What have I said in Written on the Body?
That it is possible to have done with the bricks and mortar
of conventional narrative, not as monkey-business or magic, but
by building a structure that is bonded by language. (Art Objects
189-190)
1
Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene with her first
novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), a bildungsroman
in which the female narrator is violently exorcised by the elders
(including her mother) of the Pentecostal Church, where she is
a young preacher, when at the age of fifteen she falls in love
with another girl member of the Church. The book was almost universally
acclaimed by British reviewers, awarded Britain's Whitbread Prize
for a first novel, and adapted by Winterson as a widely seen and
praised television drama series. The book was simultaneously embraced
by the lesbian feminist movement as a novel that made a major
new contribution to sexual politics. What was not so appreciated
at the time of this first novel's appearance was the way that
language plays a constitutive role in the construction of the
narrator's sexual subjectivity. When her mother turns on the narrator,
she affirms the Church's patriarchal belief that "the message
belonged to the men" (133). By assuming to turn preacher,
the girl narrator had "taken on a man's world," not
just in a social but a sexual form (133-4). Her adoption of the
male role of a preacher led in their opinion to her adoption of
the equally "unnatural" role of a lesbian lover. The
elders of the Church accordingly attempt to alter her sexual orientation
by depriving her of the Word, forbidding her to preach. Her response
is to employ her own words in Oranges Are the Only Fruit, a
text in which she can reconstitute her sexual subjectivity through
the signifying power of language.
Clearly modeled on her own childhood, this first novel led critics
to expect her to continue in the same vein (note 1). Her exuberant
mixtures of fantasy and history in her next three novels, Boating
for Beginners (1985), The Passion (1987) and Sexing
the Cherry (1989) were accepted as suitable substitutes and
widely praised. But with Written on the Body (1992) the
British reviewers with few exceptions turned against Winterson
and her work, or rather against her work because she wrote it.
Her declared lesbian orientation was a major factor in arousing
the prejudices of the heterosexist British reviewers and, strangely
enough, the reservations of lesbian critics alike. Yet Written
on the Body, with its sexually indeterminate narrator, is
a deliberate attempt to dispense with distinctions of gender and
to meditate on the nature of love stripped of its specifically
hetero- and homosexual features. It is my contention that Written
on the Body, like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, focuses
on the power of language to create both subjectivity and sexuality,
and that to concentrate exclusively on the politics of the lesbian
subject blinds reviewer and critic alike to the preoccupations
and very real distinction of this novel.
This essay will concentrate, then, on ways in which Winterson
confronts the linguistic problems of narrating a romance, starting
with her admission that the entire subject of love has been verbalized
so extensively and repeatedly that it is almost impossible to
write anything new about the experience. Her subject is less love
than the problems associated with describing it in narrative or
textual form. I will show how Winterson, facing the unavoidable
necessity of falling back on the clichéd language of love,
uses such language against itself. Her narrator alternates between
moments of utter verbal banality and moments of critical detachment
from and examination of such language. Just as the narrator defines
love by its loss, so does the language of love derive much of
its power from the breakdown of its expressive function. I will
show how Winterson pursues this parallel between sexuality and
textuality to imbue language with its own life, a life that can
revivify the love the loss of which it is brooding on. Winterson
will also be seen to employ a variety of specialist languages
drawn from such discourses as those of the Bible, travelogues
and anatomy, as well as employing such divergent narrative modes
as dramatic dialogue and epistolary fiction, to overcome the over-worn
status of romance fiction. This novel is less about desire than
it is about the language of desire, and less about the phenomenon
of love than about the problem of its fictional representation.
To get at Jeanette Winterson's writing it is necessary to clear
away more than the usual amount of critical debris and readers'
misprisions. The first task is to dispose of the mountains of
biographical criticism that have accumulated especially in the
British press and that serve as substitutes for serious evaluation
of her work. The British literary establishment never got over
her choosing one of her own novels when asked in 1993 to pick
her Book of the Year for The Daily Telegraph. She also
had the effrontery to make public her affair with her literary
agent, Pat Kavannah, who happens to be Julian Barnes's wife. There
were other provocations, including her claim to be the direct
literary heir to Virginia Woolf.
Still only in her early 40s, Winterson invited some of this vituperation
by her naiveté and inexperience with the media. But reviewers
and critics have allowed this extraneous and sometimes misreported
material to affect their assessment of her innovatory and distinctive
work. Representative is James Wood, the Guardian's principal
book reviewer, who attributed to her sixth novel, Art and Lies
(1994), the failings that he found in Winterson's public personality:
the book is "a walking self-advertisement" which "preache[s]
the importance of itself" (T 11). In other words, Wood claims,
the novel suffers from the egotism of it's author. Reviewing
her next novel, Gut Symmetries (1997) for the Daily
Telegraph, Anthony Quinn is even more blatant in his obfuscation
of the difference between writer and writing: "Great writers
understand that profound rumination is the more powerful for being
handled with a little humility. Winterson is more interested in
advancing the idea of herself as a stylist" (4).
