Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №03 (83) Март 2022

Постмодернистская ревизия архетипических странствий и истории в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон “Как определить пол вишни”

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), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Аннотация: В статье рассматривается историографический роман Дж. Уинтерсон “Как определить пол вишни” с позиций постмодернистской эстетики, предполагающей преднамеренное нарушение нарративной целостности и единства с целью утверждения идеи “множественности”. История в романе, и в этом его отличие, трактуется как “идеологически ангажированный дискурс”, обреченный на “переписывание” в силу того, что он не содержит в себе одну универсальную “истину”, но, напротив, демонстрирует наличие вариативного спектра альтернативных истин, нуждающихся в перманентной корректировке. Становление личности прослеживается на уровне архетипического странствия, во время которого герой романа проходит целый ряд инициаций с идеей доказать ценность гендерных отличий и поддержать идею гетеросексуальной фемининности. Сосуществование реальных исторических событий и постоянно меняющегося мультиверсума подвергает сомнению четкую выстроенность хронологически выверенных повествований о прошлом, тогда как замкнутый пространственно-временной континуум способствует воплощению идеи о темпоральной цикличности мифа, и деконструкции “великих нарративов” таких как история, религия и эмпирическая наука. Использование пародии разрушает традиционно существовавшую границу между историей понимаемой как хронологически выстроенной серией объективных фактов и фантазией с тем, чтобы оправдать одновременное сосуществование реального и нереального мира, их взаимопроникновение, тогда как обращение к гротеску приводит к превращению истории в игровую площадку, в модус субъективного нарратива и возможность для разных интерпретаций трансгрессивной фемининности. В статье делается вывод о том, что Дж. Уинтерсон использует традиционную сюжетику архетипического странствия с тем, чтобы подвергнуть критике патриархальные ценности и их институты.
Ключевые слова: историографический метароман, исторический дискурс, архитепическое странствие, миф, трансгрессивная фемининность, готика/магический реализм, пародия, 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)

Abstract: This paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” as a spectacular example of historiographic metafiction that undermines narrative unity and singularity to establish postmodern multiplicity. Its defining feature is that history is seen as an ideologically biased discourse, and thus not to be talked in terms of universal truth but rather as a variety of alternative truths that need rewriting. The individuation of the self is narrated as an archetypal quest in which the novel’s hero passes through a number of stages, in the process to advocate the validity of gender difference, and to endorse heterosexual femininity. The coexistence of the real historical events and an ever – changing multiverse challenges the chronological notions of conventional past and the space-time continuum to negotiate the idea of the cyclical temporality of myth, and to deconstruct “grand narratives” such as history, religion and empirical science. The acquisition of parody disputes the conventional boundary between history seen as a series of objective facts and fantasy to further justify the complementarity of the real and unreal worlds, and their merging, while the use of the grotesque suggests turning history into a playground, a form of storytelling, and an opportunity for competing definitions of transgressive femininity. This paper argues that Winterson utilizes the conventions of the archetypal quest to challenge patriarchal values and institutions.
Keywords: historiographic metafiction, historical discourse, archetypal quest, myth, transgressive femininity, Gothic/magical, parody, Winterson

In an influential 2006 study of Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre, S. Onega argues that “Sexing the Cherry” may be interpreted as the novel that “belong[s] to Hutcheon’s category of “historiographic metafiction”, a paradoxical type of postmodernist novel that combines self-reflexivity with history” [8, p. 76]. Indeed, “Sexing the Cherry” as a mode of the postmodern novel questions issues about the relationship between history and fiction, and expresses an awareness that both of them are “human constructs”, and thus not to be explained of in terms of truth but rather whose truth predominates. As a consequence, it obviously stresses the function of subjective storytelling in historical discourse to challenge the conventional notion of history seen as a series of officially accepted facts. Since Winterson’s metafiction incorporates different genre elements – the historical, the mythical and the Gothic/magical – it challenges the idea of the “real”, and prevents any attempts at constructing a reliable sequence of historical events; on the contrary, it turns into a playfield for the grotesque and the mysterious that suggests a multiplicity of oppositional responses to prevent any possibility of their “objective” and unitary interpretation. Such hybrid blending of heterogeneous discourses provides the grounds for history to be rewritten and revised.

