Christa Giles

14
Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities,
her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
unfinished condition. Nature has good
intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once
said, she cannot carry them out. When I look
at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its
defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that
Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we
should have no art at all. Art is our spirited
protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place. 14
This perception of nature culminates in an inability
to view reality through any other medium but art. Vivian,
in ˝The Decay of Lying,˝ describes moving to the window
at his hostess’s insistence to view a beautiful sunset, only to
find ˝a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period,
with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and
overemphasised.˝ 15 In A rebours, the inversion of art and
nature takes its most extreme form when Des Esseintes
obtains artificial flowers which appear real but then, ˝tired
of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some
natural flowers that would look like fakes.˝ 16 Further, he
attempts to live completely isolated in an artificial world,
creating in his house simulacra of various realities.
Wilde emphasised the importance of the individual
personality, the centrality of the subjective vision, and, like
Huysmans, he also underlined the primacy of the