Again and again critics and reviewers have asserted that since
the publication of her fifth novel, Written on the Body,
if not before, Winterson's work has shown a catastrophic decline
from its earlier promise (note 2). This escalating chorus of
criticism may reflect the fact that each of her books has become
more meditative and less narrative, a trend of which she is fully
conscious. In her only collection of essays to date, Art Objects
(1995), she asserts, "I realised that [. . .] plot was meaningless
to me. [. . .] I had to accept that my love-affair was with language,
and only incidentally with narrative" (155).
Winterson's repeated portrayal of love between women is a major
cause of distortion and prejudice among the reviewers of her books.
On the one hand the British critics have tended to accuse her
of male-bashing, and once again the source for the accusation
proves to be pseudo-biographical rather than based on her fiction.
Tellingly, it is mainly the male critics who focus on Winterson's
supposed anti-male stance and read it back into her fiction. Peter
Kemp, chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times, is representative.
Reviewing Art and Lies he deplored Winterson's "propensity
for scrawling the graffiti of gender-spite across her pages,"
her "sexist goings-on," and her "high-pitched rhapsodies
[. . .] given voice in the novel's extensive interludes of lesbian
lyricism" (2). Kemp and others seem to have forgotten Winterson's
creation of such sympathetic male characters as Henri in The
Passion and Jordan in Sexing the Cherry, Jordan who
(like Winterson herself) records the journeys he "might have
made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time" (2).
Such critics equally forget Winterson's hilarious caricature of
the successful female writer of romances, Bunny Mix, in Boating
for Beginners, or of the preposterous, fundamentalist Mother
in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Responding to a question
concerning gender in The Paris Review, Winterson replied:
"I see it as less important as I get older. I no longer care
whether somebody's male or female. I just don't care" (Bilger
102).
It is ironic that Winterson's writing has also been badly misrepresented
by some of her fellow lesbians, mainly female academics. In their
case the origin of their misrepresentation is not founded on a
judgment of her character, but is based on the success or failure
of her work to conform to what they consider to be a correct representation
of contemporary lesbian-feminist politics (note 3). They pursue
this line despite Winterson's public insistence that she doesn't
"want to be a political writer, or a writer whose concern
is sexual politics" (Bilger 105). Even Winterson's first
novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which has been proclaimed
one of "the few canonical texts which are central to the
fledgling lesbian literary tradition" (Munt xx), is nevertheless
criticized by another critic of lesbian literature for failing
to live up to "the political agenda" of the lesbian
writer (Doan 147). But it is Written on the Body with its
narrator whose gender is withheld that seems to have aroused the
most criticism from lesbian critics. Patricia Duncker is most
explicit in giving her reasons for finding this novel a failure:
"Written on the Body is a text full of lost opportunities.
Winterson refuses to write an 'out' lesbian novel." In doing
so, "she is losing more than she gains" (85). In the
same collection of essays in which Duncker writes, Cath Stowers
defends Winterson from this charge on the grounds that she conforms
to Monique Wittig's definition of lesbianism as not just "a
refusal of the role 'woman'," but "the refusal of the
economic, ideological, and political power of a man" (13).
Thus the lesbian school of criticism can only salvage Winterson's
work by demonstrating how, despite appearances to the contrary,
she actually conforms to lesbian politics and aesthetics. Ultimately,
as Louise Horskjaer Humphries has suggested, in the case of most
lesbian critics "the work is being judged by the writer (in
particular her sexuality) [. . .] rather than the writer being
judged by the work" (15). By a twist of irony British male
reviewers and lesbian academic critics coming from opposite directions
end up alike reading into the work what they think they discern
in the author.
Winterson herself is very clear about where she stands on this
issue. "When I read Adrienne Rich or Oscar Wilde [. . .]
I am not reading their work to get at their private lives, I am
reading their work because I need the depth-charge it carries"
(Art Objects 109). As for herself, "I am a writer
who happens to love women," she insists. "I am not a
lesbian who happens to write" (104). What appears to be autobiographical
in a good writer's work, she argues, is actually a rhetorical
strategy: "It presents itself as a kind of diary when really
it is an oration" (105). This is just as true of Written
on the Body as it is of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Even if one disregards the critics' tendency to read Written
on the Body as a roman à clef in which her past
affair with Pat Kavannah and her concurrent one with Peggy Reynolds
are waiting to be revealed by the critic skilled in literary gossip,
this novel is still largely discussed in terms of Winterson's
known sexual orientation. Katie Owen is representative of such
a response when she asserts in her review of the novel for the
Sunday Telegraph that "this is clearly a gay novel,
with little sympathy for heterosexual relationships or men in
general" (111). Joan Smith reviewing the novel for The
Independent, Daniel Johnson reviewing it for The Times,
and Anthony Curtis reviewing it for The Financial Times
all make the same assumption. Winterson is in effect being charged
with writing a gay novel that is being coy about its gayness.
