University of Tunis

Faculty of Social and Human Sciences

Department of English

Palimpsestic Veils of Desire in Jeanette

Winterson’s
Written on the Body

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

of Master of Arts in English

Presented by: Raouia Zouari

Supervised by: Prof. Abdennebi Ben Beya
 September 2022

 ABSTRACT 

This thesis explores the multidimensional character of desire in Jeanette Winterson’s

Written on the Body through a wavelength range of an in-visible spectrum. A closer look at

the writer’s use of the imaginary and the erotic suggests that the narrative of “nameless

desires” (Oranges 15) is at work with its own power, chipping away at the binaries that

undergird the patriarchal regulation of sexuality and subjectivity. At the core of my

analysis is the deconstruction of ideologically-privileged conventions which stifle desire

and the fluid expression of identity. By undermining the ascendancy of the politico-cultural

discourse in favour of an aesthetic of corporeal affectivity, Winterson manages to convey a

sense of queer novelty, whilst fluttering some critical dovecotes within an ethical

framework. In so doing, this study ventures to scout the Wintersonian subversive quest as

the writer creatively experiments with stylistic patterns in unlimited ink of poetic love and

fetishistic desire against the hollowing of hackneyed clichés.

As she presses on the deep connection between flesh and word, text and body,

language and sensuality, Winterson brings the reader into her imaginative world that is

opened up to unforeseen possibilities beyond all bounds. For that reason, I seek out to

correlate the act of reading with the process of writing, each of which is driven by an

overflowing force of desire.

Most crucially, to elaborate on the idea of a volatile ‘plural subjectivity,’ this paper

endeavors to demonstrate how the unity of the desiring subject is dissolved in “the

constructive secretions of the spider’s web” (Barthes 64) where meanings are interwoven

on the palimpsestic body of text.

II
III
  DEDICATION 

This thesis is
affectionately dedicated
To my brave mother,
Without whom I wouldn’t be where I am today;
To my grandmother,
Whose tenderness sustains me
with unconditional compassion,
And to my sweetest sister.

IV
  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This dissertation would not have been possible without the persistent

encouragement and thorough assessment of my supervisor, Professor Abdennebi Ben

Beya, to whom I will be forever indebted. Words will fall short to express my gratitude

towards the full love that is pouring in. Thank you for making this happen.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my instructors without whom I could not

have undertaken this academic journey. My deep appreciation goes to Dr. Nejib Swissi

whose kindness and expertise are valuable beyond measure.

I would be remiss in not acknowledging the unwavering support of my family who

sparks my desire to grow. I am truly grateful to have them by my side during my emotional

outbursts. To my dearest sister, Roua, your distinct personality makes you special in so

many ways. You deserve to have your dreams come true. And, to my little baby cousin,

Marwen, whose smile inspires my ‘joie de vivre’.

Lastly, I would like to thank a close friend of mine whose lively energy radiates

positivity, enthusiasm, and great modesty. Keep shining as you are, Mouna.

“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or

the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.” For you, my mom, Maya Angelou’s words.

Thank you for bringing out the best in me.

V
  TABLE OF CONTENTS 

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................ii

DEDICATION .............................................................................................................iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .........................................................................................iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS ..............................................................................................v

ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................vii

INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................8

I. General Statement................................................................................................ 8

II. Literature Review............................................................................................... 14

III. Working Methodology....................................................................................... 16

CHAPTER ONE : Written on the Body: Deconstructing the Patriarchal Ideology in

the Classic Adultery Literature..............................................................19

I. The Secret as a Veil of Desire........................................................................... 20

1. Narrative as a ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’.........................................................................23

a- A Novel-In-Stories.....................................................................................24

b- What’s in a Narrative Text?.......................................................................29

II. Winterson's Counter-Narrative: Adultery  Marriage..........................32

2. Counter-Memory of the Flesh..........................................................................................39

a- Louise’s Tableau Vivant............................................................................43

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 CHAPTER TWO : Winterson’s ‘Idiom’: Queer Philosophy, Poetics, Subversive

Ethics.......................................................................................................51

PART I : “I”: Without a ‘Proper’ Name..................................................................51

1. A Sign of Fetishism.............................................................................................................53

2. “Perhaps Only a Veil Divides You.”..............................................................................57

3. Queering the Body...............................................................................................................60

PART II : Exuberant Affectivity in the Queer Novel............................................63

1. An Androgynous Vision....................................................................................................65

b- Orlando is Metaphor, is Transformation, is Art.........................................66

2. A Fluid Be-coming..............................................................................................................70

a- A Touch of Love Elicits Desire.................................................................73

b- Reading the Carnal Sounds........................................................................77

3. It Begins and Ends in the Future.....................................................................................83

CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................86

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................96

VII
  ABBREVIATIONS 

WB Written on the Body

P The Passion

Oranges Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

AO Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Affrontery

PB The PowerBook

Bodies Bodies That Matter

O Orlando

EP Elemental Passions

Ethics An Ethics of Sexual Difference

ILTY I Love to You

TBT To Be Two

VIII
  INTRODUCTION1 

“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the

accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so

heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.”

~Jeanette Winterson.

“Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning

beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally,

fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.”

~Julia Kristeva.

a- General Statement

Desire is made Word through Flesh. It is given to be read and to be written. In the

depths of the flesh, there lies a secret. The secret of meaning. Any literary text suggests a

haptic mode of knowledge whereby meaning is interpreted so that to unfold its obscurity.

And yet, the interpreter cannot penetrate easily into the ‘dark’ space of the text, for it is

fraught with “secret apocalyptic signs,” (25) as Frank Kermode puts it in The Genesis of

Secrecy. The meaning, as an object of interpretation, is said to entail a measure of

disclosure and concealment. Hence, it makes room for the wandering questions to reveal a

hidden ‘truth’ from which and by which meaning opens to a comparable variety.

IX
Interestingly, Maurice Blanchot claims that “the source of truth and its satisfactions” is

“inexhaustible,” (5) thus unattainable. Literature's space [l'espace littéraire] is likewise

inaccessible. All literary works present to the reader difficulties, problems, riddles that call

upon uncertainty. Borrowing the notion of ‘dis-unveiling’ from Derrida’s Veils2, John

Mowitt accounts for the interplay between seeing [voir] and hiding [voile] which aligns the

reader with the text. Meaning, thereupon, arises from the productive encounter between the

interpreter and the text. Further, Jean-Luc Nancy shows that “meaning itself opens up in

the structure of understanding,” that is made possible “by an anticipation of meaning which

is or constitutes meaning itself [qui fait le sens lui-même]”3 (xii). It is, therefore, based on

the position of meaning, as an object of desire, that one tries to regain the lack and/or the

loss of meaning as a quest to fulfil one’s desire.

Written on the Body has a secret, “only visible in certain lights” (WB 77). While the

body appears as that obscure textual space whose meaning is still undecipherable, the

accretion of experience takes on a physical presence, as these accumulations “gather” on a

“palimpsest … like a Braille” (77). Jennifer Gustar claims that the existence of such

ambiguity “provokes in the reader a desire to understand it. We are invited to explore by

means of ‘certain lights’ an undercurrent that recurs in her work” (60). In like manner,

Ginette Carpenter draws a parallel between readers and lovers when she says, “writing …

is something that tempts and seduces the reader in its promise to indulge and fulfil the

desire to read …The pleasure of the text derives from the consummation of the desires of

author and reader” (78). In Winterson’s rendering, this ability to read a text must be

relationally reciprocal, that is, “to engage with it as you would another human being. To

recognise it in its own right, separate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a

ventriloquism of yours … To recognise, at the same time, that you are neither the means

X
nor the method of its existence and that the love between you is not a mutual suicide” (AO

110-111).

I do not think of Winterson’s narrative as consolation. I think of it as creation that is

worthy of merit and consideration. To read the current novel is to query the nature of its

corporeal poetics, ethics, and politics. For its representation of the romantic experience,

Winterson’s subversive poetics is ecstatically breathed into a corporeal unity, alongside a

politics that interrogates the patriarchal fashioning of matrimony and desire. By doing so,

she indulges in working through a contrapuntal narrative that highlights the experience of a

‘genderless’ erotic relation, grounded on the primacy of an ethics of love beyond measure

and constraints. In this regard, it is the very means that transgresses the conventions of

classic romance to produce, in sooth, a work that is exquisitely written by the senses. If

there is a transfiguration in her novel, it is not, in the ontological sense, a transcendence of

the body, but of re-writing upon the flesh, whilst crossing the bodily boundaries as well as

the textual limits of the literary work.

Winterson’s Body is a substance for inscription. It is broken up into many surfaces

whose hermeneutic potential to conceal and reveal the ‘truth’ is aesthetic and strategic. On

this subject, it is my intention to trace in the novel subtle meanings lurking beneath a veil

of words as a form of excavation. The direct purpose of this thesis is to read the text as a

palimpsestic body whose signs cannot be deciphered by “the saggy armchair of clichés”

(WB 9). In point of fact, the current study does not align itself with the latter strain of

criticism that takes on an author-based approach, drawing on biographical details of

Winterson’s personal life and sexuality.4 For that cause, the present adultery novel goes

beyond the stereotypical assumptions about marriage and love affairs through an ethical

understanding of the Erotic.

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 This oeuvre presents the reader with “a challenge to the confines of the spirit”

(Winterson, 1995). It revolves around a love-gained-love-lost story between a nameless

narrator and Louise, an Australian married woman. In the figure of the protagonist,

Winterson posits a non-gendered narrator whose identity remains indeterminable. Doing

so, the writer escapes the ideological binarism of hetero- and homosexuality through the

creation of an effective ‘storyworld’5 that opens up the space between erotic Love and

fetishistic Desire. Most significantly, the absence of any clear referential identity assigned

to the unnamed narrator impels the reader to pursue the secret but in vain. To this effect, it

is ineluctable to investigate and seek the depth of such mystery for “what can’t be

translated leaves something to be desired when it appears as such, and it makes us think”

(Derrida 87).

The ambiguous identity of the narrator has garnered considerable attention among

many critics, accustomed to heterosexual adultery fiction, who have undertaken the

challenge to unmask and demystify the oblique secret of the lovers’ erotic relation as well

as to ferret out the hidden, the deep, and the dark underlying the palimpsestic body of text.

Marilyn Farwell, for instance, sees a female narrator, and interprets the novel as a lesbian

narrative. In Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, she poses the question of “what if

the writer is lesbian, has written a significant lesbian novel, and chooses to write a book

with indirect rather than direct references to lesbian issues?” (6). This reflection overtly

depicts Winterson’s authorship.6 Other critics have gone to great lengths to unveil the

narrator’s masked self through lucid or tacit intertextual references. But their efforts are

deemed useless. One evident moment exposes such vainness when Louise addresses her

lover by saying, “I thought you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever

seen” (WB 73). As such, the reader finds it beyond the bounds of possibility to dissolve the

XII
puzzle set by the writer. Winterson herself insists that her technique of hiding the

narrator’s ‘true’ identity is used to burrow beneath the divisions of gender and sexuality to

bring forth the quintessence of love. She admits:

I mean, for me a love story is a love story. I don't care what the genders

are if it's powerful enough. And I don't think that love should be a

gender-bound operation. It's probably one of the few things in life that

rises above all those kinds of oppositions-black and white, male and

female, homosexual and heterosexual. When people fall in love, they

experience the same kind of tremors, fears, a rush of blood to the head …

And fiction recognizes this (Marvel 165).

As the above fragment shows, Winterson deliberately chooses to play with narrative

instability by keeping the narrator’s sexual identity hidden under a veil of secrecy. Seized

up, the reader falls upright into the profound expanse of silence. The writer, howbeit,

succeeds in turning silences into resonant words and secrets into mutable styles. In all of

her texts, an artifice is manifest, something in harmony with “the movement of the veil”

(Mowitt 183). Perceived in its own fabric, the text is worked out in a perpetual

interweaving of codes and signs written exclusively on the body. Like the palimpsest, 7 the

text involves a process of layering “in which several meanings are merged and entangled

together, all present together at all times, and which can only be deciphered together, in

their inextricable totality,” (226) as Gérard Genette explains in his book, entitled

Palimpsests. Contingent on its logic, the palimpsest appears as a result of subsequent textual

reappearance where involuted texts are intricately interwoven, but do not represent the

definitive version of a work. Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, coins the term

‘intertextuality’ to describe its distinctive nature. For her, “the text is not comprised of

XIII
other texts, but of utterances– a type of speech or writing such as, in the case of the novel,

narration or citation – taken from other texts” (36). This kind of interpenetration of

utterances, sign-systems, or texts presupposes a typical process of reading that “attempts to

negotiate, and do justice to, the interrelatedness of the texts on the palimpsest’s surface”

(Dillon 83).

In a novel that is arguably obsessed with the body, Winterson re-inscribes the

traditional productions of the adultery novel to challenge the hegemony of heterosexual

marriage. The presence of a non-gendered narrator critiques the patriarchal normativity in

society, thereby questioning the heteronormative discourse of sexual difference. One way

to regard the use of this strategically indeterminate sex is to consider it as a means for

breaking familiar patterns of thinking. In this fashion, the text escapes the reader’s will to

truth of a definite interpretation, creating in turn “a hammock for swinging and a game for

playing” (Oranges 119). This voluntary play on gender ambiguity not solely places the

reader in a situation where s/he is induced to deconstruct gender norms and the binary

understanding of masculinity and femininity, but above all to subvert the traditional model

of desire. By crossing the boundaries of heterosexual markers, Winterson envisions a space

for another love freed from the social restraints present in the homophobic culture.

Winterson’s shifting paradigm is not simply to dispense with the notion of a sex-marked

narrator, but to reconstruct an identity as fluid and dynamic as something which “literally

breaks in from the outside … reaches the subject from the other” (Laplanche 10). In this

degree, the narrator-protagonist can be read as a realisation of Judith Butler’s theory of

‘gender trouble’ performativity.

It follows that the rewriting of conventional narratives in a unique Wintersonian style

is an evidence for a resistance to heterosexual gender matrix. The venture to build a

XIV
gripping structure leads the reader towards a meditation on the vicissitudes of love through

a stylized exploration of language which itself demands a precision of expression. 8

Winterson makes it plain that “plot was meaningless to me … I had to accept that my love-

affair was with language, and only incidentally with narrative” (Winterson, 1995). Given

the questions raised throughout the book about the nature of love, the affect of “sense-

experience,” in conjunction with the erotic interplay of two living bodies, Winterson’s

innovative imagination becomes an invention that “re-forms fragments into new wholes, so

that even what has been familiar can be seen fresh” (AO 146). On that account, the present

novel inhabits a world of ad-infinitum possibilities where the I-narrator (and so does the

reader) explore, map, touch, fuse and con-fuse with the body and its silkworm texture

through Word/Flesh only just in the narrative’s own ethical frame of reference.

b- Literature Review

At the heart of this poetic prose, Winterson has strived to unsettle the apparently self-

evident propositions, not merely through ideology, but also through “the acceptance of

breakdown; breakdown of fellowship, of trust, of community, of communication, of

language, of love” (AO 108-109). As a result, the novel has been a subject of an escalating

chorus of criticism since its publication. Interrogations about the elaborate nature of this

literary agency have been originally biographical. For instance, the thematic repetition of

romantic love in her works is a major cause of distortion among the British critics who

have accused the writer of male-bashing. Arguably, they tend to read the novel as a roman

à clef in which the writer’s past affairs with women appear as a representation of lesbian

love whose main purpose is to create “emotion around the forbidden” (AO 106). Such a

claim can be justified in the words of Louise Humphries who suggests that “the work is

being judged by the writer, in particular her sexuality, [...] rather than the writer being

XV
judged by the work” (15). Having ascribed Winterson’s sexual orientation, the novel, with

its unsexed narrator, is said to conform to contemporary lesbian-feminist politics.

Intending to be a work that moves past the clichés about love to seek out untrammelled

metaphors and imageries for intense desire, Jim Shepherd provides an account of

Winterson’s provocative mediations on the body which gives love its own tangible texture

in the narrative, despite the vagueness of the narrator’s gender identity. From a

narratological perspective, however, “Written on the Body, whatever the sex of its narrator,

is a queer novel with a queer plot,” as Lanser notes in “Queering Narratology”. In a sense,

the narrator’s secret identity draws attention to the queerness of the palimpsestic text where

the codes of sexual marks would no longer fit the discourse of normative heterosexuality.

In other words, the novel exposes a queer subject whose bisexuality stands as a site of a

“transcendence of difference” (Buck, 1991). Reading the latter through Monique Wittig,

the subject’s secret becomes a move towards a liberation of the self, outside space and

time. According to the queer theory, society sees heterosexuality as the norm and

homosexuality as the ‘abnormal.’ Queering the palimpsest entails a departure from the

mechanics of the disciplinary apparatus by dismantling traditional understandings of

history, temporality, sexuality, subjectivity, and textuality.

Conversely, some critics condemn the novel as mimetic realism for its citationality of

love and lack of originality. Barbara Hoffert, for example, considers it as “minimal and not

altogether original” (195). Paulina Palmer also notes that Winterson’s style is “more

obviously derivative” (112). For them, it is the clichés, the repetition, and the citation that

make the narrative trajectory seem boring and somewhat banal. Yet, in Butler’s reading, “it

is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power, not

derived from the subject’s autonomous will, but rather from the priority of textual

XVI
authority” (Bodies 225). Seeing that Winterson tries to reclaim both the planate words as

well as the desensitised body, her attempt to make an erotic revival becomes a “fantastic

reconstruction of the body of the dead (or dying) lover whom the narrator has lost. What

she achieves is the inspiration of desire but not its satisfaction” (Burns 300). It must be the

case that the book infuses a multiplicity of effects, implicitly linked to the reality of our

desires, but never mentioned in a roundabout way.

