Sexing the Cherry
by Jeanette Winterson
First Edition Bloomsbury, 1989. Grove Press Reissue, 1998.
192 pages / $14.95  Buy from Amazon

I just read a review of Sexing the Cherry online, through JSTOR. The article is written by Rosellen Brown, and is published in The Women’s Review of Books. It is called “Fertile Imagination.” Considering the content of the book, that title is funny to me. I’m honestly not sure if the review is favorable or not. She keeps praising the ‘inventive arbitrariness’ of the novel at the end of it, seemingly out of nowhere, somewhat condemns the thin veil over what she refers to as Jeanette Winterson’s ‘wish-fulfillment fantasies.’ That got me thinking about this sandwich I bought from Wawa earlier, and how when I was walking back to my house after buying it, I thought about how Jordan is very much like the titular character of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones. They are both foundlings, both of them are charismatic and somewhat sensitive; somehow my train of thought disappeared though, and my mind drifted from the process of it, like a moving vehicle. In this review I learned that Jeanette Winterson is herself a foundling, and much of her character is apparent in Jordan. Does this mean Jeanette Winterson is also like Tom Jones? By the transitive property, it would seem so. But does the transitive property define reality? I’m not sure, but if it were so, this would lead to a comparison of Tom Jones’s Squire Allworthy and Sexing’s Dog Woman, who, I feel, are not compatible characters at all. I am wondering what would happen if Allworthy and Dog Woman were in the same room. She is so used to men literally ‘pointing dicks’ at her, forcing/inciting her to violence against them. Allworthy is not that way at all, though. He is, I feel, one of the most benevolent of Fielding’s creation. Maybe he just lives in a more humanistic era than Dog Woman. The next paragraph is imminent; in it I will discuss what happened when I first read Sexing the Cherry.

I was on the third floor of a college library with Sexing the Cherry on my lap. I was tired. I wasn’t thrilled to be in the library, even though generally I like it there. I decided it would help me stay attentive if I ‘livetweeted’—that is, ‘to tweet in real time’ my process of reading it, by means of phrases that I found interesting maybe. I did this for around two hours. A list of things I found tweetable:

So, there is that. Looking at it now, it’s kind of like a poem. Some of the phrases are taken out of the contexts of the sentences they appear in, for my linguistic pleasure, and, I think, yours as well because you’re reading this. I mean, what is context really, especially considering the text of Sexing the Cherry, wherein there is no context given to the reader; through one’s own constructions/deconstructions/discursive formations/ideologies/psychoanalyses/feminist reconstructions only can meaning be derived from this book. The crux of this review, really, is being set up currently. I want to define something about this book—not make a guess as to what gender some fruit represents, or what is represented by the splitting of said fruit. Truly make a claim about what something in this novel ‘means.’ Here is my theory about Sexing the Cherry.

It is clear, from the outset, at least, if one reads the inscriptions before the text begins; those two things—the one about the Hopi tribe’s language lacking tenses for time and the other about matter being mostly empty space—that the universe is not as it seems. The one in the book, I mean. There is deliberate anachronism not only in the physical setting of the novel (I’m not usually one to judge, but Dog Woman and Jordan live in a pretty ‘temporally fucked’ part of 17^th Century England) but in the way time is presented through language and the novel’s linguistic structures. Sexing the Cherry presents a universe in which time and space are not interwoven into our coveted, Einsteinian fabric; indeed, they are separate, and ever-colliding. These collisions are marked by pictures of fruits and, in the middle of the novel, fairy-like relics. As a result of the lack of connection between time and space, perspective is fluid; not how our universe’s perspective is fluid, in that a worldview can change through a human’s own will, but that dominance of perspective is constantly shifting. The rift between special coordination and the motion of things causes all consciousness to warp together, and the dominant perspective is in omnipresent shift. That is why every time there is a fruit somewhere, the narration seems to change and, towards the end the fruits are all split—this is an indicator of the unstable temporality becoming even more and more so. That’s pretty much my theory about why Sexing the Cherry is so weird, temporally and spatially speaking. On to another topic, I guess—

Now I am reading another JSTOR article about Sexing the Cherry, called “Innovation without Tears,” this one written by a man named Gary Krist. I think it’s a man. Regardless, it begins with the usual jab at postmodernism; I find that most reviews of apparently ‘postmodern’ texts begin with a jab at postmodernism. Everybody loves to hate postmodernism, it seems—so postmodern. After that, he writes about a book by someone who I always confuse with ‘Conan O’Brien,’ even though his name is ‘Tim O’Brien.’ Nevertheless, I find it interesting because I remember some friends from high school who, being in a more advanced English class than I was, were assigned to read a book called The Things They Carried. It’s about war and I was always glad I didn’t have to read it, but reading about it right now makes me want to read it because it sounds interesting. Eventually, the article somehow ends up at Sexing the Cherry, after talking about the ‘fluidity of time’ or something. Similarly to the review I read before I started to write this, it began by praising the exciting, ‘fantastic meaninglessness’ of the novel, though arguably, in this article, making more of a case for its psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications; but after that, just like before, the flaws of it are presented—humorously, I feel, in this article, with the essayist stating his reluctance to dig at the novel due to admiration, but still does so immediately—one by one, from the seeming fusion of narration towards the end to the novel-wide abuse and unfairness towards men (the first article I read actually contained a sly joke about genital mutilation). Although, at the conclusion of the section devoted to Sexing the Cherry, a statement about its essentiality to the realm of ‘unconventional fiction’ clears up any question about whether the review is positive or not.

