Читать книгу Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings: Jeanette Winterson's Language of Multiplicity and Variety - Agnieszka Miksza - Страница 10
Оглавление1 Between Poetry and Prose: Genres of the Middle
The first part of this chapter aims at emphasizing the most important aspects of the prose poem as a genre. Firstly, it seems crucial to compare and contrast the prose poem with other related genres, namely poetic prose and polyphonic prose. This comparison proves to be indispensable since these three terms are strictly connected with each other, as demonstrated by the presence of numerous dictionary entries. This chapter also attempts to outline a brief history of the prose poem as a genre, naming its initiators, major critics and the publications devoted to it. It appears that the genre of the prose poem is often said to undermine the boundary between prose and poetry, which inevitably leads to undermining the notion of “a genre” as such. The next part of this chapter deals with Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre in the context of prose versus poetry since her works illustrate an interesting tension between the prosaic and the poetic. This chapter will be an outline of the main features of Winterson’s discourse, namely the use of repetition in various ways combining poetic techniques such as metaphor with elements of storytelling which is abundant in her novels. The author is compelled to practice endless storytelling, which is to a great extent repetitive (using refrains, intertextuality, clichés), trying, at the same time, to escape repetition and create unique language which would transcend “language as a prisonhouse of repetition” (Gustar qtd. in Andermahr 55). This chapter also sums up critics’ views on the prosaic/poetic features of Winterson’s works, the relationship between storytelling and poeticity in Winterson’s oeuvre.
Before elaborating on the prose poem as a genre, the very definition of this term should be explained, as well as differences between the prose poem, poetic prose and polyphonic prose. Various dictionaries of literary terms make a distinction between the abovementioned terms with these definitions noticeably complementing each other. According to Harry Shaw, poetic prose “makes use of cadence, rhythm, figurative language or other devices ordinarily associated with poetry” (291). J.A. Cuddon gives a similar definition of the term, enumerating examples of figurative devices such as onomatopoeia, assonance and metaphor. Cuddon also mentions the length of poetic prose, claiming that it is ←13 | 14→“usually employed in short works or in brief passages” (520), and he underlines that the effect of raising the “emotional temperature” is achieved. This definition is enriched with examples of prose authored by de Quincey, Rimbaud, Wilde, Woolf, Faulkner and Durrell.
Polyphonic prose often seems to correspond with poetic prose, and the former is frequently defined in dictionaries of literary terms. Harry Shaw defines polyphonic prose as “prose which exhibits such devices of poetry as alliteration, assonance, cadence and rhythm” (294). The author also suggests that the etymology of “polyphonic” stems from Greek and means “many voiced”. The Harper Handbook to Literature defines polyphonic prose as “rich in poetic sound devices” (Frye 360) and therefore this entry is similar to Shaw’s definition. The publication also includes Amy Lowell’s Can Grande’s Castle, which was inspired by the French poet, Paul Fort (ibid.). Cuddon highlights that this type of prose was actually developed by Lowell, and it was named by Fletcher, who also used this style in Breakers and Granite (1921). Similarly, Cuddon also indicates that sound devices (rhythms, assonance) are employed in this type of prose as well. The exact date of coining the term “polyphonic prose” (1914) is given in Joseph T. Shipley’s dictionary, where he notes that Amy Lowell wanted to create an “orchestral form” (317): “a blending of meter, free verse, rime, assonance, alliteration, and the return” (ibid.). Although Paul Fort was an inspiration for the development of this form, Fletcher perceived it as different from his poetry, claiming that no similarity to the “elaborate rhythms” (ibid.) of Browne, de Quincey and Melville is to be found in either poetry or prose. He also states that after 1914, polyphonic prose exists both in American and British literature (ibid.). Delville claims that Amy Lowell’s polyphonic prose demonstrates the ambivalence of attitude of early Modernist writers to lyricism in prose. Her prose proves to be a continuation of the Decadent roots of the prose poem as regards its musicality (6). She is also seen as an early example of an American variation of the Baudelairian project which created a prose supple enough to be able to reproduce “the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flows of reverie, the pangs of conscience” (Delville 7).
As far as the prose poem is concerned, it is defined as “a short composition printed in prose paragraphs, yet containing the striking imagery, calculated rhythmic effects, and other devices of poetry” (Morner 176). It is also stated that Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard of the Night was the work which marks the appearance of the prose poem as a genre in 1836, and it was an inspiration for Charles Baudelaire’s Little Poems in Prose (ibid.). Rimbaud, Wilde, Lowell and T.S. Eliot are also proposed as authors of prose poems (ibid.). It is interesting to observe that these names are also included in dictionary definitions of poetic prose and ←14 | 15→polyphonic prose: Lowell is mentioned with a reference to polyphonic prose, and Rimbaud and Wilde are enumerated in dictionary entries concerning poetic prose (Cuddon 291). In Cuddon’s dictionary, it can also be read that authors such as Rimbaud, Wilde and Lowell can be authors of both polyphonic prose and prose poem.
It has been suggested that boundaries between the prose poem, poetic prose and polyphonic prose are far from being precise, and to a great extent, their definitions overlap. It can only be observed that while we deal with musicality of poetic language when discussing polyphonic prose, other components of poetry including imagery, metaphors and symbols are also taken into consideration in the case of the prose poem.
The prose poem and poetic prose seem to be particularly closely connected, and they may be perceived as “twin terms”. Bernard, for example, saw correspondence between these two and claimed that they are historically interrelated (qtd. in Santilli 21), and Simon perceives the prose poem as a fragment of poetic prose; however, Santilli holds the opposite view, arguing that “prose poetry and poetic prose exist at opposite ends of the prose scale and are mutually exclusive”. She also makes a distinction between these two terms with a reference to the essential difference between a genre (or a form) and style, stating “it is precisely this style that cannot be contained inside the severe perimeters of the prose poem” (22), and that the “florid verbosity” (ibid.) of poetic prose is juxtaposed with the “unnatural brevity” (ibid.) of the prose poem.
In chapter 1 of Such Rare Citings, Santilli mentions one more term related to the prose poem which was analyzed by Jonathan Monroe in A Poverty of Objects, namely “the Romantic fragment” (Santilli 31) – a form of presenting one’s ideas which was developed by German Romantics, among others. According to Santilli, the prose poem and Romantic fragment are considered by Monroe as interchangeable. Therefore, fragments by Schlegel and Baudelaire’s prose poems portray “not so much an illumination of the self by itself (alone and self-sufficient) as an illumination of the self by discourses that surround, traverse, and overdetermine it and from which it cannot finally retreat into sublime isolation […]” (qtd. in Santilli 36).
The difference between English and German fragments was analyzed in Levinson’s publication The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. It seems that these two manifest different ideas since
[t];he English Romantics practiced the fragment; they generated the form naïvely—not in the absence of ideological and material constraints but without benefit of collaboration, perceived precedent, or theoretical apparatus. Whereas the German fragments ←15 | 16→reflect upon contemporary life and thought, the English fragments reflect those realities. (Levinson 11)
The above quote distinguishes “reflecting upon” from “reflecting” life and leads to the conclusion that the German fragments were more meditations than the realistic portrayals of the world which were the domain of English fragments. It can be concluded that these fragments are contrasted by the author and juxtaposed as idealism versus realism.
The point of transition between the Romantic fragment and prose poem are de Quincey’s works (Santilli 71). Santilli emphasizes that de Quincey was a direct inspiration for Beaudelaire in his creation of prose poems since he was conducting research on de Quincey’s work and later he wrote his own prose poems (101). Beaudelaire was also involved in research concerning Poe’s works. In “Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe”, he demonstrated his agreement with Poe’s theories, especially the one concerning brevity. It is also emphasized that a connection exists between brevity and the fragmentariness of the text (102).
