Art and Lies

I think what I really like about Art and Lies is the dynamic nature of the stories. Every page is filled with something new, some new aspect of society that Jeannette Winterson is forcing us to acknowledge. For example, the three cities. Each city appears to be separate in the story, separate and gruesome in its own way. The first is, in a sense, "the forgotten city", the city that time has let go, the city that people have evolved and broken away from. It's tradition, built on and by tradition. In the modern era, tradition has been shuffled to the side and forgotten. It's monarchy, religion, the old ways. The second city is "the now", what the first city has become. Without tradition, the second city has become analytical. Not too many mansions, not too many slums, mostly apartments; the perfect bell curve. The third city is, as she says, the "invisible city", but it has ties to both. The third city is where the first and the second shuffle those who don't quite fit in their mold, the ones who the first two cities don't want to fit their mold. The thing about the cities though is that they aren't separate. They exist in each other, in our society. And while they show us everything that is not right, they don't show anything that is. So while we can see our own pettiness, our own faults, our own problems, we can't see how to change them. Perhaps, Winterson wants us to first recognize these problems before we can attempt to fix them. That's the interesting thing about her novel; she doesn't preach about what we should do, but rather what we are doing, forcing us to find the answers ourselves, in ourselves. The dynamic fluidity of her stories might be another indication of how we live now. We can't concentrate on one thing for too long; we need to be constantly engaged with something new. Just as the cities were an exaggerated representation of our society, the shortness of her stories could be a social commentary as well. Everything in the novel speaks about us, we just have to take the time to figure out what.