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Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

 | 
Jean-Michel Ganteau
, 
Christine Reynier

The Ethics of Re-Writing: Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005)

Eileen Williams-Wanquet

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, Weight, re-writes the myth of Atlas in terms of the author’s personal story, to offer a reflexion on fate, freedom and responsibility, which brings Romanticism and Modernism clearly back into the sphere of ethics. The self can choose to cast off the weight of the stories thrust upon it and be true to itself. The solution offered to the basic ethical problem of the dissonance between the self and the world is to be found in an ideal vision of wholeness reached through imagination, desire and love.

Full text

  • 1 David Parker, ‘Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s,’ Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, (...)
  • 2 Lisbeth Korthals Altes, ‘Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire,’ Études littéraires 31.3 ( (...)

1Although there is general consensus on what David Parker, among others, has called ‘the turn to ethics’1 in both Western literature and literary criticism, situated by some, like Parker himself, in the 1990s, and by others, like Liesbeth Korthals Altes,2 in the 1980s, there is no homogeneous attitude as to the meaning of the term ‘ethics.’ Nevertheless, concerning critical approaches, the understanding of the term seems, in this beginning of the twenty-first century, to be polarised into two main approaches, as Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau point out:

  • 3 Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau eds., The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction si (...)

On the one hand what can be called a (neo)-humanist ethics of a rather normative, deontic type, implying an overall moral dimension, generally associated with the ‘stable ego of the character’ as present in classic realist texts based on linguistic transparency.... On the other hand, a newer Levinasian and post-Levinasian ethics, of a non-deontic, non foundational, non cognitive and above all non ontological type....3

  • 4 Max Weber, L’Éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme, trans. Isabelle Kalinowski (1920; Pari (...)
  • 5 Georg Lukàcs expresses the same idea: ‘Le roman est l’épopée sans Dieu.’ Georg Lukàcs, La théorie d (...)
  • 6 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 4; 114.

2Starting from this customary distinction between two main ethical modes, I would like to suggest that the quarrel between the terms ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ refers to different attempts to solve what is in fact the same basic problem, i.e. the split between self and other, which is the legacy of Modernity’s secularisation of thought, of what Max Weber calls the ‘dis-enchantement of the world’4 that separated faith and reason.5 Since its origins at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the novel has been trying to find ways of bridging the gap between individual desire and collective survival. As Zygmunt Bauman rightly points out, the ‘balance between peaceful co-operation and personal self-assertion’ are ‘characteristically modern moral concerns’ that are still valid today.6

  • 7 Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism. Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: E.U.P., 1976) 36; 14.
  • 8 Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999) 17.

3Now, the proposed solution to this basic problem has varied according to historical and cultural contexts, the terms ‘morals’ or ‘ethics’ simply referring to new ways of solving an old problem. The neo-humanist ethical criticism of the end of the twentieth century, is in fact, as Robert Eaglestone points out, a ‘renegotiation’ of the traditional Leavisite ‘humanist, autonomous modernist paradigm of literary criticism.’7 The traditional model is based on the ‘world-vision’ of Modernity, in which man is seen as an ‘independent, autonomous, and thus essentially nonsocial moral being’ (Bauman 82), whose natural passions must be kept in check through imposed universal rational norms in the name of progress. This is re-thought in Aristotelian terms by a neo-humanist like Martha Nussbaum, adding emotional and practical dimensions to universal law. Andrew Gibson sees this type of moral/ethical criticism, which Robert Eaglestone calls an ‘epi-reading’ that is ‘blind to textuality’ (Eaglestone 4–5, 61), as particularly suited to nineteenth-century texts.8 But this model of an ethics focuses on a realistic mode, leaving out Modernity’s other attitude to the self/other opposition. This other attitude is, of course that of the romantic mode. Romanticism has generally been left out of discussions on ethics or morals, no doubt because of its focus on the self at the expense of society, but forgetting its search for a solution to the basic dissonance self/world in an ideal vision of wholeness reached through imagination and emotion. Similarly the newer postmodern Levinas-inspired ethics seems to incorporate and go beyond a purely textually-oriented deconstructivism linked to the post-structural crisis of language, which Eaglestone associates to a ‘graphi-reading’ that ‘prioritise [s] language, text and reading over a nostalgia for the human’ (Eaglestone 61).

  • 9 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990) 409.

