Words beyond Information

Table of contents

I. Introduction

II. Fairy tale bending / ‘mythology-engine’

III. The traumatized (lovers) try to cope with life

IV. Complex temporality

V. Fragmented text

VI. Meta-narrativity & Intertext

VII. The mirror-maze of Winterson’s reality – A provisional catalogue

VIII. Bibliography

List of abbreviations

All references to Jeanette Winterson’s work will be to the following primary texts. Citations will be made in brackets to the following abbreviations accompanied by a page number within the text. For detailed reference consult the bibliography!

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I. Introduction

We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up (PB 18).

Many scholars have approached Jeanette Winterson’s writing from feminist as well as postmodernist perspectives. Her texts have attracted awards, criticism, praise and supposedly considerable financial gain over the last 16 years. There are quite a few books that solely deal with her art (notably: the collection of essays edited by Grice/Woods^[1] ; and Sponsored by Demons ^[2] ) plus dozens of articles in scientific anthologies, journals, and dissertations. There will probably be hundreds of student papers like my own around by now, hidden and unavailable in professor’s shelves, because Winterson’s novels tend to be selected for university syllabi^[3]. Yet I undertake the mammoth venture to survey all her texts to date, hopefully extracting and re-organizing methodological subject matter not too often recognized in this way.

Jeanette Winterson writes in the field which has been coined ‘historiographic metafiction’^[4] by Linda Hutcheon, Ansgar Nünning^[5] and others^[6]. Her texts are highly fractioned, packed with re-mythologizing, undercurrents of critique directed at phallocentrism sometimes resulting in ‘ex-gendered’ protagonists^[7] ; she creates dense eroticism and plays with text-sorts sometimes to an extent of wilful plot-negligence. She is fascinated by the nature of Time (inscribed in memory & history), Love (in its manifold varieties, especially the lesbian), journeys and quests (the search after Self), outsiders and strangers (WP 233p.).

She said, ‘What about you? What brings you to Paris?’

‘A story I’m writing.’

‘Is it about Paris?’

‘No, but Paris is in it.’

‘What is it about?’

‘Boundaries. Desire.’

‘What are your other books about?’

‘Boundaries. Desire.’

‘Can’t you write about something else?’

‘No.’

‘So why come to Paris?’

‘Another city. Another disguise (PB 35p.).’

In her texts one finds all kinds of emotions and insistent poetic passages, interrupted by encyclopædic quotations, newly moulded fairy tales / myths, time travel and meta-narrativity, parody and the grotesque (often interpreted in the secondary literature in a Bakhtinian^[8] way).

The main interest of this study lies in the various narrative realities this renowned author creates and her methods of twisting (or avoiding) monolithic tale structures. I hope to unravel bit by bit the complex fabric of Winterson’s work to outline her idiosyncratic methodology of handling intertexts by blurring and re-focussing patriarchal corpora. The plot of the individual novels (note that Winterson dislikes that label) and a feminist interpretation will only be of secondary importance, because summaries would exceed the size of this study and I am no real feminist either (whatever that might indicate).

Furthermore I think I have to apologize for my ignorance of some important-seeming issues, developed by my observer-blindness^[9], heterosexuality (hopefully not WASP, rather atheist), reading practice and personal position regarding postmodernism somewhere in-between ‘death of the author’ and real geniuses (neither of which I could ascribe to). More than once^[10] Winterson suggests her being an extraordinary experimental writer, being well-educated (i.e. well-read) and a true artist. Some critics concluded that this might be a result of ‘hubris’^[11] and her preference of the modernist writers like Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Stein, Joyce etc. (AO 120pp.). Her self-confidence, perhaps arrogance, might have annoyed me now and then, because I think she doesn’t need all that, her writing being excellent and stunning by itself. It seems that in Art Objects she tries to out-rule certain kinds of analyses, making part of my paper appear void; nevertheless I struggle with her art, not with her theory. I will name her techniques of narrating and arrive at a kaleidoscopic conclusion, tackling ‘ontology.’^[12]

II. Fairy tale bending / ‘mythology-engine’

Jeanette Winterson has become one of the contemporary female mytho-machinists, ‘who pull the lever and have the engine run in different directions.’^[13] In the process of de- & re-mythologizing she glues together intertextual fragments, depolarises gender stereotypes and generates counter-myths. She has her protagonists enter the fantastic, for example:

The story was a terrible one.