The above analytical readings, albeit different, appear as a collective effort to analyse

the corpus of Written on the Body alongside its political, textual, and poetic ingredients,

and to investigate the rationale behind its writing. By reading the story ethically, the reader

is called to engage her/his values and judgments with the text as part of approaching

Winterson’s narrative as rhetoric. This reading approach, in a few words, involves “the

reader’s cognitive understanding, emotional response, and ethical positioning” (Phelan

320). Indeed, these are intrinsic qualities fairly attributed to the ethics of reading which can

take the innominate narrator as an ethical guidance to respond affectively to the embodied

text without losing touch with its corporeality of sense.

c- Working Methodology

The present research will take on an ethical stance regarding the themes imbedded in

the narrative. A critical reading of Written requires touching upon the Body, in the

meantime, delving into its epidermic surface to lay bare what is inevitably expressed in the

literary text. Without qualms, Winterson’s novel harbors a vital kernel of insight that the

acute blade of critique nearly cuts us off from ideological and theoretical styles of

criticism. And here my approach draws from Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion. In

the encounter with any work of literature, the suspicious reader presumes that language

XVII
hides its meaning underneath a canopy of signs and symbols that might escape the hold of

our understanding of what the text tends to say without saying it, and what it does not say

while saying it. Ricoeur points out that a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is a crucial

prerequisite to stew over the merits of surface and depth as it brings up a new text to which

a more authentic response is feasible. In view of this, my undertaking to dis-unveil

meanings, per definition, is a hunt for the secret—the sign here, the meaning there, but also

an attempt to expose their active lacework on the text’s palimpsestic surface. To do so, I

join an amplifying groundswell of voices, including critics in feminist, queer, and cultural

studies as well as some prominent guides to critical literary theories, and significant strands

in narratology. As to engage in critique is to suggest alternative interpretations which come

about as a result of unmasking the text’s disguised appearances, and mine are by no means

authoritative or exhaustive.

The reader, hereafter, unravels a latent world that opens up new possibilities of

thinking, seeing, sensing, thus, of desiring. Suspicion indulges the literary text in a critical

reading, one which is different from the first reading and which correspondingly can take

the reader towards a new horizon of interpretation. “Beyond the desert of criticism,”

Ricoeur claims, “we wish to be called again” (Stewart 306). In the narrower sense, the task

of interpretation is to specify the meanings that the text dis-closes through analysis,

explanation, and commentary, all of which function as a kind of bridge between two

worlds, that of the text and of the interpreter. An intrusive foray into Ricoeur’s theory,

however, alludes to the dichotomy of proximity versus distance which poses a threat and

an appeal to the reader. Put things in an alternate light, because Winterson’s text is replete

with inconclusive passages and figurative verses, it prompts us to convey ideas which

could not be otherwise stated. They either pave or derail the arduous path of thought. Any

XVIII
other way, they come to uncover both conventional and creative aspects of language in

literature. As a consequence, the reader might be held hostage by her/his delusions and

misunderstandings of what the text seeks to fetch, driven by the force of her/his own

shadowy figures. Taking this into account, insight can be accomplished by keeping a safe

distance from the text in order to perceive it as something interwoven which is not

distinguished from the figuration of the palimpsest.

Based on Barthes’s poststructuralist method, the text becomes an object of

hermeneutics only when the reader makes mutual concessions between the act of reading

and writing on the body/text by ‘imping’ onto and adding yet other text(s) to the

palimpsest’s labyrinthian surface. Barthes names this new type of reading ‘textual analysis’

or hyphology where hyphos refers to “the fabric, veil, and/or the spider’s web” (83). In

light of this background, Winterson’s Written on the Body invites us to engage in a

relational reading with the garment text woven from the threads of the already written and

the already read.

While poststructuralist critique shows indifference to unearth buried ‘truths’ and

veiled secrets, it engages nevertheless in what is called a second-level hermeneutics—a

method of reading that looks beyond the text to decrypt greater structures of traditional

literary production in order to draw out counteractive visions where the suspicious reader

is evidently involved in hermeneutics.

XIX
  CHAPTER I 

Written on the Body: Deconstructing the Patriarchal

Ideology in the Classic Adultery Literature

A glance at the major works of the nineteenth-century literature such as The Scarlet

Letter, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, reveals a significant

influence of, and reference to, the politics of adultery inscribed within these literary

classics. In his 1979 study, Adultery Novel: Contract and Transgression, Tony Tanner

observes that “it is such an obvious and legible phenomenon that many of those nineteenth-

century novels that have been canonized as ‘great’… center on adultery, that, with some

exceptions, few have thought it worth trying to take the matter further” (Amann 3). Written

on the Body fits within the corpus of adultery fiction. The intricacy of this narrative lies not

in its depiction of certain conventional themes, but results from the discovery of vague

allusions and covert citations in the text as a means to “divert the ‘contract’ of the

phallocentric terror” (Derrida 87). By re-inscribing the traditional narratives of adultery,

Winterson strives to undo the stereotypical assumptions surrounding marriage,

domesticity, and heterosexuality with the ethical consequences of desiring the text and its

bodily overflow. In Barthes’ perspective, a writerly9 [scriptible] text is one that violates,

parodies, and/or innovates upon prevailing conventions to shatter the reader’s horizon of

expectations. Accordingly, the text becomes an object of desire, or, in a Barthesian

pastiche, “a fetish object, and this fetish desires me” (27). Dressed in their apparel of flesh

and blood, desire brings the text into a magnetic field whereby the desiring subject is

XX
 goaded to read against “the indifference of (mere) knowledge,” (vii) on the one hand, and

the prudery of an “obedient, conformist” (6) language, on the other hand. The reasoning

behind such an appeal sounds impeccable. This chapter carries out a twofold structure

underpinning the palimpsestic body of work. The first part forms an excavation into the

literary narrative text within which the reader explores the dynamic production of a path-

breaking generated by the (im)balanced structure of story lines manifested in their

digressions, reiterations, doublings, and counterplots. To approach the current

Wintersonian novel as deconstructive of the ideological phallocentric discourse in the

second part, it is quintessential to exhume the subversive elements explicitly or implicitly

imbedded within the classic romance fiction.

I. The Secret as a Veil of Desire

Truth’s other side—its complement? Its remainder? –stayed hidden.

Secret. Inside and outside, we were not supposed to be the same. That

doesn’t suit their desires. Veiling and unveiling, isn’t that what concerns

them, interests them?

~Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions

without an answer are harder to cope in silence. Once asked, they do not

evaporate and leave the mind to its serene musings. Once asked they gain

dimensions and texture.

~Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body.

XXI
 The desire to think otherwise through the impossible—the unfamiliar—thrusts the

reader into a state of perpetual complexity when a work of art “offers a disguise, a

difference, a pose,” where there is “something of the debauch,” something new (Winterson,

1995). In this sense, the text renders palpable the im-possibility 10 of the secret meaning that

cannot be overtly said because it conflicts with the predominant cultural norms. However,

Derrida warns, “what cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written” (194).

Winterson’s narrative poetics precisely refuses to be silent in the face of what is not said.

Instead, it affirms its own potential capacity to depart from the limiting oppositions of the

rigid system by moving towards an ethics of love without measure and control. Indeed, the

presence of an ungendered narrator piques the reader’s curiosity 11 to reveal the ‘truth,’

while being absorbed into a narrative consciousness where the unsettling answers cannot

“leave the mind to its serene musings” (WB 11). The question of whether Louise’s lover is

male or female seems to cause much trouble in the narrative trajectory, especially when

one is confronted with the mystery of the there-not-there. By not “telling the whole story,”

(WB 77) Winterson forces the reader to interpellate the ‘true’ identity of the narrator’s

body. In so doing, Nancy calls for “a return to past values, ideas … already established,

presented, namely, to a simple signification,” (xi) so to think through the narrative lines,

whilst probing those essentially integrative implications.

The secret of meaning, thus, cannot manifest itself outside the system of differences

it generates. It keeps fluctuating between the tethering layers of the literary text—between

the known and the hidden, the possible and the impossible, the normal and the abnormal.

In this regard, meaning, as an object of desire, has to be ceaselessly seized since it marks

the sign of its presence-at-a-distance. It is present yet absent, lurking somewhere beneath

the complex system of alteration.

XXII
 Differed and deferred, the grave meaning is held in abeyance wherein the desire for

revelation ebbs and flows, caught up in the rising tension between the visible and the

invisible, producing in turn new alternative modes of thinking. Without doubt, these are

inextricable moments of dissonance12 when desire becomes the site of “mystifying and

invigorating tensions, the shifting nexus of apparent oppositions: deliberative reason and

unformulated experience, power and resistance, one’s present becoming and one’s past

being, cultural knowledge and embodiment, yearning and explicitly held values, deception

and love of truth, and so on” (LaChance Adams, M. Davidson, and R. Lundquist 3). It is

amid these warring forces of desire that the desiring subject questions the provenance of

meaning and the limit of its significance. Certainly, Nancy acknowledges the gravity of

such a burdensome thought. According to him, “the negation of the openness of meaning

through the project of a return to meaning is also an attempt to negate or deny the intrinsic

limit or finitude of meaning” (xiii). In other words, the openness of meaning is determined

by its very closure, and vice versa. Hence, the desire to return to meaning is grounded on

the primacy of lack and/or loss of meaning that constitutes the opening-up of variant

possibilities. Derek Attridge, a distinguished literary thinker, alleges that “it is only when

the event of this reformulation is experienced by the reader as an event, which opens new

possibilities of meaning and feeling” (59). Attridge perceives literature in terms of the

singularity of its event. Pivotal to this approach are the key notions of invention and

alterity intrinsic to the work of literature. For him, the prerequisite for understanding a

literary work is the ability to read the text as a singular ‘other’ which comes into ‘being’ in

the inventive act of reading. This makes evidence for the existence of a mutual force of

attraction between the reader and the literary text affected by the interplay of irreconcilable

meanings

XXIII
 b- Narrative as a ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’

In Metaphor, Terence Hawkes, a guide to theories of metaphor from classical times

to the present, reminds the reader of the etymological origin of the word metaphor which

comes from the Greek metaphora, “a transfer,” particularly from metapherein, “a carrying

over.” He explains, by way of clarification, that it “refers to a particular set of linguistic

processes whereby aspects of one object are ‘carried over’ or transferred to another object,

so that the second object is spoken of as if it were the first” (Hawkes 1). Described as such,

metaphor is employed to bridge the gap between similarity and difference to bring to light

the intrinsic value of that obscure object. If one considers the 1918 title of D. H.

Lawrence’s poem Palimpsest of Twilight as a metaphor in the classic sense, ‘palimpsest,’

then, is carried over to ‘twilight’ to illuminate its arch twilighting qualities. This

metaphoric type of relation, however, is not to be looked at with blatant disregard. It must

be noted that Lawrence’s coupling of ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’ embodies a mutually

shared liaison entre the doublet, while maintaining them as different in a queer non-

relational relation. Drawing both terms together is crucial for understanding their

ontological kind of combination inasmuch as one exists for the other, and the other way

around. ‘Twilight’ is a twi-formed word, being formed of two incongruous parts.

‘Palimpsest’ is likewise one of layering, having a two-fold structure.

Referring to Genette’s work, a palimpsest is not a metaphor of origin, eminence, or

affiliation. It is defined as either a parchment on which the original text, which scarcely

remains visible under an ultraviolet light, can be erased to create a second textual layering,

or a manuscript on which a later writing is written over with the subsequent reappearance

of the underlying script.

XXIV
 In a concise manner, the palimpsest is a space in which two or more texts coexist in a

state of coalition and collusion, where darkness “swallows dip into” light to beget “a single

star in a veil of light” (Lawrence 33). Most considerably, Winterson’s Written on the Body

forms a palimpsest whose surface is rubbed smooth by dim shades of words. Reluctant to

open the book of the Body, the curious reader assays to read Louise from cover to cover

with the help of her dubious erotic lover who unpredictably decides to “never unfold too

much,” (WB 77) thereby casting a doubt over the literary narrative text.

Palimpsestuousness, a striking and unfamiliar neologism, is consequently brought

about “to estrange ourselves from the word, to put some distance between it and ourselves,

so that it shows-up for us in a way that commands our attention, and makes us listen to

what is invested in it” (Dillon 5). Laying the word open to reappraisal, the reader is invited

to enter into a palimpsestuous relationship with the writerly text to see the way how these

interlaced texts collide and collude on the palimpsest’s surface.

c- A Novel-In-Stories

Within the palimpsestic fictional body, the interpreter is given a privileged chance to

permeate the “obscure narrative space,” (Kermode 24) where the cryptic signs of the novel

are “only visible in certain lights” (WB 77). Narrativity, in Kermode’s rendition, “always

entails a measure of opacity that the story is dark enough to call for an explanation” (23).

That being the case, it opens the route for alternative, unforeseen possibilities. Moreover,

the transformative political potential of storytelling envisions an uncanny space where

imagination and fantasy are juxtaposed with what is traditionally deemed myth that tends

to “warn us of the dangers of recognizing no reality but our own” (AO 26). This is

seductive and threatening. Winterson, notwithstanding, creates a notional reality to show

XXV
how the telling of imaginative fictions can, often simultaneously, alter and distort one’s

perception of the mundane, rational world.

The leitmotif in The PowerBook, “I keep telling this story—different people,

different places, different times—but … always this story, because a story is a tightrope

between two worlds,” (119) lays emphasis on Winterson’s desirability to blur the slippery

boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, story and history through the

ecstasy of the Word.

In the process of writing the story of her moonlighting relation with a married

woman, Ali/x, the main character in the reign of the Book, asserts that her fictional work

exceptionally hinges on the palimpsestic bond between desire and boundaries:

“What is [your story] about?”

“Boundaries. Desire.”

“What are your other books about?”

“Boundaries. Desire.”

“Can’t you write about something else?”

“No” (PB 40).

Perhaps, the main intention of playing with these portmanteau words, as Winterson

quotes Hamlet, “is, to hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature” (Act III, scene II). A mirror

that would transgress the normal functioning of vision to see the world in its entirety, in the

multiplicity of its reality only through the strange writhing looking-glass of art. On this

detail, Winterson’s novel presents the reader with a world of seemingly endless ‘stories

XXVI
within stories within stories’ banded together, yet all are unravelled in their intricate

entirety. The triple-layering of the narrative is, above all, what makes the flexibility of

meaning protrusive in Winterson’s literary fiction infused with lyrical and poetic narration.

Curiously enough, these stories are told by an autodiegetic narrator who not solely

belongs to the diegetic universe of the quasi-totality of narrative fiction, but also takes part

in story-telling as a “narrating activity” (213). In Genette’s terminology, an extradiegetic-

homodiegetic archetype exemplifies a narrator who tells her/his own story vis-à-vis the

first-person pronominal system. Just at the point at which the reader might have explored

the narrating function of the storyteller, the latter, contrariwise, feigns to acknowledge

her/his role as a narrative speaker. By choice, s/he performs ‘a game of undecidability’ that

plays into traditional assumptions of a normative heterosexual body (Farwell 201). The

inconclusiveness of the narrating I’s gendered persona poses a clear indication of her/his

unreliability on grounds of promiscuity with male and female partners. A noteworthy

statement designed to raise narratively pertinent questions about the narrator’s credibility is

the alleged “I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a

narrator” (WB 24). (Un)trustworthiness, one of the basic criteria in narratology,13 proves

problematic. In The Narrative Act, Susan S. Lanser makes a distinction between mimetic

(un)reliability and normative (un)reliability. Whereas the first refers to a narrator who is

truthful in the recounting of different occurrences, but not competent in interpreting them,

the second narratorial (un)reliability alludes to a narrator who confuses some factual

events, yet has a good understanding of their implications. Receding into an almost

illegible anonymity, Winterson’s unsexed narrator reinforces her/his credibility, by all the

more undermining it. Significant on this account is when s/he recalls a past scene with the

anarcha-feminist Dutch ex-girlfriend Inge, making an ironic joke about Renoir’s penis:

XXVII
 She said: “Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his

penis?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He did. When he died they found nothing

between his balls but an old brush.”

“You are making it up.”

Am I? (WB 52)

The present scenario is repeated in a retrospective dialogue with another ex-

girlfriend, Catherine, a would-be writer, only this time on Henry Miller, where the brush is

replaced with a ball-point pen (60). In both episodes, the rhetorical question of “am I?”

shifts into the past tense “did I?”, whilst referring exclusively to comments on the act of

narration (Kauer 42). Such instances in the narrated past are meant to bewilder the reader,

seeing that the narrator conjoins fictive biographical stories with concrete historical events

in a palimpsest of pre-Louise histoires d’amour. “Now here I am making up my own

memories of good times. When we were together the weather was better, the days were

longer. Even the rain was warm. That’s right, isn’t it?” (WB 131). This quotation sets a

good example of how the narrator fiddles with storytelling, reality, and history in a

metanarrative fictional amusement. John Fowles, an English postmodern novelist, states,

“one cannot describe reality, one gives metaphors that indicate it” (Kauer 43). To nullify

the sedative effect of time, the innominate narrator resorts to a metaphoricity of

consciousness to resuscitate the past by dint of allusion and allegory.

With an intertextual reference to The Passion’s well-known catch-cry “I’m telling

you stories. Trust me,” (P 13) Winterson reckons that history can be just as convoluted and

illusive as a story owing to its insidious entrapments. “Facts are partial,” she insists.

XXVIII
“Fiction is more a complete truth” (Winterson, 2005). Through this paradigm shift from

realistic narrative to fantastic mode, the novelist trespasses the rigidly fixed boundaries

between fact and fiction. With passion and purpose, Winterson correlates history with

storytelling, reality with fantasy, together with the ways in which myth lends itself to hi-

story [histoire]. In an introduction to Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, the writer

sympathetically reiterates, “all we can do is keep telling stories, hoping that someone will

hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity

gossip, other voices might be heard” (Weight xvi). In the case of Written on the Body, the

reader finds her-/himself engaged in a relationally reciprocal dialogue with an unmarked

narrative voice whose inscrutable equivocality stirs up and challenges the very notion of

‘identity’ as a conception constituted by sex, gender, and sexuality.

