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My story is much too sad to be told Almost everything leaves me totally cold.
-Cole Porter
Believe it or not, there is still a secret left to be told about The Picture of Dorian Gray, a secret no less open, only less sensational than the scandalous passions all but named in the novel that all but exposed the secret of its author's own. Let's face it, the book is boring: for all the thrill of Dorian Gray, long stretches of the story are almost unbearably uninteresting. If the fanfare of illicit excitement generated in the novel and by the novel has mostly managed to keep this secret unspoken,' it has scarcely succeeded in keeping it unfelt. If the engrossing rumor of covert desires attached to Dorian Gray distracts us for a while from our boredom with the novel, it is finally no more to be denied than the more pressing urges that everyone knows nothing can stop.
Such lapses of interest in the novel reflect lapses of interest in the novel: the ennui it induces mirrors the ennui it describes; the tedium of the reader mimics the tedium that prevails in the "poisonous book" she reads. One difference, though, distinguishes the boredom of Dorian Gray's readers, from the boredom of its characters: as often as ours goes without saying, theirs is a matter deemed worthy of remark; if boredom with the novel is rarely inclined to speak its name, the boredom within it never loses its voice. What another expert in ennui calls "too sad to be told" is a chronic complaint in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Too languid to compete for the novel's center stage with more exciting events and more vehement emotions, the sideline murmurs of boredom are nonetheless never out of earshot: "It is such a bore putting on one's dress clothes;"2 "the letters. . . bored him" (p. 126); "He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her" (p. 140); "[T]he only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life" (p. 79); "My friends were bored. I was bored" (p. 69); "They have become . . . tedious" (p. 80); "It is...