A young girl caught incestuously with her sister was condemned to build her own death tower. To prolong her life she built it as high as she could, winding round and round with the stones in an endless stairway. When there were no stones left she sealed the room and the village, driven mad by her death cries, evacuated to a far-off spot where no one could hear her. Many years later the tower had been demolished by a foreigner who had built the house I saw in its place. Slowly the village had returned, but not the foreigner, nor anyone else, could live in the house. At night the cries were too loud. (SC 38)

How could one unravel her technique? Impossible to simply innumerate all instances of in-woven fairy tales or other mythology. Instead one might pick out a few characteristic occurrences within her stories: the Perceval-Arthur complex, the omnipresence of Bible quotes plus chapter names, and the Winnet Stonejar^[14] tales in Oranges; the whole reformed Noah narrative in Boating for Beginners; the paranormal abilities of Villanelle, Patrick and the Queen of Spades in The Passion; fairy tales like Rapunzel / Froschkönig etc. (SC 52), and the self-invented myths (like the house with no floors) amassed in Sexing The Cherry also re-appearing in The World And Other Places as well as in Gut Symmetries (not to forget the Tarot, Kabbalah there); Artemis kills Orion in Art & Lies (here also: Sappho the time-transcender, Händel the castrato priest-surgeon) and in The World And Other Places; Lancelot and Guinevere in addition to many love stories in The PowerBook.

Winterson utilizes fairy tales and all other myths to assert (lesbian^[15] ) womanhood and love, to have some of her (anti-?)heroines triumph over fate (i.e. the patriarchal order) or at least arrange bearably. Unlike Angela Carter, who mainly de-mythologizes, Winterson twists traditional structures to re-interpret them in the sense of Foucault or Barthes.^[16] Moreover she ‘works to overcome the “death” of language. […] Fantasy in Winterson’s works, is not an experience that leaves a reader contented, but one that fuels desire, denies catharsis, and propels readers back out into their contexts.’^[17]

Prejudice and customs are questioned and critically re-evaluated. Reality, as it seems, is being incised by patches of hyperconscious fable; only a mixture of both constitutes secular and spiritual life for the protagonists. The element of fantasy both helps to thicken the intertextual, narrative layers (for example in Oranges: Morte D’Arthur, Jane Eyre, The Bible ^[18] ) and offers alternate solutions.

In Boating for Beginners she exemplifies satirically ‘how religious myths are made’^[19] but also ridicules^[20] the power-striving conservative ideology behind that. The mother-figure in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit demonstrates how fundamentalism can harm all minds involved. In the same text the first person narrator Jeanette relates stories of her orange demon and reflections on the nature of time and history (more details on that issue are examined in chapter IV of this paper). The Dog-Woman who ignores puritan metaphors^[21] and sleeps on the remains of her enemies in Sexing The Cherry may be seen as an ambivalent witch; and in The Passion one might locate spectral doubles.^[22]

Some commentators categorize her writing as magic realism^[23], which I would neither affirm nor deny. Precise symbolism and multi-facetted passions merge with cultural critique and truisms of philosophy. I doubt if Winterson wants the reader to believe in her fables, frolics or neo-myths. Those techniques are important in relation to the individual story and perhaps beyond. They delineate the psyche of characters, illustrate mental and hyper-real developments and sometimes betray the ideology of the author as well. Winterson reveals the fluidity of traditional interpretative patterns and the subjectivity of truth, as she mobilizes all kinds of mythic texts to deconstruct them with a smile.

III. The traumatized (lovers) try to cope with life

By traumatized I mean the astonishing diversity of Winterson’s protagonists and minor characters who share one common feature: no matter which time or place they inhabit or where they travel, most of them are thrown into bizarre, unnerving and hostile environments. Some have to face situations involving ignorance, fanaticism in sects, homophobia, war, assault, the cruel public sphere, rape, and a marginal group (or even solitary) existence. They react in developing survival strategies that lead out of conventional plots. Taken together all those cases might form an own narrative technique.^[24]

Let me illustrate this: Jeanette in Oranges encounters massive resentment and is being exorcised because of her lesbianism. She has to escape her narrow-minded (adoptive) mother and question all her beliefs and values. Villanelle and Henri in The Passion are singled out, too. Henri, the fragile and anxious soldier, adores Napoleon and follows him through Europe until the campaign is shattered in Russia, in the zero winter. Although being the stronger character, Villanelle, while perhaps not truly traumatized, leads a life of cross dressing, without heart (in the literal sense: the Queen of Spades keeps it in a box); she has an exclusively male attribute (a subversive resignification of gender categories^[25] ): ‘My feet were webbed. There never was a girl whose feet were webbed in the entire history of the boatmen’ (P 51, italics mine). Villanelle as a literary figure might also represent a multitude of differences and concepts, she ‘performs certain characteristics of écriture féminine […], constitutes an image of Bataillean sovereignty.’^[26] Another remarkable figure is of course the giantess Dog-Woman in Sexing The Cherry. Even this perplexing monstrous new archetype^[27], who is able to defend herself and dispatches many a man, has to face loneliness and disgust, although that does not harm her robust psyche in the way Händel and Picasso (in Art & Lies ^[28] ) experience it. While Händel flees a hypocritical world, Picasso has to cope with having been continually raped by her brother and ignored by the rest of the family. Sappho is a reincarnating lesbian (or hermaphrodite^[29] ) whose poetic work is burned by Savonarola in the 15th century (AL 58), and later maladjusted and re-interpreted again and again. All three suffer from patriarchal indoctrination and society as a whole.