In a series of past romantic escapades with lovers from both sexes, the unnameable

narrator refuses to offer any legible proof of her/his gendered and sexual identity, thus

provoking the reader to test out the probity of the I’s narrative tellability. Gerald Prince, in

his own Dictionary definition, provides plausible arguments for including sex/gender as

key narratological elements that are said to indicate a speaking narrative voice. In a similar

vein, Lanser argues that gender, along with other categories of social identity, can

influence presuppositions of mimetic authority and veracity. Any degree of information the

narrator decides to relate or withheld is of great importance. Besides, the tale teller’s

personal biography, as stated by Lanser, can help determine the genderly unspecified

voice, thereby placing the narrating “I” in the position of a susceptible reader. This is an

inferential reading, per se, consistent with the opening-up of the enfolded ambisexual

narrator who appears as a figure of (dis)embodiment, both enabling and impeding the

fluent motion of desire.

XXIX
 d- What’s in a Narrative Text?

Cautioning the reader not to fall prey to deceit, s/he points out, “the maze. Find your

own way through and you will win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in

these unforgiving walls” (WB 46). In giving over narrative authority to the cognizant

reader, the non-sexed narrator announces the hefty quality of carrying the weight of trying

to resolve the riddle throughout the textual labyrinth epitomizing the novel. Beyond a

shadow of a doubt, the restless questions, which nevertheless remain stammering as to this

indistinguishable voice, leave us to meander around, looking for an answer even if the

answer is another question. “Is that the test?” (46), the narrator suspiciously asks.

Winterson anticipates that the closure of this secret encases desire in the dark wall of

opposition that governs the decorum of all sexual marks. This is, de facto, “the success of

the serpent. Serpents of state, serpents of religion, serpents in the service of education,

monied serpents, mythic serpents, weaving their lies backwards into history,” (AO 115) she

declares in “The Semiotics of Sex.” To put it another way, the patriarchal regime of

normative heterosexuality operates through a disciplined system thought to be once

autotelic in itself and by itself. Its chief aim is to contour the materiality of sex through the

agency of assignation, therefore arresting the desire of what one truly desires in a prison

without unlocking doors. In an interview with Verena Andermatt Conley, on Feminine

Writing: A Boundary 2 Symposium, Derrida infers in what follows:

Where there is voice, sex becomes undecided. This voice lets itself be

heard, and it speaks otherwise, watching out for all these violent

assignations, of which there are always more to come. Assignations: this

word rings in its tongue, in its idiom, very close to a residential

assignation, to a judicial assignation, or more coyly, according to an

XXX
 artifice probably still more difficult to translate, to the regime of

signification (79-81).

Normatively speaking, the exegesis of sex and gender in a non-marked narrative text

is monitored by the dominant heterosexual discourse that tempts to multiply the

phallogocentric axiomatics of language to keep the standard hierarchical opposition en jeu,

scilicet, in the incessant play of internal counterforces. In Derrida’s rendering, this

differential play can produce mere effects of decidable meanings. And so, it lacks the

breeding-ground for justifying certainty in interpretation. A viable procedure is to invert

and redistribute the oppositional bipolarities in a quest to deconstruct the metaphysical

presumptions of Western thought. What deconstruction contributes to narrative analysis is

very nicely encapsulated in J. Hillis Miller’s entry “Narrative” in Critical Terms for

Literary Study. According to Paul de Man, an influential deconstructionist literary critic

and theorist, “the paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its

deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders,

in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the

prior narration” (Miller 7). In de Man’s exemplar, the genetic, narrative-producing figure is

adorned in the trope of personification that generates incompatible meanings bound

together by figurative language. In effect, he pinpoints that text, as narration, tropes over

itself due to its repetitive patterning, causing to form narrative disjunctions which can

never be brought back to unity. To this end, it is impossible to have a conclusive

interpretive reading of a narrative text simply because the latter is fraught with rhetorical

figures molten together with a vast of performative linguistic aspects.

The resultant pathos, for a critical reading, is “an anxiety of ignorance, not an anxiety

of reference, not as an emotive reaction to what language does, but as an emotive reaction

XXXI
to the impossibility of knowing what it might be up to” (19). In resonance with de Man’s

claim, Miller argues that the impossibility of holding the conundrums the text displays all

over its narrative lines is in itself an incident of the alogical that goes beyond the pale of

what is merely canonical. To broach the concept of ‘narration,’ the literary critic provides

the reader with a dense net of significations to make a digressive deviation from the

straight and narrow path, leading not to destruction but to deconstruction. Digging into this

notion, Miller finds out that “there are obscurely inscribed ideas of judging and

interpretation, of temporality in its complexity, and of repetition” (47). He further goes into

details by saying, “to narrate is to retrace a line of events that has already occurred, or that

is spoken fictively as having already occurred. At the same time this sequence is

interpreted, as a gnomon on a sundial tells the time, reads the sun, or rather reads the

moving shadow cast by its own interruption of sunlight” (47). In a figurative sense, Miller

draws a parallel between the act of narration and the process of retracing the thread in

question to unriddle narrative complexities by a discriminating reading of signs. Genette,

on his part, gives a shrewd definition of ‘diegesis,’ a Greek term for ‘narration’ that is

already used by Aristotle in the Rhetoric. In its terminological resurgence, ‘a diegesis,’ as

opposed to ‘mimesis,’ is a pure narrative that “retraces a track already made, follows it

through from beginning to end and so makes a story of it” (48). Like the palimpsest,

Winterson’s narrative text becomes a remembered script for writing time and again a

presumed bifold scenario that seesaws pursuant to the sequential line of events shielded

together under figurative power and rhetorical significance.

In seeming recognition of this, “each story and each repetition or variation of it

leaves some uncertainty or contain some loose ends unravelling its effect, according to an

implacable law that is not so much psychological or social as linguistic” (72). Miller’s

XXXII
anticipation of unexpected instances of uncertainty are definitely afflicted by the primary

omission of the narrator’s name and the pursuing exclusion of sex and gender as

productive markers for a narratological text.

e- Winterson's Counter-Narrative: Adultery  Marriage

Although lingering on in classic adultery literature, the narrative of the novel serves

to debunk the stifling conventions and moral hypocrisies of matrimony that is constructed

by ready-made veils and same-told stories. By crafting a bewildering romance fiction

within a conventional plot, Winterson posits a counterfactual stance with a view to impugn

hegemonic ideologies, and the ways in which these commonly held beliefs are written

upon the body. The latter, as one might expect, is not to be taken as the sign for a palimtext

writing-in-process. More accurately, it is deemed to concretize the historical factual

content that compromises the traditional image of heterosexual marriage and love-affairs.

While a transcendent ‘truth’ is devalued with human falsehoods, the romance genre, in

part, cannot scorch away the prejudicial impresses of society nor it can dispense with the

potent convulsions of the patriarchal system. For this purpose, Winterson explores what it

means to love beyond the classic romantic ideal of soul-merging union in an artistic

microcosm of ‘illicit’ desire (Utell 50). Exquisitely ground-breaking, the initial moment of

fascination starks the discovery of a novel kind of intimacy to pursue, yet to pathetic effect,

a lascivious fulfilment in extramarital dalliances. By its nature, the institution of marriage

closes off erotic possibilities, detaining unruly desires even if they threaten to flow over the

brim. The impulse, thereon, is to recompose an open text that aims to articulate desire in an

ethical context, tantalizing in its physical presence the epiphany of a gender-free erotic

experience.

XXXIII
 In a cliché-ridden world, the narrator ridicules the parasitic marriage-narratives, and

s/he does so to the end of proving that “hearing the same story every time” (WB 12) is

critically suspect. Tired of their frequent recurrence, the narrator seeks to puncture, in

style, technique, and standpoint, the scripts of conjugal relations which are meant to

regulate love and its corporeal affect. Pushed up against their constraints, the reader is

appalled at the generic clichés which are normally used to narrativize and idealize the

bridal life. “How happy we will be.” The narrator mocks in a sarcastic demeanor, “How

happy everyone will be” (9). The conception of marriage as the perfect constellation of

happiness is hardly a utopian envisioning. It is, instead, an indirect way of questioning the

foundations of heterosexual monogamy that “is left unexamined by the sexologists not

because it is ‘normal,’ but because such an examination would reveal tensions disturbingly

similar to those found in the strange pleasures of ‘perversion’” (Utell 51). One of the

subsequent ramifications of this approach has been a tendency to consider the infidelity

novel as a unilaterally subversive current of its time.

Tanner’s conviction of adultery as ‘critique’ clearly befits the present analysis. In his

point of view, marriage, in the early nineteenth century, was a metaphor for the social

contract, or else, the political bond that was the basis of bourgeois society. For him,

marriage is an unethical institution founded on systems which subsume the self into

objecthood, transforming the individual “I” into a collegial “we” in marital couplehood.

Tanner’s main argument is that adultery is the total disruption of these connections. In

consonance with Miller’s diagnosis, “adultery is unlawful, but it keeps the law and the

names of things firmly in place, just as a metaphorical transfer does not put in question the

literal meaning of the transported word” (32). In brief, infidelity tends to breach the

boundaries erected around the self, so-that to deconstruct gender categories through an

XXXIV
abstruse interplay of presence and absence, of recognition and rejection, of submission and

transgression. He puts it plainly:

Adultery introduces a bad multiplicity within the requisite unities of

social roles. From another point of view, we could say that the unfaithful

wife is, in social terms, a self-canceling figure, one from whom society

would prefer to withhold recognition so that it would be possible to say

that socially and categorically the adulterous woman does not exist. Yet

physically and creaturely she manifestly does, so she becomes a

paradoxical presence of negativity within the social structure, her virtual

nonbeing offering a constant implicit threat to the being of society (71).

In the above-quoted extract, Tanner recognizes the socially symbolic form of the

female adultery novel that exhibits a revolt against classical divisions of: the biological

female, the obedient daughter, the faithful mate, the responsible mother, and the believing

Christian. The genre, in preference, brings to the fore a new alternative social category of

an adulterous, deviant, rebellious woman. Unlike British Victorian novels which present a

case symptomatic of the spouse’s betrayal, such continental literary works as Anna

Karenina and Madam Bovary depict the adulteress in a tragic yet radiant light, pitching

into her “passions, desires, aches, and anxieties” (Utell 70). At the turn of the century, with

the rise of “the New Woman,” addressing the double-standards of marriage and divorce,

and their akin erudite productions, the female adulterer, admired or despised, has become

capacious in her being, a shape-shifter, a transgressor par excellence. Therefrom,

“sexuality, narration, and society fall apart, never to be reintegrated in the same way—if,

indeed, at all” (Amann 11). Winterson’s novel of infidelity, as it follows, comes to signify

XXXV
a change in perspective, having flipped, by a prudent analytic suspicion, the conventional

scripts and their erotic epistemologies.

Joseph Allen Boone, in his study of the tradition of novel form and its transgressive

patterns, distinguishes the narrative text as countertradition, that is, “a parallel trajectory

where there might be persistent ‘undoing’ of the dominant tradition” (Utell 74). On this

wise, it behoves us to deem Boone’s counterexample of narrative as applicable to

Winterson’s that works upon the context to which it responds ethically, just as it calls into

question the ambidextrous relation between marriage and adultery. The linchpin in the

narrator’s frame of reference might be delineated in the following statement:

Odd that marriage, a public display and free to all, gives way to that most

secret of liaisons, an adulterous affair (WB 14).

At heart, there exists a semipermeable membrane between ‘normal’ and ‘perversion’

along the periphery of matrimony that demands recognition of unknowability, whilst

giving prominence to an aberrant adultery. Considering the influence of infidelity novel on

modernist literature, Vicki Mahaffey touches on “the forbidden fruit of adulterous

knowledge” (Giacomo Joyce 35) whose “mortal taste” has “brought death into the world

and all our woe” (Paradise Lost Book I). It is trotting out a hoary old literary chestnut that

Milton’s epic narrative sets the beginning of Man’s fall ensuing the illicit act of

disobedience. This invocation grounds itself in the desire for wisdom as a response to

Raphael’s rhetorical question “What admire’st thou, what transports thee so, / An outside?”

(Book VIII). Wisdom is adulterated in lack of knowledge. To speak of the immoral and the

illegal, that which should be kept ob scena, say, offstage, is, without a qualm, the wisdom

of adultery. In essence, it is the desire to negotiate the reprehensible, to ponder over the

XXXVI
unthinkable, and to query the nature of the aberrational. Desire knows no barriers,

matrimonial or otherwise. It is as boundless as the sea. Silence is quietude. Desire is blast

and discord. It is the genesis of queerness and oddity. It floats over in assertion of light

obscurity. “Into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness” (Giacomo Joyce 14) of the

lovers’ lewd affinity, desire has flooded impulsively into a stream-of-consciousness

narration.

Lights on, Winterson’s novel of female cheating commences with a short play scene

in which a married woman is brooding over her secret love-affair with the genderless

narrator in a thought-provoking monologue. It goes like this:

Interior. Afternoon.

A bedroom. Curtains half drawn. Bedclothes thrown back. A naked

woman of a certain age lies on the bed looking at the ceiling. She wants

to say something. She’s finding it difficult. A cassette recorder is playing

Ella Fitzgerald, ‘Lady Sings the Blues’.

NAKED WOMAN:

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

committing adultery. (She laughs.) I’ve never done it before. I don’t

think I could do it again. With someone else that is. Oh I want to do it

again with you. Over and over again. (She rolls on to her stomach.) I

love my husband you know … If I hadn’t met you I suppose I would be

looking for something. I might have done a degree at the Open

University. I wasn’t thinking of this. I never wanted to give him a

XXXVII
 moment’s worry. That’s why I can’t tell him … When he touches me I

think about you. What have you done to me?

Cut to en suite bathroom. The lover is crying. End scene (WB 12).

The desire to see through everything, as the woman conveys in the current moving

scene, is unequivocally a desire to confront the underlying incentives why things happen as

they do. As a matter of fact, she is aware of the inexorable force of concupiscence that

brings closer her object of seduction into a qualitatively another level. 14 On the flip side,

she assumes that a crisis in marriage leads to dire straits in companion trust and fond

sentiments. For this reason, the married adulterine yearns to fulfil her libidinous-basic

needs with a corpo-erotic matrix in the most discreet intrigue, henceforth, bending the

narrative plot away from its final resolution. Revolutionary at bottom, and compelled by a

strong spirit of liberation, the foresworn woman exerts her preference for casting

aspersions on matrimonial hegemony and bridal fictions.

Adultery, as one might say, is an antithesis of marriage in that there can be no

“happily ever after,” (9) except for carnal pleasures and rapture. The desire of the other can

only be attained outside the penultimate margins of marital rites. And it is in these

circumstances that the counter-narrative begins to move, although at a slow pace, toward

an indifferentiation of signs divorced from their referents. The narrative of infidelity novel,

Tanner concludes, reaches some sort of “ultimate rapprochement among words themselves,

not a marriage but a merging, meanings swallowing each other in hopeless circularity”

(103). Surprisingly, the narrative rhythm of this episode, and the interior sensuous

experience it elicits, supersede textual irruptions with the impending rendezvous between

the Unnameable Narrator and Louise. Torn between the guilt she feels towards her

XXXVIII
husband, Elgin, an Orthodox Jew Doctor, and the desire for her unsexed lover, Louise

personifies la femme adultère. An intentionally renowned cancer researcher, her husband is

confined to the scientific field, “never sees any people” for “he wants to make the big

discovery. Get the Nobel prize” (58). Casting a pole shade of the absent present spectre,

Elgin is in sheer oblivion of all home comforts. The married couple “no longer made love.

She took the spunk out of him now and again but she refused to have him inside her” (59).

Because “marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire,” (68) Louise spurs on to feed her

fleshly physical hunger elsewhere. This is exactly the revolt of love against the traditional

ceremonies of matrimony which repress desire, reaching across an interval gap that can

never be filled, while concurrently opening that empty cleavage itself.

Not to mention that marriage calls attention to aloofness and indifference on either

side in its attempt to aggravate pain in perturbing cellular waves. Where silence permeates

the lacklustre spousal life, agony re-havocs on the soul anesthetizing the body’s most

powerful senses. Only when the private affair takes place, Louise steps over the threshold

of extreme orgasmic effervescence. When all that is holy, hidden from others, love is made

vigorously between the two exotic partners to soothe the anguish of their impatient

longing. The narrator expresses her/his exuberant feelings in a way that swerves the

narrative into a language of incandescent intensity which will embroil the story’s sequence

of events as well as the familiar forms of reminiscence. A compendium can be adduced in

the coming passage:

June, The wettest June on record. We made love every day. We were

happy like colts, flagrant like rabbits, dove-innocent in our pursuit of

pleasure. Those brief days and briefer hours were small offerings to a god

who would not be appeased by burning flesh. We consumed each other

XXXIX
 and went hungry again. There were patches of relief, moments of

tranquillity as still as an artificial lake, but always behind us the roaring

tide (BW 17).

Infatuated, Louise and her implied lover come down to dots with some adventure

wherein love beats through the rough linen and thinnish layers, and appears destructively,

bringing out a secondary stratum of inter-related potentialities. To be sure, desire must be

the gift of every inch of the body to reconceive oneself with and through another, thus and

so, embodying “the mutual creation of self-identity” (Utell 9). A connection deeper than a

thematic one links Winterson’s ethics of desire to Charles Albert’s 1910 book, entitled

L’amour Libre, an examination of free love and marriage reform. Seen as the performance

of phenomenological lust, lovemaking can engage in metaphysical exploration of the self,

mapping the body and its delicate, refined shape in a highly eloquent taste.

It goes without saying that Winterson’s fictional characters are “all on the move”

(Winterson, 1990) to let the traditional masculine paradigm find no way into the novelist’s

polymorphous world of fiction. By doing so, they diverge from the righteous “logical

paths” in that “the proper steps led nowhere” (BW 80). Depicted as a mini-epic journey

through space, time, genre, and gender, the Wintersonian lush story invokes the quest

narrative in which the reader is being transposed to a mercurial voyage, “a travel along the

blood vessels,” to “the cities of the interior” (P 68). In the midst of the inbound labyrinth, a

vacillation of mutable meanings peaks and valleys, traversing multiple border-crossings

whose “geography” is yet left “uncertain” (68). Even more so than in The Passion, the

counter-narrative of Written on the Body is figured in terms of travel tropes, reiterations,

and substitutions which work remarkably well to bequeath a book of obsessional

wanderings.

