1

From: Women’s Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts. Eds. Sebastian Groes, Peter
Childs & Claire Colebrook. London/New York: Lexington Books, 2015.

CHAPTER FIVE

Beyond Queer Time after 9/11: The Work of Jeannette Winterson

Karin Sellberg

Summary: This chapter examines recent changes in the treatment of time and temporality –
past, present and future – in the often very abstract fiction of the surrealist and magic realist
writer Jeanette Winterson. Since she first started writing, Winterson’s work has corresponded
closely with concerns in feminism, queer theory and lesbian and gay studies, and similarly to
some canonical queer theorists, Winterson repeatedly questions the concept of time and the
writing of history. Her fiction not merely challenges sexual and gender difference, but
collapses the divide between past and present to create an interstitial space where
empowering experiences abound and significant encounters may grow and prosper. Recently,
and especially in The Stone Gods (2007), Winterson’s interstitial space has acquired a more
fatalistic tone, circulating around a sense of finality and impending doom. This chapter
argues that this reflects a more explicit nihilistic turn in critical and queer theory. Post-9/11
queer theory, like Winterson’s recent fiction, rejects reproductive continuance and circularity
– and embraces temporal ends.

“1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, I wasn’t writing one”, Jeanette

Winterson states about the production of her debut novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,

which spring-boarded her to literary fame more than twenty-five years ago.1 However, the

fact that this statement is part of the opening passage of Winterson’s recently published

memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? indicates that in 2011 the day for such

retrospective modes of writing had finally arrived. Why Be Happy? claims to be “the silent

twin” of Oranges,2 divided not only by a considerable distance in time, but a completely
 2

different relationship to time, memory, fiction and the self. Winterson’s early work creates a

reality in which all dimensions in time – past, present and future – are open to continual

change and exchange, whereas her more recent memoir and novels create a sense of crisis,

finality and temporal closure.

Winterson’s comment about the ‘day of the memoir’ indicates that the ‘timeliness’ of

her novels is an important concern – and she has indeed become known as one of the most

‘timely’ writers in the contemporary British cannon. Although Winterson has a very

distinctive magical realist narrative style, often interlacing several parallel narratives with

poetic and abstract contemplations on embodiment, love and reality, her novels also reveal an

extraordinary ability to harness and adhere to prevalent narrative trends, and to change her

approach as new directions appear. Arguably, Oranges’s great success was largely due to the

fact that it agreed so extraordinarily well with the postmodern breakdowns of binary

oppositions characterising 1970s and 1980s writing; fact becomes fiction, memory becomes

narrative and the author becomes a character in her own story.3 Similarly, Sexing the Cherry

(1989) and Written on the Body (1992) provide such seamlessly analogous examples of the

feminist and poststructuralist critical views of gender, writing and embodiment in the early

1990s,4 that they could have been written specifically for the purpose of teaching feminist

and poststructuralist theory (and, they are indeed included on many such syllabi). The latter

novel is furthermore one of the most commonly used third-wave feminist and queer critical

examples, in publications outlining the inherent gendering of language, and the urge to

impose gender even when gender is lacking.5 Its first-person love narrative builds an intricate

and intimate sense of embodiment and human connection without exposing the gender of the

narrator and protagonist, but despite the fact that gender is seemingly unnecessary for the

progression of the story, most readers find themselves making guesses. The “regulatory

fiction” of “gender coherence” dominating Western ideas of subjectivity, according to

 3

feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, 6 is thus destabilised in the act of reading Written on

the Body. The text simultaneously shows us that we desire gender definitions to make sense

of the world, and that its continual presence is nonessential for narrative and subjective

coherence. As Butler argues in Gender Trouble, the perceived ‘reality’ of gender plays a

central role in our conception of ourselves and the world – but it is also potentially

changeable. 7

Just as Claire Colebrook’s chapter in this volume, on the counter-apocalyptic

narratives of Margaret Atwood, shows an anti-Oedipal drive in Atwood’s recent work, this

chapter examines the ways in which Winterson’s ‘timely’ encounters with queer theory

correspond with the movement’s own continually changing and increasingly subversive

relationship to time. Her engagement with queer time continues to be very much ‘of its time’.

Winterson’s fiction is not merely read in relation to queer theory – she has repeatedly been

recognised as a textbook example of a queer feminist writer.8 As her fiction continually

produces literary similes of the basic contentions established in queer theory, novels such as

Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body are taught in many first-year literature and gender

studies courses throughout Anglo-American academia. As Richard Hobbs recognises,

Winterson’s ‘timely’ fiction provides “a crucial doorway into the debate surrounding

gender”, 9 and this is one of its major draws. Students and teachers alike favour Winterson’s

novels when demonstrating canonical ideas in gender and queer studies, because they are

perfectly fitted for this purpose.

Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Queering’ of Time

Discursive constructions and conceptions of time are major concerns within queer theory, yet

as Judith Halberstam acknowledges in her book In a Queer Time and Place (2005) defining
 4

specific meanings of ‘queer time’ and ‘queer space’ is practically impossible.10 Despite their

diffuseness, Halberstam argues that queer time and space are often invoked in recent criticism

and theory, and they serve important purposes, because they “are useful frameworks for

assessing political and cultural change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries”.11

Most simply construed, a queer conception of time is an attempt to capture the various layers

of temporality in a seemingly distinct narrative or discursive framework. Halberstam

describes it as a conception of time that is non-teleological and non-reproductive: it disrupts

the linearity of cause and effect and displaces the procreative principle of a ‘biological clock’

that measures the progressive movement of the body in time.12 It emphasises the future

potentialities as well as the past of a body’s movement through time and space. Bodies are

never merely positioned in the present; they are moving towards spaces and away from

spaces. Queer time reconfigures the “regulatory fiction” of linear time in favour of reality as a

type of temporal hybridity, in which the present resides in the past, and the past is an integral

part of the present.

The active disruption, or ‘queering’ of time is important to the establishment of queer

temporality, and the role of the queer writer or historian thus becomes pivotal. Indeed, queer

theory, at least according to some, begins with the establishment of queer historicisation.

Several of the most seminal queer theorists, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan

Goldberg, Medhavi Menon and Carla Freccero, agree that although the term was not yet

invented, the origin of queer theory was the 1977 publication of the English translation of

Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality – and many queer theorists, including Sedgwick,

Goldberg, Menon and Freccero themselves, have since engaged with queer theory as a

historiographic discourse. In reconfiguring and multiplying the historical grand narratives and

foundational myths that have become the basis for the Western imaginary, and allowing the
 5

present to create a space within each new historical account, they expand and explode

temporality beyond any easily conceivable bounds.

Like the queer historians, Winterson tends to write semi-historical, semi-

autobiographical and semi-mythical fiction. In doing this, she builds on an established British

and American feminist tradition of surrealist or magic realist writing, developed by writers

such as Angela Carter,13 Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Most of Winterson’s novels

present an amalgamation between contemporary and specific historical or mythical spaces,14

and more often than not they are inhabited by characters displaying recognisable facets of

Winterson’s own public persona.15 Her narratives take place on multiple time levels

simultaneously. In The PowerBook one continuous multi-gendered persona, Ali, moves

between time periods and places, becoming both the narrator and protagonist of his/her own

multitudinous narrative continuum, since his/her “universe is not created in time but with

time”.16 The story emphasises the boundless power of history telling itself. Ali is a writer, and

as such he/she has the ability to completely reconfigure the rules of reality, because he/she

realises that the ‘truth’ and temporality of the stories is maleable: “[t]hey have no date. We

can say when they were written or told, but they have no date. Stories are simultaneous with

time”.17

In Winterson’s earlier fiction storytelling becomes a mode of being and being is

repeatedly likened to an extra-spatiotemporal sea journey:

Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning on this

journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day
the mind can make a millpond of the oceans [...] The self is not
contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection
of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen
vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.18
Any attempt to form a subjectivity that lasts longer than a moment within this ontological

flux is likened to a shipwreck – and the protagonist of Sexing the Cherry, a giant ‘Dog-
 6

Woman’ travels through being and time in a ship constructed from the debris of past

maritime disasters. As Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor recognises in ‘Lusting Toward Utopia’ such a

model becomes an almost impossibly fluid and undefinable space, however.19 It is a queer

utopian dream, which can only ever feature in the abstract.

In the more recent PowerBook (2000) and The Stone Gods (2007), Winterson’s sea-

bound subjectivity assumes a less hectic tone, but her queer utopia also develops dystopic

undertones. The narratives of The Stone Gods are seemingly more linear than previous story

lines: rather than remaining at sea, in continual flux, her characters are shipwrecked on an

island. Winterson argues that this space, which eventually turns out to be Easter Island, where

a large section of The Stone Gods is set, is like an “idea of itself – an imaginary island and a

real one – real and imaginary reflecting together in the mirror of the water”.20 The Easter

Island in The Stone Gods is thus not the ‘real’ Easter Island as we know it, but it is also not

entirely detached from our reality and temporality. It is an imaginary concept, but it carries

recognisable traces of the actual Easter Island, and its actual history. The protagonists of

Winterson’s novel, the lovers Billie and Spike/Spikkers develop and take shape on this

island, and like the space itself, become both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. They recognise

themselves both as their present personas and a reflection of something beyond such

spatiotemporal limits – a form of mythical legacy, enhanced by the novel’s complex

structure. The novel thus forms a new structural conception of time, through which any

distinct conceptions of past, present and future are problematised. Each of the novel’s three

distinct sections draws on separate literary traditions, reiterating recognised situations,

characters and tropes, while simultaneously reconceptualising the very basis for such myth-

making practices.
 7

Queer Time Wars

The shipwreck on Easter Island is The Stone Gods’s central event, taking on a type of

allegorical role throughout the rest of the novel. The full text is divided into three major parts,

where the Easter Island sequent appears in the middle, surrounded by two storylines from the

same basic reality, with similar protagonists, but at different times and in different places.

