Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying": Art, Life, and Imitation

Introduction: The Claim and Its Terms

In Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying, one character, Vivian, claims that life and nature imitate art far more than art imitates either life or nature. This is dubious to the extreme — so much so that it is easy to doubt whether Wilde himself believed it. In the following paper, I first take the claim at face value and give several reasons to believe it is false. Its excruciating implausibility suggests that a more charitable reading is in order, and I proceed toward one afterward. I propose that Wilde did not believe that life imitates art, and that he coyly gives us reasons to believe as much in The Decay of Lying itself — it is, after all, a treatise on lying.

The crucial terms in "life and nature imitate art…" are not easy to pin down, especially as they were used at the time Wilde was writing, and Wilde offers us little help in the text. Although we can glean the general outlines of each term, the specifics must be put aside. Wilde uses "life" to refer to human life — perhaps specifically the intentional human behaviors of Western Europeans, and in some cases perhaps only the behaviors of Western European "Society." He contrasts this with "nature," for which he suggests two possible meanings: either "natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture" (21) or "the collection of phenomena external to man" (21). Today, the contrast between what is natural and what is living is surely foreign and dubious, and — to my ears, at least — the contrast between what is natural and what is intentional human behavior is equally so. But the distinction between life and nature is of little importance here. We can take it that together, life and nature compose all that is not "man-made," including humans themselves.

"Art," finally, seems to refer to the artifacts of the familiar "high" arts — painting, poetry, and literature — as well as the "decorative" arts: upholstery, wood-carving, and perhaps carpentry. We can leave the scope of activities that generate art somewhat loose. What is crucial is, first, that the list of these activities is not radical — it does not include anything that the casual thinker would find completely surprising. Second, art is understood as the work of art, the artifact itself, not the well-lived life or an artist's interaction with an audience. Again, this is not a radical view.

With these terms fixed, we can elaborate Wilde's thesis and reasoning. We shall see that although it is true that a great deal of life imitates art, what Wilde failed to see is that every work of art imitates at least some part of a living thing — namely, its creator's "vision." Given that life, including artists' visions, has at least once been original, it shall not only be false that life imitates art far more than art imitates life; the reverse shall be true: art imitates life at all times, and life sometimes does something that is not an imitation of art.

Why Life Does Not Imitate Art

The kernel of Wilde's reasoning is captured in this passage:

Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and decorative work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle… (21–2)

Intuitively, perhaps, things are not so different in America today. We might put the point in nearly misanthropic terms: many people have too little imagination to do anything other than mimic their favorite one-dimensional characters on television. The use of catchphrases on television situation comedies provides a ready example — they are designed for the purpose of popular repetition, thus generating free advertisements for the show. If you have heard anyone yell "You're fired!" or ask "Can you hear me now?" without ever having seen The Apprentice or the cell-phone commercial featuring the second phrase, it is likely because you heard someone repeating one of these catchphrases. Choosing one's words is perhaps a quite plausible case in which life imitates art: many speakers repeat catchphrases they hear on television.

But even here, a little further reflection reveals the claim's myopia. It does not inspire much confidence even if we limit our focus to everyday American life. In a given day, the average person does a great deal of talking. Even if it is true that much of that talking repeats catchphrases from television or popular media, it is dubious that all of it will. People very often need to communicate information for which no popular expression would suffice. I must rely on my own wits to find a way to ask my brother whether he has heard a particular album or why our mother puts cheese in her pumpkin soup. There is simply no art available to imitate, and yet I find a way to ask my questions — and then my brother finds a way to answer. These are ordinary occurrences, but they would be extraordinary if Wilde were telling us the truth about art and life.

This suggests what I find to be a pervasive shortcoming in Wilde's account. It is somewhat appealing for a few cases, but it loses all its credibility when we attend to the finer details. As evidence to support his claim that life imitates art, Wilde suggests that his contemporaries adorned themselves so as to resemble then-recent art: "whenever one goes to a private view or an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream…the sweet maidenhood of the Golden Stair…" (32). But later in the essay, in support of his claim that art does not reflect a culture's era, he denies that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on medieval stained glass or in medieval stone and wood carving, metalwork, tapestries, or illuminated manuscripts (46).

Is this not evidence, then, that life does not imitate art? If the resemblance between figures in paintings and humans in 1880 is evidence for Wilde's thesis, then the absence of resemblance between figures in paintings and humans in the Middle Ages should count as evidence against that same thesis.

Indeed, for every piece of evidence in favor of the thesis that life imitates art, there are countless examples to the contrary. Take any painting and its ostensible subject — or better, take what would seem to be one of the best possible cases for Wilde: a painting of a half-rotten orange alongside an orange that, after the completion of the painting, has itself become half-rotten and is nearly visually indiscernible from its painted counterpart. Still, the painting is in two dimensions while the orange exists in at least three; the painted orange's colors do not change as the sun sets, while the natural orange's do; the natural orange rolls off the table in a stiff wind, attracts flies, and stinks of rot, while the painted orange consists of oil, smells of resin, and is valued at a thousand pounds.