However, postmodern revision of history is not nostalgic, but deeply ironic, since history has always been seen as an ideological discourse whose existence is bound by its textuality: all historical data including memoirs, chronicles, testimonies, diaries and autobiographies is retrieved from written texts that tend to be contradictory and only partially “objective”, mostly build on second-hand knowledge that negotiate debatable hypothetical assumptions, individual points of view and controversial explanations. Moreover, since these historical narratives are created with the use of allegorical and figurative language that is hardly associated with “scientific discourse”, “their genuine authenticity seems to be no longer eternal and unchallengeable, but is rather considered in terms of our changing perception of historical past” [10, p. 140]. In the manner of Linda Hutcheon, Winterson claims that “[h]istory should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing” [12, p. 91], in which the main activity is of imagining the past, with no more truth value to be found.

Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” demonstrates its controversial nature in its choice of strikingly subjective explanation of historical events, since they are not interpreted from the totalitarian perspective demanded by World History; on the contrary, they are shown from the minoritarian perspectives of the two marginal narrator-characters with the aim to reveal their “otherness”, and their deviation from the conventional cultural traditions and norms. Moreover, the novel presents its historical setting – the Civil War and the Puritan Commonwealth – with a Gothic/magical narration that embraces fairy-tales; the latter undermine stereotypical perceptions of an “objective” historical reality by deliberately destroying links and boundaries between lies and truth in historical discourse. Though the plot setting of the novel justifies Charles I’s and the Puritan’s discursive presence, its main emphasis is on two narrator-characters’ “untold histories” whose noticeable otherness is preconditioned by their class and gender difference. One belongs to a Rabelaisian huge giantess called the Dog Woman who arranges races for the boar-hounds to support her eccentric living, while the other is to her foundling son Jordan, who travels round the world in search of romantic love, exotic lands and fruits, and his own identity; the latter’s archetypal quests are “not linear, [but are] always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body” [13, p. 80]. However, in the third section of the novel entitled as “Some years later” their voices start to interweave with two new narrator-characters who live in the late twentieth century – a naval cadet Nicholas Jordan and a nameless woman ecologist who is shown to lead a desperate solitary struggle against patriarchal institutions such as the World Bank and the Pentagon; these two new narrator-characters resemble their 17^th century ancestors in their attitudes, impulses and thoughts, and strongly bring to mind the idea of the cyclical temporality of myth when the chronological divisions of past, present and future are not relevant: “The future and the present and the past exist only in our minds, and from a distance the borders of each shrink and fade like the borders of hostile countries seen from a floating city in the sky” [13, p. 144].

The cyclical temporality of myth as a theme in Winterson’s parodic metafiction gets its further development in reintroducing the fruit symbolism in a more complicated rendering with the purpose to collapse conventional distinctions such as nature/culture or male/female. Winterson returns to the fruit symbolism by exploiting visual drawings of fruit icons at the top of individual sections to introduce these two narrator-characters and by making their associations with a particular fruit against commonly supported expectations. In a playfully made confusion of Freudian imagery, the Dog Woman and the nameless ecologist are identified with the phallic banana, while Jordan and Nicolas Jordan are linked with the pineapple, a female fruit, sliced or split in two for the 20^th century characters; this deliberately undertaken confusion of traditional symbolism in the fruit metaphors points to the fact that Winterson’s metafiction uses different kinds of fruit to challenge rigid gender constructions through mixing the differences between masculine and feminine across time zones in the cyclical structure of myth.

