Ontology and Ecological Aesthetics in Jeanette Winterson’s Art & Lies

This essay seeks to trace and investigate ecologically inflected concepts in Jeanette Winterson’s Art & Lies. The general tendency in ecological and ecocritical analyses has long been a selective focus on how nature is represented in literary texts; however, the ecological crisis, globalization, and technological factors that drive environmental degradation are all tethered at the root to preliminary concepts relating to human behaviours, beliefs, values, and expectations. This essay maintains that the diagnoses should begin at the level of culture since it is at that level that ecological problems begin to germinate. Through a discussion that draws on Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, this essay performs a thematic reading of Art & Lies. Using Campagna’s elucidation of the metaphysical assumptions that inform environmentally destructive practices, it argues that Art & Lies draws attention to these assumptions and identifies in them an obstacle to raising ecological awareness. Additionally, by employing an approach that draws on ecocritical scholarship, this essay discusses how formal and linguistic experimentation in Art & Lies inscribes ecological viewpoints and attempts the mission of redress that could benefit a more ecologically attuned future.