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Abdennebi Ben Beya

University of Tunis

‘Dis-unveiling’ Jeanette Winterson’s Secret

‘Idioms’ in Written on the Body

Telling the truth was a luxury we could not afford, and so lying

became a virtue.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

The flesh is writing and writing is never read: it is always still to be

read, to be studied, to be discovered, to be invented.

Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing

The secret of meaning, as object of investigation, has always fed the curiosity of readers. Every

interpretive task presupposes the existence of an enigma that the target-object possesses. The text,

thus turned into an opaque body, becomes a dark space that the critics/interpreters, armed with

the weapons of analysis, will capture and appropriate, with, most often, controversial debates. As

a trope, the term ‘darkness’ is pertinent since among the meanings folded into ‘dark’ is ‘secret’,

‘obscure’ and ‘mysterious’,1 it becomes interestingly appropriate for its contiguity with discretion

and silence. In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode claims that all literary narratives are

“essentially dark”2 and examines the ways and means whereby they achieve obscurity. Beyond

fiction’s intricate potential on the level of plot, he maintains, it is its highly technical resources

for ambiguity that make up its appeal to the critical endeavor. For Kermode, the greatest

1 See Michael Strysick, “Mallarmé and the Madness of Obscurity”, The Romanic Review, Vol. 85.4 (1994) 3.2 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 45. Further referred to as Kermode, followed by page number.

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narratives must “proclaim a truth as a herald does and at the same time conceal truth like an

oracle” (Kermode 47). Narratives that combine semantic and metaphoric techniques of

concealment are those which are provided with “inexhaustible hermeneutic potential” (Kermode

40). Similarly, Maurice Blanchot claims that the “demand” of literature” escapes the will to truth

of every interpretation.3 Truth is sought and discovered only as a question form about its veracity.

The fact that so many critics address the same issue without reaching a final consensus indicates

that a problem is continuously explored without the prospect of ultimately providing a complete

survey or definitive resolution. In their search for truth, critical attempts often remain open-ended

and provisional. Yet, despite, or because of, these attributes, the strife goes on, opening the route

(fr. ‘voie’) for an infinity of new veils (fr. ‘voiles’), new opacities, new obstacles, new puzzles.

The hermeneutic “disunveiling”4 (Derrida) diversity only reveals that every singular

interpretation is but a minute revelation, and that the sum does not make up a complete unveiling

of the secret. Those who consider literature as containing a certain ‘truth’, then, and that the role

of the literary critic is to grasp that truth, paradoxically turn art into an object/thing whose

meaning (‘truth’) is palpable enough, and therefore is easily detectable. Literature’s objective, on

the contrary, is to reveal that ‘truth’ is unreachable. One is bound to live by asking questions, ad

infinitum; questions that do not leave room to the comfort of an answer. For Maurice Blanchot,

the act of writing is, in turn, reflected in the act of reading. “Reading, in the literary sense,” he

claims, “is not even a pure movement of comprehension. It is not the interpretation that keeps

meaning alive by pursuing it. Reading is situated beyond or before comprehension” (S.L. 196).

Jean-Luc Nancy, in turn, elegantly defines the undefinability of meaning as a form of desire,

where one seeks the object, strives to appropriate it, thrives towards it without ever reaching it,

without ever fully “having” it. The critic’s “appetite” is thus left dissatisfied, always in a state of

“want”, of need for a lacking “proximity”. Meaning, he claims, is always sought and posited as

“an object of desire”, and

3 See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Further referred to as S. L. Followed by page number. See also Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1989). Nietzsche argues:

What strange, wicked, questionable questions has this will to truth not laid before us! ... until we finally come to a complete stop before a still more basic question. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? (9)

4John Mowitt, “Reason Thus Unveils Itself”, Mosaic. Vol.40.2. (2007)7.Mowitt uses the word from Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2008) 83.

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this desire for meaning is surely not a particular kind of desire but rather qualifies desire as

such…where everything begins with a situation of loss or of being lost in which or out of

which is born the desire either to recover what has been lost (a desire cast respectively as

want, will, need, …) or to find what was never present (respectively or simultaneously an

identity, a direction, a proximity). But at the same time, this system of loss and desire

reveals, from the outset and by itself, a decisive feature of meaning: its absence or distance.

So much so that desire offers the first meaning of meaning: it is at a distance, its very

presence presents itself in the distance, and that which first has meaning is the tension

towards it. … In other words, desire is at once the appetite for the signifying fulfillment and

the sign of the distance of meaning, or more precisely, the sign of its presence-at-a-distance.5

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body6 provides an illustrative coincidence about the secret of

literature/the secret in literature, in relation to the hermeneutic inquiries it has initiated. The

principal objective of this essay will consist in reading through her narrative with a focus on the

prominent theme of obscurity and its “hermetic ambivalences” (Kermode 47) in the novel.

Precisely, Winterson, like Kermode, seems to hold the belief that the power of narrative lies in

secrecy or parable (the Greek word for “dark speech”). A story that is too transparent, too

straightforward in its outline, necessarily restrains the narrative’s potential, encouraging easy

interpretations that rarely rise above the apparent. Clear story development prevents the pleasures

of reading from reaching their intellectual appeal and the text from providing its effective impact.

But, as will be examined below, for Winterson, it is imperative that something of ‘her’ aesthetic

opacity be revealed, because secrecy is not total withdrawal from knowledge. Were it so, the

secret would not exist; it would not exist since it would be sealed, and thus, entry to its space

would be barred. Similarly, complete disclosure of the secret would annul it completely.

Secrecy, here, functions like desire. Obtaining what one needs eliminates, one might even say,

terminates, the object. For the secret to live on, it should not be fully grasped, fully satiated; for it

to be, it should be communicated in the interplay between revelation and concealment, neither

completely absent nor entirely revealed. Like desire, again, it should be experienced

simultaneously through the expectation of pleasure and its deferral. By offering the pleasure of

reading, while proclaiming the right to concealment, Winterson proves able to keep the emotional

5 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997) 31.6 Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1993). Further referred to as Written in the text, followed by page number.