According to Delville, the first prose poem in nineteenth-century France was Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen (1869) and it is defined by M. Riffaterre as “the literary genre with an oxymoron for a name” (1). It was Baudelaire who explained the characteristic features of the genre for the first time in his preface to Poems: “the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flows of reverie, the pangs of conscience” (1). Thus, Baudelaire initiated the trend which was later continued by the followers of the British Decadence who practiced prose poem and other genres which constituted a mixture of prose and poetry (1). Murphy also describes connections between critical and aesthetic prose, referring to Oscar Wilde and his essay in which he defined the role of the critic, to “replicate the aesthetic experience in his prose” (ibid.). Hence, aestheticism appears to be a good background for introducing prose poetry by such Decadent writers as Bertrand, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, which was later translated by Merill and collected in the book titled Pastels in Prose. Merill’s anthology inspired British Decadent writers, and the most prominent authors of the prose poem at the end of the nineteenth century: Ernest Dowson, William Sharp and Oscar Wilde (Poems in Prose) (Delville 5). What characterized a Decadent prose poem was its “colourful, heavily stylized vocabulary with a deceptively simple, self-consciously archaic diction often inspired by the King James Bible”. In addition, Stein’s “Cubist vignettes”, Anderson’s “Whitmanesque hymns” and Bly’s “Deep Image” poems and the new American avant-garde “Language poetry” group have all been mentioned with regard to other forms of ←16 | 17→development of the prose poem in English. Delville emphasizes the difficulties in defining prose poetry, concluding that “the history of the prose poem in English is, to a large extent, the history of successive attempts of poets to re-define the parameters governing our expectations of what a poem (or a prose poem) should look or sound like”. He refers to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, in which a detailed definition of prose poem can be found, and quotes other definitions by Martin Gray and M. H. Abrams, concluding that the prose poem is regarded from the angle of poetry and what is, in fact, defined is “the poetic” (2).
These definitions juxtapose poetry and prose, which brings to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s distinction between poetry (“the beautiful dumb blonde, all words”) and prose (“smart brunette with glasses, all ideas”) (Delville 109). Delville quotes Roland Barthes, who refers to poetry as “merely an ornamental version of prose” (2), and Jean Cohen, who claims that “prose is only a moderate kind of poetry”, finally arriving at the following conclusion, formulated as a question: “How are we to approach a prose labelled as poetry at a time when traditional notions of poetic language have become so problematic?”. Later he claims that prescriptivism that is still applied to literary genres makes the prose poem potentially subversive and political. His book shows that “allegedly ‘genreless’ or ‘postgeneric’ space of the prose poem has given a new significance and a new relevance to the notion of genre itself” (Delville 4).
It can be assumed that the prose poem as a genre undermines the boundary between prose and poetry. Following this proposition, it may seem clear that the appearance of the prose poem was equal to questioning the distinction between prose and poem; however, this is not the case. Margueritte S. Murphy highlights the fact that definitions of prose and poetry were undermined long before the French prose poem came into existence. Murphy gives the example of Wordsworth, who opposes the traditional distinction between the language of poetry and prose (9). Eighty years after Wordsworth’s famous “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, Walter Pater states,
I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative. (qtd. in Murphy 9–10)
Thus, Pater praises “imaginative prose” (ibid.) and also points out different modes of expression in cases of prose and poetry. At the same time, he claims that prose should be analyzed according to “poetic” norms because prose as well as poetry belong to the fine arts (10).
←17 | 18→
When analyzing the prose poem as a genre, it appears vital to take its constructedness into consideration. Delville puts forward Derrida’s theories as applicable when analyzing the prose poem as a genre and his “principle of contamination” (12). The prose poem “gestures to its own constructedness and, more broadly, to what poststructuralism generally diagnoses as the arbitrariness and undecidability of boundaries”. Joyce’s “Giacomo”, which was published after his death, seems to encapsulate the main preoccupation of the twentieth century that was the conflict between the lyric and narrative continuity. The work of Joyce escapes both linear narration and poetic closure, which results in the presentation of “the movement of desire itself” (Delville 13). Delville marks the connection between Baudelaire’s and Joyce’s works. Both of these authors wanted to reflect “the lyrical impulses of the soul” (19) and portray the modern and urban environments. Both Joyce’s and Baudelaire’s characters share the commonplace as inspiration. There is also a significant correspondence between the works of Joyce and the prose poem. Delville argues that Joyce’s epiphanies which were later developed into extended works of fiction can also be called prose poems despite the fact that Joyce himself rejected such categorization: he rejected labels as such.
Delville also mentions the potential of the prose poem as a subversive genre. He observes, “to many readers and critics, the prose poem is a piece of prose that wants to be a poem and derives at least part of its meaning from its ability to defeat our generic expectations” (ix). Thus, it can be concluded that the reader’s expectations play a vital role in the conceptual significance of the prose poem. It appears that the reader’s expectations are erroneous, but in fact, this error may lead to the correct interpretative path. Delville admits that the power of prose poetry is its reclaiming functions and modes which are normally associated with prose, and it is also crucial to disregard traditional generic taxonomies and perceive this genre as a dialogue between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic (e.g. linguistic) grounds of literature in general (ibid.).
The innovative aspect of the prose poem has been highlighted by various critics. Michael Riffaterre discusses its reference to the intertext as an “invariant constitutive feature of the genre. Monroe and Murphy connect the prose poem to Bakhtin’s theories and this genre is defined as “dialogical” and “heteroglot” (Delville 8). Delville concludes,
[b];oth studies describe the genre as the locus of convergence or conflict of various discourses, which in turn reflect a variety of extradiscursive realities including a number of specific social, political and ideological agendas. Ultimately they suggest that the prose poem exists mainly by reference to other genres, which it tends to include, exclude, subscribe to or subvert. To some extent, this emphasis on the inherently ←18 | 19→intertextual and heteroglot dynamics of the prose poem is indispendable in the context of a form whose very name suggests its ambivalent status as a genre writing across other genres—a self-consciously deviant form, the aesthetic orientation and subversive potential of which are necessary founded on a number of discursive and typographical violations. (8–9)
One of Delville’s hypotheses is that analyzing the prose poem as a genre allows us to make statements about genres in general: there is no “pure” genre and each generic category is linked to other genres/another genre which it appears to eliminate (9). This statement was also made by Tzvetan Todorov who claimed that “even a ‘new’ genre automatically exists by reference to one or several previously existing ones” (qtd. in Delville 10).
It is assumed that the hybridity of the prose poem is the reason for its popularity. “Arbitrariness and instability of generic boundaries” of a prose poem are also features of postmodern aesthetics. Hence, Delville mentions Barthes, Baudrillard and Derrida when discussing “centaurial neologisms” (the “poetic novel” or the “lyric short story”). He enumerates G. Stein, S. Anderson and K. Patchen as the representatives of “hybrid forms” (x) who made such forms fashionable.
Delville underlines the prose poem’s “discursive and formal hybridity” as the feature referring us back to the boundaries and rules governing genres. He argues, “many writers have turned to the prose poem because of its ability to reflect upon the methods, aspirations, and internal contradictions of poetry and thereby invite us to ask questions that address the problem of dominance and subversion, tradition and innovation”. Later he concludes, “[what] is at stake here is the extent to which poetry, like any other discourse or cultural practice, can have claims to larger concerns in the world outside text”.
