Fiery Constellations, Benjamin's Materialist

Fiery Constellations: Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry" and Benjamin's Materialist
Historiography
Author(s): Angela Marie Smith
Source: College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 21-50
Published by: College Literature
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Fiery
Constellations: Winterson's
Sexing
the
Cherry
and
Benjamin's
Materialist
Historiography
Angela
Marie Smith
Near the end of
Jeanette
Winterson's
Sexing
the
Cherry (1989),
the
image
of
a
redeeming
fire links two historical
moments. In
1666,
one of the novel's
narra
tors,
the mammoth
dog-breeder Dog
Woman,
disgusted by England's political
cor
ruption
and act of
regicide,
the
consequences
of which seem
manifest in London's
pollu
tion and the Great
Plague,
determines that
the
city
should "'burn and burn until there is
nothing
left but the
cooling wind'"(164),
and
takes her
opportunity:
"I did not start the fire
. . .
but I did not
stop
it.
Indeed,
the act of
pouring
a vat of oil onto the flames
may
well
have been said to
encourage
it. But it was a
sign,
a
sign
that our
great
sin would
finally
be
burned
away.
I could not have hindered the
work of
God"(165).
In
1990,
an
unnamed
female
protester
whose emotional and
politi
cal alliance to
Dog-Woman
has been estab
lished
through
her visions of
a
"huge
and
Angela
Marie Smith is assistant
professor of English
and Gender
Studies at the
University of
Utah. She has
published
on
the
body politics of
American
Depression-era fiction,
and most
recently,
in Post
Script,
on dis
ability
in New Zealand cinema.
22
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
powerful"alter
ego (142), camps by
a
mercury-contaminated
river.
Disgusted
by corporate
and
governmental
abuses of
power
and
nature,
she is
inspired
to
act to
change history:
"'Let's burn
it,'
she said. "Let's burn down the facto
ry'"(165).
The
convergence
of these two moments of
anger
at
political
and envi
ronmental
corruption,
with their acts in the
name of the
oppressed,
charac
terizes
Sexing
the
Cherrys
effort to interlace
past
and
present,
to conceive and
enact an
historical
practice
that
challenges
a
linear
history upholding
the
interests of the
powerful.
The novel's
use
of narrative connections across time
also invokes Walter
Benjamin's concept
of constellations of
past
and
present
as
revolutionary, potentially redemptory
moments.
Indeed,
the
juxtaposition
of Winterson's novel with
Benjamin's
essays,
"The
Storyteller"and
"Theses
on
the
Philosophy
of
History/'produces
its
own
powerful
constellation:
Benjamin's thoughts
tease out from Winterson's
playful
text the
larger philo
sophical
matters at stake in
telling (hi)stories,
while Winterson's luminous
characters flesh out
Benjamin's
ideas,
imbuing
historical and
political
issues
with
personality
and
humor,
and
insisting
on matters of
sex and
gender
obscured in
Benjamin's
theories.
Tracing
the commonalities and
divergences
of these texts renders
philosophies
of
history
more
immediate,
reveals the
ways
in which fiction and
theory
can
speak
to one
another,
and
foregrounds
the
politics
of narrative and
interpretation.
Winterson's novel and
Benjamin's
essays
combine
potentially
contradic
tory
materialist,
postmodern,
and
redemptive
elements in their historio
graphie imaginings. Certainly,
both authors
are fascinated with a
particular
practice
of
telling history,
a
"materialist
historiography"that challenges
linear
"historicism,"constellates past
and
present
moments,
attends
to economic
and
political
structures,
makes heard the voices of the
disempowered,
and
conceives of their
capacity
to act
historically
and
revolutionarily.
But,
in
deploying
narrative
strategies
now
characterized
as
postmodern, Benjamin
and Winterson also
emphasize
the
inevitably
textual status of
history.
Rather
than
mandating
any
totalizing
historical
view,
Benjamin implicitly
calls
for,
and
Sexing
the
Cherry
enacts,
a
hybridic
historical narrative
pieced together
from the
fragments
buried
by
historicism.
Finally,
"Theses"and
Sexing
the
Cherry conjoin struggles
of the
oppressed
with visions of moments which
break
open
or transcend
history:
the former with its
theological
vision of
Messianic
time,
and the latter with
a
fantastical fusion of
love,
light,
and the
human
spirit.
Such elements
complicate readings
of these
texts,
connoting
idealist, transcendental,
or
Romantic
philosophies apparently
in conflict with
the
political
outlook of materialism and the ironies of
postmodernism.
But
for both
authors,
the textual and
philosophical yoking
of secular and theo
logical impulses
is central to the
conception
of
a
radical
politics. Interpreting
Angela
Marie Smith
23
these texts'
interrelationships,
then,
is
a matter of
attending
to their contra
dictions and
warnings against totalizing
narratives,
while
heeding
their calls
to tell stories in
hybridic
and ethical
ways.
Benjamin
and "Materialist
Historiography"
The critical and
philosophical heritage
of Walter
Benjamin
is much
debated. Scholars have noted in his works influences of neo-Kantian ideal
ism,
German
Romanticism,
Jewish mysticism,
and Marxist historical materi
alism,
all
developed
in relation to his
religious background,
thwarted
aca
demic
aspirations,
and
struggle against encroaching
Fascism.1
Considering
"The
Storyteller"and "Theses"alongside Sexing
the
Cherry helps
illuminate a
dialectic between idealistic and materialist
imperatives,
and enables
a
fuller
appreciation
of the novels desires for
political
and
metaphysical
transformation.
"Theses on
the
Philosophy
of
History" (1968d;
written
1940,
published
1950),
one
of
Benjamins
last
pieces
of
writing, encapsulates
this
apparently
conflicting impulse.2
The
essay
condemns the
prevailing
form of
historiog
raphy,
"historicism,"and
envisages
a
mode of
telling history?"[materialistic
historiography"(262)?that
is associated with "the
struggling oppressed
class[,]
itself.
. .
the
depository
of historical
knowledge,"
and that
challenges
the
hegemony
of historicism and its
conception
of
linear,
progressive
time,
or
"homogenous, empty time"(261).
For
Benjamin,
linear,
teleological
modes
of
history
construct the
political
status
quo,
including Germany's
move
toward
Fascism,
as
the
only possible history:
"the adherents of historicism
. . .
empathize
...
with the victor"
(256).
Materialist
historiography
must work in
the interests of
oppressed
classes and "brush
history against
the
grain" (257)
to uncover their voices.
Such
historiography
connects
apparently disparate
events to make clear the
structures and
patterns
of
power,
the "state of
emergency
"in which
we
exist:
The tradition of the
oppressed
teaches us that the "state of
emergency"in
which we live is not the
exception
but the rule. We must attain to a con
ception
of
history
that is in
keeping
with this
insight.
Then we
shall clear
ly
realize that it is our task to
bring
about a real state of
emergency,
and this
will
improve
our
position
in the
struggle against
Fascism. One reason
why
Fascism has
a chance is that in the name of
progress
its
opponents
treat it
as a historical norm.
(Benjamin
1968d,
257)
The continual
privileging
of the
present by
"historicist"narrative makes
impossible
any
comprehension
of the
inter-relationship
of
past
and
present,
and naturalizes Fascism's rise to
power.
Thus,
a
form of
history
must be
prac
ticed that connects
disparate
events,
makes visible the state of
emergency
that
shapes
the modern
world,
and enables the
revolutionary
"constellation"of the
past
with the
present,
in a moment filled with the "time of the now"
(263),
24
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
which halts and
interrupts "progress."
Such revolution is here conceived both
politically
and
theologically: according
to
Benjamin,
materialist
historiogra
phy
makes
possible
the
entry
of the
Messiah,
and the commencement of
a
Messianic time in which the constellations of
past
and
present
are
under
stood and silenced histories
are
redeemed.
"The
Storyteller:
Reflections on the Work of Nikolai
Leskov"(
1968b;
written
1936)
also
concerns
itself with
ways
of
narrating history. Benjamin
posits "historiography"as
"the common
ground
of all forms of the
epic" (95),
and the
epic,
in
turn,
as
progenitor
of both
story
and novel. The
story
is
pre
sented as a
vanishing
mode of
historiographical
narrative related to the
"chronicle,"which
tells
history,
rather than
explaining
it in the
manner
of the
historian.
Benjamin
invokes and commends in the chronicle mode of histo
riography
a communal sense
of
participation
in a
divine,
unexplained
pat
tern;
this belief in
pattern
is re-embodied in the
storyteller,
who is the chron
icler
"preserved
in
changed
form, secularized,
as it
were"(96).
Thus,
there
exists in
chronicle/storyteUing
a sense
of
wholeness,
of
meaning
and
pur
pose,
whether
divinely
or
secularly
oriented.
However,
in the modern
world,
storytelling?exemplified
here
by
the
works of Russian writer Nikolai Leskov?is
dying,
and the information and
explanation
of the historian
triumph
in the novel form. In contrast to the
many
voices and
"many
diffuse occurrences"of the
story,
the novel embodies
homelessness,
and "is dedicated to one
hero,
one
odyssey,
one
battle"(Benjamin
1968b,
98).The
novel shifts
away
from
storytelling's multiple
and communal
expressions,
its
participation
in the
rhythms
and
meanings
of
life,
toward soli
tary consumption. People
in scattered isolation are
forced to seek in the
novel,
in the life and death of its
character(s),
a sense
of the
meaning
of lived
experience,
in which
they
no
longer participate.
"The
Storyteller,"then,
apparently
mourns
the loss of "communicable
experience"(84)
and dis
dains the
contemporary
world of "information"and events in
newspapers
"shot
through
with
explanation"(89),
a
world not
open
to
reinterpretation
and
retelling.
However,
many Benjamin
scholars assert a more
nuanced
reading
of
"The
Storyteller." Irving
Wohlfarth comments
that, indeed,
"a
melancholy
sense of'the world
we have lost'...
pervades [Benjamin's] story,"
but that "it
is because he is
vanishing
that the
storyteller's beauty
is now so
significantly
enhanced"(1981,1003).3 Benjamin
views this "moment of
transition"(1004)
as an
opportunity
as
well
as a
death-knell,
and conceives of the world
as a
place
in which
"Storytelling
has become
a
dead end. To that extent
history
cannot be told in a
traditional
way"(1005).
