WotB: Quotes, Primary and Secondary
Mar. 23rd, 2006 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaFirst, we have primary source quotes.
Page 11, description of Louise:
You laughed and waved, your body bright beneath the clear green water, its shape fitting your shape, holding you, faithful to you. You turned on your back and your nipples grazed the surface of the river and the river decorated your hair with breads. You are creamy but for your hair your red hair that flanks you on either side.
Page 18: Louise first announces her decision to leave Elgin, surprising the narrator, who has never had a lover declare so firmly that they want to stay (and the narrator, of course, sabotages this by leaving Louise).
You said, "I'm going to leave."
"I thought, Yes, of course you are, you're going back to the shell. I'm an idiot. I've done it again and I said I'd never do it again.
You said, "I told him before we came away. I've told him I won't change my mind even if you change yours."
This is the wrong script. This is the moment where I'm supposed to be self-righteous and angry. This is the moment where you're supposed to flood with tears and tell me how hard it is to say these things and what can you do and what can you do and will I hate you and yes you know I'll hate you and there are no question marks in this speech because it's a fait accompli.
[...]
You said, "I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie."
Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair is blazing and you are saying, "Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one."
Page 26, description of Jacqueline, the lover right before Louise. She sounds perfectly ordinary, ordinarily nice.
Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I'd like done. SHe came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing the lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs of fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.
Page 27, After a long description of how nice the relationship is and how the narrator has "settled down":
"You're bored," my friend said.
Page 28, another physical description of Louise.
If I were painting Louise I'd paint her hair as a swarm of butterflies. A million Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well, she does, it's the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn't rustle but her flesh has the moonlit share of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadaorned.
Page 33, How Elgin met Louise
[Elgin] fell in love with Louise when she beat him single combat at the Debating Society finals.
Page 35, what Louise does for Elgin. Note the last bit. It always fucking comes down to Louise being beautiful in some physical way.
[Elgin] was very eminent, very dull,, very rich. Louise charmed everyone. She brought him attention, contacts, she cooked, she decorated, she was clever, and above all she was beautiful.
Page 39, Louise as a threat to the narrator's own agency and the narrator's return to the cliches that accompany relationships.
Oh louise, I'm not telling the truth. You aren't threatening me, I'm threatening myself. My careful well-earned life means nothing. [...] This prelude and forethought is not unusual but to admit it is to cut through our one way out; the grand excuse of passion. You had no choice, you were swept away. Forces took you and possessed you and you did it but not that's all in the past, you can't understand etc etc. You want to start again etc etc. ... In the late twentieth century we will still look to daemons to explain our commonest action. Adultery is very common. It has no rarity value and yet at an individual level it is explained away again and again as a UFO.
Page 45, Bathsheba vs Narrator
"You told me you weren't having sex with him anymore."
"I thought it was unfair. I didn't want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left."
"I suppose that's why you've never bothered to tell him that he doesn't know how to make you come. [...] And you don't ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he'll find it distasteful. Let's hear it for sexual confidence."
[...] "You let me come," she said.
"Yes, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come."
"I didn't mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there."
"I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do."
===== Completely as an aside, you know what's the reply to that bit? "Drive me home, will you?" My fucking God, woman, your lover is PISSED OFF at you for giving him'her the clap and you expect a drive home? How stupid can you fucking get? =====
Page 49, description of Louise, more personal
There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bad. [...] She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.
Page 52, the cliche "I Love You"
I was protesting with a stream of superlatives, beginning to sound like an advertising hack. Naturally this model had to be the best the most important, the winderful even the incomparable. Nouns have no worth these days unless they bank with a couple of Highstreet adjectives. The more I underlined it the hollower it sounded.
Page 54, some stupid lines which tell the narrator to forget cliches.
"I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in another bedroom in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it."
"How shall I prove it?"