Does any of this make sense so far? If so, does it make more sense than Sexing the Cherry? If not, does it make more sense than Sexing the Cherry? Everyone acts as though Sexing the Cherry is such a strange book, but nobody says so about Beloved, and I actually think they are narratively very similar. Many of Toni Morrison’s novels are incredibly unconventional, but are generally praised simply as masterworks of fiction—rarely does someone tell me they read a Toni Morrison book and thought it was ‘weird’ or that it ‘didn’t make sense.’ I would normally say, I think, this happens because Toni Morrison has a clear agenda on her hands; this becomes problematic though, considering the parallels between Jordan and Winterson herself, and her obvious schema as a post-gendered woman. This is all so confusing. I think that might have just been a gender pun. I couldn’t read Sexing the Cherry without wanting to draw little fruits everywhere and write an epic poem. It even made me want to write a book of ‘unconventional fiction.’ I have done none of these things in the recent past.

***
Ben Morgan is person who writes, runs an online press thing called ‘Thought Process‘ and takes pictures of trees. Currently, he has two collections of poetry published online, as well as pieces forthcoming in SMASHEDCAT and TheNewerYork. (Follow him on twitter @ben____morgan)

Minor Angels
by Antoine Volodine
University of Nebraska Press, 2008
166 pages / $19.95  Buy from University of Nebraska Press or Amazon

When I think about different world cataclysms (cataclysmic for the human species, anyway)—natural disaster, famine, nuclear fallout, genocide, slavery—the idea usually resides in some abstract part of my brain. In any event, it’s usually nicely framed. It seems there are few reasons to feel immediately concerned by the prospect of a major disaster. I’m living in a home, and a country, and a relatively safe historical moment for people in my demographic. Even those of us who discuss the possibilities from a privileged historical and socioeconomic position usually reserve real urgency—the material kind—for a later, never-to-arrive date. That’s probably a fair position to take for the time being for people like us, even if it is cynical and myopic. But if you’re interested in writing Marxist post-apocalyptic fiction, or if you want to make people feel immediately concerned about the ahistorical reality of humanity’s failure, which usually presents itself at the bleak and neglected margins of the event horizon (which is temporal as well as spatial), then it would seem to be of the greatest importance to make that reality feel both immediate and visceral. In Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels we find ourselves thrown into a strange world composed of forty-nine short stories, which Volodine calls “narracts.” The novel takes place in the centuries-old wake of an apocalyptic event, after the rise and fall of Communism. In this world, Volodine’s characters (which feel more like ghosts, fading into and out of identity with one another and even with the author—who contains many of his own pseudonymous creations) are left to cope with the aftermath. While the event that led the world and its forty-nine survivors to their current condition is never precisely or definitively articulated in the text—something to do with nuclear fission, maybe?—it becomes clear that the mysterious narrators of Minor Angels are coping in very real, strange, and uncanny ways with the fallout of the disaster which is humanity at large. In this way Volodine makes the wages of his text boldly universal while we, the readers, are left to sift through the wreckage of the disaster.

In the twenty-second of Volodine’s narracts, the text performs a metafictional gesture that goes beyond our typical understanding of the metafictional impulse as a reflexive act. Narrated by Nayadja Aghatourane, we soon learn that the text’s relationship to the world outside its borders is much more complicated, interesting, and affective than that:

Twenty-one, and soon twenty-two strange narracts, no more than one each day, composed by Will Scheidmann in your presence, and when I say Will Scheidmann I am of course thinking of myself. (68)

So if we map it out, the narrator of this narract is telling the reader that her act of narration is in fact being narrated by Will Scheidmann, and that this is all being done in the presence of a “you.” And then we can’t forget the image of Volodine himself sitting down to write his forty-nine narracts, “no more than one each day.” The reason this metafictional impulse reads differently than something we might have seen in a story twenty or thirty years ago is that the reflexive act isn’t presented as an event to be discovered but as something taken for granted, an inexorable, omnipresent reality that is always at work in the text.

