Theology & Sexuality

Volume 13(2): 195-210 Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi http://TSE.sagepub.coni DOI: 10.1177/1355835806074435

In Between Sex and the Sacred: The Articulation of an Erotic Theology in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion* Brutus Green
B.Z.Green@exeter.ac.uk

Abstrnct This paper explores Jeanette Winterson's manipulation of biblical stories, tropes and language in The Passion. Winterson herself has commented upon the considerable influence that Scripture has upon her imagination and this novel bears up her claim in the profusion of allusions it makes to Christian texts and practices. While there has been a considerable amount of criticism written upon her use of intertextuality involving Scripture, this paper seeks to confront the issue from a theological standpoint and ascertain the theological implications of her writing. In viewing Winterson as a theologian, the possibility is raised of disseminating a more unorthodox, creative approach to hermeneutics, which encourages both a recognition of the paternalistic, heterosexual and patriarchal rhetoric within Scripture and traditional interpretation, and the supplanting of it with a polyphony of voices, which reach beyond the boundaries of the original texts. The conclusion of this paper is that, by inverting traditional categories of the sacred and the profane, Winterson articulates a challenge to contemporary theology in its practice of reading, and also advances a new theological hermeneutic, which reclaims an affirming spirituality of the body and desire. Keyiaords: storytelling, intertextuality, feminist interpretation, eroticism. Scripture, Jeanette Winterson

* A modified version of this paper was presented at the 'Reading Spiritualities' conference at Lancaster in 2006.

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Introduction
I grew up not knowing that language was for everyday purposes. I grew up with the Word and the Word was God. Now, many years after a secular Reformation, I still think of language as something holy.

This avowal of Jeanette Winterson's logocentric past and subsequent differentiation from it is affirmed throughout her autobiographical comments, which emphasize the exalted place of the Bible in her childhood among Pentecostal Evangelicals.^ Equally, her first novel. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, recounts the testimony of a conflict between its protagonist and her biblically based religious community on the grounds of her sexuality (there is no mention of Jeanette having any more doctrinal contentions). The structuring of the novel around the books of the Hebrew Bible and the influence of the book of Ruth on the overall structure,^ however, demonstrate a decidedly ambivalent approach to Scripture and suggest, principally, some sort of engagement with its narratives rather than an outright rejection of them.^ This has been witnessed by critics in the past who generally prefer the term 'pastiche' to 'parody', as a description of her use of the Bible.* What then of Tlie Passion, ostensibly a novel about the nature of romantic and sexual attachment? Certainly this text provides much less in terms of religious subject matter with very little obvious, systematic appropriation of biblical narratives, and yet it achieves an almost continual puncturing of the Christian imagination through carefully disseminated
1. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 153-56. See also Vintage Living Texts interview, 14 September 2002: http://www.jeanettewinterson. com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=210 (visited 7 October 2006). 2. See Laurel BoUinger's article 'Models of Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit', Tulsn Studies in Women's Literature 13 (1994), pp. 363-80; and Tess Cosslett's essay 'Intertextuality in Oranges Are Not tlie Only Fruit: The Bible, Malory and Jane Eyre', in Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds.), 'I'm Teliing You Stories: Jeanette Winterson and tlie Politics of Reading' (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 15-28. 3. Her second novel. Boating for Beginners (London: Vintage, 1999), likewise reflects explicitly scriptural content in its retelling of the story of the Flood. While her subsequent novels are less direct in their approach to the sacred, religious themes, language and stories lie as a substratum beneath all her writing. This paper does not possess the scope to fully substantiate this claim and will be limited to a demonstration of some of the ways in which she achieves this in her third novel, Tlie Passion (London: Vintage, 2001), first published in 1987 (Cape). 4. For example, BoUinger, 'Models of Female Loyalty', pp. 376-77; and Cosslett, 'Intertextuality in Oranges', p. 26.

