CHAPTER THREE1

REWORKING LINEAR TIME:

QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN JEANETTE
WINTERSON’S SEXING THE CHERRY
AND ART & LIES

OLU JENZEN

I don’t know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps this is the only
one and the rest is rich imaginings. Either way it doesn’t matter. We have
to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdependent. (Oranges,
128)

In her novels Winterson explores different aspects of temporality,

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working through the paradox that we are all immersed in time, exist in
time and yet find it so hard to think conceptually and critically about time.2

1
The following editions of Winterson's works are used in this chapter: Sexing the
Cherry. 1990. London: Vintage. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. 1991. London:
Vintage. Art & Lies. 1995. London: Vintage. The Passion. 1996. London: Vintage.
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. 1996. London: Vintage. Gut
Symmetries. 1997. London: Granta Books. The PowerBook. 2000. London:
Jonathan Cape. Lighthousekeeping. 2004. London: Fourth Estate. Tanglewreck.
2006. London: Bloomsbury. The Stone Gods. 2007. London: Hamish Hamilton.
2
Some aspects of this that I have had in mind as I formulate the idea behind this
article are Winterson’s exploration of the notion of cybertime (the virtual’s only
dimension is time) in The.PowerBook, her examination of space-time in Gut
Symmetries, and what is perhaps her most sustained preoccupation with
experiences of time (clock time versus other forms of temporality) to date—the
children’s novel Tanglewreck. Less scientific and more philosophical in tone, both
The Passion and Sexing The Cherry have references to modernist contemplations
of time, expressed for instance in their intertextual references to the poetry of T.S.
Eliot. In The Passion the ordeal of the “zero winter” alludes to Eliot’s “zero
summer” and Sexing The Cherry, which Winterson herself has called a reading of
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 32 Chapter Three

One of the recurring themes in her novels’ ongoing dialogue with each
other is the process of making time strange, or queering temporality,
which this article seeks to explore in relation to the other central
Wintersonian themes of subjectivity, gender and sexuality. In a reading
that aims to bring out the political implications of a rethinking of cultural
concepts of time, this study focuses on two principal aspects of the
queering of time in Winterson’s fictions. Firstly it will take a look at the
reworking of linear time in Winterson’s exploration of temporality in its
fantastic mode. Time (like imagination) is often left untheorized but in
Winterson’s narrative, through time-travel (or a collapsing of chronotopes)
and other metaphorical concretizations, time becomes a materializing
force.3 This perspective on time as a dynamic force relates closely to the
project of rethinking history and, the article will argue, works to formulate
a sort of deviant historiographic metafiction. This conception is an attempt
on my behalf to synthesize Linda Hutcheon’s (1988) category of
“historiographic metafiction” with Jennifer Terry’s term “deviant
historiography” which she formulates as a strategy to theorize the
“conditions which make possible [or] constrain” present and historical
“deviant subject formation” (Terry 1991, 55).
Secondly, the denaturalization of time relates to a displacement of a
chronopolitics of development that relies on an ideology of heteronormative
or reproductive futurity. As the reading will illustrate, such displacement is
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expressed through the notion of a queer untimeliness and the temporal

structure of chance. Many of the characters make up their own course in
life by renouncing reproductive temporality and this constitutes a central
part of their queerness. Conversely, however, Winterson’s fictions also
display a problematic investment in the figure of the child which is made
to stand in for notions of universality, hope and transcending love, which
are values intimately connected to a “reproductive futurism” (see Edelman
2004).4 The image of the child in Winterson’s fiction can thus be read as
both subversive and conservative.
The essay will use the notion of queerness as a position that generates
disturbance rather than definitions, which is indebted to Lee Edelman’s
suggestion that queerness is a refusal of the “substantialization of identity”
and of history as linear (2004, 4). Queer time and space develop, Judith
Halberstam says, “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality,

Four Quartets (Art Objects, 118) has, as Onega points out, a structure that
correlates with Eliot’s lines “What might have been and what has been/ Point to
one end which is always present” (Onega 2006, 78).
3
The term “chronotope" is from Michael Bakhtin 1981.
4
The term that Edelman 2004 uses.
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 Reworking Linear Time 33

and reproduction” and because of this queer time and space will follow
different “logics of location, movement and identification” (2005, 1).
Furthermore, Jennifer Terry in her article “Theorizing Deviant
Historiography” also focuses on relational processes in her call for new
methodological practices which will enable us to trace “deviant subject
formation[s]” whilst staying attentive to the problem of a cultural tendency
to view heterosexuality as a de-historicised, unmarked category (1991,
55). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies this problem and argues that what
is needed is a denaturalization of heterosexuality:

…the making historically visible of heterosexuality is difficult because,

under its institutional pseudonyms such as Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty,
Family, Domesticity, and Population, heterosexuality has been permitted to
masquerade so fully as History itself–when it has not presented itself as the
totality of Romance. (1993, 10-11)

