Pedmt: Souasn britsk spisovatelky (AJ24054) Vyuujc: prof. Mgr. Milada Frankov, CSc., M.A.

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Jeanette Wintersons Gut Symmetries

If you read reviews on Jeanette Wintersons books, it sometimes seems that each of them deals with another author. So contradictory they are. But if you look closer to Wintersons biography, you find out that this antimony is characteristic for her life from childhood till present. It is so because her existence has always been full of contrasts. Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and she was brought up in the family of a factory worker and a housewife as an adopted child. Both her parents professed Evangelical religion and were preparing their daughter to become a preacher. As such, Jeanette started to write sermons at the age of eight which is quite unusual. But parental dream about their daughters future was not in accordance with Jeanettes own dream. She loved books. Quite a strange hobby in a home where there are only six volumes and most of them religious, isnt it? Fortunately, she revealed a real treasure among these pieces. Sir Thomas Malorys Morte dArthur. This book triggered her literary and writing activity. What luck that the Wintersons did not have a bathroom in their house and Jeanette could spend her leisure time with her books in the outside toilet. If it had not been so, probably we would have never known this original writer because reading was not much approved by Mr and Mrs Winterson except the Bible. Another turning point in her life was caused by Jeanettes love affair with a woman at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Nor her parents neither the church community put up with this scandal and she had to leave her home. To be able to continue her studies at Accrington FE College and later at Oxford University, she began to earn money in various part-time jobs. The scale of her job activities was really wide: from an ice-cream van driver and a domestic in a mental home to a make-up assistant in a funeral parlour. After university she worked in a theatre in London and in publishing. It was in 1987, two years after releasing her autobiographical first novel Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, when she became a full-time writer.

Although she has won diverse awards during her literary career, she still raises a storm among the critics. The reviews appearing in journals or websites appear to be either negative, blaming her for being an egoistic author, or very positive, appreciating her innovator methods. Hardly ever there are some neutral reviews. Anyway, you probably do not find a critic who is indifferent to Jeanette Winterson. As she breaks up the boundaries. By the fact, for instance, that however she has never denied being lesbian herself, she does not agree with the proclamation that she is a homosexual writer. She does not want to support the separatism of homosexual literature and it is uncommon even today. Nowadays, she lives in her small cottage in wood in Gloucestershire or over her shop in London. It is not an ordinary shop, because nothing about Jeanette Winterson is ordinary including her appearance. This shop is a chandlery with home-made products where you can buy such delicacies as home-made pumpkin pasta and hand-made Parmesan. So Winterson fights against conventions not only by her book but also by her lifestyle. Gut Symmetries is the ninth book by Jeanette Winterson. It was published in 1997 and provoked a whole range of reactions as well as other work written by this author. What employed the critics, whether in positive or negative sense, was not so much the main story narrating about a love triangle. Rather it was the way Winterson applies her knowledge (or ignorance as some reviewers proclaimed) of quantum physics, astrology and tarot cards into her story. Either they loved it or hate it. What a typical response to Jeanette Winterson. According to the book cover, Gut Symmetries is a story of time, universe, love affair and New York. The ship of Fools, a Jew, a diamond, a dream. A working class boy, a baby, a river. The sub-atomic joke of unstable matter... And, as Winterson says on her websites: This is a miracle sort of a book - the miracles of the universe, revealed through science, and human miracles made possible through love. There are two extraordinary miracles, outside of commonsense and gravity, but if you want to find out what they are, you'll have to find out for yourself. Sorry, but with miracles, that's the only way. If you puzzle out the title, it also gives you a hint what the book is about. Winterson says that the title is a play on words. GUT stands for Grand Unified Theory - the theory of everything science wants to discover - and it's gut as in gut instinct, the feelings that lead us on much more than we like to admit. Symmetries, well, it's the search for a perfect parallel universe, the one just like ours but without the problems. I suppose that's what we look for when we fall in love...

Gut Symmetries tells the story of three main characters Jove, a world-known quantum physicist, his wife Stella and Alice, a young British physicist who is on her way to a research job at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the USA. On the board of the ship heading from Great Britain to the United States, Alice meet Jove and they commence an affair. As soon as Stella finds out that her husband has a lover, she meets Alice in a caf. Surprisingly, instead of having a quarrel or fighting, the two women start a sexual relationship, too. When Jove discovers this striking turnover, his reaction is quite ridiculous and typically male: HE: You went to bed with my wife? ME: With Stella, yes. HE: What did you think you were playing at? ME: I didn't think we were playing chess. HE: I don't believe it. ME: It was sex not a miracle. (It was a miracle.) HE: How could you? ME: I didn't plan it.