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expressions and echoes of the forms and narratives of Scripture. This paper will pursue the effect of this infringement upon the ground of theology by the novel and examine how the supple manipulation of scriptural imagination, induced in the relationship that the storyteller develops with her audience, offers a provocation to a discipline jealously guarded by dogma and doctrine. A second concern, however, held as a counter-point in this investigation, resides in the ambiguity that the quotation above summons in Winterson's paradoxical rejection and smuggling-in of logocentrism. While criticism on Winterson's novels to date has mostly concerned itself with her relationship to feminism, queer studies and postmodernism, this paper is directed at the theological implications of her melange of myth, fairytale and Scripture. To this end, I shall open with a brief examination of her portrayal of Christian structures and her appropriation of Christian rhetoric, before focusing upon the effect of her interweaving of sacred and profane narratives, with the hope of uncovering both the agenda and consequences of her disturbance of the theological imagination.
Sexing the Sacred

To begin with, let us examine the manner with which Winterson treats religious subjects in The Passion, focusing particularly upon the Christian ecclesia and Scripture itself. In the character of Patrick we are presented with perhaps the most concrete representation of this since he is a priest, albeit defrocked, and so a giver of sermons (he is certainly a teller of stories), a speaker of the Word. Patrick has been defrocked ostensibly because of his sexual appetite and has elected to join Napoleon's army as a lookout. Winterson, however, reverses Christianity's traditional prejudice and it is the bishop's disgust at heterosexual desire, rather than any notion of chastity, that is the cause for his removal suggesting a latent hypocrisy within the Church and its teaching. Scott Wilson argues that his subsequent swift entry into Napoleon's army may also suggest a complicity between the Church and military force,^ and this is supported by Winterson's own declaration, in an interview with Helen Barr, that 'the Church is offered up as a sacrament of love when really it is an exercise in power'.^ A parallel scepticism is applied to Scripture through Patrick's confession of falling for a goblin trick. This story parodies the fundamental
5. S. Wilson, 'Passion at the End of History', in Grice and Woods (eds.), 'I'm

Telling You Stories', pp. 61-74 (66). 6. H. Barr, 'Face to Face: A Conversation Between Jeanette Winterson and Helen Barr', Tbe English Revieiu 2 (1991), pp. 30-33.

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scene of revelation when God's name and the plan of liberation is given to Moses. Like Moses, Patrick has to take off his boots as he approaches the 'ring of fire', which, we are told, was definitely a 'magic place'.'' Patrick's search for buried treasure, however, is fruitless and he is left with a painful walk home. In aligning these two stories, with their shared vocabulary of fire, holy ground and footwear, Winterson parodies one of the most fundamental myths of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, likening it to a tall-tale of a roguish faerie-trick. Moreover, since the story concludes with the flourish, 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me', the reader is led both to an ambivalence over the orthodoxy and history of the scriptural narrative, while trusting the satirical value of Patrick's story, in its suggestion of a robust scepticism towards faith, through its equation of belief in God with that in mischievous goblins. In a similar vein Patrick expounds upon the Blessed Virgin's prejudice against men. He explains this to be the result of God's improper violation of her, which immediately problematizes her status as virgin (through the suggestion of a more carnal perspective on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary) and implies a directly erotic and indeed rapacious god. The revelation of the cover-up of this scandal, in which all men are implicated through their failure to acknowledge it, destabilizes both the Church's aggrandisement of virginity, and also the stereotyping of female identity into a virgin/whore dichotomy. The latter part of this dichotomy receives an equal destabilizing treatment when the vivandires of Napoleon's army are likened to and even surpass Christ in their suffering;^ Winterson here is punning on Christ's suffering under the 39 lashes and the numerically concomitant abuse of a vivandire through a more euphemistic passion. The collapsing of this dichotomy between the Virgin and the whores under the unifying category of male abuse exposes the suppression and exploitation that have characterized male attitudes towards female sexuality, which have led to an abstracted elevation of the Virgin and the negation and violation of those whom men name 'vivandires'. This double treatmentof political suspicion and of a recognition and restoration of eroticism is prevalent throughout Winterson's account of Church and Scripture. At once she both presents a satirical exegesis of the hypocrisy and oppression of the Christian tradition (particularly its denial of sexual desire^) and yet celebrates the residual humanity and passion of religious forms of life. Churches, therefore, are not principally the scene of divine communion, of 'a lukewarm appeal to an exacting 7. 8. 9. The Passion, p. 39 (parodying the 'holy ground' of Exod. 3.5). The Passion, p. 38. The Passion, p . 154.

