Written on a Body
September 6, 2007
Reading this book at first was so puzzling. But slowly I began to realize that she (narrator) wasn’t talking to me the audience but to her lover through her self. Up until page 19 it was all the narrators internal dialogue, which I found very interesting in the narrative form. As I began to read on the book does seem POSTMODERN in the sense that after page nineteen the narrative style changes she is now talking to me the audience, and slowly her characters start to form bodies and tendencies. It was very bizarre but interesting. I read her other novel Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit and I remember the “plot” being disjointed like a fading memory but I never looked at the with POSTMODERNISM in mind. I wonder how this novel is relating the life or the love cycles of this woman, what does it mean to be a woman in love with women in a society that tells you that you are supposed to love only the opposite gender in that sexual way? But I don’t think that the narrator ever specifies that she is a woman but as a reader somehow I know she is. Hmmm interesting…….
October 14, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I, too had quite a bit of difficulty in trying to ‘get’ the novel. I actually assumed that the narrator was a man, but Winterson does do a rather clever job of making it impossible to definitively decide if the narrator is male or female. It kind of reminds me of Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg that we all are, with no gender, etc. I like your idea of the narrator’s love as a ‘cycle.’ I was hoping that you would expand on this a bit more, since I am having difficulty grasping how the narrator’s love life brings us back to the beginning. Is it the beginning of the novel, when we meet the narrator, or the beginning of the narrator’s love life, which exists in a realm outside of the novel. If so, is Winterson commenting on the novel form, saying that it is simply a moment or a couple of selected moments in a character’s life that is extracted from a narrative that exists, and is just waiting to be written? I’m not so sure how I got to this, I guess I’m just trying to use my gut to understand how the author is approaching (or revealing?)her own process of writing.
October 16, 2007 at 12:04 pm
[...] 09/06/2007- Written On The Body [...]