"I can't tell you what to do."
page 56, the narrator breaking up with Jacqueline, and the quote which points to agency of the narrator:
... I mumbled something about yes as usual but things had changed. THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had changed things. Things don't change, they're not like the seasons moving on a dirunal round. People change things. There are victims of change but not victims of things. Why do I collude in this mis-use of language? I can't make it easier for Jacqueline however I put it. I can make it a bit easier for me and I suppose that's what I'm doing.
Page 57, something that shows the narrator's obsession with Louise. (Man, how does anybody call this love? Sounds really creepy to me.) Also lines out how the narrator has fallen into yet another cliche - not being able to articulate the fact that s/he has fallen in love with someone else.
I would like to come to you with all the confidence of a computer programmer, sure that we could find the answers if only we asked the proper questions. Why aren't I going according to plan? How stupid it sounds to say I don't know and shrug and behave like every other idiot who's fallen in love and can't explain it. I've had a lot of practice, I should be able to explain it. The only word I can think of is Louise.
Page 67, physical description of Louise
[...] She had a fine straight nose, severe and demanding.
Her mouth contradicted her nose, not because it wasn't serious, but because it was sensual. It was full, lascivious in its depth, with a touch of cruelty. The nose and the mouth working together produced an odd effect of ascetic sexuality. There was discernment as well as desire in the picture. She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.
Same page, moving into how to treat Louise now.
Louise's tastes had no place in the late twentieth century where sex is about revealing not concealing. She enjoyed the titllation of suggestion. Her pleasure was in slow certain aroulsa, a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals. She was not a D. H. Lawrence type; no-one could take Louise with animal inevitability. It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could onlyu be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself. She preferred celibacy to tupping.
Page 76, Louise as the new cliche in the narrator's life.
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?
Page 85, when the narrator first meets Louise
Yes, that day. I saw her from my bedroom window and rushed out. It was an act of kinds on my part but a very delightful one. It was I who had telephoned her the following day. She very kindly invited me to lunch. All that I could follow, what I couldn't follow was the spring of her motive. I don't lack self-confidence but I'm not beautiful, that is a word reserved for very few people, people such as Louise herself. I told her this.
"You can't see what I can see." She stroked my face. "You are a pool of clear water where the light plays."
Page 89, Louise's agency demonstrated on the narrator
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
Page 92: the narrator trying to appropriate agency from Louise
I started to walkhome, convincing myself that I would never hear from Louise again. She would go to Switzerland with Elgin and have a baby.
Followed by a hint of Louise's personality
A year ago Louise had given up her job at Elgin's request so they could start a family. She had miscarried once and had no wish to do it again. She told me she was firm about no baby. Did I believe her? SHe had given me the one reason I believe. She said, "It might look like Elgin."
===== What the fuck is up with all these people marrying people they don't love or even find attractive? =====
Page 96: the narrator discuss the idea of Love. Louise seems to be a catalyst for these sorts of thoughts in this novel.
No-one knows what forces draw two people together. There are plenty of theories; astrology, chemistry, mutual need, biological drive. Mgazings and manuals worldwide will tell you how to pick the perfect partner. Dating agencies stress the science of their approach although having a computer does not make one a scientist. .... Sortly the pseudo-lab coat approach of dating by details will make way for a genuine experiment whose results, however unusual, will remain controllable. Or so they say. (See splitting the atom, gene therapy, in vitro fertilisation, cross hormone cultures, even the humble cathode ray for similar statements.)
Page 99: Louise as a concept within the narrator
When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
LONG SPIEL OF POETIC STUFF INVOLVING THE MIXTURE OF SCIENCE AND LYRICS CATEGORIZED BY BODILY PARTS.
Page 144, holistic description of Louise. I have issue with this, obviously.
Louise, dipterous girl born in flames, 35. 34 22 36. 10 years married. 5 months with me. Doctorate in Art History. First class mind. 1 miscarriage (or 2?0 0 children. 2 arms, 2 legs, too many white T-cells. 97 months to live.
Page 159, Gail Right's advice
"You made a mistake. [...] You shouldn't have run out on her."
