Читать книгу Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings: Jeanette Winterson's Language of Multiplicity and Variety - Agnieszka Miksza - Страница 11
Оглавление2 “I’m Telling You Stories”. Storytelling and Poetry in The Passion
The first novel in Winterson’s career which demonstrates prose-poetry in-betweenness is The Passion. This view is confirmed by numerous authors; one of the most renowned, Susan Onega, points out that “critics unanimously agree that The Passion is a landmark in the literary evolution of Jeanette Winterson. It illustrates a tendency to move away from the autobiographical, realistically set comedy of her first novel and towards a much more overtly fantastic and lyrical kind of fiction” (“History Rewritten in a Postmodern Novel: Opposed Views on History in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion”). This is undoubtedly correct, and the connection between the fantastic and the lyrical merits greater emphasis. This chapter discusses these two aspects and demonstrates that they are inextricably linked in The Passion.
The lyrical quality of this novel is also created by references to T.S. Eliot’s poetry. As David Lodge argues, references to modern poetry “are anachronistically put into the mouths of the characters with no discernible reason except to contribute a spurious touch of class to the discourse” (qtd. in Onega). This chapter is going to question Lodge’s statement and show that references to T.S. Eliot are in fact intricately interwoven into the plot of the novel and its numerous stories.
It can be said that Winterson’s texts are re-readings and rewritings of T.S. Eliot. Numerous critics highlight this fact by merely stating that Eliot’s presence is visible in her works. I have never considered these statements to be satisfactory since these claims are comparable to the cliché concerning Eliot’s interest in Symbolism. What is missing in criticism is a detailed analysis of Winterson’s works in relation to Eliot’s texts; it is required to determine, firstly, how T.S. Eliot’s texts contribute to the composition of Winterson’s works, and secondly, how she engages in the dialogue with these texts. One may even pose a more challenging question: does Winterson in fact rewrite Eliot or does she use his texts randomly, with no structural or conceptual reason? I am interested in the signifying process of Winterson’s interpretations of Eliot – her works should be analyzed through the prism of Eliot’s poetry and essays in order to establish how these texts resonate and how Eliot’s voice harmonizes with Winterson’s narrative. Answering these questions can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between ←43 | 44→prose and poetry in Winterson’s works. It is vital to have a closer look at the “injection” of poetry into prose, making it a vital element of storytelling. In fact, one of the preoccupations of this novel is history and the problem of recording and re-telling facts, both from history and one’s personal life story. In the case of this novel, re-telling (associated with prose) and refrain (typical for poetry) are in tune with each other and they create a fluid boundary between prose and poetry.
The narration of the novel begins with the fact that Napoleon loved chickens in the same way as he loved Josephine (3), which reveals the multidimensionality of the word “passion”: that is, being very fond of something and having sexual feelings for somebody. Thus, at the very beginning of the novel, one of its main preoccupations is introduced: the ambiguity of the word “passion”, which is established as a fluid notion, constantly re-defined and located in various contexts. The first page of the book introduces one of the two main narrators (Henri) and the main themes of the novel, which are history versus storytelling (people from history described by a fictional character) and passion as a notion.
The first page of the novel also signifies that this text is going to deal with historical facts. The Passion is defined by critics as historiographic metafiction (a term coined by Linda Hutcheon). Susan Onega argues,
her third and fourth novels may be described as fantastic ‘historiographic metafictions’ in Linda Hutcheon’s terms (1988), for they combine fantasy with a self-conscious relish in the storytelling aspect of fiction and with an apparently paradoxical interest in re-writing history: the Puritan revolution that brought about the death of Charles I and Cromwell’s Commonwealth rule, in Sexing the Cherry, and Napoleon’s imperialist wars, in The Passion. (“The Passion: Jeanette Winterson’s Uncanny Mirror of Ink”)
According to Hatice Eşberk, “The Passion is one of the best examples of historiographic metafiction that underline the polyphonic structure lying beneath systems of meaning” (“History Rewritten in a Postmodern Novel: Opposed Views on History in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion”). Eşberk highlights the importance of the beginning of the novel and its implications for historiographic metafiction. The fact that Napoleon’s passion is mentioned first indicates the subjective status of historical facts presented in the novel. The critic also quotes Henri’s words which comment on the relationship between language and re-telling history,
Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As to even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris. It was a mess. Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye. I’m telling you stories. Trust me. (5)
←44 | 45→
The critic emphasizes “questionability of such a kind of reflection of history” and highlights Henri’s statement about storytelling and thus “fictionality in history” (270).