Whereas other characters like the narrator^[30] of Written On The Body or the three main figures in Gut Symmetries do not have to live through extremely hard times^[31], all of them get their share of traumatizing by way of complicated personal relationships, upbringing or wrong decisions. Winterson needs her people to be unhappy, oppressed or obsessed now and then, otherwise their solutions would not seem so special. Many protagonists summon inner sanctuaries, alternative psychic worlds; they tend to live and love passionately and reflect upon their situations in a highly unconventional way every so often.

How does the author tell us these things? Her narrative modes here are: Inner monologue style, flashbacks (childhood experience / trauma), other time leaps, literal self-explanatory paragraphs, complex diagnoses of various living conditions and the societal maladies held responsible.

More often than not the reader might get the impression that Winterson calculatingly puts males in the position of the evil-doers (Jove, Noah, Napoleon, the mischievous cook, God and many priests, Picasso’s brother and father, Elgin, pirates, Scroggs and Firebrace, Händel’s colleagues, Orion, some of the husbands of the 12 princesses, etc.). In addition to that, most dominating characters are female: Jeanette and her mother, Villanelle, Sappho, Dog-Woman, Fortunata, Alix, Alice & Stella, Louise. Two other facts are noteworthy here: Many children are adopted or foundlings; many women are at least bi-sexual, gender-benders or true lesbians. Winterson achieves an accurate, non-male dominated, emotionality that releases genuine realities upon the reader.

IV. Complex temporality

Another focal point of Jeanette Winterson’s attention is Time. From the Deuteronomy chapter in Oranges; over Jordan’s temporal voyages, century-switches in Boating for Beginners, and Sappho’s reincarnations; to theoretical statements in Gut Symmetries and the Orlando-like^[32] existence of some characters, especially Ali(x) in The PowerBook — Winterson has time bend, spiral and rewind. In her work ‘history’ merges with tale, science is thrown in, or a continuous present prevails. Michèle Roberts^[33] and a few other authors invent similar stories. This belongs to historiographic metafiction, because whole passages can be found where this anti-linear story-telling and her cosmology are simultaneously commented:

Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular – an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain (SC 89-90).

Such reflections make time flux possible in the sense of people appearing in different centuries or at least binding together human essences over vast amounts of regular (i.e. linear ?) time. The Dog-Woman partly re-appears in the radical ecologist at the end of Sexing The Cherry in the late 20th century as figment of the imagination. The ghostly Ishmael waits for Alice in the finale of Gut Symmetries to get back the diamond out of Stella’s hip-bone and revive his daughter (GS 209).

Partly Winterson employs historical romance as postmodern genre, because of its anachronism and its ability to disrupt our recognition of the past as past, ‘challenging the way we “know” history’^[34], reminding us of Rabelais and Münchhausen.^[35] This means contesting and subverting ‘the political and cultural orthodoxy’^[36] as hitherto marginalized characters become the centre of attention. ‘The past cannot be recorded, it can only be retold.’^[37]

There are recurring narrative patterns, too. Winterson clearly loves to confuse chronology, she almost slips into stream of consciousness sometimes. Moreover she blurs the narrator (particularly in Written On The Body, but also sometimes in The PowerBook and to a lesser extend in almost all other texts). One does not always know from which period in time Sappho speaks in Art & Lies; the accumulation of intertextual scraps from 2 millennia, in the little book that Doll Sneerpiece and concurrently all others read, complicates the issue even more. Clearly it has to be seen that Winterson regards time as opportunity, not only as prison. She even eroticises it:

Days and nights. Days and nights connected by rivets of pleasure. Our furnace of love heated time and welded together the separateness of hours, so that time became what the prophet says it is – continuous, unbroken.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if nor I, the imprint of myself – my fossil-love and you discover it (PB 20p.).

One has to add here, that time by no means always represents only freedom and positivity for Winterson. It can also be ‘a great deadener (O 91)’ when masked as history, it can be relentless when accelerating cancer (in Written On The Body) or when rape becomes repetitive (for Picasso in Art & Lies). Yet is also is a constituent of all people in the form of memory, however ungraspable that might sound:

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future. If the universe is movement it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time (GS 218).

