Hi folks – For Wednesday, October 15th, please continue reading Winterson’s Written on the Body. By Friday, you should have finished reading the book. Also, for Wednesday’s class, please write a blog response that addresses any theme, narrative method or style that particularly draws your attention. This is a free-writing exercise, so I am not posting any particular questions. If you’d like, write a sort of stream-of-consciousness response. Feel free to have fun with it, too . . . be creative . . . 
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Week of October 13-17th
October 10, 2008 · 14 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
14 responses so far ↓
marycreed // October 12, 2008 at 10:15 pm |
Why is the measure of love loss? – A Stream of Consciousness
“I had been reading books that dealt with death partly because my separation from Louise was final and partly because I knew she would die” (pg.154) “to lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. how could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it” (pg.155)
The particularness of a person, and that one person only; who alone owns the capacity to come out of nowhere, and catch you off guard, struck dumbly off your feet. They come and fight their way into your barricaded heart, they win, and they plunge themselves into that long neglected void, and you are helpless to stop it because despite the intrusion, despite the mess and sharp dangerous edges of barriers now broken, you want them there, and strangely; they fit.
But if ever, as ill-fated hearts are accustomed to doing, there comes a separation, and the fullness becomes empty again, the void becomes endless. Not only did you lose them, but you also lose a part of yourself that you will never regain. The gapping hole that was once there, that was hardly recognized, but then bursting at the seams, only to fall through, stretched out and is now more noticeable than ever; that, is how the measure of love is loss. The extent of one’s love is unfathomable; the depths of a passion could never be known, less they are to be taken.
Love is the measure of loss, but loss does not end love, for how than could it possibly be measured? Love stays, love endures, even if you don’t want it to. Distance makes the heart grow weaker, but makes love grow stronger.
berniechung // October 12, 2008 at 11:49 pm |
“At the post-mortem they’ll find an enlarged heart and no guts” (49).
i cue up elliot smith and amiee mann to battle as i finish jw’s written on the body.
they are going to have to fight it out just like the images of waking life and magnolia in my mind.
i keep wanting to compare jw’s wotb to mrs. dalloway or 100 years of solitude as they have the most eminent spots in mind for the post-modern stream of consciousness genre. it’s true that this novel is full of quotes that will probably end up in my signature in my emails.
i love the post-modern movement. i like post-modernism’s self proclaimed place in history. that before the age has had a chance to pass, “they” proclaimed modernism is dead and the here-after has settled in the hearts and minds of the masses. the waking dead still try to live the black and white, cut and dry life, but it’s all about the gray. jeanette winterson’s bluring the narrator’s gender is a perfect example of the gray in which the story takes place. i think the ending could be seen coming a mile away. however, i enjoyed the beautifully crafted road that jw unfolds to get the reader to the ending.
throughout the whole novel, i kept thinking about how well this would translate into a movie. it would be three days long or roughly 73 hours (yes I mean 73 and not 72). i would get john cusack to play the narrator. it would be the john cusack from high fidelity made up to look genderless. i would also have everyone speak portuguese. it would be the portuguese of sao paulo and not the language of northern brazil nor of portugal. the language is beautiful and sounds so much like romantic italian without being italian.
i wish we could have found out what happened to louise in the end. did she die? was it all an elgin lie? i wish it ended in reunion and happily ever after.