Yet, as Judith Butler observes, "being 'out' always depends
to some extent on being 'in'" ("Imitation . . ."
16). Besides, do all gay novels have to offer an affirmation of
gay love? Winterson herself insists that her use of an ungendered
narrator is intended to burrow beneath the divisions of gender
in order to excavate the essence of love:
I mean, for me a love story is a love story. I don't care what
the genders are if it's powerful enough. And I don't think that
love should be a gender-bound operation. It's probably one of
the few things in life that rises above all those kinds of oppositions-black
and white, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual. When
people fall in love they experience the same kind of tremors,
fears, a rush of blood to the head. [. . .] And fiction recognizes
this. (Marvel 165)
2
Since Written on the Body is commonly held to mark the
point in Winterson's writing when she supposedly lost her bearings,
I want to focus on this novel which I believe is an exceptional
achievement, arguably her best work to date. Considerable critical
attention has been paid to this novel due to its use of an ungendered
narrator. Clearly this highly original device allows Winterson
to escape from the binary determinations of a heterosexual representation
of human behavior, to examine sexuality in an ungendered fictional
universe. Most critics (as opposed to reviewers) of the book cite
Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body (1973) and Judith Butler's
Bodies That Matter (1993) in order to explore the ways
in which the narrator evades what Butler has termed "the
globalizing heterosexist episteme" (Gender Trouble 120)
(note 4). Yet many critics, like the reviewers, choose to assume
that the narrator is a thinly disguised lesbian lover. They promptly
foreclose a text that Winterson has deliberately left open. What
is undeniable is that her narrator is bisexual (not androgynous),
having conducted affairs with both men and women. Winterson has
said that she does not "think people's sexuality is really
that fixed" (Bilger 107). Some critics have gone to enormous
lengths to cite textual evidence for their assumption about the
gender of the narrator. But their ingenious detective work is
rendered pointless by Winterson's observation that it doesn't
matter which sex the narrator is, because "the gender of
the character is both, throughout the book, and changes; sometimes
it's female, sometimes it's male" (Stewart 74). All such
critics have done is to select those passages in the book where
the narrator is (temporarily) female.
Although the use of an ungendered narrator is an innovative move
that has significant implications for one's reading of the novel
in its entirety, I want to turn to the wider concerns that Winterson
uses this device to explore. The ungendered narrator is only one
strategy she employs among many to see whether she cannot revivify
the jaded language of love. First occurring on the second page
of the novel, the phrase "It's the clichés that cause
the trouble" is reiterated like a refrain five more times
in the course of the book (10, 21, 26, 71, 155, 180). What the
narrator is forced to face is that the clichés employed
in the discourse of love, sexual desire and romance are unavoidable.
Early in the book the narrator repeatedly ridicules the clichés
attached to married love: "Settle down, feet under the table.
She's a nice girl, he's a nice boy. It's the clichés that
cause the trouble" (71). The narrator contemptuously dismisses
the safe confines of marriage: "Marriage is the flimsiest
weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python"
(78). Yet this Lothario or Don Juan type of libertine simultaneously
catches him/herself falling victim to the clichés associated
with the sexually promiscuous lifestyle:
I suppose I couldn't admit that I was trapped in a cliché
every bit as redundant as my parents' roses round the door. I
was looking for the perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop
mighty orgasm. Ecstasy without end. I was deep in the slop-bucket
of romance. (21)
Winterson, then, embeds the inevitability of ending up in cliché
in the fabric of the narrative even
before confronting this problematic inevitability in recounting
the central love story.
The story of the narrator's and Louise's love for one another
opens on the first page of the novel, although the reader is unaware
that the unnamed "you" is Louise at this point. No sooner
has the narrator recalled Louise saying "I love you,"
than s/he is forced to confront its lack of originality
"'I love you' is always a quotation" (9). We can hear
the phrase used every day of the year on television. Hardly a
single romantic novel published by Harlequin is without it. The
focus on "quotation" alerts the reader to the fact that
the problem for the narrator of this love story is how to narrate
such a powerful emotion without falling back on language already
made over-familiar by past use. And what the narrator has to learn
over the course of the book is that it is impossible to avoid
the use of clichéd quotation altogether. To describe the
experience of love necessarily plunges any narrator into a world
of intertextuality, of language already long inhabited and become
automatized. Winterson's answer to this quandary is to embrace
the use of intertextuality and exploit it for all it is worth.
In employing those three unavoidable words the narrator compares
him/herself to some savage worshipping them only to later curse
his/her acquisition of the language of love. There follows a famous
quotation from The Tempest where Caliban curses Prospero
for teaching him to speak. So even on the first page the narrator
is citing another celebrated romance to foreground the Janus-faced
nature of language in general and the language of love in particular.
