SOURCE: Gilmore, Leigh. “Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.” In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, pp. 120–42. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Gilmore examines Winterson's treatment of gender and sexual self-representation in Written on the Body, as well as discussing the novel's problematic explorations of female identity, lesbianism, and sexual difference.]

A name makes reading too easy.

—Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher”

Written on the Body least resembles autobiography in the context I've developed here. Unlike [Dorothy] Allison, [Mikal] Gilmore, and [Jamaica] Kincaid, Winterson has neither asserted nor acceded to a primarily autobiographical context for understanding her writing. Following her first autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson wrote the kind of postmodern fiction that does not readily lend itself to autobiographical reading. Why, then, read Written on the Body as a limit-case about self-representation? The chapters that precede this one form a context for understanding how Winterson engages autobiography's central issues without reproducing its formal conventions. Indeed, she resists them, not because they are unrelated to her project, but because they are central, and resistance offers a renewable and resilient mode of engagement. Autobiography's attention to names as markers of identity, its tension about the relation between historical verifiability and the limits of memory, its distrust of fantasy, dreams, and the imagination, its multiform history and patchwork present tense all offer Winterson grounds for an experiment in (self-)representation focused on sexuality, love, and loss.

Winterson offers this exchange in Art and Lies: “What do Lesbians do in bed? ‘Tell them,’ said Sophia, the Ninth Muse. Tell them? There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies.”¹ As a response to the injunction to tell what lesbians do in bed, “[t]here's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies,” is a curious reply. Winterson seems to suggest that autobiography lies immediately behind, or within, questions of sexuality and sexual know-how. What lesbians do in bed is a personal question, a subjective question despite its generalizing tone and capital L, an autobiographical question. Yet immediately after coming to the fore, autobiography is made to recede. The circuit from sexuality to autobiography is made with dazzling brevity on the way to “art and lies,” and in this moment autobiography is negated and absented in the place perhaps where one is most likely to look for it. Traces of autobiography are significant here. That they keep turning up indicates that autobiography is embedded in both sexuality and artifice and even provides a way to think of how they are related. Indications of autobiography appear in unexpected places or they fail to appear in expected places. “There's no such thing as autobiography” echoes the fervently whispered “there's no such thing as ghosts” as a denial in the presence of uneasy, even downright panicky, belief. There is something discreditable about both autobiography and ghosts—those figures of absence and haunting—and despite the presumed truthfulness of one (autobiography) and unlikeliness of the other (ghosts), one finds recurring assertions that they either do or do not really exist, as if the meaning of that existence were insistently and precisely in question. In facing the meaning of autobiography's existence, Paul de Man in “Autobiography as De-facement” came up with tropes of absence and death. Autobiography, as de Man notes, in its effort to represent life comes inevitably upon its own impossibility. There is a certain gothic quality to his reading that allows for a link to Terry Castle's Apparitional Lesbian in which Castle argues that the lesbian is typically represented as a ghostly presence, a specter whose haunting is evidence of both her derealization and persistent presence.² In its frequent absenting from the scene of writing and persistent interruptions of it, autobiography, like sexuality, is knowable both in and as absence as well as vivid, self-declaring presence.

I offer this reading of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body as a limit-case focused on sexed and gendered self-representation. Her book is interesting in this context because it plays with certain expectations about how and whether a lesbian author writes a lesbian text, and what such a claim might mean. Yet Written on the Body is more interested in proliferating questions around that query than in producing answers to it. In so doing, it invokes certain interpretations, expectations, and conventions that attend autobiography even as it reworks those connections for productive kinds of dissonance. It allows the reading effects implied by autobiography to remain lively even as it presses beyond autobiography's formal boundaries. I describe Winterson's text as being in implicit dialogue with autobiography in order to highlight the way certain rhetorical conventions and cultural references or situations catalyze the expectations generated by autobiography, namely, that the writer has a truth to tell and is telling it about the writer's life.

What motivates this contextualization? That Winterson's first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was widely received as autobiographical has installed the expectation, confirmed by some reviewers and almost all my students, that subsequent texts by Winterson can be read within the context of an autobiographical project, even if Winterson wants to change the rules.³ Rather than pronounce this interest as false or limited, I want to let it provide a way into the trickier and more expansive discourses of self-representation and the issues raised there through its interrogation of identity as a function of representation, especially in its attention to the materiality of bodies, and the relation of language to the coming-into-being of sexuality and gender.

Let me introduce a comparison to further clarify the context in which I read Winterson's project. As a major influence, Monique Wittig's Lesbian Body has been a part of feminist discourse about the body from the beginning of contemporary interest in that topic.⁴Written on the Body intersects with a developed stage of this discourse and depends, in my view, on the thinking about the body that precedes it, including Wittig's Lesbian Body as its most salient precursor. Written on the Body is contemporaneous with a renewed interest in speech-act theory, specifically, the performative as it has been theorized by Judith Butler and others. This interest in the performative links legal studies of injurious speech to the U.S. military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy, and to the contexts in which one must answer the question “who are you?” with a statement that begins “I am.”⁵ Additionally, both texts explore how and whether texts perform autobiography, how the lesbian author's sexuality motivates the reading of her text as autobiography, and how such impulses might be rethought.

Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body features an ungendered, unnamed narrator who falls in love with a married woman. Monique Wittig's Lesbian Body creates a lesbian world in which the lovers explore the possibilities of embodiment. Through an intertextual reading, it is possible to consider what Wittig's strategy of renaming and Winterson's strategy of not-naming reveal about gender, sexuality, and the modes of signifying them, in relation to self-representation. Both Wittig and Winterson deploy one of the most common tropes of autobiography: the intertwined figures of book and body. Wittig writes: “The body of the text subsumes all the words of the female body. … To recite one's own body, to recite the body of the other, is to recite the words of which the book is made up” (10). Winterson, too, offers this trope: “I like to keep the body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book” (89). Because the bodies in both are anatomized in less than familiar ways, the figure of the book and body suggest texts that one must labor to read well. Wittig names the bodies in question on the title page as “lesbian” and feminine pronouns appear in the text. The body is represented in the mode of becoming lesbian rather than in its possession of any particular parts that make it such. In Winterson, no gender references are permitted about the first-person narrator who nonetheless describes her or his sexual adventures with men and women in some detail. The body in both texts signifies gender and sexuality in shifting allusions to the transparency and opacity of what bodies can tell us about what we “see.”