1.2 The Prose Poem and the British Tradition
The prose poem is a rather rare phenomenon in English before the 1960s (Murphy 12). The paucity of prose poems in English, compared to their French counterparts, can be accounted for by differences in versification codes, these being very strict in French, far more so than in English. S. Monte in his book Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (2000) notes that the origin of the term “prose poem” dates back to the beginning of the eighteenth century (16). He quotes Cervantes, who famously admitted “the epic may be written in prose as well as verse”. Monte also suspects the existence of prose poem in critical works such as Longinus’s “On the Sublime” since this essay underlines the importance of the impact of literature on the reader and ←19 | 20→diminishes the significance of the form. Analyzing the history of Literature, Monte arrives at the conclusion that even the selected works of Aristotle may be read as prose poems. Monte chooses the abovementioned works to highlight the arbitrariness of the division into poetry and prose. However, his later musings are focused on the modern version of prose poems. Based on an analysis of numerous publications, Monte concludes that “it is a form that somehow captures, or attempts to capture, a particularly modern experience”. He also wonders about the connections between historical development and the appearance of the prose poem, concluding that the link between the two is not particularly strong, and historical events were leaning towards the rise of the novel rather than prose poetry. In this sense, it seems that the key reason for emergence of the prose poem lies in bourgeois aesthetics which this genre came up against (Monte 16–17). Monte also quotes Wordsworth, who assumes that “there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” (17).
Santilli notes that O’Beebee defined the prose poem as a “lack”. This lack is also reflected in the absence of the prose poem in English literature which, according to Keene, is a sign of ignorance towards modernist poetics (qtd. in Santilli 15). Santilli’s analysis of English texts is romantically based and she herself admits that she omitted the genre’s connection to modernist tradition, pointing out that “the English prose poem will always appear somewhat odd, even foreign, within the context of the generic canon” (16).
Santilli’s publication abounds in statements concerning prose poem’s existence/lack of existence. She enumerates critics and authors who demonstrated a negative attitude to the genre, for example, John Simon who pronounced his view on the prose poem: “despite occasional practitioners […] the prose poem is now dead”. Authors such as William Sharp and T.S. Eliot refused to define their works as “prose poems” (T.S. Eliot expressed his views on this genre in his article, “The Borderline of Prose”). This group of disbelievers of the prose poem is juxtaposed with such believers as Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill and Roy Fisher. T.S. Eliot in “The Borderline of Prose” argued that the prose poems of Richard Aldington are deemed as an attempt “to revive stylistic preciousness and technical ‘charlatanism’ ” (qtd. in Delville 6). Eliot contrasts the prose poems of Baudelaire and “pure prose” of Rimbaud with those of Aldington’s, accusing the latter of hesitation “between the two media”. T.S. Eliot finally rejected the term “prose poetry” in favor of “short prose”. What Delville claims to be positive in Eliot’s attitude was the fact that the modern prose poem had to undermine the tradition of the Decadent school and create something new to take its attention away from its “reliance on ‘outward’ attributes of poeticity”. In spite of Eliot’s criticism of the ←20 | 21→prose poem as a genre, it was present in his oeuvre. His poem “Hysteria” is said to be a prose poem, which is seen as a precursor of the “fabulist trend”.
Delville’s book analyses the genre of the prose poem and its evolution. It contends that too few critics had paid attention to the genre, particularly considering its growing popularity over the previous thirty years. He highlights a pattern in the development of the prose poem and admits that he selected authors of prose poems for the book to highlight this tendency. Delville enumerates two critical books on prose poems (Fredman’s and Murphy’s) concluding that the authors included in these publications are “by no means representative” (7) and that the prose poem in English has been “consistently neglected by literary criticism, both in Europe and in the United States, even by the few critics who have so far written on the genre” (8).
1.3 Prose Poem and Intertextuality
An important element of a prose poem emphasized by Santilli is the implied context (109). She argues, “The implied context is peculiar to the prose poem where it is used to create illusion of autonomy”. Santilli illustrates this feature of the genre by the example of Wilde’s “Disciple”. The Narcissus myth serves as the implied context for the story which rather than being a full rewriting gives “expression to one of its myriad but distant possibilities”. In Wilde’s possibility, water sees its reflection in Narcissus’s eyes. Thus, the events presented in the myth are the same but the perspective is changed.
The notion of the implied context is inextricably linked with intertextuality. It has been demonstrated that the prose poem genre and intertextuality are linked. The connection can be noticed on the ideological level insofar that they both question boundaries: in case of the prose poem, these are boundaries between prose and poetry, and in the case of intertextuality, these are borders between texts. Santilli observes,
Attempts have been made to secure the prose poem within a larger framework but the latter has always been intertextual. For example, Michael Riffaterre regards any significance in the prose poem as being generated from a perceived interplay of intertextuality. (113)
Thus, it seems that intertextuality is essential in our understanding of this genre and its role should be examined more closely. The dialogism of the prose poem was also observed by Jonathan Monroe and Margueritte Murphy, who claimed that the genre frequently refers to other literary pieces and discourses (Santilli 138). Murphy expressed her strong belief that other texts are essential for the prose poem to exist because it subverts other genres.
←21 | 22→
The intertextuality of British prose poems reveals itself in imitations of the King James Bible. Professor Gardiner states, “in all study of English literature, if there be any one axiom which may be accepted without question, it is that the ultimate standard of English prose style is set by the King James version of the Bible” (qtd. in McAfee, “The Influence of the King James Version on English Literature”).
This fact prompts Santilli to ask: “What makes a biblical style valuable in writing prose poetry?” (ibid.). Blake’s “The Couch of Death” alludes to Psalm 139, in Coleridge’s The Wanderings of Cain Genesis 4:16–17 can be found, De Quincey’s The Daughter of Lebanon imitates Gospels, and Wilde’s “The Artist” clearly demonstrates a biblical style (ibid.). Research suggests that a biblical style was first employed in the prose poem in 1650 (Santilli 141). The importance of this connection between the prose poem and a biblical style is also seen in the works of Jeanette Winterson, who often alludes to names and stories from the Bible. Having been raised in a religious family, she extensively uses her background in her texts. However, the way she rewrites biblical themes is frequently more a pastiche than an appreciation of the Holy Scripture. All in all, it can be stated that biblical themes and motifs often function as linguistic elements of her novels.
2 Winterson and the Poetry of Fiction
2.1 Winterson and Her Views on Writing
In her essays Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995), Winterson devotes much attention to language as a tool of the poet, which is supposed to be transformative for the reader (76). When commenting on her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she highlights its “new way with words” (53–54). In her view, language has an immense influence on people not because of its communicative function but, above all, its aesthetic one (76). She mentions Virginia Woolf as an example of a writer who is entirely devoted to words in her fiction:
Unlike many novelists, then and now, she loved words. That is she was devoted to words, faithful to words, romantically attached to words, desirous of words. She was territory and words occupied her. She was night-time and words were the dream.
The dream quality, which is a poetic quality, is not vague. (75)
These claims seem to be connected to Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization which pertains to focusing artists and critics’ attention on the form rather than the content, which leads to perceiving the familiar in a new way (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 343). Winterson’s ideas also bear resemblance ←22 | 23→to Jakobson’s theory of poetics in which “the poet strives to liberate the word from the signified, from communicative meaning, thereby restoring it to the level of aesthetics. According to Jakobson, it is a feature which distinguishes poetic language from everyday speech. Similarly, Shklovsky distinguishes between poetic and everyday language: the former seems to be harder for the reader to comprehend than the latter, which makes the act of perception longer, resulting in aesthetic pleasure (The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory 12). The reader’s perception is revitalized and thus by defamiliarization, writers can oppose “over-automatization of habit” (12).
The notion of defamiliarization is connected with the concept of foregrounding (originally called aktualisace), coined by the Czech theorist, Jan Mukarovsky. It may exist on the phonetic, grammatical or semantic levels of the text, and is more likely to appear in literature than everyday discourse (qtd. in Miaull and Kuiken), as in everyday speech, the main goal is communication. In literary texts, the purpose of foregrounding is “to disrupt such everyday communication”. Quoting Mukarovsky,
Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. (qtd. in Miaull and Kuiken)
Hence, in literary discourse, “violation of the scheme” is a priority, and style is more important than simple communication. However, the communicative function of literature is not completely undermined by Mukarovsky but “foregrounding enables literature to present meanings with an intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allow”. Mukarovsky’s statements concerning the role of stylistic devices are closely connected with the findings of Viktor Shklovsky who argued that foregrounding had an effect defined by him as defamiliarization (ostranenie).