The episode on the island could be set some time in the 17th or 18th century (considering

Billie’s continual references to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) which clearly is its

literary foreground), but its timing is unspecified. Easter Island is presented as a former

tropical paradise torn apart by oppositional spiritual dogma. Originally, the inhabitants of

Easter Island decide to cut down their trees in order to transport stone blocks for the

construction of a number of great stone gods that are meant to bring them future prosperity.

When no immediate wealth appears and the island landscape grows more arid, another more

destructive religious faction grows out of the general discontent, and the stone idols, along

with the few remaining trees many of the island inhabitants still strive to protect, are doomed

to annihilation. Nature is thus sacrificed in the name of ideology, and the idols of this belief

are sacrificed in the name of a destructive nature. The result is that some of the island

inhabitants preach doom and destruction, and the rest believe in preservation and salvation.

This scenario does of course show important similarities with discourses reiterated in

21st-century environmental politics, but more importantly for the purposes of this article, it

also reflects some internal rifts developed in post-9/11 critical theory, and especially in queer

theory. As Jago Morrison shows in his chapter of this volume, on the new precariousness of

Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me, some theorists, like Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam,

have responded to 9/11 with further emphasis on sustainable futures, solidarity and mutual

respect of the precariousness and failures of life.21 Other theories have taken a more negative,

and apocalyptic turn. Through the introduction of what has become known as ‘The Antisocial
 8

Thesis’, theorists such as Lee Edelman claim that queer theory should rid itself of all thoughts

of futurity and perpetuity. Edelman’s book No Future argues that the very idea of

sustainability and the future is oppositional to queerness – because it relies on the continued

stability of the spatiotemporal system that the concept of queer and anti-normative time

attempts to overthrow.

According to Edelman, Western society is obsessed with discourses of the future.

Western ideas of time are sustained by a reproductive system of juxtaposing causes and

ensuing effects that are inherently heteronormative. As a Lacanian theorist, he argues that as

long as queer theory reiterates ideas and proposals for the future, it cannot take advantage of

the specific desire-production that same-sex couplings enable.22 It does not harness the erotic

potential of ‘negativity’ or interruption that queer sexuality offers. The fact that the queer

subject is the product of his/her parents’ past desires, but that his/her own desire will not

produce a child in the future creates a particular type of temporality, which has the power to

denaturalise (and thus ‘queer’) the reproductive or progressive principle that dominates all

major discourses in society.23 Queer desire is an amalgamation of past and present without a

future and thus carries the power to change the linearity of the space/time continuum.

The multi-temporal subjectivities of The Stone Gods, which is one of the few adult

novels Winterson composed in the years following 9/11, are all to an extent queer (their

genders change and the constellation of the couplings change with them), and they all express

a form of rejection of futurity. As mentioned, the three sections of The Stone Gods assume an

increasingly dystopian tone, and all depict realities that are coming to an end. The first

narrative draws on science fiction and fantasy traditions. It is set in Tech City on planet

Orbus, which is experiencing the our not-so-distant future. Global warming and continual

human intervention with the natural order of things has brought life on the planet to a point of

imminent collapse. Not only has humanity managed to stop the process of aging, so that the
 9

biological continuum is locked in a perpetual present, but new techniques that reverse the

maturity processes are slowly emerging. There is a general desire for regression throughout

society. The men become attracted to younger and younger girls and everyone looks forward

to the prospect of leaving the decaying planet and moving on to the newly discovered and

entirely undamaged Planet Blue, to start afresh. Rather than constructing a sustainable future,

the Orbus population descends into their past in order to relive their civilisation’s moment of

birth. The re-birth of the past emerges in the death throes of the planet’s future.

At first glance, and if we believe the theories of Edelman, this could be a truly

destructive or queer society. He argues that queer theory has subconsciously embraced the

psychoanalytic death drive, rather than the reproductive drive. Queer theory takes part in the

social force that strives to disrupt and break down conventional reproductive processes and

bring each established form to its end: it is “something implacable, life-negating, inimical to

‘our’ children” that “works to reduce the empire of meaning to the static of an electric

buzz”.24 The similar nihilism of the two sections following the story of Orbus in The Stone

Gods come to signal a form of destructive circularity. Points of destruction emerge

continually throughout the book and develop a fatalistic pattern which indicates that all of

Winterson’s civilisations are doomed to bring about their own end. The protagonist lovers

Billie and Spike/Spikkers remain similar (if not the same) throughout the novel, repeatedly

falling in love only to subsequently experience a great and devastating loss, as Spike/Spikker

dies and Billie descends into a mental and physical decline. In the final section of the novel,

Billie and Spike encounter an old radio telescope that keeps emitting a signal pattern, which

possibly could be a message from a new world, but it turns out that this is merely an old

transmission from the old dying world they inhabit, bouncing off the moon. It is the buzz of

possibility, reduced to a murmuring echo.