In neither text is the relationship between body and sexual identity primarily referential or mimetic. There is no stable referent, neither anatomical nor metaphorical, that makes the bodies lesbian; no single practice or array of fetishes that proves the body's sexuality as lesbian. Rather, the relationship between identity (what can and cannot be rendered visible when “I am a lesbian” is or is not the primary signifier of sexual identification) and representation (how to tell a story with sexuality at its center without relying upon a familiar way of representing sexuality) becomes the ground for an extended inquiry into the claims to knowledge made by the presence and absence of the names around and through which the body is made to cohere. Evidence of identity, therefore, is located in representational practices of habeas corpus (bringing out the body) that resist a legalistic imperative of proof in favor of signification, that is, of proximate and shifting signifiers that can be read relationally within and among texts. I invoke legal language here to remind us that expectations about whether and how a text is autobiographical are often coded as expectations about whether an author is telling the truth, which is frequently elided with a judgment about how well the author can be said to conform to (or reproduce) hegemonic notions of appropriate identity. This expectation reveals that identity is a function of representation which is thoroughly imbricated in the juridical. Instead of judging whether the body is made intelligible within normative discourses of identity, I want to intervene in those judgments by turning the focus toward how these texts bring out the body. The question, then, is not whether the author is telling the truth, but how the body is used as a truth-text and what truth-claims about identity are made through the body.

Wittig explores ways to signify “lesbian” through what we could call reanatomization, a comprehensive invention and display of and by bodies under the rubric of “the lesbian body.” Her refusal of a patriarchal regime of names makes it possible for bodies to dissolve under that system of kinship, which depends upon patrilineage as a system of meaning and value, and to reemerge through a matrix named “lesbian.” That the name lesbian titles the project but is not reproduced on every page indicates that the power of this signifier lies in naming the whole text The Lesbian Body rather than any single or separable dimension of it. Bodies in this text are always coming apart. They are either described through a cataloguing of parts coming back together, or parts being disjoined limb from limb, and limb from socket. The violence of this disarticulation and rearticulation points up the materiality of language (especially in Wittig's catalogues of body parts), the way language bears upon the body, and makes it knowable (or unknowable). In contrast to Wittig's experiment with the body under the name lesbian, Winterson's ungendered, unnamed narrator declines such an utterance. If Wittig's lesbian body is rendered material by its name, Winterson's textual body coheres around the performative, “I grieve.” An intertextual reading of Winterson's and Wittig's representations of bodies makes it clearer how Winterson's signification of desire without sexual identification can be read as a refusal of the patriarchal regime of names and the identities it compels. The body's intelligibility is risked in both; in Wittig by claiming and in Winterson by declining a sexual name. Both, however, work the body for its capacity to figure sexuality in terms that do not reproduce heterosexist claims to knowledge. Wittig's emphasis on naming as the mode through which the lesbian emerges makes it possible to ask of Winterson's choice of not-naming: How, in the context created by reading the texts together, does absence signify?

In order to direct this question toward critical conversations beyond autobiography studies, we need only look to the work being done on the body and the performative, and to some earlier work on the theoretical meanings of presence and absence initiated, from different but not irreconcilable directions, via deconstruction and feminist theory. A fairly diverse group of theorists informs my formulation here of how absence signifies. Feminist critics, for example, have undertaken a critical project of recovering and remembering the erased cultural productions and lives of women. Although some poststructuralist work on absence, notably by Pierre Macherey, Hélène Cixous, and Jacques Derrida, is written at a conceptual distance from the retrieval and archival work of lost, buried, and disappeared writers and subcultures, taken together these projects amount to a massive reconceptualization of evidence. Evidence, following these interventions, may be adduced in and as what is missing, through loss, omission, trauma, or some condensation of these and other phenomena. Interpretive practices have followed these projects and extended them by reading inferentially and circumstantially for remnants, traces, and fetishes of what has to be recognized as a revised real.

In the context I am describing, the revised real emerges through a reconceptualization of evidence. Representations of the real depend upon and are a function of what can be claimed as evidence, in the case of self-representation, of identity, of who was there, and of how identity can be rendered intelligible. Critical work on bodies is significant here for its claims about how bodies are read as and for evidence of the real. A newly fashioned matrix for reading bodies has merged insights about the body's materiality with claims about how the body performs meaning. Both emphases—upon materiality and performance—underscore that representations of the body are caught up in competing systems of meaning. Although an emphasis on how bodies perform gender, race, and sexuality contends with the insistence that the body possesses these attributes, these positions appear furthest apart in their most abstract formulations. They are surprisingly similar when they situate the body in a realm of material consequences. Whether the body possesses or performs race, gender, and sexuality, the material consequences nonetheless strike with similar intensity. Both The Lesbian Body and Written on the Body exploit the possibilities of how bodies possess and perform “identity.” In both, the ways in which the representation of the body is its identity is of central concern.

Written on the Body extends the self-representational project Winterson initiated in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985 when she was twenty-six, which won the Whitbread Prize in England for fiction. Yet the stability of “fiction” as a sufficient description of Oranges is called into question immediately because the constructed line between first-person fiction and autobiography is barely meaningful as a marker of generic territoriality. In Oranges, Winterson trades across this border through her combination of historical events and places (in her and her protagonist's lives) with allegory and fantasy. This intermingling of the imagined and the verifiable articulates a threshold between fiction and autobiography, and an entry point for the text into a category that expands upon the generic limits of both. Protagonist and author are brought up in Lancashire, adopted daughters of an evangelical mother and barely visible father, and both are named Jeanette. In Oranges, young Jeanette is recruited into her mother's allegorical pact with the world. Here, she recites her origin story: “I had been brought in to join her in a tag match with the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn't that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me” (3). The mother expects the daughter to become an evangelist, and this proceeds more or less according to plan until Jeanette falls in love with Melanie. Once she does so, what she is capable of seeing in herself and the local community of women believers alters. Subsequently, the lesbians in whose midst she has grown up are recognized as such. Jeanette realizes that she shares their sexuality, though what she will make of this at the end of the book is still an open question. She does not reject the carnival-tent atmosphere of evangelism and the otherworldly orientation of her mother, but neither is she accepted by her mother, minister, and church as a lesbian. So in the way of the autobiography, the bildungsroman, the coming-out story, and the heroic quest narrative, she must leave her home to find it. In this case, she heads off to university. The author's notes on the book jacket preview, condense, and displace the same lesbian pilgrim's progress.