Winterson argues that poetic fiction “is not an artificial language […] but it is a heightened language” (37), indicating that it is slightly above everyday language (ibid.). This claim corresponds with a definition of art as metaphor, as explained by the etymology of the word “metaphor” as meta (above) and pherein (to carry), suggesting that art is something “carried above the literalness of life” (66). Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization has similar preconceptions, as he proposes that writers distort syntax on purpose and heighten diction so as to “make their subjects more extraordinary or unsettling” (The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory 6).
←23 | 24→
Winterson’s claims about her “new way with words” (53–54) also elaborate on the notion of “literariness”. In Literature and the Brain, Norman Holland describes the reading process and its reliance on defamiliarization, which is inextricably linked with form (qtd. in Oatley 246). He claims that language may become literary only if it is surprising to us, which is dependent on the reader, not only on the writer,
it’s the reader whose attention is drawn by unusual juxtapositions of words, or unusual ways of seeing, who then brings the idea alive, in him- or her-self. The issue can, I think, be illuminated by the following idea about the relation of verbal expressions to their meanings.
It is also worth noticing that “[t];he only rule that can be formulated is that defamiliarization works by way of contrast, of difference” (Bertens 40). To illustrate this claim, Bertens gives the example of a poem written in heroic couplets in which non-rhyming lines appear at some point (41). As a result, the reader is made to stop reading and reflect on the strangeness of it. Bertens arrives at a conclusion, “whether a certain poetic technique serves as a defamiliarizing device depends on the larger background”. Thus, the surprising language can be defined in these terms only when set in juxtaposition with the rest of the text.
In Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Winterson describes her approach to literature and art in general. She emphasizes the role of art in humans’ “capacity of feeling” (7) and highlights its transformative power, which stimulates us in such a way that it can “coax out of us” (108) emotions which are not experienced by us in everyday life. The feelings which appear during an encounter with a work of art can test us, and the reality of art, which is different from our own, “challenges the I that we are” (12); by engaging with new stories, we may also perceive our own lives as rewritten stories. In this context, we can see the connections of Winterson’s ideas with defamiliarization and its role in the feeling which is evoked by stylistic devices that “emphasize the emotional effect of an expression” (12).
According to Shklovsky, phonetic and lexical analysis of poetic speech may lead to the discovery of “the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception” (“Art as Technique”). The critic argues that artistic creation of the work results in “the slowness of the perception” (ibid.). Thus, Winterson’s works seem to become engaged in a dialogue with Shklovsky’s theory in the discussion of whether art represents or transforms reality and our perception of it (The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory 177). This debate clearly refers to Robinson’s claim that “the Romantic aesthetics ←24 | 25→of William Wordsworth and the modernist aesthetics of William Carlos Williams articulate the defamiliarizing power of literary language” (177).
Winterson also argues that when reading a familiar story, we may realize that “it is quite unlike our mental version of it” (26). Thus, the familiar may turn out to be unfamiliar. However, the author notes the tendency for readers to make works of art as familiar as their own reality, leading them to misquote well-known texts in such a way that suits their own perception (ibid.). Thus, changing the words is equal with changing the meaning. This process constitutes an opposition to the essence of real art which is supposed to re-define and expand language. Similarly, Shklovsky argues that the most important element of poetry is the poet’s skillful control of language (Stamiris 147). Literary prose, however, is based on syuzhet (plot) which is its main component and it is distinguished from the story (147).
Michael Berube sets out some interesting views regarding defamiliarization in his publication titled Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (2006). He argues that the theory of literature is in general “an ostranenie-o-rama” (313). Berube enumerates well-known schools of criticism including feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and deconstructionism, and he concludes that “[w];hether they sought to reveal the workings of patriarchy, of ideology, of the unconscious, or of language itself, they were engaged in the Shklovskian task of laying bare the device” (313). Subsequently, he gives the example of Hans Robert Jauss’s “reception aesthetics”, which is inextricably linked with the notion of defamiliarization as it defines the value of a work of art according to its stretching the “horizon of expectations” of its readers (313). Another theory which illustrates Berube’s argument concerning the all-embracing idea of defamiliarization is gender performativity; he states, “Drag denaturalizes, disidentifies, and defamiliarizes!” (313).
Hans Bertens also discusses defamiliarization in a broader context and he argues that the novel’s development from realism to modernism and postmodernism can generally be described as defamiliarization. He proposes,
[l];iterature as a whole renews itself through the development of, for instance, new genres, while genres defamiliarize (and thereby change) themselves through, for example, parody – a defamiliarizing strategy because it invariably focuses on peculiarities – and through the incorporation of new materials and techniques taken from other genres or from popular culture. (42)
Subsequently, he gives examples of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Angela Carter who play with science fiction or with fairytales (ibid.). Bertens highlights that much as each literary work is a structure, all literature can be defined as a system of interconnected elements ←25 | 26→(ibid.). Thus, each text refers to other texts and the genre it is assigned to (ibid.). One of Bertens’ conclusions reads, “even the most innovative devices will with the passage of time lose their capacity to catch our attention. The idea that an everlasting dynamic between an inevitable process of familiarization and acts of defamiliarization is the driving mechanism behind literary change” (42–43).
2.1 Winterson’s Prose and Poetry
It has been observed that the idea of defamiliarization which is indispensable in determining “literariness” is perfectly applicable in the case of poetry but is not easily noticed in prose (Wolfreys 35). Although there are some examples of prose works which demonstrate a high level of defamiliarization (e.g. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker), such novels are rather scarce, and normally “we have to look pretty closely to find real deviations from ordinary language”. It can be concluded that the more poetic a prose work is, the more defamiliarization can be found in it. Robert B. Jones argues that “[s];tylistic defamiliarization is seen in Toomer’s technique of collapsing poetry and prose to create hybrid forms like the prose poems […] and the lyrical narratives” (115). An author whose prose may also be defined as “poetic” is Malcolm Lowry who implemented the rhythm of jazz music in his novels (Filipczak 9). Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre can be characterized by defamiliarization in its undermining and blurring the boundary between poetry and prose.
Jeanette Winterson’s prose has often been described as “poetic” by critics and she herself admits that her works employ poetic techniques that make her prose, as she defines it, “agile” and “quick” (Reynolds and Noakes 152). Onega claims that Winterson’s prose is “experimental” (13) because of its “generic and formal ambiguities” and she uses the term “poetic prose”, comparing her texts with Woolf’s Waves claiming that Winterson “may be said to materialize Woolf’s prophetic dream of a new novelistic form created by women with the intellectual and material freedom to express their own sensibility and worldview”.
What draws critics’ attention to Winterson’s style is her usage of concrete imagery, “if there is an adjective or adverb, it matches the noun or verb exactly; if there is a metaphor, it is extended on its own terms” (7). It seems that Winterson’s style is distinct in every detail, especially the titles of her novels. Thus, Winterson’s works seem to be an important contribution to the English language and her being “in love with words” (8) is passed on not only to readers of her prose but also the readers of articles in which linguistic elements of Winterson’s prose can be found. What also constitutes the “Wintersonian style” is Winterson’s interest in sounds, and she is described as “a sound artist” (8). It has been observed that ←26 | 27→all of Winterson’s most memorable phrases consist of eight syllables (8): when it comes to the sound of Winterson’s prose, there are also patterns which can be defined as refrains.