Synthesizing these anti-homophobic theoretical perspectives in my

approach, the theories of queerness I draw on imply both a way of being in
the world at odds with normative temporalities and a critique of the
“careful social scripts that usher [. . .] us through major markers of
individual development and into normativity” as the only space to
populate (Dinshaw et al. 2007, 182)
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Deviant Historiography and Winterson’s Metafictional

Historiographical Novels
Winterson’s concerns with concepts of history are outlined already in
her debut novel Oranges where she outlines the problem as she sees it:
“People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is
fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to
believe”, and more seriously “very often history is a means of denying the
past [. . .] pretending an order that doesn’t exist”. Instead, the text
suggests, history is “a string full of knots” and “the best you can do is
admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more” (91-3). This
articulation of a personal poetics states her refusal of a clear separation of
storytelling from a factual history, the assumption that one narrative is
more real than any other narratives.
Both The Passion and Sexing the Cherry reflect the view of history
that Winterson outlines in Oranges, and both can be described as
employing the narrative strategies of metafiction. Hutcheon explains that
the historiographic metafictional novel is characterized by a self-conscious
narrative that deals with the uncertainty and the multiplicity of “truths”
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 34 Chapter Three

inherent in the writing of history. Sexing the Cherry, for instance, reflects
this as it opens with a declaration of its intention to map “the other
journeys” of the past (9-10). Historiographic metafiction also encourages
us to reflect on our relationship to the past, and this is an essential and
pronounced part of Winterson’s project. The signifying sentence for this
relationship is the paradox “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”, that recurs
as a mantra throughout The Passion (5, 13, 39, 69, 139, 160) and that is
continuously repeated throughout Winterson’s body of work. The
paradoxical statement at once signals a promise of closeness and a request
for trust, yet it is also a note of warning (see Makinen 2005, 56). On the
one hand, the “trust me” imperative is reassuring; on the other hand, the
word “story” indicates a fictitious element or even a lie as in the
expression “telling stories”. The invocation to “trust”, in fact immediately
also evokes distrust and signals that there is reason not to trust the
narrator. Having thus undermined the authoritative voice of historical
narrative, all that is left are “stories” and a complex negotiation between
reader and narrator that determines how the hi/story will be read.
Following this, notions of objectivity and realness, qualities traditionally
attributed to history, are no longer sustainable. Laura Doan argues that
Winterson

[…] constructs her narrative by exploiting the techniques of postmodern

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historiographic metafiction […] as well as its ideology […] in order to

challenge and subvert patriarchal and heterosexist discourses, and
ultimately, to facilitate a forceful and positive radical oppositional critique.
(1994, 138)

The effectiveness of this strategy, this essay suggests, depends on

Winterson’s use of the fantastic mode to articulate this critique. The
fantastical mode subverts the prioritisation of a rational and realistic
narrative and also asks the readers to question their own assumptions
about reality and to reflect on what they are willing to believe. The
challenge Winterson’s historiographic metafiction presents to
heteronormative discourse may be linked, politically, to the project of
“deviant historiography” in that it focuses on marginalized subject
positions in relation to dominant power structures and seeks to bring to the
fore queerness in culture, using a historical perspective. It also ties into
what Jennifer Terry says about the position of deviant subjects as resisting
pressures to straighten out any “knots”:

Deviant subjects are engaged in a process of living in a system of

epistemic relay between authoritative knowledge and “experience,” and

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 Reworking Linear Time 35

between past and present. Deviant subjects do not set the terms of this in-
betweenness–they confuse them. (1991, 70)

Fruitfully bringing together historiographic fiction and a queer

magical realism, Sexing the Cherry is a narrative made up of myth,
history, fantasy and parody. Like its central image of the grafted cherry,
Sexing the Cherry’s historiographic form, marrying magical realism and
historical narrative, is an “unnatural kin” to both storytelling and history, a
sort of queer hybrid (Smith 2005, 38). The novel has a realistic historical
context, full of detail, historical characters and places. For example, the
story, set in London, starts in 1630, covers the execution of Charles I in
1649 and the Great Fire of 1666, and includes various historical
characters. The realistic, historical material is then subverted by the fact
that characters cross the boundary between fantasy and reality and further
by the merging of characters and events from different points in time, such
as the Dog Woman’s co-existence in the seventeenth and the twentieth
century London, and the mirroring of her crusade against the Puritans in
the political activism of her present-day alter-ego, set in a contemporary
London of the 1990’s.5 At once the text “asserts that its world is both
resolutely fictive and yet undeniable historical” (Hutcheon 1988, 142). We
find the most outright criticism of dominant historiography and linear time
under the heading “LIES” which includes: “Lies 2: Time is a straight
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line”, “Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one
has happened and the other has not”, “Lies 4: We can only be in one place
at a time”, “Lies 7: Reality as truth”, and so on (Sexing the Cherry, 83).
These statements connect back to what Winterson says about history in
Oranges, but can also be read as a list of themes that are addressed
persistently throughout Winterson's work. By labelling the statements as
“lies” she encourages the reader to question the validity of the statements,
and at the same time indicates to the reader that, by re-assessing these
fundamental perceptions of time and space, so closely entwined with our
notion of identity, there are more uncertainties to be expected.
As the citations from Sexing The Cherry above reveal, the novel
questions our notion of linear time and how time relates to identity,
pronouncing its belief in an identity that “won’t be single it will be
multiple” and that “may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the
future and in the past” (Sexing the Cherry, 126). This is essentially a
challenge to the notion of identity as duration of consciousness through

