The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact;
the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
In "The Decay of Lying"—an essay in the form of a Socratic dialogue between Vivian, a romantic, and Cyril, a realist—Oscar Wilde develops the idea that modernism in the arts involves “a huge price to pay for a very poor result” and sees the novels that emerge from this movement not only as the decadence of imagination and lying but of the highest aspirations of literature. L’art pour l’art at its peak. For Wilde, literary realism is equivalent to having “mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.”1.
Through this radical and romantic stance—a aesthetic Manichaeism of sorts in which one must decide between Art or Life—Wilde arrives at a similar conclusion to Ballard’s (4.7, 9.2, 9.4), but approaches it from the opposite side:
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgéniev, and completed by Dostoievski. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the débris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.
Seen in this light, in Wilde’s time literary imagination moulded reality. In ours, however, reality and fiction have become indistinguishable. And curiously enough it was not imagination and its fictions that brought us here, it was the realism that Wilde’s character was so suspicious of. In a matter of a century we sank into a form of media realism that derived its impetus from its literary predecessor. A form of realism that, as it covered more and more territory, ended up hyper-realized (9.4).
An analysis of the phenomenon of reality TV will allow us to appreciate that we have indeed sold our birthright—the right to a consensual reality clearly delimited from fiction—for a “mess of facts.”
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