V. Fragmented text

Not one of Winterson’s texts runs through uninterrupted. The tendency to include small semi-closed units into larger narrative is apparent in Oranges, Written On The Body, and considerably evident in Sexing The Cherry. While Gut Symmetries and The Passion fluctuate between narrators but somehow follow a consistent plot scheme, Art & Lies loosely binds together the fates of three characters but also more severely incises linearity, a feature not appreciated by the author. The PowerBook consists solely of one recurring pair of lovers surrounded by dozens of small hovering episodes, fables, anecdotes and metatextual passages. Therefore I would suggest that it is Winterson’s most fragmented text, an attempt to create a hypertext with temporal links into past and future. Winterson cautions herself against the ‘dangers of automatic[ally] writing’ oneself towards an unnecessary ending:

Break the narrative. Refuse all the stories that have been told so far (because that is what the momentum really is), and try to tell the story differently – in a different style, with different weights – and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world (PB 53).

This seems to be her strategy against needless repetition, which nevertheless cannot be wholly prevented. ‘Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine? (AL 22p.)’ Susana Onega has described this as:

[…] the contemporary writer’s awareness that no particular text can be original in the sense that it exists in a discursive space whose pre-existing codes and conventions determine the text’s intelligibility and condition the reader’s and even the writer’s approach to it. This awareness often produces in the writer-to-be a tension that Harold Bloom has described as “the anxiety of influence”, the pressure exerted on him by the bulk of the whole literary tradition which he must absorb, assimilate and recast.^[38]

But even The PowerBook must not necessarily be read in spirals, as Winterson suggests in the foreword of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a subversive^[39] practice some critics rather approve of and others deem nonsense^[40].

How do all these interruptions look like? We have already dealt with the insertion and transformation of fable, mythologem, or canonical scripture. Her temporal leaps and patchwork do also restructure reading practice. One finds text-sort-play now and again: film script (WB 14p.); etymology (AL 136, 162); or mock poetry (BB 119). Another important case in point is lists: enemies / friends (O 3); a woman’s rule book about men (SC 32); numbered objects, time, lies & paintings scattered in the second half of Sexing The Cherry (from page 81 on); Nicolas Jordan’s précis of heroes (SC 116p.); components of the body from medical textbooks (WB 113-39); Tower bricks and seducers (GS 37, 99); famous men that have written about Sappho (AL 51pp.); objections to running away from the family and the corresponding answers (AL 87p.); great and ruinous lovers (PB 77); the Moot, round one (GS 130) and the associative-chain remora:

Dog. Dog-fish. Dog star.

Horse. Sea-horse. Pegasus.

Monk. Monk fish. Angel.

Spider. Spider-crab. Cancer.

Worm. Eel. The Old Serpent (GS 72).

Winterson’s writing becomes even more fractured and episodic when she dissolves ‘traditional’ plot schemes and favours trailing, selectable (PB 205p) and loose ends (WB 190). The structure of Art & Lies resembles the insertions in the two-millennial book one reads about therein. The tenor of her work seems to be: Try to get behind both everyday experience and constructed one-dimensionality of popular fiction by spoofing the canon and transcending narrative structures as such in a playful manner.

VI. Meta-narrativity & Intertext

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction (AL 30).

When Winterson interrupts her storytelling in a book, she often begins to comment on her own authorship, puts forward proposals concerning the plot, addresses the reader openly. ‘I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator (WB 24).’ She also relates what seem to be her private values, concepts and ethics when criticizing patriarchy, technology, stubbornness, society, chauvinism, or injustice. It does not matter much whom she has say it:

Forget it. This is the time to remember. Time can travel backwards. Time can stand still. No need to be pushed down the road to progress. For progress read ‘technology’. The same old material world, this time in a space suit made of DNA. How To Fight Time The Techno Way. Heart transplant. New mistress. New car. Bigger Better Bomb. Tag and kill the ageing gene. Face lift for now. Nintendo for the kids. Virtual Reality for the grown-ups. Eat more irradiated food. Feeling ill? Radiotherapy, chemotherapy, bowel out, breasts off, we have a robot to take care of you. Losing your hair? Life-like wig followed by a day out at our follicle farm. Fear of death? Get in the freezer. We’ll thaw you out when we can. Fear of death? New! Computer controlled coffin. Self-cleaning. The kingdom of heaven is within you (AL 146).