XL
 f- Counter-Memory of the Flesh

Drilling down through the layered accumulations of a concupiscent adultery, the

narrator convenes new fissures of possibility within language. Love, “the mind’s narrative

of the body’s desire,” (Winterson, 2017) slips into a rhetoric that privileges the sensible-

sensorial binary star of somatic writing. At its most profound is the city of words, which,

by themselves, take on a surreal presence from stern to stern in Winterson’s erratic version.

In their greatest feasibility, words feed on an unremitting increase of a living hunger.

Betrothed to desire and passion, they come forth and pass through the ‘gut’ to showcase

the material embodiment of linguistic liminality 15. The immateriality of language, hereof,

is translated into a corporeal expression which exceeds our intellectual grasp of it, yet

creates an alternate logic that disintegrates the either/or, neither/nor dynamics of the

phallocentric discourse. As the driving pulse of every bit and piece of the narrative text,

language produces an embodied knowledge that is transferred externally to the body and

its component parts in dispersion through the subject-object physical interaction.

“I wasn’t happy,” the narrator professes, “but the power of memory is such that it

can lift reality for a time. Or is memory the more real place?” (WB 52). “The answer would

be presented to you as an eternal truth even though it was already in the past” (WB 149).

Memory of the flesh still hovers in the lover’s psyche, albeit with an achy heart. It bestirs

the presence of the missing beloved through the correlation of the lived body and mind.

Winterson’s narrative cannot fail but to reiterate the memory of the past in the present, and,

in so doing, enacts a breakdown through its inscription of melancholic excess which

returns a difference. It is no wonder that words in these in-between moments gain strength

since they struggle “to fill the gap left by unconscious and unanswered desires and ward

off our fear of the other,” even if “they do so only imperfectly” (Andermahr 66). The

XLI
ensuing pursuit of the illusory promise of wholeness is ineluctably confused with loss of

the desired object:

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

touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders through the

doors the mind has tried to seal. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says

forget, the body howls. The bolts of your collar bone undo me. Thus she was,

here and here (WB 106).

In remembrance of Louise, who has been diagnosed with leukaemia, the genderless

narrator meditates on their erotic encounter made intense by the extremity of dissolution of

her/his beloved. In the grip of an elegiac grief, the narrator counters the memory of Louise

in the present to relive, beyond any reasonable measures, the otherworldly experience

which acts upon the imaginary in the psyche. Distinguished by the inability to sever

attachment from the lost love object, melancholia, in Butler’s reading of Freud’s Mourning

and Melancholia essay, “refuses to acknowledge loss, and in this sense ‘preserves’ its lost

objects as psychic effects. … The melancholic seeks not only to reverse time, reinstating

the imaginary past as the present, but to occupy every position and thereby to preclude the

loss of the addressee. The melancholic would have said something, if he or she could, but

did not, and now believes in the sustaining power of the voice” (182). Eschewing to mourn

her/his decaying beloved, the narrator turns to the stories of their past romantic affair in

melancholic compulsion. In Winterson’s illicit poetic method, this act of recalling

memories is an inventive gesture of ‘fetishization’ that ventures to satisfy the internal and

external desires of the depressed subject (Z. Hamzah-Osbourne 65). On a more subversive

level, the use of counter-memory in storytelling forces to divert melancholia into lecherous

fulfilments which function as substitutes for the lost object of desire within a fetishistic

XLII
frame of compulsive repetition. Winterson rethinks the narrative text as it manages to

fetishize the desired object through an imaginative memory that does not follow a linear

chronology. In such a manner, the alternative narrative of fetishism renders Louise “like a

character in a book,” (WB 155) where histories are on the wing as though they reach no

cessation, for then, “everything moves in curious clockwork animation” (WB 51). Mindful

of the powerful momentum of artistic fetishism, Kristeva perpends the work of art as

counter-depressant. In Black Sun, she makes a claim that “if loss, bereavement, and

absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as they

threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that ‘the work of art as fetish’ emerges when

the activating sorrow has been repudiated” (9). Just as Kristeva, Winterson valorizes

fetishistic imagination which transposes normative acts of bodily veneration into other

probable procedures of fetishism. Of equal import, she considers a literary counter-

memory, powered by language and knowledge, as a sign of anamnesis that withstands the

hegemonic narratives of history. As specified by Foucault, counter-memory is “a

transformation of history into a totally different form of time,” and is moulded by “a use of

history that severs its connection to memory [and] its metaphysical and anthropological

model” (Z. Hamzah-Osbourne 64). On the far side, it gives voice to the silenced groups

who have to acquiesce to survive without being able to make their views heard. That being

so, storytelling, for Winterson, is a counterproductive strategy to dismantle the orthodox

chronicles of history in a constant cycle of memory and imagination. The narrativity of

fetishism breaks down ‘stories’ the reader is asked to trust into smaller unites which

altogether stand in stark contrast to prevalent his/tories. A recurring feature in these dis-

unitary texts is the multiple-strand technique, as shown in a prior section, proven as a

means of challenging the norms of narration to push the envelope of postmodern aesthetics

by efficient processes of counteraction and deconstruction.

XLIII
 Countering the story of the past in the here and now gives way to a “necrophiliac

obsession” (WB 103) that proliferates at irregular intervals memorial instances of

pleasurable drives and insatiable feelings to keep the image of the dead beloved ever vivid.

a- Louise’s Tableau Vivant

The narrator’s immersion in her/his memory of Louise is a de/reconstructive force of

writing the (female) body with a reverential, moving, and compassionate language of

poetic anatomy that transmutes the cinematic adventure to an almost touchable vellum. No

longer inbred in abnormal mourning for the lost love object, language and lust coalesce in

one breath in a chrysalis out of which Louise’s picturesque painting comes to light. “Eyes

closed I began a voyage down her spine, the cobbled road of hers that brought me to a cleft

and a damp valley then a deep pit to drown in” (71). The lure to move from a phallocentric

to post-genital erotic economy appeals to Louise as a colonial body, a landscape that is

drawn by a medley of geographical imageries and anatomical metaphors. For fair,

Winterson goes out of her way to herald the trite colonialist allegory of the female body as

a contested territory to be explored. Doing so, she makes allusions to Donne’s Elegy “To

His Mistress Going to Bed” with its striptease description of the woman disrobing and the

famous oration “Oh my America, my new found land” (27). In parallel with the poet’s

emblematic analogy, the lover-narrator, on musing over her/his partner, concedes, “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?” (44).

The cadence of metaphysical poetry never ceases to suffuse the (textual) body on which

the explorer-narrator premeditatively dwells, using a cluster of tropes associated with

conquest and sea travels. By her/his own admission, “I have flown the distance of your

body from side to side of your ivory coast. I know the forests where I can rest and feed.

XLIV
Night flying I know exactly where I am” (99). Louise’s body becomes the site of

occupation and consummation, “a landing strip” of alluvial riches and treasures. Standing

amazed at the wonderous sight of her celestial cleaves, the narrator rhetorically enquires,

“What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover’s body?” (71).

“Was it the worke of nature or of Art?” (Sonnet, xxi). In return for Spenser’s “Amoretti,”

Winterson’s poetic energy strikes readers as imagistic extravagance since it conveys

profuse meanings akin to the topographical trajectories of the body. And the ploy, in

spades, is a sign of the radius between heaven and earth, between divine and terrene

madness of lost love. For fear of being engulfed in a disordered state of mind, the

narrator’s unhinged “I” redefines the desired self as neither subject nor object, but as an

‘abject’ that is drastically drowned in the twisted braid of affects and thoughts of the

diseased Louise. “I don’t know what you are. You affect me in ways I can’t qualify or

contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control” (45). The

chasm of loss, and the horror it impregnates in the psychosomatic space, provide an

argument for the disintegration of the binary categories whereby the codes of the social are

replaced with the narrator’s special amatory code in the modus operandi of metaphor and

changeover. On such short notice, Kristeva makes clear in the hereafter referred:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being,

directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside

or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the

thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It

beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire … It is thus not lack of

cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity,

XLV
 system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-

between, the ambiguous, the composite (1-4).

Given leave to delve into the epidermic surface of Louise’s sepulchral body,

Winterson’s excavator discovers an eerie world where “there is no gravity. The laws of

motion are suspended” (87). Within the fragile palpable texture, the I-narrator is committed

to deconstruct prevalent hetero-patriarchal discourses, re-signifying the boundaries of the

abject, in order to reconstruct a new morphology of body/text. And so, to renovate a space

where estrangement, emptiness, and out-of-placement turn out to be indispensable

elements of a work in process. With the advent of Louise’s illness, the body starts

morbidly to destroy itself that the knotted skein of words is split asunder. As classifications

waste away poetically, the body’s T-cells have become contentious and hostile; “they don’t

obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of

spleen and intestine. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have

rebelled” (98). Infected by military invasion, the foreign body has gone astray, and begun

transforming its outer figure in a vicious tour de force. It becomes potentially fatal and

wild, destructing its organic parts from the inside out without warning. Marked by the

tendency to fluster identity, system, and order, Louise is the victim of a coup d’état against

which the body must durably fight.

In quest of opening up the enclosed arteries of Louise’s deeper mystery, the narrator

switches abruptly to medical terminology that escapes total division of her leukaemic

body. “‘Explore me,’ you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps. I dropped into

the mass of you and I cannot find the way out” (101). Granting agency to decipher the

love-partner’s equivocal body, the narrator avails her-/himself of unfolding its hidden

interiority through clinical instruments. This attempt, although proves impossible, alludes

XLVI
to a medical-anatomizing approach whose main desideratum is “to dissipate the darkness

which had surrounded observation of the body … and to expose the structure of the inner

world of bodies” (Turner, 1995). To hearken oneself thinking, Louise’s body is the site of

pathological inspection and the very source of ‘truths’ which are dis-unveiled in the

progress of mapping the material surface as well as decoding the insidious corporal secrets.

Not solely is the female body a token of newly discovered territories, it is also the object of

a medical peering gaze, renouncing Louise a subjective status. The lover obsessively has a

yen for possessing her/his absent beloved by all available means, thereon, keeping it under

careful observation with “my lascivious naked eye” (99). Louise is now the body to be

pervaded, not with chronic disease, but with fetishistic desire where the narrator is sunk

into its earthly in-depths, “to marking your passageways, the entrances and exits of that

impressive mausoleum” (100). In pursuance of corporeal explorations, “I” perseveres the

masculine paradigms only to repudiate them down the lines, while eroticizing the memory,

as it is metaphorically reminisced, through erogenous imagination.

Here is, then, an atypical stance that is quite at odds with the noetic rationale of

Western philosophy analysed by Elizabeth Grosz, whose book Volatile Bodies works to

reinvigorate the dualist logic established by the Cartesian legacy. Inflecting mind into the

body, and the body into mind, via a kind of twisting subversion, the narrator rehabilitates

Louise’s substantial corporeality made evident in her/his counter-narrative discourse. As

s/he avouches in a self-confessed intonation, “I would go on knowing her, more intimately

than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her

synovial fluid. I would recognize her even when her body had long since fallen away”

(96). To bring the desensitized body to life, the I-narrator finds in the medical diagram a

“love-poem” whereby the body/mind affect mutual transformations in the psychosomatic

XLVII
realm, hence allowing for the interchangeable submersion of subjectivity and textuality.

Put into words, “I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and

mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another’s

boundaries and make ourselves one nation” (17). Such intimate exchange produces an

erotogenic description of the body/text image as irreducibly corporeal in its progressive

formation. In that respect, Winterson pays tribute to Monique Wittig’s provocative work

The Lesbian Body, where the lover enters the bodily in-houses of her paramour in a prose

marked by the voluntary splitting of the personal pronoun [j/e] translated as ‘I’. Most

impressively, Wittig’s book traces a bawdy encounter with each and every single detail of

the (post-anatomical) body, vaster than Winterson’s vehement ground of ascertainment.

Note the impact of the seducing Word and its embodied effects, infusing desire into the

language of the erotic and its voluptuous imaginings:

To recite one's own body, to recite the body of the other, is to recite the

word of which the book is made up. The fascination for writing the never

previously written and the fascination for unattained body proceed from

the same desire (7).

The reciprocity of language and desire, together with fantastic imagination,

contribute to the creation of transubstantiation of body into word that slithers ‘writing’

away from cold and rational sense, taking it toward sensate volatile meanings which

nevertheless remain unsatisfactory. The body of “I” is a map of the equivalent communion

with the body of the other in a palimpsestic record of connection and separation. Although

the fleshly boundaries are prone to fall apart, Winterson eroticizes them with the nuance of

being both troubling and insinuating. Cryptic as it may be, “we shall sink together you and

I, down, down into the dark voids where once the vital organs were” (100). What one

XLVIII
ingests in reading the aforementioned quotation is that the narrator compassionately

identifies her-/himself with the lost beloved in a pure structural operation where the I-

voyeur devours the bodily medium with her/his naked eye to discern a place, uncluttered

by association, where the couple would retain their singularity. According to Barthes,

empathizing with the other’s misery is a “unity of suffering” (62) in that “I” feels

anguished for the deteriorating other, yet concurrently endures pain to survive the death of

a loved one. “It may be so but If you are broken then so am I” (104). Because the I-narrator

‘has’ Louise’s ache, s/he lives on the memories of their ever-present prurience, casting

them entire into a romantic prose midsection. In each of the four anatomical poetic pieces,

“I” predicts the possibility “of a complete satisfaction of the desire implicated in the

amorous relation and of a perfect and virtually eternal success of this relation” (Barthes

59). This fulfilment is a precipitation of compelling words which eventually transform

Louise ‘s body into a writerly text, une oeuvre d’art, fetishizing her absent presence as a

romantic spectre:

I Membranes and The Special Senses 

have mapped you with my naked eye and stored you out of sight. I have seen you

unclothed, bent to wash, the curve of your back, the concurve of your belly. I have seen the

scars between your thighs. You are bruised all over. The waterfall ran down from your hair

over your breasts. You turned your back and your nipples grazed the surface of the river.

You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin … My nerve endings became sensitive

to minute changes in your skin temperature. The beginning of passion, heat coming

through, heartbeat deepening. I knew your blood vessels were swelling and your pores

expanding. The physiological effects of lust are easy to read. An ordinary miracle, your

body changing under my hands. The skin loosens, yellows like limestone, worn by time.

XLIX
Your face, mirror-smooth and mirror-clear. Your face under the moon, slivered with cool

reflection, your face in its mystery, revealing me … The lining of your mouth I know

through tongue and spit. Its ridges, valleys, the corrugated roof, the fortress of teeth. The

glossy smoothness of the inside of your upper lip. The sun is in your mouth. My naked eye

counts your teeth including the fillings. Sometimes it’s me you bite, leaving swallow

wounds in my shoulders. Do you want to stripe me to match your own? I wear the wounds

as a badge of honor … The smells of my lover’s body are still strong in my nostrils. The

yeast smell of her sex. Her scent is a hoop about her thighs. My lover is an olive tree

whose roots grow by the sea. Her fruit is pungent and green. It is joy to get at the stone of

her … There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. She was compressed,

stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead.

Jeanette Winterson

(Adapted)

The lexis of desire and pleasure releases an ecstatic rush of prose poetics escalating

behind a veil of rapturous allegories. At this metaphoric shrine, Louise’s body becomes the

object of alternative sexual fetishism, just as the senses of touch, taste, smell, and sight are

submerged in indelible memories which ensemble appear to erect a gripping form of a

corporeal textual structure. Conveyed figuratively by the process of molecular docking, the

‘cortext’16 [le corps/texte] is broken up into many surfaces whose ability to ‘dock and bond’

with other surfaces in a transient union is meticulous and strategic (Lindermeyer 52). In the

hymns to the soft membranes, the I-narrator attaches language to lust in a far-reaching

interpretation of physiological effects, presenting a universe of subtle meanings which

L
exist in a state of incessant possibility. Docking inside Louise, “I” is brought into contact

with the body’s most sensual organs in a penetrative intercourse of fetishistic obsession.

The confluence of voyeuristic performance and physical attachment, thereupon,

generates carnal arousal and excitement awakened by aesthetic expression and sensation.

Beguiled by the aromatic scent of Winterson’s narrative, “I,” “you,” and “we” are situated

in a discursive medium where ‘the body’ and ‘writing’ are as emulous rivals as any fervent

lovers (Booth 11). An erotically endowed fetish object, Louise seems to control her

unsexed protagonist-lover in a controversial mode of possession, while enabling the

fetishist to be absorbed in a libidinous relation that incorporates the intimacy and intricacy

of eroticism. Through the decomposing and recomposing of the body, Winterson displays a

sort of regressive gravity whereabouts she makes use of conventional imageries of

boundary-transcending romance to deconstruct the rigid patriarchal borderlines, having the

words slip through one’s fingers all over the writerly text. In the multilayering folds of the

skin, the body au secret meanders on a winding roundabout trail and remembers deep

within the archives of a nostalgic memory that comes in compulsive reiteration to awaken

an inevitable touch, an abrupt movement of jouissance, fright, perplexity, and so, of

mystery.

Winterson’s counter-narrative text fails to justify its clarity, which itself is signified

through the connotational variability of Louise’s palimpsestic textual body and the

indecipherability of the narrator’s sexual identity. As it works steadily to express loss so

thorough and profound, the text of bliss cannot maintain its own appropriate transparency

for that bliss is at a loss for words. Borrowing Barthes’s terms, it is, in a few words,

“unspeakable and inter-dicted” (21). What is ousted, split apart, is the unity of the self

which is caught up, once again, in a state of dissonance whereby the text raises infinite

LI
questions that the answers reside below the pyramiding surface, within the yawning

silences.