The critic also underlines Winterson’s technique of creating the narration which has characteristics of historiographic metafiction, namely introducing two narrative voices which describe the same historical period. Eşberk quotes Bengston, who claims that “Villanelle and Henri narrate very differently: Villanelle is poetry (hence her name) and in a sense Henri’s muse; Henri the writer who grapples with the natures of passion and obsession as illustrated in his progress from an immature worship of Napoleon to an adult, selfless love for Villanelle” (1999, 24). Arostegui notes that The Passion “reveals a polyphonic narrative structure that merges two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic” (“History as Discourse in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion: The Politics of Alterity”), and mentions Henri’s “poetic descriptions” when he talks about his childhood times. The critic quotes The Passion,
I was homesick from the start. I missed my mother. I missed the hill where the sun slants across the valley. I missed all the everyday things I had hated. In spring at home the dandelions streak the fields and the river runs idle again after months of rain. (6)
The novel includes a lot of his stories connected with his household and especially his mother and later his passions, either for Napoleon or Villanelle. As he admits, he writes a journal in order to be able to remind himself of his feelings, not facts.
As regards the fantastic, I elaborate on this matter in the section devoted to magical realism. Both Henri and Villanelle appear to represent the fantastic, since they both use magical elements in their storytelling. The boundary between the real and the supernatural is blurred in their voices and they seem to juggle with the literal and figurative.
When discussing magic realism in The Passion, it is crucial to mention Maria Edelson’s article titled “It May or May Not Be True. It Does Not Matter; (Magic) Realism and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion”. It addresses the use of magic realism in this particular novel by Winterson which, as Maria Edelson states, is considered as “one of the most outstanding examples of magic realism in British fiction” (19). The critic counters the validity of this stereotypical view of Winterson’s work by proposing a more in-depth reading of this text, proving it to contain “indeterminate, ambiguous character which makes placing the book ←45 | 46→in a fixed literary category a rather difficult, if not futile task” (20). The author of the article highlights the fact that numerous supernatural (and thus magical realistic) elements appear to be simply stories told by various characters; these types of narration raise many doubts in their truthfulness, such as Patrick’s stories about goblins, mermaids, and his eye (21). The critic argues that Henri makes “a suggestion of disbelief” and is engaged in “skeptical observations” concerning Villanelle’s stories. The article also points out the fact that Henri is a good observer and his conclusion from listening to Villanelle’s stories is “I’m not like Villanelle, I don’t see hidden worlds in the palm of my hand” (P 55), and his admiration at her “knack of raising your spirits just by saying, ‘Look at that’, and that was always an ordinary treasure brought to life” (P 56). This quotation is vital since it emphasizes the fact that the boundary between the notion of magic realism and perceiving the ordinary in the extraordinary way seems to be fluid and one may even question magic realism in The Passion as such. Instead, the other term used is “an ordinary treasure” which bears some similarity to “magic realism” since “ordinary” seems to replace “realism” and “magic” is substituted by “treasure”. The term used by Henri seems to be more precise and more illustrative of Winterson’s writing; treasure indicates something of value, something precious and rare. It means something special but not necessarily magical (supernatural) which is also the case in The Passion’s narration. Defamiliarization, the “Look at that” effect, is highlighted; an effect involves bringing into existence hidden worlds that concern emotions as well as words, or discovering treasures in ordinary expressions.
Maria Edelson also mentions the functions of stories told by both Villanelle and Henri claiming Henri’s storytelling to be “a means of temporary escape from harsh reality and also a repository of his memories of past feelings” whereas Villanelle’s stories create “imaginative, poetic visions of her experiences” (26), which correspond with her poetic name. Regarding the poeticity of stories in The Passion, Maria Edelson also mentions other features which would definitely illustrate the relationship between poetry and prose. The basic function of the story in The Passion is based on giving the invisible and inexpressible a “shape in words”. In other words, it serves as a kind of “objective correlative” which shows strong connections of Winterson’s prose with T.S. Eliot (28).
