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Reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that performs Foucault’s idea of discursive formation, this essay explores various formal aspects of discursive formation as figured by the novel’s statements, most notably the highly stylized epigrams. Words in the novel, I argue, operate at the level of the surface, converging from different disciplines to give shape to Dorian Gray, who with his two faces emerges as a de-subjectified “type” of the new discourse of Hedonism. At the site of such occurrence, we come to recognize a new form of knowledge appearing between the apparent “faces” of the novel: an unarticulated but already understood epistemology of homosexuality whose silence gives form to the inherent paradox between expression and repression—the “already-said” and the “never-said”—in discourse. Wilde’s novel presents homosexuality as a residual, yet potentially subversive, form of knowledge emerging from the fissures between contending ideas of art and morality. Dorian’s mysterious absence hiding unspeakable acts of perversion and his prominent presence as the new artist type both work to epitomize this dynamic process of discursive formation. With new aestheticism forming the other side of homoeroticism, Wilde’s novel thus stages the generation and representation of power through a network of words and tactics that construct discourse—i.e., Foucauldian power which resides in the knowledge produced by discursive practices. As this essay concludes, The Picture of Dorian Gray does not just refer to art as the figure for discourse with its innately subversive power; it also performs power through the particular form of art that is the novel. The self-reflexivity of the novel allows us to read it as a narrative about discursive formation and to experience it as a singular event in which a new discourse of art and life occurs to turn the course of history.