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impact of the narrative profound, and conversely, by employing the provocative technique of

opacity, manages to bar “interpreters from [the narrative’s] secret places.” (Kermode 34)

I argue that Winterson’s narrative is founded properly on secrecy, simultaneously proclaiming

and concealing truth in order to preserve within the structure of the work a quality of

transmutable meaning. As a narrative strategy, secrecy will be explored in this essay, not simply

as an intentional withholding of information but as exposing the dynamic interplay between the

act of writing and reading. Concealment and disclosure within the narrative arouse the reader’s

interest and create some kind of ‘ethical’ intimacy between the object --the novel-- and the

subject of interpretation. Far from merely seeking, as some critics attempt to do, a hidden

meaning that the novel conceals behind the veil of secrecy, I will attempt to examine how secrecy

is deployed by Winsterson as an aesthetic and ideological strategy in relation to the dominant

cultural discourse of sexuality. I read Written on the Body as a discursive practice or performance

that is engaged in dismantling the binary thought which establishes a hierarchical relation

between body and mind, subject and object, femininity and masculinity. Precisely, I read

Winterson’s novel as containing troublesome layers of the androcentric “clichés” which the

unnamed narrator reveals, hence, in turn, disrupting the very conception of gender.

Many feminist critics have written about body and gender, and their readings of diverse novels by

women appropriately fit my analysis of Winterson’s novel. Luce Irigaray’s, Judith Butler’s, Julia

Kristeva’s and Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, to name but these, are often brought to analyse

the genre and consolidate their perspectives. I choose instead to examine Written on the Body by

relying on two major male philosophers and theorists. As I will attempt to show, Winterson’s

narrative inscribes itself appropriately in a theory and poetics of the ‘flesh’ that tends to fit

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and Gilles Deleuze’s evocation of sensation and

desire. These two thinkers, very much like their female counterparts, are committed to

establishing a theory that interrogates the classical division between subject and object, with the

first being the perceiving component, detached from its object, which it represents in its passive

and inert position. Such operation implies a detached distance; an active examination on the part

of the observer who feigns to provide an objective and impartial, say, disinterested, analysis of

the object. Such speculation underwrites the corporeal and the empirical and privileges the

rational idealism of the sensible-intelligible binary. As anti-idealists, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

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consider the materiality, the corporeality of the subject-object relation and bring about a sensorial

interaction -- based on desire and fantasy -- wherein feelings and emotions play an important role

in the production of a sensorial perception which transpires as a vehicle that enhances the process

of thinking. The production of knowledge that issues from this interaction is therefore an

embodied knowledge, a knowledge that emanates from and passes through the practice and

performance of the body. Thus, in order to examine Written on the Body in terms of embodiment,

I would read it as Winterson’s working through and production of a ‘poetics of the senses’ which

requires, in the terms of Cherrie Moraga, a “theory in the flesh”.7

The Secret, or, What’s in a Name?

M.D.--Lots and lots of women are horrified by their name. Even

women who don’t write.

X.G.--Can a woman write while keeping the name of her father?

Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Les Parleuses

On the level of plot, Written on the Body seems uncomplicated enough. The novel tells a story of

a provocative romance between a nameless narrator and Louise, who is married to Elgin, a

prosperous Jewish doctor. The intense intimacy between Louise and the narrator disrupts the

married couple’s relation. At the crucial moment of the narrative, when Louise makes a decision

to leave Elgin, he shrewdly reveals to the narrator that Louise’s body has “a secret”: she is

inflicted with a rare case of blood cancer. Believing Elgin who promises that “if Louise came

back to him, he would give her the care money can’t buy” (102), the narrator agrees to leave

Louise and moves to live in Yorkshire. After much suffering caused by the absence of the

beloved, the narrator returns to London, hoping to recuperate Louise. Unsuccessful, the narrator

returns to Yorkshire cottage. The narrative reaches a closure, without allowing the reader “a

happy ending” (190), thus ending as it began with the haunting question: “why is the measure of 7 Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called my Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table-Women of Color Press, 1983) 23. According to Moraga and Anzaldua, with the theory in the flesh, the classical concept of theory, as an operation that implies distance, intellectual detachment and/or speculation, is invalidated. A theory in the flesh integrates as its main source of investigation --its main substance, its process of thinking-- the corporeality of desire, of emotions, of feelings and sensuality. It is therefore the means that produces knowledge which passes through the body; it is embodied thought.

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love loss?” (9) In short, then, the plot is simple: it is a love narrative. The narrator meets a

woman, experiences a wildly passionate relation with her, loses the woman, and suffers from the

loss as a result. The major themes may be easily listed as those of love, marriage, adultery, and

death.

The central puzzle, however, has to do with the fact that the narrator’s gender is never clearly

disclosed. Readers only accompany the narrator as an “I” who recounts a love story with a

married woman. By remaining unknown, the narrator escapes determination. The novel’s force

actually lies in the interplay between the described landscape --the physically manifest-- of the

partners’ amorous rites and the genderly latent, hence withholding the closure of a determinable

moral perspective. In fact, Winterson’s erotic ethics emerge in the very lack of closure that

typifies her narrative. The undecidability of the narrator’s gender continually frustrates the

readers’ desire for truth and does not allow us to know for certainty the identity of one of the two

main protagonists. Hence, the reader’s interpretation is necessarily bound to oscillate between

uncomfortable positions. The narrative thus plays on the reader’s horizons of expectation and

teases conventional assumptions, by leaving us undecided about the narrator’s gender position.

This secret of identity has intrigued many critics. Without apparent or implied suggestions within

the narrative, Brian Finney, for instance, has definitely locked the protagonist into the subject-

position of “a thinly disguised lesbian lover,” simply because Winterson herself is one. Others

have attempted to foreclose the text that the writer has deliberately left open, and affirmed that by

conducting affairs with both men and women, the narrator is thus undeniably bisexual. 8

What these two kinds of criticism reveal is their authors’ need for the comfort of transparency.

