The Decay of Lying | Discussion Post

A DIALOGUE.

Persons: Constance and Vera. Scene: a Cafe in Bushwick

CONSTANCE (entering from the street). Vera, I’ve been looking for you. Have you been sitting here all day? It’s beautiful out. Let’s go smoke in the park.

VERA. A lovely notion but you go on without me. I’m preoccupied.

CONSTANCE. What with?

VERA. A charming text called The Decay of Lying by the inimitable Oscar Wilde.

CONSTANCE. It’s really called that?

VERA. I understand your incredulity. However, he’s making the simple case that excessive concern for facticity in art has eclipsed imagination and, I quote, “if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.” He goes on, “in literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.” He argues for the sublime, as I understand it, the transcendental in art. I daresay he’s speaking of our own time. Think about the inundation of autofiction, the navel-gazing prose, the flat affectless recounting of people’s day-to-day. We should demand more. As Hamlet said, “Sure he that made us with such large discourse, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.”

CONSTANCE. Go online if you want lies. Read Romantasy. Watch a Marvel movie. There’s no shortage of make-believe. People, when they read, want emotional truth. They want to see their own experiences and feelings reflected and validated. It’s how people connect to art and how they connect with each other through art.

VERA. A fine idea but as Wilde writes, “Art never expresses anything but itself.” The people you’re describing should seek therapy if they want their self-conception affirmed and their own thoughts parroted back to them. Why should art be a sewer of half-masticated and regurgitated facts, opinions, and observations? He makes the important distinction between “unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.” You gain far more insight through fanciful exaggerations, winding fables, and stretched accounts than you ever do through sober point-by-point recitations. Moreover, lies transmogrify into reality. “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.” If modern life seems dull and colorless, perhaps it’s because our art is too.

CONSTANCE. The world has surpassed fiction. The news is surreal. We don’t need art muddying the water. We need a clear separation of fact and bullshit. The average person has a hundred fake beliefs for every real one. If art is going to have an important role in the years to come, it’ll be as a means of setting the record straight and holding us accountable.

VERA. It’s exactly that attitude that led to our current predicament! If you use art as an ideological tool or a weapon, it’ll be used against you as soon as your opponents gain the upper hand. Art should be emancipated from petty intrigue, demagogues, and charlatans. Wilde ends with, “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” “Beautiful” being the operative word. You are concerned by ugly tricks and bestial deceptions. Wilde wants us to wrest art out of the hands of the untrustworthy rogues as well as the bromidic platitude-mongers. It’s a call-to-arms and I, for one, am convinced of the righteousness of the cause. Enough talking! Let’s go for a smoke.