fiery constellations, benjamin's materialist

Fiery Constellations: Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry" and Benjamin's MaterialistHistoriographyAuthor(s): Angela Marie SmithSource: College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 21-50Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115286 .

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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),




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




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"




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)




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




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




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. (Winterson 1989,137)

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.




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.

(Winterson 1989,102)

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




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




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

....




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




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




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. (Winterson 1989,106)

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? (Winterson 1989,102)

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




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




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.




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




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




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,




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,




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




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




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.




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




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.




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).




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