The Books: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery; ‘The Semiotics of Sex,’ by Jeanette Winterson

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, a collection of essays about art by Jeanette Winterson.

Jeanette Winterson’s celebrated first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a memoir, which goes a long way to describing her ego. Ego is not a bad thing. You need one as an artist, and you need it to be healthy, strong, and resilient. She had a story to tell, about her childhood, being a little girl adopted by a couple in Manchester, who were evangelical proselytizers. She grew up in near-poverty, and was sent out into the streets every day, with religious tracts to hand out to the worn-down populace. These were not educated people. They were her parents. Her mother was somewhat monstrous, and abused Jeanette, locking her out of the house on freezing cold days, and basically emotionally terrorizing her. But the little girl was resilient, and the little girl discovered reading. It helped keep her alive, it helped her fantasy-world take on more reality than the real world. That was a good thing, not a delusional thing. It helped save her life. The little girl was also not … girlie enough … or Winterson sensed early on that she was somehow … “different.” Eventually, she got a scholarship to Oxford, and off she went into the clear blue yonder. The writing of Oranges is what is superior about it. It is immediately apparent that you are in the presence of that very very rare thing in literature: a unique voice. It is Winterson’s voice that matters, that resonates, although people of course focus on “what happens” as well.

In Winterson’s mind, focusing on “what happens” ONLY, to the exclusion of all else, is a dumb thing to do. Dumb because then you cut yourself off from the wellspring of the whole tradition. If you only focus on “what happens” in any given book, and you need that to align with modern-day conceptions of language and political correctness or identity politics or correct views of gender, or whatever … then you are basically saying “I am only comfortable reading books written in the last 25 years.” You are saying that you don’t need to read King Lear. You are saying that T.S. Eliot has nothing to show you. You are saying that Huckleberry Finn is irrelevant. Camille Paglia has been writing about this for 30 years now, and if anything the situation is even more dire now: it’s reaching its Baroque stage, with students declaring they cannot read Ovid because they find it “triggering.” The word “trigger” has been extremely helpful for victims of assault and soldiers who have seen combat, but it is now being used to describe any mildly uncomfortable or even upsetting experience. It is lessening the usefulness of the word, and it’s happened so quickly! You’re SUPPOSED to be “upset” by certain books. Being “upset” is not being “triggered.” But I’ll leave that rant for another day. I can only pray that the phase passes soon, and we will look back on this “trigger” nonsense as one of those weird trends that happen sometimes and thank God that silliness is all over with.

Because of Winterson’s sexual orientation, she gets lumped in with lesbian writers. Orange won a prize devoted to LGBT literature. She did not turn the prize down, of course, but she dislikes the implications, especially from fans who only read books written by Queer writers, who have no concept of the grand sweep of the canon, because that was all written by straight white males, and what can we learn from THEM, and on and on. Winterson refers to herself as a “pervert,” as opposed to gay, or lesbian, and is in favor of a more fluid and imaginative presentation of identity. Orlando is the book that changed her world, that opened up the possibilities for persona and gender and sexuality (not to mention literature), and you can see its influence everywhere in her writing.

In the essay “The Semiotics of Sex” she takes on the narrow-mindedness of those in sub-groups who are only interested in listening to people from the same group. It’s interesting but if you limit yourself like that, then you actually limit your thoughts, your ability to think. It’s like those who only watch Fox News. Propaganda is used because it works. And gay interest groups can be just as rigid and unforgiving as reactionary right-wing groups. Just as exclusive. Winterson fights against that. There is no reason that straight people should not read Virginia Woolf, and there is no reason that gay people should not read Mark Twain.

