain rather than being a distraction.

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DOVER BEACH BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

● Based in Dover Beach, England

● Poem is about dover beach but more so what the poet felt when he was there
○ Metaphors, allegory, illusion
● He feels alienated, he feels there is a gulf, a gap between what he needs and what he
wants.
● He turns to her more in desperation than companionship as his depression mounts in
him
○ “Ah love, let us be true to one another”
○ Lets be real and get vulnerable with each other, lets take off our masks. Nothing
out there is real. We live, we die. Nothing is certain. Lets make sure we love each
other. At least that will be certain.
○ No more exploring and engaging in loving a person but you are dependent in the
regard that you ask them to maintain toward you. Kind of like a photograph
○ Begins with the “sea of faith”
○ Matthew Arnold is in an age of anxiety.
○ He used to think he was in the age of faith anymore, but not anymore (strewn
things on the beach”
○ Age of faith is a retreating wave that is not coming back.
○ Loss of transcendental certitude