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',^" but a locus of human involvement, in which people are brought near to one another in love and passion. When Henri thinks back to his village he thinks of the church made of the people themselves, in which the sacrament is 'Their flesh and blood'.^^ The symbols of the love of Christ, dulled by the authoritarian and hierarchical power of the Church, are replaced by those of the impassioned congregation, signalled in the replacement of the Eucharistie 'body' by the carnal 'flesh', so often denigrated by the Church, suggesting an erotic reading of the sacrament. On the other hand this is no simple dismissal of Christian language, stories and practices; rather, Winterson is operating a deliberate programme of subversion in which she creates theological per-versions that scandalize those divine figures whom the Church censures of the erotic. Such a technique undermines the malpractice and apathy that she observes in religious practice and paves the way towards the elevation of sexually impassioned activity against the Church's suspect approbation of purity and chastity. This brings to the fore the central concern with which this paper is occupied: the nature and effect of Winterson's 'holy language'. Her application of theological discourse automatically raises the question of her relationship to the metaphysics which underpin it and, while it would be all too easy to brush this to one side as a simple ironic construction, Winterson's writing unambiguously makes realist contentions, which reflect her logocentric past and suggest a lingering remnant of her eroded metaphysical foundations.^^ It is with this thought in mind that I shall now turn to a consideration of her theologically informed doxology of desire.^^

10. The Passion, p. 43. 11. The Passion, p. 42. 12. This is particularly evident in Art Objects. She writes, for example, that 'When Czanne paints a tree or an apple, he does not paint a copy of a tree or an apple, he paints its nature' (pp. 150-51). Similarly in Weight (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), she writes: 'The Myth series is a marvellous way of telling stories re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature' (p. xvi). 13. It is worth noting at this point that this essay will only seek to discuss eroticism and its relation to theological language in a general form, Laura Doan, in agreement with most critics, describes Winterson's fiction as a 'site to interrogate, trouble, subvert, and tamper with gender, identity, and sexuality' (Laura Doan, 'Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern', in Laura Doan [ed.]. The Lesbian Postmodern [New York: Columbia University Press], pp. 139-55 [154]). These issues receive a particularly excellent analysis in the above essay as well as in Christy L. Burns', 'Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson's Recovery of the Postmodern Word', Contemporary Literature 37.2 (1996), pp. 278-306, and are raised in most Winterson criticism.

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Hallowing Desire

Tbe obverse side to Winterson's sexualizing of Christian practices, narratives and figures is tbe effect of ber incarnation of tbe sacred witbin erotic narratives; how tbe inclusion of tbeological elements performs rbetorically within romantic stories. To begin with, it is noticeable tbat tbe very form of Tlie Passion calls to mind sacred writing; botb tbe empbasis upon the act of storytelling and tbe multiple layering of narratives immediately position tbe novel as a series of interlocking parables endeavouring to expound tbe nature of passion.^* Tbe stories are narrated as tbougb spoken and tbeir creative bonesty is bigbligbted tbrougb tbe repetition of 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me'.^^ Juditb Seaboyer initially relates tbis seeming contradiction to irony. Her second suggestion, tbat we are to trust not tbe tale but tbe 'creative force of narrative', is surely closer to tbe mark,^^ but in tbe context of a parable it sbould be immediately clear tbat tbere is no contradiction at all. Tbe fictional form of a parable provides a vehicle for trutba truth wbicb relies on tbe relationsbip between tbe teller and listener. Parables ask tbeir readers to trust tbe tale but understand it as figurative and loaded witb etbical value. In all tbe stories tbat comprise The Passion, we are not being asked to believe in tbeir bonesty as a bistorical possibility but ratber to allow tbe creative potential of tbe story, tbrougb its layering of narrative, allegory and metapbor, to affect us; tbat, as in Christ's parables, an expression of truth (and, as is tbe case witb all parables, a trutb wbicb goes beyond propositional fact to reveal sometbing fundamental about who we are) migbt be made tbrougb a story; tbrougb tbe performance of tbe narrative upon its reader. Winterson's tbeological espionage is also evident in ber ricbly allusive word-dropping. Scott Wilson notes tbat Winterson is 'fond of quoting tbe Bible, and Revelations is a favourite text',^^ but sbe does not simply

14. While the twin narratives of Henri and Villanelle provide the central parables of passion in their journeys through the changing climate of desire, the homily on passion is also represented in exiguity through the parables they tell within their narrative. A good example is Henri's parable of the inventor (Tlie Passion, pp. 27-28), which is a direct retelling of the parable of the prodigal son. 15. The Pnssion, pp. 13,69,160. Coslett calls this style of writing the 'prophetic "I"' ('Intertextuality in Oranges', p. 19). 16. J. Seaboyer, 'Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to Repeat in Jeanette Winterson's Tlie Passion', Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997), pp. 483-509 (495). 17. Wilson, 'Passion at the End of History', p. 70.