It is not only the merging of events and narrator-characters who act in a-temporal present of the novel that undermine the conventional notion of time; it is also Jordan’s numerous quests that destroy the boundaries between the common day and the fantastic and thus suggest the complementarity of the real and the Gothic/ magical; moreover, these a-temporal eternities add to the idea of the cyclical temporality of myth as well, since both historical events and narrator-characters are compelled to repeat themselves in an unredeemable, perpetual pattern of recurrence. This explains Winterson’s choice of the epigraph to the novel which refers to the language of the Indian tribe Hopi, with no division for past, present and future, as if “time is one” [13, p. 3], which in itself echoes T. Elliot’s assertion that “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future contained in time past” [6, p.189]. Moreover, in the second epigraph to her metafiction Winterson challenges the conventional interpretation of the Physical Universe seen as indestructible, static and solid, but later proved as another illusion, since it consists of a network of constantly ever-changing interactions, of a “collection of inert particles pulling and pushing each other like cogs in a deterministic machine” [5, p. 229], and thus provides a scientific confirmation of the mythical explanation of the matter understood as the unitary wholeness of the physical world; the latter assumption gives the grounds to question the reality of the world as well. The fact that Jordan parodies the first lines of Elliot’s “Burnt Norton”: “If all time is eternally present, there is no reason why we should not step out of one present into another” [13, p. 90] proves that he differentiates between mythical and chronological time, and acknowledges one of the truths that he discovers during his quest that “all journeys exist simultaneously” [13, p. 89]; moreover, he recognizes that matter is only “empty space and light”[13, p. 91], when he describes P. Ucello’s famous painting “A Hunt in a Forest” that clearly provides “an artistic equivalent for Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle” [8, p. 80] and justifies the co-existence of the real and fantastic worlds.

The uncanny collaboration of the real and fantastic worlds affects the strikingly paradoxical description of the Rabelaisian Dog Woman and her foundling son Jordan who act in Winterson’s metafiction as “microscopic replicas of the macrocosm” [8, p. 80] in accordance with the rules that myth dictates. While the young explorer of distant lands has a normal physical appearance that does not contradict historical discourse, his storytelling is wholly based on journeys to unreal cities and his encounters with the Gothic/magical creatures who challenge any possible plausibility of his unmaterialistic narration; moreover, Jordan’s story cannot be verified by all means on the grounds of his own revelations: “And so what we have told you is true, although it is not” [13, p. 95]. By startling contrast, his mother, a huge giantess, who has murdered her own father and thousands of men, depicts events of the 17^th century English history such as Charles I’s trial and his execution, and the Puritan Commonwealth; although the main focus is on her heroic qualities that represent her “rebellious, transgressive aspect of femininity which patriarchy attempts to suppress” [7, p. 86], she functions as the only witness to historical events that she depicts in her narration which can be doubted as well owing to Jordan’s testament: ”She is a fantasist, a liar, and a murderer, though none of that would stop me loving her” [13, p. 92]. Due to the observable fact that both narrator-characters are not reliable, their diegetic narrations cannot be considered as believed or trusted for granted; on the contrary, they undermine historical discourse and interrogate the idea of the “real”. Undoubtedly, Winterson uses “the magical mode of the narrative as a subversive space of unconscious drive to dislocate the historical discourse seen through kaleidoscopically changing magical lenses in her fiction” [9, p. 321].

History seen as a “human construct” can be accessed by parody, as L. Hutcheon persuasively argues. In “Sexing the Cherry”, parody undermines genre frames, since Winterson’s metafiction embraces historical novel, fairy-tales, autobiography, myth, travel writings and significantly used references to scientific discourses such as botany, physics and anthropology; at the same time, parody also enacts continuity, a renewal of the earlier adopted versions of historical discourse by including rather controversial details from the famous sailors’ apocryphal lives which are finally given an unexpected meaning. Moreover, provided a comic revision, historical characters lose their links with their original referents and are consequently narrated as “invented” or “fabricated” to be eventually perceived as “pop-images”. This kind of emphasis of the function of previously neglected details in the officially accepted historical discourse recalls of the New Historicists’ claim that history always tends to be re-written by the mainstream culture on top of the peripheral cultures it defeated.