 10

In accordance with Edelman’s model of queer temporality, Winterson seemingly

creates a queer poetics of destruction and finality. However, the protagonists of The Stone

Gods fight against the destructive principle, and their resistance is the novel’s most powerful

theme. Although destruction dominates the plot, love always prevails until the very end – and

because of this the narrative never quite evokes a sense of complete destruction. Winterson’s

dying civilisations never actually die at the close of the storylines. The main focus is the

novel’s desiring and loving protagonists, and they are more complicated than Edelman’s

model allows for.

Edelman develops an ideal nihilistic subject in No Future, which he calls the

sinthomosexual. It is a character who combines a homosexual subjectivity with the Lacanian

sinthome (a subject-centred, object-less or masturbatory jouissance) and becomes a future-

less, completely self-sufficient master of his own spatiotemporal discourse.25 As Judith

Halberstam puts it, Edelman worships “the eternal sunshine of the spotless child”.26 He

dreams of a subjectivity that is entirely outside of time, social discourse and connection. This

type of subject is more reminiscent of the characters Winterson constructs in Sexing the

Cherry and The PowerBook (which were both produced before 9/11) than the characters of

The Stone Gods. As previously mentioned, the Dog-Woman defies time and Ali is initially

presented as timeless: “my parents wanted an orphan. A changeling child. A child without

past or future. A child outside of time who could cheat time”.27 Both of these narratives also

derive their power from one desiring protagonist chasing his/her subjective fulfilment (rather

than two lovers, like in The Stone Gods). The one-sided nature of the romance is emphasised

in The PowerBook, as the narrative is primarily constructed around a number of one-way e-

mail conversations interspersed with introspective accounts of the relationship between Ali

and his/her lover(s). Ali’s erotic encounters are object-less. The novel circulates around the

freedom that her expressions of desire can take and her continual ability to change the story if
 11

she wishes to, but the narrative is a continuous monologue and her lover is never directly

given a space to intervene or divert the narrative journey.

Edelman states that sinthomosexuals bring out the “haunting, destructive excess” of

the temporal self “that futurism tries to allegorize as narrative, as history”.28 In the spirit of

this auto-erotic structure, Ali’s narrative makes a journey to the past. She becomes a young

girl in 1634 who dresses as a boy in order to smuggle tulip bulbs from Turkey to Holland,

carrying two bulbs fitted as testicles with a particularly fine tulip stem in the middle, to

represent her phallus. Ali gets captured on her way to Holland and becomes a sex slave to a

virginal princess, and as this happens the body of the protagonist develops the ability to

change: “Then a strange thing began to happen. As the princess kissed and petted my tulip,

my own sensations grew exquisite, but as yet no stronger than my astonishment, as I felt my

disguise come to life. The tulip began to stand”.29Ali’s relationship to the princess is entirely

focused on the flower phallus. She claims that “there it was – making a bridge from my body

to hers”,30 but the sexual encounter is merely related in terms of the sensation of phallic

pleasure. When Ali writes that “I felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself in her

body”,31 she is describing her sensation of wearing the penis rather than the joy of making

love to the princess, and she never senses anything beyond that, as she remains trapped

within her relationship to the tulip prosthesis. She is a sinthomatically self-sufficient subject.

Time and space are at her command – but at what price? As Ali comes to the close of her

narrative and her many eroto-temporal adventures, she still finds her reality lacking. She

yearns for some type of textual exchange or connection: “[a]nd I thought, ‘go home and

write the story again. Keep writing it because one day she will read it’”.32
 12

Post-9/11’s Precarious Futurity

The Stone Gods elaborates several of the themes developed in the The PowerBook, but in a

more fatalistic manner. Like Ali, the protagonists of The Stone Gods continually reiterate

their narratives in the hope that they will eventually be deciphered – and they place their trust

in reading as a means of eventual clarity. In the third and most dystopian story arch of the

novel, the multi-national company MORE, which controls every part of Tech City, decides to

create a super-computer to put an end to all moral ambiguities that have led humanity to war,

exploitation and destruction. This computer is an android, or ‘Robo Sapiens’ as Winterson

calls it, who eventually becomes Billie’s lover Spike. All the cultural and political data of

Tech City and the societies that have preceded it are fed into Spike in an attempt to

manufacture a possibility of final answers and accurate predictions, free from all the

subjective influences that have hindered its moral machine up to this point. The city is

attempting to put a stop to the destructive cycle that humanity has impressed on it.