5
In the Vintage edition I use for the purpose of this study, the part of the novel set
in a time like ours is titled “some years later", however, in the earlier, 1989 edition,
the same section is marked “1990".
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 36 Chapter Three

time (see Bergson 1911). The same criticism is expressed in the

questioning of the function of childhood memories, and the status of
childhood as the origin of identity (see Moore 1995, 117-18). The Dog
Woman deems her childhood unnecessary and Jordan points out the
fictional status of what we talk about as childhood: “I will have to assume
that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I
remember” (Sexing the Cherry, 92). The contemporary activist woman’s
memories from the seventeenth century further complicate the relation of
identity to memory in a fantastic collapsing of chronotopes. Her clear
sense of the city layout of the seventeenth century works to strengthen her
link to her historical alter ego, the Dog Woman, but also reinforces the
alternative view on “consciousness through time” that the novel endorses,
and essentially links the Dog Woman and the eco-feminist activist
camping out on the banks of a polluted river as provisional “counter
discursive deviant subjectivit [ies]”, focusing on qualities and attitudes and
deviant subject formations as discursively produced in conflict with
dominant discourse, through time (Terry 1991, 55). Winterson is here
formulating an idea of identities as provisional and relational, which fits
with her project of rewriting history and challenging Western patriarchal
and heteronormative discourse of historical time. 6
Laura Doan and Sarah Waters suggest that the complicated
relationship between the Dog Woman and her contemporary counterpart
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can be read in two ways; if we think of the Dog Woman as a ghost or

apparitional ancestor to the woman living in the London of the 1990s,
facilitating a continuum to be imagined, then, as they demonstrate, the text
can be seen as following a known formula for the lesbian historical novel
that typically emphasizes a trans-historical (lesbian) identity. If, however,
we chose to read the Dog Woman as the embodied fantasy of the
contemporary woman, then history becomes a way of reflecting on the
present, making possible “an exploration of contemporary consciousness”
which prioritizes a political reading over a romantic one (Doan and Sarah
Waters 2000, 24). In Marilyn Farwell’s view Winterson has more in
common with lesbian feminist writing than with postmodernist fiction
(Farwell, 168-94) and, similarly, Laura Doan argues elsewhere that in
negotiating the conflicting relation between feminism and postmodernism,
Winterson “compromises her postmodernist stance”, rather than her
feminist position (see Farwell 1996 and Doan 1994, 138). The conflicting

6
The queerness of the Dog Woman is expressed through her monstrous and abject
being but also through her position as negator of a particular set of conservative
values (symbolised by the Puritans) that wants to create a world order based on
certain inclusions and exclusions.
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 Reworking Linear Time 37

modes of postmodernist and feminist writings may be a problem for a

feminism hinged on representation and agency but not necessarily so from
a queer point of view where the queer is understood as the disrupter of
subjectivity. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of Winterson’s fictions
that are equally at odds with postmodernist aesthetics. For example, she
presents art as an escape out of the confines of a historic and materialist
world, “when we are drawn into the art we are drawn out of ourselves. We
are no longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space
and light” which could be said to be a position that concurs with an ideal
that belongs to modernism and clearly creates discomfort in a
postmodernist reading (Sexing the Cherry, 91).7
Doan and Waters are right in their view that Winterson’s novel breaks
with the epistemology of the tradition of lesbian historic fiction. But, as
Paulina Palmer points out, there is a back-to-front logic to the connection
between the alter egos as they, in the sequence of the novel, move from
their past representations to their contemporary ones, instead of going
back in time, exploring or reliving a past, which is a frequently used
stylistic move to give the characters “depth”’, so the historical continuum
based on a seeking out of historical ancestry is already turned on its head
(Palmer 1995, 186-7). So the distinction they make between the two
readings of the Dog Woman as an ancestral ghost or as a thought-up
(utopian) fantasy does not perhaps necessitate the text to use the historical
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mode in a fresh way. The image of the terrifyingly huge Dog Woman—all
excess—as a (historical) force within the activist woman: “I had an alter
ego who was huge and powerful…[s]he was my patron saint…[w]henever
I called on her I felt my muscles swell and laughter fill up my throat”, is in
a sense the potentiality or power of the past (Sexing the Cherry, 125). The
temporal elasticity of the fantastical mode allows Jordan and the Dog
Woman to exist at once in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries; it
breaks the separation “historic time”—“contemporary now” and further
means that their identities are split in time, or spread out over time,
subverting the notion of gender or sexuality as fixed.
Terry’s project of formulating a historiography of deviance does not
focus on a reinstatement of marginalized or hidden events, or people
excluded from traditional history, but instead concentrates on “processes
and operations by which these elisions occur” to theorize a
“counterdiscursive position of history-telling which neither fashions a new
coherence, nor provides a more inclusive resolution of contradicting
‘events’”; essentially a strategy that we can identify in Winterson’s writing

