Oscar Wilde

"The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything."
(Wilde, pg 845, from The Decay of Lying)

First, I want to say, and I will reiterate, that I love Oscar Wilde. This simple sentence says so much to me about writing. I have always considered the greatest ability of a fiction writer is in his/her ability to lie. Lying is the basis of story-telling. When I was younger and got in trouble for telling a lie, my grandmother didn't call me a liar. She told me to stop telling stories. But making stuff up (fiction/make-believe/pretend) to me was entertaining as it is to the imagination of most children. Thankfully, some people, like Wilde, have the ability to develop those lies into more clever stories. After all, "lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art (pg 846)." I had difficulty understanding Wilde's intentions in the first few pages of Vivian's dialogue. When he says, "A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it," I pictured it all with ease. Each fad and every time period has some significance that most individuals end up wanting. For the longest time, our art copied the French. Even in the beginnings of our intended independent America, we copied the Europeans. The grass is always greener on the other side. Speaking of grass, landscapes even copy each other. If xeriscaping was suddenly huge in the most popular places, everybody would rip out their grass and flowers and praise the dirt and rocks. Even Thoreau agreed with Wilde. His intention at Walden Pond was to find simplicity when everybody else was seeking to copy Europian luxuries.

"The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of human consciousness."
(pg 842)

When I first read this, I disagreed. I thought about all of the poets we have read and I wanted to believe differently. Wilde is most definitely onto something here though. Are you more likely to get your true impressions from a painting if someone is sitting next to you, judging you? Or are you more honest with your impressions on your own, when nobody has to know? I can look at a Dali and think it is eccentrically beautiful, but sometimes I see one and think that it is horrendous. Wilde is saying that it doesn't always have to be about a hidden meaning. It can be all about the aestheticism, the first reaction, or the way it makes you feel without delving into the artist's personal life. Sometimes you feel like a comedy, sometimes a tragedy, sometimes you don't want any hidden messages. I met a lady who is about 65 years young and used to teach at Mercer. (I met her in a hair salon in FL and I don't know her name.) I was ear-hustling her conversation about movies. She was really upset that her friend wanted to see Stomp the Yard. She said that she was sick of these movies with morals. I will never forget her shouting, "I wanna see god-damned Snakes on a Plane." I laughed, but now I get her point. She only wanted to be entertained. Clearly, as one of our wonderful Mercer professors, she has learned enough about morals!

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written."
(pg 846, Dorian Gray)

I enjoyed everything that the book had to offer from Mr. Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is possibly the most clever thing that I have ever read. It even made me rethink Shakespeare as my first choice. I will be reading everything Oscar Wilde in the near future as this is 100% perfection along with his Aphorisms and I too declare his genius.