Winterson's books and Winterson's body have been conflated by some reviewers and readers in an attempt to gender and name her narrator “lesbian.” To do so, readers must detour through the autobiographical, a detour into the intelligible, whereby readers inscribe the identity of the author upon the dissonance in the category of identity in the text. Whereas Oranges blends allegory and fantasy as ways to reread the contours within an arguably historical and personal landscape, Winterson's own, intervening works Sexing the Cherry and The Passion depart from the verifiable details of her life and engage history on a grander scale.⁶ In these texts her penchant for allegory is untethered from the Bible and autobiography per se and channeled into meditations upon space, time, and narrative. Her new interests resume and extend what can still be called an autobiographical task in Written on the Body insofar as Winterson's first-person narrator returns to some earlier preoccupations with identity and representation first explored via the autobiographical.

Some reviewers have assumed that Written on the Body is a sequel to Oranges, both of which are claimed as romans à clef. This is less evidence of a critical consensus than a symptom of what kinds of questions get asked when a review is framed through autobiographical assumptions. In the New York Review of Books, Winterson's fictionalizing of the self-representational “I” has been reviewed as a literary device.⁷ The unnamed and ungendered narrator is taken as an interesting conceit in a love story focused so centrally upon the body and its materiality. After all, the reasoning goes, it's not like Winterson is really hiding anything with this “I,” everyone knows she's a lesbian. While the autobiographicality of Written on the Body has not been particularly contested or even really puzzled out in the so-called straight press, some lesbian reviewers have had another point to make. Sarah Schulman, for example, finds the device of the ambiguous narrator an odd and rather unsuccessful refusal by Winterson to take the name of lesbian. For her, Written on the Body is like “all fiction based somewhat on real life” and is marred by “lapses of discipline” such as “too many lines of recreated dialogue” which somewhat surprisingly in this review, make the “emotions richer, easier to recognize.” Schulman considers the text flawed, if endearing.⁸ Schulman solves the ambiguity of the narrator's gender by diagnosing her as “a confused, insecure lesbian who can't fully love the woman of her dreams.” The problem here is not so much that the narrator isn't identified as a lesbian, but that a lesbian author has an ambiguously gendered narrator. Both reviews concern sexuality, its visibility, and what one makes of it. Yet both breeze past the constitutive and not merely perfunctory impediment Winterson sets in their path. There is a prior question here about autobiography as the generic grid of truth. To claim that the name “lesbian” would solve the questions of name, gender, sexuality, and identity evades the problematic within the representation of identity Winterson engages. In terms of names, Written on the Body already claims to be a novel. It is not through the presence of the name “novel” that this text enters into the problematic but through the absence of the name “autobiography” precisely in the places one wishes to find it. Were it present, all competing or disruptive knowledge of identity could be compelled to cohere under this name. Identity (the author's, the narrator's, the text's) would become knowable through a grid of intelligibility already in place.

I take Written on the Body as both a continuation and an expansion of Winterson's interest in self-representation, if in significantly altered terms. The question with which Written on the Body begins, “Why is the measure of love loss,” expands upon one posed in Oranges, which concerns naming: “There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult process; it concerns essences, and it means power.” Here, her question was: “But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name” (170). In Oranges, Winterson sought an answer to “who can call you home?” in allegory and fantasy. That narrative moves between the coming-out story and its consequences for Jeanette, and parables in which she chats with advice-giving demons. While her interest in fantasy links Oranges to The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, and Art and Lies, a different connection links Oranges to Written on the Body. In Written on the Body the various tensions and problematics are not charted primarily through the alternative plenitude of fantasy, but in the linkage of love and loss. Fantasy's counterpart, anxiety, emerges in the responses induced by an unnamed and ungendered narrator. In Oranges, Winterson's questions about power, knowledge, and names; her recurring tropes of home, wild nights, love, and loss; and her exploitation of autobiographical echoes gesture explicitly toward self-representational discourse. In Written on the Body, however, she extends the self-representational strategies of Oranges into the perverse strategy of not-naming.

The strategy of not-naming raises some related questions about identity and the mechanisms of identification through which identity is ascertained and secured: In what ways does a name indicate presence? Must the absence of a name be linked to loss? Or, to put it more precisely in Written on the Body's terms: When and how can absence be read as something other than loss? When and how does absence signify what one does not possess rather than what one refuses to give? Winterson's text works these questions for a range of possible answers. But there are prior questions here about names and their function within the field of representation. How, within the discourses of self-representation, do names signify identity? What does it mean for a name to identify a subject—to gender it, sex it, make it real? What are the definitional limits of “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality” as evidence of the “identity” of an autobiographical subject? Ultimately, these questions can be focused on Winterson's text in a very particular way: they suggest a project interested in the possibilities that attend the representation of identity when names are absent.

Written on the Body offers a hard case for testing the meaning of names. Immediately, the lack of disclosure or seeming invisibility of gender foregrounds sexuality as a question. Without the name of gender and the identity it indicates, how are we to know this “I”? When we attempt to infer sexual identity from the narrator's lovers, we are offered bisexuality as a nonidentifying answer to the question of gender: the beloved is a woman and the narrator has had some male and more female lovers. Gender and sexuality do not reduce to each other nor do they confirm an identity for the narrator. The refusal to disclose gender and the subsequent interpretation of sexuality as a question moves the reader briskly onto autobiography's familiar ground, where identity is implicated in questions of representation and ontology. What might seem so ontologically there as to defy the need of representation becomes, in this text, difficult to name. In this way, Winterson forces the autobiographical to divulge its weirdness and to open onto the wider, and wilder, field of self-representation through the questions above. Through her inquiry into naming, as it instantiates identity as a function of representation, Winterson moves to an unexpected location within self-representation.

