Arieanne Isabel San Pedro 3CA1

HUM1 February 6, 2019

1. How is the “narrow gate of subjective experience” an “anathema” to art and art
making?

Winterson, in her essay “Imagination and Reality” posits that the “narrow gate of

subjective experience” is an anathema to art, emphasizing that “… the role of the artist as visionary

is the correct one.” (2). The subjective experience, a cognitive and emotional process, unique to

individuals provide individuality, the diversity in perspective of a people or community. In the

context of the artist, the restriction of this subjective experience confines him into a pattern, a mold

dictated by norms and mores of different institutions, agencies, etc. Winterson cited that then, the

artist was “not to bring back visions but to play the Court photographer.” (1), pursuing the idea of

“…art as a mirror of life…” (4)– this thinking completely rejects the role of the artist as visionary.

The narrow gate of subjective experience as an anathema to art and art making is manifested

through Winterson’s metaphor of children as “batteries of new energy” (2). The pattern of plunging

children into a system which is molded to disregard the arts exhaust them of their energy, and are

eventually “successfully emptied of all resistance.” (3).

2. What is the real world compared with the notional world according to Winterson?
Five separate points (compare and contrast)

Institutions such as government, education and mass media endorse the notional life as

Winterson stressed that these perpetuate the “disregard for individuality” (2), citing freedom of

choice as its mantra but “streamlined homogeneity is the objective.” (2). These institutions serve

as agents to homogenize a thinking people for convenient mass influence.

The notional world’s subscription to a money culture, characterized by its institution’s

money-making efforts described by Winterson as having to “know what it is getting, when it is

getting it, and how much it will cost.” (5) generates a people who are lack-lustered, dull, where

“goods are worth more than time and where things are more important than ideas.” Winterson

juxtaposes this with the concept of creativity in relation to the artist; she relates that “[b]y dreaming

and idleness and then by intense self-discipline does the artist live.” (5)– a direct contradistinction

from the philosophy of money culture.

Art poses as a challenge in the notional world. Deriving from the money culture, art,

according to Winterson, “offers a different exchange rate” (5). The purchasing power of a money

culture allows its people to acquire art but “it cannot expose you to the vast energies you will find

there.” (5) as it demands reciprocity, the capacity to surrender yourself to another world. Winterson

used the metaphor of a man, able to purchase a woman but not her love. In contrast to the real

world, art unquestionably satisfies; it “offers an exchange in kind; energy for energy, intensity for

intensity, vision for vision.” (5).

The artist’s nature is to seize things in its entirety, “communicating them not as symbols

but as living realities…” (10). “To suggest that the writer, painter, musician is the one out of touch

with the real world is a doubtful proposition.” (10). In contrast with the notional world, where

familiarity cause blindness and objects are perceived and taken into our own norms, resulting in it

having little to no independent existence far from ourselves.

3. What is the life of an artist compared with the life of a realist? Three separate points
(compare and contrast)

The artist is in search for the sublime; of excellence and grandeur. He acknowledges the

presence of God and of the otherness– the belief that “…there is more around us than the

mundane…” (3) which warrants a “greater license”. Winterson mentions the development of the
visual arts during the Renaissance as an agent to bring back visions rather for the patronage of

money; “[t]the charge laid on the artist is to bring back visions.” (12).

It is in the obligation of the artist to separate optics from the virtual. Winterson posits that

“[t]he work of the artist is to see into the life of things; to distinguish between the superficialities

and realities; to know genuine from make-believe.” (10). The nature of the artist warrants him to

perceive what things for what they really are as they have developed their imaginative capacity to

its fullest. Born out of the imaginative capacity is invention, the “shaping spirit that re-forms

fragments into new wholes…” (10) and discernment, unique to the artist.

The artist is in search for a “morphic resonance”. His response to art is conditioned not by

the realities presented to us but by challenging these realities, forging his own ideals and beliefs.

4. Please find in the text these words and explain their context: invention, discernment,
imagination and reality.

“Invention is the shaping spirit that re-forms fragments into new wholes, so that even what

has been familiar can be seen fresh.” (10). In context, invention breaks apart the tangible and the

intangible and pieces them not together but to form another.

“Discernment is to know how to test the true and the false and to reveal objects, emotions,

ideas in their own coherence.” (10). For the artist, to discern is to comprehend what is obscure, to

grasp what is opaque or undetermined.

“Imagination takes in the world of experience and rather than trading it for a world of

symbols, delights in it for what it is.” According to Winterson, “the honest currency of art is the

honest currency of imagination.” (2)

 As Winterson describes, the sense-experience is what seem to be our reality. “…[W]hat

we can touch and feel, see and hear, is the sum of our reality.” (3). Winterson also highlights art

as an imaginative reality, the reality of art being the reality of the imagination.

5. “The artist is a translator; one who has learned how to pass into her own language
the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams, from the body, from
the material world, from the invisible world, from sex, from death, from love. A
different language is a different reality; what is the language, the world, of stones?
What is the language, the world, of birds? What is the language, the world of birds?
Of atoms? Of microbes? Of colours? Of air? The material world is closed to those
who think of it only as a commodity market.” Give a specific example of an artist that
functions as a translator in this sense.

Winterson’s cited Shakespeare in demonstrating the function of the artist as translator,

noting that “[t]he engineering of the play gives pleasure even to those who are not interested in the

words; but the words are the thing. The words are what interested Shakespeare and what should

closely interest us.” (12). He mastered his art– collected from fragments of shattered wholes,

pieced them together, re-shaped, re-created and finally translated into his own; Shakespeare

breathed life into his craft, immortalized into the paradigm we know of him today.

Source
Winterson, Jeanette. "Imagination and Reality." Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.
New York: Random, 1996. 133-151.