Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №02 (94) Февраль 2023

Использование истории, гендера и магического реализма в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон “Страсть”

Пиняева Елена Вячеславна
старший преподаватель кафедры английского языка отделения языковой подготовки Института общественных наук Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФ, Москва

Аннотация: This paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion” (1987) as a type of postmodern historiographic metanarrative that creates a dialogical relationship with the real seen in the carnivalesque Bakhtinian way. In mingling voices of the two ex-centrics, J. Winterson’s metafiction emphasizes the role of subjective storytelling in historical discourse; its use of the magical interrogates the idea of the “real” while cross-dressing articulates fluid gendered identities. It argues that the novel undermines unitary ways of seeing to establish postmodern multiplicity.
Ключевые слова: historical discourse, subjective storytelling, ex-centricity, gender, the magical, Jeanette Winterson

Pinyaeva Elena Vyacheslavna
Senior Lecturer at the English language chair of the Department of language training at the Institute for Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Abstract: В статье исследуется роман Дж. Уинтерсон “Страсть” (1987) как тип постмодернистского историографического метанарратива, создающего диалогические отношения с реальностью, рассматриваемой в эстетике карнавала Бахтина. Смешивая “голоса” двух нецентрированных “маленьких” персонажей, метароман Дж. Уинтерсон акцентирует роль субъективного повествования в историческом дискурсе; использование в нем категории магического ставит под сомнение идею “реального”, тогда как кросс-дрессинг способствует созданию размытых гендерных идентичностей. В статье делается вывод о том, что роман демонстрирует несостоятельность однозначных интерпретаций для утверждения постмодернистской множественности.
Keywords: исторический дискурс, субъективное повествование, нецентрированность, гендер, магическое, Дженетт Уинтерсон

 In her typically postmodern novel “The Passion” (1987), J. Winterson uses a form that L. Hutcheon has coined as “historiographic metafiction” [7, p. 5], a self-conscious metanarrative which examines the notorious relationship between history and fiction, and problematizes what is meant by each; it foregrounds the importance of subjective storytelling in historical discourse and challenges the idea of history as a series of interrelated facts. In accordance with Peter Brooker’s view, this type of the novel, “neither repudiates nor simply ironizes the past; nor does it merely reproduce the past as nostalgia”, but instead “reveals the past as always ideologically and discursively constructed” [4, p. 229]; moreover, history seen as a system of signification that helps us restore the world of representations from the past, “does not exist in any other form except the text that has always been rewritten” [11, 127], since it is known through its “remains” in the form of archives, “historical” documents and eyewitness testimony. In other words, this mode of the self-conscious fiction prompts questions not only about “the” authentic truth, but rather “whose” truth prevails in the process of making of historical events into broadly acknowledged historical facts, and as its consequence, J. Winterson’s metafiction tends to rather privilege the recognition of multiple truths, “truths that are socially, ideologically, and historically conditioned” [7, p.18]; above all, these truths have always been neglected by officially accepted History.

 J. Winterson’s telling refrain throughout her novel, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”, should be seen thus in tune with the historiographic metafiction’s claim that the writing of history is a highly literary endeavor. In this sense, the given perception of the world history events can be read only as subjective storytelling that contains unconventional contradictory endings. From this point of view, history owing to its hybrid nature seems to become an intertext, while “all historical knowledge is claimed to get the status of second-hand knowledge as it is constructed on debatable hypothetical assumptions and controversial subjective interpretations” [12, p. 140].

 The main historical events of the epoch depicted in J. Winterson’s metafiction – the Napoleonic wars of 1804-1815 and the inglorious defeat of the French army during the Russian campaign – are given deliberately from the two marginal protagonists’ perspective which questions the reliability of their narrations and demonstrates their ex-centricity, their deviation from conventional social and cultural norms. J. Winterson’s historiographic metafiction can be said to include 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” [11, p. 129]. Rather than show Napoleon’s advance across Europe from his own point of view, J. Winterson’s metafiction narrates the stories of the little people from ex-centric groups defined by their differences in social class and gender: the male soldier Henri who serves in the unheroic role of neck-wringer of Napoleon’s chickens and the female webbed-feet Villanelle, a denizen of Venice caught up as the brothel whore in the imperial project; their mini-stories supplement historical accounts while reviving the “dark areas” of history; moreover, they relocate the historical discourse due to their “unreliable” descriptions of the Venetian uncanny, and give a new status to the peripheral with emphasis being laid on the neglected ex-centric. In other words, these apocryphal histories/stories collapse the distinctions between past and present, the real and the magical, fantasy and fact, and bring to mind Michel Foucault’s idea of “counter-memory”, which Brenda K. Marshall explains as follows: “History, then, in Foucault’s terms, [becomes] ‘counter-memory’: the process of reading history against its grain, of taking an active role in the interpretation of history rather than a passive, viewing role, Counter memory intervenes in history rather than chronicles it [9, p. 150].