7
See Pykett, discussed in Helena Grice and Tim Woods (1998, 6).
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 38 Chapter Three

(Terry, 31). Winterson does address the problem of historical elision. For
example in her novel Art & Lies, the 600 BC poet Sappho reappears to
raise issues about how she, through homophobic misinterpretation and
effacement, has been ill-treated by history, and asks in an angry voice
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?” (51). Laura Doan and
Sarah Waters discuss the fact that, in contrast to the continuity and
multiplicity of gay male history, lesbian history is characterised by its
fragmented nature and its concentrated attention on a single figure, Sappho
of Lesbos (both as a factual and mythical figure). Because of the elision of
the lesbian from the historical record, much of the lesbian feminist
historical writing from the early twentieth century onwards has been
focused on establishing a continuity or a narrative wholeness of the lesbian
identity. This is a project that in academic as well as in literary form has
focused on the retrieval of the signifier “lesbian” from patriarchal
discourse, and that has often centred on the situating of the figure of
Sappho within a lesbian discourse. Winterson’s treatment of Sappho
breaks with the “impulse towards the tracing of an erotic genealogy”, to
use Doan’s and Water’s words, in that its focus is on the problematics of
Sappho’s absence and the issues of exclusion and misreading involved in
history writing, both empathetic and uncongenial (Doan and Waters, 14).
Winterson’s text here brings our attention to “the processes and operations
by which these elisions occurred” and lays bare the struggle over control
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of meaning (Terry, 56). Doan and Waters point out the particular
relationship between history and fiction that, in their view, has developed
within lesbian historical writing as a product of the necessity to “intuit a
meaningful history from the most insignificant evidence”, and that
valorises “fantasy and wishful thinking as legitimate historiographical
resources” (Doan and Waters, 15).8
Winterson problematises this development from both a feminist and a
queer deconstructive point of view. As we have seen, her texts are critical
of patriarchal historiographic norms and assumptions about a prioritised
historical truth, but they also question a need within lesbian historical
writing to establish a historical past that aligns with contemporary notions
of identity. Sappho in Art & Lies is a textual remnant, the fragmental
residue read by characters in the text, but she also upsets the textual/real
divide by becoming a character in the text’s contemporary/ futuristic
setting, living and loving (she falls in love with the character
Picasso/Sophia) and re-living the myth of the poet and her muse Sophia.

8
Terry also discusses the problem of locating any historical documentation in
relation to lesbians’ lives and sexuality (1991, 69).
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 Reworking Linear Time 39

The fantastical mode allows for elasticity in the process of signification

which in a sense enacts the construction of Sappho out of the textual
fragments rather than assuming a transhistorical sexual identity. In her
transitioning of temporal and ontological realms Sappho becomes an agent
rather than a point of reference in history, with a complexity that resists
the reductive readings of the “Very Famous Men”, alluded to in the text
(Art & Lies, 51). In this way her fiction responds to postmodernism’s
“deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions” (Hutcheon 1988, x) in a way
that foregrounds how we make history and thus also corresponds to the
principles of deviant historiography that, drawing on Foucault’s “effective
history” urges a focus on the “ruptures and discontinuities” in history, to
expose power structures but also to “trace the conditions whereby
marginal subjects apprehend possibilities for expression and self-
representation in a field of contest” (Terry, 56). And this gains importance
in relation to Winterson’s characters such as the Dog Woman and
Villanelle in The Passion, who, as Doan and Waters says, are “not quite
gay” because their sexuality, though undoubtedly dissident, does not
match the sexual categories of identity politics (2000, 20). This is indeed a
detail that has caused trouble for many of Winterson’s critics and readers,
desiring a clearer notion of these characters’ sexuality in order to make
them functional within a contemporary debate. Doan and Waters,
however, commend Winterson’s refusal to create clearly identifiable
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lesbian characters resembling the images of lesbian identities available