The expected claims about names in autobiography emphasize their stabilizing function: a name identifies a person, a family, a history, and focuses attention on the solid corporeality to which it refers. Ultimately the name seems to mark a ground zero of representational veracity: “who is the autobiographer?” can be answered by a simple cross-check and verification of the author's name and the protagonist named in the text. If they are identical, you have autobiography. But as Winterson suggests in Oranges, the stakes are too high for naming to function as a simple referential anchor that holds the world to the text through the name of the autobiographer: “Naming is a difficult process; it concerns essences, and it means power.” Though this may sound like a young lover reaching for “deep meaning,” as a comment on naming in autobiography, it is suggestive. In autobiography, the name becomes a symbol of not only the past to which one may lay claim but the past and family that claims you. Such a symbol (and such families) may well be more threatening than comforting. After all, not everyone who writes autobiographically ends up embracing the name as a signifier of familial belonging. Some write in order to destroy the claims upon them made by families, communities, and past experiences. Following in this vein in her feminist intervention in the history of ideas, Denise Riley finds an apt figure in Desdemona whose life depends upon what may be done to her through a name.⁹ Desdemona's questioning and querulous signature, “Am I that name?” resonates here as a self-representational signifier that is different from the performative, “I am that name,” though comprehensible as part of the same signifying system. “Am I that name?” does not mean the obverse of “I am that name,” not, that is, “I am not that which men say I am,” but “am I?” a question that leads toward an interpretive context in which, presumably, those who know the answer can ensure the consequences that will follow. To find oneself named, pinned in place by that identification, and placed within a community, a family, and a home is precisely what many self-representational writers are trying not simply to represent but to escape. Thus, writers may engage the discourses of self-representation as much to lose a name as to find one. To lose a name is not merely to exchange one set of constraints for a less-familiar one. To remove oneself from a familiar audience and community in an effort to find a more companionable home is not an easy task. Rather, to route self-representation more emphatically and precisely through representation necessarily engages the subject in an altered discursive project, the terms of which are not fully predictable. The writer may well need to reconstruct the very possibilities and grounds for community through this effort.

The terms in which Winterson casts this venture are more concerned with the anxiety provoked by the absence of the name than with sustaining the conceit of an unnamed, ungendered narrator. In other words, if not-naming were merely the coy pose of a clever writer, its ability to generate anxiety might well dissolve within a few chapters. Anxiety remains in lively play, however, because what is missing is the signifying chain of identity that presumably corresponds to a material reality in which identity coheres through the progressive, motivated, and linked signification of sex, gender, and sexuality. Autobiography not only depends upon this signification, it seems to prove its reality. Winterson's strategic omission of the name strikes at the signifying seam between reality and autobiography. Winterson's installation of a speaking subject whose only name is “I” places the reader in a position to question which signifiers cause the subject to unravel and which to cohere, and in what contexts.

Through the absence of names, Winterson raises questions of identity that the presence of names does not really answer. Questions about the ascertainable identities of the narrator, the author, and the text are stabilized by names, but are not identical to them. The questions lie there, redundant, seeking transparency. An answer would throw light, but in doing so would obliterate the opacity through which this narrator emerges. Both the text itself and the topos of gendered and sexual identity here are “written on the body” in such a way that the body cannot simply offer a transparently visible or unambiguously legible proof of “identity,” but that does not remove the problem of identification, of establishing how “we” know “one” (a woman, a lesbian, an autobiography) when “we” see “one.” The body is usually thought to provide compelling, even irrefutable, proof of sex and gender, and ultimately of unique identity. The body coalesces under the name of sex. The erotic body is mapped through acts, zones, desires, all of which usually cite sex as identification. How then can a book on the body, a love story no less, avoid sexing the subject? While Oranges brings out the autobiographical body through naming it as female, as lesbian, as “Jeanette,” Written on the Body traces a different path through self-representation. Winterson almost seems to be asking how much she can leave out and conserve the autobiographical trace. The experiment here plays at the extreme edge because she chooses to omit both name and sex as she refuses to secure the body's identity beyond that of “lover.” It seems improbable to pursue self-representation without names. It not only defies generic conventions and the expectations they install, it risks coherence altogether. But perhaps the limit of coherence at which Winterson plays through figures of the name and the body locates the risk worth taking precisely due to the functions both name and body have played in regimes of truth and identity, regimes in which autobiography itself has served.

Written on the Body attempts to map the boundary of representation—its limit—in relation to what can and cannot be known and uttered about the lover's body, and between what can be represented through a lover's discourse and what, in the absence of the beloved, is lost and must achieve signification elsewhere. To do so, Written on the Body divides into three sections. In the first, the narrator recounts falling in love with Louise, who, when they meet, is married to Elgin, a cancer specialist. The narrator is a hero cast in the Byronic mold; there have been many lovers, mostly women, and many married women. There have also been many heartbreaks. The narrator fears that Louise, too, will become another figure in this romance narrative, but Louise defies expectation and instead of kissing the narrator good-bye, declares that she is leaving Elgin: “My love for you makes my other life a lie.” The lovers begin an idyllic stretch that ends abruptly in some awkward and rather implausible blackmail: Louise, it turns out, has leukemia. Elgin tells the narrator that Louise's symptoms have flared, that he and he alone can guarantee her the best medical care, and that his connections offer the best hope for Louise's health. But there is a catch: he will not offer them unless the narrator vanishes. Without consulting Louise, the narrator agrees and the book breaks into its second part, a sustained meditation upon the body. This section consists of four chapters devoted to the body. At their conclusion, the narrative of the first section seems to resume, though the ending invites a revision of this schema.