Jove walked towards me, he walked away from me, he circled me as a shark does a pool of blood. Then he rang up Stella and shouted down the phone, in Italian, for two hours sixteen minutes without a pause. For the following three months he behaved like a character amalgam of Bluebeard and Coco the Clown. If he was not raging and threatening, he was cracking jokes about the man who had intended to remain a bachelor and ended up with two wives. Jove and I continued to work together, Stella and I made love together, and once a week Jove and Stella met for dinner. Emotionally balletic by nature, both were practising their lutz; in figure skating, a jump, with rotation, from the back outer edge of one skate to the back outer edge of the other. Their ice rink was my heart. As if he said: It is all right that I have a lover. But otherwise? Impossible! However, after revealing the truth, the three of them become a love triangle. It seems to be convenient for Jove but it is hard for the women to put up with this state of things. To tell the truth, it is Alice who suffer the most because of this new situation which is evident from the quotation above: Emotionally balletic by nature, both were practising their lutz; in figure skating, a jump, with rotation, from the back outer edge of one skate to the back outer edge of the other. Their ice rink was my heart.
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After some time spent in such a strange relationship, they decide to have a trip on the board of a ship. Eventually, Alice is not able to go with Stella and Jove as her father is dying and she must leave for London. Therefore the married couple set up alone and they get lost in a storm. The following part of the story is quite bizarre and unexpected. It is, in fact, the only chapter of the book told by Jove: I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

... I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity, hungry though I was. I did it so that it would have not disgusted either of us. She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. With my body I thee worship. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. Till death us do part. Till death us do part. I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it.

I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done? Jove, thinking his wife is dead or nearly dead, decides to eat some part of her to prevent himself from starvation. Surprisingly, there is a kind of happy-ending in this story. Jove and Stella are survived by Alice and some men. And they are both alive! Stella approves herself as a very strong personality and she is able to forgive her husband that he ate some parts of her. The other components of the novel are created by the stories of Stella's parents, who fled Nazi Germany, which was a very difficult decision when one was a German and the other a Jew. Corresponding to their lives are the lives of Alice's parents - her father, a workman in the dockyards of Liverpool, and her mother, an Irish beauty. Then there is Alice's grandmother, a very religious woman who still works even in her nineties. Few mentions of Joves Italian family are usually found in quite funny situations: Signora Rossetti had realised that her American-speaking customers would learn only two words of Italian: 'Spaghetti' and 'Quanto?' Faced with a foreign language they ordered by numbers. 'I'll take an eighteen.' To save them further trouble Signora Rossetti dispensed with language altogether. Her menu was a list of numbers, out of series, with further numbers in dollars, lire and sterling, to reassure the cost-conscious monoglot looking for an authentic foreign experience. So homely and honest and genuine seemed Signora Rossetti that British
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and American customers formed long queues outside the front door. They did not realise that the Italians and the Irish went around the back with a 'Ciao Mama bella bella' and took any table they liked.

No. 18, the most popular item on the menu, a secret recipe hamburger made with garlic and herbs. Although it was the only hamburger on the menu, her front door diners seemed to find it by instinct. 'I'll take an eighteen.' When they did not, Mama served it to them anyway . . . All those supplementary stories, although might be seen as unimportant parts of the book, are very significant because they allow us to understand the behaviour of Jove, Stella and Alice through their family backgrounds. The main story is also completed by quite unusual means of literary fiction quantum physics analysis, astrology and tarot cards reading. These three features of Gut Symmetries are often commented on negatively by critics and they appear to be disturbing for readers. But although these components of the novel look like inutile and used accidentally at first sight, in fact, there are reasons why Jeanette Winterson applies them. She employs quantum physics to explain matters which we usually see as non-scientific: Infinite grace. Infinite possibility. The mercy of the universe extended in its own laws. According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, but multiple chances. Space is not simply connected. History is not unalterable. The universe itself is forked. If we knew how to manipulate space-time as space-timemanipulates itself the illusion of our single linear lives would collapse. And if our lives here are not the total our death here will not be final. Through astrology she describes how the stars influence our lives and tarot cards reading helps us to understand the main characters feelings: Last month, after our moot, Stella showed me Card XVI of the Tarot deck, L'amoureux, The Lovers. A young man seems to be trying to choose between two women, Cupid, arrow-borne, over his head.

SHE: The Eternal Triangle. ME: Three is a masculine number. Odd numbers are masculine. SHE: Or are masculine numbers odd? ME: It's my fault.
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SHE: It's all our fault.