 J. Winterson’s metafiction does not provide any scrupulous description of notable historical events that constitute the conventional background of the epoch, nor does it describe any historical scenes that can be included into an officially recorded history, but instead its main emphasis is on “untold histories” of the marginalized ex-centrics, their romantic love and failed attempts to reach their personal integrity. Significantly, the “passion” of the title can be accepted as a “polysemic sign” [1, p. 61], symbolising simultaneously Henri’s hero-worship of Napoleon and later his unconventional love for the webbed-feet Vilanelle; Villanelle’s romantic passion for the mysterious Queen of Spades who in her turn suffers from the unrequited love for her husband; Napoleon’s trivial passion for chicken and large horses; Joséphine’s uncontrollable passion for melons; and finally, the sublime passion of Christ. As a consequence, the dislocated narratives that form the context of quasi-historical representations lose their original references, and are given unexpected meaning, while the real historical figures being textualized are exposed as “fabricated”; the latter’s existence alters the self-conscious narrative that combines fact with fiction, claiming to restore what has been overlooked, lost and suppressed.

 In using the genre of autobiography, each character-narrator recounts their own life story: Henri keeps his diary throughout the war campaign and writes his memoir in the madhouse retrospectively while Villanelle tells her life story to Henri, his friend Patrick and the reader. Although they present the same historical events in their stories – Napoleonic wars, the occupation of Venice, the march on Moscow – their narratives form parallel perspectives and mirror each other while emphasizing their love affairs and telling the story of Henri’s loss of heart for war and Napoleon and fighting against Villanelle’ literal loss of heart to the mysterious Queen of Spades. Their perspectives can be regarded as conventionally gendered with Henri narrating a masculine and thus rationalistic war discourse and Villanelle presenting a feminine and magical love story.

 At the same time, J. Winterson playfully inverts the relation between gender and sex in her novel: Villanelle, who has webbed feet, can be seen as “phallic” while gentle and passive Henri is feminized in his attitudes towards Napoleon and Villanelle; moreover, Henri leaves the war without having killed anyone, but then in Venice he murders the cook, Villanelle’s husband, an act which “hurt[s] his mind” [14, p. 147] and explains his self-exile in the madhouse at the end of his relationship with Villanelle who has a daughter by him but refuses to marry him. Their love discourses thus can be interpreted rather as “queered” in different ways if to take into consideration their attitude towards traditional heterosexuality.

 Significantly, J. Winterson’s novel includes several refrains: Henri’s phrase “I’m telling you stories. Trust me” [14, pp. 5, 13, 40] which refers to the theme of subjective storytelling and its role in history rewriting as well as to the problem of authorial power and reliability, while Villanelle’s two refrains – “In between fear and sex, passion is” [14, pp. 55, 60, 62] and “You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play” [14, pp. 43, 66] – point out to the theme of love as risk represented by the motif of gambling. As it follows from the text, romantic love is related to the fear of loss: “We gamble with the hope of winning, but it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us” [14, p. 89]. Unlike Villanelle, Henri tells stories in order to defend himself against the outcome of dangerous romantic love which brings him a sense of loss. The loss of the beloved – his mother, the Emperor Napoleon and Villanelle – encourages him to narrate and may explain his willingness to stay in the tower at the end of the novel. As J. Gustar notes, “Instead of making his escape, he tells the story of his life in order to preserve his love. Henri fails to overcome his loss – to do the work of mourning – and passes into the terrain of melancholia” [6, p. 61].