For
Benjamin,
"the
storyteller
still
remains the
teleologkal
end of the
narrative,"
and "The
Storyteller"promises
Angela
Marie Smith 25
his resurrection
(1005);
nevertheless,
until that moment
of
redemption
anoth
er
way
must be
found
to tell
history.
A more
complex
and materialist
understanding
of "The
Storyteller" emerges
in
considering
it
alongside Benjamin
s "The Work of Art
in the
Age
of Mechanical
Reproduction"(1968e;
written
1936).
This
piece
contrasts the "aura"of
past
works of
art,
their
"[u]niqueness
and
perma
nence,"with
the "transitoriness and
reproducibility"of
modern forms such as
films,
"picture magazines
and
newsreels"(223).
It
might
thus seem to antici
pate
the
apparent mourning
of "The
Story
teller"for
a more
holistic narrative
practice grounded
in ritual and tradition. But "The Work of Art"notes that
the
glowing
aura
of works of art derives
specifically
from their distance from
the
present,
their
enshrouding
in tradition and
ritual,
just
as the
beauty
of the
storyteller
is enhanced
as he diminishes.
Contemporary
art,
Benjamin
con
tends,
is freed from tradition and
politicized by
mechanical
reproduction:
"mechanical
reproduction emancipates
the work of
art from its
parasitical
dependence
on ritual
....
Instead of
being
based
on
ritual,
it
begins
to
be
based
on
politics"(224).
Read
against
"The Work of
Art,"then,
the
story
teller's narrative
may
constitute
a form that cannot sustain
humanity
in the
modern
era,
when
we
require
a
"heightened
state of mind"
(238)
to deal with
the
repeated
shocks of
our
technological
existence.4 As
Julian
Roberts
con
cludes,
"the
dreaming poetic delights
of the older form have to
fall victim to
this
changeover"to
a more
modern,
technological
world
(1982,184).
Modern
forms such
as film thus
valuably
shock
us out of a
traditional, auratic,
and
som
nolent
relationship
to the
past, rendering
art
immediate and
political.
The
divergent
tendencies of "The
Storyteller,"its nostalgia
for tradition
versus its
favoring
of radical
change through technology,
thus
parallel
the
apparent
conflict within "Theses": its materialist insistence on class
struggle
as
the
engine driving history
and social
change,
on the one
hand,
and
a
mys
tical notion of the entrance of Messianic time as
the ultimate source of lib
eration,
on
the other. What is
certain,
though,
is a mandate to
employ
the
forms at hand?those of tradition and
modernity?to
counter linear and
dominant historical narratives. Even if idealistic
storytelling
is
becoming
impossible,
there
may yet
be
a manner
of narration
open
to us
which refus
es
hegemonic understandings
of
history,
which makes
space
for the voices of
the
oppressed,
and which renders
possible
the Messianic moment of
redemp
tion. Into these
spaces
of
possibility
enters
Sexing
the
Cherry,
a
story-telling
novel that insists
on
the
possibility
of
narrating history
in radical
ways.5
Sexing
the
Cherry
and Materialist
Historiography
Sexing
the
Cherry
resists the
categorization
of "novel"as delineated in
"The
Storyteller" by telling
its
(hi)story
in a
"materialist
historiographie"
26
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
vein,
undermining
dominant modes of historical
narrative,
asserting
the
interp?n?tration
of
past
and
present, soliciting
and
counseling
communities
of
readers,
and
invoking
a transcendent moment of
redemption.
The histor
ical moment that the text
primarily occupies
is London from the 1640s
through
until the Fire of London in 1666. The novel is
alternately
narrated
by Dog-Woman,
a monstrous woman who breeds
dogs,
and
by
her
adopted
son,
Jordan,
who,
inspired
to travel
by
his childhood
sighting
of the first
banana
brought
to
England,
sails the seas
with his
mentor,
John
Tradescant,
in search of exotic lands and fruits.6
Jordan's
character thus
corresponds
to
one of
Benjamin's archetypal story-tellers,
the
seaman
(1968b, 85),
while
Dog-Woman suggests
the other
archetypal storytelling figure,
"the
[wo]man
who has
stayed
at
home,
making
an
honest
living,
and who knows the local
tales and traditions"
(84). Together,
like the artisan class of the Middle
Ages
as
Benjamin
conceives
it,
these
figures "combin[e]
the lore of
faraway places,
such
as a
much-traveled
man
brings
home,
with the lore of the
past,
as it best
reveals itself to
the natives of
a
place"(85).
The novel thus
proffers
a form of
counsel:
Jordan's
and
Dog-Woman
s
stories
presuppose
an
audience,
and con
struct themselves as an
appeal
to assumed readers/listeners
already
familiar
with the tales
Jordan
retells and with the events that
Dog-Woman
describes,
who
are
implicitly
asked
to re-visit these stories and re-connect them to their
own
experience.
Dog-Woman's
stories describe the rise of the
Puritans,
the Civil
War,
the
execution of
Charles,
the rule of
Cromwell,
and the Restoration of the
monarchy.
Like the
chronology
that
Benjamin praises
in "The
Storyteller,"which
is "embedded
...
in natural
history"(1968b, 95)
because
of the
regular appearances
in it of
death,
Dog-Woman's story encompasses
death
as a
natural
component
of life and
meaning.
She witnesses the deaths
of her beloved
King,
Charles
I,
and of
Tradescant;
and she is there when the
bodies of the Puritans
are
hung
out:
Tradescant is dead. Cromwell is dead. Ireton and
Bradshaw,
the
King's pros
ecutors,
frequently
found
together
beneath soiled
sheets,
are dead.
Cromwell,
Ireton and Bradshaw
...
were
dug
out on 30
January
and
hung
up
for all to see on the
gallows
at
Tyburn.
. . .
Thousands of
us flocked to
watch them
swinging
in the
wind,
what
was
left of
them,
decay having
made no
exception
for their eminence....
It did render me
philosophical, though,
to sit at
Tyburn
and watch the
mer
riment and
great
wonder of
passers-by, especially
small
children,
who had
never
thought
what it
might
mean to rot.
And
yet rotting
is a common
experience.
We all
shall,
even
myself, although
I
imagine
it will take a worm of some endeavour to make
any
impression.
(Winterson 1989,118)
Angela
Marie Smith 27
Like
Benjamin
s
storyteller, Dog-Woman
narrates a
history
that works in
conjunction
with a
natural and divine
plan:
when
plague erupts
in
London,
Dog-Woman
sees it as
"God's
judgement
on the murder of the
King"(Winterson
1989,
159).
But
Dog-Woman's
relation to
history
is not
one
of
passive dependence upon
divine intervention. As noted
above,
when
the Great Fire
begins,
her own
role in it is
emphasized,
but
as an
agency
in
concert with divine
imperatives:
"I could not have hindered the work of
God"(165).
Dog-Woman
narrates her stories from
a
position
of
marginalization:
she
is
poor, female,
large,
and
ugly.
Her
storytelling defiantly
reconstructs histo
ries shattered
by
dominant
forces,
as when she sees
working-class
women
piece together
a
stained-glass
window shattered
by
the Puritans:
"They gath
ered
every
piece,
and
they
told
me,
with hands that
bled,
that
they
would
rebuild the window in a secret
place....
I left them there and walked
home,
my
head full of
things
that cannot be
destroyed"(Winterson
1989,
66).
Soon
after,
she burns
piles
of Puritan
newspapers,
in an act which contrasts the
transience of
printed
information with the endurance of
memory,
and asserts
the existence of the stories of the
marginalized, underlying
dominant histo
ry
and
awaiting
their moment of revelation.
The novel's second narrative
perspective,
that of
Dog-Woman's
son
Jordan,
also calls
upon
storytelling strategies
to
question
conventional views
of
history. Benjamin suggests
that to brush
history against
the
grain
we
draw
on
elements inherent to class
struggle: "courage,
humor,
cunning,
and forti
tude.
They
have retroactive force and will
constantly
call into
question every
victory, past
and
present,
of the rulers"
(1968d, 255).These qualities gain
vivid
expression
in
storytelling,
and
specifically
in the
fairy-tale,
of which
Benjamin
writes,
"The first true
storyteller
is,
and will continue to
be,
the
teller of
fairy
tales. Whenever
good
counsel was at a
premium,
the
fairy
tale
had
it,
and where the need was
greatest,
its aid
was nearest. This need
was
the
need created
by
the
myth"(1968b, 102).
The
fairy-tale employs
numerous
strategies
to diminish the
power
of the
"myth"of
historical
progress,
as in "the
figure
of the fool"which "shows us how mankind 'acts dumb' toward the
myth"(102).
The
fairy-tale "meet[s]
the forces of the
mythical
world with
cunning
and with
high spirits"in
order to subvert
(102); similarly,
the humor
of the re-told
fairy-tales
in
Sexing
the
Cherry demythologizes power
struc
tures and dominant
categorizations, specifically
those of
gender
and class.
The novel
rewrites,
amongst others,
the
fairy-tale
of "The Twelve
Dancing
Princesses."
Jordan, having spent
the
night
at a
house with
no
floors,
but
only ceilings,
seeks the
dancing
woman
he met there. In a town whose
inhabitants "knock down their houses in a
single night
and rebuild them
elsewhere"(Winterson
1989,
43), Jordan
is directed to the house of The
28
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
Twelve
Dancing
Princesses,
whose
story
he has
heard,
and who
may
know
the dancer he seeks. The eldest sister re-tells their
story,
how the sisters flew
every night
from their beds to a
"silver
city"where
the
"occupation
of the
people
was to dance"
(48).
Their father
suspected
their
exploits
but
was
unable to fathom how
they escaped
or
where
they
went.
Finally,
a
"clever
prince"caught
them
flying through
the window. The women were
betrothed
to the
prince
and his eleven brothers. But in this
retelling,
this end is not the
end: "'as it
says [we]
lived
happily
ever after. We
did,
but not with
our
hus
bands'"^).