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quote; sbe appropriates.^^ One of the key images she adopts for ber figuration of passion is temperature, celebrating passion at each extremity. Even in its destructive capacities, passion is fundamentally 'life enbancing',1^ and set against the 'lukewarm' ennui that the text suggests pervades contemporary culture:^"
We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us.^^

The repeated, pejorative empbasis of 'lukewarm',^^ undoubtedly plays upon tbe ambivalence of the churcb of tbe Laodiceans, in the Apocalypse of Jobn, in wbicb he is given tbe message that because tbey are 'lukewarm, and neitber cold nor hot' tbey are to be rejected (Rev. 3.15-16). In adopting tbis language Winterson begins her association of passion witb religious fervour, which effectively exalts the former and forcefully critiques tbe passivity and inability of individuals in contemporary society to make impassioned responses by linking tbem to eternal damnation.^^ Henri, tberefore, is attracted to figures wbo burn with passion and turns from tbe tepid heat of priests and churches to tbe 'fireworks' of the Napoleonic campaigns.^"* Wbile The Passion borrows theological language in this mirroring of desire with religious devotion through tbe language of extremes of temperature, it carries a far more explicit debt in its bestowal of divine and Cbrist-like affectations upon the central objects of passion (Napoleon for Henri and tbe Queen of Spades for 18. In the manner that Eliot advocated through his remark in an essay on Massinger that 'immature poets imitate; mature poets steal' and, indeed, improve
upon or change the texts which they appropriate (T.S. Eliot, Tlie Sacred Wood [London: Methuen, 1960], p. 125). Winterson, likewise, asserts 'Borrow and be damned' {Art Objects, p. 182). 19. Pauline Palmer, 'The Passion: Storytelling, Fantasy, Desire', in Grice and Woods (eds.), 'I'm Teiiing You Stories', pp. 103-16 (107). 20. In the preface to the 1996 edition, she writes that Tlie Passion is a looking-glass that might reveal the superficiality of yuppy-Thatcherite culture, which is presumably associated with the lukewarm culture the text addresses. 21. Tlie Passion, p. 7. 22. Tiie Passion, pp. 7,12, 43,108,154. 23. Within Winterson's writing there is also a clear association of passion with art. She describes art as enlivening and exciting the spirit and uses parallel language to that used here: 'There is in art, still, something of the medieval mystic and something of the debauch. Art is excess. The fiery furnace, the freezing lake. It summons extremes of feeling, those who denounce it and its makers, do so violently. Those who fall in love, with that picture, that book, do so passionately' {Art Objects, p. 94). 24. Vie Passion, pp. 9-13.

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Villanelle). Winterson inverts the Christian narrative, however, in that it is the passionate attachment of the French and Henri, which is exalted, rather than that of Napoleon, and which leads to their sacrifice, two thousand dying at noon, rather than his. The passion of Napoleon, then, is the love, the service and the sacrifice that is rendered to him, rather than by him.^^ It is the object of passion, therefore, that is divinized, in a manner that both sanctifies the passion of the individual, in their adoration of the object, and in the Feuerbachian sense materializes god as the expression of humanity's desires. The sense of a construction of Gattungszvesen is appropriate here for, while the individual's desires are outpoured into an adulation of a concrete other, that other here is essentially constructed in this creative outpouring; there is a sense in which the beloved is the effect of the lover's imagination; as Henri notes: 'I invented Napoleon as much as he invented himself.^^ The manner of this service of the lover to the beloved is also depicted in scriptural imagery. Villanelle's calling by the Queen of Spades is likened to the disciples' calling by Christ.^^ Henri, on the other hand, is told by the priest that he will be called in the prophetic manner as a servant of God and it is in conjunction with his musing on the possibility of his being a prophet and his love of Napoleon that his vocation is eventually manifested. The act that catches Napoleon's attention is, in fact, itself a miracle: in the removal of the chef from the kitchen we are told, 'It was Lazarus being raised from the dead'.^^ In this sense, Henri also bears references which link him to the narrative of Christ. He is after all, and in common with Villanelle, the child of a strong, influential mother and a father who receives little mention. In his early childhood memories he remembers smelling like a manger and his mother, who is reminiscent of the Virgin in wishing to devote her life to God,^^ prepares and passes on the passion that motivates Henri. Villanelle is also likened to Christ as exemplified in her parentage and miraculous birth (webbed feet), and in her ability to walk on water. She remarks of Christ, something that is clearly paralleled in the lives of both the protagonists: 'The Holy child has been born. His mother is elevated. His father forgotten'.^o 25. A similar comment is made on behalf of the Czar, 'the Little Father' whom the Russians worship 'as they worshipped God' (T7ie Passion, p. 81). 26. The Passion, p. 158. Similarly, in Written on the Body (New York: Random House, 1992), the narrator questions whether s/he has invented her/his lover, Louise (p. 189). 27. TIte Passion, p. 64. 28. The Passion, p. 18. 29. The Passion, pp. 10-11,18. 30. Tlie Passion, p. 73.