Her reflections on text structure as such (in Art Objects and some asides in her other publications) emphasize that she uses metafiction knowingly, not accidentally. This becomes clear when she handles biblical material as in Oranges or Boating for Beginners:

All this was happening a long time ago, before the flood. The Big Flood starring God and Noah and a cast of thousands who never survived to collect their royalty cheques. Of course you know the story because you’ve read it in the Bible and other popular textbooks, but there’s so much more between the lines. It’s a blockbuster full of infamy, perfidy and frozen food and in just a few hours when you’ve read this book your life will seem rich and full …. (BB 12)

More recurring patterns are for instance: the tertium-non-datur discourse; the alchemy of text composition; the empty-space-and-points-of-light physics (and poetics) of existence; the assembly and reinterpretation of numerous sources from Plato, Dante, Shakespeare [‘I am hiding from the slings and arrows of outrageous beauty (AL 88).], Paracelsus to Freud, Einstein, Woolf (PB 237) and Sappho. Winterson repeats major subjects such as the reality / imagination dichotomy, the desire / love / passion / loss complex, colliding yet magnetizing personalities, or difficulties with tolerance. ‘Her fiction frequently calls into question assumptions about narratorial identity, fictional artifice, and objective reality.’^[41] She aims at forging a language suitable for the discussion of non-heterosexual love. The multiplicity of intertexts and structural experiments resists a categorization of this author into a certain single school or tradition. On the contrary, she makes visible the constructedness of clichés.

One of her favourite methods might also be what I would call self-quote or cross-reference. The ecologist in Sexing The Cherry hints at Oranges: ‘I developed a passion for personal evangelism (SC 123).’ Compare the notion of ‘the cities of the interior [that] are vast and do not lie on any map (P 152)’ with ‘the Third City [that] is invisible, the city of the vanished, home to those who no longer exist (AL 22).’ She also re-moulds contexts for mother figures: ‘She saw herself, young, kind, overworked, patient, neglected by her husband and abused by a silent toddler who would not understand that bananas are the only fruit (AL 41, italics mine).’ Note that the banana is the icon indicating passages starring the Dog-Woman in Sexing The Cherry. When one compares Oranges with Boating for Beginners regarding Mrs Munde, the orange demon, and the relationships between the protagonists, one discovers so much cross-reference that it becomes obvious how Winterson interweaves her own texts: ‘She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies (O 3 and BB 54).’ But there is more: ‘How could she forget when the day and the hour were written on her body (AL 85, italics mine)?’ Her links are playful, witty and always underline the intertextual network in her own writing. The gender swapping: ‘There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting (PB 12).’ One remembers the practice of grafting used by Jordan: ‘But the cherry grew, and we have sexed it and it is female (SC 79).’ I would even go so far as to suggest that Winterson is obsessed with reality as such. In her (meta)fictional realm she broadens it and erases what outline it might have had.

By deciphering some of the intertexts I do not intend to lessen her achievement, on the contrary: her unique^[42] contribution, namely the gathering of so many layers of cultural heritage and lore which the recipient might associate with still others, should be obvious. We desperately need people like Winterson to refill old bottles of myth with delicious new wine of meaning.

VII. The mirror-maze of Winterson’s reality – A provisional catalogue

We cannot talk about atoms anymore because ‘atom’ means indivisible. We have split it.

Can we talk about reality anymore when reality means ‘that which actually exists. Not counterfeit or assumed.’ What does actually exist? The universe has become a rebus (GS 206).

Winterson approaches ontology from the perspective of the hyperselfconscious writer who has not only studied diverse literatures, philosophies, psychology, physics and religion (and displays that knowledge through intertextuality) but who also creates a singular fusion of those to somehow disentangle space-time and matter from purely prosaic, linear, historicizing conceptions. Her protagonists awaken from indoctrination, discover their sexuality, gambol, survive traumata, invent inner worlds, live excessively, or enter a time-flux; many confront boundaries and some delve desire. Additionally one reads about a multitude of minor characters with unusual functions. She conjures up amusing and moving stories; she astonishes the readership with fabulous, enchanting yet twinkling fates and deeds. At the same time she deliberately tries to avoid rewriting the same plot over and over again. She does not want to resemble one of her quaint characters like Bunny Mix from Boating for Beginners. Now and again Winterson applies her dense symbolism in pictures like the furnace, the archive, or surreal enigmas and gender-swappers to dissolve narratorial realism and the structure of novels.

‘What happened to the omniscient author?’

‘Gone interactive (PB 27).’

Moreover she circumvents what she would deem ordinary endings in almost all her tales (including The World And Other Places). She has Doris survive Noah’s flood, magically reconciles the lovers in Written On The Body, transports the Dog-Woman’s and Jordan’s essence as alter-egos through centuries, has Stella rescued and divorced, offers alternate endings in The PowerBook, but also leaves Henri (who ‘desires desire’^[43] ) in the asylum on the rock. Many of her books offer explicit (homo)eroticism, and biting satire directed against canons, truth arbiters, the recklessly ambitious, or religious fanatics:

Believers are dangerous and mad and may even destroy the world in a different deluge if they deem it necessary to keep the faith. They are fanatics, and reasonable people will never deal with their excesses until reasonable people find a countermyth in themselves and learn to fight fire with fire (BB 66).

