Delville’s book analyses the genre of the prose poem and its evolution. It contends that too few critics had paid attention to the genre, particularly considering its growing popularity over the previous thirty years. He highlights a pattern in the development of the prose poem and admits that he selected authors of prose poems for the book to highlight this tendency. Delville enumerates two critical books on prose poems (Fredman’s and Murphy’s) concluding that the authors included in these publications are “by no means representative” (7) and that the prose poem in English has been “consistently neglected by literary criticism, both in Europe and in the United States, even by the few critics who have so far written on the genre” (8).
1.3 Prose Poem and Intertextuality
An important element of a prose poem emphasized by Santilli is the implied context (109). She argues, “The implied context is peculiar to the prose poem where it is used to create illusion of autonomy”. Santilli illustrates this feature of the genre by the example of Wilde’s “Disciple”. The Narcissus myth serves as the implied context for the story which rather than being a full rewriting gives “expression to one of its myriad but distant possibilities”. In Wilde’s possibility, water sees its reflection in Narcissus’s eyes. Thus, the events presented in the myth are the same but the perspective is changed.
The notion of the implied context is inextricably linked with intertextuality. It has been demonstrated that the prose poem genre and intertextuality are linked. The connection can be noticed on the ideological level insofar that they both question boundaries: in case of the prose poem, these are boundaries between prose and poetry, and in the case of intertextuality, these are borders between texts. Santilli observes,
Attempts have been made to secure the prose poem within a larger framework but the latter has always been intertextual. For example, Michael Riffaterre regards any significance in the prose poem as being generated from a perceived interplay of intertextuality. (113)
Thus, it seems that intertextuality is essential in our understanding of this genre and its role should be examined more closely. The dialogism of the prose poem was also observed by Jonathan Monroe and Margueritte Murphy, who claimed that the genre frequently refers to other literary pieces and discourses (Santilli 138). Murphy expressed her strong belief that other texts are essential for the prose poem to exist because it subverts other genres.
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The intertextuality of British prose poems reveals itself in imitations of the King James Bible. Professor Gardiner states, “in all study of English literature, if there be any one axiom which may be accepted without question, it is that the ultimate standard of English prose style is set by the King James version of the Bible” (qtd. in McAfee, “The Influence of the King James Version on English Literature”).
This fact prompts Santilli to ask: “What makes a biblical style valuable in writing prose poetry?” (ibid.). Blake’s “The Couch of Death” alludes to Psalm 139, in Coleridge’s The Wanderings of Cain Genesis 4:16–17 can be found, De Quincey’s The Daughter of Lebanon imitates Gospels, and Wilde’s “The Artist” clearly demonstrates a biblical style (ibid.). Research suggests that a biblical style was first employed in the prose poem in 1650 (Santilli 141). The importance of this connection between the prose poem and a biblical style is also seen in the works of Jeanette Winterson, who often alludes to names and stories from the Bible. Having been raised in a religious family, she extensively uses her background in her texts. However, the way she rewrites biblical themes is frequently more a pastiche than an appreciation of the Holy Scripture. All in all, it can be stated that biblical themes and motifs often function as linguistic elements of her novels.
2 Winterson and the Poetry of Fiction
2.1 Winterson and Her Views on Writing
In her essays Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995), Winterson devotes much attention to language as a tool of the poet, which is supposed to be transformative for the reader (76). When commenting on her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she highlights its “new way with words” (53–54). In her view, language has an immense influence on people not because of its communicative function but, above all, its aesthetic one (76). She mentions Virginia Woolf as an example of a writer who is entirely devoted to words in her fiction:
Unlike many novelists, then and now, she loved words. That is she was devoted to words, faithful to words, romantically attached to words, desirous of words. She was territory and words occupied her. She was night-time and words were the dream.
The dream quality, which is a poetic quality, is not vague. (75)
These claims seem to be connected to Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization which pertains to focusing artists and critics’ attention on the form rather than the content, which leads to perceiving the familiar in a new way (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 343). Winterson’s ideas also bear resemblance ←22 | 23→to Jakobson’s theory of poetics in which “the poet strives to liberate the word from the signified, from communicative meaning, thereby restoring it to the level of aesthetics. According to Jakobson, it is a feature which distinguishes poetic language from everyday speech. Similarly, Shklovsky distinguishes between poetic and everyday language: the former seems to be harder for the reader to comprehend than the latter, which makes the act of perception longer, resulting in aesthetic pleasure (The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory 12). The reader’s perception is revitalized and thus by defamiliarization, writers can oppose “over-automatization of habit” (12).
The notion of defamiliarization is connected with the concept of foregrounding (originally called aktualisace), coined by the Czech theorist, Jan Mukarovsky. It may exist on the phonetic, grammatical or semantic levels of the text, and is more likely to appear in literature than everyday discourse (qtd. in Miaull and Kuiken), as in everyday speech, the main goal is communication. In literary texts, the purpose of foregrounding is “to disrupt such everyday communication”. Quoting Mukarovsky,
Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. (qtd. in Miaull and Kuiken)
Hence, in literary discourse, “violation of the scheme” is a priority, and style is more important than simple communication. However, the communicative function of literature is not completely undermined by Mukarovsky but “foregrounding enables literature to present