“The constantly diminishing future [referenced by queer poet Mark Doty],” Jack Halberstam writes in his 2005 work In Queer Time and Place, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS … by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity,” (2). Literature as a form of expression oftentimes relies on a rather linear understanding of plot and narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement are taught as scripture to students from a young age, forging an understanding of what “good writing” is that can be challenging to dismantle. On the contrary, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body takes these conventions as almost a challenge, crafting a narrative whose temporality (or lack thereof) is crucial to its composition and broader perspective on relationships.
Written on the Body presents itself as an inherently-queer work in the narrator’s ambiguous gender: they invoke past relationships with both women and men, and given the reference to secretive gay lovers, it can be reasonably inferred that queerness is othered within Winterson’s narrative world. Therefore, queerness takes on the sort of marginalized identity it does in our world, to an extent. Jack Halberstam’s reading of queer time as a direct reaction to the long history of oppression and hostility the queer community has faced, then, takes on greater credence in Written on the Body as an expression of a legacy larger than the narrator’s rocky love life.
The thought process behind this post is not fully explored, but I believe that the implications here span beyond either In Queer Time and Place or Written on the Body and moreso concern the manner in which we read queer literature. Queer literature itself emerges as a consequence of a legacy that any one of us cannot fully comprehend, and Written on the Body exists as a stellar example of how, to use the words of Eli Clare’s The Mountain, language is “haunted, strengthened, underscored” by the bodies which have shaped it (11).
Queer time is, as you’ve argued, almost an anti-time, a rejection of the linear and “straight” narratives we’ve always been told. Written on the Body is queer for a myriad of reasons, but if you’re looking to expand this post for your essay (and I think you should!) what if you analyzed the absence of aging in the novel? The narrator is, presumably, a young-ish adult, but they are not looking to marry or have children or settle down in any way… they’re almost an anti-hero of the linear, “straight” progression of life. They throw bombs into marriages and families, they work as a translator––which is solitary work done on one’s own time (no pun intended), etc. The narrator is ageless and directionless, just like how the novel itself is unstructured!