Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №5 (37) Май, 2018

Гендерные и исторические дискурсы в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон "Страсть"

Пиняева Елена Вячеславна
старший преподаватель Департамента языковой подготовки Финансового университета при Правительстве Российской Федерации (Москва), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Pinyaeva Elena Vyacheslavna
Senior lecturer at the Department of foreign languages of Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow, el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Abstract: This paper analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion” in relation to postmodern theories of history, narration and subjectivity. It demonstrates how her dislocated discourses undermine traditional cultural binaries such as fact/fiction, history/story, real/magical and male/female. Playing with the limits of subjectivity and fictionality, Winterson’s metafiction reveals the performative nature of gender and its fluidity, while her using of parodic inversions and the fantastic as a subversive space of resistance challenges the unitary ways of interpreting historical reality; the latter is seen as a form of construction based on apocryphal versions of history.
Keywords: historiographic metafiction, subjective storytelling, ex-centricity, parody, apocryphal history, fluidity of gender, gender as performance, the fantastic

“The Passion” (1987), being a typically postmodern text, incorporates two major registers of discourse: the historical and the magical; the borders between them are strikingly fluid. Due to this intricate mixture of oppositional genre elements it can be identified with the postmodern form that L. Hutcheon defines as “historiographic metafiction” [6, p. 5], a narrative that problematizes the writing of the self-conscious fiction and history; the latter “is not made obsolete”, but is being reworked as a “human construct” [6, p. 16], which eventually turns into a system of signification to help us make sense of the past. History seen as an ideologically laden discourse does not exist in any other form except the text that has always been rewritten; our accessibility to it is being restricted by textuality, as L. Hutcheon claims. In other words, past can only be known through its “remains”, since archives, historical evidence, documents, and even eyewitness testimony do exist in the form of texts; besides, the former are no longer seen as authoritative sources that reveal reliable facts about historical reality, on the contrary, they tend to be considered as merely texts that support our perception of the reworked, and, thus, transformed historical reality.  This kind of metafiction is concerned with its contradictory status: being a deliberately subjective narration, it includes clearly recognizable historical reality. Moreover, due to its “imprison[ment] in the past through pastiche”, it […] can be regarded as a “liberating challenge to a definition of subjectivity and creativity” [6, p. 11], and it tends to fragment and render extremely unstable in the name of disparity. Since this metafiction foregrounds the role of subjective storytelling in historical discourse, its “paraliterary space [thus] is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation, but […] is not the space of unity, coherence or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of art” [8, p. 37]. A linear series of interconnected historical events is totally abandoned; as a result, its narrative continuity is threatened, but is both incorporated and subverted, with the closure given unconventional contradictory endings. Significantly, Winterson’s metafiction demonstrates its disbelief in “totalizing narratives” [9, p. 7], since its symbolic union with history is neither a nostalgic return nor conventional revivalism, but a critical revisiting that “renders possible any claim to “truth” [6, p. 13]; as a consequence, her metafiction refuses a possibility of any unitary interpretation of history. At the same time, it does not challenge the notion of “truth” itself, but rather questions “whose […] truth gains power and authority over others” [6, p. 18] in its making of historical events into widely accepted historical facts. Winterson’s telling refrain throughout her metafiction, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”, is in tune with the sweeping historiographic metafiction’s assertion that the “writing of history in the form of narrative representations of the past is a highly conventional and indeed literary endeavor” [6, p. 96].

