T
Continued from Page 1
By novel s end it’s up to interpretation
whether the physical world ever existed or if
Ali created the entire story in cyberspace. T he
answer is possibly both. W ith Winterson, you
always have the power to write your own story.
She came to town Nov. 9 as part of the Port­
land Arts & Lectures series. Her diminutive
size— I’m guessing 5-foot-2— belies the power­
house performance she delivers. T he crowd is an
interesting mix of Portland’s social elite and dyke
on the street, and she ropes them all in early on.
I caught up with W interson at a hotel a few
hours before she took to the stage.
Lisa Bradshaw: Your lecture is titled
“ What Is Art For?” Can you summarize that
a little and explain why you chose that topic
for your U .S. tour?
Jeanette Winterson: I thought it was a time­
ly moment when science is pretending that it’s
going to give us the answer to everything and
that if we just wait long enough, the men in the
white coats will solve all our moral, ethical and
spiritual dilemmas. I think it’s a moment when
art needs to speak up and say: “Look, the raw
material of art is human beings, human beings is
what we have to deal with, and human beings is
what we are. The place to look is inside, not
outside, for the answers....” Art also forces you
to ask yourself big questions. It’s always question­
ing the current reality; that’s why it’s so useful.
It’s always there as a counterculture and as a dif­
ferent vision to the kind o f world we live in.
When we live in a money culture like this, we
need something that stands up and says: “N o,
there are other things. There are imaginative
realities. There’s more to life than materiality.”
L B : And you don’t.
JW : N o, I don’t. I
think it’s possible to
work with it in a way
that keeps your own
work and your own
vision authentic but
expands the broad­
band of communica­
tion. W hat interests
me, too, is to reconcile
disparate positions. We
live in a world of
dualisms and binary
oppositions— you
know, black/white,
light/dark, gay/straight,
male/female— but
they’re only defini­
tions, they’re tools.
We often mistake a
way of labeling and defining as an
objective understanding of the world.
A ll of my work has been trying to
destroy false contradictions and to
show through those contradictions
the underlying unity. It’s why I play
with gender so much. It’s also why,
say, in G ut Symmetries and The
PowerBook, I’ve refused a split
between technology and humanism,
between science and the arts. It’s
only in the superficials that every­
thing seems so separated.
LB: There’s a passage in The PowerBook
that reads: “ There is always the danger of
automatic writing.... There is a fatefulness and
a loss of control that are somehow comforting.
This was your script, but now it writes itself.”
It’s disguised as a lesson in writing but also
seems to be about transition and identity.
JW: People get very fatefully caught up in
LB : I've sensed a tension about technolo­
gy in your previous work. But The Power -
Book is largely set in cyberspace. Have you
changed your mind about technology, or have
you always been thinking you could interact
art with the Internet?
JW: Well, art is interactive. Reading itself is
interactive; as soon as we pick up a book, we put
ourselves into it. We begin to rewrite the story.
Long after the book’s finished, we go on imagin­
ing what would have happened. Reading’s not a
passive act; it’s one of involvement where the
text is always changing. Strong texts can take
this; it’s why you can have a hundred million
versions of Shakespeare, and it’s still Shake­
speare. If the text is strong, a writer needn’t
worry about any kind o f interactive view. For
me, art is about communication, and if the Web
is going to further communication, then I’m for
it, I’m not against it. I don’t want to stand on
the sidelines of my own time, carping and criti­
vous. [Laughs] But actually
there’s quite a lot of them, and
you can only assume that
they’re thinking about it a lot
more than you are.
cizing.... W hen writers talk about it,
they think it’s going to be the end of
the book; they think it’s going to he
the end o f the authority of the author.
their lives, and they find it hard to see that
they are, in fact, the writer o f the drama.
There’s a sort of inevitability and loss o f con­
trol that a lot o f people partly welcome because
they can say: “ It’s not my fault all this hap­
pened to me. W hat can I do.r’ W hich is a sort
o f relief at the same time it’s an agony. I’ve
always felt that is not the case and that we are
in control, and it’s really a question of telling
the story again. I think sometimes it’s a good
idea to see yourself as a fictional character,
because then you can write your way out of a
plot. It’s something that art gives you. You say:
:
•
-.
■ v i. v
• • ■
L B : Would this theme be
in so much of your fiction if
you had not met and fallen in
love with Peggy Reynolds,
who w as married at the time?
JW : I think it doesn’t really
make any difference. I’m end­
lessly fascinated by triangle situ­
ations, situations where people
are pulled. It’s much more inter­
esting than a straight, linear sit­
uation. I think, too, that playing
with sexual difference between
heterosexual love and queer
love gives the thing a wider per­
spective. You can never know
what’s going to happen when
you start playing with sex, when
you start playing with passion;
you just don’t know what the
outcome is going to be. So I’ve
just weighed it up and run it
through so many permutations.
In The PowerBook, I was much
more sympathetic to the
woman who wanted to stay in
the marriage. We’ve moved on
a bit from Written on the Body,
where I said that marriage is a
plate glass window just begging
for a brick.
“Yes, I can change the story. I am the story,” as
it says in the beginning o f The PowerBook.
LB : Although I know you’ve been grilled
about this a hundred times by as many peo­
ple, I can’t let the chance go by to talk to
you directly about the stereotypes about sin­
gle lesbians and wives and why husbands are
nervous about it. What is it about lesbians
and married women?
JW: I think the trouble with married
women is that they’re often fascinated by what
sex with another woman would be like, and
they don’t think that it’s quite the sin or the
betrayal it would be if they went to bed with
. another guy. W hich is not so great, because it
reveals their true views on the matter in that it’s
trivial— that it’s not as important. But I think
the fascination is there, and they think, “Well, I
could just do this and it wouldn’t do any harm,
would it?” I can’t bear being with those straight
women who just think you’re going to leap on
them at any moment. They make me so ner-
LB: Some of your devoted fans are critical
of The PowerBook because it’s the same
issues, the same themes and the same mes­
sages we’ve seen in your writing before.
JW : The PowerBook is the end o f a cycle. It
finishes a series o f work which starts with
Oranges, and it really does stop here; I know
that. T h e seven books make a picture, and you
can ’t take any o f them out; they all fit together.
I see them all as pauses, chapters, in something
which is a whole cycle o f work. But it’s finished
now, that’s it, the e n d .... I think this is the best
book I’ve written. It’s me at the best I can do
after 15 years o f doing it. [Laughs] But that’s
why it’s the end; there’s no further to go for me
with this and in this method. W hat I do next
will have to be a com pletely different way o f
working. If it isn’t going to be that, it’s not
going to be anything at all. s n
L isa B r a d s h a w is a free-lance writer who
thinks interviewing Jeanette Winterson is pretty
dam cool.
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