One of the most important issues pertaining to her novels is the struggle with literary clichés about womanhood and her stand against the devaluation of females. This relates to her own lesbianism and feminism^[44] but also opens, I think, the minds of many more readers from all different kinds of societal and mental stages, because an art-discourse is connected with it sometimes, which aims at everybody’s values. ‘The writer is an instrument of transformation (AO 25).’ None of her works employ simplistic explanations, although Winterson does not write from above ideology. By transcending the cultural palimpsest and revealing patriarchal structures she is often named among contemporary authors such as Atwood, Tennant, Kay, or Doris Lessing. Each deals differently with the aforementioned issues, perhaps focuses on other conflicts. But they dwell in the same sphere.

Winterson’s style is elaborate, her narration splinters now and then to enable reception on meta-levels. Although hardly ever directly using the term ‘culture’, she amasses huge and various representations thereof and twirls them in a laconic-seeming textual kaleidoscope. She also uses locality (Venice, Paris, London, Capri, etc.) to problematize otherness^[45] and the human reactions towards it. Whether sexual orientation and practice still heat the temper of people today I do not quite know, yet Winterson has much more to offer than jovial answers to the question ‘What do lesbians do in bed?’^[46]

It should not be omitted that emotionality serves as typewriter for her, because most of her characters do not feel and think separately. They inhabit the worlds she constructed and sometimes know that they are invented (BB 148).

Jeanette Winterson builds up a lively dialogue with biblical and fantastic corpora, reveals mythmaking and demands her own right to re-mythologize. She does that in a postmodern manner, by applying techniques that make the reader aware of the textuality and therefore subjectivity of what she examines. At times Winterson complicates the matter, confuses chronology to pinpoint the fragile nature of time and our conceptions thereof.

Her reflections on reality incorporate all that. She might change the way we perceive our environment and make us curious.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? (SC 102)

VIII. Bibliography

Isabel C. Anievas Gamallo, ‘Subversive Storytelling: The Construction of Lesbian Girlhood through Fantasy and Fairy Tale in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.’ In: Ruth O. Saxton (ed.), The Girl – Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 119-134

Helene Bengston, Marianne Borch, Cindie Maagaard (eds.), Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson (Agedrup: Scholars, 1999)

Ellen Brinks and Lee Talley, ‘Unfamiliar Ties: Lesbian Constructions of Home and Family in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. ’ In: Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes (eds.), Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home (New York: Garland, 1996) 145-174

Christy L. Burns, ‘Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern Word.’ Contemporary Literature 37.2 (1996): 278-306

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus / Nächte im Zirkus, German translation by Joachim Kalka (1984; München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989)

Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy and José Ángel García Landa (eds.), Gender, I-deology – essays on theory, fiction and film (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996)

Tess Cosslett, ‘Intertextuality in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. ’ In: Grice / Woods, 15-28

Patricia Duncker, ‘Jeanette Winterson and the Aftermath of Feminism.’ In: Grice / Woods, 77-88

Diane Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1992)

Susana González Ábaloz, ‘Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry: Rewriting “Woman” Trough Fantasy.’ In: D’Arcy / Landa, 281-295

Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds.), ‘I’m telling you stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998)

Lisa Haines-Wright and Traci Lynn Kyle, ‘From He and She to You and Me: Grounding Fluidity, Woolf’s Orlando to Winterson’s Written On The Body.’ In: Beth Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett (eds.), Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts (New York: Pace UP, 1996) 177-183

Ute Kauer, ‘Narration and Gender: The Role of the First-Person Narrator in Jeanette Winterson’s Written On The Body. ’ In: Grice / Woods, 41-52

M. Daphne Kutzer, ‘The Cartography of Passion: Cixous, Wittig and Winterson.’ In: Jürgen Kleist and Bruce Butterfield (eds.), Re-Naming the Landscape (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) 133-45

G.P. Lainsbury, ‘Hubris and the Young Author: The Problem of the Introduction to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.’ Notes on Contemporary Literature 22.4 (1992): 2-3

María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui, ‘Subversion of Sexual Identity in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. ’ In: D’Arcy / Landa, 265-279

Ansgar Nünning, Von Historischer Fiktion zu Historiographischer Metafiktion (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995)

Rebecca O’Rouke, ‘Fingers in the Fruit Basket: A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. ’ In: Susan Sellers (ed.), Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York, Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf / University of Toronto Press, 1991) 57-69

Susana Onega, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Politics of Uncertainty in Sexing The Cherry. ’ In: D’Arcy / Landa, 297-313

——— ‘Postmodernist Re-Writings of the Puritan Commonwealth: Winterson, Ackroyd, Mukhejee.’ In: Heinz Antor and Kevin L. Cope (eds.), Intercultural Encounters – Studies in English Literatures (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1999) 439-466

——— ‘Self, Text and World in British Historiographic Metafiction.’ Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 6.2 (1995): 93-105

Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Lesbian Writing – Dreams, desire, difference (Buckingham & Philadelphia: Open UP, 1993)

——— Lesbian Gothic – Transgressive Fictions (London & New York: Cassell, 1999)

——— ‘Postmodern Trends in Contemporary Fiction: Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson.’ In: Jane Dowson and Steven Earnshaw (eds.), Postmodern Subjects / Postmodern Texts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) 181-199

——— ‘ The Passion: Storytelling, Fantasy, Desire.’ In: Grice / Woods, 103-116

Lyn Pykett, ‘A New Way With Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism.’ In: Grice / Woods,

53-60

Michèle Roberts, In the Red Kitchen (1990; London: Vintage, 1999)

Susanne Schmid, Jungfrau und Monster – Frauenmythen im englischen Roman der Gegenwart (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1996)

Judith Seaboyer, ‘Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to Repeat in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.’ Contemporary Literature 38:3 (1997): 483-509

Benyei Tamas, ‘Risking the Text: Stories of Love in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 3.2 (1997): 199-209

Scott Wilson, ‘Passion at the End of History.’ In: Grice / Woods, 61-74

Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies – A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd (1994; New York: Vintage, 1996)

- Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995)

- Boating for Beginners (1985; London: Vintage, 1999)

- Gut Symmetries (1997; London: Granta, 1998)

- Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985; London: Vintage, 1991)

- The Passion (1987; New York: Vintage, 1989)

- The PowerBook (2000; London: Vintage, 2001)

- Sexing The Cherry (1989; London: Vintage, 2001)

- ‘Revolting Bodies.’ New Statesman and Society 2.8 (1989): 22-32

- The World And Other Places (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998)

- Written On The Body (1992; London: Vintage, 1993)

[...]

---

^[1] Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds.), ‘I’m telling you stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998)

^[2] Helene Bengston, Marianne Borch, Cindie Maagaard (eds.), Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson (Agedrup: Scholars, 1999)

^[3] Rebecca O’Rouke, ‘Fingers in the Fruit Basket: A Feminist Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. ’ In: Susan Sellers (ed.), Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York, Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf / University of Toronto Press, 1991) 64

^[4] other British authors of this brand: Angela Carter, John Fowles, Emma Tennant, Lawrence Durrell, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, William Golding, Charles Paliser, Graham Swift

^[5] Ansgar Nünning, Von Historischer Fiktion zu Historiographischer Metafiktion (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995)

^[6] ‘What historiographic metafiction overtly foregrounds is, among many other things, the discursive nature of all referents, the fact that there is no unique reality outside language, that both fiction and history are linguistic, and therefore human, constructs. If history is discourse, the notions of objectivity, verisimilitude, trueness to life, etc. traditionally ascribed to it, no longer hold. Rather, history is shown to be subjective, open, limited, biased [and has specifiable ideological implications].’ María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui, ‘Subversion of Sexual Identity in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. ’ In: Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy and José Ángel García Landa (eds.), Gender, I-deology – essays on theory, fiction and film (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996) 274

^[7] M. Daphne Kutzer, ‘The Cartography of Passion: Cixous, Wittig and Winterson.’ In: Jürgen Kleist and Bruce Butterfield (eds.), Re-Naming the Landscape (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) 144

^[8] Paulina Palmer, ‘ The Passion: Storytelling, Fantasy, Desire.’ In: Grice / Woods, 110

^[9] ‘Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative. Relative to what is an important part of the question.’ (GS 9)

^[10] namely in the Introduction to the Vintage edition of Oranges, in her collected essays Art Objects, & elsewhere

^[11] G.P. Lainsbury, ‘Hubris and the Young Author: The Problem of the Introduction to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.’ Notes on Contemporary Literature 22.4 (1992): 2-3

^[12] Lyn Pykett, ‘A New Way With Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism.’ In: Grice / Woods, 53

^[13] Susanne Schmid, Jungfrau und Monster – Frauenmythen im englischen Roman der Gegenwart (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1996) 12 [The whole dissertation provides us with an essential introduction and in-depth survey on the use of mythology in women writing. Groundbreaking analyses, extremely valuable!]

^[14] an anagram for Jeanet[te] Winterson → Ellen Brinks and Lee Talley, ‘Unfamiliar Ties: Lesbian Constructions of Home and Family in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. ’ In: Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes (eds.), Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home (New York: Garland, 1996) 155

^[15] Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Lesbian Writing – Dreams, desire, difference (Buckingham & Philadelphia: Open UP, 1993) 100pp. [ Bildungsroman and Coming Out]

^[16] Schmid, 34

^[17] Christy L. Burns, ‘Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern Word.’ Contemporary Literature 37.2 (1996): 278, 302

^[18] Tess Cosslett, ‘Intertextuality in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. ’ In: Grice / Woods, 15pp.