One
by
one
the
women tell their
stories,
in which
they
abandon
or kill
abusive,
repressive,
or
unfaithful husbands. In one
story,
the husband is in fact
a
woman,
whom the Princess must kill to save
her from a
vengeful
mob;
and
in
another,
a
rewriting
of
Rapunzel's story,
the "witch"is an
older
woman
who lives in a tower with
Rapunzel,
and who is attacked
by
the
prince:
Then he carried
Rapunzel
down the
rope
he had
brought
with him and
forced her to watch while he blinded her broken lover in a field of thorns.
After
that,
they
lived
happily
ever
after,
of course.
As for
me,
my
body
healed,
though
my eyes
never
did,
and
eventually
I was
found
by
my sisters,
who had come in their various
ways
to live on this
estate.
My
own
husband?
Oh
well,
the first time I kissed him he turned into a
frog.
There he
is,
just by
your
foot. His name's Anton.
(Winterson
1989,
52)
These tales'
strategies
of reversal and humor
reconfigure power
structures: the
women
violently
reclaim their
right
to freedom and to
self-narrative,
and their
narratives
question mythical
norms. The violence of these stories demands
acknowledgement
of what is at stake in narrative and
historiography.7
But the novel's
storyteller
of the
past
is
also,
in
keeping
with the vision
of
"Theses,"constellated
with the
political
needs of the
present.
The
impor
tance of
historic/fairy-tale
narratives for the
present
becomes
overt toward
the novel's
end,
when the stories and identities of
Jordan
and the
Dog
Woman make contact with two Londoners in 1990. Nicolas
Jordan,
like
Jordan,
is a
young
man
fascinated
by
the
sea and
sea-travel,
while the
unnamed
woman of the
present
draws on
her visions of
Dog-Woman
to
negotiate
her
experiences
as a
fat,
taunted
child,
and
as an adult
outraged
at
dominant commercial and
political
powers.
The sudden and
significant
moments of
past
and
present
interconnection
experienced by
these charac
ters echo
Benjamin's
evocation of the "constellation"between
one era
and
another
(1968d, 263):
"The
past
can be seized
only
as an
image
which flash
es
up
at an
instant when it can be
recognized
and is never seen
again_For
Angela
Marie Smith
29
every image
of the
past
that is not
recognized by
the
present
as one
of its own
concerns threatens to
disappear irretrievably" (25 5).
Nicolas
Jordan experiences
this constellation as a
naval cadet on the
Thames
Estuary, regarding
the "constellations"one
night
with
a
friend,
who
comments:
You
know,
if we were turned loose in our
galaxy, just
let out there one
day
by
ourselves,
it wouldn't look like it does from here. We'd
see
nothing
but
blackness. All those stars that
hang
so close
together
are
light
years apart.
Our chances of
finding
any
star or
planet
at
all,
forget
about
a blue
planet
like this
one,
would be
a billion billion.
Nicolas's friend thus
imagines
a
pattern
which,
when one is in the midst of
it,
seems
empty
and
disparate,
and exudes
a sense of
homelessness,
like that
of the
contemporary
world in which
storytelling
no
longer
sustains belief in
a
meaningful pattern.
Nicolas is left alone
on
deck:
I rested
my
arms on the
railing
and
my
head on
my
arms. I felt I was
falling
falling
into a black hole with no stars and no life and
no
helmet. I heard a
foot
scrape
on the deck beside me. Then a man's voice
said,
"They
are
bury
ing
the
King
at Windsor
today"
I
snapped upright
and looked full in the
face of the
man,
who
was
staring
out over the water. I knew
him,
but from
where? And his clothes
. . .
nobody
wears
clothes like that
any
more.
I looked
beyond
him,
upwards.
The sails creaked in the
breeze,
the main
spar
was
heavy
with
rope.
Further
beyond
I saw the
Plough
and the Orion
and the
bright
sickle of the moon.
I heard a bird
cry,
sharp
and fierce. Tradescant
sighed.
My
name is
Jordan. (Winterson
1989,
137)
In this moment of
recognition,
the character of Nicolas
experiences
an
instant of
simultaneity
with the
past,
with
Jordan,
and intuits
a
meaningful,
fleetingly glimpsed relationship
between the two. It is
an
experience
of his
tory
that contrasts with the linear narrative of Nicolas's The
Boys'
Book
of
Heroes,
a
litany
of
war
and
imperialism (Winterson
1989,
131-33).
Similarly,
the
Dog-Woman
of the twentieth
century
recalls
a moment
"when I was a
schoolgirl
and
getting
fatter
by
the
day" (Winterson
1989,
146). Leaving
school,
she walks
on
Waterloo
Bridge
to look at St Paul's and
Westminster:
I watched the sun
sliding
behind the
buildings,
and as I concentrated the
screeching
cars and the
thudding people
and the smells of rubber and
exhaust receded. I felt I was alone on a different afternoon.
I looked at
my
forearms
resting
on the wall.
They
were
massive,
like
thighs,
but there was no
wall,
just
a
wooden
spit,
and when I turned in the
oppo
site direction I couldn't see the dome of St Paul's.
30
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
I could see
rickety vegetable
boats and women
arguing
with one another
and
a
regiment
on
horseback
crossing
the Thames.
I had to
get
on to
Blackfriars,
there was someone
waiting
there for me.
Who? Who?
Now I wake
up
in the
night shouting
"Who? Who?" like an owl.
Why
does that
day
return and return as I sit
by
a
rotting
river with
only
the
fire for
company? (Winterson
1989,
146-47)
The moments of "constellation"make visible for both characters the "state of
emergency
"that
they
inhabit,
providing
them with
an awareness
of
history
and historical narrative that
spurs
them
on to
political protest.
Sexing
the
Cherry
makes overt its attack on
"historicism,"questioning
the
truth and the
authority
of dominant
historiography
in a list that enumerates
"LIES"of normative
historiography, including,
"There is
only
the
present
and
nothing
to remember"and "Time is a
straight
line"
(Winterson
1989,
90).
Any ascription
to the totalitarian mode of historical
narrative,
to linear and
finite
understandings
of
time,
and to a
single "true"reality
makes it
possible
to
merely
exist in the
present
without
any
awareness
of
responsibility
to the
past; Benjamin
and
Sexing
the
Cherry
both
emphasize
the need for
present
"[historical
materialists"to redeem the
past (1968d, 254).
Winterson's characters thus
reconceptualize
their historical
existence,
and,
acknowledging
their
responsibility,
act
r?volutionarily:
the
woman,
now
a
chemist,
conducts
a "one-woman
campaign"against pollution
in rivers
(Winterson 1989,140),
and Nicolas
Jordan
is
inspired
to
join
her. That their
decisions
participate
in a
historiographical
resistance to the "historicist"con
ception
of
progressivist
time can be seen in
Jordan's musing
in front of
a
painting
of men on horseback:
When I saw
this
painting
I
began by concentrating
on the
foreground fig
ures,
and
only by degrees
did I notice the
others,
some so
faint
as to be
hardly
noticeable.
My
own life is like
this, or,
I should
say, my
own lives. For
the most
part
I can
only
see the most obvious
detail,
the
present, my pres
ent. But
sometimes,
by
a trick of the
light,
I can see more
than that. I can
see countless lives
existing together
and
receding slowly
into the trees.
Similarly,
the
protesting
woman
envisages escape
from the
present,
"this fore
ground
that blinds
me to whatever
may
be
happening
in the distance. If I
have
a
spirit,
a
soul, any
name
will
do,
then it won't be
single,
it will be mul
tiple.
Its dimension will not be one
of confinement but
one
of
space.
It
may
inhabit
numerous
changing decaying
bodies in the future and in the
past"(144).
Awareness of
an
intimate relation to the
past prompts
a
reconsid
eration of relation to the
present
and the
future;
both
Jordan
and
Nicolas,
ini
Angela
Marie Smith
31
tially dreaming
of heroic
journeys
like those that underwrite
historicism,
are
drawn instead to the "countless lives"and histories obscured
by
the fore
ground
of historicism.
Sexing
the
Cherrys emphasis
upon
pollution
and the destruction of
nature
also evokes
a
Benjaminian critique
of
progressivist history
and the interests it
serves.The
relationship
to nature embodies for
Benjamin
the
proximity
to or
distance from the world of
storytelling:
when
storytelling
flourished,
man
perceived
himself to be in
harmony
with
nature; now,
the
exploitation
of the
working
classes is intertwined with "the
exploitation
of
nature,"and
the
pre
vailing
world view
"recognizes only
the
progress
in the
mastery
of
nature,
not
the
retrogression
of
society" (1968d, 259).Thus,
the
woman
fantasizes
a
world
in which she
might
coincide with nature and its
meting
out of
justice,
inspired by Dog-Woman
as her "alter
ego
. .
.a woman whose
only morality
was
her
own and whose
loyalties
were fierce and
few"(Winterson 1989,142).
When Nicolas reads in the
paper
about her
vigil by
a
river
polluted
with
mercury
he
joins
her,
and is with her
as
she
suggests they
burn down the
offending factory.
Like "the
revolutionary
classes
at the moment of their
action"described
by Benjamin,
the
pair
are aware "that
they
are
about to
make the continuum of
history explode"(1968d, 261).
If
Sexing
the
Cherry's
characters
grapple
with the contrast between
received historicist narratives and their
own
experiences
of historical and
politically charged
moments,
the novel itself also revises conventional histor
ical views of the Puritan Revolution. On the
one
hand,
the novel's
apparent
sympathy
for Charles I and the Restoration seems to contradict
a
revolu
tionary perspective, underwriting
a
reactionary
move
back toward
monarchy.
But,
on the
other,
it is
exactly through
this revision that Winterson "brushes
history against
the
grain."As Greg Clingham
notes,
Winterson contests the
way
in
which,
in the work of canonical
historians,
"the
past
is 'written'
so as
to
justify
the
ideological
view that the revolution fulfilled
a
progressive polit
ical and cultural
pattern"(1998, 66). Sexing
the
Cherry
thus
speaks
back
to a
linear
writing
of
history.