This book abounds in references to other books, especially ones
concerned with love Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, House of
Fame, Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Midsummer Night's
Dream, Song of Solomon, not to mention writers like D. H.
Lawrence and Mark Twain, paintings such as Burne-Jones' "Love
and the Pilgrim," songs such as "Lady Sings the Blues,"
and movies such as Jules et Jim and King Kong. Even
Louise's ploy for forcing herself on the narrator's attention
is borrowed from the narrative of history: she turns up at the
narrator's door soaking wet, just as Lady Hamilton had done so
successfully at Nelson's door. Neither words nor actions can avoid
being derivative in the field of love.
Many reviewers criticized the novel for its clichéd use
of the traditional romance plot boy(?) meets girl; boy(?)
loses girl; boy(?) reunites with girl. On the one hand Winterson
deliberately appropriates this time worn plot for her own purposes,
another instance of her flaunting the intertextual nature of her
text. On the other hand the uncertain gender of the lover and
the uncertain nature of the reunion breathes new life into this
much repeated plot sequence. Carolyn Allen has pointed out a further
break with tradition in that the "heroine" (Louise)
is the initiator of the love affair (74). Winterson's strategy,
then, is to deliberately evoke textual precedents only to establish
a distance from them. Critics of lesbian literature (such as Allen)
have remarked on how closely the plot and situation of this book
resembles Wittig's The Lesbian Body and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
(1936), but also note significant differences in tone (less cruel
than Wittig) and outcome (in Nightwood Nora drives Robin
from her). That seems to be the effect Winterson is seeking
the charge of the old, combined with the shock of various departures
from it.
Clichés abound at every level in this novel, and almost
without exception Winterson seizes on the cliché and turns
it to her own purpose. Instance the adultery involved in the affair
with Louise. Previously the narrator had made use of the conventional
excuses of adulterers "You had no choice, you were
swept away" (39). But this new love for Louise is differentiated
from the others by an honesty that forces the narrator to face
up to the pain that his/her actions are bound to cause to the
third party (Jacqueline): "I know exactly what's happening
and I know too that I am jumping out of this plane of my own free
will. No, I don't have a parachute, but worse, neither does Jacqueline"
(39). Winterson makes particularly heavy use of clichéd
situation when describing the narrator's illicit sexual liaisons,
such as that with an anonymous married woman:
These are the confines of our life together, this room, this bed.
This is the voluptuous exile freely chosen. We daren't eat out,
who knows whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the
canniness of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day,
chilled in the fridge, baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot
and cold, fire and ice, the extremes under which we live. (72)
Yet the language and images she employs serve to undercut the
clichéd situation, to place it within a wider moral frame
that depends intertextually on references to, for instance, the
extremities of ice and fire that afflict the damned in Dante's
Inferno, and to Christ's sermon on the mount in which he
counseled, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"
(Matt. 6.34). In this way the banality and sordidness of the typical
adulterous tryst is reunited with spiritual profundities.
Winterson also evokes the different languages of a wide range
of discourses meteorology, biology, anatomy, chronobiology,
physics, astrophysics, zoology, not to mention the Bible
and employs them to rejuvenate the jaded language of love. Here
is just one example among many from marine biology: "She
opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with
fresh tides of longing" (73). The sheer functionality of
the female lover's sexual opening and closing here acquires the
beauty of a delicate marine flower responding to overwhelming
tidal flows of desire. She also reaches out to a number of literary
genres to add to her armory. In a two-page scene from an imaginary
melodramatic playscript, the married woman attempts to reconcile
her divided loyalties with a series of clichéd excuses
which are neatly undercut by the silence of the lover who ends
up in the bathroom silently crying (14-15). In this case a Beckettian
silence is employed to expose the emptiness of the married woman's
language and emotional life. Later in the novel Winterson turns
to the epistolary mode when the narrator writes Louise a letter
explaining that s/he feels compelled to leave her to help save
her life. The letter starts with an unacknowledged quotation from
Twelfth Night (5. 1. 132-3): "I love you more than
life itself," continues with even more commonplace expressions
such as "I did not know this much happiness was possible,"
and draws to an end with a tautology: "The message is a simple
one; my love for you" (105-6). In between come some highly
original expressions of love. Is this mixture of the genuine and
the secondhand meant to reflect the fact that the narrator genuinely
believes that s/he is acting in Louise's best interests, but later
discovers his/her action and sentiment to be derivative and presumptuous?
Winterson's self-conscious use of different discourses throughout
this book encourages the reader to expect such sophisticated,
complex effects.
Winterson's negotiation between the unavoidable use of cliché
and the breakthrough into a new language of love reflects an ambiguity
lying at the center of the phenomenon of love itself. Michel
Foucault has diagnosed a similar duality underlying the discourse
of love in his three volumes of The History of Sexuality.
