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Art objects : essays on ecstasy and effrontery

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John Pistelli

Jeanette winterson, art objects.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this collection of essays concurrently with Winterson’s novel, Art and Lies , and I suspect they were written concurrently, as there is much overlap in both books’ arguments about art and society—and the didacticism of Winterson’s fiction and the lyricism of her non-fiction only increases the similarity. Since I discussed Winterson’s political and social thought at length in my review of Art and Lies —in brief, she is a Romantic anti-capitalist, a radical-reactionary aesthete—I will confine myself here to more strictly literary matters.

This book is in three parts. The first consists of the title essay, in which Winterson transforms the word “objects” from noun to verb. She insists on the actively transformative power of art, a power that requires an equally active response on the part of the viewer/reader. (Which Winterson argues, again, is difficult to achieve in techno-modernity with its materialism and all-encroaching and far too easy pop culture.) She mainly discusses visual art in this piece; it is anchored by her experience of being arrested “by a painting that had more power to stop [her] than [she] had power to walk away,” which forces her to learn more about the visual arts (she rather defensively chooses Bloomsberrie Roger Fry as her guide) and to discover her own capacity to sit silently in front of a work of art for the length of time it requires to unfold itself to her. Eventually Winterson reveals that the painting that so affected her was one of Massimo Rao’s. This is a bit surprising, given Winterson’s otherwise orthodox modernism, as Rao is a figurative if slightly surreal painter, akin to the kitsch school of Odd Nerdrum. (You can see some of his paintings here .)

The next section contains Winterson’s essays on Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. She defends The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as a revision of autobiographical form toward abstraction and mocks Matisse, who complained of Stein’s inaccuracies, for expecting Stein to write mimetically when he did not concern himself to paint mimetically. On Woolf, she writes appreciations of both Orlando and The Waves , i.e., Woolf’s most and least entertaining novels. The rollicking and endlessly inventive Orlando —perhaps the most sheerly fun novel in the modernist canon—needs no defense, but Winterson almost makes me want to revisit The Waves , a fiction I found far too rarefied, too willed an experiment, to be edifying or transformative. Winterson throughout the book lauds T. S. Eliot, author of her favorite 20th-century poem, Four Quartets . Faithful to Woolf, she wrongheadedly disparages Joyce as too hermetic (but Joyce is not merely playing word games for the fun of it, he is rather enacting psychological and historical processes in language, just as Woolf was).

She quotes Woolf’s “Four Women Novelists” at length to explain the folly of writing out of personal or political partisanship; I will quote it too since it runs so counter to the dominant literary ideology of our time, which counsels the writer to nurse every private resentment and political fury, and with which Woolf is often seen erroneously as being in accord:

In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer’s character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman’s presence—of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights. This brings into women’s writing an element which is entirely absent from a man’s, unless, indeed, he happens to be a working man, a negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal cause or to make a character the mouthpiece of some personal discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at which the reader’s attention is directed were suddenly twofold instead of single. The genius of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë is never more convincing than in their power to ignore such claims and solicitations…

Winterson elaborates on this to slight the soapbox-preacher working-man D. H. Lawrence, whom she later cites approvingly in his judgement that central heating is immoral.

Hostile to the 19th century and its “toilsome” and somber insistence on mimesis, she faults Dickens and Tennyson for writing too much, for walking when they should have flown. She prefers the 18th century, with its bawdy playfulness and artifice, and the Renaissance, with its experiments in form and metaphor. She insultingly criticizes Conrad for being a Pole who tried to out-English the English: “the disciplined pedant, the Salieri of letters, wanted and wrote a fixed English” and so failed to write a living prose. I take her point about the impediments of Conrad’s style, but the problem, if it is a problem, is not his national origin but his discipleship to Flaubert, who immobilized fictional prose in the name of le mot juste —to which Woolf somewhere correctly replied that the right rhythm is more important than the right word. Her view of 20th-century literary history is probably not wrong, at least as applied to England:

For myself, in the literature of my own language, I can find little to cheer me between the publication of Four Quartets (1944) and Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967). Of course I am cheered by Beckett and by Pinter and Orton and Stoppard, but they are dramatists and, with the exception of Beckett, the solid body of their work comes out of the 1960s, as does that of Adrienne Rich.