Run out on her? That doesn't sound like the heroics I'd had in mind. Hadn't I sacrificed myself for her? Offered my life for her life?
"She wasn't a child."
Yes she was. My child. My baby. The tender thing I wanted to protect.
"You didn't give her a change to say what she wanted. You left."
I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn't it better for me to live a half-life for her sake? ... Who do I think I am? Sir Launcelot? Louise is a Pre-Raphaelite beautify but that doesn't make me a mediaeval knight. Nevertheless I desperately wanted to be right.
More Gail Right vs. the narrator...
"Honey, if there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it."
"Is that what you think of me?"
"I think you're a crazy fool. Maybe you didn't love her. [...] The trouble with you ... is that you want to live in a novel."
"Rubbish. I never read novels. Except Russian ones."
"They're the worst. This isn't War and Peace honey, it's Yorkshire."
=== Unfortunately for the narrator, I think she's completely right ===
Page 187, a very depressing consolation
A friend of mine said before I left London, "At least your relationship with Louise didn't fail. It was the perfect romance."
Was it? Is that what perfection costs? Operatic heroics and a tragic end? What about a wasteful end? Most opera ends wastefully. The happy endings are compromises. Is that the choice?
Louise, stares in your eyes, my own constellation. ... No compromise. I should have trusted you but I lost my nerve.
Page 189, Louise as a concept and a return to cliches.
"I couldn't find her. I couldn't even get near finding her. It's as if Louise never existed, like a characters in a book. Did I invent her?"
"No, but you tried to," said Gail. "She wasn't yours for the making. [...] You still love her then?"
"With all my heart."
"What will you do?"
"What can I do? Louise once said, 'It's the cliches that cause the trouble.' WHat do you want me to say? That I'll get over it? That's right, isn't it? Time is a great deadener."
Then...
Rubinson, Gergory J. "Body Languages: Sciencetific and Aesthetic Discourses in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body." Critique (Winter 2001), Vol 42, Issue 2, 218 - 232.
... the narrator strives to understand and articulate his/her love in a way that is not bound up with cliches. (220)
Ironically, the discourse that proves to be richest for the narrator's poetic imagination of Louise and love is, ostensibly, scientific. (221)
Scientific advances threaten to render material reality and the body superfluous... (222)
... Winterson depicts [medical science]'s failure to treat the invidiaul holistically... (223)
-- And a huge chunk which I agree with --
... In dealing with Louise, s/he is committed to a holistic view of the body, but it cannot be denied that it is still an objectifying view. Louise's status as an indepedent person is increasingly jeopardized as the narrator constructs her in a plethora of metaphoric terms...
... the narrator never construes her as a subject in her own right. Despite, or because of, all the transcendent images she sinspires, she is an object for worship.
In the end we know very little about Louise: that she has red hair, that she's Australian. Nearly everything else is the narrator's subjective construction of her as an erotic object. ... Louise's role in the novel is principally as an object to be fought over. (226)
The narrator recognizes that she/he has pasrticipated in the fictionalization of Louise - made of her an aesthetic object and so deprived her of her personhood and agency. (227)
Cokal, Susann. "Expression in a Diffuse Lanscape: Contexts for Jeanette Winterson's Lyricism." Style (Spring 2004), Vol. 38, Issue 1, 16 - 37.
.. SHe first estblishes what normative novelistic form and language are, the cliches and the scripts that characters ... normally follow even at the most emotional moments of their lives.
For her it maybe the linguistic lanscape against which a story plays that gives the content its transcendece, language that to a large degree creates emotion. (19)
Without the formal flurries, Winterson's content seems inevitably predetermined and repetitive.
Only the endless possibilities within language enable us to revisit the love story. (20)
A cliche is comfortable precisely in its imprecision ... a culturally determined script.
