THE TRUE/FALSE DEATE OVER ART: OSAR WILDE’S RIDER IN
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL)A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International JournalVol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec)http://www.rjelal.comRESEARCH ARTICLETHE TRUE/FALSE DEBATE OVER ART: OSCAR WILDE’S RIDER INTHE DECAY OF LYINGDr SUKRITI GHOSALPrincipalMUC Women’s College, BurdwanABSTRACTThe truth-value of art, questioned since the time of Plato, was in need offurther defence in the Victorian era when, helpless before the mounting pressure ofscience and pragmatism, many artists preferred the naturalistic style ofrepresentation in order to prove that their creation was not false. But as aninsightful critic Oscar Wilde saw that the more art would incline to reality to chasethe will-o’-the-wisp of truth, the more it would get degraded as art. The earlierapologists of art committed the mistake of vindicating the truth value of somethingwhich, as a product of the imagination, cannot be true in the sense scientifictheorems are true. Wilde therefore excogitates a new strategy for defending artagainst the charge of falsehood. He admits that as a product of the imagination artis a form of lying. But then he goes into the offensive and instead of condemning artfor the alleged absence of truth, he mourns the decay of this unique mode of lying –that is, the attenuation of the power of the imagination. ‘The Decay of Lying’ is thusa bulwark of romantic aesthetics and is in line with Poetics, An Apo1ogy for Poetry,and A Defence of Poetry.Key Words: truth, art, imagination, aesthetics KY PUBLICATIONSThe eminent French novelist Emile Zola wasthe subject of a heated literary debate in theeighties of the nineteenth century. The publicationof the English translation of Nana in 1884 stirred upa hornets’ nest. The Pall Mall Gazette describedZola’s works as ‘fit for swine’ (Frierson 540). AndrewLang found Zola’s interpretation of life utterlydistorted as its ideal was not beauty but sordidreality (Decker 847). Zola was faulted principally on1account of his naturalism. Zola, happily, had hissolicitors, for Vernon Lee and Robert Buchanan roseto his defence. In A Look Around Literature (1887)Buchanan put Zola in the same bracket withSchopenhauer and extolled his ‘purer sense of thebeauty of moral goodness’ (qtd. in Decker 845).58When this debate over naturalism was still in the air,in a pungently critical review Alexander Galt Rossfound fault with Wilde’s knowledge of naturalhistory in his story ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’.This provoked Wilde to write ‘The Decay of Lying’(1889) in order to give his valued opinion on theplace of fact in art as well as on how to combat thecharge of falsehood against a work of imagination.The essay has been written in the form of aconversation between Cyril and Vivian in which thelatter reads out from a self-written essay entitled‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’. In this essay Wilde’smouthpiece Vivian salutes poets for being ‘fine’liars: ‘The only form of lying that is absolutelybeyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and theDr SUKRITI GHOSAL
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL)A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International JournalVol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec)http://www.rjelal.comhighest development of this is Lying in Art’ (PE264). Ignoring Sidney who considered the poet as‘the least liar’ under the sun (28), Vivian hails thepoet as the most consummate liar of the world andsets out to clear up the prejudice that art epitomizestruth. He argues that art, inasmuch as it is a productof the imagination, needs no documentation; it isself-evidential. Vivian faults the realists who ‘find lifecrude and leave it raw’ (PE 245), that is, withouttrying to aestheticize it with the touch of theimagination. Their unhealthy obsession with factsbreeds novels ‘which are so life-like that no one canpossibly believe in their probability’ (PE 244). Whathe means is that the more art inclines to reality tochase the will-o’-the-wisp of truth, the more it getsdegraded as art. For, after all, it is the strength ofthe imagination that ultimately accounts for theageless appeal of a work of art, its truth. The pointhas been neatly summed up in an epigram thatWilde included in ‘A Few Maxims for the Instructionof the Over-Educated’ (1894): ‘The English arealways degrading truths into facts. When a truthbecomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value’ (CW1205).Incidentally, naturalism had become such acraze in Victorian England that during theperformance of Andrew Halliday’s The Great City in1867 a real hansom cab was driven across the stage(Booth 37). Many contemporary artists agreed withW. B. Donne that in order to touch the heart of