Jeanette_Winterson_Language

There is no doubt that everyone has either heard or used the argument, “It's not what you said, it's how you said it,” and the fact is that there is actually quite a lot of truth to that statement. Language is everything, it's the basis of communication for all creatures, while the type of language differs between cultures, species, etc., the structure that dictates and confines communication widely remains the same. An ill-timed hand gesture can be received much differently than it's original intention at any given time, and our spoken language is no different. Between the two authors discussed here there is two seemingly quite different uses of our modern language. Jeanette Winterson uses an evocative method of language in her writing in an effort to de-construct traditional classifications, using subtle seduction to dissolve typical gender roles a reader might be used to reading. Unlike Angela Carter, who seemingly uses the abject, this notion of experiences something unwanted yet unavoidable, to both repulse and compel a reader to continue as shown within Passion of the New Eve, Winterson allows the words to rather speak for themselves. In both novels, The Passion and Written on the Body, Winterson's ability to subdue and captivate is quickly put to work. As Celia Shiffer states in her article “You See I am No Stranger to Love”: Jeanette Winterson and the Extasy of the Word, she believes language means everything, “Our Bodies demand to be heard and can be spoken; words have a remarkable connection to the real” (Shiffer, 40). She continues, quoting Henri, “Words like passion and extasy, we learn about them but they stay flat on the page” (Passion, 155), and Shiffer argues “Yet the texts' project seems to be to make words three-dimensional, which is essentially to endow them with body” (Shiffer, 40). It is here the point is made, while Carter uses obvious boundary-pushing literature to make a point, it is Winterson's cleverness within language that makes her such a compelling writer. In this particular instance within The Passion, Winterson is doing quite the opposite of what she writes, while Henri says that words with such meaning seem meaningless, she allows the words to possess an even greater meaning. It is this postmodernist-type of writing that is so magnificent. These evocative words spoken by Henri invoke a deeper signification as they insist the reader question what they really mean. The use of postmodernism is successfully used within the texts of both Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter as they both emphasize language and tear down the traditional black and white boundaries of classification, primarily in terms of males and female. For Winterson, however, this is where she excels, In The Passion, there is an obvious role-reversal between Henri and Villanelle. With this point, Henri pursues Villanelle to great lengths hoping to win her love, as he is passionate about her. At one point he even kills her husband to steal her heart back, presumably in hopes of having her give her heart to him at which point she refuses and says she'll never give her heart away again. Henri is persistently shown as the emotional character, the softer of the two. On the other side of things, there is Villanelle, a most definitely hard-shelled woman, very tough, or at least tries hard to make others believe so. What is interesting however, is in the conclusion of Winterson's novel it would seem that the emotional visibility of these two characters is suddenly reversed once more, while it may be argued that it's quite simply because Henri has gone mad, once more Winterson's writing invites us to read more into it. The almost emotionless being, Villanelle, floats past Henri's asylum window constantly well after he refuses to flee, simply hoping to catch a glance. She refuses to marry him yet shows an obvious affection toward him as she takes the time to float past his window looking for him on a regular basis. Henri on the other hand while putting forth an image that he does not care at all, hides in the shadows with his mirror, always watching. Furthermore, the sole purpose of him remaining there is so that he can stay close to Villanelle, as he states, “There was a time, some years ago I think, when she tried to make me leave this place, though not to be with her. She was asking me to be alone again, just when I felt safe. I don't ever want to be alone again and I don't want to see anymore of the world” (Passion, 165). While it's doubtful that Winterson would ever go for the traditional male/female relationship, she doesn't simply go the opposite route either, despite the fact it might seemingly start off that way. From the beginning Henri is displayed as an emotional character as he easily becomes passionate for Napoleon and follows him from war to war, and even Villanelle is described almost immediately as detaching herself from reality, but as the story's end nears these roles are shifted constantly. This postmodernist effect does more than simply bend language, it seeks to rewrite it, Winterson doesn't just make a point that the roles can be reversed she hints at the idea that roles shouldn't exist at all. If the message wasn't clear within The Passion, Winterson elaborates on this point more bluntly in Written On the Body. Rather than playing with conventional classifications of what a male should be like, perhaps how he should be tough and maybe even arrogant, or maybe stereotypically, how weak a female should be with in a story, she simply eliminates the classification altogether. Rather than relying on the differences between sexes to build a relationship with these two characters, their love is based on nothing more than love itself, making the