Navigating
Invisible Narrative Spaces in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry: A
Reader-Response Approach
Disha Banerjee,
Ph.D. Research Scholar,
Department of English and M.E.L.,
University of Lucknow,
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Abstract: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry has been critically acclaimed for
its ability to dissolve thematic, genre-based, narrative, historical, feminist,
social and scientific boundaries of classification of literary works. While
existing studies on the novella explore unique perspectives within its textual
infinities, the Reader’s role and agency in navigating the fictional,
linguistic and philosophical narrative gaps remains largely unexplored. This
paper adopts a Reader-Response approach in reading Sexing the Cherry,
accentuating the palpable invisible spaces in the text, for the modern Reader
to engage with. It positions the Reader as the dynamic element filling the
narrative gaps, manifesting a new meaning of through their imagination, to
discover what happens in between the lines, portraying how narrative worlds are
often built on the diversity of human experiences and interactions with the
text. The paper will inquire into the ways in which Winterson allows her
Readers the freedom to interpret the story, exploring the interiority of her
work unbounded by rules. In doing so, it will also emphasize the relevance of
the Postmodern Reader's reception and interaction with the invisible life
present in the empty epiphanic spaces in Winterson’s narratives.
Keywords: Narrative Gaps; Reader-Response; Reception Theory;
Reader Agency; Metafiction; Multiple Narratives
Drawing
from Winterson’s own descriptions, one can say that Sexing the Cherry's is
“a book full of disappearances” where the “spaces are what matters” and the
Reader is given the freedom to respond, discover or “follow the trail and see
what happens” in the novel. (Winterson vii, ix) Characterized popularly as a
postmodern historiographic metafiction or speculative fiction, most of the
studies on Sexing the Cherry have
focused on its major themes and the use of narrative devices such as
self-reflexivity, parody, intertextuality, historiography and storytelling.
Yet, the position of the Reader as an active participant deciding the
interpretation of the narrative and the Reader’s role in using their
imagination to fill the fictional, narrative and philosophical gaps left by the
author, has not been studied in depth. Set within the context of a postmodern
world full of ambiguity, randomness and contradictions, where identity,
selfhood and self-expression hold the primary relevance, for Winterson the art
of writing and reading is about the invisible made visible and this paper
proposes to focus on that very notion. (xi)
Winterson wants reading to be “freedom”, and thus the
Reader is asked to be a part of the “triumph of imagination over experience”
where “the possible and imaginary replace the stable and allegedly given.”
(Hoffman 364) She suggests the entire corpus of readers and critics to
"stop worrying about what is real and find what is relevant” while reading
her novella, by becoming an active part of the narrative. (Winterson x) Sexing the Cherry marks out an area of
investigation that studies the text’s tendency to move beyond literary limits
along with the reader who opens and interprets the gaps and empty spaces left
in the text. The use of Reader’s Response criticism and theory help this case,
by examining “authors' attitudes toward their readers, the kinds of readers
various texts seem to imply, the role actual readers play in the determination
of literary meaning, the relation of reading conventions to textual
interpretation, and the status of the reader's self.” (Tompkins ix) Capturing
the reader’s intuitions while traversing and making meaning of the text’s
“projected world of objects”, Sexing the
Cherry wants the reader to forget “what is real.” (Winterson 167) Roman
Ingarden’s theory of the cognition of the literary works justifies this idea of
real and fictional through “The stratum of presented objects” which posits that
real objects are indeterminate and fictional objects “have ontological gaps,
some of them permanent, some filled in by readers in the act of concretizing
the text.”
The
stories Winterson presents in her book are- “not a completely filled-in picture
but more like a connect-the-dots puzzle” that the reader takes the onus of
solving, in his own pace. (McHale 31) Ingarden becomes a more classical
predecessor of Reception theory who introduces that “the objects represented in
a literary work exhibit ‘spots’ or ‘points’ or ‘places'’ of indeterminacy”, and
the reader tries to fill in these gaps using “concretization” by becoming a
part of the “schematized structure” of the book. (Holub 25) These “points of
indeterminacy” can be seen in Winterson’s narratives from the outset when she
says that she is “interested in the holes” of the fishnet-like structure of the
book. (Winterson vii) The reader’s process of concretization can manifest in
multiple ways, include variety of fantasies and creative strains depending on
the reader’s mental constitutions. Winterson wishes for her reader to have
freedom in interpreting her text- to discover “the path not taken and the
forgotten angle.” (2) Ingarden’s theories are further expanded on by Wolfgang
Iser who broadens the scope of the reader’s assimilation and participation in
interpreting the text, that Ingarden had limited.
Although
one finds Ingarden’s theory a good entry point to identify the concept of gaps
to be navigated by the reader in a text, Ingarden also binds the reader’s
process of meaning making by trying to establish boundaries through
conventional literary norms, and ends up excluding “non-realistic, non-mimetic,
experimental works”. (Holub 28) While “Ingarden recognizes a one-way traffic in
the process of reading: from the real world to the imaginary (purely
intentional) 'world'… Iser recognizes a two-way traffic: the reader fills in
gaps in the imaginary 'world' with the help of his life experience; yet filling
the most fundamental 'blank' - the overall meaning of the fictional work -
entails surpassing existing models derived from real life.” (Brinker 208)Sexing the Cherry cannot really be
classified as novel, but instead a long poem or even a collection of short
stories that, in Winterson’s own words, moves away from “the literal mindedness
of so much discussion about writing…and art in general”. (Intro) The reading
process in the text begins the moment Winterson herself highlights gaps and
inconsistencies within the text, because as per Iser’s theory “it is only the
illusion, (of incompleteness) on its different levels of consistency that makes
the experience "readable.”” (Iser 59) This encourages the reader to participate
actively in the concretization of meaning; in the wake of the “freedom” her art
“allows”.