Winterson’s metafiction lacks any detailed description of historical events, nor does it provide any panoramic historical scenes that might fit into officially-recorded history; on the contrary, the main historical events depicted in her fiction – the Napoleonic wars across Europe and the defeat of the French army during the Russian campaign – are presented deliberately from the two marginal protagonists’ minoritarian perspectives which undermine their own omniscience in their “unreliable” narrations; at the same time, they reveal the protagonists’ ex-centricity as well as “their total deviation from the traditionally accepted social and cultural norms” [12, p. 316]. “The Passion” can be said to embrace two intertwining mini-stories that belong to the domain of the suppressed, and highlight the postmodernism’s claim that the marginal, the non-totalizing, the local are given reassertion, as the centre does no longer exist. Their obviously less significant in their influence apocryphal histories challenge the official version by restoring what seems to be lost, and offer a different re-reading of history that not only does alter the focus, but it also problematizes the “essentialized, transcendental concept of “genuine historicity” [6, p. 89]. Both narrators belong precisely to ex-centric groups defined by their differences of gender, social class and sexual preferences: the male soldier Henri, who hero-worships Napoleon and serves him as his chicken chef, and the webbed-feet female Villanelle, a Venetian boatman’s daughter, who has been caught up as the brothel whore in the Emperor’s conquest of Europe. The two little protagonists’ stories not only do contradict the officially-accepted documents, but they also supplement historical accounts, while intending to revive the “dark areas” of history, and, thus, privilege the idea that there is falseness per se, and “alternative” truths. Henri’s narrative, which produces the realistic details of Napoleon’s rise and fall, constitutes the historical mode in the fiction, while Villanelle’s story, which keeps the account of her fabulous loss of heart to the mysterious Queen of Spades, forms its magical mode mainly; although the latter provides “unreliable” descriptions of the Venetian uncanny, it relocates the historical discourse as well due to Villanelle’s notorious collaboration with the cook, the official supplier of meat to Napoleon’s army. The two protagonists’ minor histories are thus aligned with postmodernism’s assertion that “the particular and the local take on value, once held by the universal and the transcendent” [6, p. 97]; they also bring to mind the French Annals School’s recognition of the new status of the peripheral, with emphasis being laid on highlighting the past of the previously neglected ex-centric.

In Winterson’s metafiction, it is parody that becomes a useful means of critical revisiting of history. Parody does not ignore the context of the past representations, but rather promotes an active re-reading of history that both acknowledges and undermines the power of such representations. Parody tends to exploit textual uncertainties, and, is engaged into breaking rigid genre frames that have turned into outworn conventions; at the same time, it provokes both change and cultural renewal. In other words, parody mingles creation with critical responses to replace, and, in so doing, it dislocates both the present and the previously generated texts. Discourses, being dislocated, break the “dark areas” constraints and get their new arrangements in a radically modified version of the textualized world. Consequently, forgotten, overlooked and marginalized ex-centric aspects tend to constitute the self-conscious narrative by filling out officially accepted history. The fragmented remains that form historical figures’ apocryphal lives are given unconventional shape and meaning; since they lose connections with their original referents, they are valued as “invented”. Thus, Napoleon with his banal passion for chicken is given a comic portrayal of an ogre from a fairy-tale: “It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy. Odd to be so governed by an appetite” [14, p. 3]. In the similar way, the story of his wife Josephine who seems to be obsessed with her passion for melons, occupies the unknown gaps in the accounts of officially recorded history. These examples show that Winterson uses parody not only to textualize the “distortions of the “history of forgetting”, but also, to put into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality” [6, p. 129].

The diary that Henri keeps presents one of the numerous apocryphal histories, a narrative of the marginalized, which expands the intertextual network in history. It does not only revolve around the figure of Napoleon to create a single voice in objective interpretation of history, but it embraces inextricable both the historical and the private in rendering all Henri’s subjective war and love experiences. As far as he selects events for his historical accounts, his focus moves from the description of the masculine army life to the untold stories of the army prostitutes, which makes a contrast with traditional history writing and its main concern on the reconstruction of “the public space of predominantly male activities” [13, p. 144]. Although Henri intends to shed light on history of his time, “something clear and sure to set against [his] memory tricks” [14, p. 28], he does not manage to succeed in doing this eventually; besides, his fellow-soldier Domino undermines the validity of the historical accounts that Henri creates by questioning the latter’s skills of an impartial expert in the field of history: “Look at you, […] a young man brought up by a priest and a pious mother. A young man who can’t pick up a masket to shoot a rabbit. 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?” [14, p. 28]. On the contrary, Henri’s ironic utterance suggests that history writing involves self-reflexivity, and that his version of historical events is different from conventional reconstruction of historical reality due to his interest in his own perception of history: “I don’t care about facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change. I want to remember that” [14, p. 29]; moreover, Henri’s claim reveals his deeply held conviction that retrospection that creates a certain distance between the present and the past disrupts any attempts in accurate, and, thus, objective restoration of history. Since Henri’s diary combines both recognizable historical material with metafictional subjectivity, it fails to represent authentic deconstruction of historical events: while testing the idea of objective history writing based on the phallocentric view, it demonstrates its limitations; at the same time, it parodies traditional methods in historiography that excluded female voices as objects of history.