today, and point out that this is a promising move in a new direction as it
“marks a break with the unwillingness of the genre of the lesbian historical
novel to abandon limiting paradigms, and the beginning perhaps of a more
inventive use of history” (ibid.).
Similarly, Angela Smith, sees Sexing the Cherry as a text that “insists
on the possibility of narrating history in radical ways” (25), exemplified in
the fantastical collapsing of historical and present time that I have
discussed above, but also in other aspects such as the novel’s portrayal of
the Revolution, which Jeffrey Roessner points out is significant “as a
move toward ideals of rationality and objectivity—ideals that helped
establish the value of sexual representation and the naturalness of
heterosexuality” (108). This is an example of how Winterson brings to the
fore “traces of deviant subjects revealed through conflict within dominant
accounts” (Terry, 59), in the embodiment of her characters. Winterson’s
take on history, defying a monolithic narrative and allowing for movement
in time that is deliberately freed from progressive direction, signals a
queer approach that concurs with the idea behind deviant historiography

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 40 Chapter Three

and also resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of

queerness as operating within

…the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and

resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements
of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t (or can’t be made) to
signify monolithically (1993, 8).

Following this we may want to categorize this form of historiographic

metafiction foremost as a queer project, thus developing Terry’s “deviant
historiography” into a deviant historiographic metafiction.

The Queerness of Time

Space and time are “the first filters of knowledge” at the same time as
our thinking about time and space is always mediated through language
(Munt, 1).9 This is an awareness at the heart of Sexing the Cherry where
we are already in the epigraph directed towards questions about the
relation of space-time to language:

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no

tense for past, present and future. What does this say about time?
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Matter, that thing the most solid and well know, 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? (Sexing the Cherry, 8).
Winterson here asks us to think about how language shapes what we
call reality, and highlights the linguistic and discursive aspects of time.
Time, as Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, needs to be understood as a
“dynamic force” in any conception of subjectivity and reality (1999a, 3).
Social temporal practices, Lefebvre explains, work to transform the
individual into a “social body” in a process where the circular rhythms we
associate with basic needs are overwritten by linear rhythms (Ivanchikova,
154-5). By deliberately confusing time with the perception of time, by
juxtaposing different discourses of time–scientific, philosophical, social,
mythological, private and public time, Winterson reveals time as a
constructive force. In Sexing the Cherry Jordan experiences time and
thinks about time in different ways. He explores the tension between inner

9
Using Kant, Munt here explains the impossibility of conceiving an outside space
and time.
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 Reworking Linear Time 41

and outer, or private and public time in the section titled “The Nature of
Time”, where he describes being in time as an ongoing present and “more
or less [a] straight line from one point to another”. However, thinking
about time is, he explains, radically different; it is “recognizing that all
journeys exist simultaneously” (Sexing the Cherry, 89). He experiences
time as a “Newtonian arrow” but thinks about time in a way we can
describe more as an “Einsteinian simultaneity of time/space” (Makinen,
89).10 Sexing the Cherry points hereby to the inadequacy of Western
thought-systems to think about time in a meaningful way by equating it
with one dimensional Newtonian time. By asking questions about what is
“outside” of time, the narrative aims to investigate time from outside
dominant ideological parameters.
Jeffrey Roessner criticises Winterson’s urge to escape patriarchal
temporality, replacing it, as he sees it, with feminist myth that views
lesbian desire as “more natural” and even “transcendental”; a strategy that
in his view ultimately runs the risk of simply replicating the heterosexist
discourse for a “troubling brand of counter-sexism” (Roessner, 112).
Winterson’s texts do indeed challenge conventional, patriarchal, time, but
do not, in my view, respond to a categorisation in the terms of Kristeva’s
distinction between men’s time (linear, creating history, public) and
women’s time (cyclical, private, “nothing new is created”) (see Kristeva
1981), other than with a brief discussion in Gut Symmetries about
Copyright © 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

“mother’s time” and “father’s time” that clearly borrows from the theories
of Kristeva, but that is highly ambivalent about privileging one over the
other (Gut Symmetries, 22-3). So whilst there may be attempts to
reformulate temporality, sometimes expressed in utopian terms, they are
not necessarily gendered in the way Roessner implies. His criticism of a
feminist, utopian notion of time in Winterson is therefore not very
persuasive. Rather, Winterson is asking the reader to question what the
different power relations that shape our notion of time are and how time
works as a force in our lives. The defamiliarization of time in Winterson’s
fictions can be linked to recent writings on queer time.11 In her move to

