Salon | Jeanette Winterson

Rogue Element

T H E S A L O N I N T E R V I E W
JEANETTE WINTERSON, ENGLAND'S LITERARY OUTLAW,
TALKS ABOUT THE EROTICS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS AND
THE HORRORS OF THE BRITISH PRESS.

BY LAURA MILLER | British novelist Jeanette Winterson -- "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," "The Passion" -- has a reputation as a holy terror, a lesbian desperado and a literary genius. In person, she's petite and gracious, a brilliant, articulate pixie who holds her famous charm in careful reserve. Can this be the same woman who 1) while acting as the judge of a literary award, nominated her own novel as the best of the year; 2) conducted a torrid affair with her agent, the wife of novelist Julian Barnes; 3) menaced a former friend who said something uncomplimentary about her to the press; 4) claimed to have, in her youth, sexually serviced bored London matrons in exchange for Le Creuset cookware, then later gleefully taunted the media for swallowing such a baldfaced lie? Winterson maintains that her public image is outlandish, a "doppelgänger" or "other self" over which she has little control.
The version of Jeanette Winterson who met with Salon during the recent book tour for her new novel, "Gut Symmetries," turned out to be quieter, but no less intense. "Gut Symmetries," like most of Winterson's work, involves an adulterous, bisexual triangle, but this time her heroine, Alice, is sleeping with both husband, Jove, and wife, Stella. Alice is a physicist, and the principles of quantum physics provide Winterson with a vibrant metaphor for the instability of identity once a "rogue element" like love enters the picture. As the symbolically fraught names of the characters suggest, there's more at stake here than just a marriage, and "Gut Symmetries" seethes with philosophy, fairy tales, mysticism and glittering prose, alongside a fairly brutal appraisal of human selfishness. "Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?" Winterson asks early in the book, in a characteristic mingling of the cosmic and the carnal.
Romantic triangles, particularly from the point of view of a woman having an affair with a married woman, seem to attract you as a theme. What makes you want to write books about this?
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy, when it stops being predictable, when there is a chance element which unsettles all the rules, which forces people back onto their own resources, and away from their habits. You see it often with animal behavior: They're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy. Then you see which ones eat the others, and which ones emerge stronger and better, and which ones just give up and die. Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
So, is Alice the rogue element in Jove and Stella's relationship, or are Jove and Stella that element in Alice's fairly calm life?
Well, I think it would be a mistake to think of Alice as a victim. Or as someone who is afraid. She's the youngest person in the book, only 24. Jove and Stella have been about a bit and seen the world. They know the score, but within their cynicism, there is also a huge naiveté. They just don't believe that anything can knock them off their perch. There's a kind of smugness to them, which Alice completely detonates because she is the dangerous other who is out of control, because she is seeking and yearning. She is full of passion, and she will take huge risks emotionally. And that is a shock to both of them. In the end, Stella is changed. Jove sees himself as back within the world of safety where he's comfortable. He doesn't grow, he doesn't go forward, and that is always a choice when you have to decide whether you are going to cross over into a different place. There are no happy endings here.
Is that a principle of yours?
I don't believe in happy endings. All of my books end on an ambiguous note because nothing ever is that neatly tied up, there is always another beginning, there is always the blank page after the one that has writing on it. And that is the page I want to leave to the reader.
Alice says, "The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued." Is that Alice's condition or also Jove's and Stella's? Are they waiting to be rescued?
Yes. And I think Alice is the one who really understands that. Jove would always describe himself as a rescuer. In the end, he's rescued by the very element which he has despised: mystery, strangeness, a miracle that takes place at sea, not the rational world of common sense. What happens is entirely unpredictable, which is why he hates it. He likes to be the one that manipulates things. That's why his nickname is Jove.
Alice is very open, partly because she is young. She simply throws herself into this situation because she doesn't really have any emotional sophistication or experience. She's still raw. She has got that openness to her which young people often have, which is very charming. And it is also very risky because you long for them not to be hurt, but you know that they will be hurt, and you know that it's inevitable, that hearts are made to be broken. That's their function.
Even when Stella is raging over her discovery of Jove's affair with Alice, you get the sense that she's done this before.
Yes, and partly because she has seen it before, even though she was hoping she wouldn't see it again. I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. The trappings of life come to them, and they can function in the world, they have adapted. They have respect from other people, security. And none of that is any insurance at all against the big emotions when they arrive. I worry very much that we are inclined to fall in habits, to set shells of protection around ourselves to stop real emotions getting through. Young people don't do that. It's necessary to keep that openness throughout life. People turn out to be so rigid that they actually snap when a trauma arrives. I mean many people in mid-life ... It's a joke, isn't it, the mid-life crisis? And it's because they have spent 20 years pushing away all the big emotions, all the real feelings. Then, suddenly, those things just come back at you with all the force accumulated over those years.

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