Category: 2016 Blog Post

“This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room”(190).

This quote from Written on the body is very puzzling. It mentions “Moon” and “stars” in the “room” so does that mean that it is night? Or does it mean that the narrator is imagining this scene in space? How could objects of space be located on earth? Also, the quote is odd because it states, “This is where the story starts…” but it is the last page in the book. How could the story begin when it is over? I think the narrator is implying that stories never end because as long as life proceeds time proceeds. I think this, because the word “exploding” reminds me of reactions or The Big Bang. Both of these aspects deal with time and occur over different lifetimes and different progressions.

Time however, is a tricky concept. We can think of it in hours and seconds, or relate time to calendar years and time zones. According to Halbustan, Queerness is a “potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2). Therefor, I think Halbustan is implying that if there are no boundaries and norms to fallow then there is an endless amount of time. An endless amount of time to define time in ones own way or to let time proceed on it’s own without a definition. This is shown in the moment “where the story starts…” The narrator takes this opportunity to define time in a new context. It might be crazy but I think the narrator measures time as a binary. This binary is earth vs. space where earth is the “room”, “telescope”, windows”, and “walls” while space is defined by the “moon” and “stars”. Since these are such contrasts and so far away from each other I think the narrator defines time as infinite. There is no beginning or “start”. There is no end but only a continuous movement. This book does a great job of manipulating time in this way and makes the reader think about it differently as well.

“On top of having ordinary sexual shame, and on top of having shame for being gay, the dignified homosexual also feels ashamed for every queer who flaunts his sex and his faggotry, making the dignified homosexual’s stigma all the more justifiable in the eyes of the straights. On top of that he feels shame about his own shame, the fatedness of which he is powerless to redress,” (Warner, 32).

Warner is stating that some homosexuals may not feel a sense of kinship with other homosexuals. In fact, Warner is saying that the behavior of homosexuals who embrace or parade their homosexuality may actually repel the homosexuals who do not share these characteristics. Warner’s statement reminds me of an episode of the television show “Glee”. In this particular episode, Kurt Hummel, a gay member of the glee club, is bullied by one of the boys on the football team named Dave Karofsky. To give some background, Kurt is openly gay and he dresses and acts in a flamboyant manner. The bullying continues until Kurt confronts Dave in the boys’ locker room. The confrontation reaches an apex when Dave kisses Kurt, a reaction that Kurt had not been expecting in the slightest. Kurt attempts to help Dave sort through his confusion and embrace his homosexuality, but Dave denies that anything happens and resumes bullying Kurt. This situation is very similar to the one that Warner describes. Dave, who is a football player and therefore perceived to be masculine and heterosexual, is perhaps jealous of Kurt, who is gay and is accepted as gay by other members of the community. Even more so, Kurt’s flamboyant dress and manner might suggest to Dave that if comes out then he too will be perceived as flamboyant. Though Warner is perhaps talking about already openly gay people, it certainly can apply to this situation between an openly gay person and a closeted person.

Now, I want to talk about shame and specifically sexual shame. I find that there are only a few times when the narrator experiences sexual shame, and really this is quite revolutionary. Because the narrator has been in many previous sexual relations and relationships, one would think that immediately they would be stigmatized and shamed by others in the novel. But most of the time, that simply doesn’t happen, at least to our knowledge. Michael Warner talks to great lengths about sexual shame at a personal level. He says, “Perhaps because sex is an occasion for losing control, for merging one’s consciousness with the lower order of animal desire and sensation, for raw confrontations of power and demand, it fills people with aversion and shame,” (Warner, 2). This animalistic instinct is within all of us, yet we’re programmed to suppress it. Written on the Body turns this notion on its head by having a narrator with a ruthless sexual appetite and they seem to experience almost no sexual shame with the amount of relationships they’ve had.

The only time where the narrator is shamed for her past is with Louise, and even then I’m not sure it could be considered shame. Louise says, “I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it,” (Winterson, 54). Up until this point, the narrator didn’t feel bad about her past relationships. Sure, some of them may have ended poorly, but I don’t believe she ever felt sexually guilty about them. She may have felt shame about hurting another’s feelings, but not about the sexual acts themselves. Louise however, cannot seem to get over these things initially. She tells the narrator to “forget” twice, and to come to her as ‘new”. This is entirely impossible, as no one can erase the marks and lines of what’s written on your body. Your past gets ingrained into you. It becomes a part of you and who you are. This passage from Louise reflects upon the Warner and society’s ideals of pureness, virginity, and making love with only your soulmate. The novel tries to eradicate that sentiment with the narrator’s actions and mentality, thus asking the world if shame is even really worth it.