LII
  CHAPTER II 

Winterson’s ‘Idiom’: Queer Philosophy, Poetics, Subversive Ethics

I. PART ONE: “I”: Without a ‘Proper’ Name

The fathomless silences in Written on the Body suddenly begin to reverberate with

Winterson’s perverse choice of not-naming the first-person narrator. If s/he were to be

given a ‘proper’ name, all provocative and disruptive knowledge of identity would not be

compelled to pore over the abysmal secret through which the speaking “I” emerges. The

exploratory potential implicit in the formal withholding of the narrator’s prename [prénom]

marks the site where anonymity and visibility gainsay each other. In his Ethics,

Subjectivity, and Truth, Foucault perceives the former as “a way of addressing the potential

reader: since you don't know who I am, you will be more inclined to find out why I say

what you read; just allow yourself to say, quite simply, it's true, it's false. I like it or I don't

like it. Period” (323). He, on the other hand, condemns the latter as “a mere fashion, a mere

product of the cultural institution” (324). Winterson’s designation of a speaking subject

whose only name is “I” alerts the potential reader to theoretically rich a set of

contradictions over which s/he travels the untrodden pathways of thought. The verdict of

not-to-name the non-sexed narrator is by no means a sign of negligence. On the contrary, it

is a deliberate strategy to follow the engraved etchings of conformity and resistance by

pivoting “the radical questioning of all our ways of thinking” (324). Or, better say, it is, in

the Foucauldian sense, “a pseudo-politicization that masks, beneath the need to wage an

ideological struggle, a deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read” (324). With

LIII
this in mind, the refusal to name Louise’s love-partner defies the normative discourse on

sexual identity which itself serves as a product of authoritarian institutions typifying the

phallocratic regime. The equation of visibility and identity is presumptively a form of

essentialism to which Winterson shows herself sensitive and averse. Not barely it does

reduce a person to her/his distinctive traits, but also attaches an innate value to them. In

due course, it leads to both the creation of a single, fixed self, and a hierarchy of visible

markers of sexual difference (Xhonneux 101). Winterson contends that “naming is a

difficult process; it concerns essences, and it means power” (Oranges 170). It is feasible to

consider identity as a rigid designator of patriarchy, and, in the narrow sense, the very code

of the juridical. Both philosophers, Slavoj Žižek and Saul Kripke, seriously think that the

proper name elaborates no particular content. As it is argued, naming is a function of

speech that designates an identity without providing any appropriate description of it

(Butler 153). What’s in peril, here, is the notion of the ‘proper’ which comes from the

Latin proprius to mean “one's own, particular to itself.” By ascribing the name to the Law

of the Father, the property of ownness becomes a social pact, an agreement that invests the

name with its power under the phallic control.

Anchored in the alliance of patrilineal organizations, identity is, therefore, secured by

the powerful status of the patronym. That is why, Derrida presumes the possibility of never

having one’s own appropriation since the ‘name’ is contingent on the social exigencies of

paternity and matrimony. As long as Winterson risks standing in opposition to the illusory

securing of the proper name in marital law, the lovers’ genderless erotic relation highlights

the ethical necessity of acknowledging the values of love and desire beyond the bounds of

normative (hetero)sexual classifications. To identify the limits of such pigeonholing, it is

LIV
important to approach this novel as intimately Winterson’s own work with respect to the

labyrinthine structure of textual relationality embodied in the palimpsest.

The apparently translucent narrative, which yields up latent senses to the

hermeneutic potential, requires an interactive encounter between the interpreter and the

text. Though the case be such, the interpretive endeavor to ‘know’ who the I-narrator is

keeps the book, as expressed by Cixous, “a letter on a run,” (12) where ‘truth’ remains

inexhaustible.17 Even so, as mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, the taste for the

secret is indubitably what “pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my

heart” (AO 26). The terms, in which Winterson casts her venture, are more concerned with

the anxiety provoked by the absence of the proper name than with sustaining the conceit of

hiding the anonymous narrator derrière les rideaux. This dexterously strategic omission of

the name raises questions about the ascertainable identity of the narrator which still lie

there, redundant, seeking transparency to obliterate such an inexplicable opacity.

1. A Sign of Fetishism

Both the text and the topos of gendered identity, hitherto, are transcribed on the body

that cannot pin down any conspicuous sexual mark, and, because of that, it seems arduous

to learn how ‘we’ know ‘one’ (Gilmore 130). Perpetually pulling us between certainty and

uncertainty, exhilaration and anxiety, frustration and inspiration, Winterson spurs her

potential reader to journey without guidance into the heart of the Secret’s darkness in

pursuit of desire. Burrowing underneath the concept of ‘desire,’ Derrida holds up to view

its peculiar nature that is gripping and cunning, revealing in turn another facet of writing.

“I am tempted to say,” he imparts, “that my own experience of writing leads me to think

that one does not always write with a desire to be understood—that there is a paradoxical

LV
desire not to be understood. ... If something is given to be read that is totally intelligible,

that can be totally saturated by sense, it is not given to the other to be read. Giving to the

other to be read is also a leaving to be desired, or a leaving the other room for an

intervention by which she will be able to sign in my text. And it is here that the desire not

to be understood means, simply, hospitableness to the reading of the other, not the

rejection of the other” (Poutiainen 2). A reading of this oeuvre through Derrida’s

conceptual lens proves essential to trace the borders that separate the self from the other

each of which, however, is driven by the unfathomable desire. Teresa de Lauretis suggests

that “what signifies desire is a sign which both elides and remarks that separation. This

sign, I am arguing, is a fetish” (Z. Hamzah-Osbourne 31). Winterson believes that a work

of art gains its merit essence through the Ariel power of language heeded as the principle

instrument of conveying fetishism. She writes in a free-flowing verse:

An artist is a translator, one who has learned how to pass into her own

language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams,

from the body, from the material world, from the invisible world, from

sex, from death, from love (AO 146).

Hooked on a well-thrown line of words, the writer draws the language of literature

from the under-depths, that is to say, from the deep-rooted, long-established tradition, then

creates her own counter-signature in a unique Wintersonian style. There is no denying that

Winterson complies faithfully with the Modern Classic treatment, in a bid to familiarise

past modes of artistic production, yet with an eye to the future. The mainspring of tension

upon rewriting some classic literary works lies dormant actually in the special fusion of

diachronic and synchronic times. At this junction, the past is reawakened. “It is not lost to

authority. It is not absorbed at a level of familiarity. It is re-stated and re-instated in its

LVI
original vigour” (AO 12). As outlined in The Anxiety of Influence, Winterson tends to

endorse a dual approach by “honouring the exemplars while modifying their message,”

hence sowing the seeds of “the immanent dialect of Modernism and the swerving pattern

of History” (Preda 23). It is no frivolous claim that the novelist embraces the traditional

literary Canon, in the meantime, she expresses her desire to make a cultural-historical

change, echoing what the narrator says, “I have no desire to produce but I still seek out

love. I want to make something entirely new” (WB 94). Joanna Dehler continues to

elaborate on this ambivalent idea which, in consequence, has “led to a tension between the

desire to become part of a new modernist canon and the urge to reject any constraints,

including modernist ones” (31). Nevertheless, some modernist writers such as Virginia

Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Marianne Moore, and D. H. Lawrence, to name

but a few, have tried to confront the dilemma “by encoding and ‘masking’ their messages

in their poetry prose—references to Sappho’s heritage often served as a useful mask.

Conforming to the classicist and elitist agenda of high modernism, these references

facilitated delivering subversive messages directed against gender stereotypes” (Dehler

32). In this fashion, Winterson confirms her sincerely devout attachment to the heritage of

aesthetic Great Tradition by concealing the narrator’s gender identity, thus turning the

body into “a secret code” (WB 77). Needless to say, this kind of trespassing of ‘following

by not-following’ prompts Lyn Pykett to assign Winterson the label “post-Modernist, not

in the sense of constituting a break with Modernism or superseding it, but rather as a

collaborative dialogue with Modernism which continues what Winterson sees as the

Modernist project” (Preda 26). Taking her cue from the modernists, and, in particular, from

T.S. Eliot’s idea on the new writer’s place within the continuum of literary history,

Winterson chooses to situate herself within the timeless tradition of European Literature.

By following the modernist line of enquiry in her fiction, the writer has sought to work

LVII
intertextually with major literary writers conducive to sign on her novel body of work.

Henceforth, Jeanette Winterson invents her name for those already-existing critical

inventions by virtue of transforming and deforming their (imperceptible) limits.

Nonetheless, the desire to create a new idiom,18 to mark one’s own signature, to write

one’s proper name, cannot be overlooked without probing the tacit collusion between the

auto-referent, manifested by the presence of the “I” narrative voice, and the intertextual

referent, described by Julia Kristeva, as “a referential utterance” (45). What matters in light

of this framework is the inscription of already-said speech utterances compiled from pre-

existent texts in order to be placed within the general (social) text that is inherently bound

up with culture.

The text, in kind, is no longer perceived as a singular, isolated object, but, rather, as a

compilation of cultural and historical textuality expressed in society through a profiteering

discourse. Be that as it may, an intertext is construed by an entire cultural code, comprised

as it is, of ideological stereotypes and clichés.

Whilst it daunts to expose the hollowing of all language, flaunting its detachment

from originality, the “saggy armchair of clichés” (WB 9) evinces an unyielding invisibility

of the patriarchal discursive ideology interjected within the stereographic space of the

palimpsest. Louis Althusser, a French theorist, gives an insight into this self-perpetuating

power by offering along these lines a new reading approach attuned with the dominant

values of the Western culture. “To see this invisible, to see these oversights, to identify the

lacunae in the fullness of this discourse, the blanks in the crowded text, we need something

quite different from an acute or attentive gaze … A reading which might well be called

‘symptomatic’ (symptomale), insofar as it divulges the undivulged event in the text it

LVIII
reads” (Anker and Felski 158). Viewed from this perspective, a close analysis of

Winterson’s novelistic text is not wholly an act of understanding the systematic

classification of the trans-linguistic apparatus, but also an effort to detect, albeit with

difficulty, the un-disclosed subversive mediums in Winterson’s counter-narrative fiction.

Not the less, the ‘curious secret’ of the ambigendered narrator unveils the peculiarity

of her/his sexual identity that is determined by the palimpsestuous intimacy of, and tension

between, the hetero- and homosexual desire s/he respectively depicts.

b- “Perhaps Only a Veil Divides You.”

A newly fashioned matrix for reading Winterson’s prose fiction has merged insights

with claims about how the body performs meaning by destabilizing the very distinctions

between the natural and the artificial, profound and surface, inner and outer through which

gender and systems of compulsory sex(uality) operate. In the preface of Bodies That

Matter, Judith Butler asks, “Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the

body to the performativity of gender? And how does the category of ‘sex’ figure within

such a relationship?” (Bodies 1). Butler’s seminal theories on ‘gender trouble’

performativity prompt us to interrogate the ‘causal’ connections existing between these

categories and to measure the directness of heterosexuality. In sooth, the nameless narrator

offers a re-evaluation of the intriguing (yet unsettling) interpenetration of the gender-body-

sexuality triad that is not quite stable but precarious, leaving open the possibility of change

and diversity. To be fully released from the discourses of sexual orientation, Winterson has

erased all traces of gender specificity from her narrative text. “It doesn’t matter,” she says,

“which sex it is—my own feeling is that gender of the character is both, throughout the

book, and changes; sometimes it’s female, sometimes it’s male, and that is perfectly all

LIX
right” (Finney 178). However, the corporeal permeability and impermeability, to adopt

Butler’s appellation, are handled differently for male and female corps. Woman are

flexible, penetrable ‘matter’ with no consistent façade, whereas men’s bodies are sealed off

and static (Lindenmeyer 49). Butler perceives the surface of ‘the body’ as a pure and pre-

discursive entity that is mutilated by society. Withal, what fudges together its sexed

contour is not the material substance, but that the surface—the skin—is signified by social

markings, having, as their main function, to establish the codes of cultural coherence

(Butler 131). By the same token, Foucault argues that the body is the inscribed surface of

events, or, more scrupulously, “is imprinted by history” (146) which destroys the body in

its repressive gesture. Here is, thence, a body described through the language of semblance

and force, weakened by the discourse of domination, inscription, and designation.

Considered from this angle, sexuality is understood by Foucault to construct the category

of sex as a ‘fictitious’ unity which gets meaning in the context of power relations (150).

Running beneath this discussion are the crisscrossing lines of inquiry into the relationship

between the materiality of sex and gender performance that generate Butler’s project. In

her account, performativity is the condition for gender and identity formation which

“stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter”

(Harbord 42). The process of gendering still yet requires a stylized repetition of acts that

brings about its precariousness. The workings of sex, wherefrom, are sustained by gender

performative attributes which constitute the body’s materiality and its given sex in the

name of the heterosexual imperative.

As a voice bearing a physical presence in the narrative, the autodiegetic narrator

indicates a body existence whose gender roles are foreclosed by the flood of normative

heterosexual clichés placed upon them. Because of their unobtrusiveness, the references to

LX
sexuality are easy to manipulate, to ambiguate, to hybridize. From a postmodern

perspective, Jean Baudrillard regards the body as “a commodity-sign, a consumer object

through investments of labour, a fetishized marker of sexual difference, and a genetic code

… each of these instances a ‘mode of disappearance for the body’” (Smith 27).

Characterized by proliferation and consumerism, the body is mechanized according to an

irresistible epidemic process that is burdened by the task of aligning desire with the

patriarch’s fantasy to pass over toward some other means of satisfaction. One may

distinguish between utopian fantasies which can devolve into passive escapism and active

fantasies of resistance against the politics of normalization. Due to lack of corporeal

legibility, the narrator’s body allows desire to shift laterally to its associative kin in order to

achieve at least a temporary satiation.

No longer defined by its concrete tangibility, the body is turned into an object of

fashion whose inmost features wane after a few uses. 19 The problem implicit in fantasy in

this case is its potential tilt away from the real into a complex critique of binary extremes

which palimpsestically mask the body’s naked ‘truth’ when it is driven by its own ‘pure’

desires.

Louise’s idiosyncratic avowal, “you are a pool of clear water where the light plays”

(BW 84-85) suggests that the narrator bestrides both male and female gendered traits all the

while s/he remains detached from each. One can scarcely deny that gender-choice is

normative and subject-formative that purports to grant “the appropriation of the speaking

‘I’” (Butler 3). A receding mark, this ‘I,’ though, enacts the withdrawal into anonymity,

and by that, it becomes the unspoken requisite of the dreaded crossing of identification. In

point of fact, the first gender specific identification occurs when the unnameable narrator

compares her-/himself with Alice in Wonderland (WB 8). Not alarmingly, the common

LXI
reader is prone to conflate the storyteller with the author, and to ascribe the writer’s

biographical sex to the narrator’s persona. Within such a frame of reference, the lesbian

identity is rendered visible at best.

Having read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as a semi-autobiographical text of a

young lesbian woman named after Jeanette the author, one will not take heterosexuality for

granted. Through the novel’s aesthetic fantasy-based narratives, the reader can utterly see

why oranges are, indeed, not the only fruit since there are other alternative options of

reading, of thinking, of writing, hence, of desiring.

Winterson’s I-narrator, thought to be a lesbian lover, is an intelligible response of the

female who refuses to renounce her phallic domineering position. In so doing, she

transgresses the masculine/feminine binarism, breadthening a space that can be cascaded

overwhelmingly just as desires demand (Nunn 21). Now and then, the reader is enforced to

reassess her/his hasty conclusion when the narrator identifies with one of the most

stereotypical male characters— a Don Juan (17), forthwith discerning gender as a

continuum, not ever limited to a definite sex. Yet, this philanderer is not celebrated but

ironized, in the narrator’s words, “I suppose I couldn’t admit that I was trapped in a cliché

every bit as redundant as my parents’ roses round the door. I was looking for the perfect

coupling; the never-sleeping non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy without end” (17). Akin to

the rakish Lothario and Casanova, the speaker is no more than a fictional performance; an

act of roaming infidelity that is braided in culturally constructed gender premises.

As a deduction, the transgressive potentiality of masquerade is a wilful yet

superficial subterfuge employed to evade the rules of patriarchal exchange as well as the

formulaic valuation of love-affairs in a stilted playlet of queer sexuality.

LXII
 c- Queering the Body

The narrator’s mystery is that which Foucault argues “the subject’s secret and the

secret of subjectivity,” and its name is queer (Buck, 1991). In this sense, the term ‘queer’

can be used to indicate “another discursive horizon, another way of thinking about the

sexual whose main objective is to stir up rather than solidify sexual and textual

differences” (Farwell 12). From this standpoint, the text’s construal of sexual identity

liberated from gender assignations is seen as an affirmation of bisexuality. Holding the

fantasy open, the narrator is crossed by hetero- and homosexual desire which represents a

subjectivity that is not reducible to the patriarchal Uni-verse of sexual difference. The

complexity of Winterson’s character is illustrated by her/his ability of being immersed in

palimpsestuous queerness. In a critical assessment of this special amalgam, Butler

importunes that both concepts are governed by “the history of the usages that one can

never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy”

(228). The coupling of ‘palimpsest’ and ‘queer’ can be understood as adumbrative of the

latent involutedness of identity, be it sexual, gender, or racial. It is not determined by, but

structurally hypostatizes, the historicity of sexual identifications and social practices,

including their exposure to critical and imaginative re-inscriptions. Ergo, queering the

palimpsest points up its enduring capacity to rewrite otherwise conventional modes of

thought in an effort to castigate the fundamental divisions of phallocentric sexuality

typifying the Western ideology.

