Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №06 (86) Июнь 2022

Киберпространство и проблема идентичности в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон “Интернет.Книга”

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: В статье рассматривается роман Дж. Уинтерсон “Интернет. Книга (2000) с позиций постмодернистских теорий о нарративе и субъективной рецепции текста, в котором демонстрируется появление новых возможностей в процессе сетевого распространения текстов и их прочтения. В статье делается вывод о том, что фрагментарность и многослойность данного текста приводят к нелинейному прочтению гипертекста и многочисленных историй, сводящихся к одному варианту архетипического любовного сюжета. Представленный диалог между нарратором и читателем историй отражает одновременно их сближение и дистанцию, вызванную их коммуникацией через интернет. Киберпространство дает эффект одновременного присутствия и отсутствия: отсутствие физического присутствия заменяется присутствием мгновенной реакции на сообщения; более того, киберпространство позволяет по-новому взглянуть на идентичность – она становится более гибкой, обладающей меньшей однозначностью, наделенной потенциалом бесконечного изменения в условиях виртуальной реальности.
Ключевые слова: киберпространство, виртуальная реальность, истории, идентичность, субъективное повествование, Уинтерсон

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: This paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s “The. PowerBook” (2000) in relation to postmodern theories of narration and subjectivity and shows that the web offers new opportunities for the dissemination and reception of texts. It argues that the fragmentation and multi-layering reflects the non-linear way which predetermines the reading of hypertext and numerous tales that constitute the archetypal love story. The conversation between the narrator and the customer mirrors both intimacy and distance of communicating via the net. Cyberspace gives an effect of both absence and presence: the lack of physical corporeality is balanced by the presence of a more immediate response; it also allows for the reinvention of identity, which becomes more fluid and permeable, with the potential for endless proliferation in virtual reality.
Keywords: cyberspace, virtual reality, tales, identity, subjective storytelling, Winterson

 Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre is widely known for its diverse border-crossings and fantastic quests through time, space, gender and genre. Her metafictional universes destroy boundaries between feminine and masculine, present and past, real and unreal worlds. Her early novels such as “The Passion” (1987) and “Sexing the Cherry” (1989) use multiple intertextual links to fairy-tales, myths, biblical stories, Grail legends and the whole range of chronotopes including the Napoleonic campaign to Russia, the 17^th century London at the time of the Civil War and Interregnum, and mysterious carnival Venice. As M. Wronka admits, Winterson’s novels “are fraught with various solutions, hybridities, and the multiplicity of identities, which merged together, create a maze of unexpected events, idiosyncrasies, and peculiarities” [9, p. 197], while undertaking the difficult process of search and reconciliation with oneself. In her seventh novel entitled “The.PowerBook” (2000), Winterson continues to explore subjective storytelling, quests in time and space, and self-discovery of selves through a more modern move into cyberspace; her latter novel exploits, as its name suggests, implications for online identities and self-conscious metafiction posed by computer technologies; due to its various quests to and across time zones, it can also be seen as a fictional tale where its characters exist and act both within the frames of “recognizable” history and outside it. Set both in cyberspace and “meatspace”– Paris, Capri and London – it allows to explore multiple realities in virtual reality and to reach the desired abandonment of the self that cyberspace can offer. In other words, the metafiction’s organizing structure points to the non-linear nature of interpreting hypertext and the mutability of identities.