A few months ago, I came across this picture printed and pinned up on a pole in Northeast Philly. Though I was not able to apply the principles of queer theory to this image then, I can now analyze the message with an entirely new framework of interpretation. I can’t tell how long ago this picture was taken, but the message “AIDS is not in recession” still rings true for many repressed Americans hindered by low socioeconomic status and/or non-hegemonic identity.

Judith Halberstam spends a substantial amount of time in chapter one of her novel, In a Queer Time and Place, analyzing the negative consequences for “expendable” (3) individuals living in neglected pockets of the United States during the AIDS epidemic. I believe that Halberstam would applaud the social protest conveyed by this image as a strong push against who and what America’s capitalistic society has deemed important.

Halberstam suggests that while many middle class heterosexual Americans obsess over a long-term push to procreate and pass on industrial normative values (4), there are pockets of disadvantaged individuals battling for their own short-term survival (3). The AIDS epidemic modeled in this image represents that battle, and the corresponding eternal capitalistic chiasm that exists between those at the top and those at the bottom of America’s hierarchy. “Aids is not in recession” can be used as a microcosm for all past and present epidemics that force a queer subset of society to beg for intervention.

This may be a stretch, but I believe that this image, as well as Halberstam’s message can be seen as a call to action for all of those basking in the capitalistic hierarchy to step down from the ladder that has been built by unjustly flattening those who are not able to conform. Halberstam tells us that queer time exists outside of the conventions preset by society, that queer time produces a different set of expectations for an alternative life. I believe that all of this is true, but I also believe that as a capitalistic society that thrives off of homogeneity, queer individuals are doomed to face an unjust amount of neglect and discrimination unless those at the top shift their perspectives downwards. “Aids is not in recession”, and neither is America’s discrimination against our queer citizens, ethnic minorities and impoverished persons.

“I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields” (190). I read this as the narrator dying and going to heaven to be with Louise, in the second sentence of the paragraph the narrator begins describing a scene which to me seemed like them dying, the walls exploding and the room growing to hold the whole world feels very dramatic death-like to me, they go on to describe open fields and being able to look dow at the whole world, giving a very heaven-like feel to the scene. If they are describing death it would mean that they would finally be with Louise again, hence why it would be a happy ending but at the same time they would have died. In the paragraph Louise is described as being paler and thinner, but still warm with bright hair, I read this as her having died and being a figment of the narrator’s imagination, particularly because it was followed by what seems to be the narrator’s death.

“It’s flattering to believe that you and only you, the great lover, could have done this.” (15) The author likes to believe that they are the only one who could have gotten in the way of their girlfriends marriage as unhappy as it might have already been. This passage compares the author’s girlfriend’s marriage to an empty shell, this is how the author views their girlfriends marriage but I think that in some ways the author views themselves as a damaged shell, in the way their life seems completely focused around being with all of these women through their life and not being in any relationships that would be viewed as “typical” or “healthy” and instead being in ones that have to be hidden and the relationship itself damages another relationship that the girlfriend is already committed to.

  ‘It was years ago but I still blush. Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown-up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin?’ (p.94)

  Quite often pleasure of sex comes with guilt. The guilt that you should have sex only with someone you truly love will make you ‘blush’, and feel like a ‘convent virgin’. It is so burdensome that you sometimes deceive yourself to evade from the guilt. An abrupt sex may be turned into genuine love. As what Warner insists, the guilt itself is illegitimate, restricting people’s identity and behavior without any ethical base. If we refuse the guilt, and if sex no longer necessarily means love, however, how would we know what love is?

  Marriage used to be the evidence of love. It strongly bound love and sex. But ‘grown-ups who have been through so much’ now should realize the norm do not assure you of true love. Love affairs between numerous married women and the narrator showed relationships composed of only obligations and duties cannot mean love.

  The narrator keeps trying to find how sex can be connected to real love instead of guilt and duty. The narrator says the measure of love is loss, and the loss the narrator feels is represented as her body. The narrator get obsessed with sex and touch they used to have, and then with Louise’s body and the narrator’s sensation, and then with her biological body of organs and other parts, even cells.

  Would the narrator still love Louise, who became much paler and thinner and whose all the body parts got serious cellular damage after leukemia treatment? If so, why? Wasn’t it her body that the narrator had sex with, and that convinced the narrator to fall in love? If not, why?