10
Simplifying greatly we could say that for Newton time passes uniformly,
whatever happens in the physical world, whilst in Einsteinian thought, time and
space are bound up in a spacetime continuum founded in his theory of special
relativity.
11
Here in particular we could do well with further explorations of the following
synonyms for “queer" in The Oxford English Dictionary: strange, odd, peculiar,
eccentric, living dishonestly, worthless; and in relation to temporality we may want
to emphasize the meaning of queer as living dishonestly, or in other words untrue
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 42 Chapter Three

make time strange Winterson urges the reader to take another look at the
taken-for-grantedness of time as we live it and normative temporal givens
are questioned, disturbed, parodied and re-inscribed with new meanings.
Judith Halberstam’s foray into queer uses of time and space uncovers
differences between queer time and time structured by heteronormative
family life (work and reproduction). Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman notes
the bearing temporal mechanisms of power have on our lives and points
out that those “whose activities do not show up on the official timeline,
whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often
simultaneously black, female, queer” (Freeman, 57). On a level of socio-
economical life, Halberstam links queer lifestyle or rhythms—what she
calls “imaginative life schedules”—to “strange temporalities” (2005, 1).
Situating “reproductive temporality” within the heteronormative
hegemony of contemporary Western capitalism, she demonstrates how the
structure of time has got an inherent value system that prioritizes
(re)productivity and an adult family oriented rhythm (ibid. 5). Her
contention relates to Foucault’s notion that what we call sexual identity
has as much to do with a “way of life” as sexual practice.
Further, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, how we understand our place in
the world is an effect of how we understand time and space. She notes that
“there is an historical correlation between the ways in which space [. . .] is
represented, and the ways in which subjectivity represents itself” (Grosz
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1995, 97). This is a relation that also works the other way around: when
representations of subjectivity change so does our conception of time and
space (ibid. 99). Following this, it is logical that many of Winterson’s
central characters, exploring new forms of subjectivity, which involves
pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality, generate new conceptions
of space and time, and consequently queerness may be understood as “an
outcome of strange temporalities” (Halberstam 2005, 1). Queer
temporality, according to Halberstam, also disrupts conventional notions
of adulthood and maturity, and in Winterson’s fiction there is a clear
resistance to the conventions and requirements of heteronormative
adulthood (ibid. 2). However, the relation between queerness and such
resistance toward the logics of adulthood and maturity is not without its
complications. Historically, within psychology and other disciplines,
homosexuality has been understood as a pathological restriction of
development, which again raises questions about attitudes and approaches
to a historical past. The queer politics of today would be reluctant to leave

to the temporal norm, or even “worthless" as in willfully unproductive queer waste

of time.
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 Reworking Linear Time 43

this image to the homophobic imagination, transforming it into a

conscious rejection of a particular heteronormative chronopolitics of
development. Queer temporality could thus be seen as taking full pleasure
in, and radically embracing, the restricted maturity position, refusing the
respectable, grown-up, reproductive temporality. Many of Winterson’s
characters repudiate reproductive temporality and heteronormative family
values, and this makes up a crucial part of their queerness. By stepping
outside the constraints of “reproductive temporality”, to use Halberstam’s
term, many of the characters enter into an alternative queer chronotope,
creating new forms of being in time guided by desire and creativity. Yet
the inclination in our society to pathologize their way of life remains
present in the text, as for example in the episode in Lighthousekeeping
when Silver, in a confrontation with the psychiatric consultant, declares
that she is in her own view a functional (adult) human being: “I can dress
myself, make toast, make love, make money, make sense” (159). Both
Silver’s “sense-making” and her love-making are radically out of sync.
with the parameters of dominant (heteronormative) culture as represented
by the institution of mental health in the novel, and the consultant suggests
she suffers from a psychosis.12

Futurism and the Image of the Child

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The fact that almost no children in Winterson’s fiction have what we

may call a conventional story of origin is generally read as an
autobiographical element in her writings, relating to the fact that the
author was herself adopted and never knew her birth parents. I want to
suggest a move away from this limited autobiographical reading to a more
political enquiry about kinship and reproduction in Winterson’s works, by

12
The French theorist Henri Lefebvre writes about temporality in relation to
patterns of production and consumption and argues that our everyday lives are
structured by a “socio-economic organization of production, consumption,
circulation and habitat" (Lefebvre, 73). Similarly the story in Tanglewreck draws
attention to the construction of time, making strange, or queering, any notion of
time as natural, and brings to the fore the relation between time and power
structures in a reminder of how time increasingly functions as a marker of
difference. The characters Regalia Mason and Abel Darkwater enact the
appropriation of our personal time by capitalist driven processes highlighting the
relation between trans-national capitalism and time. The story entails a warning
that in the twenty-fourth century a global company called “The Quantum" will
control all Time (Tanglewreck, 212), which is essentially what has happened in
Winterson’s most recent novel The Stone Gods.
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 44 Chapter Three