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It is not so much the case, then, that Winterson is employing a straightforward typology in paralleling a character with Christbut that she deploys Christ's life and death as a symbol of passion per se. She explicitly places passion at the extremes of temperature, 'between love and despair' and 'between fear and sex',''^ but in each case incorporating both.32 This relates to the Passion of Christ through the mediation of the cross which stands between the divine and the human; between love, of God and humanity, and suffering and death; between the desire to perform the will of the Father and despair at being forsaken by God. 'Passion' itself is a twelfth-century word referring to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross, although it is perhaps often misconstrued now and thought to relate to God's love for the world. In fact, it was not until the following century that it became associated with emotional content and not until the sixteenth that it first became associated with sexual love. It is, however, the latter meaning that now predominates and so the Passion is a perfect figure for Winterson to adopt in illustrating the twin temperatures of passion, of 'extatic' (sic) love and self-destruction. In wedding the narrative of Christ's Passion to erotic narratives, Winterson secularizes the holy narratives with a newly found eroticism but, moreover, also hallows sexual love, intoning a homily of desire.^' Bollinger notes that in Oranges the character Jeanette, 'Like the Church Fathers with the Song of Songs ... prefers the sexual to be safely concealed within the spiritual',^'* but in Tlte Passion we can see the exact opposite as the spiritual is safely concealed within the sexual. As in many parables this construction bears an essential ambiguity governed in this case by the uncertain dialectic of the profane and the sacred. Parables, as was stated at the outset of this section, are fundamentally concerned with mediating an experience or knowledge which transcends

31. The Passion, p. 76. 32. There is an echo here of Plato's Tlie Symposium, where Diotima relates to Socrates the story of the conception of eras by Poverty and Plenty which leaves Love as a mediator between immortality and mortality and between knowledge and ignorance, as the motivation for seeking the Good (Plato, Symposium 203b-204d). It is also notable that the cross is a figure of Jacob's ladder 0n 1.51), which Winterson explicitly links to passion: 'In our dreams we sometimes struggle from the oceans of desire up Jacob's ladder to that orderly place' {The Passion, p. 74). 33. While The Passion directs theological subversion to the transcendence of desire, similar trends can be found with respect to other subjects throughout her work. Love and imagination, for example, receive similar treatment in Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1990), and Art Objects deploys the same methodology in its description of art: 'Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield' (p. 20). 34. Bollinger, 'Models for Female Loyalty', p. 369.

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the text itself, and yet this form of a pastiche undercuts and deconstructs the original narratives it preys upon. While Winterson has shifted the character of truth, however, and destabilized the narratives she engages with, she nevertheless remains wedded to a realist account that purports to genuinely disclose reality and elevate its readers. It is this reversion to categories of truth and reality that constitutes her Romantic realism and consecrates her portrayal of desire.
Theological Heartbreak

In the above two sections I have attempted to demonstrate the dualrevision Winterson enacts in her eroticization of sacred stories and her application of holy tropes to romantic narratives. This dialectical synthesis of the sacred and the erotic is no more keenly felt within the text than in the description of the suffering of the lover. The key narratives apparent within the text in the characterization of this experience are those of the Passion narrative itself, Eliot's Four Quartets and Medea.''^ The daring of this move is governed by the manner in which she has selected sources which represent the extremes of virtue, sanctimony and purity (as well as masculinity) and also a narrative traditionally seen as demonic, which engages with social taboos and black magic, and exemplifies the monstrous female. The resolution of this dialectic, however, offers a significant and subtle revision of the former and a recovery of the latter, and encapsulates the essence of Winterson's erotic theology. The central image of the 'zero winter', which provides the intersection of Henri's and Villanelle's narratives in their parallel suffering, plays upon Eliot's 'unimaginable/Zero summer' of 'Little Gidding'.^^ Notably, both are winter scenes, both focus on images of extreme temperature,^''

