Jeannette Winterson's Fantastic Narrating

After her first big success Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1984) Jeanette Winterson has published four other novels within the past twelve years which were widely acclaimed by readers and critics alike. More often than not the remarkable literary quality of her writings was blurred by heated debates eddying around her eccentric personality and her provocative approach to sexuality. In contrast, this essay tries to evaluate the fine narrative web of her novels by focusing on the interaction of realistic and fantastic modes of representation. Fantasy plays an important part in Wintersons attempt to launch a far-reaching critique of Western culture. Astonishingly enough, such a critique is not just scholarly and up to date, it also proves an enjoyable humanistic dimension and hardly ever gives in to nihilistic speculations. The use of fantastic elements enables Winterson to link the past and the present, the ordinary and extraordinary, philosophical and down-to earth matters, in a way similar to the ancient gardening practice of grafting as described in her successful novel Sexing the Cherry (1989). In another sense, fantasy functions as a hermeneutic force in questioning and overcoming traditional hierarchic structures and institutions of all kinds. This is reflected in her style, as the unconventional dealing with the categories of space and time in her texts frees them from the logocentristic prison in which traditional narrative fiction is usually locked. Winterson does not aim at mirroring the world as it is. She is much more concerned, by means of association, allusion and juxtaposition, with rendering the other, the hidden, the world behind a presumably realistic curtain that rises only when fantasy is at work. The result of all this is a prose, textured and poetic at the same time, that demands both the readers’ attention and their imagination to reward them afterwards with a new freedom of thought. Apart from their critique and engagement, the novels of Jeanette Winterson convey no ideological antithesis in terms of a ready-made concept. She writes in a pluralistic, post-ideological manner while at the same time trying to promote an individualism of a new kind as a combination of art, ego and fantasy.