Not only does Henri fail to reconstruct historical reality objectively, but also he tends to avoid the traditionally male discourse being included into his representation of history. He does not focus on historic battles that normally stand for the masculine world, but rather concentrates on the private sphere by filling his diary up with the painfully sensitive stories of the French army prostitutes – vivandiѐres - who have been pushed into the margins of History; he also narrates experiences of the army deserters whose abandonment of war signifies their departure from the masculine world and its values. Henri is shy, strikingly passive and sensitive, and his narrative is determined by those traits of his character that would conventionally be regarded as “feminine”. He belongs to the domestic sphere of the kitchen by occupying the distinctly humble position of the neck-wringer of Napoleon’s chickens. In addition, he returns from the war without having killed anyone, but clearly expresses his distaste for manslaughter. While Henri is endowed with typically feminine attributes, the other pivotal character of the fiction, the Venetian fisherman’s daughter Villanelle, also subverts traditional gender identities by exhibiting “masculine” traits, in her turn. In contrast to Henri, Villanelle occupies the public sphere by working as a croupier at the casino; she is a pragmatic, resourceful and seductive bisexual woman whose physical abnormality – the webbed feet – allows her to walk on water. The most visible magical attribute that belongs to Villanelle has been always seen in Venice as the typical “masculine” feature: “there never was a girl whose feet were webbed in the entire history of the boatmen” [14, p. 51]. Standing for a “masculine” feature, her webbed feet might be read as the symbol of the male genitalia; being a woman, she is also in possession of a masculine trait. At the same time, her unique genetic inheritance not only suggests her hybridity, but also it leaves her gender in ambiguity by breaking the binary between male and female. Villanelle tends to wear male clothes to disguise her gender identity; moreover, she deliberately confuses it by drag and cross-dressing, which in itself, foregrounds the performative nature of gender. As Villanelle admits, “I took to working double shifts at the Casino, dressing as a woman in the afternoon and a young man in the evenings” [14, p. 62]. Not only does Villanelle possess both typically female and male physical attributes, but also she tends to fall in love with both men and women alike; by revealing the odd complexity of her sexual tastes, she further undermines the accepted boundaries between femininity and masculinity by making conventional gender identities blurred. As P. Palmer acutely remarks, “different forms of lesbian cross-dressing and male gay drag can, in fact, challenge and subvert heterosexual norms by demonstrating their instability” [11, p. 190]. On the contrary, in M. Aròstegui’s terms, Villanelle is the “masquerader par exellance”, the one who is “not on the side of identity but on that of performance” [1, p. 272]. It seems obvious as if her use of “masquerade” not only helps her break any clear-cut distinctions in gender categories, but also subvert the assumption of natural gender difference; as the outcome of such performance, Villanelle manages to escape the burdens of rigid gender identities by moving in and out of them rather than being bound to only one of them. If viewed in this aspect, Henri’s feminized representation undermines the dichotomy of conventional gender identities as efficiently as Villanelle’s masculine one.

Winterson’s fiction boasts a collection of intricate narratives populated with characters that are typical of the fantastic such as elves, mermaids, ghosts, and even the “de-frocked priest with the eagle eye [who can] put the best telescope to shame” [14, p. 21]; the latter circulates stories about Ireland where goblins once made his boots of the size of a thumbnail. As Henri notices, “He was always seeing things and it didn’t matter how or what, it mattered that he saw and that he told us stories. Stories were all we had” [14, p. 107]. His assumption highlights one of the leitmotifs of Winterson’s metafiction: when put into harsh conditions, where life hardly maintains itself, people share their stories to survive their discontents, to “escape the burden of an unbearable, meaningless situation and delve into an alternative reality endowed with significance by [their] desire” [2, p. 3]; at the same time, their intertwining voices lead to the transformation of historical discourse by “constitute[ing] the most radical function of the fantastic” [7, p. 83]. The fiction’s quintessential magical character, however, is Villanelle who is able to live without a heart and demonstrate a miracle of walking on water in a Christ-like fashion. Her fabulous body due to the webbed feet that she has is the body of a freak, an ambiguous being with hermaphroditic attributes, who tends to be seen both as an object of disgust and horrified fascination. Being of a freakish nature, she exists outside the structure of rigid gender dichotomy; moreover, her anatomical ambiguity does not only challenge the notion of natural gender boundaries itself, but it also suggests the social stigma that must be either erased or suppressed. Having a queer body thus entails the denial of the gendered mixture, a model of certain behavior that Villanelle clearly demonstrates: she rather presents herself as a cross-dresser, but not as a freak to disguise the truth of her bodily complexity. When she appears to the Queen of Spades in a soldier’s uniform, she prefers to expose herself to her female lover as a cross-dressed lesbian instead, and her actions show that the two ambiguities might have different options open to their perception in present white Western culture. Similarly, when Villanelle meets Henri, she avoids displaying her webbed feet, the identification mark of her freakish sexuality, despite Henri’s determination “to find out more about these boatmen and their boots” [14, p. 109]. When put to test, Villanelle’s sexually ambiguous body can reveal its intrinsically queer nature, and turn her into an object of shame and disdain; thus, her cross-dressing serves as a form of protection that allows her to disguise her genuine “monstrosity”. At the same time, her “transvestite gesture signals the possibility that the social body is as fluid as the private body’s drapery and that the gender definitions regulating the social order may shift and mutate” [4, p. 100], as J. Epstein claims.

