The Book of Winterson 3:17

In class last week Prof Ingham said something to the effect that without a fairly extensive knowledge of the Bible, one will be unable to fully understand the Biblical references and jokes that are made in Oranges are not the Only Fruit. But even without a background in Christianity, you hardly need any prerequisite awareness of the Bible to derive some of the book’s more important messages. Being a parochial Lutheran school kid from K-12, I nonetheless thought it might be helpful to explain some of the specific religious references made in OANTOF as well as sharing some of my own ideas about the novel as they pertain to some of the theorists we have read.

I guess a good starting point would be the structure. We talked briefly about how each chapter corresponds, loosely, with one of the first seven books of the Old Testament. The first five books of the Bible, named the Pentateuch, are generally understood to represent an implementation of Law and in Oranges the first five chapters establish the “Law” or ideology that surrounds Jeanette’s life. She is truly “hailed” by the ideology of the Old Testament, which exhibits features of unrelenting justice of the Law, and the harsh judgment that accompanies it, above redemption. Genesis communicates to us the beginning; Jeanette tells us her story and how she became a part of her family. Jeanette’s voyage from home to the perilous unknown of the “Breeding Ground.” That her home in this Biblical analogy stands in for the oppression and slavery of the Israelites in Egypt under the reign of a hard-hearted Pharaoh (her mother) is certainly an interesting comparison. Leviticus is the book of the Bible where the Laws (Ten Commandments) are handed down to the Israelites from God. It is also here that Oranges sketches out some of the laws that Jeanette has acquired from her mother. The book of Numbers is titled thus because of the “numbering” of the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt. The main focus of this chapter seems to be romance, I’m honestly not sure of the connection here but Jeanette displays an awareness and a dislike for the codes of sexuality and gender that are forced upon her in this chapter. Though her dream about walking up the marriage aisle to a husband that is blind, a pig, her mother, or just a set of empty clothes she displays her anxieties about falling in line with the expectations of marriage that accompany traditional heterosexuality. The book of Deuteronomy comparison is very interesting because it is here that the Biblical component of the metaphor is turned on its head. Biblically speaking, Deuteronomy is wholly comprised of Moses’ excruciatingly detailed list of rules and ways of living. It contains guidelines for sacrifice, eating, marriage, and almost everything else. Here, Jeanette questions law and custom and a proposal is made by Winterson for readers to examine how everything is a story (including history) constructed to accomplish some purpose. The doctrine of Christianity is put under a huge amount of duress.

After the first five books which serve to establish law in the Bible, the next three are stories of people and how they interact with this Law. In Oranges, this involves Jeanette taking what she has learned from Law and making her own story as she begins to challenge the framework of Christianity and society.

This is an unrelated note, but I thought it was really interesting that Jane Eyre is the favorite book of Jeanette’s mother and how she changes the ending from Jane marrying Rochester to the marriage of St. John Rivers. Rochester is a much more passionate, sexually charged character, whereas Rivers is a very conservative and religious. I think here that her mother reworks the ending to reflect her own marriage to the safe, sexless (passion-less), although not particularly religious, husband. She chose security over unrepressed desire; Jeanette makes the opposite choice, giving in to her own desires. We are confronted with deciding who made the better choice, although the book clearly advocates one over the other.

Experimenting with Saussure and Butler

So for my final paper I thought it was suitable to employ two of the theories that, at first glance seemed to talk about very different things, appeared to complement each other towards my analysis (to me anyway). I suppose that it would be useful to use this blog as somewhat of an experimental space to try work through how I can combine these into a “super-theory.” Here goes.

It seems like eons ago that we talked about Saussure and his definition of the sign as composed of a signifier and its corresponding signified that link together to create meaning. Any disconnect between these two components in communication between people results in utter confusion, or at least misunderstanding. An example that comes readily to mind of a bar between signified and signifier that caused me a bit of confusion occurred a few weeks ago when I was trying to install my cable box. I was having problems doing the “auto-connect” thing, so I decided to call in to Comcast for assistance. After what seemed like an hour waiting on the phone, I was connected with a nice lady who had a pretty thick accent. I was told to read of some sort of code on my cable box (which was covered with various numbers and letters) and all attempts to set up my box were unsuccessful. I gave up because I had to go to class. Sorry for rambling, but bear with me. After repeating this process several times with the same result I finally realized I was reading the wrong code. When the person receiving my call said to read out the WXR3000 code or whatever, I didn’t know what that was, because it was unlabeled. My inability to link the correct code (signified) with her signifier resulted in consequences for me, namely debilitating frustration.

This got me thinking to something Judith Butler said in her article on gender theory: “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” This seems to fit into my lengthy example with Comcast. If you don’t perform the actions (signifiers, I believe) that that maintain your gender (what is signified), you are punished with alienation. Butler also says, in accordance with Saussure, that the relationship between our gender and how we perform it is completely arbitrary. We don’t act in accordance with our gender because it is biologically intrinsic to our being, we do it because we are trained since birth that our actions, behaviors, mode of dress, etc. are ways to demonstrate/ signify our gender.