thereaders one needs ‘not the imaginatively true, butthe physically real’ (qtd in Booth 36). This wasunacceptable to Wilde who held that conceding tothe demands of factuality would be a kind ofstooping to conquer the heart of the sceptical andthe unimaginative. In order to vindicate his standWilde refers to the human psychology involvingconviction: ‘Man can believe the impossible, but2man can never believe the improbable’ (PE 263). Nowonder that Wilde’s spokesman Vivian imputes thesterility and ‘commonplace character’ ofcontemporary literature to the apotheosis of factand consequent attenuation of the imaginationwhich he purposefully phrases as ‘the decay oflying’.With a view to contesting naturalisticworship of facts and figures in a work of fancy,59Wilde’s persona Vivian proceeds to redefine therelationship between life and art. He first tries toestablish how art gradually sinks into atrophy due tothe preponderance of fact over fancy or thesubstitution of ‘an imitative for a creative medium’(PE 251). Making a survey of the evolution of thetheatre he finds that it is a journey towards realism,for characters in contemporary plays ‘talk on thestage exactly as they would talk off it’ (PE 251).Admittedly, Wilde here criticizes the contemporarytheatre for confusing the conditions of art withthose of life, for failing to maintain the distinctionbetween life and art. Since art is generally held to bean imitation of life, in order to discard naturalism,Vivian proceeds to interrogate the mimetic theory ofart. He dismisses Hamlet’s famous phrase about artreflecting life as an ‘unfortunate aphorism’ whichHamlet deliberately uses ‘to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters’(PE 254). This is ingenious but somewhatbewildering, for Wilde not merely gives a newinterpretation of the insanity of the Prince ofDenmark but apparently throws his gauntlet at Platoand Aristotle who have stressed the mimetic qualityof art. How Wilde wants to re-formulate the relationof art and life will be clear if one refers to his wordsin a letter to More Adey written in 1896: ‘Art is not amirror, but a crystal. It creates its own shapes andforms’ (LOW 415). Understandably, Wilde refuses tohave any truce with naturalistic obsession with factswhich impoverishes the imagination and makespoetic imitation aesthetically very poor. This is alsoclear from his appraisal of the difference betweenZola and Balzac, a ‘difference betweenunimaginative realism and imaginative reality’ (PE248). Whereas Zola goes to life for his personages,Balzac is capable of transfiguring facts into truths:Balzac ‘created life, he did not copy it’ (PE 248).Evidently, Wilde is strongly opposed to anyverisimilitudinal representation of life in art, which isthe dream of the votaries of naturalism. Whatdistinguishes creative reproduction (crystal-image)from photographic representation (mirror-image) isthat the former is inspired by ‘imaginativesympathy’. Imagination, to borrow Wilde’s words, is‘the quality that enables one to see things andpeople in their real as in their ideal relations’ (SLDr SUKRITI GHOSAL
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL)A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International JournalVol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec)http://www.rjelal.com236). Its force enables the artist to transcend3factual, temporal and moral allegiances. This clearlyexplains why Oscar Wilde in his essay ‘The Critic asArtist’ un-equivocally states that art may certainlyhave ‘some resemblance’ to the world but part of itscharm really consists in ‘the rejection ofresemblance’ (PE 310). Taking a stand diametricallyopposite to that of the naturalists, Oscar Wilderejects lifelikeness because, art is, strictly speaking, are-creation of reality, mimetic in outline butimaginative in essence.But is it not a fact that a realistic work is farmore saturated with truth than a work of pureimagination? Wilde does not think so, for he is thelast person to synonymize fact with truth. Even in‘The Truth of Masks’ where he pleads forarchaeological accuracy of costume and scenery inthe staging of a play, he categorically says that theaesthetic value of plays ‘does not, in the slightestdegree, depend upon their facts, but on their Truth,and Truth is independent of facts always, inventingor selecting them at pleasure’ (PE 353). Viviantherefore claims that the embodiment of thezeitgeist in a non-naturalistic art is worthier andthan its reflection in a realistic work. He argues thatthe highest art ‘is not symbolic of any age’: ‘Themore abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more itreveals to us the temper of its age’(PE 261).Whereas others demand art to be a reflection, Wildewants it to be an abstraction. His contention is thatsince art is an act of imaginative creation, a form oflying, the less mimetic it