Life imitating art
Anti-mimesis is a philosophical position that holds the direct opposite of Aristotelian mimesis. Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". In the essay, written as a latonic dialogue, Wilde holds that anti-mimesis "results 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."[1][2]
Background
What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art. As in an example posited by Wilde, although there has been fog in London for centuries, one notices the beauty and wonder of the fog because "poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects...They did not exist till Art had invented them."
McGrath places the antimimetic philosophy in a tradition of Irish writing, including Wilde and writers such as Synge and James Joyce in a group that "elevate blarney (in the form of linguistic idealism) to aesthetic and philosophical distinction", noting that Terry Eagleton observes an even longer tradition that stretches "as far back in Irish thought as the ninth-century theology of John Scottus Eriugena" and "the fantastic hyperbole of the ancient sagas".[3][4]
Wilde's antimimetic idealism, specifically, McGrath describes to be part of the late nineteenth century debate between Romanticism and Realism. Wilde's antimimetic philosophy has also had influence on later Irish writers.
References
- ↑ Francis Charles McGrath (1999). Brian Friel's (post)colonial drama: language, illusion, and politics. University Press. pp. 19–21. ISBN 978-0-8156-2813-2.
- ↑ Oscar Wilde. The Decay of Lying.
- ↑ Stephen Halliwell (2002). The aesthetics of mimesis: ancient texts and modern problems. Princeton University Press. pp. 287–288, 369. ISBN 978-0-691-09258-4.
- ↑ Elsie Bonita Adams (1971). "Art and Reality". Bernard Shaw and the aesthetes. Ohio State University Press. pp. 76–77. ISBN 978-0-8142-0155-8.