Halberstam recognises in The Art of Queer Failure that such a cycle also rules the

post-9/11 Western world: collapse and failure are simultaneously presented as inevitable and

timeless. Contrary to Edelman, Halberstam argues that the main problem in contemporary

Western society is its refusal to engage with the future as a component of the present. There

is no future in the Western imaginary – we remain in a continuous state of political and

financial exception, in which failure to read the signs of impending disaster are taken as a

matter of course:

Toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the
United States slipped into one of the worst financial crises since the
Great Depression and as economist everywhere threw up their hands
and said that they had not seen the financial crisis coming [...] it was
clearly time to talk about failure.33
 13

Claire Colebrook observes in her analysis of Paul de Man’s theories of reading in Theory and

the Disappearing Future (2012), that the very idea of reading or communicating without

failure – and thus the idea of engaging with the future – has become known as a theoretical

fallacy. At the same time the fact that such a venture will fail is presented as absolute truth.34

In The Stone Gods, the experiment with moral absolutism also does fail – Spike soon loses

her supposedly objective moral position and ability to accurately predict – but another means

of communication is presented instead. The novel develops an ability to communicate

throughout the spatiotemporal boundaries through the very inevitability of its societies’

failure.

This type of communication is what Halberstam characterises as a poetics of queer

failure.35 As José E. Muñoz acknowledges, it “is more about escape and a certain virtuosity”

than actual failure per say.36 Failure can become a means of resisting the inevitability of the

downward circles: “there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing, and all

our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the

winner”.37 It is also a means by which a certain means of futurity can be maintained, since the

extraordinary empathetic potential of failure is something that has been recognised at least as

far back as to the Greek tragedians. As Halberstam establishes, “[a]ll losers are the heirs of

those who lost before them. Failure loves company”.38 Spike and Billie’s inability to be

sustained within each of the societies they inhabit becomes the very means by which they

remain. Their end, their perpetual failure to survive, gives rise to something unending.

Winterson characterises this enduring entity as a memory or an ‘imprint’. Throughout

the various storylines in the novel, she repeats the words: “I will never forget you”.39 The

words are given a life, and a temporality of their own. Winterson writes that: “The universe is

an imprint. You are part of the imprint – it imprints you, you imprint it. You cannot separate

yourself from the imprint, and you can never forget it. It isn’t a ‘something’, it is you.”40 In
 14

accordance with this statement, echoes of the two lovers Billie and Spike reappear in each of

the narratives, although their sex and situation in life differs. The encounters are all entirely

destructive and non-reproductive, but they still produce an imprinted trace that becomes

embodied by the encounter itself. Winterson’s encounters between past and present signal a

move towards an affective rather than a reproductive relationship. Continuity or futurity takes

shape when the various characters (within their various time periods) affectively connect with

each other.

Winterson creates a relationship between past, present and future that goes beyond

any type of reproductive principle in the classical sense, creating a juxtaposition that most

accurately would be referred to as a historiographical ‘touch’. The fantasy of a means to

‘touch’, or sensually connect with history has been powerfully invoked in queer theory.41

Carolyn Dinshaw, Carla Freccero and Michael O’Rourke argue that queer temporality should

be the construction of such “a living connection” – and the generator of this connectivity is

the act of historicisation itself.42 In his critique of Lee Edelman’s No Future, O’Rourke

conceptualises queer historiography in terms of a productive, but not re-productive ‘touch’

and intimacy. He argues that a relationship between past and present inevitably produces

something beyond itself and he chooses to interpret this as a glimpse of futurity. When the

past is brought into the present, the past ‘touches’ the present – and such an encounter moves

the present beyond itself.43 Carla Frecerro calls the resulting concept a “historiograchical

phantom”,44 and as Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods shows, historical narrative indeed

forms a somewhat spectral connection. When the ghost of the past haunts the present in

Winterson’s narratives, a new future is born.

In The Powerbook, on the other hand, the protagonist is never touched by the past.

Her various encounters throughout the novel remain as sterile as Ali’s encounter with the

princess. The computer screen between the narrator and her stories becomes almost tangible.
 15

There are spectral reminders of the various pasts throughout The Stone Gods, but in the third

section of the novel, Winterson introduces a historiographical phantom – and this becomes

the connecting line between all the separate narratives. O’Rourke quotes Jacques Derrida’s

famous statement that history “figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose

expected return repeats itself, again and again”,45 and Winterson makes this double function

very clear. The Billie of the third narrative finds an abandoned manuscript on the London

Tube, which contains an analysis of a long gone pair of lovers. It soon becomes clear that

these are the original Billie and Spike encountered in the first narrative of Orbus – and

through this manuscript the lovers of the future and past come to ‘touch’ the Billie of the

present, who comes to create the Billie and Spike of the future and past. Despite creating a

logically rather impossible scenario, Winterson thus gives life to a circle of spectral mimesis

– and this in turn becomes the means of the novel’s construction of futurity.

