Thoughts: Written on the Body

Grrr.

Winterson's Written on the Body eludes me in my search for a research paper I could possibly have a substantial argument on. That, and I just hate the fucking story, but there really isn't anything else I want to write on. Perhaps I shall take my rage out on this book through this paper.

Firstly, I want to address the use of lyrics to describe the body. I was really going to write on this but it's not enough. Winterson uses three ways to describe love and the body, being through text, which is the point of the book, combining lyrics with scientific discourse in order to come to a more palatable coherent way of discussing the phenomenom. But the problem with text, is that it falls into the trap of cliches, and that any ay we try to describe our feelings of love, it always ends up in some cliche of some sort. "I love you" is a cliche, acknowledged by the narrator, and instead of embracing the cliche, the narrator and Louise try to avoid it, try to define their love some other way.

I fucking hate the idea of resistance if there is no solution. Sorry. Just had to say it. If you must reinvent cliches, you might as well reinvent the language. I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I guess I'm buying into the theory of linguistic determination - that our language that we learn shapes our thoughts. Does this mean our language limits our thoughts? I have seen it said that since we can't express something, we just let go of it entirely.

Then there's that distaste for science. True, science is dry. True, science doesn't really explain everything about the body - it doesn't explain emotions, it doesn't explain personality. We are limited by technology and by medical discourse. It all becomes really cut and dry and Winterson just adds lyricism to it. But the problem I have with the novel's distaste for science, or embrace of science, is that it doesn't really do anything for the narrator.

Which leads into my biggest problem with the novel: the fac tthat it's so physically focused. The narrator only seems to have this love-sick personality and is CONSTANTLY. LOOKING. FOR. FUCKING. DRAMA. Either s/he's trying to run away by embracing the cliche of "settling down" - which completely missed the point of love - or s/he embraces the idea of love... and PICKS A MARRIED WOMAN.Twice, in fact. "You bloody idiot. Another married woman." (page 32)

So, in the end it's mostly a novel of beautiful language, but physical description. It does sort of evade cliches, but it doesnt really define in the end what the measure of love is. (In that the measure of love is loss.) The text is there, but what's beyond the body? What's written on the body is only so much; it's all physicality, but what's beyond the body? In the end, WHO is Louise? Why does the narrator love her aside from the fact that she's beautiful? Why does Louise love the narrator? All we get is "You were the most beautiful creature I had ever seen." What?

Susann Cokal who wrote "Expression in a Diffuse Landscape" said, "Louise does in fact largley represent language itself, perhaps more than she represents a living, breathing person." It's significant to understand that the most eloquent of passages come with thoughts of Louise. Louise as an abstract then, does make sense. Within the physical contexts expressed though... not really, because the thoughts being communicated are quite obviously concrete, in avoidance of cliches, but concrete nonetheless.

Who is Louise?

What's beyond the body?

Louise is:
an invention of the narrator
a concept representing language
a person.
a channel the narrator uses lyricism in tro deny cliches.
defined by physicality and what the narrator feels.
the medium through which the reader attempts to connect to the narrator
A person?
a woman, a wife, a daughter. a disappointed lover. A friend? Who are her friends?
a potential cancer patient.
limited by the first-person narrative - as a result we never really get to know her, the same as we never get to know the nrrator.
limited by cliches?
limited by physical description. by cancer?
limited in agency? Only to the reader.
freed? By love? from love? from cancer?
freed from stereotypes? cliches?

WHO IS LOUISE?

Thoughts: Written on the Body II

In Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson attempts to avoid the cliches of romance in terms of text by resorting to lyricism. - through use of a genderless narrator. The character who expresses the demand to avoid cliches, however, is Louise, where she demands the narrator to strip away everything that's been learnt from the past relationships: "I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learnt, forget them. Forget you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until the day you have proved it" (54).

Personate note: I don't suppose I need to tell anybody here how really stupid that sounds?

Louise is the catalyst for lyrical language. Everytime the narrator sees her, there's a flurry of poetic language that doesn't really come out anywhere else in the novel. Other girlfriends are discussed in shorter, more prosaic terms. When Louise is not around, the narrator turns to medical texts and tries to poeticise them. The times when the narrator is in direct contact with Louise, in an intimate encounter, are the times when the language is most vague and defying of general conventions such as grammar and punctuation. Louise gives the narrator a cause to fight for, a cliche to fall back on - a motif from a bad Russian novel (in Gail Right's terms,"this isn't War and Peace, honey, this is Yorkshire" (160) and she's painfully right).

Louise is the narrator's physical obsession. From when they first meet to when the narrator abandons her, and after that, the narrator continues to be obsessed with her cancer and her body. Most of the emotions described in the text have something to do with physicality - the love they share is physical; the cancer that afflicts their relationship is physical; the . Part of the reason why it's so hard to relate to the narrator as a character and to Louise is that Louise is described only in physical terms, leading to the next point:
EDIT 22:45 - Louise is therefore objectified and worshipped.

Louise is an agent outside of the narrator. This is the most problematic part, seeing as the narrator limits her agency so much because the narrator is so self-focused on its own preception of Louise. Therefore, Louise is a limited agent outside of the narrator, and we get to know her only through the narrator's interactions with her family, or in relation to her interactions with others. I could list down what the reader could find out about Louise: she's strong-minded and independent (she needs to control Elgin). She's intelligent (Elgin met her at a Debate conference). She needs to be engaged intellectually (that's why she doesn't have sex with Elgin). And finally, she's elusive to the narrator as she is to the reader: she disappears at the end and the narrator is left with just memories of her body.


...

Okay. Time to put together some quotes.