4The latest approach to ethics (both in criticism and in literary texts) has had to adapt both to the post-structuralist crisis of the subject and to the historical failure of the Enlightenment project. It would seem to aim at both a re-association between experimental formalism and traditional historicism, and a ‘re-association of sensibility.’ Furthermore, there is a shift in focus, from social rules, to the I-Thou relation. Whereas in neo-humanist ethics, ‘[i] ndividual responsibility is translated... as the responsibility for following... the socially endorsed, [rational] ethical-legal rules’ (Bauman 29), in a ‘postmodern ethics’ as defined by Zygmunt Bauman and inspired by the work of Levinas, responsibility is returned to the ‘moral party of two,’ to the relation between self and other that precedes the addition of a third party, which makes up society. Crucial here is Levinas’ idea of being for the Other before one can be with the other. This is ‘the first reality of the self, a starting point rather than a product of society. It precedes all engagement with the other... It has therefore no foundation.’ As such, ‘moral responsibility is a mystery contrary to reason’ (Bauman 13). Paul Ricœur comes to the same conclusion in Soi-même comme un autre, admitting that he does not know from whom or from where comes the injunction from Other that founds the ethical/moral self: ‘Sur cette aporie de l’Autre, le discours philosophique s’arrête.’9 This relation to the Other can only function through empathy (Bauman 143). Indeed, ‘in the history of Levinas’ ethical philosophy, erotic love supplies the frame in which “being for,”... the moral condition as such, was to be plotted’ (Bauman 92).

  • 10 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 27–28.

5In this postmodern ethics that rehabilitates the self through the presence of the other within it, key words linked to the pivotal notion of responsibility are: alterity, truth, dialogue, creation, imagination, affectivity, and change. The focus is on the future rather than on the past, on change rather than the maintenance of fixed rules, on dissensus rather than consensus, on freedom rather than determinism, on the singular rather than the universal, on affectivity rather than reason, yet on the other rather than on the self. But no term excludes the other in a mode of thought that is fundamentally non-dualistic. Ethics as ‘an encounter with alterity, which is to say the shifting and opening-up of settled modes of thinking and feeling’10 through imagining new modes of being, is associated to endless questioning.

6When Jeanette Winterson was commissioned by Canongate to write a novel for a series called Myths, she chose to re-write the Greek myth of Atlas in a novel entitled Weight (2005). The very fact of reworking an old story is ethical, as it represents the ‘shifting and opening up of settled modes of thinking’ (Attridge 27–28). The past is re-appropriated and regenerated, as the new story is grafted onto the old one that is repeated with a difference. In addition, as Andrew Gibson points out, myth is ‘a mode of narrative that is suited to [ethics] in that it inhabits a hinterland between actuality and possibility’ (Gibson 176).

  • 11 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit I (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 93–104; 105–162.
  • 12 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (1995; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. 1997) 19.
  • 13 Jeanette Winterson, Weight (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005) xviii; xx.

7I would like to show how the formal aspects of Winterson’s re-writing are inherently ethical in the postmodern sense of the term. And also to suggest that she offers a solution to the self-Other problem in typically Romantic terms, bringing Romanticism and Modernism clearly back into the sphere of ethics that has generally been limited to realism. To do so, I shall structure my reading of the novel according to the three ethical movements referred to by Paul Ricœur in Temps et récit I, as Mimesis I, II and II, whereby the existing explanation of the world transmitted by ideology-laden stories is first ‘prefigured’ or imitated, then ‘configured’ or re-written in an imaginary ‘quasi-world,’ to be finally ‘refigured’ and sent back to the world as an ‘ought,’ as a call for change,11 demanding an ethical response on the part of the reader that Adam Zachary Newton calls ‘hermeneutic ethics.’12 In a part entitled ‘Introduction,’ the author herself mentions the rooting of her novel in the myth of Atlas holding up the world as ‘recognition,’ adding that she ‘wants to tell the story again,’ and hoping that ‘someone will hear.’13