As
Jeffrey
Roessner
comments,
while "the
[civil]
war
can
be read
as
part
of
a movement toward
a more
democratic form of
gov
ernment based on civil law rather than divine
authority,"Winterson
finds
an
alternative
interpretation, linking
"the
war with the
development
of
oppres
sive ideals of scientific
objectivity
and the
sovereign individual"(2002,107).
Sexing
the
Cherry
thus enacts a
materialist
historiography, tracing
under
dominant historical narrative the
development
of
bourgeois
and colonial
sys
tems of
oppression.
But the novel's stories
foreground
not
only
the class
struggle emphasized by Benjamin,
but also the
struggle
of
women
within
patriarchal society,
and of lesbian desire within
a
heterosexist
paradigm.
Winterson's
rewriting
of
history
is feminist
as
well
as
materialist:
as Roessner
32
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
points
out,
the novel
"depicts
the Revolution
as a move
toward ideals of
rationality
and
objectivity?ideals
that
helped
establish the value of sexual
repression
and the naturalness of
heterosexuality"(2002,108). Dog-Woman's
gender politics
and the lesbianism and
sex
traversing
the Princesses' stories
indicate that
Sexing
the
Cherry's challenge
to historicism also
requires
the
gendering
and
sexing
of narrative. The consideration of Winterson's text
alongside Benjamin's essays
thus draws attention to
Benjamin's
elision of
gender politics,
and testifies to what
Joan
Scott terms
the
"deeply gendered
nature of
history itself"(1988,18).
Sexing History
Dog-Woman's
agency
within
history suggests
her as an
exemplar
of the
specific
female "historical actor"whose
story
feminist
history
seeks to
repre
sent
(Scott 1988,25).
More
overtly,
the
many
descriptions
of her unusual and
huge body throughout
the
text
emphasize
the role of
gender
in
structuring
both
history
and
historiography.
In Gender and the Politics
of History (1988),
Scott has outlined two
"propositions"for
a
feminist
historiography.
First,
she
states,
we must be attentive to
gender
as "a constitutive element of social rela
tionships
based
on
perceived
differences between the sexes"
(43)
and as
embedded in historical
symbols,
normative
concepts,
"social institutions and
organizations"(43),
and
"subjective identity"(44).
In her
personal
narrative of
her
first,
thwarted
love,
in her failure to conform to dominant
images
of
womanhood which
grants
her a certain
freedom,
in her
fierce,
independent
mothering
of
Jordan,
and in her
friendships
with
marginalized
women such
as her
neighbor
the witch and her
prostitute
friend,
Dog-Woman
simultane
ously
embodies and defies the
gendered
conventions which structure her
experience
and her
history.8
Scott's second
proposition
for
a
feminist
historiography
involves under
standing
the
ways
in which
"gender
is a
primary way
of
signifying
relation
ships
of
power"(1988,44).
Such
a
proposition
reveals the often blind
depend
ence on
sexual difference that has structured
historicism,
and that remains
unacknowledged
in
Benjamin's
historical
materialism,
as at the end of
"Theses,"where
he declares: "The historical materialist leaves it to others to
be drained
by
the whore called 'Once
upon
a time' in historicism's bordello.
He remains in control of his
powers,
man
enough
to blast
open
the contin
uum
of
history"(1968d, 262).9 Terry Eagleton
notes the "virile
swagger"of
this
passage,
which uses "sexist
mythology
"to
present "[h]omogenous
histo
ry"as
"whorelike both in its instant
availability
and in its barren
empti
ness"(1981,45).
In
contrast,
Eagleton
insists,"It
is
women,
not
men,
who
are
the most exact
image
of the
oppressed;
it is in child-birth and
child-rearing
that the desolate condition of the workers is most
graphically figured
....
Angela
Marie Smith
33
Woman,
notwithstanding Benjamins fantasy,
is not the whore of
history
but
the ultimate
image
of violation. She embodies the final
loss,
that of the fruits
of the
body
itself
"(47).10
Benjamin
elsewhere acclaimed the
prostitute:
he criticized
society
for
seeking
to
separate
"Eros"from "culture and
morality"(Roberts
1982,
31),
and held that the
prostitute valuably
"sexualised the
spirit" (qtd.
in Roberts
1982,
31). Sexing
the
Cherry,
in
making
sex
central to its historical
revision,
strives for
a
similar sexualization of the
spirit
and condemnation of
hyp
ocrites who both
exploit
and denounce
prostitutes.
The crime of Puritans
Preacher
Scroggs
and
Neighbour
Firebrace,
who meet such a
grisly
end in a
brothel at the hands of
Dog-Woman,
lies in their division of their
public
abhorrence and
repression
of
sexuality
from their
private
sexual acts. But
Sexing
the
Cherry
also
challenges
the location and validation of the
prostitute
in a
purely figurative
realm,
and
disputes Benjamin's denigration
of the
whore/prostitute figure, by presenting prostitutes
as
historical
agents
from
a
potentially revolutionary
class,
enacting
a
violent retribution
against
the
Puritans who both
oppress
and take
advantage
of
working
women.
The novel
also
challenges Benjamin's
sexist
depiction
of the historical
materialist,
by
depicting
the
potent
female
figure
of
Dog-Woman
as the
history-teller
"man
enough
to blast
open
the continuum of
history."Through
the
very presence
of her monstrous
and female
body
in
Windsor,
in the
brothel,
and in
church,
Dog-Woman
connects for us
the
political,
the
religious,
the
gendered,
and
the
sexual,
warning
that
any truly
alternative
history
must
follow in her foot
steps
or
risk
repeating
the
errors of historicism.
However,
while
Dog-Woman's
narratives
suggest
the
interweaving
of
gender,
sex,
and
power,
her idealization of
monarchy,
her violent murderous
ness,
and her dismissal of
Jordan's
historical
philosophies
also
suggest
her
inability
to
encompass fully
the
implications
of
gendered power
structures.11
Where
Dog-Woman
does not attain the theoretical and critical
perspective
required
for feminist
historiography,
it
is,
as noted
above,
her constellation
with her
twentieth-century alter-ego
that
points
toward a
feminist historio
graphies obligation.
The
woman
protestor
draws
strength
from
Dog-Woman
as her
"patron saint"(Winterson 1989,142):
"I am a woman
going
mad. I am
a woman
hallucinating.
I
imagine
I am
huge,
raw,
a
giant" (138).
She envis
ages
a scenario in which she invades the World Bank boardroom and the
Pentagon, stuffing "[m]en
in
suits"(138)
into a
huge bag, taking
them to "the
butter mountains and wine lakes and
grain
silos and deserts and cracked earth
and
starving
children and armed dealers in
guarded places,"and training
them
in "feminism and
ecology":
"Then
they
start on
the food
surpluses, packing
it with their
own
hands,
distributing
it in a
great
human chain of what used
to be
power
and is now
cooperation" (139).
In the
convergence
of the
Dog
34
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
Woman of the
past
and the feminist of the
present, Sexing
the
Cherry
indi
cates how
storytelling might
be mobilized in the historical materialist
strug
gle,
but does so
by attending
to a
feminist
historiography
that
reveals,
as
Scott
envisages, relationships
between
gender
and
power.
Hybrid
Cherries: Postmodern
Historiography
As
we
have seen
then,
Dog-Woman
constitutes a teller of
(hi)
stories that
disrupt
historicism: she is a
voice for
a
community
of the
marginalized,
pro
viding
what Roessner calls "a
counter-memory
of Charles's execution that
challenges
traditional histories of the war"
(2002, 107).
However,
Dog
Woman is also anachronistic in
seeking
the restoration of
a
prior,
idealized
and monarchical condition. Her
storytelling, by
itself,
cannot
provide
a
truly
modern and
revolutionary
narrative
form,
for she does not connect
the insti
tutions she encounters to
philosophies
of
history: suspicious
of her son's
notion of
"journeys
folded in on
themselves like
a
concertina,"
she holds that
"the earth is a
manageable place
made of blood and stone and
entirely
flat"
(Winterson
1989,
19).
It is
Jordan's perspective
that
complicates
the
certainty
of
Dog-Woman's
narratives,
emphasizing
that the kind of
storytelling
delineated in "The
Storyteller,"a
form which
we
necessarily
idealize from our
presentist
out
look,
is neither accessible in the
contemporary period,
nor
adequate
to
bring
about revolution.
Jordan's thoughts
about
history
exhibit
a
postmodern
sus
picion
of master
narratives,
linearity,
and absolute
truth,
and in so
doing open
Sexing
the
Cherry
to the criticism that it
inconsistently
mandates social and
political change
while
undermining any given
narrative,
including
those of
the
marginalized,
as
inevitably
constructed and
contingent.
But,
in
employ
ing
the
postmodern
historical
form,
Sexing
asserts the
validity
and
political
significance
of
a
certain, ethical,
but
inevitably
textual,
engagement
with his
tory.
Thus,
the novel echoes the
postmodern
elements of
Benjamin's
own
critical and intellectual
practices,
which?while often
summoning theologi
cal visions of
unity,
which
we
shall examine below?assert the
necessity
and
value of
constantly refashioning
the
past
in the different and
imperfect
lan
guages
of the
present.
The
contingency
of
storytelling,
its
persistent
refusal of
single
truth, per
vades the
retellings
in
Sexing
the
Cherry.
When
Jordan
finds the
dancing
princess,
the
missing
twelfth
sister,
she retells the
fairy-tale.
She
commences
with the
wedding day
and her
escape
from the
church,
and later describes
the
beginning
of the
story:
the enchanted
flying city,
and its
nightly
anti
gravitational pull
on the
light-weight
sisters,
as well as
their downfall
on
the
night they
were to make their home in the
city
and "drift
through space
for
Angela
Marie Smith 35
ever"(Winterson
1989,
111).
But Fortunatas version of her
flight
from the
church
on
the
wedding day
conflicts with the
story
the sisters told
Jordan:
"But the
story they
told
me about
you
was not the same. That
you escaped,
yes,
but that
you
flew
away
and walked on a wire stretched from the
steeple
of the church to the mast of a
ship
at anchor in the
bay."
