The Books: “Written On the Body” (Jeanette Winterson)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson

In Written On the Body (perhaps Winterson’s one of best-loved books – it’s not at all my favorite, as a matter of fact I started losing interest right around reading this one – but I know I am in the minority!) we have an unnamed narrator – and we do not know the gender. It could be a man, could be a woman. Can’t tell. The narrator is a womanizer – a ladies’ man/woman … But, surprisingly, the narrator falls in love with a married woman named Louise (naturally a redhead – all of Winterson’s objects of desire are redheads). Louise is married to a cancer researcher, but it is through the eyes of the narrator that we fall head over heels for her. The narrator ends up breaking off the affair with Louise when it is found out she has cancer. This becomes Winterson’s extended metaphor: the body, and its systems … and how each system/part reflects an aspect of love, or loss. Winterson, in this book, seems interested in excavating loss – and how the memories of a loved one remain, for better or for worse … one of the recurring questions in the book is something along the lines of “Why is the measure of love loss?” I’ve got to say: Winterson, in this book, in her writing on love, and what it feels like to lose someone and be haunted by that person – puts other writesr to shame. She seems paramount to me. She is a grandiose and romantic writer – but never sappy. There are lines where you actually have to put down the book and take a moment. Or at least I did. And if I know anything I know that the measure of love is LOSS. She is able to write about that particular brand of sadness in a way I find captivating, and completely real. She speaks directly TO her audience … and in breaking down the body (we get to know Louise’s body intimately), and focusing on this or that … she keeps the whole thing from being too literal. Anyone who’s read her books will know what I mean. Nicholas Sparks, for example, may THINK he’s writing about love – but he’s only re-stirring some lukewarm pot of sappy sentimentality and rehashing “ideas” about soulmates for an adoring stupid public who wouldn’t know real romantic writing if it knocked them on the ucipital mapilary. And yet his reputation is that of a guy who writes sweeping romances. Baffling. To me, Winterson – by avoiding telling a straight-out story – by holding back on certain expected things (even the name or gender of her narrator) – she puts us into the realm of poetry and experience, rather than “and then this happened, and this happened.” She’s a poet. The title of Written On the Body is perfect because that is exactly what Winterson does here. The body is a canvas. When you love someone you write yourself ON them. And love, at that intense level, is not separate from desire, or lust, or whatever. It’s all the same. I’ve had that kind of love. You know. Where fucking is the same as a deep philosophical conversation or laughing hysterically about Young Frankenstein – there is no separation, it is not “here we are naked, and here we are clothed” – because you’re that connected, it’s all one. That is love.

Here, in Winterson’s world, love is a visceral palpable thing. But it is only in the context of LOSS that we can even really perceive love – and that’s something that sucks big-time.

Like I mentioned before – my favorites of Winterson’s books are the fairy-tales … This is more of a contemplation, and to me it takes on a same-ness, after a while – whereas something like Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here) never feels “the same”. But again, that’s just me. In the lexicon of Jeanette Winterson – Written On the Body is probably her most beloved book, and got her her most devoted audience. I may not be in that group, but that is neither here nor there. Based only on The Passion, I’ll read whatever this woman writes. And there are sections of Written On the Body that rank with the best romantic writing of the last 20 years, certainly. No contest.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson

Into the heart of my childish vanities, Louise’s face, Louise’s words, ‘I will never let you go.’ This is what I have been afraid of, what I’ve avoided through so many shaky liaisons. I’m addicted to the first six months. It’s the midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn’t do any of it again. I did suspect that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra overcoat. Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her I forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it’s not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it’s no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked.

I never used to think about my previous girlfriends until I took up with Jacqueline. I never had the time. With Jacqueline I settled into a parody of the sporting colonel, the tweedy cove with a line-up of trophies and a dozen reminiscences about each. I have caught myself fancying a glass of sherry and a little mental dalliance with Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Judith, Estelle … Estelle, I haven’t thought about Estelle for years. She had a scrap metal business. No, no, no! I don’t want to go backwards in time like a sci-fi thriller. What is it to me that Estelle had a clapped-out Rolls-Royce with a pneumatic back seat? I can still smell the leather.

Louise’s face. Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid. Am I hoping for a saviour in Louise? An almighty scouring of deed and misdeed, leaving the slab clean and white. In Japan they do a nice virgin substitute with the white of an egg. For twenty-four hours at least, you can have a new hymen. In Europe we have always preferred a half lemon. Not only does it act as a crude pessary, it also makes it very difficult for the most persistent of men to drop anchor in what may seem the most pliant of women. Tightness passes for newness; the man believes his little bride has satisfyingly sealed depths. He can look forward to plunging her inch by inch.

Cheating is easy. There’s no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.

When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don’t look don’t smell, don’t dream. The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage. Swear you’ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that’s what will happen. Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex. The charm didn’t work. You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn’t work. It’s not your fault is it?

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. A friend of mine, a banker and a very rich man who had travelled the world, told me he was getting married. I was surprised because I knew that for years he had been obsessed with a dancer who for wild and proper reasons of her own wouldn’t commit. Finally he had lost patience and chosen a pleasant steady girl who ran a riding school. I saw him at his flat the weekend before his wedding. He told me how serious he was about marriage, how he had read the wedding service and found it beautiful. Within its confines he sensed happiness. Just then the doorbell rang and he took receipt of a van-load of white lilies. He was arranging them enthusiastically and telling me his theories on love, when the doorbell rang again and he took receipt of a crate of Veuve Clicquot and a huge tin of caviare. He had the table set and I noticed how often he looked at his watch.

‘After we’re married,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine wanting another woman.’ The doorbell rang a third time. It was the dancer. She had come for the weekend. ‘I’m not married yet,’ he said.

When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else.