is, the more ideally it wouldepitomize the spirit of the age. Medieval paintingand contemporary Japanese art, according to Vivian,illustrate this highest form of abstract art. Bycontrast, contemporary English painting is trash, forit is, according to Vivian/Wilde, predominantly a4photographic representation of life. It is inferior ascreation because here painters see an object notwith their own eyes but with the eyes of the public.In other words, as artists they are not loyal to theirown vision; rather they betray it. Elsewhere in theessay Vivian criticizes such modernity of form asvulgar, since here ‘the common livery of the age’ ismistaken for ‘the vesture of the Muses’ (PE 249).In a letter dated January 1889, Wildeconfides to Pollock that his ‘new views on art’ have60been expressed in a form unintelligible to the public(LOW 236). The unintelligibility mentioned here maybe due to the quixotic phrasing intended more toshock than to win the reader’s conviction. Anyonewho labours to dig beneath the surface woulddiscover that the essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ is reallya bulwark of romantic aesthetics and is in line withPoetics, Sidney’s An Apo1ogy for Poetry, andShelley’s A Defence of Poetry. While Plato impugnedpoetry principally on philosophical grounds, thenineteenth-century positivists denounced it ed literature as ‘the disease of the age’because ‘Ledgers do not keep well in rhyme’ (qtd. inAbrams 302). Bentham like Plato held that all poetryis misrepresentation, for in the utilitarian view anyform of language except the logical is distortion.Thus poetry and truth were posited in oppositionalrelationship.Whenever the alarming growth of scienceand pragmatism threatens to clip an Angel’s wingsor unweave a rainbow, the votaries of art feelimpelled to vindicate the worth of their pursuit. Itwas Aristotle who first defended poetry againstPlatonic charge of misrepresentation with his theoryof mimetic idealization. Sidney in the sixteenthcentury found the charge of falsehood untenablebecause nothing is affirmed here: ‘Now, for thepoet, he nothing affirms, therefore never lieth’ (28).The phrase ‘science of feelings’, used byWordsworth in the Note to his poem ‘The Thorn’,seems to an attempt to update the terminology.Keats’ vindication of the imagination in his letter toBenjamin Bailey (22 November 1817) is confidentenough: ‘what the Imagination seizes as Beautymust be truth– whether it existed before or not’(Sharrock 176). But it is no argument but anutterance hardly plausible to people who do notshare Keats’ conviction. Subsequently, I. A. Richardswould defend poetry by making its language valuefree. According to him, poetic statements, evenwhen ‘frankly false, this is no defect their truth,when they are true, is no merit’ (PLC 215). M. H.Abrams rightly says that had these theorists given‘truth’ to science and ‘adopted a different term tocharacterize poetry’, the dispute could have beenDr SUKRITI GHOSAL
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL)A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International JournalVol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec)http://www.rjelal.comresolved (312). However, the term was too charmingand prestigious to be dispensed with.Here Oscar Wilde stands unique. He knowsfor certain that to call poetry true or to describe it asa semblance of truth – as a product of theimagination it is neither – is to underpin theargument of his antagonists. He finds that while theromantic reasoning about the value of poetry is just,its premise is vulnerable and as such the conclusiondrawn is apparently indefensible. Far from being avates an artist is nothing better than a liar: ‘a skilful,ingenious, pleasant, or even salutary liar, perhaps,but still a liar’ (Collingwood 286). With a deep criticalinsight Wilde diagnoses the root of the problem. Aspoetry is a product of the imagination, strictlyspeaking, it cannot be true in the sense scientifictheorems are true. Reality-fixation of the naturalistkind actually strengthens the charge that poets areliars. Or else why should they be so shy of valorizingthe imagination? As a theorist Wilde, therefore, triesto score over the misomousoi by going into theoffensive. Without making any attempt to reconcilewhat Poe calls ‘the obstinate oils and waters ofPoetry and Truth’ (Edel 233), he strategically stepsinto the philistine shoe to cleverly draw his ownconclusion. Without showing any hesitation to call aspade a spade, he admits that poets who bank uponthe wealth of the imagination are certainly ‘liars’.For, after all, what is represented in poetry is notverifiable. But instead of condemning poets onaccount of this, he salutes them for their non-factualrepresentation, and also mourns that incontemporary naturalistic literature this uniquemode of lying is on the ebb. He agrees with