And yet this comfortable is a trap that ultimately leads to unhappiness. (21)
It is significant that the first time we hear of her/his profession, it is through Louise's lips. ... Symbolically, Louise (love) gives the narrator a profession... it is the narrator's profession as a translator that creates a context - the library meeting - in which finding love is possible. In the end, language creatives love. (22)
... Louise does in fact largely represent language itself, perhaps more than she represents a living, breathing person. (24)
.. It shows up the gender roles usually written onto the physical body, the behavrios that have become predictable and contextual. (27)
The very word 'cancer" introduces mystery into the nove: the sexual story is planned out, scripted, early on, but with cancer the outcome of that story turns murky; it is as if, in trying to avoid cliched scripts, Louise and the narrator invite disease. "Cancer" also reveals the origins of lyricism - which lie in the sense of loss, not love... (28)
With Louise gone, poetry leaves the text; the lover moves into an ugly cold hovel... in Yorkshire and works in a wine-and-fish bar. The narrator will now try, once again, to read Louise. (29)
Lyricism means that expression and the body are freed up... (32)
Hansen, Jennifer L. "Written on the Body, Written by the Senses." Philosophy and Literature (October 2005), Vol. 29, Issue 2, 365 - 378.
The nature of language is that it is public; language allows us to communicate our feelings, experiences, or perceptions in words that make sense to a listener. (368)
We must engage in the interaction between the protagonist and Louise to understand anything at all about our protagonist.
... a story engages the reader's passions with detailed description of how the beloved smells, tastes, and feels to the touch. (370)
The raptuous description of the crevices, cavities, and chasms of Louise's body becomes an emotional account of love, of love lost. (375)
Murdoch claims that philosophy cannot leave a space open for the reader. However, one problem with this view of what philosophers must always do is that it presupposes that philosophers can obtain a god's eye view on all phenomena, including ourselves. (377)
Other works consulted:
Hoff, Molly. "Winterson's Written on the Body." Explicator (Spring 2002), Vol. 60, Issue 3, 179 - 181.
... Fuck, I thought I had another one, but it looks like it ain't on the novel at all. JesusAllahBuddha. *goes back to the journal database*
Started at around 4pm. Finished 1am! Yay!
Page 11, description of Louise:
You laughed and waved, your body bright beneath the clear green water, its shape fitting your shape, holding you, faithful to you. You turned on your back and your nipples grazed the surface of the river and the river decorated your hair with breads. You are creamy but for your hair your red hair that flanks you on either side.
Page 18: Louise first announces her decision to leave Elgin, surprising the narrator, who has never had a lover declare so firmly that they want to stay (and the narrator, of course, sabotages this by leaving Louise).
You said, "I'm going to leave."
"I thought, Yes, of course you are, you're going back to the shell. I'm an idiot. I've done it again and I said I'd never do it again.
You said, "I told him before we came away. I've told him I won't change my mind even if you change yours."
This is the wrong script. This is the moment where I'm supposed to be self-righteous and angry. This is the moment where you're supposed to flood with tears and tell me how hard it is to say these things and what can you do and what can you do and will I hate you and yes you know I'll hate you and there are no question marks in this speech because it's a fait accompli.
[...]
You said, "I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie."
Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair is blazing and you are saying, "Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one."
Page 26, description of Jacqueline, the lover right before Louise. She sounds perfectly ordinary, ordinarily nice.
Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I'd like done. SHe came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing the lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs of fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.
Page 27, After a long description of how nice the relationship is and how the narrator has "settled down":
"You're bored," my friend said.
Page 28, another physical description of Louise.
If I were painting Louise I'd paint her hair as a swarm of butterflies. A million Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well, she does, it's the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn't rustle but her flesh has the moonlit share of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadaorned.
Page 33, How Elgin met Louise
[Elgin] fell in love with Louise when she beat him single combat at the Debating Society finals.
Page 35, what Louise does for Elgin. Note the last bit. It always fucking comes down to Louise being beautiful in some physical way.
[Elgin] was very eminent, very dull,, very rich. Louise charmed everyone. She brought him attention, contacts, she cooked, she decorated, she was clever, and above all she was beautiful.