Patricia Duncker, a British novelist and academic, hails Winterson’s bodily writing

as queer which, by her definition, “undermines fixed, settled, heterosexual discourses. The

binary opposition between masculinity and femininity is fluid and stable. … Gender is

performance. The body becomes ambiguous. Therefore, power and knowledge cannot be

LXIII
so easily allocated to the masculine in queer discourses. Queer is a gender game. Queer is

an attitude, a look, a style. Queer is cheeky, provocative, subversive” (85). Imbedded in

postmodern discourse, Queer theory takes up an aggressive and confrontational stance in

its progressive political activism. A sustained attention to the major propositions associated

with this realm demonstrates that gender identity is not something we are born with. More

willingly, it is something we are born into (Rudy 202). It consists of a myriad of

performances which are non-heteronormative in spite of appearance. Queer theorists stand

against the policy of categorization on an assumed ontological basis. First and foremost,

they are interested in getting-together masculinity and femininity into a new unity to

transcend the fantasies of exclusion by re-inscribing difference along political lines.

In thwarting sexual object-choice as the vehicle of social identity, queer theory leads

to believe that sexual desires are rudimentary for constructing alternative identities without

the assertion of male/female classification.

The drive to move past the bounds of heterosexual normalcy into an androgynous

space of libidinous pleasures has subsequently led to the demolition of male-dominance in

favour of feminism. Feminists such as Joan Scott, Denise Riley, and Judith Butler, assail

the heteronormative gender system, in the meantime, work towards a fluid comprehension

of subjectivity that does not immure itself to one role model. Considering that the novel

invests in a cycloramic image of its own sequential events, some feminist critics observe

the postmodern narrative as excessive since it announces the deviation from linearity. For

example, Paulina Palmer finds Winterson’s opus to handle a plethora of storylines, and to

“depict identity … in terms of narrative” (Farkas 44). From a political viewpoint, Laura

Doan acknowledges the narrative’s subversive power to undermine the heterosexual

hegemonic discourse, leaving gender performative acts intact (45). Equally important, the

LXIV
critic, among other lesbian-feminists, places lesbianism at the center of the novelist’s

postmodern contravention, despite Winterson’s assertion in many of her interviews that she

is neither a feminist nor a radical lesbian. “I am a writer who happens to love women,” she

vindicates, “I am not a lesbian who happens to write” (AO 104). It must be noted that the

writer relinquishes her erstwhile engagement with lesbianism in contemplation of an

aesthetics that is widely known and esteemed as postmodernist-feminist with regard to its

queer philosophy and subversive ethics. On Winterson’s behalf, Lillian Faderman evades

those sexually biased allegations by proposing to approach the coming-out novel through a

‘lesbian sensibility’ encrypted in the text. The scholar inquires whether “we can identify a

lesbian sensibility in literature that may not be concerned specifically with lesbian

sexuality and attendant matters” (52). Faderman appreciates the affecting clout of

sympathy and sensibility as a hair-trigger responsiveness to any work of aesthetics.

According to her, Winterson’s fiction should not be read as the incorporation of the

postmodern lesbian, in lieu, as the transcendence of lesbianism.

“Written on the Body,” as the title reveals, corroborates the deconstructive play with

word/flesh to indite a text that crosses over from poetry to Love. Crucially, Winterson’s

fictional characters come to speak with their bodies which themselves have the flexibility

to be inscribed and chiselled, yet readable against their intentional authenticity. On this

subject, the writer contrasts the motives of affectivity galvanized by art to those

commanded by the macho consumer culture, which “insinuates bodies to desire what they

do not desire” (115). In her view, art has a different rate of exchange that ultimately

denounces the ‘hold’ of the world’s passive diversions, enabling bodies to desire else ways

the fusion in mutual intersection.

LXV
 d- PART TWO: Exuberant Affectivity in the Queer Novel

Butler’s brief online essay, entitled “Uncritical Exuberance,” is the perceptive

shadow of her approach of queer critique. 20 In a remarkably broad sweep, the feminist

theorist conflates the discourse of positive affect21 and political imagination, bringing to

crisis the discursive mechanisms of heteronormative biopower. Whilst the imagery of

innovation and exploration is meticulously persistent in Winterson’s work, her narratives

of desire reflect the concomitant vision of literature as an exuberant love-relation of queer

belonging. The writer explicates throughout her essays on aesthetics and politics, “true art,

when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling

in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of

its terror, is the world turning upside down” (AO 15). An affective reading of the novel

yields a valuable means of recognizing the influence of fetishism on the lover’s discourse.

Originally stemming from the solicitation of affect—the body’s immanent openness to

qualitative change, Winterson’s fetishistic desire contains “the quality of all desire,” (Z.

Hamzah-Osbourne 8) insofar as it has the capacity to queer sexual and social norms. The

above asseveration is an instigation to seek new forms of relationality in the interest of

challenging the biopolitical conditions buttressed by consumer structures of feeling

(Bradway 190). Significant in this context is the emphasis on political imagination

conceived of as an affirmative method to ground knowledge in certain ways and means.

The reader, in no uncertain terms, is triggered to cultivate a sense of contingency which, by

and of itself, signals the ability to procure a more comprehensive understanding of the

political (Hutchison 354). Within reach, contingency can be viewed alongside anti-

normalization which does encompass, to some extent, the entirety of sexual politics. Where

a reactive resistance to sexual oppression takes a stance that is normalizing, a productive

LXVI
resistance tries to loosen the seam between desire and identity. Most evidently, it aspires to

transform sexuality into eroticism by dismantling the identitarian ways of thinking about

desire (Meeks 328). Resistance proffers a resilient mode of engaging with what is not

readily lent to a determinate probability.

As it is shown, political imagination invites to enunciate new values against those of

the normalization of sexual difference. 22 At the core of anti-normalizing politics is the

productive contestation of dominant heterosexist norms to bring into the open a queer

relation that is less encumbered by suppressive codes.

Rejecting control, Winterson, henceforward, exerts herself to reinvent the erotica

experience which embraces uncontrollable difference that provides “no safety, no certainty

of return” (The Stone Gods 68). With regard to Nietzsche’s eternal return, the feminist and

queer theorist Elizabeth Grosz sees affect as the organ of becoming. So as to her, “return is

that which initiates, and engenders, difference” (141) of sexually specific physical forms.

Against the provisionally stringent conception of the body, Winterson offers a chance for

changing the stability of gender identity into an incalculable becoming without the

skewing of material sex. It is against this background that the queerness of affect

contributes to the creation of an idiom that tempts to surpass the patriarchal mere

codification of sexual desire toward the exuberant pleasures of erotic Love.

1. An Androgynous Vision

In the giving of a venereal narrative text, Winterson creates an erotic version of love-

affairs that is not quite part of the traditional script, yet imbued with literary passion and

intertextual compulsion. The inscription of a lived experience plunges the writer into a

world of intertextuality23 already long inhabited by the classics of literature. Virginia

LXVII
Woolf is a fountain and an inspiration. She is, to Winterson’s spirit, “waterfall and wine”

(AO 53). In a riveting resonance with the gender-neutral story of Written on the Body,

Woolf’s Orlando depicts a character who erodes the mediocrity of sexual disparity.

b- Orlando is Metaphor, is Transformation, is Art24

Read intertextually, Winterson’s tapestry of first-person narration is threaded with

that of Orlando’s, the narrator-protagonist. As both stories unravel, the alert reader might

get notice of the imaginative experiments of ‘degendering’ the fully fledged fictional

characters (Schabert 73). By welcoming the opportunity for deep-water expeditions within

the novel’s deepest secrecy, we can observe how Orlando undergoes a transsexual

metamorphosis, while being entrapped in a state of in-betweenness. At some point in the

narrative, the homodiegetic narrator relates when the female looked at “her-/himself” in a

mirror and went to take “his/her” bath (O 118). Dazed and astounded, the capricious

Orlando could do nothing but give up the masculine in furtherance of the feminine role.

S/he admits, “in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for

‘he’” (O 220). One should keep in mind that the linguistic opposites of gender nouns,

adjectives, and pronouns act as an impediment to ambitions of undoing sexual difference.

Notwithstanding the slashed forms of ‘s/he’ and ‘his/her,’ Woolf’s androgynous character

negates the fixity of gender identity, and, in a rigorous sense, devastates the rigid

backbones of patriarchy. From the opening line, “He—for there could be no doubt of his

sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it,” (O 6) to a later passage

where Orlando is standing under a stained-glass window, Woolf, in Nietzschean terms,

throws the reader into the abyss of incertitude apropos of the character’s ‘essential’ sex.

The biographer remarks:

LXVIII
 When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it

was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus,

those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them,

might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body and the

well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of

heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit

solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be

impossible to find (9).

Based on the above-cited excerpt, the vivid imagery of Orlando’s face stands for

exuberance and self-transcendence. Paradoxically enough, Woolf lays on the lines a

modified fundamentalist view of the ‘self’ with the monopolizing use of oxymoronic

qualifiers “candid” and “sullen.” The first personal pronoun switches suddenly to an

epicene plural, referring to the past and present Orlando as “they”. Like so, the narrator is

not ‘she’ nor any ‘he,’ but is both andr ‘male’ and gyne ‘female’: “(1) that Orlando had

always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man” (221). The change of sex,

albeit altering the character’s futurity, has done nothing whatsoever to shatter their core

identity (O 220). In the interim of the body’s perennial transmutation, its quintessence

remains otherwise the same difference. Woolf has always thought that there could exist

within each of us many ‘selves’ residing at lodgement lest they are prone to disclosure.

One of those selves is the unknown ‘true’ self that emerges at a time when the mind is light

and dark, becoming at last androgynous. Granting all this, that is probably the most

“fearful Truth” (O 216).

Set as the prime loci of subversion, the fluid transformation of body during this

transsexual operation forges an androgynous vision which, as Robert Kimbrough notes,

LXIX
“the human desire to reach a sense of human wholeness” (Yilmaz 85). Put in other words,

it is the desire to exceed the normative separation of genders to obtain a non-binding

concession of Selfhood. By visualizing a dubious image of the body, Woolf pronounces

her confrontation with officialdom. Without reluctance, she conveys her desire to play part

in a game of continuous interchange. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf works on the

‘theory of androgyny,’ meanwhile, avoids writing from the limited point of view because

“a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely

feminine” (87). The author preferably takes to incorporate “man and woman part of the

brain” (86) in a grotesque25 dualism of fancy and imagination. Reflecting upon the vital

preoccupations of the ‘grotesque,’ Professor Ben Beya provides a synthetic definition of

the term in his course, The Grotesque, or, ‘The Sweetness of Twisted Apples’ in the Short

Story. “When so free,” he asseverates, “imagination is natural to mind … and real vitality

enters artists, they are sure to connect themselves with the ‘forbidden’ branch of

enjoyment. FREE GROTESQUE ART expresses otherwise truths about humanity that are

coded inexpressible. What emerges from this is that the grotesque is an imaginative

playing of the forbidden and the inexpressible” (7). The work of the artist is to denude the

Veiled ‘truth’ that is pivoted around the Forbidden. True art can only emancipate the

conventional mind from its own imprisoning shackles. An innovative imagination

enlightens the shadowy eclipse of the sun. And yet, “what is forbidden is hidden” (AO

115). We cast veils over our mouths for fear of being misunderstood and misjudged.

“Telling the truth was hurtful and so lying became a good deed” (WB 14). We tend to

deceive ourselves, even though the ‘truth’ lies within us. Suppressed, our authentic desires

are wickedly disgraced and commodified. The world’s face is disfigured. The blur, the

scare, the delay, the deadening, the withering, the daily frontier-crossing, the body’s

LXX
downgrading, would all soon end by a coup de grâce? Free grotesque art, in spite of that,

breaks silence to speak the ‘truth’ in an overflowing relief of aesthetic metaphors.

The Bakhtinian grotesque image of the body has wrought an androgynous

subjectivity in transformation. It has evolved into “an active subject, an event-making

agent” (Jung 1998, 98). The grotesque reflects the flexibility of bodily cyclic change from

stable to fluid, rising above the boundary lines of its confined territory.

In Rabelais’s novel, Bakhtin interprets the phenomenon of androgyny as a grotesque

duality that embraces both male and female categories, yet infers deep ambivalence to the

socially gendered reader. Elicited from the desire to read a cortext as we would another

human being, Winterson hints at the talented skill of reading matter that presents a

“complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealized world,” (AO 111) steering, as it

should be, the entire resources of body and mind. Orlando’s character (and Written’s

storyteller) could convert the storms of opposition into the wind beneath their wings. They

freely split open the separating walls of gender and sex seclusion by transforming their

bodies into the detonator of volatile change. Combining stereotypically gendered traits,

these figures portray the integration of sexual binary. The body in this vein maintains a

hyphenated yet different identity that brings into existence a transcendental being, not in

the fashion of Christian theology, but in its surpassing of the normal heterosexual brinks

and cultural mores. Woolf admits that it is “fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple;

one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (136). Just-the-same, Bakhtin’s grotesque

body craves to outgrow itself in contemplation of reaching a brimming-over abundance.

Thus far, it is an embodiment of incompleteness in that the human corps is not a

closed, replete entity. It is a body-in-process of becoming in which the opposite sexes

LXXI
intermix for “the Rebirth of new human being and the new society. This, in its widest

possible sense, is the androgynous vision” (Bazin and Freeman 212).

c- A Fluid Be-coming

Love intervenes in Winterson’s open-ended story to unleash difference by dint of

renewing Flesh in a reciprocal mutuality of sexually fluid subjects. Luce Irigaray’s

Elemental Passions sings the praises of an erotic, pleasure-loving relation in tune with the

desire for sexual divergence. Expressing something amorphously in-between, fluent, and

protean, the French feminist philosopher argues that “women and men can only be wed

beyond an already defined horizon. Another sunrise, another relation between nature and

culture, a new human identity … A love between the sexes is essential to the discovery of

an individual, one which is both empirical and transcendental” (4-5). This amorous

exchange represents in the most intimate terms Irigaray’s vision of a new world that evades

oppositional binaries in the submersion of creative fluidity.26 It appears at first sight that her

visionary account is utopian and idyllic. However, the ideal heterosexual intercourse she

describes does not mean a kind of pre-established harmony between the two sexes. On

second thought, it foresees a shared space, yet with different horizons, where identity is not

swallowed up but respectively cherished. In Irigaray’s philosophy, love is pivotal for the

postural coupling of these self-differentiating partners. A mediator, “Love can be the motor

of becoming, allowing both the one and the other to grow. For such a love, each must keep

their body autonomous ... Two lives should embrace and fertilize each other without either

being a fixed goal for the other” (EP 27). Irigaray evinces that love between the same and

the not-same, videlicet, between the ‘male’ and the ‘not-male,’ calls forth the discovery of

multiple alterities, thus the breakdown of antagonistic dichotomies. Neither shall be a

rampage nor a thralldom for the other. Instead, the two pairs should benignly clasp to one

LXXII
other’s bosom sans fin arrêtée. Not to mince words, love operates with a fluid logic that

reconciles difference with multiplicity in the ‘im-mediate ecstasy’ [extase instante].27

Accentuating her redesigned philosophical categories with egalitarian rights-oriented

feminists, Irigaray distinguishes her sense of sexual difference from the common

normative understandings of heterosexuality, procreation, and mothering. In An Ethics of

Sexual Difference, she importunes that a non-hierarchical love-relation must be considered

outside the demands of reproduction and nurturance. Love, through Irigarayan lenses, is

the fruition of communal interaction, and the fecundity of dialogue, not a child, between

co-creators drawn as two living bodies. In order to celebrate marriage, “a harmonious

passage from the exterior to the interior, from the interior to the exterior of bodies … is

needed. That the two be here and there at the same time, which is not to say that they

merge” (Marine Lover 124-125). Matrimony is no longer conceptualized as a reproductive-

maternal exchange submitted for signing the marital contract. It is now thought of as an

emblem of openness, fluidity, and fertility, characterized by a respect for subjective

boundaries without possession on either side.

The fulcrum of Irigaray’s analyses hones in on an ethics of sexual difference that

induces aversion to the sacrificial substitution of traditional religions. Conventionally,

ethics posits a hypothetical basis that rests on community, equality and oneness. To view

Irigaray's rejection of sameness and admiration for otherness as unethical still would be to

misunderstand her project. In her earliest work, she verges upon mysticism in its

description of women’s sexual economy. Erotic pleasure, for her, is never a seizure of

power, but of dispersal where sexuality and ethics merge in sensually corporeal

transcendence. At the other swing of the pendulum, woman’s otherness incarnates the

Divine nature of God as Other. When objectification abounds, alterity is ineptly sacrificed.

LXXIII
Within the phallic mode of discourse, the heterosexual female lover is positioned as

passive object and beloved. Irigaray critiques this essentialist picture, claiming that “to

define the couple in love as lover and beloved signifies, already, an assignation to a

polarity which deprives the female lover of her love” (Ethics 189). By falling back on the

objectified (normative) role of the selfless ‘beloved,’ women lose their own identity that is

made to stave off their exemption. Worse, the symbolic division of labour deters women

from becoming-for-themselves. Due to this fact, Irigaray counters ‘l’aimée’ with

‘l’amante’—a woman lover, an actively desiring female subject who sustains her

irreducible being in the erotic encounter which is the raison d’être of a “carnal ethics” of

sexual difference.