35. The Passion is full of references to Eliot and particularly to Four Quartets; for example, 'All time is eternally present and so all time is ours' (p. 62), echoing the beginning of 'Burnt Norton', or 'Then human voices wake us and we drown', unashamedly stealing from the end of 'Prufrock' (p. 74). Winterson has of course stated her admiration for Eliot, and particularly Four Quartets, elsewhere (Art Objects, p. 129). A further text that Winterson calls upon is Pushkin's 'Queen of Spades', in which the final card which brings about the ruin of the young man, Hermann, is the Queen of Spades, representing the Countess who possesses the secret to gambling (The Queen of Spades and Other Stories [London: Penguin Books, 1962], pp. 153-83). 36. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 201. 37. 'Little Gidding' begins with images of 'frost and fire' and flaming ice and abounds with images of fire such as flaming doves, pyres and the Nessus shirt, ending in the 'crowned knot of fire' (Eliot, Collected Poems, pp. 201, 207-208).

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both are set in times of war and both draw upon apocalyptic imagery.^^ Winterson's 'zero winter' stands as the obverse side to the heat of passion as a period of desolation marked by the absence of the beloved and their rejection of the lover. This follows the pattern of Four Quartets in Eliot's progression from the revelation in the rose garden at Burnt Norton to the Dark Night of spiritual mortification emphatically pronounced in 'East Coker'. Winterson desecrates the metaphor in applying it to inter-personal passion, but retains the language so as to extol passionate attachment, even in its destructive qualities, likening it to the laudable path of spiritual purgation. Henri, who is held most enthralled by passion, ends the novel in an asylum in solitary confinement. The image, however, retains an ambiguity, rendered by its echo of the periods of confinement and solitary habits of St John of the Cross (from whom Eliot quotes wholesale in Four Quartets), and of the monastic life in general (the asylum on the Venetian island of San Servlo was originally a Benedictine monastery), as well as by his seemingly insane attempt to grow a 'forest of red roses' on a rock at sea.'^ This not only calls to mind the rose-garden that symbolizes Eliot's spiritual and romantic awakening at the opening of 'Burnt Norton', but, moreover, the single rose with which Eliot completes 'Little Gidding' (which itself echoes the close of Dante's Paradiso), symbolizing divine love and linked to spiritual fire. It is the Johanine mortification of the body that provides the link with The Passion's figuration of desire through the character of Medea, in which Winterson attends to the destruction that passion begets. The story of Medea is immediately brought to mind by the epigraph of the novel, and to some extent through the portrayal of Napoleon, who ruthlessly sends his children (the French people) to their deaths, dismembering them with two thousand deaths a day upon the sea. In her legend, Medea, attempting to escape her Father, kills and dismembers her brother, her own flesh. She scatters his body parts into the ocean
38. The desolation of Winterson's Russia and the apocalyptic language of the 'lukewarm', alongside Eliot's 'blowing of the horn' and references to purgatorial and hell fire {Collected Poems, pp. 205-208). 39. Tbe Passion, p. 160. As is the case in much of her writing, Winterson is here also alluding to fairy tales. The thorns, which compose Henri's garden are reminiscent both of Christ's thorns and the thorns which surround Sleeping Beauty, who was called 'Briar Rose'. Similarly, her use of red roses, while clearly being an appropriation from Eliot and Dante, also brings various fairy tales to mind, one thinks perhaps of 'Beauty and the Beast', where the story turns upon the picking of a single rose. Red roses themselves are of course traditionally a symbol of passion. Again, this is a good example of her interfacing religious and romantic narratives and symbols.

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in order to slow her pursuers' progress. She is, of course, even more infamous for the murder of her own children, a consequence of the embitterment of her love for Jason, when he has betrayed her and is set to marry another. Winterson adopts Medea to exemplify passion, focused upon its wrathful aspect, at the point at which it turns and begins to destroy both the beloved and the lover, the 'huge and desperate ... monstrous' hate that succeeds love.'^o This is played out in the stories of physical dismemberment; that both Henri and Villanelle tell, of the dismemberment of the French soldiers in the zero winter, and in the dismemberment of the Villanelle's gambler who loses his life through gambling. In Henri's desertion of Napoleon he specifically uses the metaphor of dismemberment to elucidate the suffering of Napoleon's army; how through the cold and the hunger, the body begins to devour itselfthe fat, the muscle, the bone and how in desperation soldiers dismember themselves, slicing away until all that is left is the heart in its 'ransacked palace'.'*^ The dismemberment is fundamentally, however, the twisfing of Henri's passion for Napoleon, demonstrated by his wish that the heart should be taken first since it is the 'heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are'."*^ Echoing 'Little Gidding' Henry claims that in order to survive the winter the soldiers abandoned their hearts making a 'pyre' of them. In Eliot's poem the choice is between two pyres, of purgation or hell. Love here, for Eliot, is portrayed as the Nessus shirt (itself associated with desire, having been given to Heracles by his wife in order to make him solely desire her) that destroys with fire but in order to restore, to burn the 'sin and error'. Eliot, however, also in 'Little Gidding' associates fire with the fiery tongues of Pentecost (Acts 2.3) and charismatic renew^al of people through the Spirit.*^ Love, then, is synonymous with suffering, either in the eternal or purgatorial sense, as well as empowerment and excitation of the Spirit. It is this image that Winterson takes up to portray both the suffering and also the excitation of the lover. The narratives of Henri and Villanelle are mirrored reflections of each other to this point, united in heartbreak and brought together in the heart of the zero winter outside Moscow. Villanelle's tale of dismemberment concerns the rich man who gambles with his most valuable, fabulous thing; in his case his life. The gambler loses and his forfeit is his
40. The Passion, p. 84. 41. Tire Passion, p. 82. 42. The Passion, p. 82. 43. It has already been noted that Henri bemoans the lack of fire in the Church and Villanelle wants it to be Pentecost everyday [Tire Passion, p. 122).