For Foucault sexuality itself is a function of ideology:
It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not
a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface
network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special
knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are
linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies
of knowledge and power. (105-6)
It is interesting that Foucault throws together "stimulation
of bodies" and "the incitement to discourse," that
is, sexuality and textuality (about sexuality). Whichever of the
two is invoked, there appears to be an internal contradiction
that resists any attempt to achieve stability of meaning or effect.
Addressing what she terms "postmodern love," Catherine
Belsey defines it from a poststructuralist perspective as similarly
conflicted: "Love is [. . .] at once endlessly pursued and
ceaselessly suspected. [. . .] It cannot speak, and yet it seems
that it never ceases to speak in late twentieth-century Western
culture" (685). According to Belsey, desire's citationality
roots it not in nature but in fiction and the entertainment industry.
The language of love consequently "is at the same time dispersed
among banalities, poetry, the sacred, tragedy" (693).
Turning her attention to Written on the Body for half a
page, Belsey claims without further elaboration that "[l]ove
is very explicitly shown to be subject to the dialectic of Law
and desire" (693). How? Where? The opening sentence of the
novel (reiterated later) offers the key: "Why is the measure
of love loss" (9)? Winterson's unusual word order ensures
that love and loss are directly juxtaposed. Love, the novel implies,
necessitates and is constituted by loss, just as desire, viewed
from the poststructuralist psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques
Lacan, is defined paradigmatically by a sense of lack. Talking
of the subject, Lacan claims that "it is in so far as his
desire is unknown, it is in this point of lack, that the desire
of the subject is constituted" (218-9). Lacan proceeds to
point out that the lack is located in both the subject and the
object of the subject's desire. That dual lack is what produces
desire. Similarly in Winterson's novel desire is consistently
associated with a dual sense of lack, absence or unobtainability.
No sooner does the narrator succeed in luring Louise away from
her husband than s/he chooses to absent him/herself from the relationship.
This has the immediate effect of raising the register of desire
in both the narrator and Louise and sustaining it at a high level
for the rest of the book. Winterson is careful to build this interdependency
of love and lack into the texture of her narrative. For instance
at one point the narrator is describing a moment of tenderness
between Louise and him/herself:
I put my arms around her, not sure whether I was a lover or a
child. I wanted her to hide me beneath her skirts against all
menace. Sharp points of desire were still there but there was
too a sleepy safe rest like being in a boat I had as a child.
She rocked me against her, sea-calm, sea under a clear sky, a
glass-bottomed boat and nothing to fear.
"The wind's getting up," she said. (80)
The paragraph associates "child" with "safety"
with "boat" with "Louise." No sooner has s/he
achieved this childish sense of safety, of being protected from
the storms of nature rocked in Louise's maritime arms, than Louise
warns him/her of impending danger. No sooner has it manifested
itself than love paradoxically generates the condition for its
survival - the immediate threat of loss.
Winterson continuously exploits the parallels between sexuality
and textuality. She acknowledges the fact that the language of
love is as beyond the writer's control as is love beyond the lover's
control. Talking about language in general, she has said, "to
release the power of words is to release a power which is sometimes
in your gift but never in your control" (Barr 32). In Art
Objects Winterson parallels art (literature) to love. Each
"challenges the reality to which we lay claim." Part
of the pleasure and terror of each is "the world turned upside
down" (15). Sappho gives poetic expression to the same belief
in Art and Lies: "Is language sex? Say my name and
you say sex" (66). If "[a]rt is excess" (Art
Objects 94), so is love: beneath Louise's control is "a
crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass
pylons" (49).
Language pursues a life of its own. Winterson not only describes
humans as textual artifacts but also thinks of works of literature
as if they were living beings: "A work of art is abundant,
spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets
to close the curtains, dries your eyes, is your friend, offers
you a disguise, a difference, a pose" (Art Objects
65). Similarly Louise's declaration that she was leaving Elgin
because her love for the narrator makes her married life seem
like a sham is transformed by the narrator from a verbal offering
into a precious object: "I've hidden those words in the lining
of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching"
(99). Obversely the first-person narrator/lover is constituted
by language, the language of others. As Lucy Hallet pointed out
in reviewing this novel, "The speaking subject is always
grammatically androgynous: 'I' is an ungendered pronoun"
(116). Gail Right reinforces this impression that character is
a construction of language when she tells the narrator: "The
trouble with you [. . .] is that you want to live in a novel"
(160). Seen from the reader's vantage point, s/he does live in
a novel which s/he also narrates. Both love and art offer us "freedom,
outside of the tyranny of matter" (Art Objects 59).
