Reading Wilde as a Thinker

‘Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life,’ declares Oscar Wilde. ‘Life holds the Mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.’ These witty, antimetabolic propositions of the aesthetics of art for art's sake may have lost their effectiveness or freshness in contemporary western societies, where much of modern, avant-garde, anti-mimetic, and abstract art has drifted so far away from life that it no longer seems to have any bearing on the reality of life. When I first read these words almost forty years ago under very different circumstances, however, they were absolutely powerful, refreshing, and electrifying! I was reading ‘The Decay of Lying’ in a Chinese translation at a time when a most repressive and hypocritical doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ dominated what counted as discourse on art and literature in Mao's China. That discourse was repressive because it was the only orthodoxy dictating that art or literature should be a ‘reflection of life’ – not just any life, but life of the ‘peasants, workers, and soldiers’. That discourse was at the same time hypocritical because it was not really a ‘reflection of life’ at all, but reflection of the Party line only or what the Communist Party ideologues thought art and literature should be, namely, a maidservant attending on the needs of the Party. When the official discourse appropriated such concepts as ‘realism’, ‘life’, ‘reality’, and ‘truth’, and harping on the necessity of art and literature serving the interest of the Party, and when many people, particularly the young and rebellious, were completely tired of the political propaganda and fed up with such a Party line, reading Wilde could be a revelation, an epiphany of a totally new and different way of looking at art for its own sake.

I recall this personal moment of my first encounter with Wilde's writings because at such a moment, art for art's sake became a gesture of resistance to the official discourse and the orthodoxy, offering a politically subversive understanding of what art and literature could or should be. Wilde's wit, as Regenia Gagnier well puts it, is ‘the linguistic subversion of the status quo’.