 “The.PowerBook” reveals its contemporaneous nature nearly on every page with its chapter headings such as “open hard drive”, “new document”, “search”, “view as icon”, “empty trash”, “quit” and “save”, and, thus, points to the interactive logic of the cyberspace as the metafiction’s organizing principle. The metafiction’s main narrative line resembles the form of a chat between a young woman who presents herself as Ali/x and the internet customer, an older upper-middle-class married woman, who wants to be transformed by the healing powers of storytelling; its narrator Ali/x, a “language costumier”, exploits the possibilities of virtual reality to transfer both the object of her all-consuming passion, whose alias is Tulip, and herself through exotic space and time continuum in accordance with her promise: ”This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise” [11, p. 4]. In her attempt to enchant and seduce Tulip, Ali/x, being a professional writer, offers and creates imaginative online tales like Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights in which the two of them can experience and express their unrealized desire for quests using different forms of disguise. In one of these, Ali/x takes the advantage of the unarticulated space between history and fiction by inserting herself into the real historical environment that relates a notorious 17^th century tulip mania in Holland. “Storytelling is thus a means of both putting the self into discourse and covering up an original lack or absence" [1, p. 106], as S. Andermahr says. This Scheherazade protagonist, whose “biological identity […] remain[s] shifting and unclear” [2, p. 22], assures her narratee – “To avoid the discovery I stay on the run” [11, p.3]; as it follows from the narrative, the narrator is ambiguously gendered and appears in her e-stories, by turns, both male and female. Ali/x makes sure that the potential for modern self-individuation lies in the act of subjective storytelling ruled nowadays by the internet principle that offers further disguise: “The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell it myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story” [11, p.4-5]. Thus, the main narrative line that contains the story of Ali/x and her customer Tulip is revealed by means of a web of thematically related stories that can be endlessly accessed, revised, interacted, deleted, reopened and rearranged, as if they were links in a hypertext boasting of its apparent fragmentation, fluidity and inconclusiveness: “This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. New continents of thought break off from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade wind, some sink without trace. Others are like Atlantis – fabulous, talked about, but never found” [11, p.73].

 The novel’s structure is determined by its index called “MENU”, which divides the novel’s chapters into two categories: the ones that belong to the frame narrative, or the internet chat, and the others that include the embedded tales created by Ali/x on her customer’s demand; in accordance with the arrangement of the e-mail addresses, the internet chat is written in small print, while the embedded tales are written in capital letters in the fashion of The Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade manages to stay alive by telling the sultan stories. In the conventional tale-within-the-tale structure, the frame narrative embraces other tales by opening and closing the novel’s embedded narratives, though in “The Power.Book” the frame narrative is left deliberately open, if to judge from the fact that the titles for the last four chapters are written in capital letters, as would be seen more typical for embedded tales. This structural openness in the manner of John Fowles points to the fact that the virtual love affair between Ali/x and Tulip is left inconclusive at the decisive moment when Tulip has to choose whether to stay with her husband for married security or start a new life with Ali/x, which means a riskier proposition; furthermore, to keep the narration interactive Ali/x offers her customer both links to actualize and narrate two possible endings that the virtual reality can offer. In keeping with this, the “real” world of the frame narrative and the “unreal” world of the imbedded tales are not sharply differentiated, but seem to be blurred and even merged in the “QUIT”, where two protagonists Ali the Turk and Alix from the Muck House start to identify with the narrator of “The Power.Book” who is known as Ali/x. This indeterminate feature of the narrator’s identity is progressively increased by the numerous clues that the language costumier constantly identifies herself with the author of this book – Jeanette Winterson, since the background, looks, habits and the occupation they share are remarkably similar. In other words, the confusion of the cyberspace and “meatspace” and the writers – the narrator of the tales and the real author of “The Power.Book” - points to Winterson’s understanding of virtual reality as many-sided and of multiple possibilities, only some of them are finally actualized by an attempt of individual imagination: “In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps bearing in on us, but only reachable by worm-holes we can never find […]. I can’t take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing – my future [11, p.63].