Page 39, Louise as a threat to the narrator's own agency and the narrator's return to the cliches that accompany relationships.
Oh louise, I'm not telling the truth. You aren't threatening me, I'm threatening myself. My careful well-earned life means nothing. [...] This prelude and forethought is not unusual but to admit it is to cut through our one way out; the grand excuse of passion. You had no choice, you were swept away. Forces took you and possessed you and you did it but not that's all in the past, you can't understand etc etc. You want to start again etc etc. ... In the late twentieth century we will still look to daemons to explain our commonest action. Adultery is very common. It has no rarity value and yet at an individual level it is explained away again and again as a UFO.
Page 45, Bathsheba vs Narrator
"You told me you weren't having sex with him anymore."
"I thought it was unfair. I didn't want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left."
"I suppose that's why you've never bothered to tell him that he doesn't know how to make you come. [...] And you don't ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he'll find it distasteful. Let's hear it for sexual confidence."
[...] "You let me come," she said.
"Yes, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come."
"I didn't mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there."
"I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do."
===== Completely as an aside, you know what's the reply to that bit? "Drive me home, will you?" My fucking God, woman, your lover is PISSED OFF at you for giving him'her the clap and you expect a drive home? How stupid can you fucking get? =====
Page 49, description of Louise, more personal
There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bad. [...] She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.
Page 52, the cliche "I Love You"
I was protesting with a stream of superlatives, beginning to sound like an advertising hack. Naturally this model had to be the best the most important, the winderful even the incomparable. Nouns have no worth these days unless they bank with a couple of Highstreet adjectives. The more I underlined it the hollower it sounded.
Page 54, some stupid lines which tell the narrator to forget cliches.
"I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in another bedroom in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it."
"How shall I prove it?"
"I can't tell you what to do."
page 56, the narrator breaking up with Jacqueline, and the quote which points to agency of the narrator:
... I mumbled something about yes as usual but things had changed. THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had changed things. Things don't change, they're not like the seasons moving on a dirunal round. People change things. There are victims of change but not victims of things. Why do I collude in this mis-use of language? I can't make it easier for Jacqueline however I put it. I can make it a bit easier for me and I suppose that's what I'm doing.
Page 57, something that shows the narrator's obsession with Louise. (Man, how does anybody call this love? Sounds really creepy to me.) Also lines out how the narrator has fallen into yet another cliche - not being able to articulate the fact that s/he has fallen in love with someone else.
I would like to come to you with all the confidence of a computer programmer, sure that we could find the answers if only we asked the proper questions. Why aren't I going according to plan? How stupid it sounds to say I don't know and shrug and behave like every other idiot who's fallen in love and can't explain it. I've had a lot of practice, I should be able to explain it. The only word I can think of is Louise.
Page 67, physical description of Louise
[...] She had a fine straight nose, severe and demanding.
Her mouth contradicted her nose, not because it wasn't serious, but because it was sensual. It was full, lascivious in its depth, with a touch of cruelty. The nose and the mouth working together produced an odd effect of ascetic sexuality. There was discernment as well as desire in the picture. She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.
Same page, moving into how to treat Louise now.
Louise's tastes had no place in the late twentieth century where sex is about revealing not concealing. She enjoyed the titllation of suggestion. Her pleasure was in slow certain aroulsa, a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals. She was not a D. H. Lawrence type; no-one could take Louise with animal inevitability. It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could onlyu be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself. She preferred celibacy to tupping.
Page 76, Louise as the new cliche in the narrator's life.
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?
Page 85, when the narrator first meets Louise
Yes, that day. I saw her from my bedroom window and rushed out. It was an act of kinds on my part but a very delightful one. It was I who had telephoned her the following day. She very kindly invited me to lunch. All that I could follow, what I couldn't follow was the spring of her motive. I don't lack self-confidence but I'm not beautiful, that is a word reserved for very few people, people such as Louise herself. I told her this.