On the most basic narrative level, while living in a nursing home Will Scheidmann’s witch- and fury-like grandmothers have created Scheidmann through an act of magic in the hope that he’ll save the world from destruction. Instead of doing this Scheidmann eventually restores the fundamental dynamics of the capitalist system, to the detriment of the world at large. As punishment for his decision to reestablish the capitalist order, Scheidmann is sentenced to death by firing squad, but at the last instant, with their guns drawn, the grandmothers change their mind. Rather than executing him for his crime, Scheidmann’s grandmothers listen to Scheidmann as he recites the forty-nine narracts that make up the entire text of Minor Angels. This makes the grandmothers the subjects of the second person narration quoted above. So, when the “when I say Will Scheidmann I am of course thinking of myself” moment arrives (and moments of destabilized and disseminated identities like this—both human and non-human in nature—are profuse throughout the forty-nine narracts of Minor Angels), it isn’t just another transparent reflexive meta-textual moment at play. In a way it’s actually the opposite. It’s the text’s refusal to recognize its creator. It’s a deflection or déplacement of the narrator, the arranger, the author. The text tells us, and I paraphrase: “It isn’t me who’s writing this. It’s her. No, it’s him. No, it’s him.” The text never stops pointing fingers. The text is a refusal, a coping mechanism. And if we can agree on this point then it starts to look like the whole of Minor Angels is a kind of diary of coping mechanisms, written within a historical reality from which the bleak end is always already playing itself out.

As the twenty-second narract continues, it’s hard not to see the world described as our own. The walls are down, but it’s as though there’s no one there to see what has been left:

I would have liked someone to speak to me of the men and women I’d told of, [I would have liked them to say to me]: ‘We also belong to the dying humanity you describe, we too have come to this point, to these final moments of dispersion and nonexistence,’ or else ‘You were right to show how the joy of remaking the world has been stolen away from us forever.’ But there was no on whispering beside me, no one encouraging me to continue. I was alone, and suddenly began to regret it.’ (69)

Is this a story about the bleak end of humanity and its world, or is it about the deep solitude and loneliness of one anachronistic person, or is it about the end of literature and of the generative act of creation itself? We ask ourselves the question, and the answer has to be “Yes.”

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Public Dick Punk 83
by Richard Brammer
East German Sunshine, 2014
93 pages / $5.98 (print version) $1.28 (e-book)
buy from Amazon

1. This is Richard Brammer’s second book following on the heels of last year’s MDMA and Menthol Cigarettes which first discovered and borrowed on Alt-Lit library. This one isn’t free but it’s still pretty inexpensive (especially the e-book but I’d recommend the print version).

2. This is to be the first in a long line of Public Dick Punk… books. The next is mooted to be named Public Dick Punk 82. We are not sure about the significance of the ‘83’ or the ‘82’. These poems/writings appear to be set in the present day.

3. Number 2 may be a lie as previously Richard Brammer stated that his second book was to be called ‘Selected Serotonin’ and fabricated (presumably fabricated?) an interview with retired English ballerina Darcey Bussell about the new book. He said the new book would be a homage to Teenage Fanclub album ‘Bandwagonesque’ but there book never appeared and was never mentioned again.

4. Public Dick Punk 83 is an extremely fast read, the reader flies through it and then wishes to fly through it again afterwards. In the words of poet Michael Hofmann it is ‘a machine for re-reading’.

5. It contains many proper nouns and names and brands and theseare collected in a particularly unhelpful index at the back. I will now list a few of these things:  Michelle Williams, the Roland 303 drum machine, the NSA scandal, cupcake lesbian, Bjork, Bourne Supremacy, The Fall, Dreampop, Instagram, John Updike, Fractional Reserve Banking, Estonian Shoegaze, Google, TV, Hipster and PDF, Husker Du.

6. The index also elucidates on which pages basic conjunctions and articles such as ‘the’, ‘and’ and ‘if’ appear on. For instance: ‘if’ appears on pages 16, 29, 34, 37, 47, 55, 65, 70, 72, 84, 87, 92, and 96.

7. The poems/writings are split into five sections: ‘Log In, Remember me’, ‘Thrift with outside detractors’, ‘Food and Activities Outside’, ‘On Coloured Vinyl’ and ‘A short history of all memory’. None of these section titles appear to have much to do with the poems that they envelope but sometimes you think ‘Hey there’s a plan, here!’ so sometimes the reader thinks they do.

8. The book is very hipster friendly and is unapologetic for that, defiant even. It is dedicated to ‘the unreconstructed hipster’.

9. There is a poem about a girl named Edie whose name ‘isn’t Amy’ and who has ‘a cool cervix’.

10. The poems/writing themselves are generally written in a breathless kind of way with many idioms recognisable from social media but also from a variety of registers. You get the impression this writer hasn’t only grown up on the internet and references to early 80s style magazines such as ‘The Face’ and to a number of bands much beloved of what was, at one time, called ‘college radio’ (now known as bands that Pitchfork are likely to review)  crop up throughout. As does late-80s, early 90s British rave culture.  You never know, maybe he’s just Googled alot of this ‘vintage’ stuff.

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