Objections come to mind, largely American: Nabokov? Ellison? O’Connor? Welty? None of them dull realists, all of them poets in the broad sense. That the only American she mentions is Adrienne Rich puzzles me greatly, as I judge Rich to be a turgid, dreary, and self-congratulatory ideologue of the kind I’d think would bore Winterson.

In the final section, Winterson discusses the relation between art and life. She insists that fiction is artifice and not autobiography; she blames both prurient straight and activist queer critics for a stultifying identity politics that have readers associating her own work with Radclyffe Hall rather than with T. S. Eliot just because she is a lesbian. She understands the paradoxes of art and ideology well:

Communist and People’s Man, Stephen Spender, had the right credentials, but Catholic and cultural reactionary T. S. Eliot made the poetry.

There is a beautiful essay on book collecting called “The Psychometry of Books,” which defends the physical object, the codex bound in space and time, as a bearer of aesthetic presence. An essay on “Imagination and Reality” associates the artist with the priest and the king, with royal presence and the quest for the divine. She waxes nostalgic over the system of church and court patronage, which she sees as kinder to the artist than a market that subjects the creator to clock-time rather than the eternity of creation.

The words to mock Winterson for these views come so readily to mind that it is possible to forget that the mockers would have been thought stupid, coarse, or crazy for most of history. In rejecting any special pleading on behalf of her own social position, Winterson makes it easy enough for the reader to object in her stead that those who deride her unfashionable Romanticism are simply unable to take seriously the spiritual and cultural aspirations of a working-class lesbian from Lancashire. For my part, I will take Winterson’s untimely modernism and timeless Romanticism and her sense of the writer’s divine vocation over contemporary academe’s view of the arts—all those fervorless snide minions of Bourdieu and Foucault for whom art is nothing but a game of social status.

Winterson’s final essay discusses, at perhaps excessive length, her own work, her struggle to write fiction after the superannuation of the realist novel, her attempt to reanimate the modernist legacy and its own links to tradition. I like the part where she defines the writer as one who “lives in a constant state of readiness,” one who reads and thinks every day but who does not need to write every day (I’ve always thought “write every day” was bad advice, as if a work of art were a job you went to and punched a clock).

Complaints? Winterson has a great command of English literary history, but seemingly little outside that. Where are the Continental or Russian or American writers, to say nothing of points further east or south? She is able to make short work of realism by deriding Trollope, but wouldn’t Stendhal or Tolstoy give her a much harder time? Also, this book tends to repeat itself, and to repeat the didactic passages in her fiction. There is a performative contradiction here: in making such strenuous and serious arguments for a lightsome poetry, Winterson too walks when she should fly and betrays a certain Victorian (stern, earnest, sober) sensibility of her own. But there is no fascinating writer without contradictions, and I found this a fascinating book.

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[…] wanted to revisit Dickens after reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects. Like other British critics who want to keep alive the modernist tradition—see also Gabriel […]

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Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Vintage International) Kindle Edition

• Print length 208 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date April 17, 2013
• File size 2359 KB
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A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’ s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, JEANETTE WINTERSON burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit . Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry , The Passion , Written on the Body , and The PowerBook , have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00C0ALX1I
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (April 17, 2013)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 17, 2013
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2359 KB
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• Print length ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
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About the author

Jeanette winterson.

Jeanette Winterson, OBE (born 27 August 1959) is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl [Attribution, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Art Objects

Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

By Jeanette Winterson

Part of vintage international, category: art | essays & literary collections | literary criticism.