Like love, language, according to Winterson, offers us a form
of religious experience. She thinks of language as "something
sacred," (Art Objects 153), books as "talismans"
or "sacred objects" (Bilger 76), and the writer's pursuit
of perfection as a search for "a Holy Grail" which she
knows she will never find (Art Objects 168-9). Still, language
is necessarily a substitution for a deeper need or desire that
inevitably eludes us in the attempt to give it linguistic life.
At her most intense Winterson will resort to the language of the
Bible to express the inexpressible experience of love. Her use
of the Song of Solomon in this novel (e. g. Written on the
Body 20) has been much commented on. At the same time Winterson
recognizes the tendency of lovers' language to topple unexpectedly
into absurdity or self-deceit. She rarely loses her critical faculty
and will subject her narrator's use of language even in his/her
interchanges with Louise to scathing examination:
"Hello Louise. I was passing so I thought I might pop in."
Pop in. What a ridiculous phrase. What am I, a cuckoo clock?
We went down the hall together. Elgin shot his head out of the
study door. "Hello there. Hello, hello, very nice."
(30)
Not content with mocking the narrator's temporary aberration,
Winterson extends her comic image to ridicule Elgin who pops out
(rather than in) and sounds like the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock.
Similarly the narrator is quick to catch him/herself excusing
his/her new-found love for Louise to Jacqueline with the expression
"things had changed," when it is s/he who had changed,
asking, "Why do I collude in this mis-use of language"
(56-7)? One has to be very alert to Winterson's use of language,
because she makes it work for herself in complex ways. Describing
the narrator's decision to settle for a safe, comfortable, loveless
life with Jacqueline, she writes: "I became an apostle of
ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum,
praised the gentle bands of my existence [. . .]" (27). The
repeated use of oxymoron here betrays to the reader the contradictory,
pointedly foolish (the Greek meaning of oxymoron) behavior of
the narrator in trying to settle for second best where love is
involved.
Winterson also uses tropes of travel and anatomy to pursue her
textual exploration of the corporeality of love. She has said
that she wrote The Passion with its Venetian locale before
she ever visited Venice. "I do travel in my head" (Bilger
100). She goes on to point out that travel is a simple trope for
conveying "an inner journey and an outer journey at the same
time" (101). The lover's exploration of the total person
constituting the loved one (not just her body) is given substance
by analogy to earlier explorers of new-found lands:
Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets, I will
find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you
and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We
shall cross one another's boundaries and make ourselves one nation.
(20)
Where the trope differs from the explorations of early travelers
is in the lack of exploitation. This form of love is not conquest
but mutual discovery. "I was lost in my own navigation,"
says the narrator (17). Winterson seems to want to differentiate
this love from the stereotypical heterosexual version where penetration
of the interior and possession of the gold mined there is the
norm. The indirectness of these allusions to the lovers' bodies
only adds to the erotic charge and demand on the reader's imagination:
"Eyes closed I began a voyage down her spine, the cobbled
road of hers that brought me to a cleft and a damp valley then
a deep pit to drown in." The next sentence makes us realize
that Winterson has used this trope to turn the little world of
the lovers into an everywhere: "What other places are there
in the world than those discovered on a lover's body" (82)?
This is not the only occasion in the book when Winterson draws
on Donne's comparison of love to territorial exploration, but
with a difference. Where Donne turns the loved one into a conquest
("O my America, my new found land, / My kingdom, safeliest
when with one man manned" "Elegy 19"), Winterson
celebrates reciprocity: "I had no dreams to possess you [.
. .]" (52).
In the second section of the novel the narrator, nursing his/her
pain, enters into an extended series of prose poems meditating
on various parts of Louise's cancer-ridden body. Each section
opens with a quotation from an anatomical textbook. The narrator's
explorations of Louise's body at times combine anatomical definitions
with tropes of travel: "I dropped into the mass of you and
I cannot find the way out" (120). This entire section constitutes
an extended conceit centering on the paradox that love is so frequently
thought of as a disease lovesickness. The narrator, for
whom love previously has usually lasted six months, cannot help
seeing analogies between a vision of love by definition dependent
for its power on its potential undoing and a terminal disease
like cancer. Both love and cancer end in death (yes, death too
in the sense that the Elizabethans loved to play on so exhaustively).
Marianne Børch has succinctly summarized the extent of
the parallels between love and cancer established in the text:
no one knows why love or cancer strikes or how to cure it (pp.
67/96); neither can be controlled, but only known from its effect
(pp. 53/105); normal rules of existence are suspended (pp. 115/10);
the sick body hurts easily, even as intense love-making leaves
the heedlessly passionate lover bruised (pp. 39/124); even as
the sick body enters a recession of deceptive health (p. 175),
so seemingly healthy love may mark a withdrawal into narcissism;
cancer invades the body, an intrusion similar to the lover's exploration
(pp. 115/123); the cancerous body dances with itself, self intimate
with self in the way of dancing lovers (pp. 175/73). (47)
Winterson uses these variations on an anatomical theme to give
poetic expression to the underlying duality of love and of the
language of love that is the obsessive theme of this narration.
