Readers Place

Jeanette Winterson interview/review

Taken from jeanettewinterson

Windrush : September 14th 2002

1. Have you always written? When did you first start writing and what were you writing?

I think I started writing before I could read because I wanted to write sermons, because I was driven by a need to preach to people and convert them which possibly I still am, except that now I do it for art’s sake, and then I did it for God’s sake.

Being brought up by Pentecostal Evangelists meant that there was tremendous drive to go out there and make a difference, and think that literature does make a difference. I think that that’s it’s purpose – to open up spaces in a closed world, and for me, it’s a natural progression which seems bizarre perhaps – from those days of preaching the Word to these days of trying to make people see things imaginatively, transformatively.

1. So if you were writing before you were reading, do you still write in order to read the world?

Yes. I write so that I’ll have something to read, but I also write so that I can explain the world to myself, because writing becomes a third person – it becomes something which is separate from yourself. It’s no longer you, although it’s generated by you, and when it returns to you it explains things. It explains you to yourself and it explains the world.

Books are always cleverer than their authors. They always contain more than the writer intended to put into them – at least they should – otherwise they become rather formulaic. I suspect creative writing school books contain only what is put into them, which is why they’re so dreary.

1. And when you were writing Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, what were you trying to explain to yourself?

I was trying to explain where I’d come from. I was trying to make sense of a bizarre childhood and an unusual personal history. And I was trying to forgive. I don’t think it’s possible to forgive unless you can understand, and one of the things that writing can do – that literature can do – that all art can do, is to help you understand.

It can put you in a position which is both inside and outside of yourself, so that what you get is a depth of knowledge otherwise not possible, about your own situation, and a context in which to put that situation, so you’re no longer alone with feelings that you can’t manage. People’s powerlessness comes from feelings that they can’t manage, and especially those that they can’t articulate.

Being able to write a story around the chaos of your own narrative, allows you to see yourself as a fiction, which is rather comforting because, of course, fictions can change. It’s only the facts that trap us. I’ve always thought that if people could read themselves as fictions they would be much happier.

1. Was the present first line of the novel always the first line of the novel?

‘Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father’? Yes, it was. My first lines aren’t always written first, but they never change when I have written them.

1. All right, what about the title? Was that yours? Or does it come from something else?

Well I don’t know, because it’s lost in a kind of pre-history now of conjecture and myth. It’s a stupid title. It’s definitely not a selling title, but it’s become part of the language. Which just shows you can persuade anybody of anything if you do it for long enough.

I don’t know where it comes from. I can’t remember how I thought of it, all I can remember is that it came out of the idea – the central metaphor of the orange – but why Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit I really don’t know. People often ask me to explain it but I can’t.

1. But all of your titles have ended up becoming icons and end up getting used: Sexing the Cherry turns into ‘Sexing the shopping trolley’, even Gut Symmetries has been turned into a headline, even the simplicity of something like The Passion gets reiterated. Why is it? Why do these titles move into a language that then becomes more widely used?

I think because they are evocative and memorable. It’s very important to have the right title for a book. Usually I think of my titles before I’ve written the book, and not afterwards. Which suggests that something has formed already, and simply needs to be written out – perhaps that is what happens.
But I think it’s important to have a title which means something to people, which they can remember and use as a talisman for what they’ve read, so that they associate the title with the content.

It’s not something separate from it. It’s not just simply a way of labelling or tagging what you’re writing – it’s integral to it. It must be so I think, otherwise you end up with a book that is divorced from its title. I don’t want that. I want the whole thing to work together.

1. And yet it has a bigger, shadowing meaning behind it. Even Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and the way it get uses as a proverb…

Well people can then play with them and use it themselves as they see fit. Journalists love to do that. Nothing wrong with that, because it gets the book about more widely than it otherwise might be. I think it’s pleasure in language. If you care about words, you’ll want to have the best words on the front cover won’t you?

1. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – for obvious reasons – is written in the first person, but actually the first person is your favourite mode. Why?

Because it’s direct. Because it sets up an intimacy which is and isn’t true. People think that you’re talking only to them. You’re not, of course, because hopefully other people are reading the book at the same time. So there is a little trickery there. But there’s also an honesty to it, because reading is a one to one experience.

It’s a direct connection between reader and writer. It’s not the same as going to the cinema or the theatre. It’s something that you do privately, silently, no one can see what you’re doing, you’re not sharing the experience and that does make it peculiarly intimate. I think that’s valuable in a world where people have very little private time and space now because it sets up a virtual world of your own. And I like to make that space as close and as secret as I can.

I like the reader to feel that for that time, at least, nothing else exists and they are entering a world – a bit like the Ancient Mariner I suppose – where somebody is stopping them on their busy ways and saying ‘Listen to this. Here’s a story’. The third person to me always seems rather omnipotent and remote and better left in the nineteenth century where it was done rather well. Some writers use it, but I prefer not to. And if I do use it I usually do so for the purposes of distance, to get away from the kind of intimacy I’m usually aiming for.