As two lovers unite with one other, they become together in their desirous

reciprocity. The voluptuous affair they experience is an internal rapport that makes

possible “a state of becoming with no objective other than becoming” (Ethics 33). It does

not transcend vertically to the incorporeality of Forms as the Socrates of Plato’s

Symposium would have to, but, rather, horizontally into the fleshly empirical adventure,

that is, into the singular plurality of the relation. For all one knows, eroticism is sparked by

a passion of ‘wonder’ at embodied sexual difference germane to the lovers’ (in)corporeal

intersubjectivity. Adopting the term from Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, where it is

considered “the first of all the passions,” 28

(17) Irigaray reckons with admiration the

affective and future-oriented mode of the erotic self-other experience at which the lovers

stand astonished and amazed as both being seduced by each other in the evanescence of

their cooperation. This being the case, wonder is one of the productive bases of sensual

intimacy through which separation generates alliance, and with the order reversed. Defined

by a paradoxical conjunction of ‘alliance and separation,’ the Irigarayan erotic relation

LXXIV
seeks to ingrain the seeds of sexually different desire in the fluid subjects who both arise as

its very constitutive effects.

a- A Touch of Love Elicits Desire

The carnality of physical reciprocation carries within it its own type of fecundity

intimately tied to the experience and memory of touch. As is Irigaray’s transgressive

inclination, union-in-touch constitutes the justification for an erotic ethics of sexual

difference on the grounds that it deconstructs the normative image of the beloved woman

as ‘a marketed sexual object’ (Schutte 53). Taking this thought captive, the

phenomenology of touching embodies an incarnation of otherness that undermines the

supremacy of the fixating eye on the woman/object in the sensorial adventure where the

lovers must in all respects recognize each other’s alterity not as individuals, but also in

terms of gender and subjectivity. Not unlike Simone de Beauvoir, Irigaray severely

criticizes the normative model of femininity by radicalizing the theory of existentialism,

while providing a new account of female sexuality that is excessive, unorthodox,

subversive per se. Because sexual difference has been conventionally perceived from an

ethical standpoint, Irigaray dismantles the existentialist masculinist ethos by prioritizing

the evanescent quality of touch, working at the macro level for a liberation of “being

through the affective” (Ethics 212) and appreciation of the lovers’ underlying alterity. Of

vital importance in the Irigarayan corporeal imagining is the memory of flesh which

transliterates the lover as “a concrete other” (216). In her view, remembering the other,

whether absent or present, accentuates gratifying moments of touching, meeting the needs

of the self whose body feels the other’s in their most reciprocal communion. Consider the

successive intriguing passage in which the memory of the touch is firmly related to the

memory of the flesh with regard to their consequential effects:

LXXV
 The memory of touching? The most insistent and the most difficult to

enter into memory. The one that entails retuning to a commitment whose

beginning and end cannot be recovered. Memory of the flesh, where that

which has not yet been written is inscribed, laid down? That which has

no discourse to wrap itself in? That which has not yet been born into

language? ... The felt, which expresses itself for the first time. Declares

itself to the other in silence. One must remember this and hope that the

other remembers (Ethics 215).

Memory of the flesh makes erotic intimacy possible only if the lover, as an embodied

other, moves across the surface of contact to come into the spatio-temporal place,

exonerated from fixed notions of heterosexuality and gender identity, allowing the body to

feel otherwise in the intersubjective act of touching the flesh. This fetishistic behaviour of

looking, caressing, sensing is exemplified in two homogenous stages of obsession that

emphasizes the demand to explore the secretly felt and to express emotions in close duality

of “I-me” and “you-other”. The first stage is that of seeking to satisfy the lover’s desire

which itself requires the need to touch the desired other as a being evoking both care and

respect and not as a referent object who is subject to consumption and manipulation. The

second stage is utterly the tangible recognition of the lover-as-other in order to fulfil that

need, enabling desire to transport the two concrete subjects out of time, thereupon,

rendering the quotidian world worthy of meaning. The carnal, correlative of the loving

touch of the bodily flesh, makes emphatic the artistic effects of the erotic relationship

between the “I” and the “non-I” both of whom feed on the desire for the one other “without

final halt” (EP 27). Irigaray claims that, “in this double desire, “you” and “I” always

remain active and passive, perceiving and experiencing awake and welcoming” (TBT 29).

LXXVI
As alterity-conscious lovers, they are summoned to co-exist side-by-side, to love and be

loved, therefore, to elicit desire via a kind of ‘cross-fertilization’ (Schutte 55) between

them, most acclaimed, through the fecundity of the caress.29

Love fecundates the Irigarayan inter-subjects in their amorous awakening with the

elementary gesture of the caress. Whilst this non-appropriative sensuous approach to the

embodied intersubjectivity of the lovers is significant in Irigaray’s account, the Levinasian

Eros is oblivious to consider the material boundaries of the bodily self and the other as the

hermeneutic locus of physical contact. Abiding by the lineaments of each other, the touch

of the caress routs out and endorses otherness in its relentless movements within the

confines of alliance, but not over the envelope-walls of separation. In the call for an

affective corporeality, this prolific gesture, apace with the reminiscence of the flesh, make

all-embracing possibilities attainable only in the utmost consummation of sensual delight

[volupté] that is brought up in its very transgression of the traditional conception of

normativity. In this fashion, the voluptuousness of the erotic caress makes lovers proceed

towards each other, not solely as living bodies, but also through their bodies in a privileged

space-time. They “meet in one moment of this incarnation. Like sculptors who are going to

introduce themselves, entrust themselves to one another for a new delivery into the world”

(126). In their chase for mutual desire nurtured by its own intensified hunger, in the love

that the bodily “I-me” shares with “you-other,” fecundity continuous to sort itself out with

the unfolding and folding of the veil and/or of the skin on way for corporeal

transformation.

Perceived as a subjective mode of Irigarayan Eros (Cohoon 487), the erotic

transgression of boundaries leads intrinsically to multiple sensations made more intense by

the touch of the caress and the persuasive receptivity of skin which changes in state-of-the-

LXXVII
art from a rigid surface to a stimulating interface. As specified by Irigaray, the horizons of

skin transform from the “relatively dry and precise outlines of each body’s solid exterior’’

into the ‘‘mucous membranes of the body,” breaking in the ‘fluid universe’ (180) where

the one other give their approval of the ‘sensible transcendental’ (Whitford 167).

Notwithstanding the propensity of the Irigarayan erotic intimacy, the interregnum between

the two lovers diminishes “beyond zero,” (Ethics 48) due to their fertile secretions, each of

whom is at once transcendent and transcended. Desire, hither, functions as a shield that

“overcomes the interval while at the same retaining it” (Ethics 48). It is, for Irigaray, the

cause of locomotion toward and degradation in interval without taking possession of the

other. This inevitable con-fusion, wherefore, is a reciprocal ‘transcendence of the flesh,’ ‘a

shared outpouring,’ a mutual ‘crossing of boundaries,’ (180) that bridges the world

between two fluent sexes, two fecund inter-subjects, two living bodies, thereby proving the

sublime existence of ‘a between-us,’ (TBT 28) but all the more so in their confidential

mystery.

The touch of love, then, “in that gift which touches, ‘we’ becomes a flow, fluid” (EP

80) forasmuch as the lovers transcend the rigid subjectivity as well as the fixity of the solid

self, “allowing each one their living becoming,” (EP 27) along the fluctuating movement

of the (in)visible caress. At the core of the communal experience is the free play of ‘we’

who fuse and inter-fuse in/through/with their expressive bodies where the bodily self

dissolves in the fluid immersion of intersubjectivity, just as Irigaray prefers to call it, in the

‘elementary flux’ of fecundity.

The collaborative potential for becoming is now a matter of corporeal openness to

the other where “I” discovers itself gradually with the help of “you-other” to be(come) a

subject freed from established norms and fixed boundaries, but not outside the sensuous

LXXVIII
experience of their mutual reciprocity. The Irigarayan lovers at this instance come together

to corporealize their sensually erotic relation, rising above the mere conceptual system of

designation, to “return to themselves, other than they were,” (181) that is, to become

‘ourself’ in ‘us’ [devenue nous en nous] polymorphous in ‘our’ twoness within the

subversive ethical framework. As previously stated, Irigaray does not reconciliate, but

reinforces sexual difference since it generates new modus of embodiment, new pleasures,

new passions, and, in so doing, it triggers the jouissance of coming and becoming together

(Cohoon 493). It must be confessed that “the reading hands,” (WB 77) together with the

striking energy of fingers, are, in Irigaray’s eye view, the most intimate elements of bodily

interaction in the imminence and transcendence of the erotic encounter where silence

changes its tune into poetic rhythm, intervening with the steady “heart beat” (77) of free

love and pure desire.

b- Reading the Carnal Sounds

Listen: nothing. The sound of silence. The rustle of air in the silence. The

music of air touching itself—silently.

~ Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions.

The fetishistic touch of love is sublimated in the aesthetic creation of a corporeal text

through the sensual expression of the fluid senses which still lie in their intimate secrecy.

The I-narrator is now determined to trace the working of Louise’s artistic body, while

delving “deep, deeper than the greatest depths your daylight could imagine, once I caress

you. Luminous night, touched with a quickening whose denseness never appears in the

light. Neither permanently fixed, nor shifting and fickle” (EP 13). With no holds barred,

‘our’ inexpressible secret is in a state of be-coming that incorporates otherness at the heart

LXXIX
of intersubjective interiority. It flows between the two bodies sensing each other, “myself

in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate

every surgeon’s wall” (WB 101). Come what may, ‘our’ desire is more ample, more

fecund, more thoughtful than the mere inscription of ‘our’ illicit love-affair. ‘We’ only

recognize the strain of ‘our’ secret’s song in the ambient noise of silence when ‘our’

bodies are in polyphony with “the music of air,” (EP 70) having felt the touching artistry

of the first time. That is exactly when ‘I’ realized why ‘I’ never prayed, as one human can

only say “oh God!” so many times. In the swift wave of ‘your’ body, ‘you’ become ‘your’

own ecstatic pleasures. In the quietude of ‘our’ amorous exchange, ‘we’ see the streams

flowing with no fixed borderlines. ‘We’ pursue the rhythm of ‘our’ purely erotic love, its

tonality, its singularity in one fell swoop, so as no longer to be as ‘we’ once were. “Kiss

me. And openness is ours again … and the world enlarges until the horizon vanishes” (73).

‘We’ become both in solitary confinement and occult mystery, stayed hidden elsewhere

beyond the stern institutionalization of names. Ambiguity begins with the body au secret,

or, more precisely, with what ‘we’ are. To lighten this intolerable burden, ‘we’ are two

together: the same and the other. ‘We’ are born out of alliance and separation. ‘We’ are

singular and plural in ‘us’. The body comes from another body. It progressively becomes

an alterity, other than it was, and yet, remains transcendent to the same. “You become

whatever you touch” (73) with interest and vigilance. In the love ‘we’ both share together,

‘we’ release ‘our’ mutual pleasure. Freedom is what ‘we’ long for. “Whole without parts.

Indefinitely mobile. Impulse, change, the process of becoming, these cannot be imposed

from the outside, from something considered as a law or principle” (EP 80). They must be

obtained in the inter-subjective gestures of touching upon the body without possessing it,

of listening to “the sound of silence” (EP 70) without interruption, and of desiring the other

LXXX
without suppression. This is best detailed in Irigaray’s exquisite book, entitled I Love to

You, when she says:

With this sharing, the carnal act becomes an act of speech, and is mindful

of silence and breath. It privileges verbs expressing dialogue, doing

together: it uses to, between, with, together … Speech must stay as word

and flesh, language and sensibility, at the same time … Communication

between and reciprocity, as well as respect for one’s own gender, respect

for the gender of the other, require touching upon without reduction or

seduction, the safeguard of the sensible” (ILTY 124-126).

The two living bodies come to act and interact with each other in all senses through

the touch of love that elicits irrepressible sensations. Their mute sensual interplay becomes

a power [puissance] of corporeal expression which is aimed at counterbalancing the

clichéd language of the macho culture. The body-in-writing presents a prolific ground in

which infinite entrances into desire exist. It is a further transmutation of flesh into word,

and vice versa. The writerly text sustains its hermeneutic ability to create its own space

where meanings intersect with the somatic lines both in style and rhythm. Hence, it brings

the work of art to a sensorial life [la sensorialité] that invokes a new dimension of

experience.

The “I-me” body is the archive of “you-other” body, whose memories assume

form of a palimpsest that is being continually written over, but never perfectly so. Even

though, memory of the other is given away in the caress of skin, in the touch of flesh, in

the imminent ecstasy of the bodies’ mutual reciprocity where they speak the language of

LXXXI
corporeality, not solely in the tumult of their dynamic gestures, but also in the poetic pulse

of the special hands:

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. I will hold on to

this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide

of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm (WB 43).

‘Our’ profound secret is subsumed in the exuberant density of the lived body [corps

proper] that comes into contact with the body of the other as well as with the sensible

world through “sense-experience,” [le sentir] as Merleau-Ponty describes it in The

Phenomenology of Perception. “Sensation,” according to him, “is not an invasion of the

sensor by the sensible. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand

which subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand

with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the

sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one

confers significance on the other” (PhP 248). On the contrary, the body tempts to maintain

its singular corporeal schema and to follow its own path by envisaging an imaginary space

within the world of physicality where it gives prominence to a myriad of sensations in the

synaesthetic experience (Al-Saji 113). This means that the incarnate relation between the

two bodies is marked by a sensory encounter with the world, whilst taking pleasure in

sensing, feeling, exploring, and so, in plunging into the mystery of becoming. The

unnameable narrator acknowledges this very well when s/he states, “all your sensation

comes from deeper down, the live places where the dermis is renewing itself, making

another armadillo layer” (WB 103). For her/him, the body-in-be-coming, is not barely a

LXXXII
vulnerable body—it is, rather, a map, a place that has its own geography, a realm to be

discovered and understood overtime through the medium of sensation.

Upon discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of sensation, Grosz argues that the

body is both: a surface that “needs to be interpreted, read, in order to grasp its underlying

meaning,” and an interior for “the body is a surface to be inscribed, written on, which can

be segmented, dissolved into flows” (Z. Hamzah-Osbourne 50). The movement towards

the perceived body, with the sense-giving intention of deducing its palimpsestic surface

and abundant interior, entails the desire to identify the variant qualitative levels of

sensation crucial for the transversal interaction of the ‘senses,’ each conveys differently its

lurking (yet indecipherable) meaning as respects to other senses. Indulged in compassion

and sentient emotions, the I-narrator is preoccupied with Louise’s visible-sensible body

that is open to interpretation, thus, to communication and synchronization of the senses

with the physical world:

I was holding Louise’s hand, conscious of it, but sensing too that a

further intimacy might begin, the recognition of another person that is

deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than held in the

mind. I didn’t understand that sensing… I’d never known it myself

(WB 71).

Insofar as the embodied perceiver bands together tactile sensations and visual

perceptions when looking into the perceived body, s/he is engulfed in embodied

consciousness where, in Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, “the active, interested body and the

patterned world meet and intersect, there meaning is formed” (Douglas 69). This actively

engaged perceptual meaning is construed as the body ‘being-in-the-world’ (Al-Saji 111)

LXXXIII
that gives sense to its existence by means of aesthetic expression which itself must give life

to meaning in an organic entity of words, while ceasing to be a way of designating

objective thoughts and static things. Otherwise stated, language, for Merleau-Ponty, should

be aesthetically affected by the body’s senses which, by their very nature, express a

diversity of sensations, and so, of various meanings that are granted a new significance.

The compulsion of senses and their natural corporeal expression bring the subject of

perception into proximity with the expressive body of sensations in the synaesthetic

experience wherein the bodily self gives meaning to the other, and contrariwise, through

the reading hands and the overlaying extension of fingers. As specified in the hereunder

epigraph:

The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap meaning

on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes

with my heart beat … Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you

play upon me, drumming me taut (WB 77).

The I-narrator’s body becomes a musical instrument upon which Louise’s fingers

playact to make a new sense of meaning by using a new idiom distinctive of their intimate

erotic relation. In this momentous event, they create a textual performance during which

the vibrant musical notes are designed to counter-signify the generic signs and the

normative codes of the dominant discursive speech. It could be said that the lovers come

together to compose a special duet song in which they take turns, allowing their bodies to

follow the vital rhythms in mellifluent movements. As such, they find expression in their

reciprocal action, transferred through unlimited series of gestures, sounds, patterns, and

textures. Irigaray takes to heart this pretentiously artistic experience of love which,

LXXXIV
according to her, transpires in the mode of threeness. “In this relation,” she confesses, “we

are at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of the others: you, me, and our work

[oeuvre]” (180). What is most noticeable in light of this is that the creative work of art,

produced in the fluid release of subjectivity, serves to empower the duality of the co-

creators, rather than sabotaging their fecund relation. Just so, each lover-performer comes-

at-able to infinite arrays of possibilities to become a potentially protean subject who has

“no objective other than becoming” (Ethics 33) which always remains unclosed, opened up

to a futural horizon.

c- It Begins and Ends in the Future

Having experienced the dissolution of their conventional subjective boundaries and

the dismissal of all mechanisms of control and possession, the lovers find themselves

immersed in a newly created dimension that defies rigorous dichotomies, yet embraces

their potentiality for becoming in a never-ending cosmic cycle. As subjects-to-be, they are

motivated by a susceptibility to the boundless newness of the one other who take up ever-

changing positions in their shared erotic relation. The fluid universe—the third, —made

possible by the subversive deconstruction of the binary logical system, results in the

fecundity of the Irigarayan Eros that is projected into the future.

In Irigaray’s re-interpretation of Levinasian phenomenology of touch, the

evanescence of the caress has the power to break through the lovers which “differs from an

approach to the other’s skin here and now” (Ethics 188). It is particularly this

transformative capacity to call the lovers back to their skin who beckon from the futurity of

their inexhaustible corporeal change to start off a new life that is teeming and rich.

LXXXV
 This source of energy, this initial force of becoming is, in Irigaray’s words, “the most

extreme experience of sensation, which is always in the future,” (Ethics 19) yet to come.

No longer the two lovers are notoriously defined by rigid modes of being, they are now

oriented toward and into one another, whilst having to annunciate a renewal, an opening

overture which itself becomes an incentive to nourish and foment their synergetic

reproduction.

Dismissive of the spatio-temporal limits, the closure of Winterson’s oeuvre begins

and ends in the future. Just when the narrative opens with a question, “Why is the measure

of love loss?” (WB 8) the queer novel draws a curtain over its amaranthine erotic scenes,

yet expends the brinks of its horizons into an immeasurably vast topography:

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

exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moons and starts

are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. 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 the roads are, we

shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun

under my arm. Hurry now, it’s getting late. I don’t know if this is a happy

ending but here we are let loose in open fields (WB 156).