In
the text, the concept of “postmodern untrustworthiness”, instability and
ambiguity also plays a huge role in determining how memory and self-records by
the protagonists are full of gaps and inconsistencies and are not to be blindly
trusted. Iser points out in his analysis that Ingarden does not realize that
these “gaps and indeterminacies” in a text are there to form a more dynamic
text rather than existing as blank spaces that necessarily need to be filled in
by the reader to arrive at a larger conclusive meaning. Contrary to Ingarden’s
ideas, there is no appropriate or inappropriate meaning making of a text as per
Iser, in keeping with the ideals of ‘New Criticism’. Consequently, the main
intention while reading books like Sexing
the Cherry would be the synthesis of “both the written parts of the text
with the reader's unwritten contribution and the reader's explication of the
gaps, the indeterminacies, the inconsistencies.” (Creighton 222) For example,
the reader can never quite trust Dog Woman’s stories about herself, “nor
resolve the contradictions she embodies”. (Sancheti 8) Thus, the reader just
tries to keep pace by imaginatively interpreting, accepting or rejecting the
inconsistencies and contradictions. While the reader eventually tries to make
“inter-relations between past, present, and future” in the text causing “the
text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections”, one cannot deliver a
totalizing judgement of the book as “Time has no meaning, space and place have
no meaning” in it. (Iser 54, Winterson 19) Thus, as per Iser, “expectations are
scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts”, and indeterminacies are
supposed to exist in such texts. (Iser 53)
In
Sexing the Cherry, “the
"unwritten" part of a text stimulates the reader's creative
participation”. (Iser 51) For instance, the reader is asked to find out with
the author “what happens in between what happens”. How do you make a “journey
without moving at all?”, Who is Fortunata and where does she vanish? What
happens to the twelve dancing princesses without their happily ever after? What
is the past and present in the text? What happens in the gaps of Jordan’s
travels? What else did the Dog Woman forget to tell the readers? How do we find
the real and the imaginary in the text? How is the Dog Woman both heavy enough
to cripples and as light as air? All of these pose as valid questions in the
text that the author never answers. Here, “The reader begins to understand the
constructed nature of reality...” and also how “It is only through inevitable
omissions that a story gains its dynamism.” (Sancheti 9, Tompkins 55)
The
tendency of beckoning the reader’s “imaginative impulse” and leaving them “free
to ignore the boundaries of here and now” while reading the text becomes
important in Sexing the Cherry.
(Winterson 101) The gaps and spaces in the text allow the reader to insert his
own self in between those facts and fiction in the narrative. “The empty spaces
in-between the registered “facts” or items can expand to a point where the text
not only leaves gaps but willfully obstructs the notions of consistency,
coherence, verisimilitude, logic, and whatever may “normally” pass for meaning”
(Hoffman 550). For instance, Winterson presents sudden listed Truths and Lies
and Facts about the nature of the world and human condition in between Jordan’s
travels and Dog Woman’s stories, which create gaps in continuity within the
narrative interrupting its flow and disturbing the reader. Thus, “whenever the
flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the
opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing
connections- for filling in the gaps left by the text itself." (Tompkins
55) Similar to this, the angle of the reader as an active participant in
meaning making also shifts to the reader navigating the criticisms of the
cognitive frames of references in the work. In Sexing the Cherry, “what is communicated” is more important than
“He She What Where When How Why”. (Winterson xi) While the author retains
certain control over what direction the reader’s response will take, “The
reader of fiction is always an actively mediating presence; the text's reality
is established by his response and reconstituted by his active participation.”
(Hutcheon 151) He fulfills the text’s demands of creating a new imaginary
object of out what the author had already produced, while also constituting
itself under what the author has allowed.
According
to Winterson, things and objects exist so we can see the space behind them, the
background that can be seen while focusing on the most visible themes and
ideas. Authors like Winterson try to “find alternative patterns of meaning
capable of giving sense to the human condition” and in that process end up
transcending the limits of literary works and the self that is involved in
creating such a work. (Currie 100) This paper studies the reader’s navigation
of and integration with, the gaps, holes and invisible lines, that the author
herself wishes the reader to explore, or rather demands it. The more the reader
pursues the narrative in search of meaning, the more he loses himself in its
inconsistencies as the author keeps expanding her vision, presenting the
vastness of “the matter of the mind”. (Winterson 117) The reader-oriented
analysis of the text becomes relevant and important as it moves the textual
interpretation away from alleged narratives that attempt to define “the circle
of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain”. (101) The
repositioning of the reader takes place within a postmodern world where it can
be analyzed how the text encourages the reader to be flexible, accept
diversity, embrace multiplicity, let go of literal minded linearity and escape
the confines of universalizing metanarratives.
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Currie, Mark. Metafiction.
Routledge, 1995.
Creighton, Joanne V. “The Reader and Modern and Post-Modern Fiction.” College
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Holub, Robert C. Reception
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McHale, Brian. Postmodernist fiction. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
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