As a hopefully refreshing deviation from the endless trifles of robotic and au natural neo-poetics, I've decided to pressure you into enjoying the invigorating confusion of Jeanette Winterson. Although poetry is not her genre, it is certainly her intent. Her short works of fiction read like extended poems, where paragraphs are line breaks and a new chapter grants enough pause to start the next verse with fresh breath. "The Passion" even features a character named Villanelle, and certain phrases repeat throughout the text within different contexts and between two "rhyming" narrators, mimicking and extending the form's structure.
Winterson plays with our expectations of narration, confession, and myth, weaving surreal tales that read like a history but feel like legend. She doesn't suppose her readers crave the mundane, thus her narrators inhabit the mindset of Bohemia. Androgynous fantasts, outcasts, and gentiles see more than the average Joe, and mystify the surrounding world with delightful incision. Inverted chronologies, unreliable and imagined protagonists, geometric narration, and philosophical meanderings reveal Winterson to be the writer's writer; one who doesn't just tell a good story but but who does so cleverly. The real irony is that she unravels the stories she spins, pushing her readers to question the very nature of storytelling - its purpose and its promise. And a new page of Winterson is always more than promising. Her words are completion, the final act of finding passion where it springs, and never again going thirsty.
If you haven't read her already, buy The Passion and taste the words. Here's an appetizer:
"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."
"On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path."
"I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as [my mother's] I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should."
"His wife had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. like God, she was neglected."
"What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we're still alive, and say you've got the truth? Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now."
"The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to. In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water."
"In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is."
2 comments:
I think you have pegged her writing style quite precisely here. I read a bit of this excerpt aloud and it rolled off my tongue much in the way poetry or prose does.
I love your comments about hr work but perhaps you could have used a shorter excerpt and still gotten you point across. I confess the initial view was quite daunting.
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