This statement indicates that although language cannot change reality, it can transform the self and one’s attitude to it, and it can finally bring relief and happiness. The critic mentions the biomedical and poetical aspects of the novel, but omits the statement that it is not “biomedical or poetic” (45) but rather poetic through its biomedical aspect. Quotations from the medical dictionary constitute a point of departure from the poetic dimension of the novel with the two being inextricably linked.
Winterson “dismisses difference in favour of sameness, which is articulated in lesbianism” (Front 101). The homosexual aspect of Winterson’s works is frequently underlined by critics, and they often refer to the biographical fact that the author is a lesbian. However, Winterson often denies being a lesbian writer saying, “I’m a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write” (Winterson, AO 104). This sentence may also be applied to her texts in general and the notion of sameness is not only sexuality but also textuality. Although Winterson uses various texts and weaves them into her own stories, she performs an operation which may be compared to transplantation: she makes extraneous words her own; she internalizes them and they are injected into her own discourse. In this case, she also undermines difference that seems obvious in the case of intertextuality. This writing philosophy is also an example of her disobedience to any rules of fixity, another aspect of her language which foregrounds the in-betweener, “what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Front 104).
The aspect of textual (and sexual) in-betweenness also refers to Virginia Woolf’s concept of androgynous minds “in which the feminine and the masculine elements exist in equilibrium” (Front 107). This aspect of the writer’s mind is visible in Winterson’s works, especially in those whose narrator is of ←36 | 37→unknown gender (Written on the Body and partially The PowerBook). This kind of androgyny is manifested through a form of “linguistic cross-dressing” (ibid.), especially in The PowerBook in which Alix defines himself/herself “a language costumer” (4) saying “I can change the story. I am the story” (5).
2.4 Various Voices of Jeanette Winterson
Gavin Keulks in his article “Winterson’s Recent Work: Navigating Realism and Postmodernism” refers to the question of polyphony in Winterson’s works and juxtaposes it with Winterson’s postmodern strategies. He quotes Mueller who argues that Winterson has the “desire to reconstruct previously deconstructed categories of orientation and classification” (Andermahr 147). This attempt also involves a paradox of rewriting the most grand narrative of all: love which possesses, as Keulks defines it, “mythopoetic power” (ibid.) and constitutes a “metaphysical summons and moral imperative” (ibid.). He also states that Winterson’s poetics of love “becomes enmeshed with representation, hopelessly textualized and hypermediated” (150).
The critic also mentions the duality of Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping which juxtaposes the romantic and the realist through intertextual references to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The aforementioned works reflect opposing categories and ideas: “objective, scientific, empirical, quantifiable” (Winterson L, 169) is contrasted with “subjective, poetic, intuitive, mysterious”. Discussing her use of names as an allegorical device, Winterson defies “endless babble of narrative” and seems to be in favor of fitting “the template called language” (Winterson L, 135). Winterson’s mixture of biblical references and linguistic concerns link her to structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Simultaneously, Lighthousekeeping seems to employ realist techniques of storytelling which may question its being defined as postmodernist work, and propel many readers to name it “anti-poststructuralism”.
When analyzing The PowerBook, Reynold and Noakes also suggest intertextual reference of the sentence “Every journey conceals another journey with its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle” (Winterson 2000 qtd. in Reynolds and Noakes, 95). The quote appears to be an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” which should be compared with Winterson’s proposition. Other allusions to poetry can be found, including Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Byron’s “He Walked in Beauty”. Winterson rewrites these texts and it seems crucial to compare these two versions (103).
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Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge by Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart presents the connection between metaphors and science. It seems vital to highlight the connection between these two when reading Winterson’s works, since scientific elements and theories are used by the author as metaphors which express the emotional complexities of her narratives. Massen and Weingart argue that metaphors are a significant tool of attaining knowledge about the world,
[f];rom the vantage point of various disciplines, one should not only look at but also learn from metaphors as always locally applied, context-dependent, hence malleable units of knowledge, partly responsible for the enormous dynamics of knowledge today. (2)
They propose a thesis that metaphors are not only the aim, but may also be a method of analyzing discourse (4). Winterson’s discourse is abundant in scientific metaphors, which corresponds with her numerous statements that for her, the aim of writing is mostly to gain the knowledge about the world and about herself. Therefore, a piece of writing is not only a product of her creative skills, but simultaneously constitutes a question and answer to the problems which inspired her to write novels. She defamiliarizes the language of science as a source of knowledge about the world. She frequently suggests that factual language cannot convey any significant meaning concerning reality. At the same time, the author uses scientific language creatively and constructs her own bridge between the notions and emotions. A perfect example of such endeavors is Gut Symmetries in which the author juxtaposes the Grand Unified Theory and gut feelings, which is also a reflection on binary oppositions of male versus female, rational versus irrational. “Making Alice and Jove physicists, Winterson utilizes the rules of quantum physics as metaphor for the flux of identity when a chance element like love perturbs all the principles” (Front 119). As Grice and Woods argue,
The masculine theories of Einstein and Heisenberg are utilized in the book to opt for a feminist standpoint theory of the universe only to be repudiated eventually as contrasting the insights of the world and one’s identities in it. Instead Winterson intermingles different discourses, of physics, philosophy, alchemy, metaphysics to imply that human conceptualization of the world should pose a conglomeration of various discourses since science, spirituality and mysticism are interrelated. Yet, connecting the scientific theories that celebrate relativity and fluidity with ‘gut feelings’ that is emotionality and intuitiveness and the Grand Unified Theory with linearity, rationality and intellectuality, and sexing them female and male respectively, Winterson once more underlines the dualism she attempts to subvert. (Grice and Woods in: Front 125)
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It is also supposed that Winterson’s attitude to science in her discourse varies from novel to novel. As Front discusses Gut Symmetries, she arrives at a conclusion, “in contrast to Written on the Body, science is appropriated here as discourse capable of embracing love” (117). Gut Symmetries is an indirect statement about scientific language being capable of grasping the meanings connected with emotions, whereas Written on the Body illustrates the failure of medical discourse in describing the beloved body. At this point, I would disagree with Front since without scientific discourse, the meaning of the prose poem section of Written on the Body would not be fully conveyed. It is clear that being a professional translator, the narrator wishes to perform a personal sort of translation which constitutes dealing with loss, tackling a problem which seems insurmountable, and so she turns the translation of medical discourse into a poetic task. Each prose poem is accompanied by an entry from a medical dictionary. Both medical and poetic discourses are dependent on each other and emotional charge is present in both of them. The very point of transition from one discourse to the other portrays a question asked