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'piece by piece' dismemberment.'''* Her story is a metaphor for the loss she has suffered to the Queen of Spades and the tale serves as another parable of the nature of passion: the Edenic paradise of its beginning: 'We were naked and not ashamed','*^ the gamble of desiring and needing more, followed by the realization and subsequent loss of the beloved: the fall into the zero winter and the dismemberment, the death in the loss of the heart. These two stories reinterpret Medea by figuring her as self-destructive passion from the turning point of the betrayal of love to the dismemberment of her own flesh, her brothers and her children, figuratively interpreted by Winterson as the erosion of the lover in the process of heart-break. Medea's children, the children of passion, are figuratively its promised future; of the acquisition of the beloved and the fulfilment of desire. Passion, however, exists between 'fear and sex', 'love and despair',''^ and so its children have no future. It must end with their rejection: 'the silent space of never having enough. The silent space of starving children'.'*'' Desire precipitates an ever-increasing gamble, which cannot be won.'*^ Medea gambles her family and her country for her love of Jason. When this love is rejected, she is an exile and, having staked all she had in her passion, she loses it all. In the freezing of her passion she brings ruin on both her own and her lover's lives. This is echoed in the Napoleonic campaign as Napoleon gambles his soldiers to the ruin of all France and also the passion into which Henri is drawn and that which destroys him since he, with the French soldiers, 'were gambling with all we had from the start ... We were fighting for our lives'.'*9 The inclusion of the Edenic imagery in Villanelle's tale relates the fall of Medea to the biblical fall of humanity as death and separation from God are brought into the world through over-reaching desire. At the same time, however, the narrative naturally entwines itself, in infanticide, with the suffering of Christ in his Passion, through his abandonment by the Father and subsequent death. While the juxtaposing of such narratives initially seems incoherent, Winterson balances them by drawing the Passion narrative, as a story of the abandonment of the beloved by
44. The Passion, p. 93. 45. The Passion, p. 95. 46. The Passion, p. 76. 47. The Passion, p. 96. 48. 'There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won ... Victors lose when they are tired of winning. Perhaps they regret it later, but the impulse to gamble the valuable, fabulous thing is too strong' {The Passion, p. 133). 49. The Passion, p. 104.

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the lover to the beloved's suffering, death and entry into hell before resurrection into the spurning of Medea and the subsequent dismemberment of her flesh and self-destruction. This results in a collage narrative of the betrayal of passion, which, through the interweaving of the narratives, eroticizes the Passion, as a scene of passionate relationships, and, by its association with the sacred narrative, recovers Medea's story. By drawing upon Eliot's and St John's journey of the soul through purgation to unity with God and the Passion of Christ, heartbreak and this negative aspect of passion are sanctified and ultimately redeemed since, even after the purgative winter and the loss of the beloved, Villanelle asserts she will gamble again and Henri grows his red roses of passion.
Toiuards an Erotic Tleology