sableotey // October 14, 2008 at 10:03 am |
What stuck with me was the beginning of the book, Louis is married? I’m spinning, it’s like there a mix of stories, a mix of people, a big mix of I don’t know. She sleeps around with other men, and women? Maybe Louis does this to feel as though she can get what she needs from one particular person so she has to seek out others (which explains the why there are so many people that she’s sleeping with.) She’s afraid to fall in love, she refers to it as an armchair and the armchair is referred to as everyone. (pg. 10) Everyone loves or falls in love. Generally a lot of people sit in armchairs. Maybe she was comparing love to a general routine or cycle. Just as one would get up to wash his face or brush his teeth, he’d fall in love. She also compared it to her parents and grandparents, kind of like a tradition. Since they were married/ loved maybe she would too. Is she afraid of love, afraid that she’ll be broken afraid that nothing good will come out of giving someone a piece of her heart? Maybe she doesn’t feel as though she can be committed to one person? She asked how can you wed one person and then have sex with someone else. (pg. 22) But isn’t it also possible to wed someone and not have sex with any one else? It seems as though different people is her addiction. In the beginning there are about 5 different people that are mentioned. It seems as though being with other people is the only thing that satisfies her, or maybe not because Inge was someone that she claims to not really have feelings for, yet she called and her and waited for her to contact her, so maybe there is a little bit of confusion. She slept with all of these people, and she did it leisurely/casually, hoping for comfort, satiation and anything but love in return. She wanted to keep her heart to herself so that she wouldn’t infect anyone, so that he wouldn’t love or have someone love her. (pg25) She used the saying, “Falling in love was just like walking the Plank.” Being in love is a death trap? No. Maybe she’s had a bad experience, and that one person has screwed it up for everyone. Which isn’t fair at all, everyone isn’t the same, everyone doesn’t love the same, and everyone doesn’t comfort you exactly the same way that another person would.
thang08 // October 14, 2008 at 5:21 pm |
These following three quotes illustrate that Written on the Body is the story of an unnamed Libertine, whose sex is always hidden. While I was reading the novel, I always try to figure out whether the narrator is the male or female. “I had a lover once, her name was Bathsheba. She was a happily married woman (Pg 16).” When we were first discussing the novel in our class last week, I still assumed that the narrator was a male because I had seen the words like the first quote in several places. However, after reading the whole novel, I have decided that the narrator could be a female since the author uses the word like “boyfriend” in some places. For instance, “I had a boyfriend once, his name was Carlo, he was a dark exciting thing (Pg 143).” “Did I say this has happened to me again and again? You will think I have been constantly in and out of married women’s lumber-rooms (Pg 17)” is a good example for the narrator is the unnamed libertine.
I asked myself a question when I was reading the beginning part of the text that why the author, Jeanette Winterson, writes this kind of the unnamed libertine? I had thought that the narrator continues to cheat many other people. However, I began to appreciate the writer when she swaps her readers’ attention that the narrator stops his/her bad character after he/she meets Louise. When the narrator leaves Louise, I can sympathize for the narrator because he/she does not want Louise to die, and want her to survive from Leukemia. These facts encourage me to assume that the narrator has also belonged a decent heart. Finally, Winterson’s expression about the narrator’s obliterating passion for Louise is compelling interest and exceptional for all the readers.
Ian T // October 14, 2008 at 7:00 pm |
I write this blog after finishing the book within three hours. I am writing immediately after reading the last phrase, and yes, I feel “let loose in open fields [190].” The type of writing here is not just stream-of-consciousness, but a particularly introspective form of it. When the analysis turns into narrative, it is as if the world is intruding upon the book. This form took me into the feelings of the narrator, bringing me through past relationships, breakups, divorce, and death. The ambiguity of gender assigned to the narrator allows any reader to find him or herself in the story. The intensity of the inner dialogue crescendos in the section entitled “The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body.” Here there are contained a modern form of the Sonnets written by Shakespeare denoting the attributes of his mysterious lover. The use of medical text to begin each section lends a sense of reality to the almost ethereal terms used to describe love. This, I think, is the central theme of the book: love as the ethereal concept brought to earth by its necessary interplay with the tragedies and realities of the world in which it exists. The book opens with a question about love, then proceeds to document a series of forays into what the narrator believes is love. We see a constant search for the reality of love. The narrator tries to understand the interplay and dichotomy of love and lust while describing his seeming propensity toward women who are involved [76, 77]. He leaves the book with the question, was it an act of love to leave his lover, or would it have been one to stay?