Judgements such as these tell us as much, if not more, about the preconceptions of readers than

about the contents of the text.9 The obscurity of meaning is confronted with the critic’s desire for

8 See Brian Finney, “Bonded Language : Jeanette Winterson’ s Written on the Body, in Women and Language, Vol 25.2 (2002) 27. Further referred as “Bonded” in the text, followed by page number. See also Gregory J Rubinson, “Body Languages: Scientific and Aesthetic Discourses in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body”, Critique, Vol. 42.2 (2001); Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996); Andrea Harris, Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson (New York: SUNY Press, 2000). 9 Winterson expresses her exasperationtion at being read in biographical terms. For her, a piece of writing should naturally stand on its own and be valued and read as a work of imagination. She states:

It seems to me that the interpretation between a writer’s life and a writer’s work is irrelevant to the reader. The reader is not being offered a chunk of the writer or a direct insight into the writer’s mind, the reader is being offered a separate reality. … The question put to the writer ‘How much of this is based on your own experience?’ is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the

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clarity and light. “Such binary relation,” Michael Strysick argues, “runs the risk of implying that

… light is privileged and associated with meaning and sense while the obscure is associated with

non-sense and unintelligibility.”10 One may argue, then, that far from revealing what the narrative

conceals, the two types of reading above inform us more about the interpreters’ monologic drive,

symptomatic of the will to capture, to open up the puzzling folds of the text. This interpretive

endeavor may be viewed as a hasty process that aims at ripping the veil of, laying bare and

displaying what is initially wrapped in secrecy, hidden, hence un-analyzable, or hermeneutically

inaccessible.

The charm of the novel lies actually in its complexity and play. Even though the interpretation of

the narrative with the tools of lesbian theory is tempting, I believe it is limiting. In interviews11

and essays, Winterson herself often expresses her contention against labels and condemns easy

interpretations which read her novels according to her identity as a lesbian. In Art Objects, she

writes about the constant pressure of having to cope with living in two worlds, and claims the

freedom of experiencing diverse ways of living: “We learn early how to live in two worlds; our

own and that of the dominant model, why not learn to live in multiple worlds” (110). In line with

Bruce Finney, considering such easy analysis as one among other options would not be

challenging, either. Finney contends that

Written on the Body focuses on the power of language to create both subjectivity and sexuality,

and that to concentrate exclusively on the politics of the lesbian [or bisexual] subject blinds

reviewer and critic alike to the preoccupations and very real distinction of this novel (“Bonded”

24).

Read as a box of secrets, Winterson’s narrative expresses the will to safeguard its privacy, the

intimacy of the work, withdrawn in a secure space which escapes the terrifying laws of

comprehension. “La bouche cousue” (literally ‘the sown mouth’), rather than expressing

poem is not a version of facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing.

Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects (New York: Vintage, 1995) 27-28.

10 Michael Strysick, “Mallarmé and the Madness of Obscurity”, The Romanic Review, Vol. 85.4 (1994) 599. 11 Winterson admits that by leaving the narrator faceless, she aims at producing narrative instability, where the reader is only allowed the function of “a player” but is denied the comfort of knowing the narrator who “has no name, is assigned no gender, is age unspecified, and highly unreliable. I wanted to see how much information I could leave out …and still hold a story together (http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=13).

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submission, presents itself as the perfect stratagem used to escape hermeneutic closure. Silence,

as that which speaks without saying anything, is always, as Derrida states, “the best technique for

keeping a secret.”12 Hence, the advent of determinacy --that is, the critic’s search for providing

coherent signification-- will be endlessly deferred. Beyond the transparent obviousness of the

said lies the specter of what refuses to speak. In short, the invisibility of the secret blurs meaning,

thus narrowing the scope of the interpreter’s knowledge by displaying its limitations. Reading

literary language as one reads the language of daily life mistakenly turns it into a space where

meaning is merely determined by the self-evident information content of the words.

To start with the title of the novel: “Written on the body” invites reading an object (“body”),

which is apparently transparent, naked, unveiled; yet, the multiplicity of signs “written”, stuck on

its surface, renders it tattooed all over, hence covered. Writing functions as a mask, an artificial

body that disables direct contact with the ‘original’ object. What we see and read then is not the

object but the discourse that hides it as a coffin covers a dead body. The ‘who am I?’ becomes a

‘what am I?’: a corpse, a non-being, buried under a substitute. Therefore, language cannot

represent the referent without displacing it; words cannot communicate truth about the world

without abstracting it. Language, by being a substitute for the thing, becomes that very thing,

without the essence of the latter. This kind of substitution-as-usurpation reveals the inherent

violence of language, of representation, or what Jean-François Lyotard calls “the existing

idioms”. In The Differend, Lyotard examines violence as that which creates a “tort” (a wrong)

that cannot be expressed, either because it is so grand that it resists expression, or because

testimonial validity is being assessed by the perpetrators themselves, who can de-authorize the

victim’s version. “In the differend,” he writes:

something asks to be “put into phrases,” and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be

put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use

language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which

accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that

they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information

communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased

12 Chantal Zabus, ed., Le Secret : Motif et moteur de la littérature, (with a Preface by Jacques Derrida) (Louvain-la-Neuve : Recueil des Travaux de la Faculté, 1999) IX. 

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exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms

which do not yet exist.13

The narrator’s voice is overwhelmed by the painful burden of convention. Beyond the loss of her

love-partner, the narrator’s pain is inflicted by the personnel of a conceptual machine that cannot

be denounced. How can one respond to epistemic violence, to all those kinds of violence which

are always already being erased by the structures of systems which constitute us, and of which we

are part? But Winterson refuses to answer. In a Nietzschean tone,14 the narrator contends:

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are

harder to cope with in silence. Once asked, they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its

serene musings. Once asked they gain dimensions and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake

you at night- time. A dark hole sucks up the surroundings and even light never escapes. Why

do human beings need answers? Better then ask no questions. (Written 13)

Unveiling the ‘Existing Idioms’: Adultery

Nothing exists that isn't the work of man, neither thought, nor speech, nor word.

Nothing exists yet that isn't the work of man; not even me. Especially not me.

Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme

--There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself. And everyone knows that to go

somewhere else there are routes, signs, “maps”--for an exploration, a trip.

--Everyone knows that a place exists. … That is writing. If there is a

somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction,

where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.

Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman

Adultery is an issue tackled by many nineteenth century novelists, often with an ambivalent

representation of the adulterous protagonist who happens to be invariably a woman. Jeanette 13 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) 5, 13; emphasis added.14 See note 3 above.

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Winterson revisits the traditional narratives of adultery to condemn the stereotypes surrounding

domesticity and respectability, and to destabilize normative discourses of marriage and

heterosexuality. These are provocatively troubled by the genderless narrator through whom

Winterson re-inscribes the traditional productions of the adultery novel to draw the readers’

attention to the patriarchal ideology that shapes the genre, so as to challenge its structural and

allegorical frameworks.

The traditional narrative of adultery is used as ‘the prison-house’, the codes of which functioning

as barriers against desire. With no specific gendered partner to Louise, the whole conventional

discourse of (hetero)sexuality is disrupted. By withholding the truth about Louise’s erotic partner,

Winterson actually means to testify about the dominant culture’s prejudicial classification which

privileges a kind of sexual orientation and condemns the other as abnormal, perverse and anti-

social. Concealing Louise’s lover’s name is an aesthetic strategy that demonstrates her political

will to confront the official sexual ideology, by preventing it from fully grasping the nature of the

relation. Winterson is aware that the dominant culture constructs normative discourses that are

driven by underlying fantasies about the deviant. Her strategic half-withdrawal of the veil (only

mentioning Louise’s name and marital status) excites the patriarchal power’s fantasies by

exhibiting the sexual relation, yet refusing to confess its nature. In such hide-and-seek game with

authority, Winterson feigns to “capitulate to power by telling it what it wants to hear.” Yet,

[b]y employing and manipulating [its] discourse, however, [she] constitutes [herself] in the act

of self-disclosure in such a way as to disturb or alter the power-knowledge relations of a culture.

For the injunction of telling power what it wants to hear serves as a ruse by which [she] evades

recognition, scrutiny, or surveillance precisely by dint of revealing its inessential secrets.15

Reading the novel as an adultery narrative with a genderless narrator is meant to create an

unresolved ambiguity as regards the social status of one of the two partners. By leaving the latter

undefined, Winterson renders the relation not only more intriguing but also more subversive of

the traditional adultery narratives. In a sense, Louise’s body may be read as the site on which the

patriarchal “saggy armchair of clichés” is written and simultaneously challenged:

15 Oliver S. Buckton, Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 8. Italics in the text.

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The saggy armchair of clichés. It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The

springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar. … Look, my grandma and granddad did

it. … And they all lived happily ever after. … It’s the clichés that cause the trouble (Written 10).

In Winterson’s novel, the narrator’s staunch criticism of ‘habits’ and ‘clichés’ that determine

people’s consciousness and guide their attitudes could be construed as being leveled at people’s

effortless tendency to accept the most aberrant situations and ‘naturally’ swallow the most

clichéd ideas, as they tend to confuse concepts with things, by assuming that words are mere

expressions of the things in the world. Things are in the world, so the clichéd common sense

presumes, and language is a mere reflection of what precedes it -- these very things in the world.

Winterson, on the contrary, exposes the reality of the ‘thing’ we call art, as that which oscillates

between the will to truth and the playful game to hide it simultaneously, hence creating a

discursive space that only shows by dissimulating, a space which, while bound to the mimetic

function of reflecting the world, remains nevertheless one which can only represent half-truths

about reality.

In the above-quoted extract, if one takes “grandma and granddad” as metaphors for precursors as

possessors and disseminators of knowledge, Winterson will be accordingly drawing our attention

to the risks of taking their discourses for granted, as well as to those involved in our desire to

consolidate the tradition through our ‘happy’ uncritical satisfaction with their ways of being.

Perhaps it should be noted in passing that Winterson does not mean to cold-shoulder tradition;

she does in fact admit her debt to her predecessors’ contributions in her development as an artist,

and points to “the relationship of the individual talent to tradition … [a]s one of disciplined

immersion, rupture, and renewal” (58). Winterson recognizes the weighty influence of normative

epistemology. Actually, to make sense of their experiences, people tend to use linguistic

expressions which are embedded in their respective cultures. These sedimented structures are

normative ways of interpreting the world and of regulating behavior within it. Truth has a history,

Winterson admits, that is long-established but not fixed. It is open-ended. If embedded once and

for all, there will be no further effort, no creativity and no imagination. Truth follows a chain of

transformations and deformations. For her, cultural mores should not be passed over. They must

be admitted as part and parcel of being. Yet, instead of conceiving them as self-evident, one

needs to work through and revisit them so as to examine the ideological foundations that

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underpin them, and ultimately reveal their provisional character. According to Winterson, then,

our being, as cultural subjects, is sedimented with prior speculations whose prejudicial nature

cannot be fully identified and comprehended without careful and vigilant enquiry about their

fundamental structure. About the partiality and provisionality of meaning and truth, Douglas Low

subtly remarks that

there is a sublation of past structures. We take up past structures and theories, correct their

mistakes and lift them to a higher level of integration, i.e., by correcting their contradictions,

by adding what they leave out, by explaining what they failed to explain, we advance

knowledge. Even when theories break with the past structures, they do so by explaining what

the others cannot. There is sublation, never total separation.16

One is always ‘after’ truth, a follower of meaning, a follower of tradition and past theories; one is

even ‘after’ ancient mythologies. Yet, one has to be an “anacoluthon acoluthon”17, Derrida

cautions. One has to follow by not following, or does not follow by following; one, in short, has

to be faithfully unfaithful or unfaithfully faithful. As Derrida argues:

There is no simple opposition between the acolyte, or the ‘acoluthon’ and the ‘anacoluthon’.

That is a problem, because to accompany, or to follow in the most demanding and authentic

way, implies the ‘anacol,’ the ‘not-following,’ the break in the following, in the company so

to speak. … Logically they [‘acoluthon’ and ‘anacoluthon’] are opposed; but in fact, what

appears as a necessity is that, in order to follow in a consistent way, to be true to what you

follow, you have to interrupt the following. … . Within the experience of following, there is

something other, something new, or something different which occurs and which I sign.