Reproducing Failure

Although the mimetic reverberation of Billie and Spike’s love is not directly reproductive, it

does engage in a form of sterile production. Similarly to what Tim Deans describes as a

formative “self-shattering” in his critical response to Edelman’s No Future, informed by the

philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Winterson’s lovers take part in a simultaneous destruction of

“civilized egos” and a multiplication of desire.46 The Stone Gods is powered by an urge for

expansion and further connection. In the midst of the circle of death there is a chain of

mutually productive erotic encounters between past, present and future selves exponentially

multiplying as they connect and disconnect, feeding off society’s destructive energy.

Elizabeth Freeman refers to these types of relationships between the past, present and future

as ‘time binds’, borrowing her term from Freudian discourse on the management of desire
 16

and excess. This is not merely a ‘bond’ between two spatiotemporal modes, but a bonding

explosion: “this very binding also produces a kind of rebound effect, in which whatever it

takes to organize energy also triggers a release of energy that surpasses the original

stimulus”.47 Despite the atmosphere of finality, the affective bonds formed through the

discourse of failure in Winterson’s novel thus also create a sense of hope and continuity. New

desirous dimensions are generated, shooting out of the ashes of each narrative’s destructive

end.

The desire cloud that emerges can to some extent be seen as Billie and Spike’s

progeny, but not the type of linear continuation of self that Edelman considers the ‘child’ of

heterosexual reproduction to be. As Halberstam establishes in The Queer Art of Failure,

Edelman’s construction of the child as a symbol of a reproductively sustainable future

disregards the possible implications of mutation, disruption or discontinuation in ideas of

biological futurity.48 Discourses surrounding children in Western society actually create some

of our most powerful poetics of failure, and Edelman’s No Future itself is very much a failed

child or ‘antichild’ of 1990s queer optimism.49 Interestingly, some of Winterson’s most

acclaimed recent pieces of fiction are Tanglewreck (2007) and The Battle of the Sun (2009),

which are both deeply allegorical narrative negotiations of time for children. Oranges also

famously creates one of the most pertinent literary examples of contemporary failed parent-

child dynamics and Why Be Happy? develops this theme further, both on an experiential and

a symbolic plane. Winterson systematically creates and recreates the image of her

relationship to her fervently Pentecostal adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson throughout the

memoir. Simultaneously, she creates and recreates the time bind between the memoir and its

fictional predecessor/parent, Oranges.

The fact that the idea of finality or apocalypse presents a major theme in Winterson’s

fiction receives a rather different set of connotations when read in relation to her recent
 17

memoir. Winterson indicates that from her perspective, doomsday philosophies and ‘ends’

have always been associated with her childhood and the influence of Mrs Winterson, who

prayed “Lord, let me die” every day and waited with great longing and anticipation for the

day of final judgment:50 “I was excited about the Apocalypse, because Mrs Winterson made

it exciting”.51 In Winterson’s spatiotemporal universe an “End Time”, which is “never far

away”,52 comes to signify one in an expanding field of maternal principles, a return to

another tentative myth of origin, and each of her ends expose one more reiterative layer of

self. From this perspective Why Be Happy? actually comes to reverse the reproductive

principle of linear time. As Winterson heads back in time through her various childhood

records in order to find her biological roots after her adoptive mother’s death, she comes to

discover more and more mothers: the ominous adoptive mother Mrs Winterson, the

biological birthmother Ann S. and her writing mother Ruth Rendell.53

The most important difference between the ‘children’ spawned by all these queer

temporalities and Edelman’s heteronormative linear futures is that the former are

characterised as the destructive means by which “human energy is collated so that it can

sustain itself”,54 rather than a sustained form of humanity itself. In The Stone Gods the ‘child’

produced throughout the narrative – its continuity – is an entirely linguistic reiterative

machine. It is what Colebrook, in her terms borrowed form De Man, would call the

‘inhuman’ afterlife of Billie and Spike’s love.55 It is the process of historicisation itself, “not

a linear, narrative or natural history, but an unreadable rupture”.56 Such a history-writing

process would, according to Colebrook, be “strangely figured as human”,57 and in

Winterson’s novel it takes the shape of the Robo Sapiens. The echo of Billie and Spike’s love

actually becomes contained within Spike. Her data memory reiterates the love story over and

over throughout the ether of the universe. It is a past that reverberates throughout the present,

voiced through the ghost of an impossible future.

 18

In light of such dreams of future echoes of love and connection, it is perhaps not

surprising that Winterson writes remarkably teachable fiction. Through continuous reiteration

in various classroom environments, the ‘timeliness’ of Winterson’s fiction eventually brings

her message beyond its time. It is the generator of a rhizomatic and inhuman imprinting

process of Winterson’s expansive idea of love, which she recognises to be the one topic she

continues to try to capture.58 In The Stone Gods it has taken a humanoid and strangely sensual

shape, whereas in The Powerbook it is characterised by an always-already present internet.