point that love and emotion is gender neutral. In this instance, exact language aside, Winterson takes a moment to be someone parsimonious in that she allows the scene she sets up to speak volumes before her language comes into play. It's an interesting direction to take in that it works perfectly to break down this classification of how a man should love or how I woman should. In The Passion, there seems to be an effort to suggest that these ideals: Love, passion and emotion in general, should not be confined by one sex, or shared from one sex toward a particular sex (in this sense, constricted to the opposite sex), but in this text Winterson aims to prove it. One particular passage furthers this point, “To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people but the gap never closes. How could it' . . . This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to'” (Written, 155). Winterson's use of language is profound here, it quite simply suggests that love is nothing more than a human experience rather than a confined gendered experience. Through the entire novel while one might struggle to pin down the actions and emotions of the narrator to one particular sex, there are these constant reminders that it really doesn't matter, what does matter is love, and who you love. It doesn't matter if you're male or female everyone falls in love, and everyone can be heartbroken, there's a very similar moment within The Passion of New Eve, when Eve loses Tristessa to the children's cult and Eve, now a woman who is actually a man must deal with the loss of someone (s)he actually loved, “I was pelting off towards my only home, my lover's grave, and the signature of warfare above me meant not so much to me as the memory of a single one of Tristessa's kisses, I tell you, nothing at all so much as the track of his footprint in the dust” (New Eve, 160). In both instances, these two lovers must face the pain of emptiness but again it's Winterson's use of the evocative, one can't help but be put in those shoes, to know at some point what it's like to fill a hole in your heart, a much different feel than Carter's effusive language. Coming back to Written on the Body, from the very first line, “Why is the measure of love loss' (Written, 9), the narrator's journey to expand, build and explain love begins as Winterson attempts to make the point, if for no other reason than to suggest that love is based on something completely different than anything related to gender. In fact, she goes beyond just suggesting what it is, but questions the basis of how it functions, we base our level of passion for something not on what we have, but how we handle losing it. The use of a word for Winterson is much more important that the meaning of it, she constantly reverses the obvious, compelling the reader to question so much by really saying so little. As Celia Shiffer suggests in her article, “there is something remarkable about her (Winterson's) texts, which perhaps stems from their precise, and often beautiful, weaving of feminism and postmodernism to construct new possibilities – new realities – in and through language” (Shiffer, 31). There is a relentless blend of both the language Winterson uses, and the breakdown of conventional barriers that unquestionably lures and compels, in both of her novels The Passion and The Passion of New Eve, discussed here there really isn't a whole lot happening, not to say the stories aren't realistic or compelling but they lack a sense of extravagance one might find in a magic-realism type text. Take Angela Carter's Passion of the New Eve for example, in many ways there is a similar move toward a postmodernist breakdown of what it means to be a man or a woman as the protagonist of her story undergoes a sexual transformation much more in depth than a simple sex change. To quickly summarize, Eve(lyn) is abducted by a cult of women who physically transform her into a woman, eventually escaping before being impregnated only to be kidnapped by a crazy man moments after escaping this cult. This Agent Zero that captures her forces her to live among pigs and preform ridiculous acts. While hunting for a woman with Zero, a woman who is referenced as the epitome of feminism, s(he) eventually finds herself falling in love with her, despite the fact that this ultra-feminine woman is actually a he, and of course shortly thereafter he is murdered by an army of children that Eve(lyn) eventually escapes from before meeting back up with the woman he met before his change, and the story ends with her stealing a boat and heading out to sea. This broad summarization, while it leaves a lot out, most importantly the abject language that Carter's novel contains, it still suggests a story that continually goes from one unbelievable extreme to the next. To compare this to Jeanette Winterson's works, they are drastically different even on the surface, despite the fact that like mentioned prior, they aim to achieve a very similar deconstruction of genders. Nonetheless, however, despite Winterson's lack of the abject she succeeds just the same with her own version of language. In Shiffer's article, she discusses this point that Winterson uses simple language and it's potential symbolic nature to tell her stories and that it is a breakdown of language just like deconstructing classes, that invokes interest in a compelling story. Shiffer states, “To expose language as fraudulent, however, is not to say that words to not carry truths or express something real. Rather, to call the symbolic on its fictionality is to multiply its modes of expression, widening the field on which to play out the struggle between word and thing” (Shiffer, 40). Quoting Written on the Body, “And then there we were in our pyjamas side