Sorting Through Irigaray

Although I found this essay relatively difficult to decode, like many of the other texts we have read that have been translated into English, based on what I was able to glean from “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” was entirely unexpected. Here, Luce Irigaray makes an argument for what she believes to be the most effective way for women to advance the feminist cause and to, at the very least, allow for common discourse concerning gender. It is not, as many feminists today would likely propose, by waging a confrontational war against the system of hegemonic masculinity currently in place, but rather by employing a much more subtle campaign to “reveal,” or shed light upon, the current state of gender inequality. According to Irigaray, this can be done by mimetically “assuming the feminine role deliberately” in order “to thwart” subordination. She doesn’t advocate fighting back, as much as she proposes outward submission and identification with the roles imposed on women since birth.  It seems that Irigaray is saying that through identifying with the presuppositions imposed on them, women are trying to compensate for the lack of a penis. I really just don’t see the connection here, but continuing on her logic, by recognizing that truly compensating for this lack is impossible, a woman can use this “lack” to create an opportunistic space for existence. So instead of desperately trying to “speak as a masculine subject,” which is essentially a losing battle that only serves to weaken her position, a woman should work within the limits of the phallocracy to affirm themselves.

I’m not too sure if that was exactly what Irigaray was trying to say, but if it was then I think her argument is almost like the women’s version of some of Henry Louis Gates’ ideas on challenging hegemonic authority. They both seem to call for an elusive, indirect resistance that transforms or twists whatever limitations have been imposed on the subjects into strengths. They “play the game” in a way that smartly uses the “letter of the law” to their advantage against their oppressors.

Anyway I’d be great if someone could clarify any misunderstandings that I may have had in this post because, as I mentioned, I found this reading bearable and somewhat able to be deciphered only because of its length.

Psychoanalysis and Cinema

We discussed both Laura Mulvey and Vertigo in depth merely a few weeks ago in my Gender and Sexuality class and I thought it might be helpful to share a few key points as they relate to this class, especially as they pertain to the cinema and tying all of that back to Lacan. As Mulvey states, “The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasure looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect.” In her use of cinema she isn’t talking about films in general but about the actual showing of a film in a movie theater. This is because the physical setting of a movie theater allows us to slip out of reality (to lose our unified sense of self, our ego) into a dream-like mental state of infantile fantasy. It does this by essentially recreating a dream state or, to a lesser extent, the mother’s womb. It is dark, we are seated in a state of immobility, we can’t see the machinery producing the images on screen, etc. Some theorists claim that our desire to return to this earlier stage of physical development, before the ego was formed, is why “a night out at the movies” is so immensely satisfying for us (so much so that we are willing to shell out 15$ in many cases.) The cinema is able to reproduce or closely approximate the structure and logic of our unconscious because of this voyeurism that it elicits in us, we feel as if we are producing and controlling the images on screen, similar to dreaming. This causes us to disavow what we know to be true (ie the events on screen aren’t actually happening) in favor of belief. This explains why some people cry during a particularly emotional scene or jump out of their seats during a scary movie. Yet we are never able to fully immerse ourselves in this fantasy presented to us which parallels closely Lacan’s assertion of the inability to access our unconscious desires.

Through the male gaze at women as objects, we lose the concept of ourselves as we attach our identity and point of view with the (in most cases) male protagonist. It could be possible that our identification with this character occurs in a process somewhat mimicking the mirror stage. I don’t think this necessarily applies to Vertigo, but in many cases (at least for men) I think we see the strong male protagonist as a better, more perfect version of ourselves. In class when we watched some of the scenes in Vertigo, not only did we view a ton of close-ups, which emphasize the gaze of the male and to some extent the emotions that we should be feeling, but also many point-of-view shots in which we “became” Scotty; we saw what Scotty saw. This serves to strengthen our already significant identification with the man.

Power in Pleasure

As much as I tend to disagree with Sigmund Freud’s theories on the “ego” and our infantile development of self (particularly the Oedipus complex), especially as they relate to pleasure, I think Freud makes several good points that can be useful in our interpretations of pleasure.

I noticed an immediate similarity to Barthes definitions of pleasure as repetitive actions that bring us feelings of comfort in the initial discussion of a child throwing his toys about the room. In this instance, Freud notes that the “game” that the young child engages in entails repeated actions where the result is easily predictable and gaining a sense of satisfaction from this activity. For Barthes ideas of pleasure, I think this closely corresponds to text with a foreseeable, straightforward plotline that does not shock us in any way. We derive pleasure from familiarity and from the safe structure that provides a reliable cause and effect rule with no variability, possibly an extension of creating a world that we can comprehend and influence to some degree.

This leads me to another notion of pleasure that a gleaned after a few moments of reflection on the text. A large reason that the child gained pleasure from his game is that he, through his actions exerted a great degree of power in creating a desired result, likely more power than he would have over any other circumstance in his life at this infantile stage. He had control. Is having some sort of control, or the illusion of control, an important component of what gives us pleasure? As I reflect on the things that give me pleasure, the answer to this question appears to be a reluctant yes. While I do believe that it can be the primary factor of pleasure in many cases, in others it appears to have a much-reduced role.

However the last few pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle held much less *meaning* for me. I was rather confused by many of the ideas put forth and among those that I did manage to understand, I often disagreed with them.

Connotation of Distinction

In his social critique on taste, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu seems to assert that our tastes are cultivated facets of our lives that manifest themselves in order to confirm ourselves as part of a group that ascribes to a certain thing and the connotation of that certain thing, or to exclude those as a group of those who do not share our “taste” for that thing. This indirectly contradicts my original notions of taste as a fairly random and individualized aspect of our lives that we have little power to change. Obviously I assumed economic factors largely played into our tastes, (for example it seems highly unlikely that someone with little financial means would have an overwhelming preference for decadent truffles) but I felt as though taste exhibited a wide variation even among those who are of similar economic and even class stature. Bourdieu also touches on this when he elaborates on working class taste as a function of utility and necessity rather than the leisure and aesthetic afforded the rich. The interesting facet of Bourdieu’s claim is that this somewhat structural division of taste transcends economic capital and leaks into nearly every other “metric” or arena of our lives.