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