Did I rewrite a classic?
No. I used a classic to practice writing about the present.
Many of us forget how fiction is often a response to truths one cannot voice out loud without dire consequences. Oscar Wilde is an author who faced those consequences. If one reads beneath the surface while referencing the history of that time, you can see what he is also writing about in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In Wilde’s book, Dorian’s beauty gets idolized early in the novel, describing him as “made of ivory and gold” whose mere smile (“the curve of your lips”) alters reality itself… ::read, reshaping the past/any crimes/etc.::
An anonymous admirer writes something similar in a letter to Dorian who is much older in the novel then and is looking at his corrupted youth with different eyes. He sees his beauty as the thing that inspired his moral decay, and he smashes a mirror that reflects this beauty.
I am Indian, and you try to criticize anything, people will bring up sanskar (values), culture, and scripture. We will treat each other and the country horribly, but we cannot say that using the exact words because India is pretty and prosperous. The nationalistic pride (no duties) overrides ethics, trapping us in the seductive influence of a past none of us was alive to see.
It makes me angry when the older generation spews so much vitriol towards the younger generation for trying to move towards the possibility of a future. The fixation on the beauty of the Indian identity and the instinct to not embarrass the country because look at India’s rich, rich past seems…reductive. We don’t like to talk about it, but I wish they saw the past for what it was in its entirety and not just the trade and artistic prosperity.
We are Indians; an amalgamation of many small kingdoms that unified under different empires and then got colonized. Every version of history people remember tells us homogenization is a tool for erasure. It is so extremely un-Indian and yet, here we are.
Fiction will do this to you… allow you to express yourself without talking up to or down to people. You can go blah-blah-blah, or you can simply say something like:
“I saw the stain of history and painted over it with mythology.”
-Binati Sheth
It is the same thing.
If you’ve ever wondered how writers learn to express what you feel in your heart and your head, this is how we learn. We overthink. We overwrite. We delete most of it. We read something. We feel. We look around us. We pick up our pen. We write. We set it free.
Try that.
No writer’s block will touch you if you stay in touch with the world you live in, and the worlds preserved in the pages of many books.
-Binati Sheth
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