"You can't see what I can see." She stroked my face. "You are a pool of clear water where the light plays."
Page 89, Louise's agency demonstrated on the narrator
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
Page 92: the narrator trying to appropriate agency from Louise
I started to walkhome, convincing myself that I would never hear from Louise again. She would go to Switzerland with Elgin and have a baby.
Followed by a hint of Louise's personality
A year ago Louise had given up her job at Elgin's request so they could start a family. She had miscarried once and had no wish to do it again. She told me she was firm about no baby. Did I believe her? SHe had given me the one reason I believe. She said, "It might look like Elgin."
===== What the fuck is up with all these people marrying people they don't love or even find attractive? =====
Page 96: the narrator discuss the idea of Love. Louise seems to be a catalyst for these sorts of thoughts in this novel.
No-one knows what forces draw two people together. There are plenty of theories; astrology, chemistry, mutual need, biological drive. Mgazings and manuals worldwide will tell you how to pick the perfect partner. Dating agencies stress the science of their approach although having a computer does not make one a scientist. .... Sortly the pseudo-lab coat approach of dating by details will make way for a genuine experiment whose results, however unusual, will remain controllable. Or so they say. (See splitting the atom, gene therapy, in vitro fertilisation, cross hormone cultures, even the humble cathode ray for similar statements.)
Page 99: Louise as a concept within the narrator
When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
LONG SPIEL OF POETIC STUFF INVOLVING THE MIXTURE OF SCIENCE AND LYRICS CATEGORIZED BY BODILY PARTS.
Page 144, holistic description of Louise. I have issue with this, obviously.
Louise, dipterous girl born in flames, 35. 34 22 36. 10 years married. 5 months with me. Doctorate in Art History. First class mind. 1 miscarriage (or 2?0 0 children. 2 arms, 2 legs, too many white T-cells. 97 months to live.
Page 159, Gail Right's advice
"You made a mistake. [...] You shouldn't have run out on her."
Run out on her? That doesn't sound like the heroics I'd had in mind. Hadn't I sacrificed myself for her? Offered my life for her life?
"She wasn't a child."
Yes she was. My child. My baby. The tender thing I wanted to protect.
"You didn't give her a change to say what she wanted. You left."
I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn't it better for me to live a half-life for her sake? ... Who do I think I am? Sir Launcelot? Louise is a Pre-Raphaelite beautify but that doesn't make me a mediaeval knight. Nevertheless I desperately wanted to be right.
More Gail Right vs. the narrator...
"Honey, if there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it."
"Is that what you think of me?"
"I think you're a crazy fool. Maybe you didn't love her. [...] The trouble with you ... is that you want to live in a novel."
"Rubbish. I never read novels. Except Russian ones."
"They're the worst. This isn't War and Peace honey, it's Yorkshire."
=== Unfortunately for the narrator, I think she's completely right ===
Page 187, a very depressing consolation
A friend of mine said before I left London, "At least your relationship with Louise didn't fail. It was the perfect romance."
Was it? Is that what perfection costs? Operatic heroics and a tragic end? What about a wasteful end? Most opera ends wastefully. The happy endings are compromises. Is that the choice?
Louise, stares in your eyes, my own constellation. ... No compromise. I should have trusted you but I lost my nerve.
Page 189, Louise as a concept and a return to cliches.
"I couldn't find her. I couldn't even get near finding her. It's as if Louise never existed, like a characters in a book. Did I invent her?"
"No, but you tried to," said Gail. "She wasn't yours for the making. [...] You still love her then?"
"With all my heart."
"What will you do?"
"What can I do? Louise once said, 'It's the cliches that cause the trouble.' WHat do you want me to say? That I'll get over it? That's right, isn't it? Time is a great deadener."
Then...
Rubinson, Gergory J. "Body Languages: Sciencetific and Aesthetic Discourses in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body." Critique (Winter 2001), Vol 42, Issue 2, 218 - 232.