Platothat poetry is a mere copy and exclaims that it is nota creation. He finds fault with contemporarynovelists for presenting ‘dull facts under the guise offiction’ (PE 243), for their failure to bank on theimagination to move beyond the real. His cleverargument is that it is wrong to ascribe truth-value topoetry, for poetry creates a heterocosm where theunreal conjured up by the imagination shines with asmuch brightness as truth in the real world. As all artis essentially an imaginative reconstruction of life,the ‘decay of lying’, manifest in morbid factorientation of literature, is bound to enfeeble art.Regrettably enough, the critics of Wilde mystified by61his highly complex idiolect, have failed to place thearticle in the proper critical perspective. ‘The Decayof Lying’, thus, is not an exercise in criticalbrinkmanship. It is actually a highly serious treatisein which Wilde is out to deviously defend art, the5science of lying, from the attacks of thoseinsensitive Gradgrinds who, like Bitzer in Dickens’Hard Times, would define ‘heart’ not as a centre ofemotions but merely as an anatomical organ forpumping and circulating blood.Notes1. Naturalism is the crudest form of realism thatexpects an artist to depict life ‘with all theprecision and inclusive detail of the biologicalscientist (Dutton 59). For Wilde naturalism is adisease of vision as well as of representation.Servile adherence to fact, Wilde believes,results inevitably in naturalistic pidginization ofart.2. Cf. ‘A likely impossibility is always preferable tounconvincing possibility’ (Bywater 84). TheAristotelian ring of the sentence can hardly bemissed. Aristotle held that even the impossiblehas a room in art provided it is made probable.Conversely, the possible may be out of place inart if it strikes us as improbable, that is,unconvincing.3. Incidentally, ‘imagination’ must be distinguishedfrom ‘make-believe’. At the touch of the formereven the impossible impresses us as probable;the latter tries to cover up the deficiency of theimagination with a stronger sensation butcannot raise even the possible to the level ofthe probable.4. The pejorative undertone is fast dying out.Thanks to the cinema, the T.V. and the excellentsnaps of some eminent photographers,photography has emerged as a powerful formof art in our times. However, even here thetouchstone is not flawless reproduction whichthe camera, a gift of science, ensures. What isvalued is the artist’s sense of angle, colour andthe perspective which raises it above meremechanical reproduction.5. Wilde has not coined the phrase but the hint isunmistakably there where Wilde explains howthe natural instinct for falsehood was graduallyDr SUKRITI GHOSAL
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL)A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journalhttp://www.rjelal.comelevated into a self-conscious science known asart.Works CitedAbrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: RomanticTheory and Critical. Tradition. Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press, 1953. Print.Booth, Michael. R. Prefaces to English NineteenthCentury Theatre. London: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1980. Print.Bywater, Ingram (trans.). On the Art of Poetry.1920; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.Print.Collingwood, R.C. The Principles of Art. 1938; rpt.Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981. Print.Decker, Clarence R. ‘The Aesthetic Revolt againstNaturalism in Victorian Criticism’. PMLA, 53(1938), 844-56. Print.Dutton, Richard. An Introduction to LiteraryCriticism. Hong Kong: Longman, 1984. Print.Edel, Leon, et al (ed.). Masters of AmericanLiterature. Cambridge: Riverside Press,1959. Print.Frierson, William C. The English Controversy overRealism in Fiction’. PMLA, 43 (1928), 53350. Print.Murray, Isobel (intr.). Oscar Wilde: Plays, ProseWritings and Poems. London: J. M. Dent &Sons, 1990. Print.Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. 1924;rpt. New Delhi: Universal Book Stall, 1990.Print. Cited as PLC.Sharrock, Roger (ed.). Keats: Selected Poems andLetters. Calcutta: Oxford University Press,1976. Print.Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry, ed. ViswanathChatterjee. Calcutta: Orient Longman,1975. Print.Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar FingalO’Flahertie Wills Wilde: Stories, Plays,Poems, Essays, intr. Vyvyan Holland. 1948;rpt. London: Collins, 1983. Print. Cited asCW.,Poems and Essays, intr. Kingsley Amis.London: Collins, 1956. Print. Cited as PE.62Dr SUKRITI GHOSALVol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec)
THE DECAY OF LYING Dr SUKRITI GHOSAL Principal MU Womens ollege , Burdwan ABSTRACT The truth-value of art, questioned since the time of Plato, was in need of further defence in the Vic
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