Feb 04, 1997 | ISBN 9780679768203 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780679768203 --> Buy

Apr 17, 2013 | ISBN 9780307763600 | ISBN 9780307763600 --> Buy

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Feb 04, 1997 | ISBN 9780679768203

Apr 17, 2013 | ISBN 9780307763600

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About Art Objects

In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves , she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us. " Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."– Los Angeles Times

Also in Vintage International

Also by Jeanette Winterson

About Jeanette Winterson

A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’ s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman… More about Jeanette Winterson

Product Details

Category: art | essays & literary collections | literary criticism, you may also like.

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“Jeanette Winterson is one of Britain’s brightest alternative literary lights. Her quirky, madly poetic prose has won her a loyal cult following and a lot of respect from the mainstream.” H.J.Kirchhoff, The Globe and Mail “Thrilling, persuasive, challenging and written with a skill and beauty entirely shorn of artifice. . . . Should be bought, read, re-read and read out loud as often as possible.” Edmonton Journal “Brilliant essays, the finest I’ve read in years, a wonderful, timely endorsement of what art is and what it isn’t. In 10 separate ways, from 10 different angles, she takes clear, intelligent aim at the modern wish that art be less arty, and more entertaining; that art be easier for people to chew and quickly digest. . . . Should be required reading.” Ottawa Citizen “It is invigorating to read these essays by a woman who believes in art, full stop.” The Globe and Mail “A delight. . . . I find Winterson an invigorating critic, as well as an exhilarating literary soul mate. . . . At a time when literary commentary is bogged down by dense, impenetrable post-modern and post-structuralist twaddle, Art Objects . . . offers itself as a breath of fresh thought and fresh expression.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record “Brilliant, challenging, funny, highly personal.” Family Practice “A witty, reasoned look at the power of, and our powerful need for, all forms of art.” Ottawa Citizen “A book of essays to set your intellect on fire.” Bruce Powe, The Financial Post “Potent. . . . Part soulful meditation and part fiery manifesto. . . . Ms. Winterson is a passionate writer. . . . Hers is a book born of a restless, uncompromising intelligence and a life of practicing what she preaches, of taking the kind of artistic risks she so fiercely espouses.” The New York Times Book Review “Winterson is in fine form in these essays about art, arguing, admonishing, infuriating, teasing. . . . She fights solemnly, beguilingly, for ecstasy and silence and the revival of our ability to contemplate. . . . She says much that is important about energy and passion. Her stalwart defence of the modern is a challenge to the barrenness and niggliness with which we live.” The Observer (UK) “There is no denying the beauty and precision of her writing, nor the clarity of her expression. . . . On her heroines—Stein, Woolf, Eliot, books themselves—she is particularly strong and passionate. Through it all, a central theme occurs: that art, true art, is and will remain a vital force, without which life is scarcely worthy of the name.” Time Out (UK)

Table Of Contents

PART ONE Art Objects PART TWO Transformation     Writer, Reader, Words     Testimony Against Gertrude Stein     A Gift of Wings (with reference to Orlando )     A Veil of Words (with reference to The Waves ) PART THREE Ecstasy and Energy       The Semiotics of Sex          The Psychometry of Books        Imagination and Reality       Art & Life        A Work of My Own

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Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

Jeanette winterson.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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Community reviews.

There used to be something called The Canon This was regularly used to blast iconoclasts who said terrible things at tea parties, such as ‘Surely Katherine Mansfield is as fine writer as Proust?’ The Canon allowed no debate; it guarded the entry and exit points to the Hall of Fame and stood firmly behind t(T)he t(T)imes. When not routing offenders in petticoats it fired warning shots over the heads of the uneducated. The Canon was admirably free from modern Existentialist Doubt. It knew who belonged and who didn’t belong. No Question. ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Who said that?’ It was Virginia Woolf Addressing The Canon. --Jeanette Winterson

”The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.”