In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes, "To reveal art and to conceal the artist is art's aim" (Wilde 377). But in the novel the fatal picture is revealed as an independent and autonomous objet d'art only when both its creator and its model are dead. The violence that separates art from the artist indicates a strain and hostility in their relationship. "Art's aim" suddenly sounds like an implicit personification that credits "art" with scheming against the artist, perhaps to the point of murder.
The schism between the (textual) author and the (actual) writer is evident already in the eighteenth century, when the rise of authorship as a profession assumes as its "occasional metaphor ... the writer's death" (Rosenthal 30). But it is in the nineteenth century, precisely when romanticism, with its cult of the genius on the one hand, and copyright laws, with their definition of intellectual property on the other, emphasize the individual nature of creativity, that "writing (becomes) linked to ... the sacrifice of life" (Foucault 198). The paradox whereby artistic creation, supposedly predicated on individual talent, at the same time demands "the death of the self" (Boym 12) indicates a split between two concepts of subjectivity:
The physical subject, rooted in the limited and mortal body, and the textual subject, infinitely reproducible and potentially immortal. As the text is born, argues Sartre, the umbilical cord linking it to the writer is decisively cut: "We hope that our books remain in the air all by themselves and that their words, instead of pointing backwards toward the one who has designed them, will be toboggans, forgotten, unnoticed, and solitary, which will hurl the reader into the midst of a universe where there are no witnesses" (Sartre 158).
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