As the narrator acknowledges, Louise "opened up the dark
places as well as the light" (174). Not just love but language,
words, can "poison you" (Gut Symmetries 119).
In one interview Winterson agreed that disease is "one of
those useful metaphors that everyone understands." She continues:
"Even the dimmest people can see that this is not only to
do with their own bodies but a kind of metaphor for the state
crumbling away" (Bilger 108). The narrator's failures in
love can be seen as part of a wider failure in the narrator's
society as a whole. Elgin, Gail Right and her pretentious wine
bar, Louise's mother and her fear of what the neighbors think,
even the degeneration of the local railway station--all indicate
a criticism of contemporary Britain.
But if love has its death written into its genetic code, the process
can be reversed, at least in the language of love. When the narrator
returns home from the library with an anatomy book, s/he sets
out to defy the quotidian world of decay and disease: "Within
the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking,
sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise.
I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair
and voice that I craved" (111). In writing a love poem about
Louise, the narrator is substituting a textual for a sexual and
physical evocation of her. So in the section dealing with the
clavicle or collar bone, the narrator opens his/her meditation
with: "I cannot think of the double curve lithe and flowing
with movement as a bony ridge, I think of it as the musical instrument
that bears the same root. Clavis. Key. Clavichord" (129).
This inventive use of language converts the negative clinical
view of Louise into the musical and poetic evocation of the lover
the narrator remembers. These prose poems resuscitate the dying
Louise with the magic of language, the signifiers of which indefinitely
defer desire. Love is and has its own language. This love story
is one written on the body, not of the body. "Written on
the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the
accumulations of a lifetime gather there" (89). Only the
lover and the artist can decipher this linguistic karma. With
her reading hands Louise has "translated me [the narrator]
into her own book" (89). Where once the Word was made flesh
(John 1. 14), Winterson in godlike fashion seeks to turn flesh
back into the word. "Let me leaf through you," Sappho
says in "The Poetics of Sex," "before I read you
out loud" (The World 46).
The clichéd plot of romance is subsumed within a prolonged
meditation on the interdependence of love and language and on
the essentially conflicted nature of both language and love. What
controls this narrative is not plot but shape. Winterson says
she is "a writer who does not use plot as an engine or foundation"
(Art Objects 189). Shape is important to her as much as
plot is irrelevant. What shape does this book take? There appears
to be a movement from the predominantly flippant tone used early
on in the narrative to a more impassioned and serious tone once
the narrator learns of Louise's cancer. Winterson employs humor
throughout. But the overall mood changes from near farce, when
describing the narrator's earlier love life, to the lyric tone
used for the central love affair, to a near tragic mode that takes
over once the narrator has renounced Louise. (Winterson has learnt
from Shakespeare, who "never bothered to think of a plot"
[Art Objects 149], that tragedy is more effective if interlaced
with moments of comedy hence the episodes with Gail Right
and Louise's mother.)
Then there is a shape to the narrator's experience of love. What
passed for love during the narrator's earlier six-month stands
gives way to numbness with Jacqueline: "With her I forgot
about feeling and wallowed in contentment" (76). Once the
narrator discovers true love, s/he is quickly embroiled in its
creative and then its destructive forces. These unavoidable destructive
forces are what give love its special charge. "Why is the
measure of love loss?" the narrator keeps asking (9, 39).
The narrative offers a textual solution. Just as love destroys
the libertine in the narrator, so the narration aims at destroying
the clichés in the language of love. That process occurs
most intensely during the long period in which the narrator mourns
the loss of love.
There is also the suggestion of a mythic shape to this book. It
opens at a time of drought. "It hasn't rained for three months.
The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots
into the dry ground" (9). How can one avoid recalling the
opening lines of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land with its
"dead land" and "dull roots"? In Art Objects
Winterson has not only defended Eliot and his theory of the impersonality
of the artist, but has also declared her indebtedness to modernists
like Eliot and Virginia Woolf in general, calling them "the
mainstream" (177). One might call Winterson a neomodernist
rather than a postmodernist. The chronology of this novel seems
to have been disrupted in order to suggest a mythic movement from
aridity to fertility that parallels that of The Waste Land.
The opening in fact anticipates the summer six months after the
narrator has left Louise for Yorkshire. Late on in the book we
return to this period of drought: "June. The driest June
on record. [. . .] The sun that should have brought life was carrying
death in every relentless morning" (150). The narrator is
left with her own "broken images, where the sun beats"
found in The Waste Land (l. 22). And like The Waste
Land, the final section of the book offers "a damp gust
/ Bringing rain" (ll. 393-4). Trudging back to the cottage
in the Yorkshire countryside, the narrator finds that the "rain
on the dry land from a dry summer hadn't penetrated through the
soil to the aquifers, only as far as the springs that fed them"
(185). As in the poem, the end of the book appears to promise
the possibility of renewal after dearth / loss.