 Like J. Winterson’s earlier fictions, the novel intricately mixes a realist narrative with episodes of magical intrusion. The magical in this novel exists in two main forms: magical objects and magical features. The former include the magical icicle with a thread of gold which the dying soldier Domino gives as his present to Henri. Months later, it has been discovered still in its un-melted form. Some personages, like Henri’s friend Patrick, possess magical features: his telescoping eye can apparently see young parishioners committing adultery two miles away; besides this, he tells stories about Ireland where elves, ghosts and goblins tend to live under the hills.

 The novel’s most significant magical feature, however, belongs to the “phallic” webbed feet casino croupier Villanelle who has an ability to miraculously walk on water; as a consequence of the pregnancy ritual practiced by the wives of Venetian boatmen that goes wrong, she is born with the webbed feet that are considered as the mark of a male: “[t]here never was a girl whose feet were webbed in the entire history of the boatmen. My mother in her swoon had visions of rosemary and blamed herself for her carelessness” [14, p. 51]. Her webbed feet symbolize her hybridity, a break with conventional gendered identities and a mark of her difference. Like Virginia Woolf’s hero(ine) Orlando, she possesses both male and female attributes, and has love affairs both with women and men; and even her name is not literal either, since it refers to a poetic form, which she wears “as a disguise” [14, p. 54], as she says. When Villanelle literally loses her heart, it keeps on beating in the jar in the Queen of Spades’ palace in Venice: “The jar was throbbing. I did not dare to unstopper it. I did not dare to check this valuable, fabulous thing and I carried it, still in the shift, down the last two floors and out into empty night” [14, p. 120], as Henri recollects in his memoirs. Moreover, after killing the cook, who sold Villanelle as a prostitute to the French army, Henri observes Villanelle walking on water while dragging their boats across the canal. As S. Onega claims, J. Winterson “redefines reality as complex and manysided, and situates it in the realm of the fantastic, that is to say, in that frontier territory of epistemological uncertainty where the real and the unreal coexist” [10, p. 147]. As a result, these magical objects and magical features like Villanelle’s freakish body and her miraculous ability to live without a heart interrogate the nature of the “real” and undermine the authenticity of historical discourse which seems to be narratively re-assessed and re-evaluated.

 Even Henri’s narrative which contains inverted hauntings and hostilities of the real world perplex the confines of distinction by including grotesque-like fantasies into his alternative historical discourse, which cause the latter’s further fragmentation: “I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace” [14, p. 82]. Since Henri’s narrative includes fantastic elements, it can be aligned with subjective storytelling that belongs to the voice of the suppressed. In accordance with R. Jackson’s view, “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture, that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made “absent” [8, p. 4].

 It is not only the use of the magical that disrupts historical discourse in the novel; it is also the employment of parody that significantly helps undermine the officially accepted versions of history by providing the mainstream record with half-forgotten narratives that form the “dark areas” of alternative history. By leading to the tension between the officially documented and the apocryphal versions of history, parody enacts both transformation and renewal with the aim to promote marginalized ways in interpreting history; it blends creation with critical responses to substitute, and, in so doing, it dislocates both the given text and the earlier generated narrations. As a result, marginalized ex-centric aspects tend to form the self-conscious narrative while filling out the officially recognized history. The fragmented remains included into historical figures’ apocryphal lives are given unexpected meaning; since they lose connections with their initial referents, they start to be accepted as “invented”. Thus, Napoleon is given a comic portrayal of an ogre in a fairy-tale due to his banal passion for chicken: ”He wishes his whole face were mouth to cram a whole bird. In the morning I’ll be lucky to find the wishbone” [14, p. 4]. In the similar mode, the story of Napoleon’s wife Josephine, who has a passion for melons, embraces unrecognizable details that reveal her different identity and occupies the unknown gaps in the accounts of the mainstream history.

 The novel depicts Venice as a carnival space which recalls the Bakhtinian idea of masquerade. As Mikhail Bakhtin claims: “The mask is related to transition, metamorphosis, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. It contains the playful element of life” [3, p. 40]. Venice like Villanelle represents the playfulness of excess, both in literal and metaphorical terms: an excess of its water and sexuality. It is described as a “mercurial city” [14, p. 49], “a city of mazes” [14, p. 49] and finally, as “a city of disguises” [14, p. 56]; it is a territory of permanent transformation that confuses rational minds. In this changing world of shifting canals and casinos, which is “uncertain and temporary” [14, p. 57] Villanelle feels most comfortable at night: “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” [14, p. 76]. As J. Seaboyer argues, Venice “recalls the ancient myth of the labyrinth, a fluid space of transformation and danger that has traditionally stood for the psychic inward journey, and increasingly for textuality itself” [13, p. 484].

