Author: Maria Alster

Riki Ann Wilkins writes that, “[o]ne’s body continues to display a multitude of information through nonlinguistic signs, the language of gesture, posture, stance, and clothing”(Wilkins 153). The language that surrounds the body is core to gender presentation. As gender is so often treated as constant, so too is the language assigned to a body. But what then of the narrator of Winterson’s novel, Written on the Body. While their body is present, and core to the narrative, that same body is given no descriptors that might gender it. The narrator’s actions still display information, but the body itself is an empty space in the narrative. Perhaps, by removing those gendered signs, Winterson is allowing the reader to examine a body devoid of the very signs we use to shape gender.
Perhaps, on this ungendered body Winterson creates an alternative manner of analyzing gender, more in line with Wilkins’ theory. Winterson writes, “[w]ritten on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there”(Winterson 89). The narrator’s gender is part of this code, inscribe on the body, but Winterson only shows the reader the narrator’s body under a light that ignores the gendered signs. The body we are shown is covered in signs without the context of gender. Thus the body symbols are separate from the gendered symbols. Winterson uses this divide to hint at the difficulty in interpreting actions without a gendered form. As gendered signs can limit the interpretation of gendered actions, the interpretive framework for other symbols expands in the absence of gender signifiers. Thus the narrator’s symbolic form is rendered more complex once freed from the interpretive limitations of gender.

In Cereus Blooms at Night, Shani Mootoo writes about a group of boys slowly burning a praying mantis alive. The mantis seems to be an allusion to Mala Ramchandin and her abuse. “As the flame got nearer the mantis’ body began to arch. The insect twisted its head, its front legs a blur. The instant the flame touched a back leg, the mantis’ movements stopped abruptly. It became as rigid as if it had disappeared”(MooToo 91). The mantis is ultimately frozen by its trauma, it loses its capacity for action. The mantis seems to disappear. This paragraph is immediately followed by the line, “Pohpoh [Mala] bit her lower lip. She stood perfectly still”(Ibid). Watching the mantis’ pain makes Mala frozen, like the mantis, incapable of acting in an attempt to stop the insect’s incineration.

Moreover, like the mantis, Mala is still, rigid, a term that could hint at the behavior of a corpse. Both the mantis and Mala could then be removed from existence, or, perhaps even reduced to corpses, in the context of their trauma. The issue with this interpretation is that it denies any agency to Mala or the Mantis. However, by observing this scene in comparison to Tyler’s comment that he “wonder[s] at how many of us […] either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping”(Ibid 90). This statement allows the reader to interpret a certain, albeit limited, agency on Mala’s part.

Anne Carson’s novel, Autobiography of Red, deviates from expectations by retelling the myth of Geryon and Herakles while allowing Geryon to remember the more traditional version. Instead of simply rewriting the myth, Carson is examining Geryon’s story in the context a story that ends in Geryon death. This process of contextualizing the novel against the ancient myth is made apparent when Carson writes, “New ending/All over the world the beautiful red breeze went on blowing hand/in hand”(38). This is a declaration that, by the end of the novel, the ending of the myth will have drastically changed.
By engaging Geryon’s death in the traditional myth of Herakles, and stating a new ending, Carson is not only challenging our perceptions of the heroic Herakles inside the text, but in the context of the myth, and, perhaps, even in the broader scope of the ideals of conquest and power that the mythical Herakles represents.
But this is a dangerous interpretive path as it leads us away from the main character, who is promised a new ending, Geryon. If we take this self-aware focus on shifting the story as a shift from the traditional narratives, then we must shift our perspective away from a traditional hero, and towards Geryon, a character who lacks clear symbolic structures. His identity is something unclear, symbolized by the vague word “red,” otherwise undescribed by language. And it is only through the contextualized shift in focus that Geryon’s redness can be giving a new ending, while remaining separate from language

In Written on the Body, time is nonlinear and unstable. Rather than adhere to a predictable framework of time, the narrator shifts from moment to moment with only the barest hints of an ordered chronology. This ambiguous timeline is contrived in order to force the reader to experience time in the same no normative manner as the narrator. The narrator experience what Judith Halberstan refers to as Queer time. The narrator flits through the moments of their life in pursuit of love, however any love they find is doomed. Most of their relationships are begun with the understanding that they are temporary and certainly deviate from normal behavior. The narrator speaks of love, but not of family or aging. At the same time they obsess over black holes and, after learning of Louise’s sickness, the slow wasting of diseased flesh towards death and decay. But, for the narrator, that is the basic rule of essence. To the narrator, “time always ends” (Winterson 18).
Even if the narrator accepts the dream of a “saggy armchair of clichés” (10), they do not have a form that would fit in normative time. As obsessed as the narrator might be with bodies, their own body is formless. Without the markings of gender or sexuality, they cannot slip into this normalized time. Just as the narrator seems to exist in an ambiguous moment, or string of moments, in time, they also inhabit an ambiguous space. Unable to slip into a more traditional lifestyle, the narrator could even inhabit their own “time without end”(18), at least for a moment.

“I am living in a red bubble made up of Louise’s hair. It’s the sunset time of year but it’s not the dropping disk of light that holds me in the shadows of the yard. It’s the colour I crave, floodings of you running down the edges of the sky on to the brown earth on to the grey stone.” (Winterson, 138)
Red contrasts with brown and grey. The red represents the ethereal, the sky, and the sun, enveloping the earthly and banal. The red could be the passion of romance that is far more intense than the mundane cares of daily life. In the broader context of the book, this could relate to the narrator’s tendency to prefer the more dramatic romance instead of the dullness of marriage. The narrator is held in the shadows by this colour, the red of Louise’s hair. The red bubble is the narrator’s world. The red completely encompasses the narrator’s existence. This may not be a bad thing, as bubbles can be comforting. There are repeated references to round and curved shapes. The use of the disk shape of the sun, spherical bubbles, and even the droplet shape of liquid running down edges are all round and smooth. This could also convey the narrator’s comfort in the thought of Louise. Spherical shapes have also been viewed as geometrically perfect and possibly divine. However, the narrator also refers to themselves as being held in the shadows. So, perhaps the narrator’s obsession with this divine red could ironically be the thing that keeps them separate from it, locked in the boring and earthly. In the broader context of the novel this could infer that by focusing on Louise’s existence, the narrator is ultimately separating themself from their supposedly idyllic romance with Louise’s. The narrator idealizes their relationship with Louise while also idolizes Louse. This ultimately is what drives them from Louise.

“This is the moment when I’m supposed to be self-righteous and angry.” (18)

The narrator is resistant to being cast into the role of the tragic hero. They are as tangled in, and conflicted with, this script as they are in their affairs. The use of “supposed” suggest that the narrator is expected to act in a specific way. The self-righteous response that is suggested can be good and virtuous. However self-righteous could also hint at arrogance. This may be the reason that the narrator sounds resistant to this action. We also have to consider that this happens in a moment. That is, the narrator claims to be acting instinctively. In this context, the narrator’s lack of action suggests an indifference or even hostility to the force that expects them to react further hinting at an act of resistance.
The narrator does not follow the script. The narrator does not let another affair end. This could be them trying to reach an idealized love that they claim to have forgotten. But this search for an ideal is itself rather tragic. As they attempt to make their relationships work out the narrator also draws closer to the realization that, perhaps, the ideal really doesn’t exist. That realization, that the narrator could be driving themselves to ruin in an attempt to avoid imperfection, is the sort of ironic fate that only the most tragic of characters deserves. And even more tragic is the narrator’s own suggestion, in the following paragraph; that they might be aware of the ironic end they are rushing towards.