Making Art From Life

Oscar Wilde does not want you to write about yourself.

Don’t worry. I do. But I recently read some of Wilde’s collected writings, and he made me think a lot about the relationship between art and life. How do we write about our lives in a way that’s meaningful?

Wilde’s writings are intentionally iconoclastic. But while he’s almost certainly doing a bit, I think he’s only amplifying the most obnoxious parts of himself to get at his feelings about art and life. I’m going to dive into those, because I think that, although Wilde himself hated the idea of art as self-expression, his pretensions offer interesting ideas for all writers, nonfiction writers included.

What is (Literary) Art?

In his essay (which is written as a dialogue) “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde advances the argument that Art can never imitate Life—that “Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality.” Art may use Life as raw material, but it is never trying to emulate Life—it must always expand upon it, and create something new which Life will only imitate after Art has created it.

It’s a bold claim, punctuated by Wilde’s capitalizations of “Art” and “Life;” to him, these ideas are concepts with their own spirits, much like the Muses in Classical Greece.

Immediately, my question is whether a work of nonfiction can be capital-A Art. Wilde is pretty emphatic that it cannot be, not just in the argument above, but also in this passage:

“Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance.”

And, in Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist,” he writes:

“As a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.”

How can we make art out of the truth of our lives, and do so in a way that expands those lives, those truths?

You see the dilemma here, right? Wilde wants art and literature to divert from the facts. Life itself is boring and full of pain, and art is only cathartic to the audience when it expands life through lives that were never lived. Fiction and poetry are art; to Wilde, nonfiction is tawdry reportage.

Now, why should you care what some Victorian bourgeois decadent had to say about art? And is art even the goal of writing nonfiction? Plenty of us just want to set the facts of our lives on the page, lofty invocations of Art notwithstanding and Oscar Wilde be damned.

Plenty of nonfiction writers write because they want to be heard. It is cathartic to put ones own truth on the page, and wonderful to find that your own life story has helped someone else with theirs.

I think that Art, as a goal for our own writing, aids us in those aims. For Wilde, capital-A Art is the pursuit of capital-B Beauty so that capital-L Life can be more rich, rewarding, and interesting. Art complexifies Life and makes it worth living.

Moreover, I think Wilde’s unspoken challenge is interesting. How can we make art out of the truth of our lives, and do so in a way that expands those lives, those truths? And how do we do that without the lineation of poetry, the suspension-of-disbelief of fiction?

One Solution is Form

Nonfiction is not just the telling of true stories. It is the search for an arrangement of facts and events—narrative, if you will—that will make real life more understood. We have to contend with the fallibility of our minds, our memories, and our attentions. Successful nonfiction transcends those limitations to achieve something greater than just the facts.

The search for narrative is the search for form. And the right form will amplify a narrative’s constituent facts, creating that gestalt in which the sum of life is greater than its parts.

The search for narrative is the search for form. And the right form will amplify a narrative’s constituent facts.

Probably a more artistic approach is what’s called the Hermit Crab Essay, named after the hermit crab’s tendency to fill the space of whatever shell it finds. The essay’s “shell” can be naturally occurring language, such as an essay in the form of a recipe, grocery list, email chain, legal disclaimer, dictionary entry, commercial script, etc.

It can also be more abstract. An example of this is the essay “On Shells” by Chelsea Biondolillo, a meditation on beachcombing and the hermit crab essay itself. The essay is written in braided fragments, each fragment acting like one fragment of a shell combed from a beach of personal experience.

Essayists can also borrow from poetic forms. A good example is “Pantoum for 1979” by Brenda Miller, which adapts the Malaysian pantoum form into prose.

Outside of this, nonfiction writers might write braided essays in which two or more ideas/timelines/stories are interwoven with each other. This approach creates parallels between the braided essay strands, using the art of juxtaposition to generate meaning and insight. There’s also the lyric essay, whose approach is more language-focused and teeters on the prose poetic.

Another Solution is Speculation

Ever since I learned about the idea of speculative nonfiction, I’ve been enchanted by the idea of truth being discovered at the boundaries of falsity.

Speculative nonfiction describes nonfiction that heavily incorporates speculative elements. By “speculative,” I mean “imagining things that could have happened but cannot be proven in the real world.” This is more a tool than a genre, although it does have its own aptly named literary journal.

It’s kind of like educated guessing. The writer uses what they know to guess at what they don’t, using invention, wondering, and speculation to uncover deeper truths.