It is arguable whether Winterson’s oeuvre is to be categorized as prose poetry, poetic prose or polyphonic prose. As it has been discussed before, these terms overlap and they may be confused easily. However, as it has already been argued, Winterson’s prose is characterised by precision rather than “florid verbosity” (Santilli 22). “Unnatural brevity” is a much better definition of Winterson’s books. This kind of brevity can be observed in the way Winterson edits her texts – she avoids running narratives and favors breaks in narration. In one of her interviews, she explains this technique saying that she wants to divert people’s attention from the plot. Winterson does not want her readers to look for the consecutive part of the story treating language as a transparent medium. Instead, she says, language should be
something in its own right and that it needs to be concentrated on, just in the way poetry does, without looking for the next bit of the story. Otherwise reading becomes faintly pornographic, doesn’t it? Because you just look for the next bit of excitement. (Reynolds and Noakes 15–16)
The fragmentation present within her works is also purposeful when it comes to the reading tempo. Winterson believes that breaks in her narration allow the right pace of reading to be kept. She believes that the appropriate reading tempo will enable her readers to unearth meanings of her prose in a better and more complete way (16). These claims are closely connected with Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization, especially slowness of perception, which he believes should be the result (Bertens 41).
Winterson refuses to be defined as a poet. However, it is possible to look at her prose works as prose poetry – the genre which can be perceived as a dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s prose. In fact, Winterson frequently refers to Woolf as one of her main inspirations and she demonstrates it in the poetic quality of her own fiction. The key poetic feature of Winterson’s works is her focus on language, making it the center of the narrative. As Sonia Front observes, Winterson acts against the “debasement of language through cliché, media, advertising” (Front 49) and she practices “erotic re-appropriation of language” (Front 49). Winterson frequently uses repetition and refrain, metaphors and symbols to convey the emotional complexities of the plot. She also defamiliarizes readers’ perception of language using discourses which are not associated with love, such as the language of recipes and technical vocabulary connected with computers when describing romantic feelings.
←27 | 28→
Winterson claims that she does not write novels because “the novel form is finished” (Winterson, AO: 191). Referring to “the novel”, Winterson means realism and it seems that she treats the novel as realistic genre. As Onega acutely observes, Winterson’s aversion to realism is puzzling bearing in mind the fact that in this way she undermines storytelling which is in fact vital to her own writing (10). However, at the same time, she defines herself as “a writer who does not use plot as an engine or foundation” (AO: 189). This claim reveals Winterson’s ambivalence towards storytelling which is also proven to be a characteristic feature of postmodern works (Onega 10–11). The author avoids the terms “novel”, “storytelling” and “romance”, believing that her vocation is the Modernist idea of innovation and Winterson, as rooted in Modernist tradition, and aimed at creating “literature of replenishment”, “capable of renewing the ‘exhausted’ literary forms of the 1950s and 1960s”.
Winterson identifies herself with Modernists such as H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Radclyffe Hall, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, but she also pays great tribute to John Donne, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The variety of Winterson’s inspirations is defined by Onega as “apparent incongruity” (11), but as the critic observes, Winterson solves this riddle herself when discussing Modernism as the movement and putting into question differences between prose and poetry,
Novels were meant to be novels (stories), and poems were meant to be poetic (pastorals, ballads, and during the war, protests). Amongst its other crimes, Modernism was questioning the boundaries between the two. (AO 38)
What is most crucial about Winterson’s tribute to Modernism, however, is her emphasis on the fact that the writers of this period were “working towards returning literature to its roots in speech” (in: Onega 12). This contention is compared by Onega with Ackroyd’s division into two views of language: humanist (seeing language as a transparent medium) and modernist (language as a self-containing universe) which was also the formalists’ view. As a result, supporting modernist claims, it can be concluded that the notion of “genre” as such is also devoid of meaning.
This research certainly suggests that boundaries and in-betweenness are most characteristic of Winterson’s style and her attitude to writing in general. Her writing philosophy and actual texts constitute a whole and strictly relate to one another. A point of departure for Winterson is the opacity of language which is inextricably linked with the opacity of the term “genre” and its implications. ←28 | 29→Her preoccupation seems to be linguistic and generic defamiliarization or even generic defamiliarization through linguistic defamiliarization. This starting point is the main vehicle for Winterson’s prose.
When considering the poetic aspects of Winterson’s texts, it seems inevitable to refer to Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes’s guide to her novels (Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide). These two authors suggest the key points of four Winterson’s novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook. A potential reader of Winterson’s works is given a set of clues and questions concerning the most vital elements of each novel. Apparently, Reynolds and Noakes quite frequently refer the reader to poetic elements of the aforementioned novels.
The Passion can be said to be one of Winterson’s most poetic works when considering structure as well as allusions to poetry which are abundant. Reynolds and Noakes attract the reader’s attention to the symbolism of colors (blue, orange, red, white, green) and then refer her to a dictionary of symbols, and her own associations, to try to apply them to the text (69). The authors of the guide also focus on key phrases of this book and invite the potential reader to make a note of them and analyze their different meanings in various contexts (73). Furthermore, naming is proposed by The Guide as an important aspect, especially Villanelle whose name stems from the poetic form and also corresponds to the actual structure of the novel (75). The book also suggests references to games of chance and red hair as important symbols (77). What is also interesting is the aspect of “the play with the languages of image and metaphor” and “the concept of crossing over” (78). The critics also suggest that in the overall analysis of the novel the imagery of light and darkness is necessary. When referring to The Passion, Reynolds and Noakes also consider it as vital to compare Winterson’s works with those of Virginia Woolf. They admit that Winterson belongs to a modernist experimental tradition “in terms of her interest in time and narrative method” (86). The reader is encouraged to juxtapose the texts of Woolf and Winterson to “[l];ook for formal prose patterns and ways of using language, as well as themes” (150).
Kathy Acker is another experimental writer whose oeuvre bears a similarity to the works of Winterson, and it is suggested that Acker’s methods are similar to those used by Winterson in The PowerBook. It is possible that Winterson drew her inspirations from Acker’s writings since it is known that she was familiar with them and even wrote an introduction to Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker.
←29 | 30→
The uniqueness of Winterson’s language is combined with the strategy of repetition which is also defined as a defamiliarizing device (Wolfreys 34). When discussing the role of language in Winterson’s works, Gustar mentions the notion of iterability of language (Andermahr 56) and the fact that Winterson is opposed to “preserving language as a prison house of repetition” (Andermahr 55). Simultaneously, repetition is a vital component of the author’s stories, which resemble one another and hence constitute a re-telling of well-known stories (intertextual references) or reinvention of the stories she told in her previous works. Winterson seems to be entangled in iterability, but also tries to undermine its status. It can be assumed that paradoxically, she attempts to escape the repetitiveness of language and stories by using repetition.
Repetition functions on various levels. One of these dimensions is certainly the musicality of language, for example The Passion, which is described as “rhythmic and seductive” (Onega 54); other researchers compare the style to Virginia Woolf’s texts and refer to the name of one character (Villanelle), and likening its structure to “a villanelle, an elaborate […] verse form in which words are repeated in a mesmerizing pattern” (Onega 54). This feature is said to be the element of poetic prose.
Susan Onega, in her “Introduction” to the publication Jeanette Winterson (2006), juxtaposes Winterson’s works with Ezra Pound’s Draft of XXX Cantos which demonstrate fragmentariness as well as “organic unity” (7). It is due to two elements:
the juxtaposition of the general with the particular, of all kinds of voices, genres and modes, of history, autobiography and literature: and by having the Cantos crisscrossed by the figure of the poet as a wandering Odysseus, a mythical quester, travelling across time zones and ontological boundaries in order to ‘shock the readers […] into an awareness of the disturbed and complex world around them. (7)
The abovementioned mechanisms are claimed by Onega to exist in Winterson’s works, thus achieving immense unity within a variety of texts, contexts, themes and stories. Winterson is named by Onega “a mythical quester” (7) who goes beyond boundaries of separateness of novels making them whole “by means of slightly differing repetitions of recurrent themes or leitmotifs” (7). Thus, Winterson questions the idea of separateness and she seems to view all her works as one system. Onega points out that Winterson locates herself in the group of writers (including Herbert and Graves) who were guided in their writings by a single obsession. The critic acutely observes that Winterson’s own characteristics bear resemblance to Isaac Berlin’s division of writers into “foxes” and ←30 | 31→“hedgehogs”. The former “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way” (7), the latter “relate to a single central vision, one system […] in terms of which they understand, think and feel” (7). According to Berlin, the hedgehog type of authors includes Dante, Herbert, Graves, Yeats, Eliot and Pound (qtd. in Onega 8). It can be noted that all writers who represent the “hedgehog type” are poets, one of whom (Eliot) is often claimed to be the main inspiration. Onega’s contention is also the poetic aspect of Winterson’s repetitiveness, which can be said to be the main element of her texts’ poetic quality.