Yet the ending resists any such redemptive interpretation. Just
how are we to take the finale in which Louise reappears, whether
in person or in the narrator's fantasy the critics cannot decide?
There is another way of understanding it. The entire narrative
is a confessional told in retrospect until we catch up with the
dry September described on the opening page, which occurs approximately
on page 161 out of 190 pages. Further the narrative is put in
the hands of a narrator who is seen to be factually unreliable.
"Have I got it wrong, this hesitant chronology?" asks
the narrator early on (17). Twice someone alleges, "'You're
making it up.'" "Am I?" the narrator asks the reader
as much as the character (22, 60). On another occasion the narrator
addresses the reader directly: "I can tell by now you are
wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator" (24). For
Winterson art is in the business of "persuading us of the
doubtfulness of the seeming-solid world" (Art Objects
135). She resists realist art, and considers that film and television
are now satisfying people's need for "the narrative of fact."
That "should free up words into something far more poetic,
something about the inner life, the imaginative life" (Bilger
91).
Discernible in the ending is a structure that defies such progressive
patterning as I have traced in Winterson's use of narrative shaping.
The end is reminiscent of the Piranesi nightmare that the narrator
is caught up in: "The logical paths the proper steps led
nowhere" (92). In narrative terms this romance likewise leads
nowhere. Consoled by a friend who says, "'At least your relationship
with Louise didn't fail. It was the perfect romance,'" the
narrator comments, "Was it? [. . .] The happy endings are
compromises" (187). Next the narrator wonders, "Did
I invent her?" (189). Finally in the penultimate paragraph
Louise appears at the kitchen door, paler, thinner but warm. The
effect on the narrator of this appearance is to turn her little
room into an everywhere (pace Donne): "The world is bundled
up in this room" (190). In the final sentence the narrator
admits, "I don't know if this is a happy ending" (190).
The clichéd conclusion of romance has been problematized.
This is because the reader is not meant to see this ending in
realist terms at all. As Jordan reflects in Sexing the Cherry,
"very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for
the lover's dreams. [. . .] To be a muse may be enough" (79-80).
The conclusion of Written on the Body celebrates the transformative
effects of art itself. It removes us from what Winterson calls
"the nightmare of narrative" (Gut Symmetries
24). It is neither factual nor explainable simply as a character's
fantasy. It celebrates the triumph of a purely textual and artistic
recreation of a lover already dead ("I knew she would die,"
154) but a love renewed by a renewed use of language. The structure
that Winterson has bonded by language is one of love brought into
focus through loss. It is also one of words whose symbolic meaning
is reached only at the cost of lack of being hence the enigmatic
status of the ending. Textual love necessarily sacrifices sexual
love. We are left with the consolation of language.
Notes
1. For instance: "Peter Kemp refers to "her first
and far-away best book, Oranges Are the Only Fruit."
Peter Kemp, "Writing for a Fall," rev. of Art and
Lies, by Jeanette Winterson, Sunday Times 26 June 1994:
sec. 7: 1-2.
2. For instance: "Most critics would agree that she has
not written a book worthy of her gifts since Written on the
Body." Angela Lambert, "Jeanette: could anyone be
as good as she thinks she is?" Independent 23 Jan.
1998: Features: 16. Cf. "for many years she has offered us
work which is the product of only the rump of her genius."
Carmen Callil, "Absent without leave Carmen Callil laments
a lost talent," rev. of The World and Other Places,
by Jeanette Winterson. Daily Telegraph June 27 1998: Books:
4.
3. See, for example: Patricia Duncker, "Jeanette Winterson
and the Aftermath of Feminism." "I'm telling you
stories": Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading,
ed. Helena Grice and Tim Woods (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 77-88).
Leigh Gilmore, "An Anatomy of Absence." The Gay 90's,
ed. Thomas Foster et al. (New York: New York UP, 1997. 224-51).
Heather Nunn, "Written on the Body: An Anatomy of Horror,
Melancholy and Love." (Women 70. 1996. 16-27). Christy
R. Stevens, "Imagining Deregulated Desire." 27 July
2000 <http://www.ags.uci.edu/~clowegsa/evolutions/Stevens.htm>.
Cath Stowers, "Journeying with Jeanette." (Hetero)sexual
Politics, ed. Mary Maynard & June Purvis (London: Taylor
& Francis, 1995. 139-58).
4. See Christy L. Burns, "Fantastic Language." Contemporary
Literature 37 (1996): 278-306, and Patricia Duncker, Leigh
Gilmore, Heather Nunn, Christy R. Stevens, and Cath Stowers (all
in note 3).
I wish to thank Michael North for reading through an earlier draft and suggesting ways of revising this essay that helped to substantially improve it.
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Copyright 2000 Brian Finney