She
laughed.
How could such
a
thing
be
possible?
"But,"
I
said,
"how could it be
possible
to
fly every night
from the window
to an
enchanted
city
when there are no such
places?"
"Are there not such
places?"
she
said,
and I fell
silent,
not
knowing
how to
answer.
The
shifting
of stories is
paralleled by
an
uncertainty
about time and truth.
The novel
opens
with
Jordan's
"This is the first
thing
I
saw,"followed
by
a
description
of
fog drifting
toward and
encompassing
him
(1),
and Fortunata
also
begins
her narrative with "This is the first
thing
I
saw,"and
describes
a
winter scene
shortly
before her
wedding day (104).
But
Jordan's
narrative
deems these
beginnings impossible,
and associates them with the "LIES"of
"historicism": "It was not the first
thing
she
saw,
how could it have been?
Nor was the
night
in the
fog-covered
field the first
thing
I saw.
But before
then
we were like those who dream and
pass
through
life
as a
series of shad
ows. And so what we
have told
you
is true
although
it is
not"(106).
This
uncertainty
of
memory
extends to a
concept
of time that cannot be under
stood in linear terms: "MEMORY l:The scene I have
just
described to
you
may
lie in the future or the
past.
Either I have found Fortunata
or I will find
her. I cannot be
sure.
Either I am
remembering
her
or I am still
imagining
her. But she is somewhere in the
grid
of
time,
a
co-ordinate,
as I am"
(104).
For
Winterson, memory
and
storytelling
are no more
guarantors
of some
kind of truth
or
authenticity
than is
"historicism,"and
Jordan
delineates this
ambiguity
of
memory:
Did
my
childhood
happen?
I must believe it
did,
but I don't have
any proof.
My
mother
says
it
did,
but she is a
fantasist,
a liar and a
murderer,
though
none
of that would
stop
me
loving
her. I remember
things,
but I too am a
fantasist and
a
liar,
though
I have not killed
anyone yet.
...
I will have to
assume
that I had a
childhood,
but I cannot assume to have had the one I
remember.
Everyone
remembers
things
which never
happened.
And it is common
knowledge
that
people
often
forget things
which did. Either we are all fan
tasists and liars
or
the
past
has
nothing
definite in it. I have heard
people say
we are
shaped by
our childhood. But which one?
To
proceed
in the narrative mode of
storytelling,
to use
fairy-tale
and its cun
ning
and
high spirits
to
challenge
the
history
of historians is a
necessary
36
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
enterprise
on the terms of this text. But it cannot
appeal
to the
certainty
that
"historicism"deems
possible
and desirable. The novel's oscillation between
the narratives of
Dog-Woman
and
Jordan,
then,
challenges
linear
historicism,
but refuses to
simply replace
it with
a
singular
and
privileged
narrative form
of its own.
Rather than
an
idealized articulator of stories in a
divine
plan,
Dog-Woman
is,
despite
her embodiment of female historical
agency
and
empowerment
of the
oppressed,
"a
fantasist,
a
liar and a
murderer"as much
as
any
of the victors who have written
history. Jordan's questioning explo
rations of narrative and
interpretive uncertainty emphasize
the
impossibility
of
any
true and
totalizing rendering
of
history.
Sexing
the
Cherry
thus
exemplifies
the
postmodern
historical
novel,
or
what Linda Hutcheon terms
"historiographie
metafiction,"which
"prob
lematizejs]
both the nature of the referent and its relation to the
real,
histor
ical world
by
its
paradoxical
combination of metafictional
self-reflexivity
with historical
subject matter"(1988, 19).
For
Hutcheon,
postmodern play
with
language
and
imagery
is a
valid and valuable
approach
to
history,
for
"[t]he past really
did
exist"(92)
but "we
only
know of those
past
events
through
their discursive
inscription, through
their traces in the
present" (97).
But at its
extreme,
this
logic
threatens to undermine
any conception
of a rev
olutionary
historical
knowledge,
because
"[hjistoriographic
metafiction
. . .
keeps
distinct its formal
auto-representation
and its historical
context,
and
in so
doing problematizes
the
very
possibility
of historical
knowledge,
because there is no
reconciliation,
no
dialectic
here?just
unresolved con
tradiction"
(106).
For some
critics, then,
the
postmodern
tendencies of
Sexing
the
Cherry
undo
any
authentic
engagement
with
history. Clingham
notes
critiques
of
the novel such
as
Michael Gorra's contention that the novel fails to
integrate
the worlds of
Dog-Woman
and
Jordan (1998, 62),
and Rose Tremain's asser
tion that "there
seems to be
no
attempt
to inhabit the
age,
either in
image
or
in
language,
so
that in the end the choice of
century
seems
arbitrary" (qtd.
in
Clingham 1998,63).12
But for
Clingham,
such criticisms are
based
on
expec
tations of realistic
conventions,
rather than
an
acknowledgement
of the fan
tastical act
required
to
ethically represent
an
utterly
different historical
peri
od. Rather than
dismissing history, Clingham
asserts,
"textuality implies
and
actually requires
for its full
operation
an
independent
historical
experience
and
order"(68).The postmodern
historical novel must thus both
respect
that
history's alterity
and seek to connect with it: "when
we understand that the
novel
operates
on the
principle
of
alterity,
and
proposes
historical and lin
guistic
difference
as
the basis of its
functionality?then
we can
argue
that
Sexing
the
Cherry's
remarkable
poetic textuality
has
as its
object
and
purpose
Angela
Marie Smith 37
a
representation
of the seventeenth
century
rather than
a
pastiche
of it or an
escape
from it"
(68).
Such
an
interpretation
of
Sexing
the
Cherry's relationship
to
history
holds
that
an
"authentic"relationship
to the
original,
the historical
period
in
ques
tion,
is not
possible. Clingham
considers Winterson's act of
authorship
as
more like
a
translation, and,
referencing
Restoration
concepts
of translation
as
"stepping
out of
one
present
into another
through
art"
(1998, 71), presents
artistic
representation
as one mode of
making
the
past pertinent
and imme
diate in the
present.
The act of translation is one to
which
Benjamin
attend
ed in his "The Task of the Translator"
(1968c;
written
1923),
where he
imag
ined it as a
process
not of imitation but of renewal: "no translation would be
possible
if in its ultimate
essence it strove for likeness to the
original.
For in
its afterlife?which could
not be called that if it were not a
transformation
and
a
renewal of
something living?the original undergoes
a
change" (73).
In its fantastical and textual
elements, then,
Sexing
the
Cherry
draws attention
to its inevitable distance from its historical
setting,
but also avows
the
possi
bility
of,
in
Benjamin's
words,
"incorporatfing]
the
original's
mode of
signi
fication"
(78).
As
Clingham
argues,
the novel achieves this?and denotes its
historical
setting
as
deliberate,
not
arbitrary?by engaging specific philo
sophical
concepts
of the Restoration
period, including
the notion of transla
tion
and,
as discussed
below,
the sacred/secular
symbol
of the
King's body.
In
presenting
translation
as an act of artistic
reproduction, Benjamin
has
frequent
recourse to
metaphors
of natural
reproduction;
a
translation is cre
ated with "birth
pangs"and
exhibits
"kinship"but
not
necessarily
"alike
ness"to the
original (1968c, 73).
He also invokes botanical
reproduction,
referring
to the "hidden seed"of
pure language (75)
that is
ripened by
each
act of translation
(77).
While this
inspirational
vision of
pure language
is dis
cussed more
fully
below,
the botanical
imagery
here is relevant also
to
the
"impure"and imperfect
acts of translation
employed
in the material
world,
and to Winterson's
own botanical
figure
for her
postmodern historiographi
cal narrative.
The titular
hybrid cherry
of the novel embodies and
metaphorizes
its
historical
practice,
a
process
of
translating
a remote
history
into the
present
in a
way
that illuminates that
history's
relevance and
immediacy.
In the
novel,
Jordan,
with
Tradescant,
brings
exotic fruits back to
England,
and enables
them to
grow
there. He learns the art of
grafting:
Grafting
is the means
whereby
a
plant, perhaps
tender
or
uncertain,
is fused
into a
hardier member of its
strain,
and so the two take
advantage
of each
other and
produce
a
third
kind,
without seed or
parent.
In this
way
fruits
have been made resistant to disease and certain
plants
have learned to
grow
where
previously they
could not.
38
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
There are
many
in the Church who condemn this
practice
as
unnatural,
holding
that the Lord who made the world made its flora as he wished and
in
no
other
way. (Winterson
1989,
85)
Jordan
defends his
activity
in the face of his mother's criticisms: "I tried
to
explain
to her that the tree would still be female
although
it had not been
born from
seed,
but she said such
things
had
no
gender
and
were a
confu
sion to themselves
....
But the
cherry grew,
and we
have sexed
it,
and it is
female"
(Winterson
1989,
85).
Just
as exotic fruit falters in a
harsher
climate,
storytelling
cannot flour
ish
in,
and is not
adequate
to,
the shocks of modern existence.
Just
as
botan
ical
grafting produces
the
stronger,
hybridic cherry,
so
the artistic
grafting
of
fairytales
and historical narrative
produce postmodern
historical
fiction,
an
artistically
and
blasphemously
created form. Rather than
naturally propagat
ing,
as
through
seed,
Sexing
the
Cherry's historiographie
form is "unnatu
raT'kin
to
storytelling
and
history:
it
"transplants
. . .
the
original"(Benjamin
1968c,
75)
.Yet,
like the
cherry
that is still
female,
the novel's
postmodern
nar
rative is also still
a
form of
storytelling,
as
argued
above,
soliciting
readers
to
heed and act on its counsel.13
The
concept
of
grafting
makes
possible
a
less
pessimistic reading
of the
modern
world,
Nicolas
Jordan's
world,
where information
proliferates,
divid
ing
communities and
entrenching hegemonic understandings
of
history.
A
confusion of narrative forms
shapes
Nicolas's
perceptions:
novels,
history
books,
paintings,
and movies about
war,
the
ocean,
and
space.
