Precis: The Decay of Lying

Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” attempts to throw preconceived notions of Art, Life, and Nature upside down. Wilde continually comes back to the idea that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. Everything in the world that we experience is linked to a previous thought or image that our minds recognize and immediately compare to. Wilde feels that our experiences are becoming dull and stagnant. Art is a medium used to inspire and create new things, and most importantly, to shape Life. Wilde calls for a return to lying because lying is pure fantasy and is crucial in the development of Art and artistic expression through Life.
Realism and Impressionism are denounced and presented as attempts to manipulate and mold by mimicking and altering what is real. The problem for Wilde is that once we accept something as being real, the formulation of that thing has already been understood as unchanging. We can only mimic things that are constant. For Wilde, the creation of the real relies completely on the inventions of Art. Art allows our imaginations to create the realities that human nature seeks to fulfill. An example is given as to how a sunset was never a sunset before it was painted. It was simply an experience that each person had, visually. After the sunset was painted, it was shown in exquisite fashion, as perfection. Our idea of what a sunset ought to be is forever engrained in our minds when we see a natural sunset. We compare the colors of the clouds and of the sky to a certain artist who employed those colors in his creation of a “sunset.”
The character of people is determined by Art as well. Writers have created characters to build their work of Art in the form of fiction. People strive to maintain their own identities by latching on to those identities created by fiction. Fiction becomes much more like fact, and writers attempting to capture fact seem only to be able to create fiction. These writers are attempting to capture what is, what happened, and what was, but only succeed in replicating those circumstances. Elements of the event are written in forms that were created by artists and in trying to describe the real, the author creates his story. What is already present in the real cannot be mimicked and considered artistic.
Nature is said to be crude, monotonous, unfinished and lacking design. What is in nature is already there and Art cannot become of nature as a result. Art is new. Wilde tells of poets who wrote about and were inspired by nature. Their poetry is not considered beautiful because it tells of natures beauty, it is beautiful because the author brought the skill of poetry to writing about nature. Wilde says “people only discover in nature what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.” Nature is a creation of humans. All that exists as nature is only thought to be such because we invented it. “For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation.”
Wilde describes nature as stagnant and boring. His description is a result of his characterization of Art and Life. Nature is boring because it simply “is.” Our conceptions of beauty in nature are creations. Nature is depicted in ways to mirror what actually exists. A painting of a mountain is designed to show what the mountain looks like, but this is not Art. A fanciful interpretation of a mountain with striking faces and glittering snow with gleaming skies and the greenest trees is a lie that attempts to show what nature should be. Our interactions with nature rely on artistic renderings of the surroundings that are supposed to be untouched. It is in this way that Nature is always boring, always falling short of artistic expectation. Nature never influences our interpretation of the world, our interpretations of the world through the experiences of Art, shape Nature.
It seems as though Nature is lie according to Wilde. But this lie does not seem to be the lie that he is striving toward in the beginning of his writing. Nature is a creation, but it is not created because of the influences of Art. The lie of Nature does not contribute to the formulation of the multiple beauties that Wilde says Art inspires to create. Instead, the lie of Nature is a result of people imitating and replicating life. This inartistic approach creates a worshiping of Nature as something other than what it really is. Nature becomes a reproduction of the visible objects found within it. Nature cannot be mimicked because life imitates Art and Nature is not Art. Nature is the imitation of Life. Still, it remains unclear when Nature is a creation of the human mind whether or not this constitutes as a lie similar to that described by Wilde? If Nature is a creation, it does not reflect the real, and is a lie. Then is the lie of Nature not preserving the artistic mode of creation Wilde is begging for? Nature cannot be mimicked because life imitates Art and Nature is not Art. Nature is the imitation of Life.