  ‘Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.’ (p.89). It is the narrator’s memory with Louise that sustains his/her love. The memory is about flesh and carved in flesh. In other words, it is not Louise’s present physical body but the narrator’s memory of her body why the narrator long for her. Memory of body is the narrator’s unit of love.

 

“Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of space.” (156)

 

The narrators choice of words here are exquisite in its generalization. “Fragile creatures” viewing humans not as people but of unknown mysteries both capable of good and evil. Not only capable but expected to, because one doesn’t come without the other in human nature. The power in these words loses the essence and need to gender people, because like the language that Winterson uses, the language allows room for growth and tolerance of not having to define and categorize all that we are.

“…of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of space.” We are physically surrounded by ninety seven percent water only which two percent has been explored by the humans, in a system of unknown. This unknown is what the narrator is getting at in the entire context of the novel. No matter how much research can be conducted on the solar system, or to whatever extensions we can try to make in order to understand the depths of the ocean that go miles deep into the earth, it is impossible to know it all. So our frail minds, bodies, and souls, have to embrace this fact in order to truly live and see past the definitions that we quickly look to make.

“Why is the measure of love loss?” (9)

I chose this sentence because it repeats several times throughout the course of the novel. The narrator seems to be the type of person that falls in love very quickly and very deeply. However, for the narrator, each time their relationship ends with one of these people, they seem to be alright. In the case of the narrator’s relationship with Louise, this is not true. The narrator spends almost half the novel reflecting on how much they miss Louise, or how beautiful she is, or how much she loves her. It is evident that the narrator feels a great deal of loss from having to leave Louise, and perhaps did not realize just how much she loved her when she was actually with her. The form of this sentence is a question. This shows the narrator’s confusion, or lack of an answer. However, the form of the sentence also suggests that the narrator believes that the measure of love is loss, but is simply asking why that is. The cliché “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone” is very much like this sentence, however, as the narrator also reiterates several times “It’s the clichés that cause all the trouble.” Perhaps the narrator is simply restating this cliché in their own words so as not to cause any “trouble”. Though this sentence is perhaps not the best for close reading on its own, when taken into context, the narrator is often talking about their relationship with Louise. In conclusion, this sentence reveals the narrator’s opinion of love, in that one does cannot realize how much he/she loves someone until they are gone. This applies to the text as a whole because it becomes a theme. The narrator’s repetition of this sentence times reveals how much they love and miss Louise, even before we know that the narrator has left her. This sentence is imperative to the novel because it revolves around the love life of the narrator, and gives a deeper sense of how each relationship has impacted the narrator and shaped their opinions.

“This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece” (190).

The closing paragraph of Written on the Body is starkly different from the rest of the novel, which focuses overwhelmingly on bodies and the effect of language on the body. If the passage above does actually describe Louise’s return, and I believe that it does, then the narrator’s lack of focus on Louise’s body is startling in the context of their obsessive attempt to learn and possess her body throughout the rest of the novel.

The final passage reveals that “the story” is not in fact written on Louise’s body, as the title of the novel suggests. Rather, it starts in “this threadbare room,” which rapidly transforms: walls “exploding,”  windows turning into telescopes, the sun descending to rest above the mantelpiece. The room’s extraordinary transformation is at once an expansion and a condensation; while the walls explode, and the windows would need to expand outward in order to become telescopes, the moon and stars seem to have come into the room, where they are “magnified,” and the sun too now exists indoors. It would seem that the room has either expanded to accommodate the newly descended universe or that the universe has coalesced in a single room. The passage does not provide any clarification, and the paradoxical nature of the description works well as a means of understanding how the narrator’s understanding of love has transformed throughout the novel.

On the previous page the narrator asks Gail, “What else is embossed on your hands but her?” (189). The question captures the narrator’s previously narrow perspective on their relationship with Louise. The narrator was focused only on Louise’s effect on their body, was unable to recognize Louise herself. After Louise’s return, however, the narrator is able to look past their own body and Louise’s body and to recognize the significance of their relationship. All of the physical marks that Louise has left on the narrator’s body diminish in comparison to the universe that she has brought with her return. At the end of the novel, we see that the narrator has learned to look beyond Louise’s physical self and has fully recognized not her body, but the world that they inhabit together.

While the passage seems to deviate from the title and major themes of Written on the Body, I’m inclined to understand it as an illustration of the narrator having finally learning to apply the text that Louise has written on their body as a means of understanding the full scope of their relationship. Louise is no longer the only one translating and creating language. The narrator has also learned to translate something other than Russian literature, and can consequently step back from their intense focus on the body in order to appreciate the world that they inhabit alongside Louise.