That’s what I call a ‘counter-sign’, a counter-signature. A counter-signature is a signature

which both confirms the first signature, the former signature, and nevertheless is opposed to

it; and in any case it’s new, it’s my own signature. A counter-signature is this strange alliance

between following and not following, confirming and displacing.18

16 Douglas Low, “Merleau-Ponty on Truth, Language and Value”, Philosophy Today, Vol. 45.1. (2001) 72. 17 Anacoluthon (from Greek an ‘not’ + akolouthos ‘following’; ‘follower’)18 In Michael Payne and John Schad, eds., Life.after.theory (London: Continuum, 2004) 7; 9. To explain this non-oppositional paradox, Derrida notes that when dealing with past philosophers and writers,

I try not to betray them; I try to understand what they mean and to do justice to what they write and to follow, to follow them as far as possible and as closely as possible, up to a certain point. When I say 'up to a certain point' I mean that there is a moment that I betray them.

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In the same vein as Low and Derrida, Winterson accompanies her tradition, follows it, even also

“listens” to it, respects it, but interrupts it by transforming it, by revealing its limitations, its

deceptive sides, or by showing its excessive repression. This is why, perhaps, she seems to more

forcefully recommend that those of us living in “the dominant world” should try to risk a variety

of alternative ways even if this leads them to face their discomfort” (Art Objects 110). Having a

narrator who remains genderless forces the reader to just do that. Identification with the narrator

forces readers to face their own ambiguity, to face their repressed desire for the other, their

hidden drive for the forbidden and the taboo. As an adultery narrative with a genderless narrator,

the novel maintains the ambiguity of the adultery triangle but also forces us to face our

discomfort with adultery itself. Written on the Body is, in many ways, a novel which succeeds in

forcing us to wonder about our own cultural entanglements and repressed choices.

By recounting her/his own entrapment within the established fabric of social and emotional

relations, the narrator confesses that her/his own life experience has also been fashioned in

accordance with the dictates of the “existing idioms”. Yet, while the narrator’s pre-Louise sexual

relations evidence such entanglement, they also point to an anxious strife to escape from the

social space of deceit. Strategically, it seems, the narrator believes that one cannot be fairly

critical of one’s tradition if one has not actually experienced and suffered from what one’s society

demands.

More than the sexual drive which attracts one person to another at the physical level, the narrator

positions her/his quest at the emotional level, each time seeking the appropriate partner through

an invocation of the affect as a key to deciphering the strong and lasting commitment or the

precariousness of the love-relation. Hence, the narrator’s sexual satisfaction is only one side of

her/his greater search for self-realization through love. As such, s/he corresponds to the

established idea about romantic relations, defined in terms of gratification, achieved via a burning

If I just repeat, if I interpret ‘following’ as just repetition, following in a way, in a mechanical way, just repeating, not animating, it’s another way of betraying. So, if I want to follow, I have to hear. In French we say écouter, to listen to and at the same time to hear, to understand, to do our best to understand. If I want to listen to the teachings of [past philosophers], there is a point at which in order to listen to what they say or write I have to say something, not simply to take but, rather, to write in my turn. And when I write I say something else, there is something new, something different. … You cannot simply repeat the same thing, you have to invent, to do something else if only to respect the alterity of the other. (9;11)

14

desire to be united with the partner of one’s heart. The fact that she/he admits being “an

emotional nomad for too long” (38), expresses not a confessional insincerity but points to a

psychic craving for a love-partner who would respond to a sensual relation that transcends mere

biological consummation and satisfaction – with questionable success. The narrator ‘honestly’

tells the stories of the many failed relationships that hardly leave a memorable trace of affection.

Each time, repeatedly, only deceit and distrust prevail. The romantic setting, so it seems, is

framed with appearances and simulation, with lies folded within a rhetoric of truth, with taking

rather than giving; with consuming and dispensation, so that, each time, a parasitic status quo is

established between these temporary partners. Such temporary stretch of pleasure reaches its

apocalyptic fallout with Bathsheba, the narrator’s happily-married dentist who becomes a three-

year “after work, five to seven” lover until “we sank lower and lower in our love-lined coffin.”

(16) Unable to share with Bathsheba anything but the bed for a few stolen hours, arguing about

what is reasonable and what is not, and feeling guilty for hiding the truth from friends, the

narrator is forced to accept that “telling the truth was a luxury we could not afford and so lying

became a virtue” (16). The curtain falls when Bathsheba had to choose between her lover and her

husband, which she does by going on a six-week trip to South Africa with the latter, thus

pretending to keep “the perfect public marriage” for ten-twelve years despite the fact that it was a

total sham. (45)

The numerous relationships with different partners turn out to be fruitless escapades that fuel merely

a few months of passion which soon afterwards grow into a burden and source of frustration. Yet,

what most irritates the narrator is not that love relationships fail; it is rather the people’s artless

capacity for cheating, by showing a public figure of perfect harmony and enviable emotional bond

while their private lives are a theatre of betrayal and deception, a scornful show of feigned

respectability and virtue, wearing the artificial ornament of comfort and assurance, while envy and

fear, vice and guilt ring them up unnoticed, or too commonly shared to be noticeable. “I suppose,”

s/he admits, “that I was trapped in a cliché every bit as redundant as my parents’ roses round the

door” (21):

During the interval of the Marriage of Figaro …, on every side, … the women wore their

jewellery like medals. A husband here, a divorce there, they were a palimpsest of love-

affairs… (31)

15

NAKED WOMAN: I wanted to tell you that I don’t usually do this. I suppose it’s called

adultery. (she laughs)…(14)

… See ? The door was open. True, she didn’t exactly open it herself. Her butler opened for

her. His name was Boredom. (15)

Because this is a novel about clichés and the troubles that follow, and as the explored troubles are

those of domesticity and the space allocated to married women, the matrimonial public/private

binary codes of spatiality create one in which woman is merely a “sex which is not one.”19

Interestingly, through the unnamed and ungendered narrator, Winterson is able to move beyond

fixed gender roles. While the latter is tackled critically in her contention of the societal winding

codes of domesticity and the hierarchical interaction between femininity and masculinity,

Winterson seems to be more concerned with the issue of subjectivity through the working of the

language of desire, fantasy and love, rather than through the gender roles of the partners, hence

cusing the issue of gender to be peripheral to the frame of the narrative. While gender politics

remains pertinent to my analysis, I argue, in the following section, that a focus on the language of

desire helps us better fathom the partners’ psyche in the process of their unruly subject-formation

which stands at the confines of the symbolic order.