paying attention to the radical repositioning of the child as outside the

“value of reproductive futurism”. The image of the child is strongly
connected to issues of temporality. Edelman argues that in our culture “we
are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future
than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the child”
(2004, 11). On the other hand, queerness designates the side outside
political consensus on the “value of reproductive futurism” and “threatens
the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends”, making the
image of the queer at odds with the image of the child (ibid. 3). Queer is
conventionally stigmatized as anti-children, in its non-reproductive
sexuality, as a perceived threat to children, and in its signalling of a loss of
innocence. Queerness brings childhood to an end, according to our culture,
Edelman argues (19). Then, to locate queerness in the child becomes an
upfront provocation threatening to subvert cultural order, unless the
child’s queerness is either exorcised (as the pastor tries to do in Oranges)
or re-diagnosed as a “gender” (disorder) condition. Handel in Art & Lies
and Silver in Lighthousekeeping are like Jeanette in Oranges: queer
children at odds with their heteronormative surroundings and refusing to
grow up as long as growing up means accepting the paradigm of the adult
world. Their refusal of growing up is in a sense a rejection of the
conditions and logics that form part of a rational, “grown up”, sane and
straight ideal. Queer theorists argue further that the heterosexual alibi of
Copyright © 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

reproduction gives heterosexuality sexual meaningfulness and this is a

notion that is eliminated in Winterson’s fictions where children are found
in rivers, born out of bottles or adopted (see Edelman, 13). The origins of
the foundlings Jeanette in Oranges, Jordan in Sexing the Cherry, Silver in
Lighthousekeeping, and Ali in The.PowerBook, is an open question,
rejecting the notion of a single story of origin, and rejecting their function
as children within the paradigm of reproductive futurism. Then again, in
contrast, there is in Winterson’s novels also a romantic investment in the
image of the child linked to notions of survival, hope and so on. Despite a
critical perspective on the valorisation of biological families, and an
offering of new family constellations, there is a strong notion of love as a
universalizing, transcendent force. The child is perhaps not fully liberated
from its role as “futurity’s emblem”, to use one of Edelman’s terms, but
evokes the possibility that that child may be queerer than expected.

Love is Chance
The idea of chance is a recurring theme in Winterson’s texts that is
intimately linked to notions of futurity and time as becoming. In The

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 Reworking Linear Time 45

Passion this theme is articulated in the recurring phrase: “You play, you
win, you play, you lose. You play.” Grosz theorizes newness, chance and
“the event” as aspects that upset the dominant power’s need to “make the
eruption of the event part of the fabric of the known” (1999b, 16) and thus
points to the inherent queerness of time. Grosz’s view on futurity is very
different from Edelman’s in that it acknowledges in futurity a potential
openness and though she, like Edelman, underlines the structuring role of
the future in the present, it appears that she sees possibilities outside the
paradigm of reproductive futurity in the “indeterminacy, the becoming, of
time itself” (Grosz 1999a, 11). Chance, or the untimeliness of the event,
are key elements in any political effort to bring “into existence futures that
dislocate themselves from the dominant tendencies and forces of the
present”, she argues (Grosz 2004, 14). This untimeliness is, in its
association with that which ruptures, creates cracks and openings, what
signifies queerness of time. In Winterson’s writings it is of course the
moment of falling in love that is the moment of difference that more than
anything else constitutes the “event” or temporal rupture. In all her texts
love is characterized by its unassimilability and potential for taking us into
a “future yet unthought”, to use Grosz’s term.
Further, by anachronistically bringing the possibilities of the past into
the present, Winterson creates such untimeliness in order to query the
constraints of the present, and the novel Art & Lies can be read as enacting
Copyright © 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

a queer untimeliness through the image of the castrato. The queerness of

Handel the castrato in Art & Lies is as complex as the novel itself. Handel
leads an anachronisticout of sync. existence in a contemporary capitalist
driven world resembling our own. As a man who has lost his status both as
a priest and as a doctor he is the most abject character in the novel, as
Christy Burns notes (1998, 376). Further, he has a connection to the
operatic castrato through his name which he shares with the historical
person George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), the composer who composed
many operas with roles written specifically with a castrato singer in
mind.13 The castrati of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
integrated into culture, holding high status positions both within the
church and within the world of the opera, yet at the same time caused
cultural anxieties through their otherness, which stemmed from a
combination of the androgynous, strange and even supernatural voice, the
abnormal body morphology, and feared sexual deviance founded in the

13
The sexuality of the historical person Handel himself has proven a problematic
issue for his biographers. In a contextualizing reading, drawing on his life, his
work and his audience, Gary Thomas (1993) constructs Handel as “homotextual".
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 46 Chapter Three

