Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies: A Contrapuntal Piece for Three Voices and their Readers/Listeners
Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies: A Contrapuntal Piece for Three Voices and their Readers/Listeners

Summary/Abstract: This paper addresses Jeanette Winterson‟s Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd as a contrapuntal performance that exemplifies an artistic ability to elaborate a counterpoint joining the major characters, Handel, Picasso, and Sappho whose names are used as titles for the novel‟s chapters. Three voices take turns to tell their stories as in a song or a piece of music to end up speaking/singing together in a chorus. To read the novel as a contrapuntal performance is to address its celebration of the artistic perspectives of music, poetry, and painting as movements that work together to reclaim a sense of wholeness and revitalize language deadened by clichés. The narrative ends, but the novel continues with pages from Strauss‟s “Der Rosenkavalier,” inviting the Barthesian readers to straddle the boundary between fiction and music, engage these two genres in a dialogue, and take over the authorial project of celebrating art.

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