Repetitiveness in Winterson’s works is not linguistic (she always steers clear of ordinary patterns of language), but it is connected with storytelling and the multiplication of similar stories. It can also be stated that the storyteller sees herself as a piece of fiction. As Winterson argues,
I believe that storytelling is a way of navigating our lives, and to read ourselves as fiction is much more liberating than to read ourselves as fact. Facts are partial. Fiction is a much more complete truth. If we read ourselves as literal and fixed we can change nothing. Someone will always tell the story of our lives – it had be better ourselves. (qtd. in Andermahr 39)
Repetitiveness of storytelling is especially visible in Weight. As the author states at the very beginning, “I want to tell the story again” (qtd. in Andermahr 57). Gustar defines this sentence as “the signature language motif” of the novel and it also illustrates Kristevan subject-in-process (ibid.). This leads the critic to discuss theories of subjectivity and the concept of subjects as “citations of a language that is not of our own making, but we are also citations of what we have made of that language” (58). The citationality in Weight is connected with the identification of the speaking persona with the mythical Atlas, and in this case, the titular Weight is not only the weight of the world supported by Atlas, which gains figurative meaning in the context of the narrator’s life, but also the intertextuality of the novel, and “the weight” of previous texts (ibid.). Gustar claims that the iterability of Weight applies not only to re-telling the well-known myth, but also Winterson’s Written on the Body, her previous novel which she quotes a number of times. Thus, it can be stated that the notion of repetitiveness in Winterson’s works exists on at least four levels: language (debunking and criticizing language as a “prison house of repetition”), well-known stories (repeating and re-telling familiar stories and myths), Winterson’s own stories (repeating and quoting herself in her own novels) and “refrains” (many of her novels include sentences which are repeated several times within the same novel). Winterson attempts to undermine repetition (on the linguistic level) but she simultaneously uses ←31 | 32→strategies of repetitiveness, and even perceives it as the essence of the writing process.
Repetition in Winterson’s works can have a defamiliarizing effect on the reader especially by decontextualizing well-known stories, phrases and sentences. Winterson has a capacity for mixing seemingly disparate themes (e.g. quantum physics and romantic love) making the reader reflect on the text and focus on the form rather than content. In Written on the Body , the author copies dictionary definitions from the anatomy book in order to rewrite them into love poems. Thus, repetition precedes recreation and constitutes an important element of the creative process. In The Passion, many aspects of repetition can be found. Sonia Front discusses The Passion and the process of writing a diary by the main character of the novel, Henri. Front claims that repetitions are essential to the integration of the “fractured ego” (78) and writing is a refusal to being overwhelmed by pain. This novel is abundant in “refrains”, which in general refers to Winterson’s desire to repeat stories (“I’m telling you stories. Trust me”), the intertextual aspect of repetition (quoting T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”), and also seeing the language itself as a way of coping with loss. “You play you win, you play, you lose. You play” (Winterson 66, 73, 133). The last quotation introduces the topic of gambling (which may indicate both gain and loss) and it is by itself repetitive (the quote “you play” is repeated). Despite the obvious interpretation of life as gambling (or love as gambling) there is another: language as gambling. Dealing with language, that is, the process of writing is a winning or losing situation. It may also be argued that winning means loss or loss means winning: the loss (of one’s lover or death of our relative) can be a creative event that fosters the production of a piece of writing which is, in terms of language, a winning situation, since this experience is inherent in language (and by language). Winterson always underlines striving for exactness, for finding the right words in order to translate feelings into words, which is also illustrated by Henri’s dealing with the loss of Villanelle by writing his diary. Denby also recalls refrains from the novel. She highlights the role of the Eliotean intertext “In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between ear and sex, passion is” (Winterson qtd. in Andermahr 106). She also mentions choruses from “The Rock” which is paralleled with the ending of the immature stage of Henri’s passion (107). Thus, in The Passion, Winterson defamiliarizes familiar literary works. The use of refrains also has a defamiliarizing effect since they appear in different contexts, allowing new meanings to be assigned to them.
Sonia Front points out another aspect of repetition which is defined as “repetition-with-difference”: referring to history, the chance to “renarrativise” the future (191). Winterson wishes to avoid automatic writing, which can influence ←32 | 33→the “automatic living” way of life (qtd. in Front 191). “Renarrativising” the future also corresponds with the author’s statements from Art Objects concerning the transformative power of art (76).
Another aspect of repetition in Winterson’s oeuvre formulated by Sonia Front is re-enactment. The critic emphasizes that re-enactment is an important strategy used by Winterson – not only in the case of her own process of writing, but also in the manner in which her characters perform an act of writing. It can be illustrated with the example of Henri from The Passion. Front argues that his writing of a diary portrays “a contradiction of his refusal of wholeness and the concomitant struggle to re-enact it” (80). Another important aspect of the diary is repetition, which is a crucial element of Henri’s reconstruction of his self. According to Front, transcribing pain is contrary to being defeated by it.
The crucial element of repetition in Winterson’s works is her preoccupation with clichés in romantic language. In her article “Reinventing the Romance”, Andermahr defines Winterson’s oeuvre as
the creation of a new language for the expression of sexual love, drawing on, as Borch shows, the long tradition of Western quest romances and more recently and humbly the specific genre of lesbian romance. (97)
The critic summarizes Winterson’s use of language as “defamilarizing” (94) which is a mixture of the poetic and the vernacular (94). The use of the vernacular in poetic language has also been highlighted during discussions of elements of defamiliarization.
The notion of defamiliarization in poetry predates the Russian formalists. E.g., in De vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence, 1304), Dante sets out to prove that there is an “illustrious vernacular,” which should be venerated as a language suitable for poetry the same as the “sacred, solemn and eternal Latin language.” He seeks to prove that the vernacular can be poetic, that the poetic exists in the mundane. (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 343)
In her discussion of Winterson’s defamiliarization, Andermahr uses the refrain of Written on the Body: “It’s the clichés that cause the trouble” (Winterson WB: 10, 21, 26, 71, 155, 180). She also refers to Borch who argues that Winterson questions “romance’s characteristic idiom” (94) and portrays “how the clichés destroy the love they are often invoked to express” (94). What is mentioned at that point is also the notion of the iterability of the cliché associated with the common, contrary to love that is linked with the unique.
As regards storytelling, it must be highlighted that the Bible plays a vital role in Winterson’s works. It can also be argued that this aspect of her works reflects the general tension between storytelling and poetry. In her essay titled “Religion and ←33 | 34→Spirituality”, Michelle Denby discusses the significance of religion and spirituality in Winterson’s oeuvre. When elaborating on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit she states, “The novel parodically rewrites biblical themes, events and styles in ways that highlight evangelicalism’s production of universalizing, dogmatic stories” (Andermahr 101). The critic observes that the novel simultaneously undermines and glorifies the authority of scripture, insofar that Winterson parodies biblical themes but draws her inspiration from biblical styles, since it presents the “Poetic Genius” which connects myth, poetry and history. Thus, Oranges portrays “contemporary narrative and poetical theology’s reevaluation of the Bible as both ‘epic narrative’ and ‘sacred poetry’ ” (Cupitt qtd. in Andermahr 101). In this case, the Bible is ideologically undermined, but stylistically appreciated. The chapter of Oranges titled “Genesis” includes the parody of biblical Genesis by rewriting it into Jeanette’s adoption story. Denby argues, “Its literary style recalls the biblical book of Genesis, which draws its effect from the “polarity between prose and poetry … the prose function[ing] as a setting in which, repeatedly, the gem of a poem sparkles” (Fokkelman qtd. in Denby, Andermahr 102). Throughout the book, Winterson uses “spiritual symbolism” (Andermahr 103) and allegories as stylistic devices. As in the aforementioned novel, The Passion also questions the Bible ideologically, but not literally employing a poetic “villanelle structure” (Denby qtd. in Andermahr 105).