illegitimacy of non-reproductive sex.14 Thus, in many ways, the figure of

the castrato singer signifies queerness of culture and the castrato’s iconic
status our enjoyment of this figure’s aesthetic otherness. The notion of the
castrato voice as a seductive and dangerous vocality is enacted in the
relationship between Handel as a boy and his older lover, also a castrato.
Art & Lies as a contemporary queer fantastical novel not only relives a
queer history of operatic gender bending but revives the aesthetics of the
hybrid figure of the castrato, making it the voice of hope in the novel.15
The novel mirrors a complex context of meanings and ideologies behind
aesthetic and erotic codes.
The narrative of Art & Lies is in part played out in the very early
twentieth century when the decline of the castrati had reached its end and
the practice of castrating boys for the purpose of a singing career was
banned. The continuation of a castrato legacy that is manifested in the
novel by the last castrato—the Cardinal—Handel triangle makes the story
of Handel both awkwardly anachronistic and illegal. In the novel there is a
parallel between the silenced voices of Sappho the lesbian poet and the
castrato as the problem with recreating Sappho’s poems from fragments
that the novel speaks of is similar to the enigma of the castrato’s voice; as
there is no full record of it, we cannot know what it sounded like.16
Handel brings up the subject of the castrato singers as he listens to
Wagner’s opera Parsifal in his car, talking about the known recordings of
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the last castrato, 17 describing the voice as “reedy, unearthly, not beautiful,
seductive, not a male voice nor a woman’s either” and then surprisingly,

14
Due to interference with hormone production the castrati typically had some
feminine features (no Adam’s apple and no facial hair for example) but other
effects, created by the same cause, resulted more in a different looking body, albeit
not directly relating to androgynous traits, but nevertheless deemed abnormal, such
as very long arms and legs in proportion to their torso (see André 2006, 28-9).
15
The castrato roles (sometimes playing women, sometimes young men) were
subsequently taken over by female singers and the concept of the “travesti roles”,
or “trouser roles” such as Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier
(1911)— the opera that ends Winterson’s novel, was developed.
16
In 1987 there was an attempt to remaster the only recordings available of a
castrato singer, that of Alessandro Moreschi, from recordings made in 1902 and
1904 (on a wax cylinder) but the technical shortcomings of the original recording
could not be overcome. The 1994 film Farinelli tried to recreate the castrato voice
through merging a counter tenor (male) and soprano (female) on the soundtrack.
This as André points out worked well as a metaphor for the altered castrato voice
but is by no means a recreation of the actual sound (See André 2006, 18-20).
17
Though not naming Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922), the text here probably
refers to these recordings.
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 Reworking Linear Time 47

he announces: “I have heard a castrato myself, yes, with my own ears, in

Rome” (Art & Lies, 174), indicating a first hand account and an intimacy
with the castrato, which is also fantastical as it transports us back in time
to the early twentieth century if we were to refer to any official record of
the last castrato. As a consequence the reader will either assume the
timeline of the narrative to be dislocated or make the assumption that
Handel mysteriously knows of a present-day castrato. The context
becomes more comprehensible further on in the text where Handel talks
about a Cardinal he befriended as a young boy when he lived in Rome
with his parents, in a period during which his father worked for the
Vatican. It is the Cardinal who tells him about the last official castrato to
sing in the Vatican, whom he knew and loved and who sung for him. Their
relationship had begun when the Cardinal was a boy of ten and the Vatican
choir castrato “old out of reckoning” (ibid. 192), an incident which is
mirrored in the fact that Handel encounters the Cardinal also at age ten.
Handel and the cardinal enter a pact and in secrecy Handel undergoes the
surgery that will preserve his voice and only at the end of the novel when
he liberates his “queer voice” (and sings again, he sees “his past, his life,
not fragments nor fragmented now, but a long curve of movement that he
began to recognise” (ibid. 197, 206). The heteronormative form of
constancy (linearity) through inheritance linked to reproduction is here
replaced with a queer “erotohistoric” lineage (cf., Freeman, 2005).
Copyright © 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

This essay has discussed explorations of alternative conceptions of

temporalities in Winterson’s fiction, linking them to notions of
subjectivity and sexuality. Winterson’s fiction utilises a fantastical and
multilayered narrative that resists rationalistic sequencing and breaks with
a perception of history as conclusive, objective and finite. Instead
Winterson presents us with a rewriting of historiography that is hybrid,
feminist and queer in its refusal to straighten things out and that
“collaps[es] time through affective contact between marginalized people
now and then” (Dinshaw et al. 2007, 178). It favours the fragmented and
multiple over the monolithic, and an ongoing narrative of becoming over
any static knowing. However, Winterson is not just presenting us with an
alternative take on history; essentially she is asking questions about how
we produce history, and asking questions about the meaning of time and
history in our lives now. The time and space of the everyday is shown to
be performative, multidimensional and inherently queer, in a sense.
Winterson uses both a fantastical mode and the colliding of different
discourses of temporality to make the reader aware of the strangeness of
time as we know it, and to reveal its material effects and the often
unnoticed political aspects of the construction and organization of time. In

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 48 Chapter Three

their complex nature her texts endorse a notion of temporality that tries to
reach beyond regulated, linear and (re-)productive time, but has also a
romantic vision of a utopian temporality, governed by passion and desire.
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