Love, for Winterson is a continual apocalypse: an ego-obliterating and thoroughly destructive

event, ensuring that a linear and monolithic History (with a capital h) never takes shape. She

teaches us that for the past to conjugate with the present, or the future to take shape in the

echoing death throes of the past, the bounds of our individual selves must be torn apart or

exploded. Only love can do this. Only through love can a figure of mutual communication

and mutual exchange be engendered.

Works cited:

Andermahr, S. (2007), ‘Introduction: Winterson and her Critics’ in S. Andermahr (Ed.)

Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. London: Continuum.

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York &
London: Routledge.

---. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York & London:
Verso.

Colebrook, C. (2012) ‘The Calculus of Individual Worth’ in T. Cohen, C’ Colbrook and J. H.

Miller Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, On Benjamin. New York:
Routledge.

Dean, T. ‘The Antisocial Homosexual’ in PMLA, 121.3, 826-8.

Defoe, D. (2003). Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin.

Derrida, J. (2006), Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International. New York & London: Routledge.
 19

Dinshaw, C. (1999), Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern.
Durham: Duke UP.

Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP.

---. (2006) ‘Antagonism, Negativity and the Subject of Queer Theory’ in PMLA,
121.3, 821-2.

Freccero, C. (2006), Queer / Early / Modern. Durham: Duke UP.

Freeman, E. (2010), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP.

Goldberg, J & M. Menon. (2005) ‘Queering History’ in PMLA, 120.5, 1608-17.

Halberstam, J. (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.
New York: New York UP.

---. (2006), ‘The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory’ in PMLA, 121.3,
823-5.

---. (2011), The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP.

Haraway, D. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (New York
& London: Routledge)

Hobbs, R. (2004), Writing on the Body. Sex, Gender and Identity in the fiction of Jeanette
Winterson and Angela Carter. Nottingham: Paupers’ Press.

Hutcheon, L. (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York &
London: Routledge.

Lanser, S. S. (1996), ‘Queering Narratology’ in K. Mezei (Ed.) Ambiguous Discourse:

Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill & London: North
Carolina UP, 250-61.

Merleau, C. T. (2003), ‘Postmodern Ethics and the Expression of Differends in the Novels of
Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Modern Literature, 26, 84-102.

Morrison, J. (2006) , ‘”Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?” Love, Sex and the
Problem of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15(2), 169-80.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York:
New York UP.

O’Rourke, M. (2011), ‘History’s Tears’ in B. Davies & J. Funke (Eds.) Sex, Gender and Time
in Fiction and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 53-69.

Ozyurt Kilic, M. (2009), ‘Introduction’ in M. Ozyurt Kilic & M. J-M. Sommez (Eds.)
Winterson Narrating Time & Space. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, ix-xxx.
 20

Rine, A. (2011), ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking the Future’ in B.

Davies & J. Funke (Eds.) Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 70-86.

Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. (1993), Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP.

Sellberg, K. (2009) ‘Transitions and Transformations: From Gender Performance to

Becoming Gendered’. Australian Feminist Studies, 24.1, 71-84.

---. (2012) ‘Slime and Time: Cannibalistic Erotics at the Limits of Temporal
Transgression’ in M. Foley, N. McRobert & A. Stephanou (Eds.) Transgression and
Its Limits. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Wagner-Lawlor, J. A. (2009), ‘Lusting Toward Utopia: Jeanette Winterson’s Utopian

Counter-Spaces from The Passion to The PowerBook’ in in M. Ozyurt Kilic & M. J-
M. Sommez (Eds.) Winterson Narrating Time & Space. Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 65-84.

Winterson, J. (1985), Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. London: Vintage.

---. (1989), Sexing the Cherry. London: Vintage.

---. (1992), Written on the Body. London: Vintage.

---. (2000), The PowerBook. London: Vintage.

---. (2007), The Stone Gods. London: Penguin.

---. (2007), Tanglewreck. London: Bloomsbury.

---. (2009), The Battle of the Sun. London: Bloomsbury.

---. (2011), Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage.

Notes

1
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2011), p.3.
2
Ibid., back cover.
3
See Andermahr (London: Continuum, 2007) and Merleau (Journal of Modern Literature 26, 2003) for a more
detailed discussion of the postmodern narrative strategies of Oranges. Winterson constructs a classic example
of what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographic metafiction’ in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction (New York & London: Routledge, 1988), pp.105-123. Oranges challenges the divide between history
and story telling, seamlessly binding them together in a narrative that cannot be unproblematically defined as
either.
 21

