Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings: Jeanette Winterson's Language of Multiplicity and Variety. Agnieszka Miksza
4.6 “The Rock” by Eliot and “The Rock” by Winterson
5 Villanelle
6 Conclusion
3 “Empty Space and Points of Light”: Storytelling and Poetry in Sexing the Cherry
1 Introduction
2 History and Storytelling
3 Fortunata and Narration
4 Time and Reality
5 Defamiliarization and Magical Realism
6 Cities
7 Conclusion
4 A Secret Code: The Poetry of Written on the Body
1 Introduction
1.1 Written on the Body: The Title
2 The Conceit
2.1 Theory
2.2 Conceits in Written on the Body
3 Intertextual References to Poetry
4 Religious References in Written on the Body
5 The Prose Poem Series
6 Conclusion
6.1 Storytelling and Poetry
6.2 Repetition
6.3 Defamiliarization
5 The Ambiguity of GUT: Poetry and Science in Gut Symmetries
1 Introduction
2 Refrain
2.1 Refrain “Walk with Me”
2.2 “What We Know”
3 Poetic Devices and Ambiguity
4 Gut Symmetries and Tarot Cards from Titles of Chapters.
5 Language as a Character
6 Use of Clichés
7 Conclusion
6 Unfamiliar Familiarity of Virtual Reality. Storytelling and Poetry in The PowerBook.
1 Introduction
2 Storytelling
3 Language of Recipes
4 Virtual Reality
5 Intertextuality in the Novel
6 Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
CONTEXTUALISING LITERATURE AND MEDIA
Edited by Dorota Filipczak
Advisory Board:
Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam)
Patrick Gill (University of Mainz)
Philip Hayward (University of Technology, Sydney)
Jan Jêdrzejewski (University of Ulster)
Christine Nicholls (Australian National University, Canberra)
Aritha van Herk (University of Calgary)
VOLUME 1
Notes on the quality assurance and peer review of this publication Prior to publication, the quality of the work published in this series is reviewed by the editors and members of Advisory Board of the series
“Only the impossible is worth the effort” (54, 78, 188). This is a sentence from Winterson’s novel, The PowerBook (2000), and it also seems to be the motto of all of her oeuvre. It appears to me that she aims at achieving the impossible: she would like to write prose and poetry simultaneously, her narrators happen to be both men and women at the same time (in Written on the Body and The PowerBook), physics and metaphysics melt into one and past, present and future take place simultaneously in her narrative. Most of all the ultimate impossible is original language to describe love. Whether she accomplishes this “impossible” or not may be debatable but what is evident in her prose is indeed the effort which she calls in reference to Woolf’s The Waves “the effort of exactness” (AO 79), that is, the point in which words intersect with experience.
Jeanette Winterson is a novelist. She has never published any poem, but visiting her website (jeanettewinterson.com) we can read a lot of her favorite poetry. It seems that poetry is extremely significant to her as an author. In her speech in Sydney (“An Evening with Jeanette Winterson”), she emphasizes the importance of poetry in her literary and personal life. The writer illustrates this fact by sharing her private story with the audience: her relationship ended and she went through a hard period of depressive and suicidal thoughts. She was unable to express her emotions, and she claimed that she was abandoned by language. Then, as she confesses, “[l];anguage returned to me through the agency of poetry… because I couldn’t read narrative at the time. Poetry was different because it was concentrated, it was exact”. She continues, “I’ve always had great trust and fidelity in language” and talks about her own therapy which she invented for herself: reciting poems in front of the mirror. One of these poems was “We Are Driven to Odd Attempts” by Adrianne Rich. It probably refers to darkness which she experienced at that time. Literature seems to be a contrast to the dark because, as Winterson puts it, it makes our lives “illuminated”. It is also important because it allows “[p]utting into words things difficult to feel” which is a rewriting of Dante’s statement about poetry and “putting into words things difficult to think”. Thus, she also proposes a thesis that reading is a way to maintaining sanity.
In her speech, Winterson describes her own story connected with books, namely being banned from reading fiction in her family household. As the author recollects, she could read only the Bible and commentaries to it not being allowed to read any fiction. What is interesting is that her mother was ←9 | 10→passionate about reading detective stories. When the writer asked her mother why she read such books, she replied: “If you know there’s a body coming there’s not so much of a shock” (“An Evening with Jeanette Winterson”). This made young Winterson realize why she had a ban on reading fiction: her mother was probably afraid of the influence literature could exert on her. She argues, “[t];he impact that language offers which forces us out of the safe places to the difficult territory”. Thus, she highlights challenging and defamiliarizing power of literature and language.
Winterson also talks about “necessity of other stories”, “hearing someone else’s story which is not ours” which supports her belief in the connecting force of literature that transcends linear time and makes it possible to relate to stories which were written a long time ago. Their emotional impact seems to be independent of the literary period in which it was written. Winterson encourages the audience to look for other stories which may not be contemporary but still we can relate to them to a great extent. Thus, reading stories is confronting the Other, but, at the same time, finding the familiar and our own stories. The conclusion may be that storytelling is significant in one’s identity construction. Furthermore, Winterson talks about one more way of re-constructing yourself by storytelling, namely that “you learn to read yourself as a fiction”. This means that the story can be rewritten or retold which may be life-changing for the storyteller.
Reading Winterson’s novels, I have an impression that her talk in Sydney is inextricably linked with her fiction. As a writer she proves to be a reader of other stories as well as poetry. Her narrations are always in the first person that may indicate that speakers treat themselves as fiction, which can be created and re-created.