^[19] Schmid, 78pp.

^[20] clearly discernable from Douglas Adams, Monty Python and Julian Barnes

^[21] ‘It is precisely the Dog-Woman’s colossal incapacity to accept the metaphors of patriarchy that makes her so terrifying: her literal reading of the Puritans’ instructions allows her to show how deadly their metaphors are and to open up a space for the construction of “new links between objects and ideas” that would respond to a new, more authentic picture of the world.’ → Susana Onega, ‘Postmodernist Re-Writings of the Puritan Commonwealth: Winterson, Ackroyd, Mukhejee.’ In: Heinz Antor and Kevin L. Cope (eds.), Intercultural Encounters – Studies in English Literatures (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1999) 450

^[22] Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic – Transgressive Fictions (London & New York: Cassell, 1999) 49p. & 78pp.

^[23] compare for instance the astounding stories of the cockney princess Fevvers (in Angela Carters’ Nights at the Circus) with the narrative of the Dog-Woman in Sexing The Cherry

^[24] One could argue here, that almost all novels written to date by any author involve some kind of conflict, where the heroes have to emancipate themselves or fail. Yet I suggest that Winterson’s figures are deliberately placed in those singular circumstances, to expose miserable social conditions, or to crack ordinary tale structures, etc.

^[25] Asensio Aróstegui, (in: D’Arcy / Landa) 266

^[26] Scott Wilson, ‘Passion at the End of History.’ In: Grice / Woods, 69

^[27] Schmid, 157pp.

^[28] which might also be seen as a ‘reflection on the use of art as social reconstruction’ → Burns, 281

^[29] Patricia Duncker, ‘Jeanette Winterson and the Aftermath of Feminism.’ In: Grice / Woods, 86

^[30] whom Winterson tries to depict in a homodiegetic way that excludes gendered pronouns, but who nevertheless has been identified as bi-sexual woman by Ute Kauer, ‘Narration and Gender: The Role of the First-Person Narrator in Jeanette Winterson’s Written On The Body. ’ In: Grice / Woods, 47

^[31] Although it depends on the definition of ‘hard’, for instance, if one would count loss of love (WB), life in poverty or being half eaten by one’s husband (GS 196) here.

^[32] Lisa Haines-Wright and Traci Lynn Kyle, ‘From He and She to You and Me: Grounding Fluidity, Woolf’s Orlando to Winterson’s Written On The Body.’ In: Beth Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett (eds.), Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts (New York: Pace UP, 1996) 179

^[33] Michèle Roberts, In the Red Kitchen (1990; London: Vintage, 1999)→ 20th century and pharaoh-time parallel

^[34] Diane Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1992) 12

^[35] Paulina Palmer, ‘Postmodern Trends in Contemporary Fiction: Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson.’ In: Jane Dowson and Steven Earnshaw (eds.), Postmodern Subjects / Postmodern Texts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) 187

^[36] Susana Onega, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Politics of Uncertainty in Sexing The Cherry. ’ In: D’Arcy / Landa, 300

^[37] Jeanette Winterson, ‘Revolting Bodies.’ New Statesman and Society 2.8 (1989): 32

^[38] Susana Onega, ‘Self, Text and World in British Historiographic Metafiction.’ Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 6.2 (1995): 93

^[39] Isabel C. Anievas Gamallo, ‘Subversive Storytelling: The Construction of Lesbian Girlhood through Fantasy and Fairy Tale in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.’ In: Ruth O. Saxton (ed.), The Girl – Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 121

^[40] Lainsbury, 3

^[41] Helena Grice and Tim Woods, ‘Reading Jeanette Winterson Writing.’ In: Grice / Woods, 1

^[42] The concepts of originality and uniqueness could seem misplaced where dissolution of the ‘self’ into systems of signifiers reigns. But the aspect of re-invention tooled by Winterson in her specific way must not be underestimated. Are we able to copy this style? When she talks about true artists in Art Objects she insists on a certain irreducible quality in the works of art she prefers (including her own), and even if one feels uneasy to approve, not everything can be explained away. There is still a degree of resistance.

^[43] Benyei Tamas, ‘Risking the Text: Stories of Love in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 3.2 (1997): 204

^[44] ‘The lesbian feminists believe that by denying male sexual definition, by identifying only with women, women will be able to discover their own true nature, as opposed to the male-defined roles and behaviour patterns imposed on them for centuries.’ → Susana González Ábaloz, ‘Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry: Rewriting “Woman” Trough Fantasy.’ In: D’Arcy / Landa, 290

^[45] Judith Seaboyer, ‘Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to Repeat in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.’ Contemporary Literature 38:3 (1997): 488

^[46] The Poetics of Sex (in: WP 34) & (AL 141; her answer here: ‘There’s no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies.’)