At the same
time,
in
ways
that recall
Benjamin's
"The Work of
Art,"
the
very
multiplicity
of these forms makes them
potential
sources of alternative modes of histori
ography.
It
is,
after
all,
a
newspaper
article that introduces Nicolas to the
modern-day Dog-Woman,
and rallies him to her cause.
Sexing
the
Cherry
is
thus,
as
Eagleton interprets
the
story
described
by
"The
Storyteller,""a
kind
of
hybrid
of the auratic and
mechanically reproduced
artefacts,
redolent of
mythological meaning yet
amenable to the labour of
interpretation" (1981,
60).The
most auratic stories are
also those whose remoteness and
compact
ness
render them most available for
"recycling"in
the
present (60).They
are,
in
Benjamin's
own
words,
"seeds of
grain
which have lain for centuries in the
chambers of
pyramids
shut
up
air-tight
and have retained their
germinative
power
to this
day" (1968b, 90).
But
powerful
stories also show the mark of
the
artisan,
the
storyteller:
"The traces of the
storyteller cling
to the
story
the
way
the hands of
a
potter cling
to the
clay
vessel"
(92).
The
production
of the
hybrid cherry
thus takes
an exotic fruit and
reproduces
it
through
the unnat
ural but artisan-like intervention of
technology, just
as auratic stories and
dominant histories
are
grafted together by
the
postmodern
novelist to trans
Angela
Marie Smith 39
late the materialist and
possibly redemptive
elements of the old forms into
the modern world.
As well
as a
model for
a new
form of
historiography,
the
hybrid
is also
a
model for different and
productive concepts
of
gender.14
Because
postmod
ernism is seen as
deconstructive and anathema to
political
commitment,
some critics have felt that
Sexings
feminist and lesbian
politics
run counter
to its
postmodern
tendencies,
reversing
but also
reinscribing
sexual bina
risms.15
However,
as
Laura Doan
points
out,
with the
figure
of the
hybrid,
Sexing
the
Cherry
does more than
parody
or
disrupt patriarchal
and hetero
sexist
discourses,
depicting
a creative and
political
act that
opens up multiple
conceptions
of self and
sexuality:
"What
[Judith]
Butler
pioneers
theoretical
ly,
Winterson enacts in her metafictional
writing practices:
a
sexual
politics
of
heterogeneity
and a vision of
hybridized gender
constructions outside
an
either/or
proposition,
at once
political
and
postmodern" (1994,153-54).
Clearly,
then,
consideration of this novel
alongside Benjamin's
essays
illu
minates a
convergence
around matters of
postmodern
and materialist histo
riography:
these
are
narratives that at once
deconstruct dominant narratives
and articulate
politically suppressed
stories with
an aim to revolution. But the
texts share
a
third,
significant tendency.
Even as
they
link
practices
of histor
ical narrative to material conditions of
oppression?on grounds
of class
and,
for
Winterson,
gender?both Benjamin
and Winterson
continually
invoke
a
moment of transcendence
or
redemption,
toward which the act of material
ist
historiography
strains. For even as
Benjamin presents
translation in what
we
might perceive
as
postmodern
terms?"a translation touches the
original
lightly
and
only
at the
infinitely
small
point
of the
sense,
thereupon pursu
ing
its own course
according
to the laws of
fidelity
in the freedom of lin
guistic
flux"
(1968c, 80)?the
act of translation nevertheless
gestures
toward
and strives to realize
a
linguistic unity
in
"pure language"(73):
"it is transla
tion which catches fire
on the eternal life of the works and the
perpetual
renewal of
language"(74).
The fires which constellate
past
and
present
in
Sexing
the
Cherry,
then,
also
approximate
and seek to
bring
about the
"pure"light
of
a
kind of
revelation,
one
which seems at
odds with the
polit
ical and
postmodern
elements of the
novel,
but
which,
as
with other
appar
ent
contradictions,
underpins
the novel's
hybridic
power.
The
Redemption
of
History
For
Benjamin,
the historical materialist
practice
of narrative mandates
both
storytelling
with an
eye
to
subverting
the totalitarian
regimes
that
exploit
and silence the
oppressed
classes,
and the creation of a
world in which
the Messianic
conjunction
of
past, present,
and future
may
occur.
This con
junction may
ensure that the model of
our
relationship
to the future resists
40
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
Benjamin's interpretation
of Paul Klee's
painting:
"the
angel
of
history"fac
ing
toward the
past
where
"historicism""keeps piling wreckage upon
wreck
age
"and
being propelled
into the future
by
the storm of
progress (1968d,
257). Only
the
practice
of materialist
historiography
can
make
possible
the
moment of transcendence in
which,
according
to
Benjamin,
"redeemed
mankind receives the fullness of its
past.... [Ojnly
for a
redeemed mankind
has its
past
become citable in all its
moments"(254).
For
Benjamin, theology
is the hunchbacked dwarf that
necessarily
controls the chess
game
from
beneath the
board,
even as it seems
that the dwarfs
"puppet,"
the automaton
of "historical
materialism,"makes
the moves
(253).
As
already
indicated,
the
relationship
in "Theses" between materialist
politics
and Messianic
redemption
is much
debated,
with
some
critics assert
ing
that
theology
is reconceived
politically,
others that Messianic transcen
dence becomes the ultimate
means
of
transformation,
and still others that the
essay
fails to
successfully
reconcile such
opposing perspectives.16 Certainly,
redemption implies
the material world
as a
fallen and
profane space,
await
ing
the Messianic arrival which will
bring
about
paradise
or
utopia.
This
appeal
to an
other-wordly
intervention
seems to contradict
political strug
gles
toward
a more
just worldly
existence.
Yet,
as Susan Buck-Morss
notes,
"It
is
no secret that the
Jewish
Messianic
conception,
which
already
has the
attributes of
being
historical, materialist,
and
collective,
translates
readily
into
political
radicalism in
general
and Marxism in
particular"(1989, 231).
For
Jewish
intellectual and
Benjamin's longtime
friend Gershom
Scholem,
whereas
"Christianity
conceives of
redemption
as an event in the
spiritual
and
unseen
realm,"
Judaism
"has
always
maintained
a
concept
of
redemption
as an event which takes
place publicly,
on the
stage
of
history
and within the
community" (1971,1).
The
religious
belief
system
on
which
Benjamin
draws, therefore,
makes
space
for
a
suggestive
and intimate
relationship
between
theology
and mate
rialism,
in which the
practice
of materialist
historiography
is
required
to make
possible
the
redemption
of
history,
and in which the
concept
of
redemption
facilitates materialist
historiography.
Thus,
in
Benjamin's
story,
while the the
ological
dwarf makes the chess
moves,
it is the historical materialist
puppet
that "enlists the services of
theology"(1968d, 253).17
Like each act of trans
lation which strives toward and
glimpses
pure
language,
each materialist
nar
rative of
history
seeks to realize the destruction of historicism's
"homoge
nous,
empty
time"and the
redemption
of
history
in all its fullness.
Utopianism
and
political
action thus
co-exist,
for the fact that Messianic his
tory
is a
violent break with historicism?rather than the inevitable conclu
sion of historicist
progression?mandates urgent political
and
historiograph
ie intervention. In Buck-Morss'
words,
Angela
Marie Smith
41
this
Utopian
desire
can
and must be trusted as the motivation of
political
action
(even
as this action
unavoidably
mediates the
desire)?can,
because
every
experience
of
happiness
or
despair
that
was ours
teaches us that the
present
course of events does not exhaust
reality's potential;
and
must,
because revolution is understood
as a Messianic break from
history's
course
and not its culmination.
(Morss
1989,
243)
The
capability
and
responsibility
to create revolution resides with
us: "Like
every generation
that
preceded
us,
we
have been endowed with
a
weak
Messianic
power,
a
power
to which the
past
has
a
claim"(Benjamin
1968d,
254).
We
can
find
a
point
of contact between
Benjamin's theologically
informed visions and Winterson's
Utopian glimpses
in the
imagery
of
light.
Discussing
the
Kabbalah,
a
mystical
belief
system
informing Judaism,
Scholem describes
how,
in
creating
the
world,
God
"emit[ted]
beams of
light"into
vessels,
"but the vessels could not contain the
light
and thus
were
broken."Consequently,
the
light
was
scattered,
some
"sparks
of
holiness"falling
into the material
world,
where
they "yearningly aspire
to rise
to their source but cannot avail to do
so
until
they
have
support"(1971,45).18
Peter Brier contends
that,
rather than
accepting
this
teaching
as
"literal
truth,"both
Benjamin
and Scholem "saw in it a
metaphysical,
ethical,
aes
thetic,
and
even
political
model for the
"repair
of the
world"(2003, 82).
This
spiritual
narrative thus
uses
pure
light
to evoke the realm of
redemption
and
unity,
and
figures "sparks"of light
and fire
as
the
presence
ofthat realm in the
material
world;
such
figures
may gesture
towards
a
beyond,
but advocate a
materialist
politics
attuned to the
sparks
of alternative
histories, times,
spaces.
It is also
through images
of
light
that
Sexing
the
Cherry provides glimpses
of
a
realm in which time and
history
are
redeemed and
simultaneously
undone.
Jordan
confronts this vision when he
comes across
his ideal and
fig
mentary dancing
Princess:
At a
dancing
school in a remote
place,
Fortunata teaches her
pupils
to become
points
of light.
. . .
She believes that we are
fallen
creatures who
once knew how to
fly.
She
says
that
light
burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve
us at
any
moment.
. . .
It is her
job
to channel the
light lying
in the solar
plexus, along
the
arms,
along
the
legs, forcing
it into
fingertips
and
feet, forcing
it out so that her dancers sweat
tongues
of flame.... [A]t
a
single
moment,
when all
are
spinning
in
harmony
down the
long
hall,
she hears music
escaping from
their heads and backs and livers and
spleens.
Each
has a tone like cut
glass.
The noise is
deafening.