The critic goes on to point out Winterson’s references to Eliot (“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Hollow Men” and “Hamlet and His Problems”). Maria Edelson mentions Eliot’s poetry characterized by “the search for the rhythm of common speech and the transmuting of thought and emotion into images of sensation” (Eliot qtd. in Edelson), which can also be observed in Winterson’s prose as she uses a “poetic diction” which resembles everyday speech and makes ←46 | 47→an attempt “to express emotion as well as thought (not divorced from emotion) by presenting ‘sets of objects’, situations and images. Her images often undergo condensation more typical of poetic expressions” (29).
Referring back to magical realism, the critic mentions “strong connections between magical realism and poetry as a rule” (30) also emphasizing the difference between the magical realism of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Winterson’s The Passion. The author of the article compares Winterson’s text with David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937) which has been defined as “a poem (largely prose in form)” and “experimental in form being written partly in prose and partly in free verse” (qtd. in Edelson). T.S. Eliot claimed that this book told the story of “the experience of one soldier in the War of 1914–1918” (qtd. in Edelson 31) whereas Jones himself stated: “I have only tried to make shape in words, using as data the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes, apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time and of those particular men” (qtd. in Edelson 31). Thus, as the critic concludes, his aim is not to describe facts but to “recreate emotional responses to the experience of the Great War” (31). Comparing Jones to Winterson, Maria Edelson highlights the similarities between these two writers and claims that Jones’s words regarding his book may also be applied to Winterson’s The Passion when it comes to her approach to facts concerning Napoleon’s times and Venice, which illustrates an attempt to make “a shape in words”.
Maria Edelson also compares other stylistic features of Jones’s and Winterson’s writing such as repetition and use of pauses to emphasize the fact that both of these texts are novels “fusing prose with poetry”. The conclusion reads
The significant role of poetry in Winterson’s book provides sufficient reason for arguing that it is a kind of “poem in prose” which has numerous links with the more usual type of novel and with realism including its magic variety, but its relation to reality is like that of a poem with its “licentia poetica” which transforms life into “a shape created by words”. (32)
The conclusion of the critic is that categorizations of Winterson’s work cannot be so easily made and it does not have to be defined as “magic realism” (33).
Although the term “magic realism” is dubious in the case of The Passion, it will be used in my descriptions of Winterson’s narrative technique. However, I would like to emphasize that by the term “magic realism” I mean “the ordinary treasure” or the miraculous.
There are numerous elements of magical realism in the novel and it is inextricably linked with the refrain “I’m telling you stories. Trust me” (5, 13, 160). As far as the supernatural elements in the novel are concerned, they are based ←47 | 48→on stories told by narrators, gossip or legends, for example, Henri listens to stories told by Patrick, who claims to have seen goblins who were talking about treasure stolen from fairies. Patrick also told him about shoes which were not bigger than a nail but he was still able to put them on. After re-telling this story, Henri says that he did not know whether to believe him or not. Then the refrain of the novel appears “I’m telling you stories. Trust me” (5, 13, 160). He tells a different story about the figure of St. Mary which moved under the influence of women’s prayers and remained unmoved by men’s prayers. This part of The Passion illustrates an example of magical realism, here employing the method of literalization, that is, the figurative expression “to be moved by something” gains a literal meaning; this is divided by the refrain “I’m telling you stories. Trust me” (5, 13, 160). The refrain reminds the reader of the fact that this novel contains numerous stories, but at the same time, being a refrain, constitutes an element of poetry. The meaning of the refrain is ambiguous, in that these two sentences seem to contradict each other, but probably refers to the term “magical realism”, where “magical” pertains to “I’m telling you stories” and “Trust me” to realism.
The other excerpt of the novel in which the story about supernatural elements is told is Villanelle’s description of Venice, which she observes as being inhabited by souls taking care of their relatives (78). She comments on this fact, referring to our ancestors, who are important because they are what we belong to, leading her to reflect on time; this is reminiscent of the reflections present in Four Quartets from “Burnt Norton” “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable. (IV). She claims that without the past and the future, the present is only partial and time is infinitely present (78). Villanelle also remarks that she can see the future glittering on the water and can see the distorted reflections of her face, which are what she may become. Asking about her future, she pronounces the refrain “Between fear and sex the passion is” which evokes Eliot’s The Hollow Men “Between the idea /And the reality/Between the motion/ And the act/Falls the Shadow”.