There is, however, an even more complete refutation of Wilde's thesis: "life" includes the imagination on which artists base their works. We can illustrate the point with a simple account of mental representation. Suppose that when an artist conceives of a sculpture, she forms an image of it in her mind. As she works the clay, she seeks to make it resemble that image. When a truly skilled sculptor completes a work, her art is a very good likeness of what she imagined. The art she has created imitates what she has imagined. This account need not be precisely accurate; so long as it can be truly said that the artist's work imitates her conception, it will be true that works of art imitate life.

Furthermore, insofar as it is essential to a work of art that it reflects its creator's "vision," it will be essential to art that it imitate life. If it is constitutive of art that it imitate life, then there is no art that does not imitate life. And if that is so, it cannot be true that life imitates art more than art imitates life. For even if life always imitates art, the two will imitate each other equally in terms of percentages — each imitating the other 100% of the time. But if life ever imitates something other than art — nature, perhaps — or if it does something original, then art imitates life more than life imitates art.

Reading Wilde Charitably: Vivian Is Not Wilde

These objections are hardly insightful. It is difficult to believe that a man of Wilde's publicly declared genius would have failed to notice them. We are compelled, then, to consider the possibility that he held a more subtle view, or that his truly held view is somewhat elusive.

Wilde does not himself say that life imitates art more than art imitates life — he has a character say it. Moreover, that same character advocates lying as an artistic form, so it is plausible that not even everything Vivian says represents what Vivian believes. But more to the point, it is doubtful that Wilde believes what Vivian says. Vivian herself warns us against taking Shakespeare's characters to represent Shakespeare:

My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare's real views upon Art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals. (30)

The same warning would presumably apply to our interpretation of Wilde. We may then question whether Wilde's character represents Wilde's real view. The Decay of Lying is presumably a work of art — it seems fatuous to ask whether Cyril and Vivian ever actually had this conversation. The text is thus subject to the same standards that Vivian advocates within it. If it meets those standards, then it should exaggerate the truth of life; and if it exaggerates the truth, it may also exaggerate Wilde's own convictions, with the result that perhaps Wilde does not believe that life imitates art more often than art imitates life.

If, on the other hand, The Decay of Lying fails to meet Vivian's standards, it would still seem that Wilde's convictions regarding art are not Vivian's — for if they were, Wilde would have thought his own work poor, given its apparent imitation of life. "All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature" (54). If that were so, we should wonder why Wilde ever made the work public. It is dubious, therefore, that The Decay of Lying imitates life, and perhaps it bears no burden of truly reflecting Wilde's views on art and life. In either case, we have only weak reasons, if any, to believe that Wilde shares Vivian's ideas about aesthetics.

Taking some liberties, we can sharpen these claims. Consider the following proposition (a) as a work of art — an utterance made by Oscar Wilde:

(a) Life imitates art; art does not imitate life.

If the second clause of (a) is true, then (a) itself is not an imitation of life. If "life" includes Wilde and his beliefs, then (a) entails that Wilde does not believe (a). Conversely, if the first clause is to be believed, then it is only after (a) has been uttered that anyone living would believe it. We may therefore conclude that if Wilde does believe (a), this came to be so only after Wilde uttered it — that is, only after he wrote The Decay of Lying.

What would have been the point, then, of writing a work in which the thesis that life imitates art more than art imitates life is defended at length? The answer is to be found in Vivian's defense of lying: for its tragic beauty. Vivian tells us that "Art is not simple truth but complex beauty" (23). If this is Wilde's art, then we should not expect it to speak a simple truth; we should ask what is beautiful about it.

Conclusion

Oscar Wilde's claim that life and nature imitate art more often than art imitates life and nature is very difficult to believe. If it is literally incredible, then we should find some other way of understanding Wilde's point of view. I have argued, first, that the claim fails on its own terms: everyday speech, internal contradictions in Wilde's own evidence, and the essential role of the artist's vision all demonstrate that art imitates life at all times, while life only sometimes imitates art. I have argued, second, that we have good reason to doubt that Wilde himself held the view he places in Vivian's mouth — and that the self-referential structure of The Decay of Lying supports this reading.

What Wilde is asking us to do, I propose, is to consider the possibility of a world in which the claim is true — a world in which life and nature imitate art. Perhaps contemplating such a world is meant to show us that in it, each person would bear a creative burden for the benefit of those around them. And perhaps this, in fact, is not so different from our own world, even though we seldom choose to shoulder that burden.

References

Wilde, Oscar. Intentions. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004. 1–55. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings. New York: Pocket Books, 2005. 241–365. Print.