Precis: Decay of Lying

Interestingly enough, the first text of this class was the last text of another. I am referring to, of course, Oscar Wilde's wonderful piece The Decay of Lying.

The first thing to notice is the dialogic form of the text, a form that not only brings to mind a Socratic dialogue but is also fitting for a text that laments the prevalence of saying exactly what you mean instead saying it obliquely, in a veiled code.

The central claim of the piece is that current literature suffers from the "decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure" (13). To reverse this decline, we must revitalize the "proper aim of Art," which is Lying--"the telling of beautiful untrue things" (47). Thus, what Wilde means by lying is not mere misrepresentation but a poetic inventiveness that conveys not "simple truths" but rather"complex beauty" (24).

The dialogue revolves around the important concepts of Art, Life, Nature, and Truth. I will focus in particular on the concepts of Nature and Truth since they relate most directly with the substance of this class.

Vivian, who seems to be the dramatic vehicle for stating Wilde's opinions, shows a spirited contempt for Nature. Nature is subordinate to the artificial, man-made creations of Art because it is so "imperfect" and "unfinished" (9). Nature, according to Wilde, is "a collection of phenomena external to man" and therefore "people only discover what they bring to her" (22). On this understanding, Nature is not a fixed thing from which we extract facts and literal Truths but a bundle of figures that can be re-fashioned, re-arranged, and re-configured through works of Art. As a result, a work of Art, rather than imitating Nature like a "mirror," is a "veil" that refracts our understanding of Nature in a novel way.

Thus, for Wilde, "Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style" (28). This statement, of course, is a paradox because literal Truth is not a matter of style but of fact. However, what this paradox--this "beautiful lie" so to speak--brings to our attention is a figurative understanding of Truth. Borrowing from Nietzsche, we can say that on this figurative understanding Truth is an "army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms."

Wilde's paradox, I think, gets to the heart our class. Throughout the term we have been confronted with different readings of Nature. Each author, movement, and identity has reconfigured Nature according to their particular interpretation of it. It therefore seems that much of the substance of the political debate regarding environmental issues is about the basic images and metaphors that configure our understanding of Nature and our relationship to it.

But, the problem is: how do we reconcile this figurative understanding of Nature and Truth with the literal, scientific facts about Nature? How does rhetoric in its mode of imaginative reason deal with an instrumental reason?

Indeed, I think that what the recent "Climate scandal" has demonstrated is this exact problem: if you tell the truth no one will believe you, but if you try to re-frame or re-package the truth so to speak then still no one will believe you (because they'll call you a liar). Of course, the scientists involved in the scandal were unethical and did in fact misrepresent data, but it still illustrates the tenuousness of truth when we attempt to tell a beautiful lie.