Written On The Body by Jeanette
Winterson (1992)
Recommended by Anita
My body is written on.
I have three tattoos. Each
is a carefully chosen design, patterns I knew I wanted indelibly inked upon me.
The nuances shift, but their core meaning doesn’t: they represent transitions.
I got each one during the final element of a pupa stage. They are memento moris of my past lives.
(We tattooed people do
witter on about how deep ‘n’ meaningful the things are. Boring bores, the lot
of us.)
But, lately, I’ve been
wondering if there’s another, less highfalutin' reason for my tattoos. I think
it’s also an expression of my background, a branch from the same root as liking
amusement arcades and gaud at Christmas. Loads of people I grew up with have
them. If you don’t tattoo the name of your child on your arm, well, what kind
of mother are you? Don’t you love your kid?
I feel kinship with
Jeanette Winterson. She has my name! There are precious few of us Little Jeans
around. But, too, she was a working-class girl who found herself running with a
different crowd when she went to university. For me, the process had already
started before I left Norwich (a schoolfriend accused me of being a class
traitor), but it certainly solidified after the age of eighteen. I never
thought of it as a conscious denial of my background, although I’m sure others
saw it that way. As I wrote in Week Sixteen, there are only two people from my
pre-uni days involved in Two Readers.
It's a minor part of the book, but Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit captures
this chequered experience well: the excitement and feeling of belonging with your
new life, coupled with the sense of loss for the old.
In her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson revisits the material she drew on for Oranges. Her conflicted feelings about her upbringing (and apart from the class aspect, her family circumstances are very different to mine) continue to be source material for her. Having read those two works, I approached Written On The Body with veiled autobiography in mind.
It was an interesting book to tackle directly after The Pursuit Of Love.
I had said them many times before, dropping them like
coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true. I had said them
many times before but not to you. I had given them as forget-me-nots to girls
who should have known better. I had used them as bullets and barter. I don’t
like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I
don’t mean it then what else am I?
The gender of Written On The Body’s narrator is never
revealed, yet (perhaps because of my association of Winterson with memoir) I
found myself thinking of that narrator as ‘her’ throughout. I assumed one of the
country’s top lesbians must be mining her own relationships with women.
But of course it could be a man, or a transgendered person. (There is no Smack My Bitch Up ‘surprise’ twist
ending). I also suspect Winterson was drawing attention to the difficulty of
expression without gender pronouns, critiquing how binary and constricting
those categories are.
We begin by reading of the narrator’s back love catalogue. The
prose is graceful, charged and often erotic, although it does sometimes spill
into floridness.
I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it
slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink under the deep red
weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.
I do like it when
Winterson gets a bit bawdier, too.
June. The wettest June on record. We made love every day.
Most of the narrator’s women
are flowing-locked anarcho goddesses (‘I had a girlfriend once who was addicted
to starlit nights.’ Not addicted to Tetris,
then?), but perhaps this is intended to show how the narrator
idealises love objects rather than as a parade of unrealistic females. The
Helenest of these Helens Of Troy is Louise: the pair embark upon an erotic and
emotional odyssey until we discover that Louise’s body is more than
honey-filled breasts and love-saturated heart. It has been invaded by leukaemia.
We are beholden to our
bodies and, suicide aside, it is the body that has the ultimate control: the
power of life and death. (That’s another reason why I decided to get tattooed.
The body does enough stuff that you don’t want it to do, might as well get it
to do something you do). The narrator now has to come to terms with this, and
the book’s interlude, the extended prose poem ‘The Cells, Tissues, Systems And
Cavities Of The Body’, explores Louise’s physicality as something more than
sexual. It is an expression of the narrator’s love, framed by the new awareness of
the cancer spraying graffiti on the inside and outside of Louise’s body.
Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you,
trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies
your blood? Why are there no lock gates on your portal vein?
Like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace, the narrator roams around:
you can hear fingertips running on the corrugated roof of Louise’s mouth.
But, when the narrator returns to the corporeal world, the hard fact of Louise’s
illness is still there. What is more important, the health of the body or that
of the heart?
One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without
warning?
This novel didn’t, for me,
have the personal clout of Oranges Are
Not The Only Fruit: the story seems deliberately not as strong, almost as if Winterson
thinks that an abstract narrative is a more valid approach to
literature. But I really enjoyed getting lost within Louise’s capilliaries, climbing
her spine stepladder, being swaddled by her intestines.
And while we’re thinking
of bodies, what body do you picture when you hear ‘mermaid’? Ariel in The Little Mermaid? Daryl Hannah in Splash? Cher in fancy dress? Jerry Hall
on the cover of Siren? Chances are it
isn’t this…
Cryptozoology is a word I
had never encountered before I met Anita. It refers to the study of fake or
unproven creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and Norfolk’s own
Black Shuck. (Look at this fascinating list of cryptids – a Man-Eating Tree!).
And then there’s The Buxton Mermaid, that beauty above.
Anita restored her. She is
also her ambassador, telling her story to the press and to museums. Her care of
The Buxton Mermaid goes beyond a job, and that is typical Anita. She
will give her time and her support to those (and crypto-those) who she loves. She’s
certainly done it for me. When I was in the midst of a crisis, Anita not only
propped me up with words and hugs, she came to my place and did my washing-up.
When everything is surreal because sadness is so huge, to have someone who can
gently re-orientate your world, so you’re in no doubt it’s still worth living
in because you have friends like her… it is a key to recovery.
I love conversing with Anita about books. (She's Tim's sister, equally as erudite as he) and as the year, and this
project, has written itself on my body, I've realised I have my Two Readers friends to thank for
more than just their book recommendation. It’s talking about the posts, sharing
thoughts on the books in person, and to hear other interpretations of the stories and ideas that has been so incredibly inspiring, and the motivating factor in getting me to book fifty-one out of
fifty-three.
Hold on to your hats. There
are two amazing works coming down the
Two Readers bridleway before midnight
on the 31st of December, 2013.