The employment of the huge giantess, the Dog Woman, who is seen as the main Gothic/magical farce figure in Winterson’s metafiction, works not only to challenge rationalistic perception of reality in historical discourse but also to incorporate an alternative conception of fluid gender identities and sexuality, since her body is of a freakish nature due to the technique of grafting considered an unnatural practice for the 17^th century mentality. She is obviously given a parodic portrayal in Winterson’s metafiction owing to her awe-inspiring looks to which she refers proudly as “the mountain of my flesh” [13, p.14], which clearly alludes to J. Swift’s traveller Gulliver: “the Man-Mountain” [11, p. 45], a name given to him by the Lilliputians. The Dog Woman’s repulsive face with a flat nose, black teeth and skin where fleas habitually live, undoubtedly parody John Milton’s notorious character Sin with Hell Hounds also, and is strongly linked with Bakhtin’s depiction of the grotesque body that is typically conventional for the carnivalesque masquerade. In accordance with Bakhtin’s theory, the monstrous bodies of the pregnant hags are normally associated with female animals who “combine senile, decaying, degradation and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life” [1, p.26]. Such grotesque imagery emphasizes the importance of the reproductive organs and the belly associated with the earth and the latter’s symbolism for maternity, cyclical and cosmic renewal that is also typical of myth connotations. Interestingly, the Dog Woman refers to her finding of her adopted son Jordan as the gift from Mother earth: “When I found Jordan, so caked in mud I could have baked him like a hedgehog” [13, p. 14]. Moreover, the Dog Woman’s monstrosity comes from the lower part of her hideous body and is seen as physically dangerous in terms of Freud’s vagina dentata, which in its turn links her to mythical female hideous hybrids such as harpies, sirens and sphinxes whose both monstrosity and sexual power are located in their lower halves as well, and symbolize men’s primitive fears of transgressive femininity. It comes clear that Winterson “does not merely revive the female grotesque as the exemplar of Bakhtinian abjection, but rather transforms it into the image of female power by exaggerating Gothic clichés to the limit of grotesqueness” [9, p. 322]. Needless to mention, the Dog Woman and other fabulous creatures such as mermaids and spotted toads that sing funny madrigals not only question the objectivity of historical discourse but they also challenge gendered identities since they symbolize the transgressive femininity due to their freakish bodies that combine both male and female features as well.

At the same time, the Dog Woman’s relationship with her foundling son Jordan is characterized by the lack of the possessiveness of Kristeva’s “abject mother”, which is central to the socially constructed notion of the horrific associated mainly with blood, vomit, pus, faeces and other bodily wastes; on the contrary, Jordan feels proud of his gigantic mother, and he even desires to be like her imagining the possibility of applying a similar technique of joining tissues of plants together that could allow him overcome his bodily limitations to “become something else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger” [13, p. 87]. Furthermore, Jordan identifies her with Lacanian je-idéale who substitutes the father figure for him during his “mirror stage” phase. Besides this, he clearly appreciates the fact that he was given “a river name, a name not bound to anything, just as the waters aren’t bound to anything” [13, p.11], which might be seen as a signifier of fluid gendered identities. In addition, when Jordan becomes old enough to undertake transatlantic archetypal quests to remotely located countries he is fond of his mother’s attitude towards his long and frequent absences: “We never discussed whether or not I would go; she took it for granted, almost as though she had expected it” [13, p. 101].

After the royal gardener John Tradescant comes up as it were by mere miracle in his function of the “herald”, and initiates the conventional “call to adventure”, Jordan is given an opportunity to embark on many a round-the-world voyages in search of remote lands, which points to the coming of adolescence or transformation by means of the notorious rite of passage, when the “familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand” [3, p.47]. At the beginning of this type of a self-quest Jordan experiences an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure with exotic plants that comes unexpectedly as a guide, symbolizing the coming of a new stage in his life; and this is how this moment of intense anxiety that signifies the starting point of his maturation process is explained in his mother’s words: “I saw Jordan standing stock still. He was standing with his both arms upraised and staring at the banana above Jonson’s head. I put my head next to his head and looked where he looked and I saw deep blue waters against a pale shore and trees whose branches sang with green and birds in fairground colours and an old man in a loin-cloth. This was the first time Jordan set sail” [13, p. 13]. If to judge from his intent gaze and his ability to imagine things, Jordan can be seen as a “mental traveller” in W. Blake’s interpretation of this term, and his quest is concerned with its invisible side first of all.