I’ll tell a little story and I won’t name names. After the reading of my script at the Vineyard, I was approached by a hugely successful producing team. They were at the reading and they pulled me aside in the lobby. They were so enthusiastic. Their enthusiasm was genuine. The following week they took me out to lunch to discuss. They have had a lot of success (like Tony Award success) with gay plays. My play is not a gay play. It’s about a straight couple. And one of the guys said to me, “Is there any possibility you could re-think the play as a gay story? We could sell it no problem.” I have no idea what the expression on my face was, but I am sure it was something in the realm of “What did you just say to me?” because he said, “Just a suggestion.” The same guy said, “I also have to admit that I felt a little left out watching your play. Like, maybe the two could attend a gay wedding or maybe they have gay friends or something – it could just be a line or something – nothing big … I just know I felt a little left out.” I have often wondered if I made that comment up, but I know I didn’t. I was polite, and said that sure, I would think about it, interesting point (while inside I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? Over my dead body.”) There is not at all a dearth of gay plays right now. As a matter of fact, maybe 90% of the plays produced in NYC right now have gay characters, gay themes. The whole thing went down very politely and it was an okay meeting (nothing came of it) but I called my cousin Mike as I left the diner, literally – as I was walking out the door, and said, “Listen, I can’t have any more of these lunches. I need an agent, like, YESTERDAY. What do I do?” I had no business sitting at that table. That is what agents are for. 2 weeks later I had lunch with one of the best agents in the business, who had flipped over my script, really got it … and I moved on. But it was extremely illuminating. It’s a very New York scene thing. I hesitated to write about this initially because, of course, those two men were wonderful and were in love with the script, and their backers and financial people would be more inclined to support a gay play, that’s their reality. They would know how it sell it if it was about two gay men. That was realistic on their part (although surreal from my side of the table). I also hesitated to share it because maybe it makes it sound like I’m like, “Gay plays? Ew!! Who wants THOSE?” Which of course I’m not saying at all. But I wrote what I wrote, and I was thinking of my script as part of the tradition of other male-female two-person plays (Frankie and Johnny, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Two for the Seesaw, Same Time Next Year, and on and on and on), and that’s the genre my script belongs to, so sell it according to THAT, not according to what it’s NOT. (Ultimately, what that meeting revealed was that those guys were not the right fit for my play. No harm no foul.) Those were two casual comments that were part of a much larger conversation that went on for a couple of hours. But it really gave me a lay of the land. Two straight people fucking and fighting made one of those guys feel “left out.” Now I can watch Love Valour Compassion and not feel left out. Maybe it’s because I’m more used to “seeing myself” onstage than gay men are (although, as I mentioned, that is no longer true at all when gay plays dominate the New York theatre scene). I can watch a war movie and enjoy it, even though there are no women in it. I love Moby Dick even though the only women in the story are the broads who ladle out the clam chowder in the beginning chapters. But this guy seemed truly taken aback that there wasn’t one reference to him and his group in the play. If I had been sarcastically inclined, I might have said, “Well, I don’t mention South Koreans either. Or Inuits. Or people with scoliosis.” Not everything is going to be inclusive of every single thing. Elementary, right? Obviously, his reaction is emblematic of larger issues, of the grouping-together of minorities into small sub-cultures (for extremely valid reasons!), and the long history of total ERASURE that such groups have experienced. But the end result can be that sort of weird not-getting-it-if-it’s-not-about-you thing.

Studies have been done showing that women, on the whole, are more “adventurous” readers than men. I imagine that that’s because from a very early age, in school, the majority of classic books you have to read are by men. Listen, I’m not complaining. Those Dead White Males wrote some of the best books ever written. So women are trained to be able to look at the world through male eyes, and not see a problem with it. The opposite, however, is NOT true. I cannot tell you how many people I love and respect who list their “what I read this year” book lists and it’s all male authors. They don’t even realize it. A blogger I love actually realized that he didn’t read any books by women, and devoted an entire year to only female authors. He read everything: popular literature, classic literature, avant-garde stuff. I was so psyched for him and psyched that he had the wherewithal to recognize his own blind-spot. There was a huge brouhaha a couple of years ago when the AV Club put together a list of the 50 best films of the last 50 years or something along those lines. It was a group endeavor, the entire staff was involved in putting together that list. And on that list, there was not ONE film directed by a woman. NOT ONE. This is blindness. It’s not necessarily malevolent, it’s just … blinders. And what’s even worse was that not once along the way of putting together that huge piece did anyone say, “Huh. Where are the women?” Okay, fine, if you want to put together a list of the greatest films from 1910 to 1940 … then fine, you get a pass. There were women directing then, but just not as many. But since 1950 or whatever? You have no excuse. Kudos to the AV Club folks for being truly chagrined once the error was pointed out to them. They seemed truly embarrassed. This is an example of being erased from the culture, and women (and other minorities) are right to call that shit out for the bullshit that it is.