... the narrator strives to understand and articulate his/her love in a way that is not bound up with cliches. (220)
Ironically, the discourse that proves to be richest for the narrator's poetic imagination of Louise and love is, ostensibly, scientific. (221)
Scientific advances threaten to render material reality and the body superfluous... (222)
... Winterson depicts [medical science]'s failure to treat the invidiaul holistically... (223)
-- And a huge chunk which I agree with --
... In dealing with Louise, s/he is committed to a holistic view of the body, but it cannot be denied that it is still an objectifying view. Louise's status as an indepedent person is increasingly jeopardized as the narrator constructs her in a plethora of metaphoric terms...
... the narrator never construes her as a subject in her own right. Despite, or because of, all the transcendent images she sinspires, she is an object for worship.
In the end we know very little about Louise: that she has red hair, that she's Australian. Nearly everything else is the narrator's subjective construction of her as an erotic object. ... Louise's role in the novel is principally as an object to be fought over. (226)
The narrator recognizes that she/he has pasrticipated in the fictionalization of Louise - made of her an aesthetic object and so deprived her of her personhood and agency. (227)
Cokal, Susann. "Expression in a Diffuse Lanscape: Contexts for Jeanette Winterson's Lyricism." Style (Spring 2004), Vol. 38, Issue 1, 16 - 37.
.. SHe first estblishes what normative novelistic form and language are, the cliches and the scripts that characters ... normally follow even at the most emotional moments of their lives.
For her it maybe the linguistic lanscape against which a story plays that gives the content its transcendece, language that to a large degree creates emotion. (19)
Without the formal flurries, Winterson's content seems inevitably predetermined and repetitive.
Only the endless possibilities within language enable us to revisit the love story. (20)
A cliche is comfortable precisely in its imprecision ... a culturally determined script.
And yet this comfortable is a trap that ultimately leads to unhappiness. (21)
It is significant that the first time we hear of her/his profession, it is through Louise's lips. ... Symbolically, Louise (love) gives the narrator a profession... it is the narrator's profession as a translator that creates a context - the library meeting - in which finding love is possible. In the end, language creatives love. (22)
... Louise does in fact largely represent language itself, perhaps more than she represents a living, breathing person. (24)
.. It shows up the gender roles usually written onto the physical body, the behavrios that have become predictable and contextual. (27)
The very word 'cancer" introduces mystery into the nove: the sexual story is planned out, scripted, early on, but with cancer the outcome of that story turns murky; it is as if, in trying to avoid cliched scripts, Louise and the narrator invite disease. "Cancer" also reveals the origins of lyricism - which lie in the sense of loss, not love... (28)
With Louise gone, poetry leaves the text; the lover moves into an ugly cold hovel... in Yorkshire and works in a wine-and-fish bar. The narrator will now try, once again, to read Louise. (29)
Lyricism means that expression and the body are freed up... (32)
Hansen, Jennifer L. "Written on the Body, Written by the Senses." Philosophy and Literature (October 2005), Vol. 29, Issue 2, 365 - 378.
The nature of language is that it is public; language allows us to communicate our feelings, experiences, or perceptions in words that make sense to a listener. (368)
We must engage in the interaction between the protagonist and Louise to understand anything at all about our protagonist.
... a story engages the reader's passions with detailed description of how the beloved smells, tastes, and feels to the touch. (370)
The raptuous description of the crevices, cavities, and chasms of Louise's body becomes an emotional account of love, of love lost. (375)
Murdoch claims that philosophy cannot leave a space open for the reader. However, one problem with this view of what philosophers must always do is that it presupposes that philosophers can obtain a god's eye view on all phenomena, including ourselves. (377)
Other works consulted:
Hoff, Molly. "Winterson's Written on the Body." Explicator (Spring 2002), Vol. 60, Issue 3, 179 - 181.
... Fuck, I thought I had another one, but it looks like it ain't on the novel at all. JesusAllahBuddha. *goes back to the journal database*
Started at around 4pm. Finished 1am! Yay!