Jeanette Winterson 1

Fiery Constellations: Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry" and Benjamin's Materialist Historiography
Author(s): Angela Marie Smith

Source: College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 21-50
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Fiery Constellations: Winterson's
Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin's

Materialist Historiography
Angela Marie Smith
Near the end of Jeanette Winterson's
Angela Marie Smith is assistant
Sexing the Cherry (1989), the image of a professor of English and Gender
redeeming fire links two historical

moments. In 1666, one of the novel's narra
tors, the mammoth dog-breeder Dog

Woman, disgusted by England's political cor
ruption and act of regicide, the consequences
of which seem manifest in London's pollu

tion and the Great Plague, determines that
the city should "'burn and burn until there is
nothing left but the cooling wind'"(164), and
Studies at the University of
Utah. She has published on the

body politics of American
Depression-era fiction, and most

recently, in Post Script, on dis
ability in New Zealand cinema.
takes her opportunity: "I did not start the fire
. . . but I did not stop it. Indeed, the act of

pouring a vat of oil onto the flames may well
have been said to encourage it. But it was a

sign, a sign that our great sin would finally be
burned away. I could not have hindered the
work of God"(165). In 1990, an unnamed

female protester whose emotional and politi
cal alliance to Dog-Woman has been estab

lished through her visions of a "huge and
22 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]
powerful"alter ego (142), camps by a mercury-contaminated river. Disgusted

by corporate and governmental abuses of power and nature, she is inspired to
act to change history: "'Let's burn it,' she said. "Let's burn down the facto
ry'"(165).
The convergence of these two moments of anger at political and envi
ronmental corruption, with their acts in the name of the oppressed, charac
terizes Sexing the Cherrys effort to interlace past and present, to conceive and
enact an historical practice that challenges a linear history upholding the

interests of the powerful. The novel's use of narrative connections across time
also invokes Walter Benjamin's concept of constellations of past and present
as revolutionary, potentially redemptory moments. Indeed, the juxtaposition
of Winterson's novel with Benjamin's essays, "The Storyteller"and "Theses
on the Philosophy of History/'produces its own powerful constellation:

Benjamin's thoughts tease out from Winterson's playful text the larger philo
sophical matters at stake in telling (hi)stories, while Winterson's luminous
characters flesh out Benjamin's ideas, imbuing historical and political issues
with personality and humor, and insisting on matters of sex and gender
obscured in Benjamin's theories. Tracing the commonalities and divergences
of these texts renders philosophies of history more immediate, reveals the
ways in which fiction and theory can speak to one another, and foregrounds
the politics of narrative and interpretation.
Winterson's novel and Benjamin's essays combine potentially contradic
tory materialist, postmodern, and redemptive elements in their historio
graphie imaginings. Certainly, both authors are fascinated with a particular
practice of telling history, a "materialist historiography"that challenges linear
"historicism,"constellates past and present moments, attends to economic
and political structures, makes heard the voices of the disempowered, and
conceives of their capacity to act historically and revolutionarily. But, in
deploying narrative strategies now characterized as postmodern, Benjamin
and Winterson also emphasize the inevitably textual status of history. Rather
than mandating any totalizing historical view, Benjamin implicitly calls for,
and Sexing the Cherry enacts, a hybridic historical narrative pieced together
from the fragments buried by historicism. Finally, "Theses"and Sexing the
Cherry conjoin struggles of the oppressed with visions of moments which
break open or transcend history: the former with its theological vision of
Messianic time, and the latter with a fantastical fusion of love, light, and the
human spirit. Such elements complicate readings of these texts, connoting
idealist, transcendental, or Romantic philosophies apparently in conflict with
the political outlook of materialism and the ironies of postmodernism. But
for both authors, the textual and philosophical yoking of secular and theo
logical impulses is central to the conception of a radical politics. Interpreting
Angela Marie Smith 23
these texts' interrelationships, then, is a matter of attending to their contra

dictions and warnings against totalizing narratives, while heeding their calls
to tell stories in hybridic and ethical ways.
Benjamin and "Materialist Historiography"
The critical and philosophical heritage of Walter Benjamin is much
debated. Scholars have noted in his works influences of neo-Kantian ideal
ism, German Romanticism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxist historical materi
alism, all developed in relation to his religious background, thwarted aca

demic aspirations, and struggle against encroaching Fascism.1 Considering
"The Storyteller"and "Theses"alongside Sexing the Cherry helps illuminate a
dialectic between idealistic and materialist imperatives, and enables a fuller
appreciation of the novels desires for political and metaphysical transformation.
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1968d; written 1940, published

1950), one of Benjamins last pieces of writing, encapsulates this apparently
conflicting impulse.2 The essay condemns the prevailing form of historiog
raphy, "historicism,"and envisages a mode of telling history?"[materialistic
historiography"(262)?that is associated with "the struggling oppressed

class[,] itself. . . the depository of historical knowledge," and that challenges
the hegemony of historicism and its conception of linear, progressive time,
or "homogenous, empty time"(261). For Benjamin, linear, teleological modes
of history construct the political status quo, including Germany's move toward
Fascism, as the only possible history: "the adherents of historicism . . .