There is in this 'slapping together of binary opposites',^ this paean to desire and veneration of the lover, rendered by theological language, stories, figures and parabolic style, the development of a (post-)'secular Reformation' holy-language. While retaining an even-handed discourse on the inconstancies and tribulations of human eros, Winterson extols all aspects of passion, consecrating it as holy, in that it is set apart from, and 'a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life'.^^ It is the flesh made Word, or as Christy Burns writes, 'a kind of transubstantiation of body into word'.^^ The success of this, as with the success of any parable, depends upon the response of the reader, in its ability to reach and affect the reader's perspective, for which it requires the elicitation of an act of faith in the text. Essentially, Tlie Passion tells us a story and we are asked to trust it and, moreover, through this trust, allow ourselves to be transformed. In a sense, and indeed whether or not one shares Winterson's attitude towards the Church itself, Tlie Passion constitutes an imaginative leap that challenges traditional perspectives and the reader's conception of both the religious and the erotic. The very act of sanctifying that which would normally be considered profane, sinful and fleshly necessarily disrupts the stability of theological categories such as righteousness.

50. Lauren Rusk, The Life Writing of Otherness (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 122. 51. Art Objects, p. IQS. 52. Burns, 'Fantastic Language', p. 299. Winterson preaches upon the flesh made word specifically in Art and Lies, often echoing both John the evangelist and the Song of Songs, with a graphic eroticism: 'She takes a word, straps it on, penetrates me hard. The word inside me, I become it. The word slots my belly, my belly swells the word' (Art and Lies [London: Vintage, 1996], p. 74).

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purity and love.^'' Moreover, since the novel actively denigrates certain traditional theological virtues, particularly virginity and uncritical faith, and questions Church practice, it effectively attempts a radical transformation of the very substance of theology, instantiating, in its place, a subversive erotic theology that seeks to awaken passion itself as a form of spirituality for the present age. Rowan Williams has written of the link between narrative and transformation, remarking that 'all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically'.^"^ He invites the Church to 'speak and act parabolically': to create new parables that challenge the way traditional narratives and practices are approached. In an interview with Mark Marvel, Winterson has stated that in her revision of stories she is 'telling another story about that story' with the intention of 'challeng[ing] people, both into looking more closely at tbe tbings tbey thought were cut and dried and also, perbaps, into inventing tbeir own stories'.^^ By retelling scriptural narratives, and particularly by drawing tbem alongside otber familiar, discontinuous stories, Winterson draws attention to our assumptions and tbe politics of reading and calls for botb a re-evaluation of tbe original texts and tbeir re-creation in tbe readers' lives and practices. It is perbaps not too radical a claim, tben, to suggest tbat The Passion functions as a piece of tbeology or to recognize tbe tbeologian, or perbaps, more aptly, tbe 'propbet',^^ in Jeanette Winterson. It is certainly true tbat tbere is a degree of ambivalence in tbe manner in wbicb Winterson bandies notions of trutb and a lingering, residual realism tbat clings to ber work. It is certainly evident in tbe positive epistemology of art sbe espouses in Art Objects and in ber claim tbat stories can reveal some of tbose 'permanent trutbs about b u m a n nature'. Furtber more, as we bave seen, ber dialectical confrontation of tbe sacred witb the profane does not collapse tbe former into tbe latter by any means and tbe Geist, wbicb stands at tbe border of ber writing, wbetber it is called art, passion, transcendence, or God, altbougb certainly described differently, remains

53. And in this case expiating the ecclesially defined sinful nature of eros and, in particular, revising the Church's binary gender definitions and roles and castigation of all erotic behaviour, which does not fit within the narrow confines of ecclesial approval. 54. 'Postmodern Theology and the Judgment of the World', in Frederick B.
Burnham (^d.), Postmodern Theology, Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (New York, Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 92-112 (109). 55. Cited in Rusk, The Life Writing of Otherness, p. 164. 56. As Bollinger and Cosslett have called her ('Models for Female Loyalty', p. 377; 'Intertextuality in Oranges', p. 24).

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undeconstructed; as Burns writes: 'Desire is what is real, in Winterson, more so than historical events or material objects'.^'' This Romantic realism, which poses a curiously ambiguous metaphysic within her treatment of texts and rings discordantly with the general tone of postmodernism, offers further credulity to the nature of Winterson's work as theologically parabolic. Read in this way, she enlivens us to the possibility of a more creative hermeneutic and a resurrection of scriptural imagination in new unanticipated forms. The Passion creates a community in the relationship it develops between the storyteller and her audience, which seeks to disclose truth and to encourage its readers to exceed themselves. In order to achieve this, Winterson blends Scripture, myth, history and contemporary narratives, gathering them together in a contemporary Passion play: a form of recreation that attempts to institute more impassioned ways of living among her readers through the revelation of a subversive, erotic theology.

57. Burns, 'Fantastic Language', p. 302 (my emphasis).