1 Mimesis I or recognition

8Winterson explicitly roots her novel in the Greek myth, as well as in her own life, in a literary tradition, in modern scientific discourse, and in contemporary critical theory that she is obviously familiar with. In a ‘source note’ that opens the novel, Winterson refers to herself in the third person, telling the reader that: ‘the author referred to Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Volume One and Volume Two in her research for this book.’ She then tells us, in the Introduction, that Weight will retell the Greek myth of Atlas and Hercules. Here, the flesh and blood author addresses the reader directly, taking the risk of exposing herself, suppressing distance, and implicitly asking for reciprocity. The author conversationally explains why she accepted the ‘telephone call’ asking her to rewrite a myth: ‘Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you;’—her terms seem to echo the Levinasian ‘Here I am’ as responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. She then explains that the call only revealed her existing latent interest in the Atlas myth: ‘These chance sightings... begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face’ (Winterson 2005, xvii). Once more, her words seem to echo the ethical idea that ‘the other is other only in so far as it has not yet come into being’ (Attridge 32)—in other words, her encounter with the myth brought into existence the ‘otherness’ that already existed within herself.

  • 14 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
  • 15 Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography,’ Collected Essays, vol. IV, ed. Leonard Woolf (1925; London: Th (...)
  • 16 When she scathingly rejects what ‘human beings as a mass’ call ‘real,’ lumping together in this cat (...)
  • 17 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (London Arnold, 1992) 16.
  • 18 Susana Onega, Jeanette Winterson (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006) 31.

9In this Introduction that echoes ideas expressed in Art Objects,14 Winterson explicitly roots her retelling of the universal timeless story in her personal life and in the literary tradition she adheres to. Echoing the italicised dedication to her present companion, ‘For Deborah Warner, who lifted the weight,’ the Introduction begins with the words: ‘Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.’ This explicit choice of an individual outlook on life is then clearly set in Romantic and Modernist traditions. When Winterson writes, ‘Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important’ (Winterson 2005 xix), she seems to echo Virginia Woolf, who declares in ‘The New Biography’: ‘On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality.’ Like Woolf, Winterson privileges the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth over the ‘rainbow-like intangibility’ of personality.15 She privileges Ricœur’s ‘ipse-identity,’ the inner inexpressible core that marks us out as what we really are, over his ‘idem-identity,’ the more external possibility of identifying the self as sameness in time, the ‘who’ of selfhood over the ‘what’ of character (Ricœur 1990, 137–166).16 She clearly rejects what Nietzsche called the ‘herd mentality,’ situating herself in ‘a late modern Romanticism,’ which, according to Patricia Waugh, has its roots in Nietzsche’s reading of Romantic individualism and ‘can be traced back to Coleridge.’17 Her announced intention to ‘find permanent truths about human nature’ (Winterson 2005, xx) through her individual outlook, positions her as Blake’s poet/prophet, who, as Susana Onega explains, has ‘the godlike capacity to... create the shape of her own life.’18

  • 19 See Gregory, J. Rubinson, The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson and Carter (Jefferson: McFarlan (...)
  • 20 ‘The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary li (...)
  • 21 Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (London: Minerva, 1985) 12.

10The story is also rooted in the geological history of the world, reflecting the author’s increasing concern with science and technology, and her belief that the poet goes further than the human scientist in the pursuit of knowledge.19 An untitled preface starts off as objective scientific discourse on sedimentary rock, which is then compared to the pages of a book, playfully using larger font to highlight key words.20 The key modernist motif of ‘the world as a book or as a textual labyrinth... points to Winterson’s visionary outlook on art and her belief, with William Blake and the Romantic poets, in the godlike creativity of the human imagination’ (Onega 2006, 230). In addition, the metaphor presents writing as inherently ethical: palimpsestic, incomplete, forever being reshaped. This also echoes Levinas’ definition of a book as, ‘interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks’ (qtd. in Eaglestone 165)—the ‘saying’ (the response) constantly interrupts the ‘sedimentation’ or the ‘said’ (the logos, or the totalising teleological narrative of identity). As in Boating for Beginners, the reader is invited to read ‘between the lines’ of the myth, as ‘the record is far from complete.’21

11The first chapter, in which the first-person narrative voice now seems to have metamorphosed into that of an omniscient god-like narrator, offers a subjective and poetic, yet scientific and panoramic, history of the universe from ‘the beginning’ before ‘space and time,’ through the birth of the earth in ‘the supernova bang’ situated ‘fifteen aeons ago,’ through the ‘miracle’ of the beginning of life and of ‘history’ with the formation of ‘oxygen,’ then the birth of man ‘three or four million years ago,’ to the present day, and beyond to a future when ‘the sun will die’ (Winterson 2005, 3–7). This Romantic vision of the oneness of the universe and of the artist as visionary joins up with a post-humanist vision of history, as a vast timeless cosmic expanse, in which human life merges, barely discernible, from the rest, as expressed in a heterogeneous random enumeration: ‘Rock, sand, soil, fruit, trees, rose, spiders, snails, frogs, fish, cattle, horses, rainfall, sunshine, you and me’ (Winterson 6).