Winterson herself refers to the citationality of her works, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me. But I have said these things in The Passion” (qtd. in Andermahr 58). As Gustar concludes, “her new language remains citational” (59). The critic juxtaposes the iterability of Winterson’s language with the notion of storytelling and identity. Narrative identities constitute a by-product of language and desire (59). Written on the Body is a novel which stems from the desire to deal with loss through language. Winterson’s works in general can be defined as dealing with loss. As she writes in Weight, “I want to tell the story again. That’s why I write fiction – so that I can keep telling the story. I return to problems I can’t solve, not because I’m an idiot, but because the real problems can’t be solved” (137). Thus, dealing with loss in Winterson’s case seems art for art’s sake, language for language’s sake, the story for the story’s sake.
Reynolds and Noakes also suggest concentrating on repetitions in the text and consider them as vital, asking the question, “What does this poetic network of images suggest about the nature of the narrative method?” (145). Especially chapters 23 and 24 of The PowerBook explore the idea of repetition since they begin with the same sentence: “The Map. The Treasure” (Winterson PB, 221, 227). Apparently, this section includes numerous words and ideas which have already appeared in the novel, such as ‘Wilderness’ (145). The critics suggest a ←34 | 35→relationship between repeated words and invite the reader to be imaginative in trying to decipher the meanings hidden behind these connections (145). Links are also made between Winterson’s novels as regards the image of the maze in The Passion and the literary maze in The PowerBook (149) although these mazes are of a completely different nature.
In the analysis of The PowerBook, the critics suggest focusing on certain images which reappear in the novel, for example, “treasure, the journey, the idea of disguise, water” (Reynold and Noakes 132). Winterson’s vivid narrative is defined as “metaphoric narrative structuring” (132). The critics ask: “What technical means, to do with metaphors and imagery, make this text distinctively ‘Wintersonian’?” (133). Therefore, it is suggested that Winterson creates a unique voice which is manifested not only in the plot of the novel but also in her linguistic strategies.
Winterson realizes that her stories are repetitive in the realm of content but the form is always different from the previous one. Thus, by her focusing on form rather than content, Winterson seems to be successful in achieving defamiliarization. The repetition is in fact recreation: in this case, of well-known stories and her familiar problems. She also emphasizes that she does not seek resolution for her problems, which may also signify her non-utilitarian and non-didactic approach to storytelling and language, and that transformation and progress in understanding her own self can be fulfilled through repetition and even regression, returning to the point of departure.
2.3 Winterson and Language (of Poetry)
Writing about the connection between language and body in Winterson’s texts, Sonia Front quotes Brush’s “Metaphors of Inscription”, which highlights parallels between sexuality and textuality, saying that they “coagulate corporeal signifiers into signs, producing all effects of meaning, representation, depth” (75). Front also contemplates the etymology of the word “text” which originates from the Latin word textum (“web”). Thus, it can be concluded that “[t];ext means tissue” (ibid.) and it constitutes “a galaxy of signifiers”.
In her chapter, “ ‘It’s the clichés that cause the trouble’ – Looking for the Language of Rapture”, Front discusses Art & Lies and states that “[t];he symbolic poses the locale of ‘dead words’ which have been ‘tortured and killed’ to trap their meaning, to pinpoint objects and feelings” (Front 76). Sappho is opposed to the “phallic language” (77) and can see it in a new way. Front proposes that “[t]o rediscover the potential of language is to make the words palpable through lyricism, metaphor, alliteration, refrains and word play” (77) and refers ←35 | 36→to linguistic signification in which “articulation of meaning in speech constitutes the translation of bodily modes of signification, as well as emotions into words”. These arguments can be linked to the prose poem as a genre. Jonathan Monroe argues that the prose poem “aspires to be poetic/literary language’s own coming to self-consciousness, the place where poet and reader alike become critically aware of the writer’s language” (qtd. in Delville 11).
When discussing Written on the Body, Gustar points out,
The text does not simply repeat the romance narrative, but makes the citational legacy of the romance narrative its particular focus by reiterating the conventions of romance in its multiple love plots, narrative, biomedical or poetic. Winterson thus demonstrates the failure of language to verify the body of the beloved but language remains a necessity – it is the only, if inadequate, consolation for the loss. (45)
This statement indicates that although language cannot change reality, it can transform the self and one’s attitude to it, and it can finally bring relief and happiness. The critic mentions the biomedical and poetical aspects of the novel, but omits the statement that it is not “biomedical or poetic” (45) but rather poetic through its biomedical aspect. Quotations from the medical dictionary constitute a point of departure from the poetic dimension of the novel with the two being inextricably linked.
Winterson “dismisses difference in favour of sameness, which is articulated in lesbianism” (Front 101). The homosexual aspect of Winterson’s works is frequently underlined by critics, and they often refer to the biographical fact that the author is a lesbian. However, Winterson often denies being a lesbian writer saying, “I’m a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write” (Winterson, AO 104). This sentence may also be applied to her texts in general and the notion of sameness is not only sexuality but also textuality. Although Winterson uses various texts and weaves them into her own stories, she performs an operation which may be compared to transplantation: she makes extraneous words her own; she internalizes them and they are injected into her own discourse. In this case, she also undermines difference that seems obvious in the case of intertextuality. This writing philosophy is also an example of her disobedience to any rules of fixity, another aspect of her language which foregrounds the in-betweener, “what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Front 104).
The aspect of textual (and sexual) in-betweenness also refers to Virginia Woolf’s concept of androgynous minds “in which the feminine and the masculine elements exist in equilibrium” (Front 107). This aspect of the writer’s mind is visible in Winterson’s works, especially in those whose narrator is of ←36 | 37→unknown gender (Written on the Body and partially The PowerBook). This kind of androgyny is manifested through a form of “linguistic cross-dressing” (ibid.), especially in The PowerBook in which Alix defines himself/herself “a language costumer” (4) saying “I can change the story. I am the story” (5).
2.4 Various Voices of Jeanette Winterson
Gavin Keulks in his article “Winterson’s Recent Work: Navigating Realism and Postmodernism” refers to the question of polyphony in Winterson’s works and juxtaposes it with Winterson’s postmodern strategies. He quotes Mueller who argues that Winterson has the “desire to reconstruct previously deconstructed categories of orientation and classification” (Andermahr 147). This attempt also involves a paradox of rewriting the most grand narrative of all: love which possesses, as Keulks defines it, “mythopoetic power” (ibid.) and constitutes a “metaphysical summons and moral imperative” (ibid.). He also states that Winterson’s poetics of love “becomes enmeshed with representation, hopelessly textualized and hypermediated” (150).
The critic also mentions the duality of Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping which juxtaposes the romantic and the realist through intertextual references to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The aforementioned works reflect opposing categories and ideas: “objective, scientific, empirical, quantifiable” (Winterson L, 169) is contrasted with “subjective, poetic, intuitive, mysterious”. Discussing her use of names as an allegorical device, Winterson defies “endless babble of narrative” and seems to be in favor of fitting “the template called language” (Winterson L, 135). Winterson’s mixture of biblical references and linguistic concerns link her to structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Simultaneously, Lighthousekeeping seems to employ realist techniques of storytelling which may question its being defined as postmodernist work, and propel many readers to name it “anti-poststructuralism”.