The writer uses what they know to guess at what they don’t, using invention, wondering, and speculation to uncover deeper truths.

Kelly Luce’s essay “Mary Ruefle Drives Me To the Dentist” is one of my favorites. The story itself probably never happened in real life, but what does happen is a meditation on the wisdom of Ruefle’s poetry. It’s a great example of an essay that doesn’t need actuality in order to be completely true.

In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde argues that our ability to divest from the actuality of real life is how Art offers us new ways of living. Let speculation be a way of empowering you to do this.

You can learn more about speculative nonfiction here. You might also be interested in some of the ideas found in Louise Glück’s essay “Against Sincerity.”

A Third Solution is Criticism

Wilde describes the critic as someone who “attains the highest form of art.” It’s yet another of his bold and controversial claims. But what he argues is that, when a work of criticism is successful, the critic has unlocked a richer relationship to the subject of their criticism, expanding its possibilities and creating new doorways for the art and for society. Criticism, in other words, is its own art form.

To be clear, criticism isn’t just “I dislike this.” It’s also more than just likes and dislikes. Criticism is a deep engagement with a work of art with the purpose of revealing the spirit of that work.

Criticism is a deep engagement with a work of art with the purpose of revealing the spirit of that work.

In this way, it is also not fanfiction, literary retellings, or ekphrasis—though these are also ways of making art from art. Criticism is a genre unto its own. Why is this relevant to you? Because, Wilde writes, all criticism is necessarily “subjective” and requires the critic to “intensify their own personality,” making “more real the interpretation” itself.

In other words, if we bring our whole selves into an understanding of a work of art, those selves are reflected back in our criticism, and our criticism makes that work of art so much more engaging and engaged.

Kelly Luce’s aforementioned essay is a good example of this. While the essay is not necessarily a work of criticism, it is an essay in which Luce’s life is brought directly in conversation with Ruefle’s poetry, revealing something about both Luce and Ruefle.

For a proper work of criticism that enacts what Wilde argues, check out, in LitHub, Arvad Ashby’s “Surrendering to Subjectivity: In Praise of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.” His writing on Nelson’s writing includes a meditation on the authority of the “I.” Less personal but nonetheless contemporary, Becca Rothfeld’s exegesis of Rachel Cusk’s novels reveals a lot of urgent questions about selfhood in the 21st century.

Are these essays “personal?” Not in the traditional sense. But through the author’s relationships to the work they write about, a richer sense of self emerges. As Wilde writes, “To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”

Through the author’s relationships to the work they write about, a richer sense of self emerges.

Wilde’s praise of criticism has had plenty of 20th century critics. Wilde, for example, argues that the contemplative life (bios theoretikos in Greek) is the highest form of enlightened living. Plenty of phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, would counter with the necessity of bios politikos, the action or practice (praxis) necessary from contemplation and criticism which yields a richer public and civic life.

Moreover, the 1960s post-structuralist movement was expressly against the institution of criticism. Perhaps you’ve heard of “Death of the Author” by Barthes. The title is a bit of a misnomer, because what Barthes advocates for is the death of the institution of literary criticism, which gatekept the meanings of literary texts (and thus, the authors of those texts) and disempowered the reader.

Barthes also has his pushbacks, but I don’t want to derail too far into literary theory. The point of this overview is to note both Wilde’s ideas of enlightened art and the fact that his ideas are far from universally accepted.

Prompts for Art-Inspired Nonfiction

To state the obvious: not everything we do has to be art.

Oscar Wilde would hate to have that sentiment presented next to his own ideas. Maybe in 100 years, someone will juxtapose my writing with something I disagree with, and I’ll also be rolling in my grave.

But really, we write for all sorts of reasons, not least to understand the stories we even try to tell.

Nonetheless, whether you find Wilde provocative, interesting, accurate, or downright snobbish, I hope the ideas here give you different doorways into new essays. Here are a few prompts to that effect.

1. Write a hermit crab, braided, and/or lyric essay. Start with a subject you would like to write about, figure out a form that reflects that subject, then write into that formal restriction.
2. Write a speculative essay. Use imagination to write into what you don’t know about the peoples and histories that inform your own world. Spend some time researching those peoples and histories, but then use speculation to fill in the gaps of what otherwise might be unknowable.
3. Write a work of art or literary criticism. Make the work you’re critiquing the centerpoint of the essay, but ask yourself how your own life informs the way you engage with this piece of art or writing. What happens when your life is at the periphery of your writing? You might find the circuitous route teaching you more about your own lived experiences.