2 Mimesis II or telling the story again

12Winterson actually retells the story of Atlas and Hercules. She fills in the incomplete record, re-contextualises the myth, brings it up to date and changes the ending, re-visiting familiar themes and narrative techniques. All narrative explanations of the world, whether mythical, historical, scientific, or personal, are questionable and open to artistic godlike re-creation through imagination.

  • 22 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1996).

13Weight generally respects the main storyline and characters of the story of Atlas and of Hercules, but turns the myth into a story. Far from totally rejecting storytelling, Winterson reclaims it, makes it new, blurring ‘the traditional boundaries between the literary genres and between the literary and non-literary genres’ (Onega 2006, 12), as she merges traditional storytelling, myth, fantasy, self-reflexivity, historicism and autobiography, the particular and the archetypal. In the Greek myth, Atlas’ mother is Earth or Gaia, who, with Uranus or the sky are the original deities. Winterson, following the Egyptian version, replaces Uranus by Poseidon, the Olympian god of the sea. Their original lovemaking is described in highly poetic and sensual terms by Atlas, Earth’s mountainous shapes recalling those of the Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry :22

My father loved the strong outlines of my mother’s body.... He swept, he sank, he flooded, he re-formed.... When my father wooed my mother she lapped it up. He was playful, he was warm, he waited for her in the bright blue shallows and came a little closer, then drew back, and his pull was to leave a little gift on her shore; a piece of coral, mother of pearl, a shell spiralled as in a dream. (Winterson 2005, 11–12)

14This is juxtaposed with commonplace domestic images to describe cosmic movements, comically underlining the human dimension of the universe, and insisting on its wholeness, as every action reverberates through it: ‘When my mother threw a plate across the room the whole world felt the crash’ (Winterson 2005, 12).

  • 23 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 64.
  • 24 The golden apples were a wedding gift to the goddess Hera from the Earth goddess when Hera married (...)

15Winterson uses a similar narrative method to that used in her first novel, Boating for Beginners, where she revisits the biblical episode of Noah’s Ark. She playfully desacralises and familiarises the impersonal, laconic and fragmented mythical account. She fleshes out the Olympic Gods and Titans—Atlas, Heracles, Poseidon, Earth, Prometheus, Zeus and Hera—into true-to-life characters with a voice, that take part in a coherent chronological narrative, going from ‘Creation’ to the British sending of ‘BEAGLE 2 to Mars’ in 2003 (Winterson 2005, 11, 133). She grafts a popular style onto epic action, comically re-writing myth in updated, familiar, even vulgar language—close to what Gérard Genette calls ‘travesty.’23 Applying what Genette names ‘stylistic expansion’ to the ‘zero-degree style’ of the myth (Genette 304–306), she amplifies details, adds descriptions, and introduces subjective points of view. For example, when Atlas the Titan explains how he took the world on his shoulders, in punishment for rebelling against the Olympian Gods led by Zeus, he tells us: ‘There was a terrible pain in the seventh vertebra of my neck’ (Winterson 2005, 23). She dramatises the story by the use of dialogue between the characters, as when Heracles, Zeus’ bastard son by Alceme, agrees to relieve Atlas of his burden so that Atlas can help him to perform his Eleventh Labour, i.e. to pick the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides.24 Heracles saunters along and addresses Atlas: ‘Have a drink Atlas, you old globe. We’ve all got burdens to bear. Your punishment is to hold up the universe’ (Winterson 2005, 29). She also makes explicit and amplifies the numerous sexual undertones of the myth. Using the other type of ‘amplification’ that Genette calls ‘thematic extension’ (Genette 298), i.e. the adding of narrative content, she invents the apparition of Hera in the Garden when Heracles goes there to kill the serpent Ladon of whom Atlas is afraid. She uses ribaldry to reveal that the basic problem between Heracles and Hera is sexual attraction. As the two friends are drinking wine and Heracles explains:

‘I saw Hera this afternoon. God, what a ball-breaker. You know that story about the Milky Way and how it was the milk I spurted out after she suckled me? Well it wasn’t the milk, it was this stuff, but she’s too much of a lady to tell anyone.’
Heracles was just about to come. ‘This’ll put snow on the Himalayas, eh boy?’
He lay back, scattered over the stars. Go on Atlas, now you.’
(Winterson 2005, 52)

16The style is typically Wintersonian, and perfectly in line with a postmodern ethics. It corresponds to what Gibson calls ‘an ethics of dissolution’ (Gibson 92), that refuses an ‘original and fundamental unity’ to the text, that decentres and blurs narratorial authority, making the subject both herself and other.’ The voice of the flesh and blood author serves as a frame to a text in which the narrative voice alternates between Atlas and Heracles as autodiegetic narrators, and an external omniscient narrative voice that has a panoramic vision and moves in and out of the characters’ minds. In addition the text is interspersed with metalepses (or interruptions by the author), always in italics, which in Susana Onega’s words, convey ‘the disquieting possibility that the extradegetic might be the same as the diegetic, so that not only Jeanette Winterson but also [the readers] are included within the text’ (Onega 2006, 33). Atlas and Heracles’ stories are complementary, as their forward-moving narrative ‘recoils back into the text,’ in digressions that aim at filling in the past and linking up with other related mythical characters and plotlines. Playful typographical variations—italics, capital letters, larger type, blank spaces or asterisks—give the impression of what Gibson calls ‘a proliferation of instances’ (Gibson 97, 95). Yet, both the forward thrust of the story and the fragmentary impression is belied by a pattern of repetitions that merge with the recurring metalepses to confer an inner unity to the text. Words and questions (often in italics) like ‘What? Why? boundaries, desire, nothing, freedom, weight, choice, Fate’ are repeated, reflecting the main themes of the novel. A circular and rhizomatic structure is thus imposed on the chronology, reinforced by the repetition of the titles of the first and last chapters—‘I want to tell the story again’—framing twelve unnumbered central chapters.

17Atlas loses all sense of time and space until the myth finally merges with recent history and science, as real events are mentioned and precisely dated, in the eleventh chapter playfully entitled ‘Woof!’ He changes history by saving the sacrificed Laika (which means ‘Barker’ in Russian) the Soviet dog that became the first animal to orbit the earth in 1957, proving that a living passenger could endure weightlessness. Love grows between the God and the dog. They watch the Russian space station Mir as it crashes into the Pacific. These experiments in gravity reactivate the niggling ‘why?’ that Heracles sowed in his mind ages ago, and his ‘dream of freedom’ prompts ‘a strange thought. Why not put it down?’ (Winterson 2005, 134).

3 Mimesis III or Reconfiguration

18This is where the text circles back to the voice of the flesh-and-blood Jeanette that was heard in the Introduction, as the penultimate chapter entitled ‘Desire’ repeats sentences for the beginning of the novel. The author tells us she writes fiction to try and solve problems that ‘can’t be solved’ (Winterson 2995, 137). True details about her parents and childhood alternate with scientific facts about the birth of life on earth. The globe by her bed that she used to spin as an unhappy child dreaming of another life, and the changes undergone by the earth through time, both become metaphors of other possible lives that she can invent for herself through fiction: ‘I thought that... As a character in my own fiction, I had a chance to escape the facts... Spin the globe. What landmasses are these, unmapped, unnamed?’ (Winterson 2005, 139, 141). The circular movement of the narrative echoes the spinning globe, and Jeanette and Atlas’ narratives merge, as their questions and desire for freedom echo one another. Author, mythical god, and universe become one. The flesh-and-blood Jeanette, indistinguishable from her fictional visionary omniscient alter ego has a godlike creative vision, the possibility of imagining a different story for herself.

  • 25 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (1600; London: Methuen 1961) V. (...)