When analyzing The PowerBook, Reynold and Noakes also suggest intertextual reference of the sentence “Every journey conceals another journey with its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle” (Winterson 2000 qtd. in Reynolds and Noakes, 95). The quote appears to be an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” which should be compared with Winterson’s proposition. Other allusions to poetry can be found, including Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Byron’s “He Walked in Beauty”. Winterson rewrites these texts and it seems crucial to compare these two versions (103).
←37 | 38→
Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge by Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart presents the connection between metaphors and science. It seems vital to highlight the connection between these two when reading Winterson’s works, since scientific elements and theories are used by the author as metaphors which express the emotional complexities of her narratives. Massen and Weingart argue that metaphors are a significant tool of attaining knowledge about the world,
[f];rom the vantage point of various disciplines, one should not only look at but also learn from metaphors as always locally applied, context-dependent, hence malleable units of knowledge, partly responsible for the enormous dynamics of knowledge today. (2)
They propose a thesis that metaphors are not only the aim, but may also be a method of analyzing discourse (4). Winterson’s discourse is abundant in scientific metaphors, which corresponds with her numerous statements that for her, the aim of writing is mostly to gain the knowledge about the world and about herself. Therefore, a piece of writing is not only a product of her creative skills, but simultaneously constitutes a question and answer to the problems which inspired her to write novels. She defamiliarizes the language of science as a source of knowledge about the world. She frequently suggests that factual language cannot convey any significant meaning concerning reality. At the same time, the author uses scientific language creatively and constructs her own bridge between the notions and emotions. A perfect example of such endeavors is Gut Symmetries in which the author juxtaposes the Grand Unified Theory and gut feelings, which is also a reflection on binary oppositions of male versus female, rational versus irrational. “Making Alice and Jove physicists, Winterson utilizes the rules of quantum physics as metaphor for the flux of identity when a chance element like love perturbs all the principles” (Front 119). As Grice and Woods argue,
The masculine theories of Einstein and Heisenberg are utilized in the book to opt for a feminist standpoint theory of the universe only to be repudiated eventually as contrasting the insights of the world and one’s identities in it. Instead Winterson intermingles different discourses, of physics, philosophy, alchemy, metaphysics to imply that human conceptualization of the world should pose a conglomeration of various discourses since science, spirituality and mysticism are interrelated. Yet, connecting the scientific theories that celebrate relativity and fluidity with ‘gut feelings’ that is emotionality and intuitiveness and the Grand Unified Theory with linearity, rationality and intellectuality, and sexing them female and male respectively, Winterson once more underlines the dualism she attempts to subvert. (Grice and Woods in: Front 125)
←38 | 39→
It is also supposed that Winterson’s attitude to science in her discourse varies from novel to novel. As Front discusses Gut Symmetries, she arrives at a conclusion, “in contrast to Written on the Body, science is appropriated here as discourse capable of embracing love” (117). Gut Symmetries is an indirect statement about scientific language being capable of grasping the meanings connected with emotions, whereas Written on the Body illustrates the failure of medical discourse in describing the beloved body. At this point, I would disagree with Front since without scientific discourse, the meaning of the prose poem section of Written on the Body would not be fully conveyed. It is clear that being a professional translator, the narrator wishes to perform a personal sort of translation which constitutes dealing with loss, tackling a problem which seems insurmountable, and so she turns the translation of medical discourse into a poetic task. Each prose poem is accompanied by an entry from a medical dictionary. Both medical and poetic discourses are dependent on each other and emotional charge is present in both of them. The very point of transition from one discourse to the other portrays a question asked by Winterson: are facts the essence of our understanding of the world? The answer is included in prose poems which are built around the imagery and metaphors concerning the physiology of the human body. It can be stated that metaphors are the narrator’s method of understanding his/her situation and emotional states. Thus, it seems that medical discourse is capable of expressing emotions and is also a means of dealing with them.
When discussing metaphor, the notion of conceit should also be mentioned. In addition, it is an important element of Winterson’s texts, especially of The PowerBook; its conceit structure is suggested by Reynolds and Noakes as a subject of analysis for a potential reader. The words used by Winterson for this conceit, which are selected (e.g. “icon”) and their multiple meanings highlighted, will be developed further in this book. It is proposed that various semantic fields of the word may be applicable to events of the novel. The theme of storytelling is juxtaposed with “metaphoric narrative structuring” (132).
The author often uses organizing metaphors which permeate the whole text and constitute a linguistic point of departure for stories which are told and re-told. The selection of most frequent metaphors in Winterson’s texts should be mentioned at this point. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the titular orange is the central metaphor of the whole novel. Winterson plays with the associations of the forbidden fruit, but also introduces the idea of “the orange demon” as a signifier of Jeanette’s homosexuality. In The Passion, gambling is an organizing metaphor (Front 159) which may refer to love, as well as language and the titular passion. Ships and voyaging are Winterson’s other types of metaphors which she employs in, for example, Gut Symmetries (Front 189). ←39 | 40→The metaphor of archeology, and time as layers, is used in various texts including Lighthousekeeping, The PowerBook, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Boating for Beginners and Stone Gods. It can be generally observed that Winterson chooses similar types of metaphors and that her usage of metaphors is systematic and repetitive. Even if metaphors vary between works, the way Winterson weaves them into her storytelling may be perceived as similar?
Reynolds and Noakes underline the significance of naming in analyzing Sexing the Cherry. It does not only refer to names of characters but to the very act of giving names to abstract ideas and thus constructing a perception of the world through language, which is pointed out by Winterson in the first chapter of Sexing the Cherry (93). The theoretical background is mentioned when referring to Section 4 of the novel when Jordan, the main character, talks about meeting the Hopi (SC 134–135). The critics refer to Sapir and Whorf who described language as a frame for the universe. As Hopi’s perception of the world excludes past and future, we cannot understand this way of thinking (115). Introducing the Hopi in this book matches the whole structure of the text since Winterson’s main preoccupations are time and language, especially in this novel. Winterson’s attitude to language is said by critics to be an important point of analysis asking: “How does Winterson suggest that language is a physical object?” (96).
Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit clearly outlines her engagement in Hayden White’s discussions concerning the reliability of historical facts,
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious. How is it that no one will believe that whale swallowed Jonah when every day Jonah is swallowing the whale? I can see them now, stuffing down the fishiest of fish tales, and why? Because it is history. Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet. (92)
Later in this chapter, other statements about history appear, such as “Very often history is a means of denying the past”, “We are all historians in our small way”, “There is an order and balance to be found in stories” (10), “When I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished”, “I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced ←40 | 41→with mustard of my own”. Winterson suggests making our own “sandwiches”, by writing our private stories against the Master Narrative.
On the one hand, Winterson’s works constitute one continuum in which themes, motifs, stories and phrases keep reappearing; on the other hand, the author frequently divides her texts into shorter fragments since she favors breaks in narration. These divisions are usually meaningful and each part of the text constitutes a self-containing entity and can be read and interpreted as a separate piece of writing (the prose poem). In this case, it can be concluded that these shorter fragments are “bricks” for the whole narration, acting as elements of storytelling, although they may seem random and insignificant in action development. These fragments cause retardation of reception which is characteristic for defamiliarization.
Returning to Berlin’s theory of “foxes and hedgehogs” in literature (Onega 8), Winterson proves to be a hedgehog, since her vision of the world and language is consistent and developed further in each of her consecutive texts. This visible repetition of her ideas may be perceived as a refrain and in this case, may also refer to her poetic perception of the world.
Winterson’s unique style poses numerous questions and doubts concerning our perception of what poetry (or prose) is and is not. Winterson’s general interest in boundaries and borderline issues (binary oppositions of male versus female, homosexual versus heterosexual, history versus story) is reflected in the “Wintersonian style” which can be defined as a constant inability to choose between the two media, prose and poetry, which results in her balancing on the boundary between the two, and the consequent stylistic defamiliarization. The way she manages not to fall into one of these categories should be further examined.
←41 | 42→←42 | 43→