And it is then that the
spinning
seems to
stop,
that the wild
gyration of
the dancers
passes
from
movement into
infin
ity. (Winterson
1989,
77)
In our
seemingly
solid and fallen
world, space
and
light provide impressions
of an
infinity
within matter and time. The novel's two
epigraphs
articulate
worldly
facts which
testify
to another
reality:
the first references the
"Hopi,
42
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
an
Indian
tribe,
[who]
have
a
language
as
sophisticated
as
ours,
but
no tens
es for
past, present
and
future"19;
and the second asserts that
"Matter,
that
thing
the most solid and the
well-known,
which
you
are
holding
in
your
hands and which makes
up your
body,
is now
known to be
mostly empty
space.
Empty space
and
points
of
light.
What does this
say
about the
reality
of the world?"Winterson's
"points oflight,"like
the Kabbalic
"sparks
of holi
ness,"index
a
realm of
pure light,
a
utopie
realm
glimpsed
in the "time of
the
now.
"
Winterson,
like
Benjamin,
strives to
imagine
a
historical
practice
constantly guided by
visions of
a
radically
different
relationship
to
matter,
space,
and time.
As with
Benjamin,
the extent to which this
Utopian
vision is
religious
remains unclear in
Sexing
the
Cherry.
Winterson
grew up
in a
Pentecostal
household,
but moved
away
from
religion. Just
as
Benjamin
held a
theologi
cal view of
language,
touched
upon
in "The Task of the
Translator,"that
in
our
fallen
world,
acts of
language
may aspire upwards
toward the Word of
God?the
pure
language
of creation and
naming,
"the
magical language
of
things" (Roberts 1982,112)20?so
Winterson
thought
of
language
as a
point
of contact between the material and the
divine,
writing
in Art
Objects,
"I
grew up
with the Word and the Word
was
God.
Now,
many years
after
a sec
ular
Reformation,
I still think of
language
as
something holy" (1996,153).
As
well,
Clingham points
out,
Winterson's novel is fascinated with "the medieval
idea of the
king's
two bodies?the sacred and the secular"and the
ways
"the
symbolic
and
religious
power
of this fiction is shattered in Charles's sacrile
gious execution"(1998, 71).
Rather than
adhering
to a
conservative defense
of
monarchy's
divine
right,
however,
Clingham suggests
that Winterson
attends
ethically
to the historical
significance
of this
concept:
"her
critique
draws
on a
seventeenth-century appreciation
for the
symbolic significance
of
cultural forms
(including monarchy),
as
well as
the
contingency
of knowl
edge,
scientific
as
well
as
humanistic,
that
recognized
the
metaphorical
con
straints of
language"(72).
Winterson
adapts
the sacred status of the
King,
"appropriating
his
symbolic significance
into
a
critique
of the historical and
cultural movements that
begin
with the Civil War"
(72).
Winterson thus
respects
and draws
upon
the
symbolic
powers
of lan
guage
and
religious
belief, but,
like the historical materialist
puppet,
enlists
that
power
to break
open
received
histories,
all the while
straining
to illumi
nate the
spiritual
transcendence of which the sacred-secular
body
of the
King
is but a
profane spark. Significantly, Jordan's
vision of the dancers and
their
points
of
light
follows
immediately upon
the
King's
execution,
suggest
ing
the
Utopian power
Winterson
hopes
to unleash with her
blasphemous
translation of the Puritan Revolution. The artistic act of
yoking together past
and
present
is thus also
a
political
act,
in
keeping
with Buck-Morss' vision of
Angela
Marie Smith 43
Benjamin's "negative theology,"which "replaces
the lost natural
aura
of the
object
with
a
metaphysical
one that makes nature as
mortified
glow
with
political meaning."Buck-Morss
continues,
"Unlike natural
aura,
the illumi
nation that dialectical
images provide
is
a
mediated
experience, ignited
with
in the force field of antithetical time
registers, empirical history
and
Messianic
history"(1989, 244-5).
Winterson's
use of the
fairytale
of the
Dancing
Princesses and other stories thus acts
politically
and
metaphysical
ly,
both
uncovering
the
marginalized
voices of
women
and lesbians and
using images
of
light
to assert the transformative
powers
of feminist and les
bian narratives.
Despite having
consonance
with
theological
discourse,
the transcen
dence
figured
in the novel
is,
like the
hybrid cherry, irreligious: Jordan
declares,
"I'm not
looking
for
God,
only
for
myself
and that is far more com
plicated.
. . .
[I]f
the other
life,
the secret
life,
could be found and
brought
home,
then
a
person
might
live in
peace
and have
no
need for God. After
all,
He has no need for
us,
being complete"(Winterson
1989,
115-16).
The
potentially redemptive
forces embraced
by
the novel revolve rather around
love,
passion,
and an
honest evaluation of one's fantasies and desires:
Jordan
asks "Was I
searching
for
a dancer whose
name I did not know
or was I
searching
for the
dancing part
of
myself?" (39). Sexing
the
Cherry's
tales of
desire and
love?idealized,
passionate,
romantic,
imperfect, unrequited?con
struct human
passion
and interconnection
as
forces that
shape,
and
can
per
haps
redeem,
history.
The visions of sexual difference and desire that
perme
ate
Sexing
the
Cherry
are
powerful dynamics
in
upsetting hegemonic, patriar
chal
history,
and
creating
alternative histories and visions of a
redemptive
moment. For
Winterson, therefore,
historical narrative
practice
does not sim
ply
make
possible
the entrance of the Messiah. It
may
also
itself bring
about
the
redemption
of
history.
If
Benjamin ultimately
insists on the seed of
pure
language
and "the
precious
but tasteless seed"of time in the
"nourishing
fruit of the
historically understood"(1968d, 263),
Winterson
foregoes
these
originary
and
pure
seeds for
worldly
acts of artistic
grafting inspired by
fan
tastical visions.
As
already
noted,
the uncertain
relationship
of the
mystical
to
the
polit
ical has been criticized in both Winterson and
Benjamin's
texts.
Just
as,
for
some,
Benjamin
undercuts his historical materialism with
appeals
to an out
side,
Messianic
element,
so,
for
example,
Roessner faults
Sexing
the
Cherry
for
seeking
to
escape
the material
identity
of the
gendered body
with "an essen
tially
Romantic drive to locate
a
ground
of
being
outside
time,
space,
and
material existence"
(2002, 112).
For
Roessner,
Winterson s
effort "to kick
over
the traces of
patriarchal
order
by denying
the
categories
of time and
space
on which it is
based"(119)
dissolves into a
counter-sexism that
privi
44
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
leges irrationality
and desire and" elide
[s]
the material existence of her char
acters,
particularly
women"
(110).
But if Winterson's novel fails to reconcile its feminist
politics
with its
philosophical
fantasies,
it does so in the
same
way
that entire schools of
phi
losophy
have failed
to
settle,
finally, upon
a
single ontological
or
epistemo
logical
narrative. Roessner's
critique
does not
acknowledge
the dialectical
motion between the
embodied,
earthy, Dog-Woman,
at once
revolutionary
and
reactionary,
and her
son
Jordan,
with his
metaphysical wanderings
through
oceans,
fairytale
worlds,
and beams of
light.
On the
one
hand,
Dog
Woman
repeatedly
reminds
us
of the
dangers
of idealism: "The
Puritans,
who
wanted
a
rule of saints
on
earth and
no
king
but
Jesus, forgot
that
we are
born into flesh and in flesh must
remain"(Winterson
1989,
70).
On the
other,
Jordan
tells Greek
myths
which invoke
mystical
and alchemical trans
formation: "the transformation from one element to
another,
from waste
matter into best
gold,
is a
process
that cannot be documented. It is
fully mys
terious. No
one
really
knows what effects the
change"(150).
Committed
engagement
with the material and
political
world and visions of alternative
and
Utopian
realms thus reach out to one another. As the female
protestor
of
1990 concludes: "I don't know if other worlds exist in
space
or
time.
Perhaps
this is the
only
one
and the rest is
just
rich
imaginings.
Either
way
it doesn't
matter. We have to
protect
both
possibilities. They
seem to be
interdepen
dent"
(146).
Somewhere between those
possibilities
lies
a
hybridic, imperfect,
ethical,
materialist
historiography,
a
way
of
narrating
that breaks
open
linear
history
in favor of the
fragmented
voices of the
many
and in
hopes
of
revo
lution, and,
simultaneously,
dreams
idealistically
of
a more
holistic,
liberating
place
in
space
and time.
In
examining Sexing
the
Cherry
and
Benjamin's
essays
together,
then,
we
find
strong
commonalities in their concern for the
politically marginalized
and their
forgotten
stories
alongside
their evocations of transcendent and
otherworldly redemption.
The texts'
interrelationships,
however,
do not
pro
vide
a
clear and
indisputable
conclusion
as to what will
bring
about the
spir
itual and
political
liberations
they envisage. Certainly,
we can trace in their
inner contradictions
a
dialectical
process,
a movement
spiraling upwards
towards
a
synthesis?the
nature of which is uncertain but relates to some
kind of
redemption
for
history's forgotten
and
oppressed.
But,
given
the
irresolution of those contradictions within the
texts,
the
ongoing dynamic
between
potentially conflicting philosophies,
and the
necessary contingency
that thus attends our
interpretations,
it is also
important
to understand the
texts in relation to
the kind of
political postmodernism
described
by
Hutcheon,
in which the textual and
political
effects of materialist and reli
gious
discourse
signify
as much
as
the "real"existence of
a
mystical sphere.
Angela
Marie Smith
45
In their
crossings
between
spiritualism
and
secularism,
religion
and
pol
itics,
transcendence and
materialism,
both
Benjamin
and Winterson
generate
glimpses
of
principles
which could
shape
an
ethical and even
revolutionary
narrative and
historiographie
form.
Further,
their narratives
provide
a model
for their
own
renewal and
transplantation
in the act of
interpretation.
In
jux
taposing
these theoretical/fictional texts we
respond
to their invitation to
constellate
past
and
present, producing
a
blasphemous hybridic re-reading
which seeks to honor the
alterity
of the
original
texts and
pass along
their
counsel,
while
inevitably reconceiving
them in line with our own
political
concerns and
metaphysical
desires.
