This is the kind of book that you start reading with a pen handy in order to mark striking and significant passages only to give up because you soon realize that if you keep on at the rate you're marking up the text you'll end up underlining four-fifths of the entire book. Indeed, there is an essay or two in this 10-essay collection that you might easily highlight in its entirety. The whole book is a highlight.
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Jeanette Winterson believes in art. She believes in it with a capital A. She believes in it like you and I believe in the sun coming up tomorrow. She believes in it like a Christian in a cannibal's pot, like a Muslim fundamentalist steering a jet into a skyscraper. She believes that Art is not as essential to life as breathing but that it makes breathing a meaningful thing to do.
Art, in short, is transformation, transubstantiation.
Art is not, as its commonly supposed and expected to be today, entertainment.
Art is ecstasy.
For some people, she acknowledges, this notion is embarrassing. The twentieth century, she says, in the footsteps of the nineteenth, has difficulty with the notion of art as ecstasy. Yet that is the traditional notion and I believe it is the right one. It is quite easy to live at a low level of sensibility; it is the way of the world. There is no need to ask art to show us how to be less than we are. Art shows us how to be more than we are. It is heightened, grand, an act of effrontery. It is a challenge to the confines of the spirit. It is a challenge to the comfortable pleasures of everyday life. There is in art, still something of the medieval mystic and something of the debauch. Art is excess. The fiery furnace, the freezing lake. It summons extremes of feeling.
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As such, Winterson champions the notion that art is meant to be experimental, boundary- challenging, pushing those boundaries back, redefining and expanding consciousness. At it's highest level, she argues, new art incorporates and extends the art of the past bringing us new ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling.
Art, she says, doesn't imitate life; it anticipates life.
She points out how past experiments in art and literature—impressionism and Modernism, for example—bold and incomprehensible in their time to the majority of people have since become passé, even obsolete today.
She exhorts artists not to give in to commercialism, to the chase for mass popularity, to the lure of fame and money because such work is always little more than a rearguard action at best, old-hat even when brand new, nothing but third-rate stuff already in the rearview mirror.
Most people, alas, live their lives looking in the rearview mirror.
An artist must be forward-looking.
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But at the same time, she insists that to make truly new art an artist must undergo a long apprenticeship and appreciation for those who came before. It is an education that never ends. This becomes clear again and again in these essays in which Winterson talks about her own love of books, her devotion to the word. While experimental work may look wild and unbound, it must, if it is to be worth anything substantive, be the culmination of a long period of self-discipline and study. It must be an outgrowth of what has come before. Otherwise it has no roots, no anchor, it's not fed or supported, not connected to anything. It will only be fad and gimmick. New for no other reason than being new. Such work won't last longer than its novelty. This isn't work, it's shell-game trickery, ultimately another form of capitalist exploitation, offering you something shiny of no inherent value. That's not art.
In other words, there are no shortcuts.
In other words, you must do your homework.
In other words, it isn't easy, isn't meant to be easy, you'll probably fail, but so what? If you're audacious enough as a writer to think you have something to add, that's worth following Woolf and Eliot, can it be any other way?
You fail, you die all the same. Let it be in the pursuit of something that matters.
In other words, it's good, even essential, to read Dickens. It's neither good nor essential to write like him.
***
A novel should be novel. How can anyone miss the fact? It's in the damn word, stupid! Novel=new.
Why would anyone want to write a novel like anyone else, anyway?
—or paint a picture, or compose a piece of music, or live a life merely repeating what someone else did?
Because it's safe. Because it gains almost guaranteed approval. Because it makes money.
All the wrong reasons, as Winterson sees it, for making art.
Or living life.
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You're an explorer, a pioneer, an adventurer, an inventor, a scientist in the lab.
You are an artist.
***
Winterson champions Virginia Woolf in two essays, one on Orlando, the other on The Waves. Neither book deserves its popular reputation for being dull or boring or esoteric, Winterson argues. But both require time and some degree of attention and effort on the part of the reader. Attention and effort being two qualities that aren't expected of audiences much anymore. But that's what art does: it requires time and attention.
There is no compromising with this book, Winterson says about The Waves, but she means the same for any great work, either you read it on its own terms or you cannot read it at all. It is not an easy book to master but it never tires and it never fades. If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.
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Winterson has many, many bad things to say about capitalism and a culture (can we even call it a "culture") that equates time with money; thereby leaving the majority of people too exhausted and frustrated in their chase for petty "goods" that they have no time (or money to buy back the time) to cultivate a taste of art. We are thus left all impoverished. Haste, she writes, is the enemy of art. Art, in its making and in its enjoying, demands long tracts of time. Books, like cats, do not wear watches.
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The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called life, says Jeanette Winterson.
It is a rebellion against a society of deadening routine, against authority, against unquestioning obedience, against the talking heads.
Art is a constant challenge to the status quo.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many are so hostile to art and artists? Is it any wonder that so many artists are ignored, ridiculed, starved out?
Art, Winterson asserts, is dangerous.
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Of course, following Winterson's prescription of working against popular opinion, against capitalist culture, against consumerism, against the notion of "useful" art, the artist is likely to find herself discouraged, rejected, or perhaps even worse, totally ignored, by the culture she is devoting her life's work to enhance. But that shouldn't discourage her.
She says, a writer needs to be unswayed by praise or blame and skeptical of the easy friendships and sudden enmities offered by the industry in which she now has to work. The commercialization of art has inevitably included the commercialization of the writer, who is now expected to be a pubic figure and a target (no other word will do) of interest. The writer should refuse all definitions of herself, and of her work, and remember that whether her work sells or whether it doesn't, whether it is loved or it is not, it is the same piece of work. Reaction cannot alter what is written. And what is written is the writer's true home.
This determination, she continues, to live by the work and be known by the work is not popular but it is a writer's humility and the only humility helpful to her. Simply, the work is more important than she is, and to put it first, to put it above everything, is to allow nothing to compromise it. That includes the ordinary desire to be liked.
***
In the end, then, you write for yourself, to follow your vision, to create a space in which you and what is relevant to you can flourish—if only for a time. If you're working correctly, though, your work won't only be about you, even in spite of yourself. It will fill in some missing piece in the work of all who came before you and it will resonate with and be a starting off point for those who come after.
It will be the perch upon which you can sing your song, no matter what it is, no matter who is or isn't in the forest listening, for as long as there is breath in your beak.
And that is what matters most.
***
Art, whether it makes you rich and famous or not, enriches your life. It is a good in itself, as few things in life are. What art enables you to do is to connect with and discover parts of yourself that you didn't know existed. It is a tool for time-travel that allows you to live broadly and variously all the parallel lives in all the parallel universes in which you actually exist, even in potential. For our potential selves are every bit a part of us as our actualized selves. An artist lives a thousand lives in one. To be all that you can be, you don't have to join the army. You can open a book. You can use your imagination. Really, it's as easy as that.
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Along with Dean Young's The Art of Recklessness and Carole Maso's Break Every Rule, you can add Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects as among the most inspiring books there be on fomenting a day-to-day rebellion against the ordinary and on cultivating the sacred creative fire within—the fire that lights, the fire that warms, the fire that sustains.
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