The excess generated by the absence around naming and gender finds explicit, even hyperbolic, representation in Louise and Elgin, the Married Couple. There is even a detailed account of how Elgin got his name, and he is rendered in stereotypical terms as Jewish. In a similarly schematic way, Louise's gendered representation is a proliferation of formalist attributes, even fetishes, of gender: her red hair, her pale skin, her lovely home, her effects, all amount to a hyperbolic emphasis on her femaleness, on the necessity of saying “she” in reference to Louise. Louise pervades, even invades, the scene as a system of gendered signs. Signifiers of gender proliferate around her; she is an extension of and extends into her home. All this metonymic displacement allows the narrator to find fetishes everywhere: “She dribbled viscous juices down her chin and before I could help her wiped them away. I eyed the napkin; could I steal it? Already my hand was creeping over the tablecloth like something out of Poe” (37). The excessivity of Louise's gendering in the context of the narrator's self-representation casts Louise's “reality” into doubt. She is a gendered object in a hyperreal sense: she is almost a phantasm. Some names attach to her readily, but all depend upon an interpretive context of sexuality that is structured through a significant absence. The problem of knowing Louise's name(s) is consistent with the problem of not knowing the narrator's; both concern the context in which gender and sexuality as evidence of each other is performed. Louise is not presented in a delimited way as a “married woman”; her desire is not thoroughly heterosexualized by this name, and therefore the narrator doesn't pop out from behind namelessness as a fella. Instead, Louise reacts unpredictably in relation to that name, and the reader is offered another possible name for the beloved. She's a real femme, that Louise. With the femme-ing of Louise comes the subtextual encoding of the Casanova-Narrator as a butch lesbian.

Perhaps Terry Castle's reading of the lesbian as apparition permits a two-step reading toward identifying the narrator: if Louise can be read as an apparitional lesbian, then the narrator steps from behind the curtain and reveals herself, too, as such. Louise's extreme womanliness is not precisely what Castle argues for as the lesbian's derealization, but it accomplishes the same spectralization of the character. Obviously, this is an inferential reading, a circumstantial reading, and it is consistent with the opening-up of this reading practice rather than in the narrowing of the evidence into a single proof of the narrator's identity. But such an inference does not, finally, resolve the question. Do lesbians fall in love only with lesbians? Can a reading practice that seeks to open up the categories “married” and “woman” afford to, or be expected to, close down around the category “lesbian”? In other words, things get tricky here precisely because it is the ascription of names to identity, the very code of the juridical, that Winterson is scrambling. Castle's argument works best, I think, for texts other than Written on the Body, for in this case it is the unknowability that is interesting. Thus I see less a veiled derealization than a sympathetically posed question about realization. While Castle provides an engaging way to identify lesbians in literature, I mean to emphasize here that Written on the Body's signification performs in a different way. The absence of a referential ground zero for the narrator keeps the signification in play, renders interpretation necessary. If the narrator is not readily comprehensible as a “woman,” she need not be incomprehensible as a lesbian, and this is the sort of linkage of gender to sexuality as the basis of identification and identity that Winterson wants to keep coming at throughout the text and not, particularly, to resolve. Her questions unfold in this way: Must a reading of sexuality be routed through a gender proof? How great is the distance (interpretive, representational, self-representational) between the names woman and lesbian? Both questions concern the interpretive space opened up between sexuality and gender, between identity and names. It is a space Winterson will not suture.

Since Winterson will not suture this space, what meanings are generated and circulate here? The space ambivalently evokes both loss and omission; namelessness may seem like the space that marks where a name was lost as much as the space of its refusal or obliteration. Such ambivalence between loss and refusal leads in two directions. In one direction, if one believes that a name has been lost, then its former presence registers as that which one formerly possessed or knew. The “lost” name becomes a pretext for nostalgia, which gestures toward a narrative with an origin (toward myth) and installs the repetition of loss as a central motif, whether this is figured as the “return” of or to what was lost, or the repetition of its loss. In a different direction, namelessness memorializes another struggle. Here the absence of a name does not signify loss, but a successful evasion of the fixity implicit in naming, and a redirection of the representation of identity. Nostalgia and this provisional freedom from fixity are welded together in Written on the Body, and both circulate through the representation of gender and sexuality.

In this context Winterson's narrator raises the question of narcissism by turning from the other or others to the self, toward the narrator's own pain rather than toward an external love object. The narrator's own body is now the only place where Louise's body can be known and, functionally, is. In this extreme incorporation that apprehends another as the self and that merges self and other to the point of absorption, Winterson seems to be flirting with something rather more controversial than character development. By coding the narrator as narcissistic, she gestures toward the discourses of sexology and their inscription of homosexuality as pathology, most notably, as narcissism. However, I find no simple identification grid here: if narcissism, then lesbianism. The connection is implicit in the discourses of sexuality, and interpretive practices of reading for the possibility of lesbian representation make much of inference. Even as the specter of narcissism is raised in this text, however, Winterson eludes the trap that Freud set because the subject to whom narcissism would attach engages self-representation differently. This isn't, then, simply a story of “women who love too much” or “lesbian without very good boundaries.” The text frustrates those conclusions, even as it suggests them, as Winterson constructs a discussion of the beloved's body by a lover without the name to which narcissism might attach.

Following the first section of Written on the Body, the narrator's body is removed from one narrative, a straightforward tale of complicated love, and another self-representational discourse in which to measure love and loss is called for. Winterson does all that can be done with the questions that I have suggested animate the first section of the book, and then raises the representational stakes. The narrative breaks when Louise becomes ill and the narrator presumes to choose Louise's future for her. At this point, Louise's body is on the verge of becoming the body in pain, and, as a body saturated in a materiality with consequences, a body that demands another discourse for representation. Winterson removes Louise in order to focus primarily on how the narrator experiences the pain of loss. The narrator has lost a body that in this text is primary. While it is not originary per se as either a maternal or infantile body, it is a primary love object nonetheless, and, insofar as it is absent, mourned, and central, is a fetish for the body logic that is generated by the context of a central loss.¹⁰

The text moves to an engagement with representing the self in relation to representing trauma. The pain of lost love—amplified by the narrator's decision to heed Elgin's blackmail without consulting Louise, the narrator's disappearance, and then Louise's—combines with the way the narrator can imagine Louise's illness. Lost love and leukemia become analogues with different textual references. Bereft of Louise's body, which the narrator imagines changing in relation to disease, the narrator enters a textual universe where all constructions of the body are simulacral. The narrator reads books on grief and mourning that advise sleeping with a pillow to blunt the pain of the beloved's absence. In addition, the narrator pores over medical literature about bodies and illness. In contrast to the self-help books' emphasis on the beloved's absent body, the medical texts construct a present, if simulacral, body through a rhetoric of parts and their functions.