Taken too far, though, and you get into tokenism. “We need a woman just so we can check off that little box and not get bitched at for it.” Gross.

Winterson gets frustrated with the focus on sex and sexuality. As she says in the excerpt below, she reads Oscar Wilde not because he is gay but because of the “depth-charge” he provides. If you boil someone down to who they choose to fuck, you are limiting yourself. Who someone chooses to fuck is often the least interesting thing about them. What matters is the writing itself. Is the writing good? Do you respond to it? Does it address something that you feel is true about life? Winterson refuses to participate in a queer culture that rejects T.S. Eliot because of his Catholicism or his politics or his sexual orientation. She has no interest in cutting herself off from anything that may inspire, challenge, heal.

But I’ll (finally) give her the floor.

Can you tell I love this book?

Excerpt from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery: ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, by Jeanette Winterson

It is through the acceptance of breakdown; breakdown of fellowship, of trust, of community, of communication, of language, of love, that we begin to break down ourselves, a fragmented society afraid of feeling.

Against this fear, art is fresh healing and fresh pain. The rebel writer who brings healing and pain, need not be a Marxist or a Socialist, need not be political in the journalistic sense and may fail the shifting tests of Correctness, while standing as a rebuke to the hollowed out days and as a refuge from our stray hearts. Communist and People’s Man, Stephen Spender, had the right credentials, but Catholic and cultural reactionary T.S. Eliot made the poetry. It is not always so paradoxical but it can be, and the above example should be reason enough not to judge the work by the writer. Judge the writer by the work.

When I read Adrienne Rich or Oscar Wilde, rebels of very different types, the fact of their homosexuality should not be uppermost. I am not reading their work to get at their private lives, I am reading their work because I need the depth-charge it carries.

Their formal significance, the strength of their images, their fidelity to language makes it possible for them to reach me across distance and time. If each were not an exceptional writer, neither would be able to reach beyond the interests of their own sub-group. The trust is that both have an audience who do not share the sexuality or the subversiveness of playwright and poet but who cannot fail to be affected by those elements when they read Rich and Wilde. Art succeeds where polemic fails.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of heterosexual readers who won’t touch books by Queers and plenty of Queer readers who are only out to scan a bent kiss. We all know of men who won’t read books by women and in spite of the backlash that dresses this up in high sounding notions of creativity, it is ordinary terror of difference. Men do not feel comfortable looking at the world through eyes that are not male. It has nothing to do with sentences or syntax, it is sexism by any other name. It would be a pity of lesbians and gay men retreated into the same kind of cultural separatism. We learn early how to live in two worlds; our own and that of the dominant model, why not learn how to live in multiple worlds? The strange prismatic world that art offers? I do not want to read only books by women, only books by Queers, I want all that there is, so long as it is genuine and it seems to me that to choose our reading matter according to the sex and/or sexuality of the writer is a dismal way to read. For lesbians and gay men it has been vital to create our own counter-culture but that does not mean that there is nothing in straight culture that we can use. We are more sophisticated than that and it is worth remembering that the conventional mind is its own prison.

The man who won’t read Virginia Woolf, the lesbian who won’t touch T.S. Eliot, are both putting subjective concerns in between themselves and the work. Literature, whether made by heterosexuals or homosexuals, whether to do with lives gay or straight, packs in it supplies of energy and emotion that all of us need. Obviously if a thing is not art, we will not get any artistic pleasure out of it and we will find it void of the kind of energy and emotion we can draw on indefinitely. It is difficult, when we are surrounded by trivia makers and trivia merchants, all claiming for themselves the power of art, not to fall for the lie that there is no such thing or that it is anything. The smallness of it all is depressing and it is inevitable that we will have to whip out the magnifying glass of our own interests to bring the thing up to size. ‘Is it about me?’ ‘Is it amusing?’ ‘Is it dirty?’ ‘What about the sex?’ are not aesthetic questions but they are the questions asked by most reviewers and by most readers most of the time. Unless we set up criteria of judgement that are relevant to literature, and not to sociology, entertainment, topicality etc., we are going to find it harder and harder to know what it is that separates art from everything else.