 Like Jordan in Winterson’s earlier novel “Sexing the Cherry” Ali/x identifies tales with “[M]aps of journeys that have been made and might have been made. A Marco Polo route through territory real and imagined” [11, p.63]; she makes sure that her aim is to bring together the real and the imaginary tales and make them merge: “I was typing on my laptop, trying to move this story on, trying to avoid endings, trying to collide the real and the imaginary worlds. […] It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet” [11, p. 107-8]. Given the identification of the novel’s narrator with the author of “The.PowerBook”, “these words may be read as a metacomment on the overall structure of the novel” [5, p. 185], as S. Onega authoritatively claims. Significantly, all of the tales that the metafiction retells are the archetypal love stories about either illicit or obsessive love with its dramatic or fatal consequences; they tend to be drawn from a variety of sources embracing Arthurian legend, medieval romance and fairy tale and contain intertextual references to “great and ruinous lovers’. In one of these, a beautifully told tale based on Malory’s version of Arthurian legend, Lancelot, King Arthur’s most valued knight of the Round Table, falls in love with Queen Guinevere, his patron’s fiancée, and finds himself in a personal conflict; after the marriage the pair becomes lovers but they are discovered by spies who inform Arthur of his wife’s infidelity; the knight escapes but the Queen Guinevere is condemned to be sent to a convent where she dies half an hour before Lancelot comes there. Another archetypal love story about the Red Fox starts with the words typical for a fairy tale: “A hunter loved a Princess. Simple as that” [11, p. 210]. As the winter was coming, the Princess asked the hunter to bring her the pelt of the red fox she had seen in the forest: “That night the Princess looked in the mirror and it seemed to her that the red of the fox would be perfect against the white of her skin” [11, p.211]. Against his will, the hunter promised to do so but asked the Princess to bring it to her alive. However, the Princess ordered her servant to draw his knife and kill it whereupon it turned into the hunter, lying dead in the yard. Throughout these tales of blind passion runs the refrain: “There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet” [11, p. 152, p. 222]. Despite the fact of their shallow differences, the narrator Ali/x assures us that the basic structure of these tales is the same: “I keep telling this story – different people, different places, different times – but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tightrope between two worlds” [11, p. 141].

 Throughout the novel the narrator makes efforts to explain her urge to tell tales: “I live in one world – material, seeming solid – and the weight of that is quite enough” [11, p. 64]. Tales therefore are used as a means to abandon the burdens of identity, as a way of maintaining the world ‘light’. Furthermore, tales that include quest narratives serve as a means to narrate desire: “My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found […]. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself” [11, pp. 92-3]. As it follows from the text, Winterson once again uses the idea of treasure taken from her earlier novel “The Passion” – “the valuable, fabulous thing that everyone has and keeps a secret” [10, p. 98]. The ending of the novel thus proves that Winterson combines all love tales into one archetypal quest story, which seems to return the romance to its medieval origin since it describes the hero’s dramatic attempts to find the object of his desire while fighting his way through the wild forest. Human desire whether this be “his lady, his falcon, his horse, the band of robbers who had fired his house” [11, p. 283] turns out to represent the particular discourse of the archetypal quest for “the treasure’. At the same time, Winterson’s love tales that she uses in her novel “evoke every kind of violence, injustice, and mischance” [8, p. xxiii] to challenge patriarchy and show the performative nature of both sexual and textual identity. Furthermore, the merging of the present-day events and historical environment recreated in Winterson’s stories and fairy-tales “undermine the conventional notion of time” and clearly destroy “the boundaries between the common day and the fantastic” to demonstrate once again the “complementarity of the real and the Gothic/magical” [6, p.172], their obvious co- existence.

 The narrator herself is presented as a fiction, a protagonist that slides through the hardly recognizable gaps of history. As far as the novel progresses, fiction and reality become interchangeable: “I am sitting at my screen reading this story. In turn, the story reads me” [11, p. 247]. At this point, the frame narrative has become totally inseparable or indistinguishable from the embedded tale of the narrator and her e-customer, while the boundary between fiction and reality starts to be seen as fluid, mixed, blurred and permeable. As a consequence, the quest through cyberspace leads to eliminating of the boundaries between self and other, fact and fiction, the acts of writing and reading. For just as Ali/x, the narrator, sends an e-mail to her lover, so her e-message calls her into being, allowing to create her both real and imagined identity discursively: “The story is reading you now, line by line” [11, p. 96]. This idea sounds reminiscent of the post- structuralist notion that identity is always constructed in and through discourse and that the protagonists are “subjects-in-process” [4, p. 91], as J. Kristeva claims. The story becomes “transitive, not just something that passes between readers, but something that actively writes itself and ‘reads’ its readers” [1, p. 107], as S. Andermahr concludes.