Following the opening, unnamed narrative section, there are four lessons in the anatomy of absence entitled “The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body,” “The Skin,” “The Skeleton,” and “The Special Senses.” Each section begins with a Gray's Anatomy-like description: “The clavicle or collar bone: The clavicle is a long bone which has a double curve. The shaft of the bone is roughened for the attachment of the muscles. The clavicle provides the only bony link between the upper extremity and the axial skeleton” (129). What follows are reminiscences in the presumed present tense of narration from which the narrator has recounted the story. Memory combines with grief to produce a discourse in which the partial presences conjured by memory combine within the sliding invention of imagination. Memory goes beyond reporting and becomes self-invention. The turn toward the other via memory is a turn toward the self as the producer of counterimages and also as the locus of grief. The absence of the beloved within this present tense is now embraced and becomes the occasion for both memory and self-representation: “It was a game, fitting bone on bone. … Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it's my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here” (129–30).

Even with this renewed emphasis upon the materiality of the body, upon the names by which the body can be described beneath the surface, sex is still not announced. Written on the Body refuses to hint at sexual identification through sexual difference. Here is the narrator on the presumptive appeal of sexual difference: “I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual attraction but there are so many things about us that are the same” (129). The invocation of sexual difference suggests the old chestnut that “opposites attract,” which is shorthand for the logic of heterosexism in which sexual difference is the fetish that, ironically and illogically, grounds heterosexuality. In the narrator's embrace of sameness, an unmarked body offers no “clues” to gender and sexuality. Although this is the sentence I have heard quoted as “proof” that the narrator is a lesbian, consider how it continues to deflect that gaze and to pursue a different discourse of sexuality than one that assigns names to sexual identities. No erotogenics follows from conventionally sex-marked sites, body parts, zones—no penis, labia, clitoris, breasts, but also no anus, no nipples. No “source” sites or parts from which substitutes are drawn—the site of pleasure and pain is, more comprehensively, the body. If there is a fetish, and why wouldn't there be, it would be the body as the displaced locus of embodied knowledge, the material with which eros develops, the real that aches. If I say, as Winterson's narrator might, “I ache for you,” do you want to know, precisely, what part hurts? Winterson's language helps to locate a different source of desire—the “I” rather than the specified, named person, who in desire has desire. It is not “Jeanette” or the genitals (“jeanette-als”?) so much as the self-representational “I,” the capacity for saying “I,” that constructs pleasure and pain.

Through its emphasis upon the “I,” the anatomy lessons continue to explore autobiography, if in different terms from the first section in which absences in the narrative could be filled, as some reviews of the text suggest, with information from Winterson's life. The lessons anatomize absence and indicate, however, that this is a self-representational project that capitalizes on the shared “I” of autobiography and first-person fiction in which the “I” forms an opening, an orifice through which the self-representational pours. It is impossible to say, though, which is hole (the self-representational? narrative?) and which is rim in this reading because the “I” of the narrator generates meaning in both locations.¹¹ Perhaps most pertinent to Written on the Body is the way in which this “I” functions as a body part in a way that is consistent with the text's erotogenics and is no more or less a mark of the real than the other body parts represented here. It is not that Winterson claims there is no materiality to bodies and sex, the representations of other characters besides the narrator suggest as much. Rather, the text makes it possible to consider the materiality of language through the representation of the narrator. The materiality of names does not totalize the materiality of bodies and sex, and the materiality of bodies and sex is not totalizable under names.

In this context, we can ask if Winterson succeeds in taking up the project that Judith Butler adumbrates in the conclusion to her essay, “The Lesbian Phallus”: “For what is needed is not a new body part, as it were, but a displacement of the hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference and the critical release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure.”¹² Butler rereads narcissism and the phallus to uncover two meanings: (1) that Freud links pain to love when he detours through hypochondria in his discussion of narcissism, and (2) that Freud's and Lacan's use of the phallus depends not upon the equivalence or nonequivalence of phallus to penis, but upon the logic of expropriability and substitution. That is, the phallus is not the signifier of the signified worth having, but the signifier of investiture. As such, according to Butler, other phalluses or other assignations of the phallus are certainly possible and would become productive of other imaginary morphologies. Through this reading, Butler makes clear that the lesbian phallus is not a new body part, but a signifier of alternative morphologies, of imaginary bodies with pleasures that are not predicated on their reproduction of what she calls the “hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference.” To enlist Butler in reading the body logic I am describing in Written on the Body, the “I” does not underwrite the coherence of the body any more than any body part does, though taken together, all gesture toward a materiality that motivates signification. They do not so much refer to a total object of which they are all parts so much as the function that produces them, here, a representation of the body, and a materiality of sex rendered without the names of sexual difference-as-identity.

At this critical intersection, Wittig's work offers a significant counterpoint to Winterson's. Compare the interpenetrative possibilities in the named lesbian body in Wittig to the unnamed in Winterson. A representative moment in Wittig: “The women lead m/e to your scattered fragments, there is an arm, there is a foot, the neck and head are together, your eyelids are closed, your detached ears are somewhere, your eyeballs have rolled in the mud, I see them side by side, your fingers have been cut off and thrown to one side, I perceive your pelvis, your bust is elsewhere, several fragments of forearms the thighs and tibiae are missing. … I announce that you are here alive though cut to pieces, I search hastily for your fragments in the mud, m/y nails scrabble at the small stones and pebbles, I find your nose a part of your vulva your labia your clitoris, I find your ears one tibia then the other, I assemble you part by part, I reconstruct you …” (79–80).¹³ The beloved's violent bodily dispersal and her recuperation are repeated throughout the book. The lesbian body is capable of infinite disarticulation and reassembly under the name of lesbian. Wittig's pleasure in cataloguing the lesbian body, its organs, functions, and intimate anatomy, form the rhetoric of a series of prose poems or block-style fragments. Without the name of lesbian, this body does not cohere. It would merely be destroyed, its resurrection outside the logic of identity explored in this text. However, the grieving lover may always collect the beloved and restore her to health within the embrace of the lesbian body as a system of representation.