by side and my lips were sealed and my cheeks must have been swelling out like a gerbil's because my mouth was full of Louise” (Written, 41), Shiffer proves this point that by playing with the symbolic nature of words rather than what the word(s) actually means speaks leaps and bounds beyond its ordinary potential. Not only are Winterson's words beautiful in their sound as each really does jump off the page despite Henri's argument in The Passion, but these letters that caress our inner ears tear down modernist conventions with almost no objection. As her article continues, Shiffer proceeds to suggest that it is what language can symbolize rather than what it simply means that is important to Winterson, relating it to our quest for unconditional love, or rather our simple desire to be passionate about something, or someone. Shiffer refers to Kristeva in saying, “Perhaps Kriseva's statement makes it clearer: there is no room for love out in the open of the paternal symbolic, relying, as it does, on negativity and death. The symbolic's straightforward language, with its interest in containment or in closing things up, works always to cover up the limitless possibilites that lies in its gaps and in our languageless and varied bodies” (Shiffer, 45). She goes on to say, “Written on the Body indicts the conventional discourse of love, which has too easily become clichéd. As it bravely attempts to construct a new kind of love story, it explores both our generic and deadening constructions of romance and our need for love” (45). For Winterson, it is what love can represent, the limits it can break, the gender roles it surpasses that allow her succeed in what she writes, unlike Carter, there aren;t many moments within either of Winterson's texts that would repulse, on the contrary the words on each page captivate and completely absorb. For Carter, she seeks to seduce through a reader's human nature, that idea of staring at a car accident, display something so disturbing and unnerving that we can't help but continue to read, if for no other reason that to see what happens next. Going back to Shiffer's quote, she mentions that it is our need for love, to find love and experience it, that we as readers pass over the sometimes frustrating construct of this new love story using conventional constructions of our views of romance. There isn't much different between Louise and the Narrator's love that might be witnessed in a typical male/female relationship and yet the it is completely different because the Narrator has no gender. Again, however, it is our almost barbaric need for love that allows this tale to succeed. In the end of Shiffer's article she concludes by reaffirming the simple fact that it is the possibilities that Winterson's language represents, the symbolic nature in the words she uses, how they flow together that captivates an audience as she states “it is clear that the Utopian vision of Winterson's texts, where possibility rather than lack drives language and subjectivity, is itself infectious, for its energy seeps easily into critical discourse. Her texts' insistence that the boundaries of fiction/theory, word/body, and imaginary/real are fluid and arbitrary, and the faith that we can actually change the real by working within and across these boundaries by way of language, demands that their validity be recognized” (48). While Winterson's writing is nothing short of magical, Christy Burns takes this interpretation a bit further, stating that it's fantastical. In her article Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson's Recovery of the Postmodern Word, Burns makes the argument that it is Winterson's ability to intertwine fantasy into an otherwise completely believable world that allows her work to function so well. She even goes as far as to relate this exact method of writing into the character of Henri within The Passion, stating that Winterson is proving both literally in her own writing and fictionally within the text how well it does function, “Henri reflects on. . . the thin line between passion and obsession as it plays on our ability to accept fantastic reality while resisting the fall into madness” (Burns, 288). While fantasy can sometimes be confused with escapism as opposed to an alternative real as Burns suggests earlier in her article it is exactly this fine line that Winterson toys with in both her texts. Rather than subjecting the reader to the obvious or blunt such as, “Raising her knife, she brought it down. She cut off all my genital appendages with a single blow, caught them in the other hand and tossed them to Sophia . . . So she excised everything I had been and left me, instead, with a wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon . . . And that was the end of Evelyn” (New Eve, 68) as seen in Carter's novel. For Carter, her novel is seemingly filled with passages such as this that rather than leaving something to the imagination, fill it with grotesque imagery that while still successful leaves the reader with quite a different taste, it's this method of hyperbolic writing that Carter seems to favour that separates these two writers so much. There is no doubt that Carter brings her own level of magic realism to the literary table, as Burns mentions in her article, “Like many British postmodern authors, Winterson is dissatisfied with mere realism, and she, like Angela Carter, would graft new possibilities onto the received social order” (Burns, 292). Again, however, well it is their goals are so similar, the path the each take to get there couldn't be more different. Winterson's use of fantasy within her language is much more subtle, playing on the emotional strings of the audience. In The Passion, Villanelle's belief that there can be a lot