 “The. PowerBook” gives particular importance to fluidity and limitations of the characters’ identities. In reply to the narratee’s proposal to change identity, Ali/x offers the chance of “scrolling into another self” [11, p. 120], and getting rid of the physical body in favor of a figurative body of tales: “You say you want to be transformed. This is where the story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night” [11, p. 4]. The text thus shows the opportunities given by the virtual reality for throwing away old identities and adopting new ones. The narrator foresees the pleasures of interactive games, in which s/he can construct a new persona complete with any lifestyle s/he wants. This possibility enables readers to get “the self” beyond both artificially constructed gendered identities and biological sex. Thus the text points to Winterson’s belief, expressed throughout in her book, that “we think of ourselves as closed and finite, when we are multiple and infinite” [11, p. 121]. Furthermore, the cyberspace motif makes it possible to evaluate the postmodern notion of subjectivity in terms of the new technologies, comparing the concept of “the self” to a ‘windows’ program: “There are so many lives packed into one. The one life we think we know is only the window that is open on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can close that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view” [11, pp. 119-20]. Significantly, the structure of the novel resembles a series of “windows”, each giving a new layer to the text so that the process of reading can be compared with analogous to surfing the net when the reader can make any metafictional interventions and additions: “When I sit at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own. I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove. I disappear into a web of co-ordinates that we say will change the world. What world? Which world?” [11, p. 108].

 The narrator’s use of the web as a means to transcend and evade sexual identity engages with the aspect of “third wave” feminism identified as cyberfeminism, since the novel demonstrates what D. Haraway defines as the “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” [3, p. 191], whether they are sexual, gendered or narrative. The novel’s interpretation of identity may also be explained in terms of Z. Sofia’s notion of “virtual corporeality” [7, p.64], a trope that juxtaposes two concepts with opposing meanings with a nod to Winterson’s transgendered time-traveller Ali/x who performs as yet another version of the numerous species hybrids that populate her earlier novels. “The Power.Book” thus provides an answer to Haraway’s explicit request for novels “in a postmodern, nonnaturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender” [3, p.192]. Indeed, when asked about her sex online, the narrator replies “Does it matter? This is a virtual world” [11, p.30].

1. Andermahr S. Jeanette Winterson. – N.Y., Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
2. Armit L. “Storytelling and feminism” in S. Andermahr (ed.), Jeanette Winterson. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007.
3. Haraway D. “A manifesto for cyborgs”, in L.J. Nicolson (ed.) Feminism/Postmo- dernism. N.Y. and London: Routledge, 1990.
4. Kristeva J. “The system and the speaking subject”, in T. Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader. – Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
5. Onega S. Jeanette Winterson. – Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
6. Pinyaeva E.V. “Postmodern revision of archetypal quests and history in Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry”// Филологический аспект. - 2022. -№3 (83). –С. 169-178.
7. Sofia Z. “Virtual corporeality: a feminist view”, in J. Wolmark (ed.) Cybersexu-alities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs and cyberspace. – Edinburg: Edin-burg University Press, 1999.
8. Warner M. Once upon a time: a short history of fairy tale. – Oxford: OUP, 2014.
9. Wronka M. The problems of identity in Jeanette Winterson’s Why be happy when you could be normal? Oranges are not the only fruit and the Passion. – The Grove. Working papers on English Studies 24 (2017): 195-206. DOI: 10.17561/grove. V24 A10.
List of sources
10. Winterson J. The Passion. – Penguin Books. London, 1988.
11. Winterson J. The. PowerBook. – Vintage International. N.Y., 2001.