19The whole text is about the possibility of freeing oneself from the burden of the past, of the narratives that entrap us, about the freedom of the self to make choices. In the chapter entitled ‘Desire,’ Jeanette’s dream is expressed in terms of Atlas’ dream. She tells us that the ‘world’ she made as an angry unhappy child spinning her bedside globe ‘grew’ and ‘started a life of its own,’ adding: ‘it gradually became too big to carry. It’s on my back now, vast and expanding.’ Deciding that ‘there are no limits’ and that ‘the story is curved,’ she gives way to her desire to be free of it: ‘Let me crawl out from under this world I have made... I don’t need the weight. Let it go’ (Winterson 2005, 145–146). Then, in the last chapter, the external narrative voice focuses again on Atlas, whose self is annihilated by ‘the monstrous weight’ that ‘decided everything.’ As the question ‘Why not just put it down?’ returns in a metalepsis, Atlas suddenly decides to ‘let go’ and he ‘put his hands on the floor of the universe or ceiling of the stars’ (Winterson 2005, 149–150). His words echo those of Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice—who refers to the sky as ‘the floor of heaven’—as he explains the Renaissance notion of the Music of the Spheres, whereby man is perceived as a miniature cosmos.25 The universe’s being turned topsy-turvy signals a new birth, as Atlas ‘waited, rigid with doom.’ But, as we are told in italics and capitals: ‘Nothing happened/Write it more substantially—NOTHING.’ Then, the narrator adds: ‘Atlas looked back at his burden. There was no burden’ (Winterson 2005, 150). The flesh-and-blood author has the last word, in a short playful and italicised conclusion: ‘All that we can see is only a fraction of the universe/... Some matter is called dark matter... or... black holes./Or it could be Atlas holding up the universe./ But I think it is Atlas and Laika walking away (Winterson 2005, 150–151). Thus, the story ends playfully on a palindrome, as the god and the dog are united by love.

  • 26 Alain Badiou, L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris, Hatier, 1993) 39; 49.

20The weight that Jeanette wants to put down is a ‘made’ world, a constructed world; it is one of the ‘stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true,’ be they historical or religious or scientific. She tells us: ‘I love it. I hate it. It’s not me, it’s itself. Where am I in the world I have made?... What am I? Atoms/What are atoms? Empty space and points of light’ (Winterson 2005, 143, 145). The last line is an exact repetition of the last words of Sexing the Cherry and an echo of Woolf’s definition of granite-like truth, which has ‘an almost mystic power,’ as it seems ‘to be able to give off for ever... atoms of light’ (Woolf 229). Grafting post-structuralist theory about the constructedness of the subject and postmodern theories of desire onto the Romantic tradition, Winterson rejects ‘the false myths’ which are ‘the fictional projections of others’ and ‘chain us to beliefs in a subject-centred reason,’ to ‘self-consciously and aesthetically’ reshape them, in order to become who she is through desire and creative imagination, viewed as ‘an impulse projected form the drives of the body’ (Waugh 13, 20). She casts off the ‘what’ of idem-identity as ‘itself’ as ‘stories’ or as ‘atoms,’ refusing what Ricœur describes as ‘le recouvrement du qui? par le quoi?’ (Ricœur 1990, 147) in a search of who she is, of her singular selfhood for the truth herself, a truth is to be found in ‘black holes’ made of love. As Susana Onega puts it: ‘Jeanette Winterson is a “hedgehog” type of writer, with love as the single central vision around which her fictions develop’ (Onega 2006, 8). Winterson’s search for truth echoes that described by Alain Badiou’s sense of the term: a ‘vérité’ that is not a ‘savoir,’ a kind of hole made in knowledge.26 This truth is to be found in the love encounter with the other, and the self has the responsibility of being faithful to this event by finding another way of being (Badiou 38). Furthermore, the final ‘I think’ calls for a responsible ethical response on the part of the reader, who is interpellated into thinking about the problem in her turn.

  • 27 Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998).

21The title of the novel, Weight, that cleverly intermingles a myth about burden and scientific experiments concerning gravity, to reflect on the author’s personal burdens—call them her past life, the narratives that have fashioned her, original sin, or karma—and of the possibility of freeing herself, which is one of her central themes, examined, for example, in Sexing the Cherry or in the volume of short stories, The World and Other Places.27 Winterson seems to adopt an attitude, which is close to Nietzsche’s negative outlook on weight as the unbearable responsibility of eternal return, and which is associated to desire (Onega 2006, 89). For Winterson, only desire or passion can free the soul and permit it to escape and recreate a new world for oneself through imagination.

  • 28 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) 28.