In this sense Butler's reading of Lacan can illuminate what Winterson and Wittig are doing with names. As Butler points out: “For Lacan, names, which emblematize and institute this paternal law, sustain the integrity of the body. What constitutes the integral body is not a natural boundary or organic telos, but the law of kinship that works through the name. In this sense, the paternal law produces versions of bodily integrity; the name, which installs gender and kinship, works as a politically invested and investing performative. To be named is thus to be inculcated into that law and to be formed, bodily, in accordance with that law.”¹⁴ This presumption of bodily coherence through sex and the name are refused and reworked by Wittig's, and Winterson's (if in a very different way), inscription of the lesbian body. Without the phallus, without genitals, or hierarchized erogenous zones, Wittig gives us a body ripped and ripping open that nonetheless persists under the name of “lesbian.” A name is generated here that is also part of the pieces from which all of the lesbian body may be reworked. Its pleasures are in its continuity. Winterson's narrator declines the performative because the narrator's identity cannot logically be identified by that utterance. To declare a name and a gender would give the narrator the status of all narrated objects, including Louise, and the project would implode. Winterson gives us bodies in pain: the text of Louise's leukemic body is set beside the narrator's grieving figure.

It is important to raise again, and in altered terms, why the refusal of names, especially in a climate of detection, is significant. When we remember how emphatically the name goes to kinship, and how the enforced linking of names to kinship structures makes legally binding familial ties out of arrangements such as marriage, and through this construction legalizes acts that would be crimes were they committed against non-kin, we might well conclude that the call for names is less about establishing referentiality than the kinship structures and juridical discourses that follow from them. Names for identity and body parts belong to an order of signification that is a social order. To resist these specific names, at the very least, is to resist that social ordering. In The Lesbian Body the resistance to the social ordering that includes patriarchal kinship focuses on linking changed names to a changed body, and, implicitly, to changes in the social body. The patrilineal names are refused along with the regimes of the body they impose. Wittig breaks down the body and catalogues it, reanatomizes it as lesbian, and undertakes an epic and violent reworking of the acts of love, their embodied knowledge, and their complex pleasures. In the absence of patronymic traditions, the body breaks down. In fact, bodily integrity itself is risked. This makes possible the emergence of an altogether different bodily coherence, one not organized around the phallus as the symbolic signifier of value.

I should clarify here that my interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis is subordinate to my interest in Butler's reading of it. I intend her reading to operate as a pivot, a way to turn from psychoanalysis, while acknowledging its relevance, toward an alternative reading. A Lacanian morphology misses the pressure points of Wittig's experiment, for although it could be suggested that Wittig seems to start and stay within the logic of a return to the mirror stage by representing a body in pieces, it seems more plausible that the lesbian body as le corps morcelé is on the verge of cohering differently. Through this representational location and tactic, Wittig undertakes a sustained project in signification. Her emphasis does not fall simply upon putting the body together differently; that is, she is not trying to come through the mirror stage to and as something/someone/someplace different. Rather, the project is sited there and stays there, inhabiting its function and techniques and working the contours of signification for the persistence and appearance of the disallowed—the lesbian body, a body the subject is prohibited from forming. The repetition is key here. Wittig can disassemble and reassemble the lesbian body from any part. Thus a psychoanalytic reading reaches a particular limit when confronted with The Lesbian Body. As an alternative to a Lacanian reading and as a supplement to Butler, I would suggest that the logic through which Wittig's lesbian body coheres is fractal.

Fractal geometry offers a way to describe irregular shapes (sometimes called “pathological” in Euclidean geometry) that are self-similar, that is, shaped identically at their micro and macro levels. Fractal geometry has been used, for example, to demonstrate that the shape of the English coastline at one-hundred-mile segments or at one-mile or one-foot segments is identical to its overall shape. The point in my reading of The Lesbian Body as a shape that is comprehensible through fractal geometry is to claim that no fetishized part of the body stands in for or represents the whole (as through synecdoche); rather, as I read Wittig, the lesbian body at every order is identical in morphology to every other order of magnitude. Each part is identical to any other part in shape and therefore the body can be recognized as lesbian from any fragment and can also regenerate the largest organization of the body from any fragment. From any body part, including the “I,” the whole project of writing autobiography without names could be generated.

In Written on the Body, the grieving lover has left the wounded beloved and cannot recollect her. Parts and functions of the body become occasions for meditations upon loss without the prospect of reconstruction. Whereas Wittig has refused patrilineal names and instituted a discourse of the endlessly explorable lesbian body, Winterson seems to go under its interdict and lose a name. Winterson's narrator cannot reach the beloved, but can only move further away, study books on grieving, and wait. The narrator is returned to one body: the narrator's own. This I's discourse on the body does not bridge the violence of separation, but leaves the I on one side of the abyss with only the body s/he can touch as evidence of the other's presence … and absence. There are similar tropes in both texts, but one difference remains the place of the name and the morphological equivalence between identity and name that both will claim. For Wittig, “lesbian” is the signifier of bodily coherence that incorporates violent dismemberment but permits the pleasure of putting the body back together. Without the signifier of lesbian in Written on the Body, the lover's identity persists through and as the absence of Louise, a monument to breaking up: “I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body” (9).