1. In spite of the fact that you’re using the first person, it’s not monolithic, because you do tend to do this double strand technique. Even in Oranges you have the first person, but then you have the fairy stories interweaving; obviously in The Passion, Henri and Villanelle; the Dog Woman and Jordan in Sexing the Cherry; even in The Powerbook a story, and then lots of other stories set against it. What’s the strength of using this double strand?

I continually break my narratives. Nothing depresses me more than seeing a page with no breaks in it. It’s such a lot to read, apart from anything else. I like the spaces and the pauses that you can make. I think it’s also important to offer these forceful interruptions to people’s concentration, because the problem with a running narrative is that people skip. We all do. You’re looking for the story. The language becomes something which simply conveys meaning, and not something in it’s own right.

I believe it should be something in its own right, and that it needs to be concentrated on, just in the way that poetry does, without looking for the next bit of the story. Otherwise reading becomes faintly pornographic doesn’t it? Because you just look for the next bit of excitement. So what I try to do always, is remind the reader that they are reading. That this is something which demands concentration. It’s not like watching television. It’s a dialogue, and it’s not a passive act.

It’s something which is absolutely active. And just as you would listen to a friend talking to you, so you have to listen to the book and you have to pick up its rhythm and move in the time that it creates. It’s very important to get the right tempo and to get the right pace when you’re reading somebody’s work. Other wise you’re likely to read it wrongly simply because you’re reading at the wrong speed.

One way of helping people to pick up the rhythm is by this variety of form, and use of language which changes as you go along. I don’t do it accidentally. Everything that I do is very deliberate in this. And it is about telling a story in such way that, I hope, people will remember it. Of course some people find this vastly irritating and simply want to skip along and read a monolithic narrative. I feel sorry for them.

1. At the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit we get one of the inset ‘fairy stories’ as it were, with a character called Winnet Stonejar, which of course is an anagram of Jeanette Winterson. Why is naming such an important topic for you? What is it about the magic of naming that interests you?

Names are places where you pause. They are places where you recognise, they are places that tell you something about where you are. They’re not accidental. Whether it’s people or states or situations. And I like to play with names.

Sometimes I don’t use any names at all. Or the names change for the character. In Written on the Body the narrator doesn’t have a name. I wanted that narrator to be a kind of Everyman. In Oranges the narrator has my name, because I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character.

There has been some confusion around this, because people have thought, ‘Well, it must be autobiography’. In part it is. Because all writing is partly autobiography in that you draw on your own experience, but not in a slavish documentary style, but in a way that transforms that experience into something else.

I saw myself as a shape-shifting person with many lives, who didn’t need to be tied to one life. So it’s not been difficult for me to use myself as a fictional character. Other writers do it. Milan Kundera does it, Paul Auster does it. Of course when they do it, it’s called ‘metafiction’. When women do it, it’s called ‘autobiography’. Unfortunate.

1. You’ve adapted Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit for the television. You’ve adapted The PowerBook for the stage. You’ve actually written a screenplay for The Passion. What are the pleasures of adapting your own work? Or are there any pleasures? Are there only difficulties?

Yes. You give it a new life, and of course, for the adaptation of Oranges for the telly, I had to cut out all the fairy stories, and that was right, because the demands of television are very different to the possibilities of the fictional form. It would have weighed it down.

As it was, it was three one hour episodes, which is a lot for a book which is only 180 pages or so. But that’s just because there’s plenty packed in there. When you start unravelling, it becomes a different thing. Television and cinema work best with a simple single narrative stretch. It’s hard for it, it’s hard for that medium to jump and to shift and to play and to move about. Not least because you have to film it. You have to endlessly set it up and take it down again. It’s very cumbersome. You can do it in a single sentence with no effort at all in a book. It involves a crew of 50 when you try and do it on the screen.

So I wanted it to be simple. I wanted people to be able to enjoy what it was, and then come back to the book if they were so interested and find the rest there. I never have any worries about that with adaptation. I don’t think you need to be faithful to the letter. I just think you need to be faithful to the spirit. And then hope that people will be drawn to the work itself. And of course it does take on a new life then.

It’s very exciting to watch it go into somebody else’s hands, somebody else’s life. When they change it and work with it it’s a collaborative venture, and writing’s a very solitary venture. So, for somebody who has to sit on their own for a long time, it can be rather exciting to go out in the evening

1. What does ‘What you risk reveals what you value’ mean?

Well I don’t know. Everybody likes ‘What you risk reveals what you value’ don’t they? They say it to one another….

1. What does it mean?

It means……it means…‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’. [Winterson is quoting T.S. Eliot. This is the first line of Eliot’s poem ‘Ash Wednesday’. When an inquirer asked him what it ‘meant’, he made this famous reply.]