Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings: Jeanette Winterson's Language of Multiplicity and Variety. Agnieszka Miksza
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.
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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.
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