Villanelle’s fabulous body can exist even without a heart, which is depicted as an autonomously throbbing object encased into the jar. When Villanelle asks Henri to help her retrieve her heart from the house of the mysterious Queen of Spades he does not believe that such an unreasonable thing might be ever possible: “you’d be dead if you had no heart” [14, p. 116]. Nevertheless, when Henri enters the mansion, he finds there not only the jar with the heart pulsating in it, but also the lady’s tapestry which presents Villanelle as one of the insects woven into the fiber of its textile net. If the Queen of Spades had woven Villanelle’s lost heart into her tapestry, Villanelle would have been her prisoner forever, as she explains it to Henri, while the latter doubts the veracity of such a thing. The following scene shows that Villanelle is quite capable of not only losing her heart, but of returning it back into her own possession in the most miraculous way: “I heard her uncork the jar and a sound like gas escaping. Then she began to make terrible swallowing and choking noises. […] She touched my back and when I turned round took my hand again and placed it on her breast. Her heart was beating” [14, p. 120-121]. Villanelle’s story of the lesbian love relationship, which “demonstrates a life lived to excess and a self lived for the moment, and for the transcendent experience of passion” [10, p. 63], can be interpreted in terms of gambling, the ultimate desire of which is to lose, rather than to win: “Pleasure on the edge of danger is sweet. It’s the gambler’s sense of losing that makes the winning an act of love” [14, p. 137]. However, it is both her Venetian pragmatism and her pluralized visions of femininity that makes her choose the more fluid route of life which Venice, a city where binary oppositions collapse into a confusing mixture, can dispel her “death drive”.

Villanelle’s polymorphous body is in harmony with the mysterious topography of her native city, whose shape-shifting world of its labyrinthine canals signals a continuous transformation and danger that might confuse rational minds; being a notorious space of the Bakhtinian carnival, a city of masks and disguises, it also stands for a playful excess of all kinds of transitions and intricate mutations that Villanelle’s ambiguous body signifies. Its fluid-like quality that represents female identity refuses any strict, straight and clearly marked masculine pattern – “not even Bonaparte could rationalize Venice” [14, p. 112], and allows Villanelle to subvert gender boundaries between male and female, and to inhabit different forms of sexuality. While the floating Venetian site of rebirth and reunion can sustain Villanelle’s mutability, it leads to Henri’s despair and madness, and symbolizes his defeat and ruination, having turned into a wasteland of permanent exile where Henri, while following his drive for death-in-life, “passes into the terrain of melancholia” [5, p. 61].   

The existence of the two different narrators in Winterson’s metafiction makes it possible to reconstruct events from opposing perspectives; at the same time, two both narrators’ stories fail to produce a totalizing historical discourse, but rather provoke its fragmentation due to dialogism and certain narrative instability, and, thus, interrogate the validity of any objective and unitary interpretation of history. Since they mingle history and fantasy, they do not aim to restore historical events, but rather create their imitation, and, in so doing, they challenge the idea of “historical accuracy” on which the hetero-patriarchal history writing is based; as its consequence, they guarantee the constructed nature of history. Moreover, in their stories they do not present a “quest for a unified and coherent essentialized self but a consistent willingness to explore multiple and fragmented fictions of identity” [3, p. 149], as L. Doan says. Indeed, their identities are represented as subjects-in-process that refuse any defined categorization.

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