영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 녹색 카네이션
로버트 히첸스의 《녹색 카네이션》은 1894년 익명으로 처음 출판된 소설이다. 이 재치 넘치는 풍자 작품은 오스카 와일드와 로드 알프레드 더글러스를 얇은 베일로 가린 초상을 통해 탐미주의 운동을 정면으로 겨냥한다. 런던의 만찬 자리와 시골 저택을 배경으로, 등장인물들은 현란한 대화와 세심하게 연출된 몸짓으로 자연보다 인위적인 것의 우월함을 역설한다. 상징적인 녹색 카네이션이 무엇을 의미하는지 깨달으며 불안을 느끼기 시작한 젊은 과부는 매력과 원칙 사이에서 선택을 강요받는다. 와일드의 추문적인 재판 이후 잠시 출판이 중단되었던 이 소설은, 예술적 개인주의와 허식에 대한 날카로운 비평으로 지금도 여전히 빛을 발한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens
In 1894, someone who knew Oscar Wilde far too well decided to write him down.
The result was The Green Carnation — published without an author's name, for reasons that would have been immediately obvious to anyone in London society who read it. Robert Hichens, having spent enough time in Wilde's luminous, suffocating orbit, produced a portrait so precise it barely qualified as fiction. His Wilde surrogate holds court at dinner parties with the unhurried confidence of a man who considers conversation a higher art form than anything hanging in the Royal Academy. His Douglas surrogate glitters beside him, beautiful and decorative as an expensive vase, and about as interested in self-examination.
The green carnation — dyed, artificial, worn as a badge of superiority over the merely natural — says everything the novel needs to say before a single page is turned. These are men who have elevated affectation to philosophy, who find sincerity gauche and nature insufficiently interesting. They are, in their own estimation, magnificent.
It takes a young widow with clearer eyes than most to see what the flower actually represents, and to feel the chill of it.
Hichens writes with a scalpel disguised as a dinner fork — every glittering epigram a cut, every languid pose an exhibit. The Green Carnation endures not merely as a literary curiosity or a footnote to Wilde's tragedy, but as a genuinely sharp inquiry into what happens when a pose becomes a prison, and when the most artificial thing in the room turns out to be the man wearing it.
Among the contents
He slipped a green carnation into his evening coat, fixed it in its place with a pin, and looked at himself in the glass, the long glass that stood near the window of his London bedroom. The summer evening was so bright that he could see his double clearly, even though it was just upon seven o'clock. There he stood in his favourite and most characteristic attitude, with his left knee slightly bent, and his arms hanging at his sides, gazing, as a woman gazes at herself before she starts for a party. The low and continuous murmur of Piccadilly, like the murmur of a flowing tide on a smooth beach, stole to his ears monotonously, and inclined him insensibly to a certain thoughtfulness. Floating through the curtained window the soft lemon light sparkled on the silver backs of the brushes that lay on the toilet-table, on the dressing-gown of spun silk that hung from a hook behind the door, on the great mass of gloire de Dijon roses, that dreamed in an ivory-white bowl set on the writing-table of ruddy-brown wood.
