Think of a cigar box. Remember the opening credits of the film of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? Scout keeps her treasures in a cigar box. Remember the soap doll? The broken pocket watch? Remember how invested those objects are with special meaning after one learns where they came from, who gave them to Scout? Okay. Now keep that cigar box in mind. We'll come back to it in a minute.
When we read Jeanette Winterson, particularly for the first time, it is all too easy to want to turn to contemporary literary criticism and theory to explain and incorporate the less familiar elements of her technique. Looking for help, we're likely to encounter all sorts of perfectly legitimate, and perfectly useless -- at least for the purposes of our Book Club discussions -- critical jargon about "metafictional explorations" and "post modernist tropes" and the like. All of that tangle is meant to place Winterson within a critical, rather than a literary tradition. Think of it as the difference between enjoying a concert of serious music and learning music theory. One doesn't need the latter to enjoy the former, right? I'm not saying that what is in the critics' analysis of Winterson's work is not true, I'm just suggesting that as readers, as opposed to academics or critics, it doesn't help us much in our conversation, or enjoy the book more, does it?
Instead, I would suggest that rather than trying to understand or explain away the elements of
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit that do not conform to more traditional, familiar narrative techniques (plot, character development revealed through the action of the story and over time, dialogue,) though Winterson does use
all of these things, we try an experiment.
Remember that cigar box? Try to remember what it was to be a child. What mattered to you? What objects did you value? What did you treasure? Now. Other than Nick, I don't know that any of us grew up to become novelists, but if we had, mightn't our talisman be not so much a soap doll, or a pocket watch, but the stories we told ourselves as children? All children fantasize and play. All children tell stories. Now, imagine yourself in the home described in the novel. What toys does Jeanette have? Does she watch television? Does she go to the movies? Does she have friends her own age? When does she finally make a friend not an adult? What would Jeanette have in her cigar box? What would Jeanette treasure? With what does Jeanette play?
And think also about the books Jeanette either has read to her or eventually reads for herself. Other than Jane Eyre and the Bible, what is the first book we're told Jeanette read?
I don't mean this to be a riddle or a quiz. I'm just trying to suggest, for anyone for whom this kind of fiction is either a new experience or an unfamiliar one, that what might help most in discussing this particular novel is to try to experience it not as we might another, more straight forward book, but as if our own childhood experience was being explored at the same time as we experience Jeanette's. Remember, the rules for one child telling another child a story are different from the stories adults tell children, and even from the stories children tell adults. So. How does Jeanette tell us her story? How does she tell us not only the events of her childhood, but their meaning to her at the time? What points of reference does she have, what kind of stories would she know? What are the tools this girl has to explore her emotions, her growing maturity, her religious training, her sense of humor?
What makes Winterson such a brilliant and challenging novelist isn't that she applies particular theories or narrative strategies to her books, though obviously she does do all that quite self-consciously, but that she succeeds in recreating both the sense and the feeling of this childhood, quite possibly her own, without the intrusion of what I'd ask you to think of as the Narrative Nanny. This would be the reassuring presence of the adult voice, either in the third person of an anonymous narrator, or the adult narrator commenting retrospectively on the state of mind and the state of events in the life of the Jeanette in the book. Again, think of Harper Lee's Scout, the adult Scout who regularly appears in the narrative to first reassure us that Scout survives and learns from her experience and turns out just fine, and second, tells us what we need to know about what is happening even if Scout can't possibly appreciate the larger implications at the time. This is how we are used to reading about childhood. Harper Lee writes to this model exceptionally well. We do not question Scout's reality as a child, and we do not question that she has appropriate adult supervision in the telling of the events of "that summer." But who's looking out for Jeanette? What Winterson may be doing is doing away with this convention all together. The novelist Jeanette lets the child Jeanette tell her story any damned way she chooses, or seems to. To put that another way, the novelist Jeanette Winterson, quite slyly, refuses us the comfort of commenting directly on what the Jeanette in the novel chooses to tell us and when and how she does so. This can be uncomfortable, but it need not be confusing or frightening. We know Jeanette will survive, don't we? Besides the obvious reassurance of having the novel itself as proof that Jeanette Winterson survived her childhood, what other clues do we have that the novel's Jeanette is a survivor? What does she use to survive? What do her stories tell us? And how much do you love the way this kid's mind works?
I'd ask everybody in the group to try the cigar box exercise and think of the objects, the books and the stories and the treasures we all had as children. Bring those with you to the group, if not physically, then mentally or as a list. What were the tools you used as a child to explain and explore your place in the world? How did you tell your own story? Where was the magic for you?
A friend sent this sad news from today's LA Times. The photo is of the then manager of A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood, circa 2000! I'm long gone, but still remember the store fondly and am very sad to see yet another GLBTQ bookstore on its way out.