Analogous to the Bakhtinian chronotope,30 Winterson’s carnivalesque space is an

archetype of the fluid universe from which traditional conventions are devoured back by a

constellation of narrative forces that allows the reader to become a nomadic traveller in the

adventure story. This passage is, in fact, another piece of writing outside time, mediated by

unconfined spatial leeway. As the windows wondrously change into telescopes, and the

LXXXVI
cosmological division between fundament and firmament is flipped over, the timeless

space hurls us past the boundaries, coerced by imposed gender identities, into the “open

fields” of ethereal potentiality. Love, as a mediator of endless possibilities, is set loose

from the tout bonds of marriage and domestic narrative linear-time. It comes alive through

the metaphysical language of quantum uncertainty, and flows over the edges of the somatic

(uncontainable) text. In this threadbare room, which “becomes a code that you only have a

few minutes to crack,” (WB 42) love is remade effervescently, eradicating and

reconstructing its heterosexual templates by dint of utilizing its own affective viable

means. What’s more, it appears to liberate life from the deadening effects of idle reality

and mundane rationality, taking the reader into a realm that is quite different, far more

deeply inter-fused, whose site becomes the hallmark of space/time continuum. Winterson

conveys her immoderate perception of love, saying that “my commitment to story-telling,

like my commitment to love, is a commitment to discomfort, not security. To adventure,

not satisfaction. To possibilities, not answers” (Love 24). The un-folding story of this novel

keeps us under lock and key, all the while, it plays openly with its end [fin] that impels us

towards other beginnings, alternative endings, unforeseen predictabilities, interminable

questionings with no straight answers.

This is further given testimony by Winterson’s resolute decision to leave the

narrator’s sexuality behind chord names. If the flamboyant description of Louise’s (textual)

body delineates her as an object of desire, it stands in contrast to the narrator’s wish to be

reunited with her/his beloved in another eternal place “beyond the door, where the river is,

where the roads are, we shall be”. The future now awaits the lovers to be embodied in flesh

and word away from any coherent narrative time. Since “she has translated me into her

own book,” (WB 77) Louise becomes the desiring female subject who tries her hand at

LXXXVII
writing her love-partner from every switch in the chronotopic cartography, yet providing

no definite clue for the inquisitive reader. Winterson’s nameless narrator, whose gender

identity remains a secretive mystery, turns into an open book that is left to imagination,

discernment, and critique inasmuch as it provokes the writer’s desire for creating a new

idiom in the instability of its words which are always on the move, forever fluid.

LXXXVIII
  CONCLUSION 

Approaching Written on the Body as a work of literature entails an ethical

commitment to the literary text which itself serves to dissipate the seeming definiteness of

its structure into an array of open-ended possibilities. By binding the reader with the text,

literature becomes an epitome of a “live-entering” experience (Bakhtin 285) whereby the

reader is called to contemplate on her/his values and judgments within a certain theoretical

framework. This ethical imperative is central to James Phelan’s account of the ethics of

reading and engaging with the text, but also responding responsibly to the critical work to

help examine the workings of our heteronormative presumptions and beliefs. To instantiate

his claim, Phelan makes firm that “our understanding influences our sense of which values

the text is calling forth, the activation of those values influences our judgments, our

judgments influence our feelings, and our feelings our desires” (320). This thesis does not

seek to offer a subjective-biased approach to probabilities attributed to the narrative text.

On second thought, it tries to trace the coils of different hues of desire as they loop and

wind during the act of reading, whilst remaining squarely within the ken of critical

thinking.

The ambiguous sense of the story plays itself out with infinite weariness that the

process of interpretation, as “temptation,” (Prince 82) is destined to exceed the boundaries

of one’s conventional mind. Using Foucault’s expression, the “desire for knowledge” (326)

tempts the reader to explore the flight-maps of the palimpsest upon which all the idiomatic

handwritings of love/hate, gain/loss, pleasure/pain, life/death, normalcy/abnormity,

LXXXIX
unity/fluidity, have been inscribed excessively that the “letters feel like a Braille” (WB 77).

While there has been an avalanche argument around Winterson’s oeuvre that tends to

confront ideological, cultural, and narratological conventions, few of these have attended

to affective tones of metaphor inbred in storytelling. It has been one of the main objectives

of this paper to establish a connection between the literal and the metaphorical, between

the reality of the physical and the creatively imagined space, intertwisting the unfamiliar

with the already known. A combination that has assisted the progress of the body-in-

writing as well as the incarnation of meaning which, by its nature, flows from the queer

novel-in-stories and its corporeal embodiment. Since the structure of the palimpsest is one

of layering, it inherently embodies a woven texture of metaphoricity that sustains the

survival of meaning, living on/through other writerly texts, and those yet to come.

Writing is a delicate procedure, fragile, subtle, and volatile. Howbeit, its delicacy is

coarsened, obscured when language joins those oppositional binaries with one another in

an apocalypse, leaving no room for clarity nor for certitude. The text, as such, becomes a

palimpsestuous apocalyptic landscape that bears a necessity to deconstruct and perverse

the standard hierarchical inversions constitutive of the patriarchal system. The alchemy of

writing is not only the decipherability of signs, formulae, and codes. It is, over and above,

the cryptic haunting from one mark to another. It is neither the one nor the other. As Nancy

suggests in A Finite Thinking, “it is something other, or, rather, it is otherwise, totally

otherwise” (281). This being said, Winterson’s counter-narrative is interspersed with

flashes of innumerable dissident dichotomies, and yet, coincides with the unravelling of

ideological subtexts so to interrogate, subvert, destabilize, or else, to take umbrage at the

foundations of normative heterosexual matrimonies. In so doing, the writer provides an

alternative logic that dismantles the socio-linguistic dynamics of the phallocentric

XC
discourse by creating her own idiom. On this account, the curious reader takes on an

endeavour to look into the bodily text, as a layered palimpsest, in a concurrent gripping

locomotion of reading and writing.

It stands to reason that language is drawn from several breadths and origins. Put

differently, “it is a melee of languages. Melee of Ares and melee of Aphrodite, melee of

these melees: blows and embraces, assaults and truces, rivalry and desire, supplication and

defiance, dialogue and dispute, fear and pity. A melee of competition between codes,

configuration of spaces, borders made to cross, so that crossing becomes sharing” (Nancy

287). In a sense, the text is not just a detouring movement between these opposite

signifiers. Rather, it is a combat zone for units being at war—a war as mixture without

limits. A joust with each other as one is different from the other, divided by the wall of

separation, yet joined together under the aegis of Ares and Aphrodite where desire comes

in between to make a purely erotic encounter possible. Irigaray’s carnal ethics of sexual

difference lies in drawing attention to subversive fundaments that bolster their lure of the

paradoxical congruence of separation and alliance. The use of metaphor to express her

erotically charged, poetic vision of fecund desire assesses both the potentialities and the

challenges her feminine writing31 [écriture féminine] pose in light of our ideologically

impelled theoretical premises. To interpret her philosophical project as utopian or

improper, however, is to impede the play of meaning it gets in operation. In line with

Cixous, coming to writing32 a body of text would not be intriguing without an appeal to the

other-as-other, without a compelling force of desire that is already at work in a labour of

love. She admits in a rhythmic tone:

A desire was seeking its home. I was that desire. I was the question. The

question with this strange destiny: to seek, to pursue the answers that will

XCI
 appease it, that will annul it. What prompts it, animates it, makes it want

to be asked, is the feeling that the other is there, so close, exists, so far

away. … The answer for which one continues to move onward, because

of which one can never rest. Yet what misfortune if the question should

happen to meet its answer! Its end! (Coming 1).

Desire lives in the inscription of what is unknowable, unanswerable, unreachable. It

writes and gives right to itself, without restriction, without control. Desire follows the

question without providing any answer to it. It senses the other, yet cannot trace its

otherness. Desire signs the somatic text with words through flesh. It is a having-flesh that

manifests itself in its own blood-rapport, in the act of writing, so to speak. Language, as a

melee of signs and codes, covers the body with a veil of secrecy to keep it “rolled up away

from prying eyes” (WB 77). Accordingly, one reads a body/text in order “to come close to

its meaning, and to uncode all the names surrounding it, making it appear, even if the light

is to fade out,” (3) as in Cixous’s paraphrase. Desire, by implication, is a crystalline abyss

where the veiled body is kept hidden at bay. It tries hard to denude its draped secret since

“what the body really wants is to be naked” (77). Interestingly, aesthetic fantasy, in

Winterson’s work, is one that fuels desire with imagination. What is real, in her point of

view, is desire, as an affective emotion, which arouses at the point where reality meets with

fantasy in the process of reading Written on the Body. Winterson’s erotic lovers desire each

other beyond any marital bounds whose wanton nudity is, yet, bestrewn with the rubrics of

normative heterosexual precepts. Nevertheless, the accretions of their intimate experience

draw the gravitational field for Winterson’s subversive metaphor of bodily fusion in which

the reader resists both ideological and sexual repression.

XCII
 Barthes takes heed of the flexibility of chiaroscuro subversion inasmuch as the text

“needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject:

ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds” (32). In his transcription, the writer’s perversity

stems from the potential to revolutionize specific literary conventions, subsuming their

socio-historical restraints, but, at the same time, to recognize the significance of these

widely accepted codes which implicitly invite their transgression. It follows that the text is

experienced in its production of meaning “in so far it is sensually produced,” (61) a

fecundity best illustrated by its occult force of dismantling ideological structures and old

classifications. “Taking the word literally, we might say that the Text is always

paradoxical” (58). Just like language, it is structured but decentered, with no closed

ending. Irremediably shaken by the interlacing of visceral dynamics, the text is not to be

seen as the final product of an outright subject. Rather, as “a polysemic space where the

paths of several possible meanings intersect, where the subject unmakes himself, like a

spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web” (64). Barthes perceives the text

as a surface phenomenon in which several linguistic and social signs are interwoven,

conforming to the figuration of a textual palimpsest. In this regard, the plurality of meaning

requires profound adjustments of reading, especially when the text embodies a catachrestic

perversion of metaphors represented in and by the palimpsestuous kind of relationality

existing between them.

Barthes’s theory of the text implies the simultaneous critical and erotic value of

textual discipline that escapes ideological imprisonment for the sake of attaining a libidinal

emancipation throughout the reading/writing process. For him, the writerly text

necessitates a full reading whereby “the reader is nothing less than the one who desires to

write, to give himself to an erotic practice of language” (44). The text, hereupon, functions

XCIII
as a transgressive activity that demands a vertical reading induced by the boundless

malleability of meaning as well as the layering of significance. On that case, the distinction

that Barthes makes between pleasure and jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text merits a

considerable attention. According to him, a text of pleasure is ‘classical’ in that it “comes

from culture and does not break with it” (14). Opposed to it is a text of bliss, one which

“imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural,

psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to crisis

his relation with language” (14).

Based on the ecstatic sense of jouissance, the writer (and so does the reader) takes

the text as a site of bliss, albeit cognizant of its own perversion, it imparts a ‘sexual climax’

whereby words are detectable, yet having lost their own bearings. This way, the text of

bliss becomes a textasy33 that which has recourse to an ecstatic loss in the reading/writing

subject, playing with the decentralization of the self, but also creates an imaginative space

where the palimpsestic veils of desire lay foundation for an aporetic reading.

XCIV
XCV
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 1
 ENDNOTES 

The introduction is in part inspired by Professor Ben Beya’s article on Academia.edu, entitled “Dis-unveiling” Jeanette
Winterson’s Secret “Idioms” in Written on the Body. University of Tunis, 2010.

2
The notion of the ‘veil,’ here, does not refer to the haïk, but, rather, to the unseen and the invisible; to what is present
yet absent, something that hides from the eyes of its reader. Tracing the intricate presence of the veil requires a
constant movement of un-veiling which unites complexity and reflexivity. The unfolding of a veil suspended between
the contraries leads to the re-covering of veiling. To touch upon the word and the flesh is, thus, to engage in an
interactive discourse with the text.

3
Nancy thinks that the subjective enclosure of meaning is revealed in the schema of the return to meaning in order to
determine its signification. In so doing, the reader is called to ask questions, find explanations, bring sense to meaning
as part of understanding the text.

4
Winterson believes that any literary work must resist autobiography and should not be contained by its reader. She
makes firm:

Forcing the work back into autobiography is a way of trying to contain it, of making what has become unlike anything
else into what is just like everything (AO 106).

5
Coined by David Herman, the term ‘storyworld’ illustrates an affective narrative that gives leave to “imaginatively
(emotionally, viscerally) inhabit a world in which … things matter, agitate, exalt, repulse … both for narrative
participants and for interpreters of the story” (Herman 16).

6
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, for example, has been read as an autobiographical text of lesbian love, hence
marking Winterson as a lesbian writer.

7
Thomas De Quincey inaugurated the concept of the palimpsest in 1845 when he published an essay in Blackwood’s
Magazine entitled, ‘The Palimpsest’. Since then, it has become found in different areas of research that insist upon the
field of interdisciplinarity.

8
In Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, language is an expression of our embodied encounter with the sensible, visual,
rhythmic world through which we come to recognise a provisional truth that is motivated, shaped, and is likewise
articulated by the body’s senses.

9
In S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes distinguishes between a readable [lisible] text and a text which, albeit writable, is
unreadable [illisible]. For him, the readerly text, such as the realistic novel, tends to conform to the patriarchal
dominant discourse, and so is easily interpretable and apprehensible. The writerly text, on the other hand, seeks to
express the reader’s desire to play a role secretly more active than that of a mere consumer and observer, especially
 when s/he comes in contact with aesthetically transgressive aspects in the narrative.

10
Derrida explains that the impossibility of an event is conditioned by the negation of its possibility. When something is
predictable and foreseen, it annuls its possibility. That’s why, he prefers writing ‘impossible’ with a hyphen to
highlight the mutual relation between the ‘possible’ and the ‘impossible.’

11
Foucault describes the term in a vigilant way of view:

Curiosity evokes care; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality,
but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain
determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for
seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing.

12
See Sarah LaChance Adams, Christopher M. Davidson, and Caroline R. Landquist, “Desire’s Dissonance”. In New
Philosophies of Love and Sex: Thinking Through Desire. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Internationals,
2017, pp. 1-13.

13
According to Prince, narratology is a theory of Narrative which “studies the nature, form, and functioning of
narrative,” and examines “what all and only narratives have in common (at the level of story, narrating, and their
relations) as well as what enables them to be different from one another.” It also “attempts to account for the ability to
produce and understand them” (39).

14
See Professor Ben Beya’s course, entitled The Lover’s Discourse, Or, Ethics in the Narrative of Desire. Faculty of
Social and Human Sciences of Tunis, 2002-2003.

15
Derived from Latin limen meaning ‘threshold,’ liminality is a transitory state or space which is characterized by
indeterminacy and its potential for subversion. In narrative text, border situations are associated with life-changing
events, affecting, as a consequence, the linear plot structure of the story.

16
Regardless of their divergence, body and text are melt into each other, and so, they become a single poetic entity. To
write about the body is to inscribe and sign upon it by adding another layering to the bodily text. As such, the body
acts as a text of various codes ready to be read (Nabil 11).

17
Cixous perceives ‘truth’ as one which “makes you tick [La Vérité le fait marcher] in all the senses of the word. It’s
also the law of writing: one can only write in the direction of that which does not let itself be written and which one
must try to write” (9).

18
In The Differend, Jean-François Lyotard speaks of the invention of a new idiom that can only be accomplished when
already existing idioms are put under scrutiny to be contested and critiqued by counteracting their normative
ideological nature.
19
“The Waning of Affect” is Fredric Jameson’s term that results in a loss of depth in feeling and rapid displacements of
the focuses of desire, and, as Celeste Olalquiaga has noted, technology and advertisement facilitate this privative
depthlessness.

20
“Queer critique” has been defined as the performative subversion of naturalized norms. Particularly, it operates
through a hyperbolic allegory that demystifies the seemingly natural connection between gender performance and
biological sex (Bradway 187).

21
“Positive affect” highlights the affective discourses which can cultivate a sense of political contingency to disrupt the
binary thinking that beholds ‘affect’ as either an ideological construct or a sensorial force. By way of illustration,
Winterson provides a visceral intimation of “queer exuberance” to challenge the biopolitical codification of sexual
identity.

22
See Chet Meeks, “Civil Society and the Sexual Politics of Difference”. Sociological Theory, Vol. 19, no. 3. American
Sociological Association, 2001.

23 23
See Graham Allen, Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom, New York: Routledge, 2022.

24
Taken from Winterson’s “A Gift of Wings”. In Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.

25
The word ‘grotesque’ derives from Italian grotta, ‘cave’. It was coined to designate a certain ornamental style
suggested by antiquity. It denotes something playfully gay, yet ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally
different from the familiar one where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid (Kayser 21).

26
Fluidity has mainly a threefold meaning. First, it refers to a logic generated by the emergence of mutual yet different
subjects. Second, it appeals to the female herself who passes out of the rigid boundaries in which she has been
positioned in the masculinist psychoanalytic theory. Language is also fluid. It is poetic, playful, and filled with tropes
and imageries.

27
The im-mediate ecstasy is both transcendent (ec-static) and immediate (in-stante). The one does not exclude or
incorporate the other. Rather, the two should overcome the traditional sexual division while preserving their own lived
subjectivity (Whitford 167).

28
See René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul. Glossary: “Part II: The Number and Order of the Passions and
explanation of the six basic passions,” pp. 17-22.

29
In the last chapter of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray provides a feminist critique of Levinas’s
“Phenomenology of Eros,” in his book, entitled Totality and Infinity.

30
Laid out in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” the chronotope, literally means ‘time space,’
describes the coalition of spatial and temporal categories in literature where carnival time and narrative space become
 co-ordinators in the reconstruction of the story. Bakhtin defines the term in what follows:

“In the literary artistic chronotope, special and temporal indicators are fused into carefully thought-out, concrete whole.
Time as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charges and responsive
to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic
chronotope” (48).

31
See M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. “Feminist Criticism”. In A Glossary of Literary Terms. Ninth Edition.
Wordswoth Cengage Learning, 2009, pp. 110-116.

31 32
Originally a title of Cixous’s book, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays.
32

33 33
See Robert Young, Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Boston, London, and Henley: Routledge, 1981,

pp. 31-47.