4
See, for example, ‘The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’ in Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1989),
pp.46-60, which extrapolates on twelve different ways in which language is dangerous for a woman. As
princess number 10 says, “as your lover describes you, so you are”(56).
5
See, for example, Susan Lanser’s discussion of Written on the Body’s queer potential in ‘Queering
Narratology’ (Chapel Hill & London: North Carolina UP, 1996).
6
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York & London: Routledge, 1990), p.180.
7
Ibid.
8
I have made this example before in ‘Transitions and Transformations’ (AFS, 2009). Susan Lanser also makes a
convincing argument for Winterson’s conscious ‘teachability’ in ‘Queering Narratology’ (Chapel Hill: North
Carolina UP, 1996).
9
Richard Hobbs, Writing on the Body (Nottingham: Pauper’s Press, 2004), p.5.
10
Judith Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place (New York: New York UP, 2005), p.1.
11
Ibid., p.9.
12
Ibid., p.5.
13
I have written elsewhere about the structural and thematic similarities between Winterson’s and Carter’s
work. See e.g. ‘Slime and Time’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press).
14
Like queer historiography, such historiographic metafiction problematises the very idea of History (with a
capital H) as a stable concept. As Hutcheon acknowledges in A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York & London:
Routledge, 1988), it makes the past a space of continual recreation, p.107. Many of Winterson’s historical
accounts take place during the early modern period in England or sometimes Europe (for example in Sexing
the Cherry, The PowerBook, The Battle of the Sun). This is interestingly also the period that the queer historians
and historiographers tend to focus on.
15
Princess number 10 in Sexing the Cherry is called Jess (p.56), like the author’s alter-ego in the TV series made
from Oranges, the narrator/protagonist of The PowerBook claims to be the author of The Passion (p.26) and
the protagonist of The Stone Gods shares Winterson’s physical build, looks and environmental activist ideals.
16
Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (London: Vintage, 2000), p.216.
17
Ibid., p.216.
18
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1989), p.80.
19
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, ‘Lusting Toward Utopia: Jeanette Winterson’s Utopian Counter-Spaces from The
Passion to The PowerBook’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp.84-86.
20
Ibid., p.87.
21
See Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York & London: Verso, 2004)
and Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011).
22
Lee Edelman, ‘Antagonism, Negativity and the Subject of Queer Theory’ (PMLA, 2006)
23
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), pp.1-31.
24
Ibid., p.153.
25
Ibid., pp.33-66.
26
Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), p.108.
27
Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (London: Vintage, 2000), p.137.
28
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), p.153.
29
Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (London: Vintage, 2000), p.22.
30
Ibid., p.22.
31
Ibid., p.22.
32
Ibid., p.243.
33
Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), p.87.
34
Claire Colebrook, Theory and the Disappearing Future (New York: Routledge, 2012), p.132.
35
Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011).
36
José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York UP, 2009), p.178.
37
Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), p.120.
38
Ibid., p.121.
39
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (London: Penguin, 2007), pp.20; 103; 105.
40
) Ibid., p.105.
41
This idea is most extensively developed in Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities,
Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), pp.12-15. Dinshaw constructs the ‘touch’ in relation to Donna
Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York &
London: Routledge, 1991) and a Foucauldian idea of trans-spatiotemporal “vibrations”, arguing that the
 22

acknowledged “desire for some sort of recoverable past” in queer history creates what Haraway calls a “partial
connection”: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is
always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together
without claiming to be another”, in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), p.14, and Haraway,
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), p.187.
42
Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke UP, 2006); Michael O’Rourke, ‘History’s Tears’
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
43
Michael O’Rourke, ‘History’s Tears’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p.63.
44
Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p.79-80.
45
Michael O’Rourke, ‘History’s Tears’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p.60; Jacques Derrida, Specters
of Marx (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), p.10.
46
Tim Deans, ‘The Antisocial Homosexual’ (PMLA 121.3, 2006), p.827.
47
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), p.Xvi.
48
Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), p.119. As Tim Deans points out in ‘The
Antisocial Homosexual’ (PMLA 121.3, 2006), this is particularly remarkable considering that the psychoanalytic
discourses surrounding the family are based on ideas of perversion and parent-child contention.
49
Judith Halberstam, ‘The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory’ (PMLA 121.3, 2006), p.824.
50
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2011), p.9. Due to this
fact apocalyptic references in Winterson’s work tend to be imbued with a certain amount of childhood
nostalgia and sarcastic humour. See, for example, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (London: Vintage, 1985)
pp.38-39, where the protagonist child Jeanette wants to embroider ‘THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT
YET SAVED’ on a cross-stitch sampler.
51
Ibid., p.23.
52
Ibid., p.76.
53
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is dedicated to all three of these. Winterson furthermore
recognises that she has engaged in a fictional search for the maternal throughout her fiction. The mother of
Oranges and the Dog Woman of Sexing the Cherry are impersonations of her mother (see Why Be Happy When
You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2011), p.36), whereas The PowerBook and The Stone Gods stage a
search for a more abstract maternal principle.
54
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), p.3.
55
Claire Colebrook, Theory and the Disappearing Future (New York: Routledge, 2012), p.142.
56
Ibid., p.142.
57
Ibid., p.142.
58
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2011), pp.8-9.