revealed about what a person values based on what they will gamble is another attempt to do just that. Once more with her abstemious language Winterson implies everyone has something to lose, and in that everyone shares an equal opportunity to desire, lose and simply care for someone in an equal manner. “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You Play” (Passion, 79), as Villanelle states, you can't help but be involved in the game, to take part, share as all others do. It is in this same way that Carter and Winterson both take part in the game of Postmodernism as they attempt to break down what it means to be a woman, even what it means to be a man for that matter. However, what differs is the matter of what you're willing to gamble, and for Winterson she plays her hand magnificently, as more often that not she invites the reader to consider on their own what to pull from the text rather than Carter's flamboyant style of putting it right there on the table. Returning to Jeanette Winterson herself, there has been a lot of controversy over her intentions for her novel, Written on the Body, why she wrote it' Who it's for' Is she the narrator' Being a self-professed lesbian, writing about a genderless narrator who has seemingly endless relationships with married women might seem like nothing more than a modern romance novel using genderless speaker as an unbiased way of telling the story. But like everything she seems to write, there just has to be more to it than that. As Jennifer Gustar states in The Body of Romance: Citation and Mourning in Written on the Body, “By refusing to identify the gender or sexuality of the narrator, while, at the same time, installing a well-worn and, some have argued, sadistic conventions that reify the female as object of desire, Winterson forces a recognition of the normative ideologies embedded in such representations of woman, but she also, at the same time, demonstrates the rigidity of certain identity categories – that is those which link gender and sexuality unproblematically” (Gustar, 29). The symbolism behind every word enclosed in Winterson's novels promotes a desire to deconstruct, what is most interesting, however, is by completely eliminating the gender and sexuality of the primary character in this particular novel the reader becomes so wrapped up in attempting to solve the mystery, in searching out meaning in virtually every word that it doesn't really matter about the author's reasoning. For that matter it doesn't take long before the primary concern of deciding the gender is pushed to the side as well as it is taken over with a desire to understand unbiased love. For either a man or a woman reading this text to start saying, “Yeah I could feel that way too,” no where near staying flat on a page, Winterson's text quickly takes on a metamorphose as it successfully blends the line between what it means to act as a man, or a woman, or even straight or gay. “Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land' Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas' I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me” (Written, 52). Just like the narrator's attempt to uncover and solve the mystery of Louise, Winterson's evocative writing does so much to allow one to paint their own picture, more so however, it almost requires the reader to delve deep, and discover for themselves. It's not to say at any point that Angela Carter lacks any skill in her ability to write, or that her novels are not enjoyable, but the way that her words explode out of the gate from the very first page, “The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa” (New Eve, 1). There is, perhaps, a lack of elegance in her delivery. As mentioned previously, it is obvious that both Carter and Winterson write in a postmodernist style, if for no other reason to tear down the basic classifications of what it means to be a man or a woman, to act out either role as society has told us to for such a long time. There is no doubt that the sophistication and refinement in which Winterson writes is unparalleled as she speaks with such a level of seduction that abject and grotesque are not required to achieve the same reaction. The definition that goes beyond the words on a page unravel the basic classifications with such a smooth level, as Henri states in his diary, “I go on writing so that I will always have something to read” (Passion, 174). What is the point in texts, in writing, if not to have something to read, he mentions earlier on that as he went back and re-read what he had written he experienced his love for Villanelle differently, “as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like a genius she is ignorant of what she does” (74). To think of this passage speaking of the author is unavoidable, like Villanelle allows Henri to discover himself, Winterson's writing explains and opens so many doors of understanding and consideration through it's simple, yet elegant manner. Work Cited Burns, Christy L. “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson's Recovery of the Postmodern Word.” Contemporary Literature. Vol. 37, No. 2. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996: 278- 306. Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago Press, 2009. Gustar, Jennifer. “The Body of Romance: Citation and Mourning in Written on the Body .” International Journal on Culture, Subjectivity, and aesthetics. Vol. 2, (1). 2005: 25-41. Shiffer, Celia. “You see, I am no stranger to love": Jeanette Winterson and the Extasy of the Word.” Critique. Vol. 46, (1). 2004: 31-52. Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. Toronto, Canada: Random House, 2000. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Toronto, Canada: Random House, 1992.