She looked at the picture. 'I think, perhaps, that the women are trying to decide for themselves and the man is taking no notice.' In the interview, which you can find on Jeanette Wintersons website, the author tries to explain why she writes in the way she does and why she uses such complicated topics as quantum physics. She says: I was interested in it. Science fascinates me and I've taken New Scientist for years. All of my books are preoccupied with time - it starts right back in Oranges in the Deuteronomy section. In Sexing the Cherry I use time vertically, not just horizontally, and in Gut Symmetries I wanted to explore the dimensionality of time. How do we understand time? What happens to the past? Does the future already exist? These are questions the book deals with, not because I hope to answer them, but as a way of adding to the puzzle. I think that this quotation should make clear her style of writing. A lot of critics blame her that she does not understand the matters she writes about. But she does not want to do the work of quantum physicist and she does not declare that she is one of them. Quantum physics is only one of her fields of interest, so why couldnt she write about it? If the critics accuse Jeanette Winterson of not understanding perfectly the quantum physics than they should criticise all the authors of fiction of not understanding their job. Because just few fiction writers are specialists in the sphere they write about. If it were not so than all the detective stories authors had to be policemen or murderers and all the writers of historical fiction had to be either historians or personal observers of the era they are writing about. And they are not, are they? Winterson's attempts to link physics to passion read like The Song of Solomon as recounted by the cast of Star Trek - Amanda Craig, New Statesman Gut Symmetries is extraordinarily difficult to get through; based on yet another romantic triangle in which two women end up happily as a couple, while the beastly man who has brought them together is sent to hell; full of tiresomely amateurish explanations of the `new physics' which are then pressed into service as distressingly overbearing metaphors; and, once again, showing no sign of serious interest in any human being who is not a projection of Winterson's own self. - David Sexton, The Spectator

Except those reviews blaming her for being amateurish and joining incompatible topics as quantum physics contra love story, there are also other pieces of critique stating that Jeanette Winterson is an egoistic and selfish writer: Though there are numerous wonderful passages in Gut Symmetries, and many compelling ideas, ultimately Winterson, rather than taking me on the extraordinary journey promised at the novel's start, is simply listening to herself speak, or, to be more accurate, reading herself write. - Lucy Grealy, The Village Voice But do you know a writer who is not an egoist? At least in a certain sense of this word. Each author, as far as I know, describes things he or she is interested in. If Winterson is keen on quantum physics and astrology and tarot card, why should she write about cooking for instance? If she did so, she would not enjoy writing of the book and we would not enjoy reading. If someone decides to become a writer, he or she has to love writing and has to have something to write about. Logically, the author depicts topics he or she likes and is crazy about. That is why every single writer can be regarded as selfish. And if someone is able to write a book about a topic which he or she is not concerned with then, I suppose, no one is going to read it. Because if there are some writers who are able to create a catchy story about themes which are not close to them, I would really love to meet them. Fortunately for Jeanette Winterson (although I am not sure if she cares about the critics) some partly positive reviews appear, too. These reviews appreciate Wintersons innovative approach to writing but they also admit that her novels are not easy to read: Gut Symmetries strains for the fluidities of poetry, and actually conveys the sense of a writer grappling with language; indeed, it feels like it may have been fun to write. But it is mortifyingly dull to read. - Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph I found that Gut Symmetries kept me on my toes, not the most comfortable way to walk, but one that made me aware of the steps I took. A kind of walking meditation, the book asks us to think our way toward insights that only our guts can know and to feel our way toward mysteries that lie beyond our analytical minds. The path is, of course, not straight and it leads in multiple directions simultaneously, but in a Winterson book, you learn by going. Even if you don't follow every turn and angle, the journey is well worth the walk. - Audrey Bilger, The Los Angeles Times

Whether the critics write anything, according to the number of prizes and awards and according to the contributions to her website forum, Gut Symmetries and also the other books by Jeanette Winterson are worth reading. If not for fun, they are certainly good for experiencing something new and unconventional.

Primary Sources: Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. London : Granta Books, 1997. Print.

Secondary Sources: Booktrust, British Council and Dr Jules Smith. Jeanette Winterson. Contemporary Writers. Literature Department of the British Council in association with Booktrust. 2009. 28 Jan. 2011. Web. <http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth100> Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. The complete review contributors. Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson. The complete review. The complete review. 2010. 29. Jan. 2011. Web. <http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/wintersj/gut.htm> Winterson, Jeanette. Jeanette Winterson. Jeanette Winterson. 2008. 28. Jan. 2011. Web. <http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/>