 Indeed, in the tales of Henri and Villanelle, the novel depicts moving versions of the archetypal quests while focusing on the representation of Venice as a central topos of beauty and decay linked to the drive for death. Its waterways represent the impossibility of any mapping and offer the chance of living lives in imaginative quests and assuming oppositional gendered identities; moreover, its water plays a figurative role in the understanding of both Venice and its dwellers as embodiments of a dangerous female fluidity. As Villanelle remarks while presenting her view of her native city: “The city I come from is a changeable city. It is not always the same size. Streets appear and disappear overnight, new waterways force themselves over dry land. There are days when you cannot walk from one end to the other, so far is the journey, and there are days when a stroll will take you round your kingdom like a tin-pot prince” [14, p. 97]. The link between the city and Villanelle is obvious, it anticipates the latter’s sexuality, her androgyny and her passion for cross-dressing and gambling. The parallel is evident due to the use of the same nouns that refer to Venice and to Villanelle – the disguise: “You’re a Venetian, but you wear your name as a disguise” [14, p. 54]. Later, in the novel, Villanelle uses the same word to identify Venice: “This is the city of disguise. Whatever you are one day will not constrain you on the next” [14, p. 150]. Here it is cross-dressing through which Villanelle explores the subtle line between the construction of her sex identity and the performativity of gender.

 In the treatment of Villanelle’ sexuality, J. Winterson adopts a conventional model which became influential in the early 1990s when J. Butler offered her idea of gender as a drag: “Drag constitutes the way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself” [5, p. 127]. Examples of drag and cross-dressing foreground the artifice of Venice seen as a carnival city and the performative nature of gender. As Villanelle remarks: “I dressed as a boy because that’s what the visitors like to see. It was part of a game, trying to decide which sex was hidden behind tight breeches and extravagant face-paste” [14, p. 54]. As M. Aròstegui claims, Villanelle is the “masquerader par excellence”, who is “not on the side of identity but on that of performance” [2, p. 272]. As it follows from the text, J. Winterson uses masquerade to disrupt and re-signify gendered identities and to undermine the idea of natural sexual difference. At one point, Villanelle astonishingly asks: “And what was myself? Was this breeches and boots any less real than my garters?” [14, p. 66]. Significantly, Villanelle’s subversive potential means that she can change her gendered identities rather than being fixed and trapped by them.

 The novel’s feminism, at the same time, resides not only in Villanelle’s feminine narrative with its struggle against patriarchy and the depiction of lesbian love in the city of carnival Venice, but also in Henri’s male critique of militarism and his horror of male violence against women being exploited in war. While Henri’s youthful desire is directed towards Napoleon, his gendered identification tends to be with the women in his life: they include his pious mother who wanted to be a nun, the French army prostitutes – vivandières, whose side he takes against their violent clients; and, certainly, Villanelle, whom he declares to love despite her rejection of him. Moreover, Henri’s narrative gives an insight into male admiration of the bonds between women: “She would never do that for me” [14, p.15]; he bemoans when he observes one prostitute who comforts another: “She held her companion for a moment and kissed her swiftly on the forehead” [14, p. 15], and he envies women’s courage: “They go on”, he claims. “Whatever we do or undo, they go on” [14, p. 15]. Henri seems to rewrite the traditional gender opposition saying a seemingly fundamentalist statement: “Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture” [14, p. 45]. While this lamenting view appears to represent the world of Winterson’s novel, in fact its heroes repeatedly prove otherwise by challenging rigid gendered identities. Just as Henri’s feminine-like sensitivity presents him unsuitable for soldiering activities, Villanelle’s ambiguous sexuality and her choice of her career put her beyond the pale of traditional femininity. If in this view, by textualising individual and minor perspectives that undermine unitary ways of seeing and interpreting, J. Winterson challenges conventional monosexuality and reveals the performative nature of gender.

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