Sexing the Cherry
15 April 2008
by: Jeanette Winterson
Time falls, like a sheet out an open window, as the back-drop of this tight-little book. The sheet billows for a bit as it catches some petal-studded breeze, it collapses and exhales slight ripples that interminably undulate across the smooth surface. Time can be folded up or curled into or as Sexing the Cherry intends it, time may be painted on. But I can not say this book is ‘about’ time — I despise calling books names — though time certainly has something to do with it.
There is a certain shivering thrill I experience whilst reading short books. Perhaps this is part symptom of short books being something I rarely do. Heavy books are leagues ahead in their attraction; caress that weighty stature, fondle the myriad-multi-layered ‘message’ they have aims to convey. I think I must look smarter as I balance the big book on my lap. . . and that makes me laugh. . . looks and books? The mirrors within the words are like those in fun-houses, no matter the girth that has been bound.
I must veer off track, as that is where the above has taken me: Simon has brought a gift from an English speaking country. This book is no feather and Oh! how eager I am to balance it on my lap! The most recent edition of Porius, by the genius, John Cowper Powys. With this tome I will find no lack of feasting! With this book my mania will be given great subsistence on which to thrive!
Back to track. . . Small books have their virtues too. Jeanette Winterson’s writing is so perfectly concise. I have no doubt when I say, “There is no word misplaced here; no word has gone missing.” The imagery in short books is of a sharpened poignancy that is never off mark; it is a javelin thrown by the steady hand of a skilled knight. Sexing the Cherry reads like a book that could fit down a funnel; without a speck of unctuousness, all of it shakes together so indivisibly.
My highest gratification was in Jordan and his voyages, his discoveries of time.
The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end.
Jeanette Winterson has created two characters for her main ones; both Jordan and his mother, the Dog Woman, have ‘replicas’ in the ‘present’ day. I do not think that this is a stretch of the imagination, but a hint to the strong proof that is always within us: We live in a constant state of multiplicity. If, during the reading of this book, you stopped here and gathered up everyone you have ever been, you would see yourselves holding hands with the author, along with her characters, and everyone else she has ever been. The chain does not stop.
Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.
I have often thought that I was meant to live in another era, that my ways are better suited to some turtle-paced time. I have often thought — before I began writing, when I was only dreaming about it — that my life was like slides in a projector; meaning, the faster I spun them the more seamlessly they came together, the slower I went, the more visible the cracks became. I believe that living a singular life would be less satisfying and that I am able to find voices for all my multiplicity through writing. In my adolescence, I used to think that schizophrenia would be a short descent for me!
Then, there is the Dog Woman. A domineering name if there ever was one; a domineering lady in the biggest sense of the word. She is perhaps the defiance of space in the relationship. She reminds me of large ideas that I’ve had, ones that promised to swallow me up if I did not stick to my defenses. Her proportions defy her descriptions; her features, best settled on as grotesque, even though that word does no justice, she wears fine pearls around a recently scrubbed neck. I enjoyed her musings on sex, such a bestial grounding when compared to Jordan’s own ephemeral thoughts. He is after a dancing woman who does not exist.
I also enjoyed the Dog Woman’s, almost lustful, rampages. So cut and dry in their sense of goal, which is not even apparent to her, she just does. She does what she has need to do. And it is she who gives lead to the internal discourses on love. Such softness, striking against her appearance. (Though her appearance is only a projection of her inner-hugeness, as we learn from her ‘replica.’)
I am too huge for love. No one, male or female, has ever dared to approach me. They are afraid to scale mountains.
If she is too huge to be loved then she has a huge love for Jordan (and her dogs.) I found there to be a peaceful quality to it, the pureness of love without the desperation. She knows he is going to leave her. She is the one who found him in the water; she is the one who named him after a river.
Jeanette Winterson is surely ‘a poet that thinks.’ In Sexing the Cherry she has taken our dull lives and proved to us that they sparkle. That beneath every one is a myth and multiple myths to be discovered.
Bracciano Italy
April 2008
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