Winterson’s ‘Counter-Signature’: Body, Desire, Love

If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have

too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and

leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized. Asleep again, unsatisfied, we shall

fall back upon the words of men--who, for their part, have “known” for a long

time. But not our body. Seduced, attracted, fascinated, ecstatic with our

becoming, we shall remain paralyzed. Deprived of our movements. Rigid,

whereas we are made for endless change. Without leaps or falls, and without

repetition.

Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One

19 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

16

Winterson’s narrative runs counter to the stories imposed by the discourses on sexuality which

are produced to serve the interests of authoritarian institutions. Eschewing the either/or --either

female or male-- and the neither/nor --neither female nor male --, leaves only the option of the

both/and --both male and female--, not in the sense of the narrator being androgynous or bisexual

but as one who frees sexual identity from its established stability. Written on the Body is a

combat with/between idioms -- the “existing” ones and the narrator’s: the cultural patriarchal

legal idiom of marriage set against that of free desire and love; the idiom of transparency and

secrecy; of light and darkness; the idiom of common language/knowledge and literary/artistic

multifarious ambiguities. Winterson dismantles these traditional ‘idioms’ which leave “women’s

bodies unrepresented or represented only as disability and lack,”20 by exploring new spaces where

a ‘purely’ erotic encounter is possible, an encounter which unwrites the patriarchal discourse by,

in Derridean terms, counter-signing hers. Destabilzing sexuality causes it to be more intriguingly

fluid and multiple. Such intriguing quality of sexual performance does not lie in the sexual

choices of the narrator but in Winterson’s way of creating a textual performance of sexuality that

renders the erotic scene almost palpable. It thus expressly works through the very idiom of

writing and attempts to unwork it, by corporealizing it:

Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and the dumb, singing on the body body

longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as

branding irons? … The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message

on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I

had a steady heart beat before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown

strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut

(89).

In this extract, with the infinite layers of writing on it, the palimpsestic body which the

stereotypical epistemology has othered, is freed. The body appears here as that undusted textual

space whose signs cannot be deciphered by the clichés. By unburying it, Louise’s fingers re-

originate it, say, re-beget it in its primal purity. The authoritarian will to read fails as the space

and the signs written on it are indistinguishable. The opacity created by the novel opens it up to a

multiplicity of alternative readings that break out through the status quo of the heterosexual 20 Elizabeth Grosz, “The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray”, in Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (New York: Columbia, 1994) 336.

17

conventions of eroticism. Marilyn Farwell notices the “excessive” display of the protagonists’

bodies and explains it as “a challenge to the traditional Western textualization of the female

body.”21 “Trapped within a story, fraught with clichés” (Heterosexual Plots 188), the narrator

attempts to experience new positions, and therefore provide a new story. This metafictional

quality of the novel, Farwell claims, helps determine the narrative as “a story about story, about

the possibility of telling the same story in a different form but not in an unrecognizable form”

(189).

“Articulcay of fingers”: This is how Winterson’s text feigns transparency. The extract is indeed

constituted by a series of words, finely articulated, knotted together, as in a poem, sung silently

by “the deaf and the dumb” on a desiring body. “Articulacy” -- a concept that traditionally

requires language and expression -- manifests itself in the encounter of the fingers with the body.

The latter substitutes for the blank page and the former is the agent-creator that fills it with signs

and their meaning. Language loses its abstraction. The narrator subverts the habit of reading and

of providing a meaning. Within the boundary of the conventional paradigm, meaning is provided

mentally via the laborious effort of thinking and reasoning. This model exiles the body/text and

displaces it from meaning-making. Here the latter is sought in the erotic creative energy, with the

puzzling capacity of fingers to act as “printing blocks”. How are readers to understand these

fingers that write and “tap meaning into the body” of the lover? The caress, the touch, become the

signs, empowered by the singular and unique function of being the sources of their own meaning.

They become agents and performers, defining the lover’s skin. The erotic partners indulge in a

silent sensual interaction that frees them from the normative discourses of sexuality, as theirs is

transcribed in “morse codes”: “the language of the deaf and dumb” (89). This kind of relationship

dismantles the boundary between feeling and thinking established by the conventional logic of

meaning production. With this form of counter-production, of “counter-signature”, say, one is

now bound to appreciate how the “articulacy of fingers” interrupts the conventional assumptions

that associate “articulacy” with speech and verbal dexterity. We thus come to understand

Winterson’s poetic rhythm as that which “speaks” the language of corporeality. The fingers of the

beloved alter the narrator’s “steady heart beats”; they therefore undo the presumed stability of the

cogito. To adapt Blanchot’s words on literature, the body --as text—as poem in this extract,

21 Marilyn R. Farwell, Heterosexual Plots (New York: New York UP, 1996) 187. Further referred to as Heterosexual Plots, followed by page number.

18

seems to be linked to a speech which cannot be interrupted, for it does not speak, it is. …

The [narrator] is the one who has heard this speech, who has become its reception, the

mediator. … [The narrator] is the one who has heard the interminable, the incessant, who has

heard it as language, who has attuned [herself/] himself to it, who has sustained its demand,

and lost [herself/] himself in it. And by sustaining it, has rendered it apprehensible

[saisissable]. (S. L. 35-6)

The way Louise “plays upon” the narrator’s body with her own body turns the carnal act into a

producer of meaning in which there is no subject and no object but a fusion, say, a con-fusion of

subjectivities where one is incapable of distinguishing the ‘dancer’ from ‘the dance’. Later, the

narrator returns to the image of enunciative fingers and addresses this total immersion of the two

bodies: “Your hand prints are all over my body. Your flesh is my flesh. You deciphered me and

now I am plain to read” (106). In such guises, meaning is made out of the erotic interplay, in the

overlapping of the two bodies, in their juxtaposition, each informing the other. If ‘your flesh is

my flesh’, then one is the other, and mutual comprehension is possible as each becomes reader-

and-creator of meaning to the other.