HB // October 14, 2008 at 8:55 pm |
According to my reading and understanding, I come across this theme that the author/protagonist dealing throughout the story about the love, its values in life, and different consequences related to it. “You said,’ I Love You’ why is it that most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?”(p. 9). When it comes to love, we cannot keep silent. “Love demands expression, It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no” (p. 9). The certainty that one loves another cannot remain hidden, it cannot be doubted, and demands to be spoken as if a deep truth of the universe has been discovered. Love cannot remain silent because the intensity of love for the beloved becomes a big question: is this love only something that I possess, that I feel, something solely contained in my heart? Or is this love between us, intertwining us? Does love demonstrate that we are an “us,” that we are not alone? Perhaps love is precisely the way out of the problem of solipsism that haunts philosophers. Neither of these insistent questions, claims our protagonist/author, can be met with silence: “Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs; wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates?” (p. 13). In the whole story our protagonist brings over these questions many times. We might take these words as challenge: philosophy can neither answer nor can it abandon those questions with more than one answer. The desire to seek the depth and meaning of love, of the beloved’s love for us, cannot be dismissed in order to return to “serener musings.” Such questions assault us at night; trip us up in the day. They become the sole content of our minds. We cannot leave these questions aside; we cannot abandon them simply because no certain answer seems able to be found. We must explore what it is to be engulfed by love, and that requires setting aside universally true formulations in favor of the question what it means for the lovers.
izamojda // October 14, 2008 at 9:10 pm |
Jeanette Winterson doesn’t believe in perfect love stories. She doesn’t do nice and tidy. She delves into the mess, even the storm that seems to reflect the majority of people’s love lives. It is fraught with traps and pitfalls. A person spends the majority of the time in the relationship in a vexed state, interrupted only by fleeting moments of pleasure. Somewhere along the line, if two people have buried enough of their personality to appease the other person, they are able to co-exist and end up getting married. “They did it, my parents did it, now I will do it won’t I…”(10). Please, tell me there is something more significant that comes out of all these trials and tribulations than settling. Life is so short, why settle for the mediocre? Then again, life is so short, who wants to spend it alone with an apartment full of cats? I think the narrator really struggled with those ideas; between being selfish and wanting someone to be there, and still having IT mean something. Only after the narrator has stopped their search for Miss Right, do they find her. As I mentioned before, Ms. Winterson doesn’t do tidy. Remember the first sentence of the book, “Why is the measure of love loss?”(9). Unbeknownst to the narrator, Louise is terminally ill. Cancer. It really is love now isn’t it? Somehow Louise’s illness has changed things. Now the narrator has to cope with the imminent threat of the total loss of the one thing they have been searching their whole life for. Memories come flooding back, and now they are sweeter, more meaningful. Then why? What cruel force would bring love into ones life and then abruptly tear it away as if someone were tearing their very own limb from their body? “You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language”(9). Was it worth it? Finally knowing real love for another human being, only to have it potentially cut short in a most tragic way? Maybe enduring such pain is not worth it. Or maybe Tennyson had it right when he wrote in his poem In Memoriam, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” Pain, just as much as love, makes us human. Those emotions also give our relationships value. It is impossible for one emotion to exist without the other. If you experience either one without the other in a relationship, then you can be sure of one thing: that something is wrong. The two emotions play an integral role in the imperfect, and often stormy and messy state that is known as love.
cbaileyb // October 14, 2008 at 11:27 pm |
The thing that strikes me the most about this book, is the honesty. Our main character is a raw, open, and flawed person. They feel, their problem is that they feel too much. They know that they are not morally correct, but by pursuing their passions they are being honest to themselves. Though their out look on love ems to be quite a cynical view they are honest about their insights. ” Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.” (pg. 78) This character does no follow the traditional train of thought. This character succumbs to what their true self feels, even if it leads to heart break. They follow the written directions of their body rather than the expectations of society.
bgray11 // October 14, 2008 at 11:43 pm |
The theme of “love” occurs frequently in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. Her book tries to convey to readers the passion and art of physical love. This book is filled with love, relationships, loss, and seems to be leading to hope/resolution towards the conclusion. When reading her novel, the reader will notice the vague voice of the first-person narration carried throughout the book. This “voice” of the narrator tell us of scandalous thoughts and lover affairs of a woman named Louise. The role of “Love” connects the imperfections of relationships to the emotions experienced between two lovers. The various voices heard throughout this novel are the outcomes for the thoughts people think and their actions coming alive through the words of the character’s in Winterson’s novel.
