Review of Two Aladdin Lamps by Janet Winterson – Freewheeling Reflections on Life, Art, and Artificial Intelligence | Articles

IIn the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahrayar avenges his wife’s betrayal by ordering her to be executed and marrying a new virgin every night, beheading both of them at sunrise so that they would not have time to cheat. When victims run out, the young Persian queen Scheherazade volunteers but stops her murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and they become the stories we read.

As Janet Winterson says in her new book—a dizzying swirl of memoir, history, philosophy, politics, and self-help, loosely linked by commentary on the Nights—Sheherazade’s creative achievement “rejects the emergency of the moment—the contrived drama of a strong man.” The resonance of life in the age of Trump is deliberate; For Winterson, the way Scheherazade changes her predicament holds out hope that progressive politics is currently losing ground to “far-right thuggery.” “A better story begins with a better story,” she writes. “Reason will never win. Without imagination, nothing changes.”

Each chapter begins with an eloquent retelling of a Scheherazade tale, peppered with 21st-century jargon (“The Minister… has no room to vent”), before giving way to wide-ranging musings on anything and everything, from the history of eugenics, to 13th-century Mali, to the atrocity of trouser suits “favoured by some types of CEOs and a lot of female politicians.” As opinions on matters large and small pass, the tone alternately evokes a party political programme, Radio 4’s Thought of the Day, an old friend setting the world on the path to rights. “A global economy that serves everyone is not a childish dream… There is always enough money to set up an arms factory.” A quick analysis of Mozart’s misogyny Cosi van Totte concludes that it is pointless to cancel dead artists (“We Shall Not Marry Them”). At one point, Winterson tells us that compassion is lost on sex offenders: “There is such a thing as evil, and we should neither excuse nor forgive it.”

It seems thrillingly direct, even when its views are mundane: the Internet fosters division because “millions of followers… cluster around ideas that are rotten at heart—like flies on a corpse,” while smartphones push us to film our lives without actually seeing anything. “I’m sure people are addicted to falling in love because it’s one of the few times we really look and look and look,” Winterson says, writing about how a new lover sharpens our perception; But she suggests that the best therapy is art, which allows us to “get closer to ourselves,” in contrast to TikTok’s dopamine mill (“A miserable way to live”).

More unconventional is Winterson’s embrace of big technology’s potential to redefine the self, a theme she has previously addressed in her essay collection 12 Bytes (2021) and her sex robot novel Frankenstein (2019). The metaverse empowers “the you who is not met or served in the ordinary world.” Nanobots in our bloodstream, like silicon chips in our brains, make us “not dependent on the body, or what the body depends on” — which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be human, “unless you think that being human begins and ends with biology.” As for sentient AI, let’s talk: “Our Game of Thrones will be over… What would a non-biological entity want with gold, cars, private jets, guns, and land grabs?”

It is difficult to reconcile this with the general thrust of her politics, although the idea that fallen humanity might learn a thing or two from a disembodied Savior perhaps bears a trace of Winterson’s evangelical upbringing, about which I have written elsewhere and revisited here. Her adoptive mother had hoped she would become a missionary, and there may be a trace of that, too, in the infectious urgency of this free speech.

Winterson believes that for Scheherazade, art is what makes the difference between life and death, and it was not necessary at all. “Who comes home, after a long day of hunting and gathering just to survive, and then settles down to draw pictures on the wall? Humans! And first we had to make crayons. So don’t tell me that art is a luxury.”