What the narrator’s resonances to the touch further reveal is the intertwining of physical

sensation and affective response, better grasped by Merleau-Ponty’s “sense-experience” (le

sentir) he deals with in The Phenomenology of Perception.22 For Merleau-Ponty, sensation is a

process of waiting, address and response. The threshold of sensual interaction involves, according

to Ponty, an openness of the body to another body and, therefore, to the world. Hence, “I look, in

the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my gaze, and I

surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and

filling space [of sensation]” (PhP. 246). Ponty, then, reads sensation as the site of an encounter

on the level of the affect. “Sensation”, he explains is “the way in which I am affected and the

experiencing of a state of myself” (PhP. 3). This is a sensual encounter between two mutually

expressive and lived bodies whose interaction can be better grasped by examining the experience

via the process of the sensations which vibrate through it:

22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Further referred to as PhP. in the text, followed by page number.

19

Erotic perception is not a cogitatio which aims at a cogitatum; through one body it aims at

another body, and takes place in the world, not in a consciousness. A sight has a sexual

significance for me, not when I consider, even confusedly, its possible relationship to the

sexual organs or to pleasurable states, but when it exists for my body, for that power always

available for bringing together into an erotic situation the stimuli applied, and adapting sexual

conduct to it. There is an erotic ‘comprehension’ not of the order of understanding, since

understanding subsumes an experience, once perceived, under some idea, while desire

comprehends blindly by linking body to body (PhP. 181).

Philosophy, etymologically ‘the love of wisdom,’ is traditionally conceived as the search for the

wisdom that one loves. What if ‘the love of wisdom’ turns out to be ‘the wisdom of love’? A

whole conception of philosophy will change. This new conception of philosophy, as Merleau-

Ponty suggests, would imply that philosophy joins together the body, the heart, the affect as the

wisdom that one loves. Love is beyond comprehension. Its texture exceeds the meaning of words.

Love is inscribed in/on/through the body with the senses. The materiality of love is its tangible

truth. Love is tactile, not abstract or conceptual:

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it’s my own body I touch. Thus she

was, here and here. . . . Wisdom says forget, the body howls. The bolts of your collar bone

undo me. Thus she was, here and here. (130–31)

It is, in this respect, that Winterson’s Written on the Body offers an alternative mode of

addressing metaphysical questions such as what it means to love, what love is, or how we know

ourselves and others in loving. Because Winterson does not even give us enough of a portrait of

Louise, the reader, as a result, experiences love simply by getting immersed in the complex

operation of bewildered focus on a begging partner that attracts to entangle, where only blind

desire seems to lead the narrator in the winding labyrinth of an erotic situation, mapped, like in

adventure travel narratives, by loss and indirection, by risk and ultimate con-fusion:

“Explore me,” you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home

soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m

free, … but then I turn a corner and recognize myself again. Myself in your skin, myself

lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That

is how I know you. You are what I know. (Written on the Body 120)

20

Winterson weaves the particularity of the experience that is lived as a poetics of the senses, which

engages the reader’s passions with detailed descriptions of how the beloved’s island-body smells,

tastes, and feels to the touch. In Written on the Body, “we touch Louise, smell Louise, taste

Louise as the protagonist does”23:

Louise strode through the door, her hair piled up on her head and pinned with a tortoiseshell

bar. I could smell the steam on her from the bath and the scent of rough woody soap. She

held out her arms, her face softening with love, I took her two hands to my mouth and kissed

each slowly so that I could memorise the shape of her knuckles. I didn’t only want Louise’s

flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together .  . . In the

heat of her hands I thought, this is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me,

feed me and care for me . . . You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin. (50–51)

The affective and sensual levels of the encounter, therefore, cross the boundary of the perceiving

subject with intention and consciousness and a perceived passive object. In the latter separatist

perspective, the world of the senses appears as secondary, a byproduct of idealist epistemology.

Sensation comes last in the order of cognition, and when it is experienced, it is already tamed by

the transcendent level of understanding. Here, in both Winterson’s and Merleau Ponty’s view,

both subject and object, sensing and sensed, are constituted inseparably and therefore activity and

passivity are put into question. No consciousness or cogito intervenes to represent the object at

the thought level. “Sensation,” Gilles Deleuze maintains, “has no faces at all, it is indissolubly

both things, it is being-in-the-world, in the phenomenological sense. At the same time, I become

in sensation, and something happens through sensation, one through the other, and one in the

other.”24

This dismantling play of the traditional order positions the unruly protagonists in a Bakhtinian

carnivalesque space and time where law is perverted by free floating desire, by the eruption of

unlimited energies, performed as liberatory flights, unearthed from the sepulcher of the social

order -- meant to be a timeless space of bounded confinement --, and opening up to a horizon of

23 See Jennifer L. Hansen, “Written On The Body, Written by the Senses”, Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005) 370.24 Gilles Deleuze, “Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation”, in Alia Al-Saji, “Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: Bodies of Expression and Temporalities in the Flesh”, Philosophy Today, Vol.45. ( 2001) 111.

21

emancipated futurity. For Bakhtin, carnival25 is the choronotope that allows the discovery of the

unrepressed. “While carnival lasts,” he explains, “there is no other life outside it. During carnival

time, life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it

is a special condition … of the world’s revival and renewal” (Rabelais 7).

Winterson thus takes us on a voyage of discovering her “idiom”, and invites us to participate, by

showing us that love is simply revealed as an unconditional hospitality and freedom, not as a

transaction. “No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love

belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence”. The I love you is a cliché that

makes “cheating easy” (Written 77).