rachel5702 // October 15, 2008 at 12:09 am |
Like you said at the beginning, “most people either love this book or hate it.” Well, I am one of those who hate it. The way Winterson describes love, relationships, and marriage is to me very hopeless and sad. I don’t know if she was trying to portray it this way, but overall she describes love, relationships, and marriage with no morals or convictions. There is no right or wrong in her book. To Winterson, marriage is something that people do, but it doesn’t change their life in any way, it just makes them hide things that otherwise would be in the open. When in reality, it’s a life commitment made between two people. Everything is based off of feeling, not their conscience and what they know is right or wrong. Like bgray11 said above, “love connects the imperfections of relationships to the emotions experienced between two lovers,” I do think that is what Winterson is trying to portray, but this connection is only temporary because it’s happening again and again. No one gets real satisfaction. Overall, this repetitive theme was very distracting to me and almost made me feel bad for Winterson.
cteran // October 15, 2008 at 1:02 am |
Written on the body explores different aspects of what most people would consider intimate relationships or at least intimate relations. It sets up a contrast of two sets of competing values. On one hand the narrator can choose: to remain committed to marriage, “contentment”. on the other hand they have found: “love”, and is happier.
“I don’t feel wise. why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
The facts of my case are not unusual:
1 I have fallen in love with a woman who is married.
2 She has fallen in love with me.
3 I am committed to someone else.
4 How shall I know whether Louise is what I must do or must avoid?”. The narrator faced with a major decision has created a list in their mind of the situation. The last point, a question, is a fact in that it is the choice placed before them.
parkhannah // October 15, 2008 at 6:24 am |
This book is a story of a nameless narrator, whose sex is never revealed, and his/her obliterating passion for Louise. The first time that I read this novel I assumed that the narrator was male, but when I re-read it from the perspective of a female, it has opened up new view for me in the book.
This is a book that leads you through the maze that is love. From quote to quote, the narrator gives moments of mad passion, pages of delicate tenderness, and leaves you with a heart raw from its bruising journey. “The Maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. (54) “No-one knows what forces draw two people together (96). ”
I personally didn’t really like this book. Maybe it’s because it’s little too complicated.
sbr291 // October 16, 2008 at 12:36 am |
Some people say the like the book and some say they don’t, well my opinion I can relate to it a little with the love, drama, and relationships. Yet I don’t understand why the writer would try not to identify his/her identity. Yet as well the way Winterson tries to describes love, relationships, and marriage with no morals or convictions. There is basically no way that the relationships were perfect. There isn’t any wrong or right in the book. She shows us that some relationships don’t go by love to get married but in reality it does, but in reality as well people just get married to get married. Like the marriages brought from other countries saying they have someone lined up before there 15 birthday. Yet it grows into love and she really didn’t go by that. The narrator never revealing his or her sex made us well me look at the love and relationships in both views as a male and female. It shows that anyone can be scandalous or even fall into affairs.
d3stin3d // October 20, 2008 at 6:29 pm |
When the book first started off it sounded like someone has just lost a long lost love but then I got a little confused because I was trying to figure out was it a woman that lost her love or was it a man. Not only did the identity confuse me a little but their paroxysm of random thought threw me off too. The narrator seemed as though they were in a continuous conversation reminiscing about the past yet trying to stay afloat in the present. I believe the present was the relationship with Jacqueline and then Louise. Since both of the relationships are connected and intertwined with one another, I think aside from the narrators past memories, which was the surface of the text, the narrator was really dealing with love and being in love. I believe there is a definite distinction between the two. The way the narrator treated Jacqueline compared to the way they treated Louise exemplifies the difference. I really believe the narrator just settled into a relationship with Jacqueline because he/she was so used to being in one and even though he/she may not have wanted one they did it just because. “I considered her. She had no expensive tastes, knew nothing about wine, never wanted to be taken to the opera and had fallen in love with me. I had no money and no morale. It was a marriage made in heaven” (26-27). Since the narrator said that marriage is a deception the referral of marriage to Jacqueline clearly implies that the narrator is not really happy but covering up their true desire. The relationship with Jacqueline was “simple and ordinary” (27) which was really not the narrator’s style. From the memories of the narrator I’ve noticed the frequencies of relationships with married women than with single women. I believe the relationships with single women were too easy for the narrator. The relationships with married women challenged the narrator. Despite the rehearsed ending of those relationships, it seemed like the narrator couldn’t help themselves, as if they received a high from the exihileration of being involved with someone that they did not call their own.
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