Following the four lessons on the anatomy of absence, Written on the Body returns to the story. It is March and Elgin has promised to call with news about Louise's condition. But something has shifted, and it is not just what was left of the plot. Interruptions in the style of the lessons recur in the narrative as it drives toward an ending that is distinct from the storytelling style of the first section and informed by the self-reflexivity of the second section's excursion into the body. The ending reflects on the process of writing (perhaps the most narcissistic gesture of all because it entails the representation of the self to the self and an engagement with the gap that structures representation), and the identity that emerges from this shift in the third section is the author-identity which, Foucault argues, is always disappearing: the identity signified by the autobiographical performative “I am writing.”¹⁵

The third section breaks from the confines of storytelling to become more self-reflexive, almost an allegory of storytelling, and finds Winterson resuming her interest in fantasy. The differing form of each section offers differing strategies for writing on the body and as such form an experiment in alternative morphologies (of the lover's body, of the body of the writing, of sexuality). Whereas the first section is more conventional in narrative terms and the second section meditates upon anatomy and absence, the third section is disorienting in terms of time, and in its willingness to turn phantasmatic Louise loose as the uncanny. When the narrator finally decides to find Louise and set it all right, attempts to track her down turn up only traces and dead ends. The places where the narrator might find Louise are now, more than ever, the narrator's own body. Yet Louise, phantasmatic in the first section, and spectral in the second, is now, curiously enough, “back.”

Louise returns in the penultimate paragraph, paler and thinner, but alive. But the shimmering real into which Louise enters is loaded with signifiers of writing and textuality. Winterson concludes:

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. … I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. … Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.

(190)

In its conclusion, Written on the Body appears to be more prequel than sequel to The Lesbian Body. The lovers have reunited and their bodies grow to incorporate the world that can now contain them both. Here, to be “let loose in open fields” may signify the same expansive and fictive desire for limitlessness that namelessness has signified throughout the text. Winterson's refusal to anchor the narrator through the name “lesbian,” or her textual practice through the name “autobiography,” has allowed for a particular inquiry into the limits of intelligibility within the representation of identity. Nonetheless, the ending turns back upon the project itself as the narrator wonders: “I don't know if this is a happy ending.”

This hesitant moment may well suggest the next best question to pose within the terms of what I have been describing as Winterson's project. We should allow this moment its charm: Could a narrator who asks “why is the measure of love loss?” resist asking whether the story has a happy ending? Still, and with no damage to pleasures besides charm, I am concluding that Written on the Body allows for an exploration of figures of facticity. Winterson has assembled a code for reading around the nexus of identity. She plays with the semiotics of naming as an i.d. code, and investigates the slippage between names and things in a way that reworks the meanings among sex, gender, sexuality, and autobiography as problematical, uncertain, even enigmatic. To emphasize the connection to Wittig, we should remember that Wittig has argued that women are made knowable through the category of “sex” as a forcible interpretive act and that “sex” is a category she considers thoroughly political, without ontology, and constituted through a violent assault on the grounds of ontology.¹⁶ For her “[t]he category of sex does not exist a priori, before all society. And as a category of dominance it cannot be a product of natural dominance but of the social dominance of women by men, for there is but social dominance” (5). “Sex” as it prefigures “gender” and the autobiographical body for women is not primarily, then, a lived construction so much as a nonlived obstruction.¹⁷

Thus, to “be” a woman already indicates a kind of material violence. Winterson and Wittig reject autobiography as the narrative account of a woman's subjection. That Winterson chooses to tell a love story focused upon the intensity of embodied longing without a gender marker may mean less that the narrator doesn't feel like a lesbian than that she doesn't feel like a woman in precisely the way that Wittig does not, and, therefore, refuses that identification. For Wittig, the name “lesbian” trumps patriarchal kinship, makes it impossible for it to tell its story. Writing twenty years later, Winterson is more skeptical about whether a different name (and the substitute order it proclaims) escapes the juridical. In this she plays poststructuralist to Wittig's structuralist. For Winterson, a name is still a name and while namelessness may not smash the juridical, it sure throws a wrench in the works. Taken intertextually, Winterson's and Wittig's work frames a question for self-representation and lesbian representation: if the continued possibility of self-representation is currently being renegotiated through autobiography without names, is this a happy ending? “I don't know,” as a self-reflexive signature of dubious tone, indicates the need to read absences and the resistance to conventions of autobiographical, gendered, and sexual representation as revisions of the real.

Notes

1. Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1994), 141.

2. See her Polemical Introduction to The Apparitional Lesbian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) for a briefing on this thesis. The familiar term “thinly veiled autobiography” further suggests the ghostliness of autobiography. Some readers look for autobiography everywhere, as if it were everywhere, and when they find a certain kind of text they suggest that its art is subordinate (“thinly veiled”) to its real existence as autobiography. Writing, in this view, merely drapes the real recalling the metaphors of language as the clothing of thought or existence.

3. Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987).

4. Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon, 1986; first published in French, Paris: Minuit, 1973).

5. See Judith Butler's work on the performative, especially in “Critically Queer,” GLQ 1 (1993): 17–32. Performatives are those speech acts in which the saying is the doing, as in Searle's example, “I now pronounce you,” from the wedding ceremony. A declaration of identity such as “I am a lesbian” is performative of identity in a context in which speech is conduct. This logic underpins the U.S. military's deeply problematic “don't ask, don't tell” policy. I call attention to the performative here to show how Winterson's refusal to make such a declaration can be read as resistance in a climate of surveillance and punishment. A performative can be an autobiographical utterance and to decline it is part of Winterson's limit-testing about the representation of sexuality and identity.

6. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (New York: Vintage, 1989); Sexing the Cherry (New York: Vintage, 1991).

7. Gabriele Annan, “Devil in the Flesh,” New York Review of Books, May 4, 1993, 22–23.

8. Sarah Schulman, “Guilty with Explanation: Jeanette Winterson's Endearing Book of Love,” Lambda Book Review 3, no. 9 (March-April 1993): 20.

9. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

10. In this context, see Teresa de Lauretis's Practice of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) for a discussion of loss and fantasy in lesbian representation and reading.

11. See Lacan's “The Subversion of the Subject,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), for a fuller discussion of this dynamic, especially 299, 304, 315–16.

12. See her discussion in “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 91.

13. The Lesbian Body was translated by David Le Vay who is described in the foreword as an anatomist and surgeon.

14. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 72.

15. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

16. Monique Wittig, “The Category of Sex,” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 1–8.

17. See my Autobiographics for an elaboration of this point.