Notes
The author thanks those whose commented
on
earlier versions of this
essay, par
ticularly John
Mowitt and the readers of
College
Literature.
1
An extensive
body
of work in
English analyzes
the
range
of
Benjamin's
writ
ings
and
philosophical
ideas:
important
texts include
Terry Eagleton (1981);
Richard
Wblin
(1982); Julian
Roberts
(1982);
Susan Buck-Morss
(1989);
Graeme Gilloch
(2001);
and
Margarete
Kohlenbach
(2002).
2
The
essay's
tide is sometimes translated
as
"On the
Concept
of
History."
Benjamin
did not intend "Theses" for
publication, fearing
"enthusiastic misunder
standings" (qtd.
in
Buck-Morss, 1989,
252).
But the
essay's powerful suggestiveness
has rendered it one of his most
widely
discussed
works,
mandating
its
continued,
careful consideration.
3
In the same
vein,
Roberts
states,
"Lesskov's
art,
and his world
view,
were beau
tiful;
but in accordance with
Benjamin's theory
of
beauty, they
were beautiful
pre
cisely
because their historical
redundancy
was
making
them fade
away"(1982, 180).
4
Benjamin
also writes about shock and modern existence in "On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire"
(1968a;
written
1939).
For more detailed considerations of the differ
ent kinds of
"experience"invoked
in
Benjamin's
work,
and of his notion of
"shock"and its relation to Freudian
theory,
see,
for
example, Eagleton (1981),
Roberts
(1982),Wolin (1982),
and Howard
Caygill (1998).
5
This
essay
focuses
only
on Winterson's
Sexing
the
Cherry,
but similar themes
can be and has been
fruitfully
considered in relation to Winterson's
many
other nov
els,
which also
explore
sexual and
gender
matters in
postmodern
narrative
forms,
as
well as Winterson's
essays
about
writing
in Art
Objects (1996). Along
with those
employed
in this
essay,
useful articles on
Sexing
the
Cherry
include Alison Lee
(1994);
Christy
L. Burns
(1996); Marilyn
R. Farwell
(1996);
Susan
Onega (1996);
Elizabeth
Langland (1997);
and Bente Gade
(1999).
6Tradescant is an historical
figure:
see
Greg Clingham
on
John
Tradescant,
father
and
son,
both
royal
horticulturalists and travelers
(1998,
fn.
9,
80-1).
7
Winterson's
strategy
of
rewriting fairytales
to undermine dominant
patriarchal
narratives echoes
Benjamin's
own use
of the
Sleeping Beauty
tale to assert class
struggle
as the
galvanizing
force in
history.
In a
letter to Gershom
Scholem,
Benjamin
wrote: "I would like to tell in a different
way
the
story
of the
Sleeping
46
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
Beauty.
She is
asleep
in her thorn bush. And
then,
after so
many years,
she awakes.
But not to the kiss of a
prince charming.
It was the cook who awakened
her,
when
he smacked the kitchen
boy;
the smack resounded with all the
pent-up
force of those
long years
and re-echoed
throughout
the castle"
(qtd.
in
Eagleton
1981,
44).
Comments
Eagleton,
"The sound that will stir
[truth]
to life is the
rough
noise of
class
violence,
issuing
from the lowliest
quarter
of the castle"
(44).
8
As a
historian of the
lower-class,
Dog-Woman
also fulfils Scott's mandate of
attending
to the
overlapping
of issues of class with the
symbolic register
of
gender.
9
This
image,
read
against
"The
Storyteller
"confirms
Benjamin
does not view
story telling solely through nostalgic
and
idealizing
lens: the
metaphor aligns
the
fairy-tale,
with its
generic opening
line "Once
upon
a
time,"with
mythic
or
histori
cist narrative that
simultaneously
severs and conflates
past
and
present,
rather than
constellating
them in
politically productive
ways.
In
Eagleton's
words,
"In a
single ges
ture,
the
past
is at once
relegated
to a safe distance
and,
robbed of its
turbulence,
sur
rendered to the
hegemony
of the
present"(1981, 45).
The
image suggests that,
what
ever the
past
values of
fairy-tale,
it alone is not
adequate
for
contemporary
needs.
10
Similarly,
Roberts
notes that while
Benjamin questioned
conventional views
about
prostitutes,
he
approached
their
exploitation
in
"quasi-religious"rather
than
"socio-economic"terms
(1982,30), asserting
that the
prostitute valuably
"'sexualised
the
spirit'"(31),
but
"entirely pass[ing]
over the material context of
prostitution" (32).
Still,
Benjamin
elsewhere considers more
consciously
the entwinement of
gendered
and sexual fantasies with
conceptions
of the
past,
most
clearly
in "A Berlin
Chronicle"
(1978a;
written
1932)
where Berlin's
prostitutes shape
his reminiscences
about the
city
of his childhood.
And,
as
Eagleton points
out,
Benjamin
more astute
ly acknowledges
women's double
oppression
under
capitalism
in a review of Brecht 's
play
The Mother
(1981,
fh.
87,
47).
For more extended
analyses
of
gender,
the femi
nine,
and the
figure
of the
prostitute
in
Benjamin's
texts,
see Christine Buci
Glucksmann; Buck-Morss;
and
Helga Geyer-Ryan.
11
Here, too,
Dog-Woman
recalls
a
characteristic of
Benjamin's
work,
embody
ing
a violent
tendency
in his
writing
discussed
by
Peter Demetz:
there was in his character and in his
thought
a half-hidden thirst for violence
(more
poetic
than
political).
His studies of Sorel and his defense of anarchist
spontaneity
(as suggested
in his
essay
on
violence) against
any
Marxist
'programming'
of action
reveal
something
in him that
precedes
all
political theory
and
perhaps
has its ori
gins
in a
mystic
vision of a Messiah who comes with the sword to
change
the world
into
white-and-golden perfection.
His recurrent
images
of
barricades,
exploding
dynamite,
and the furies of civil
war
(as,
for
instance,
in the
essay
on
Surrealism)
have
an almost sexual if not
ontological quality,
and should not be obfuscated
by pious
admirers who would like to
disregard
the
deep
fissures in his
thought
and
person
ality. (Demetz
1978,
xii)
Thus,
Dog-Woman
carries out a
fantasy
of
divinely
mandated and
justified
violence
that exceeds
any
programmatic uprising
of the
proletariat
or
oppressed
women,
in
keeping
with the
contradictory
elements of the
historiographie practice envisaged
by Benjamin
and Winterson.
Angela
Marie Smith
47
12
For the
original
sources noted
here,
see Gorra
(1990)
and Tremain
(1989).
13
Thus,
as
Eagleton
reads
Benjamin,
It is not that we
constantly
revaluate a
tradition;
tradition is the
practice
of cease
lessly excavating, safeguarding, violating, discarding
and
reinscribing
the
past.
There
is no tradition other than
this,
no set of ideal landmarks that then suffer modifica
tion. Artefacts
are
inherently
available for such
reinscription, just
as
Benjamin's
mys
tical
theory
of
language
sees
'translatability'
as an essential
quality
of certain texts.
(Eagleton, 1981,59).
14
The continued relevance of
gender
and
sexuality
to
Jordan's postmodern
his
toriography
is also made clear in his
temporary assumption
of female
guise
in order
to understand relations between women and
men,
and women's role in the world
and its
history.
15
See,
for
example,
Roessner
(2002);
Sara Martin
(1999).
16
For
example,
Scholem found in the
piece
a
despair
with secular
politics
pre
cipitated by
the 1939 Hitler-Stalin
pact,
and a
corresponding "leap
into transcen
dence"
(qtd.
in Roberts
1982,
198).
But Bertolt
Brecht,
who lamented the
"ghast
ly"mystification
of historical materialism in other
Benjamin
works,
concluded of the
"Theses"that "the small work is clear and avoids confusion
(despite
all
metaphors
and
judaisms)"(qtd.
in Buck-Morss
1989,246;
fh.
179,
451).
RolfTiedemann's 1975
essay
contends that
Benjamin's
Messianism is here conceived in secular
terms,
but
that the text fails in its
attempt
to "unite the irreconcileable"
(1983-84, 96),
and falls
back
upon
"the enthusiasm of anarchists"rather than "the
sobriety
of Marxism"
(95).
Roberts is frustrated with the
essay's apparent
return to an earlier
transcendentism,
its reduction of
political
revolution from "the locomotive of world
history"to "'grab
bing
the
emergency
cord',
which would have as its
consequence
the 'messianic ces
sation of events
happening'"(1982,
219).
Such a
position,
Roberts
believes,
is refut
ed
by
"the work of
Benjamin's maturity "(219),
which validates careful
analysis
of his
torical
processes
over "uncontrolled
visions"(221)
and eschews "sudden
mass illumi
nation"in favor of "the rational
encouragement
of an
underlying
historical
process,""the organic
climax of
processes
in
humanity's
'second
nature'"(222).
Susan
Sontag provides
an overview of
Benjamin's practice perhaps
most useful for our con
sideration of
Sexing
the
Cherry: "Passionately,
but also
ironically, Benjamin placed
himself at the crossroads. It was
important
for him to
keep
his
many 'positions'
open:
the
theological,
the
Surrealist/aesthetic,
the communist. One
position
corrects
another: he needed them
all"(1979, 27).
17
See Kohlenbach
(2002,187).
18
This
particular conception
of creation
comes from the Kabbalist school of
Isaac Luria Ashkenazi
(1534-72) (Scholem 1971,43).
19
For the
interrelationship
between
Sexing
and the works of
Benjamin
Lee
Whorf on the
Hopi language,
see Peter Buru
(1997).
20
For
Benjamin's
comments
upon language,
as
well
as
"The Task of the
Translator,"see
"On
Language
as
Such and
on
the
Language
of
Man"(1978b;
writ
ten
1916);
and "On the Mimetic
Faculty"(1978c;
written
1933).
48
College
Literature 32.3
[Summer 2005]
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-.
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on
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and
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Harry
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ed.
Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
-.
1968c. "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of
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Benjamin: Essays
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Harry
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ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
-.
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1968e. "The Work of Art in the
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1978a. "A Berlin Chronicle." In
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