An essay that deals mainly with imagination vs. reality much in the same way as storytelling vs. fact is discussed in most of her texts in some way. The possibilities of art and what conditions the artist has to work under are being compared through the centuries. Money has always been the enemy of art. As Winterson correctly points out, money can buy you a book or a painting but it can’t give you the energy within the art object.
"In a money culture, art, by its nature, objects. It fields its own realities, lives by its own currency, aloof to riches and want. Art is dangerous." Reality is being of things contrary to their non-being and other (possible, eventual etc.) forms of being.
Reality is the method that embody the objectively cognized and esthetically changed nature in the most absolutely way. It’s characterized by true describing of human personality in its multishaped relations to real life, law-governed and typical revealing, and describing life individually. Reality requests for “not only true details, but all the typical characters in typical circumstances”.
It was proved a long time ago by Jane Austin, that that art and reality are two completely different things with completely different regularities.
There are two extremities – reality on one hand and myth, legend, dream, imagination on other hand.
“A writer's style should be distinctive. Indeed, if it isn't distinctive, then it isn't a style. A creative person is someone who imagines what other people cannot. Their value to us lies in expanding our own possibilities. Walls fall. We break out. Art releases what was lost.” – said Jeanette Winterson herself. And I completely agree with that.
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