(In-)Conclusion

Nameless, aware of its silencing and erasure, Winterson’s narrator becomes anyone. Neither a

subject nor an object of investigation. Secret, isolated, unexposed, the narrator is yet uncannily

exposed. Everyone and anyone can participate in the narrative as a protagonist. The “new

idiom” is found and is displayed as a gift. The unnamed “I” slowly, sensually, lifts the curtain.

Something gapes. The mask is drawn, and turns into a mirror reflecting our blindness. We have

failed to see what is so close to us, so familiar, so intimate. We have been strangers to ourselves.

“Eros” is the narrator’s name, phenomenal appearance, the repressed specter, unveiled, is naked

on the stage. We begin to experience love as the protagonist does: via the carnivalesque touch.

‘What is love?’ divides into multiple lives, guises and disguises, into infinite relations, which,

however diverse they may be, are united in the singular apprehension of the experience of love.

The faith in universal essence is shaken here. ‘What is?’ returns always to the same answer: ‘the

will to power’--the desire to know, to grasp, to control. ‘What is?’ is a comprehensive question; it

seeks to take hold, and by holding, it masters. It is a question, then, that would hold knowledge

secure; it understands and it overcomes. ‘To love’, on the other hand, is to ‘touch’, to be with,

tracing out a body, following the lines of the path across the surface, backing up its ‘search’ by

25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Later referred to in the text as Rabelais, followed by page number.

22

the questions, unfolding new questions without any seeming answer. ‘To love’ opens

possibilities. It does not grasp. It is joining of bodies which remain united but separate, free, open

because enclosed. The body is no longer a text, written in order to be captured; the text is a body

without limits, or better with boundaries that enfold, intersect, touch. The word ‘love’ touches us;

it calls to the flesh; words touch as skin touches skin. Language is an encounter with the

ungrasped surface, the surface one touches --the steady heartbeats are altered by desire, desire as

a question of reach and contact, overlap and intersection, not of grasp; desire as a question of

distance and proximity of the limit. In pure desire, human beings lose their subjectivity, they are

always incomplete, lacking wholeness, always driven, drawn by and into other bodies, always

divided, always desiring inter-subjects:

Far from presupposing a subject, desire cannot be attained except at the point where

someone is deprived of the power of saying ‘I’. Far from directing itself towards an object,

desire can only be reached at the point where someone no longer searches for or grasps an

object any more than s/he grasps her/himself as subject. … Desire is in itself not a desire to

love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces, that engineers.26

Indeed, desire, in Winterson’s narrative, does not lack, and it is not lack, and yet, it is linked to

lack, to deprivation –the subject herself is lacking, absent (unable to say ‘I’) at the very point

where desire is. For Deleuze, desire is not to be conceived as powerlessness. Desire belongs to no

one; it demands dispossession. It seems, then, that one has a fixed subjectivity only when s/he

denies desire, when one says ‘I’. It sounds as if the word surrounds and contains the ego within

oneself, outside of difference. In desire, as Deleuze claims, the subject is missing, and is indeed

lacking, but desire, pace Lacan, is not lack. “Who, “except priests, would want to call it ‘lack’?,

he asks, “Nietzsche called it ‘will to power’. There are other names for it. For example ‘grace.’

Desire is not easy, but this is precisely because it gives, instead of lacks”.27 Desire is difficult

because it simply is, lying beyond control. Only when our response to desire remains

incomprehensible is that response true. A response that is understood destroys desire. Love is

measured by loss and the degree of risking ourselves in that loss. Adore desire crave seek

demand. Words-in-the-flesh that touch, and “touch makes it possible to wait, to gather strength,

26 Gille Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 333.27 Gilles Deleuze, “Psychoanalysis and Desire” , in The Deleuze Reader, trans. , ed. and introduced by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 114.

23

so that the other will return to caress, from within and from without, a flesh that is given back to

itself in the gesture of love.”28 If “I love you” is a cliché, a “quotation”, as Winterson contends,

then, “I love to you” is freedom and release, Irigaray responds. It is gift and unconditional

withdrawal of possession. “I love to you” is an address, an opening, a welcome. “I love to you”

aims at, seeks touching and sharing, maybe fusion and con-fusion. “I want to penetrate into you,”

the narrator dreams. “In sharing”, Irigaray explains, “there is silence and breath that stand beyond

the imperative….In communicating, touching intervenes. ... To allow the other to emerge, silence

is necessary. … “Touching is a grammar of connection: to, between, with, together, rather than

transitive forms, which always risk reducing the other to an object….I love to you, rather than I

love you.”29 A true lover is not the one who seeks to possess, to capture the beloved, because s/he

recognizes that possession is a betrayal of the kind of being the beloved is. To love a being, for

Winterson, is to love in such a way that desire is always provoked and deepened by the beloved

(73). To love is where beginning is eternity and end is the threshold of being:

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows

have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over

the mantle piece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is

bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where roads are, we shall be.

We can take the world with us and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it’s getting late.

I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in the open fields. (190)

“This is where the story starts” is the startling opening of the final paragraph of Written on the

Body. The end is a beginning. The untold story that commences from “this threadbare room” is

somehow produced by what precedes it, and yet is seemingly distinct from it, starting here rather

than continuing. A promising trip is announced where all are infused with an ecstatic sense of

power and possibility. Indeed, in the “threadbare room”, all “the walls are exploding,” and the

narrator is obviously overflowing with energy and excitement, “stretching out my hand and

reaching the corners of the world.” The promise of ecstasy is nonetheless threatened by

uncertainty. What is about to be accomplished is halted, without weakening the power of the

promise: “I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are ….” Fully recognizing the

uncertainty of the story that is about to unfold, the narrator nonetheless races ahead, rushing

28 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone, 1993). 29 Luce Irigaray, I love to You, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996) 124-5.

24

towards the boundless possibility of being “let loose in the open fields”. As an exemplary

adventuress, and despite all the dangers, encountered, crossed and survived, Winterson’s

storytelling is practised with full consciousness and an oxygenated sense of responsibility, of

radical subversion and freedom.

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