22At the heart of Weight is the deeply ethical problematic relationship of self and world, sharing the ‘crucial concern with the analysis of subjectivity’ (Onega 2006, 227) that is to be found in all her work. Winterson offers a solution to the problem of alterity that brings to mind postmodern theories of the subject, like that of Judith Butler developed from the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, according to which the self is both subject and subjected-to. In Judith Butler’s terms: ‘If the subject who speaks is also constituted by the language that she or he speaks, then language is the possibility for the speaking subject, and not merely its instrument of expression.’28 Interpellated by the narratives of others, the self can counter-interpellate by ‘restaging’ an old story. But Winterson does not focus on the political problem of social cohesion with the introduction of the Third (Bauman 110). She is concerned with the basic ‘I-Thou’ relation. Neither can her solution to the self/other problem be situated anywhere on the spectrum going from the pole of complete surrender of the self to the other, to the opposite pole of eradication the Other. She approaches the ethical responsibility of the self for the other from a Romantic perspective, instead of from that of a humanist ethics, which postulates a fundamental opposition between self and other and advocates the suppression of passion in the name of universal reason. Being true and responsible to one’s own emotions is the basis of all living together. As we are part of a whole, any harm done to the tiniest part of this whole will necessarily affect us. When Atlas discovers there is no real burden, that the burden is only discursive, it ‘is a moment of illumination and wholeness [call it Eliot’s ‘the still point,’ Joyce’s ‘epiphany,’ or Kant’s ‘sublime’], when the barriers between self and world collapse and the human being is absorbed into the divine’ (Onega 2006, 93). Winterson’s vision can thus be analysed in the light of a postmodern ethics that perceives responsibility for the other as mystery.

Notes

1 David Parker, ‘Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s,’ Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, eds. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1998) 1.

2 Lisbeth Korthals Altes, ‘Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire,’ Études littéraires 31.3 (été 1999): 39–56.

3 Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau eds., The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) 2. The first approach is represented by critics such as Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, David Parker, Richard Freadman; and the second by critics such as Zygmunt Bauman, Andrew Gibson, Robert Eaglestone, Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida, Drucilla Cornell, Geoffrey Harpham, J. Hillis Miller, Adam Zachary Newton.

4 Max Weber, L’Éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme, trans. Isabelle Kalinowski (1920; Paris: Flammarion, 2002) 166.

5 Georg Lukàcs expresses the same idea: ‘Le roman est l’épopée sans Dieu.’ Georg Lukàcs, La théorie du roman, trans. Jean Clairevoie (1920; Paris: Denoël, 1968) 84.

6 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 4; 114.

7 Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism. Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: E.U.P., 1976) 36; 14.

8 Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999) 17.

9 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990) 409.

10 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 27–28.

11 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit I (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 93–104; 105–162.

12 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (1995; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. 1997) 19.

13 Jeanette Winterson, Weight (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005) xviii; xx.

14 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).

15 Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography,’ Collected Essays, vol. IV, ed. Leonard Woolf (1925; London: The Hogarth Press, 1967) 229–235; 229.

16 When she scathingly rejects what ‘human beings as a mass’ call ‘real,’ lumping together in this category ‘Reality TV, low-grade documentary, factual programmes, “true life” accounts and biographies’ as ‘pointing to the terror of the inner life,’ and announcing her dedication to ‘imagination, the sublime, the poetic, the contemplative, the life of the mind, the soul’s journey,’ Winterson is clearly rejecting Realism and aligning herself with Modernism, as she has often done.

17 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (London Arnold, 1992) 16.

18 Susana Onega, Jeanette Winterson (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006) 31.

19 See Gregory, J. Rubinson, The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson and Carter (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2005) 142–146.

20 ‘The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Ultimately, the record is far from complete. The process of sedimentation in any one place is invariably interrupted by new periods.... The succession of layers is further obscured as strata become twisted or folded....’

21 Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (London: Minerva, 1985) 12.

22 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1996).

23 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 64.

24 The golden apples were a wedding gift to the goddess Hera from the Earth goddess when Hera married Zeus. Hera entrusted the tree to the Hesperides, the seven daughters of Atlas. The garden was guarded by the dragon Ladon.

25 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (1600; London: Methuen 1961) V. i.58.

26 Alain Badiou, L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris, Hatier, 1993) 39; 49.

27 Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998).

28 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) 28.

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