| Lies
has been forbidden, praised, believed.
Lies are at the base of every right, of every
art. Reading a novel you become an accomplice
of the author.
In a world where everything is uncertain because
everything is impossible and possible at the same
time, we let ourselves be taken in, reading works
of pretense, because through them we look for
a formula that gives our life a meaning.
The "literary lie"
represents a universe because it is a declared
lie, approved, that allows the control
of a reality that partly recalls ours.
Oscar Wilde’s intuition
was brilliant.
In 1889’s "The decay of lying"
conversation, he saw inside art something
more than a false creation: for Wilde,
art is an escape from life, that is poor and defective.
In this dialogue, the two
characters Cyril and Vivian,
give voice to what Wilde himself calls a "consideration"
on nature, art
and decay of lies.
The author begins with a declaration about nature:
"nature is so uncomfortable",
"so indifferent, so unappreciative"
and the human nature, which is communicated by
the "modern" literature,
or rather from the realism of the late XIX century
novels, "is a dreadful universal
thing".
According to Wilde,
the cause of the decadence
of the lie must be searched in the modern
propensity of poets and promoters of the art to
describe the facts, invading every thing "with
their chilling touch."
"Art never expresses anything but
itself", "she
is not to be judged by any external standard of
resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.
She has flowers that no forests know of, birds
that no woodland posses. She makes and unmakes
many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven
with a scarlet thread", and with
the facts she is dirtied.
Therefore, the true artist
is not the reporter that describes us
all the things as they are, but the liar
that re-invents them, sometimes succeeding
in improving the reality (the
life that imitates the art).
Considering that, as Wilde says, "Lying,
the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the
proper aim of Art", to resuscitate
this ancient art of the lie, is necessary to cultivate
the pretense, against the horrendous realism,
only then "fact
will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will
be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance,
with her temper of wonder, will return to the
land…dragons will wander about the waste
places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest
of fire into the air…and over our heads
will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful
and impossible things, of things that are lovely
and that never happened, of things that are not
and should be."
Vivian, the main
character of this dialogue, offers a hard
attack to realism, he despises human
nature and wants to propose some methods to be
able to revive this lost art of the lie.
Oscar Wilde is considered one
of the greatest exponents of the Art for
Art's sake; in one of his last considerations
in "The decay of lying",
such doctrine is magnificently exposed:
"The
third doctrine is that Life imitates Art more
than Art imitates Life. This result not merely
from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact
that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find
expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful
forms through which it may realise that energy.
It is a theory that has never been put forward
before, but is extremely fruitful, and throws
an entirely new light upon the history of art.
It follows, as a corollary from this, that external
Nature also imitates Art. the only effects that
she can show us are effects that we have already
seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is
the secret of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation
of Nature's weakness."
Wilde, convicts the realistic
imitation of nature: a
nature element becomes more
beautiful if it reminds us of an art element,
but an art element doesn't look beautiful just
because it reminds us of a nature element.
 
The aesthetical impression
that originates from an art work doesn't
owe anything to the memory, to the similarity,
but it comes to conceive a more paradoxical
idea that tunes in perfectly
with its way of being and expressing:
life imitates art
more than art imitates life.
Besides
art is a synthesis of impressions,
very richer than nature,
which must be interpreted and not imitated.
The real aspect of pretence,
of lies that had succeeded in imposing themselves
on the reality, is represented, according to Wilde,
from the English upper classes.
"What
is interesting about people in good society,
is the mask that each one of them wears,
not the reality that lies behind the mask."
During the Victorian age,
a substantial and diffused hypocrisy
hovers about; where "middle class"
shows a double face: on one side it wants
to grant itself all the privileges of
its own position, on the other side it reveals
its sense of guilt on the newspaper pages.
It protests against slavery,
conducting a merciless war against the ships of
that transport the African slaves in America.
It deals with philanthropic activities,
to improve the conditions of lower classes, without
nevertheless giving up the privileges caused by
this poverty.
Men and women who lived in this period, following
the example of Queen Victoria,
were conformists: they followed
puritanical norms of life that
for instance set veto on themes as sex,
and they used to take part in "Charitable
institutions."
But underneath this appearance of a prosperous
period, founded upon healthy principles, an uncomfortable
truth is hidden: unfortunately,
the economic progress had touched
only the "middle
class", a small part of population
composed by dealers and bankers,
while the largest part of the population, composed
by workers and by unemployed, lived in dramatic
conditions.
They lived in overcrowded hospices ("working
houses"), built following the "Poor
Laws", in which the most fundamental
hygienic norms were not respected and, at that
time, they didn’t have the right
to vote. From this hypocritical attitude
of the Victorians and from such contradictions
came out the "Victorian Compromise".
|
Oscar
Wilde 