As Jordan openly admits, during his numerous transatlantic voyages to remotely located lands he scrupulously keeps the log-book, although nothing is revealed from it; at the same time, he, as he says, writes down his own journey and draws his own map in his secretly kept private book; the latter is not intended to note “the truth as you will find it in diaries and maps and log-books” but mostly the things “I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time” [13, p.10]. As it follows from Jordan’s revelations, his unofficially kept book relates to his “hidden life” and is written with invisible ink, a practice strongly reminiscent of the ancient Greeks who used to hide their notes written between the lines with the help of milk to describe the “life flaring up undetected” [13, p.10]. Furthermore, Jordan’s private book written with the “white ink” of “mother’s milk”[4, p. 49] might be seen as a fine example of écriture feminine, the type of writing that suggests an alternative to the phallologocentric narrative, as H. Cixous claims. The fact that Jordan keeps different log-books – the one that justifies patriarchy and its institutions, since it is written with a pen/penis, while the other one is strongly associated with femininity because of the invisible ink it is created with - bears testimony to his understanding of the fluid binary oppositions and his suppressed bisexuality as well. Undoubtedly, his individuation process involves his awareness of his incompleteness by comparison with his mother whom he eagerly wants to resemble: “I want to be like my rip-roaring mother who cares nothing for how she looks, only for what she does. She has never been in love, no, and never wanted to be either. She is self-sufficient and without self-doubt” [13, p. 101].

Indeed, Jordan’s foster mother, the Dog Woman, is different from her son in her attitude to love, and her only fear is not that Jordan can be bodily injured in the course of his quests, but that he can lose his heart, since, as she admits, he does not have “my common sense and he will no doubt follow his dreams to the end of the world, and then fall straight off” [13, p.40]. Thus, if her foundling son is to mature, he should succeed in overcoming his state of incompleteness highlighted by his overwhelming search for Fortunata, the dancing princess, and to acquire the Dog Woman’s wholeness and self-confidence. However, Jordan as an archetypal lover fails to accept the most common belief that love should be “kept tame by marriage vows and family ties” [13, p. 38], although he recognizes the perils of the unrequited love and passion driven by desire: “The philosopher of the village warned me that love is better ignored than explored, for it is easier to track a barnacle goose than to follow the trajectories of the heart” [13, p.38]. At the same time, if Jordan does not feel content with too narrow and rigid binary stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, and escapes only temporarily the burdens of gendered identities through his cross-dressing, his endless quest for Fortunata might be interpreted not as search for the real woman, but as a search for his own feminine side, his own anima, or as he says, for the “dancing part of myself” [13, p. 40].

Although Winterson’s metafiction is populated with different Gothic/magical figures, objects and elements – a house with no floors, bottomless pits from which the crocodiles crunch, “words of passion” that fly across the sky in the shape of doves, and mops that brush away the swear-words, among many others – they do not enact the conventional subliminal effect but rather add to Bakhtinian idea of the carnivalesque; on the contrary, harmless mermaids that lack their traditional seduction, funny toads that are no longer associated with making witchcraft, and birds that help Jordan escape the dangers of being locked in the death tower, perform the function of the archetypal supernatural aids or guides that assist the hero in his crossing the first threshold at the “entrance to the zone of magnified power” [3, p. 71]: “I let go at once, but the birds, somehow imagining me as a great fish, carried me up into the air and flew me over the city and out to sea”[13, p. 33].

Even though Jordan mentions the opportunity of using the new technique of grafting for himself, he never manages to transcend his own gender because he never escapes his sex; moreover, in the course of the novel he learns that the “queer” theory of species reproduction based on the French horticultural concept of “grafting” can be applied to the growing plants of female sex. Gender still remains for him a kind of drag, a playfully undertaken act of ever-changing performance, a carnivalesque approach to the unattainable ideal by means of “gesture, the move and the gait” [2, p. 134]. His notorious cross-dressing in the brothel allows him to facilitate a break from imposed restrictions only but temporarily, but it cannot signify a permanent authentic social and cultural change. Since Jordan’s intention to “catch up with [his] fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way” [13, p.80] didn’t work out towards the end of his chaotic narrative, his archetypal quest for individuation of the self cannot be considered as truly completed. On the contrary, the novel’s ending thus suggests the narrator-character’s failure to act for the others and attain a higher form of communal recognition; unlike typical mythopoetic heroes who bring a new sense of harmony to their tribes, Jordan appears to become a dissident hero who is condemned in the “silence of [his] personal despair” [3, p. 362] to initiate yet another quest in his endless search for Fortunata:” As I drew my ship out of London I knew I would never go there again. For a time I felt only sadness, and then, for no reason, I was filled with hope. The future lies ahead like a glittering city, but like the cities of the desert disappears when approached” [13, p. 144].

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