The Decay of Lying: Oscar Wilde

The Decay of Lying

Oscar Wilde's essay “The Decay of Lying” should not be seen as a broad manifesto on the purpose and nature of art; it simply does not cover the full spectrum of his philosophy of artistic expression. However, Wilde does make key statements as to his own beliefs; statements that can be viewed as representative of the aesthetic movement of late nineteenth-century Britain (Pease, 2004).

The first element that may strike the reader of “The Decay of Lying” is its form. The essay is written as a Socratic dialogue, which immediately invokes one of the key philosophical influences on Wilde's thought, Plato. Not only has Wilde chosen Plato's favourite form for his essay, but he has drawn heavily on Platonic thought for its substance. For instance, Wilde's rejection of realism in art is essentially the same as Plato's (see book X of “The Republic”). Furthermore, Wilde's doctrine of “The Decay of Lying” is built on the premise of the pursuit of the ideal as the ultimate purpose of life. This too, is a Platonic idea in origin. The means by which this pursuit is conducted, however, is where the two thinker's perspectives sharply diverge. Plato rejected art as a destructive force that moves both the subject and the observer further from the ideal and, therefore, from truth. In this sense Plato had tied art intrinsically to his idea of its didactic function: ethics—or the lack there of. Wilde, on the other hand, argues that art is, in fact, the only means by which people can pursue the ideal.

It can be argued that this combination of the pursuit of the ideal and the use of art for this pursuit is the central idea of “The Decay of Lying”. In “The Decay of Lying”, Wilde's Vivian bemoans the state of literature, whose writers rely on rationalism, or a “morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling” (924), leading to a kind of sterile realism. This realism is a “complete failure,”(943); people are too concerned with the matter and forms of modernity to look at them with anything but a misguided subjectivity. Instead the artist must draw on the forms and themes of the past, and from those of the imagination, and strive to create something ideal and, as such, beautiful.

This, however, does not mean that Wilde rejects subjectivity completely. In fact, it can be argued that in a sense he embraces it, absolutely. Wilde constructs an artistic vision whereby the artist relies not on the kind of subjectivity of the empiricists, who claim to be able to perceive the world and then create an objective conception of it. Instead, Wilde puts forward a kind of reverse subjectivity whereby the viewer projects his own ideals upon the observable world and in so doing creates the nature he is observing. Of nature, which is a very broad conception for Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” and can be considered to mean the whole observable world, Vivian says, “People only discover in her what they bring to her” (pp928). Whether this means that the pursuit of the ideal through art is simply “art for art's sake,” based on an individualistic and decadent modus operandi, or if it is, in fact, a means by which a more beautiful and fulfilling cultural reality can be created, is not made clear by Wilde, and is a matter on which scholarship is divided (Pease, 2004, pp100). However, it can be argued that Wilde's ideals are ideals precisely because they transcend the subjective conditions of the Victorian world, and, if nature truly does imitate art, could only serve to better, or at the very least beautify, those conditions.