empathize ... with the victor" (256). Materialist historiography must work in
the interests of oppressed classes and "brush history against the grain" (257)
to uncover their voices.
Such historiography connects apparently disparate events to make clear the
structures and patterns of power, the "state of emergency "in which we exist:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency"in
which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a con
ception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clear
ly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this
will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why
Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it
as a historical norm. (Benjamin 1968d, 257)
The continual privileging of the present by "historicist"narrative makes

impossible any comprehension of the inter-relationship of past and present,
and naturalizes Fascism's rise to power. Thus, a form of history must be prac
ticed that connects disparate events, makes visible the state of emergency that
shapes the modern world, and enables the revolutionary "constellation"of the
past with the present, in a moment filled with the "time of the now" (263),
which halts and interrupts "progress." Such revolution is here conceived both
politically and theologically: according to Benjamin, materialist historiogra
phy makes possible the entry of the Messiah, and the commencement of a
Messianic time in which the constellations of past and present are under
stood and silenced histories are redeemed.
"The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov"( 1968b;

written 1936) also concerns itself with ways of narrating history. Benjamin
posits "historiography"as "the common ground of all forms of the epic" (95),
and the epic, in turn, as progenitor of both story and novel. The story is pre
sented as a vanishing mode of historiographical narrative related to the

"chronicle,"which tells history, rather than explaining it in the manner of the
historian. Benjamin invokes and commends in the chronicle mode of histo

riography a communal sense of participation in a divine, unexplained pat
tern; this belief in pattern is re-embodied in the storyteller, who is the chron
icler "preserved in changed form, secularized, as it were"(96). Thus, there
exists in chronicle/storyteUing a sense of wholeness, of meaning and pur
pose, whether divinely or secularly oriented.
However, in the modern world, storytelling?exemplified here by the
works of Russian writer Nikolai Leskov?is dying, and the information and
explanation of the historian triumph in the novel form. In contrast to the
many voices and "many diffuse occurrences"of the story, the novel embodies
homelessness, and "is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle"(Benjamin
1968b, 98).The novel shifts away from storytelling's multiple and communal
expressions, its participation in the rhythms and meanings of life, toward soli
tary consumption. People in scattered isolation are forced to seek in the
novel, in the life and death of its character(s), a sense of the meaning of lived
experience, in which they no longer participate. "The Storyteller,"then,
apparently mourns the loss of "communicable experience"(84) and dis

dains the contemporary world of "information"and events in newspapers
"shot through with explanation"(89), a world not open to reinterpretation
and retelling.
However, many Benjamin scholars assert a more nuanced reading of
"The Storyteller." Irving Wohlfarth comments that, indeed, "a melancholy
sense of'the world we have lost'... pervades [Benjamin's] story," but that "it
is because he is vanishing that the storyteller's beauty is now so significantly
enhanced"(1981,1003).3 Benjamin views this "moment of transition"(1004)
as an opportunity as well as a death-knell, and conceives of the world as a

place in which "Storytelling has become a dead end. To that extent history
cannot be told in a traditional way"(1005). For Benjamin, "the storyteller still
remains the teleologkal end of the narrative," and "The Storyteller"promises
his resurrection (1005); nevertheless, until that moment of redemption anoth

er way must be found to tell history.
A more complex and materialist understanding of "The
Storyteller" emerges in considering it alongside Benjamin s "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(1968e; written 1936). This piece

contrasts the "aura"of past works of art, their "[u]niqueness and perma
nence,"with the "transitoriness and reproducibility"of modern forms such as
films, "picture magazines and newsreels"(223). It might thus seem to antici
pate the apparent mourning of "The Story teller"for a more holistic narrative
practice grounded in ritual and tradition. But "The Work of Art"notes that
the glowing aura of works of art derives specifically from their distance from
the present, their enshrouding in tradition and ritual, just as the beauty of the
storyteller is enhanced as he diminishes. Contemporary art, Benjamin con

tends, is freed from tradition and politicized by mechanical reproduction:
"mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical
dependence on ritual .... Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be

based on politics"(224). Read against "The Work of Art,"then, the story
teller's narrative may constitute a form that cannot sustain humanity in the
modern era, when we require a "heightened state of mind" (238) to deal with
the repeated shocks of our technological existence.4 As Julian Roberts con
cludes, "the dreaming poetic delights of the older form have to fall victim to
this changeover"to a more modern, technological world (1982,184). Modern
forms such as film thus valuably shock us out of a traditional, auratic, and som
nolent relationship to the past, rendering art immediate and political.

The divergent tendencies of "The Storyteller,"its nostalgia for tradition
versus its favoring of radical change through technology, thus parallel the
apparent conflict within "Theses": its materialist insistence on class struggle
as the engine driving history and social change, on the one hand, and a mys
tical notion of the entrance of Messianic time as the ultimate source of lib
eration, on the other. What is certain, though, is a mandate to employ the
forms at hand?those of tradition and modernity?to counter linear and

dominant historical narratives. Even if idealistic storytelling is becoming
impossible, there may yet be a manner of narration open to us which refus
es hegemonic understandings of history, which makes space for the voices of
the oppressed, and which renders possible the Messianic moment of redemp
tion. Into these spaces of possibility enters Sexing the Cherry, a story-telling
novel that insists on the possibility of narrating history in radical ways.5
Sexing the Cherry and Materialist Historiography
Sexing the Cherry resists the categorization of "novel"as delineated in

"The Storyteller" by telling its (hi)story in a "materialist historiographie"
vein, undermining dominant modes of historical narrative, asserting the

interp?n?tration of past and present, soliciting and counseling communities
of readers, and invoking a transcendent moment of redemption. The histor
ical moment that the text primarily occupies is London from the 1640s
through until the Fire of London in 1666. The novel is alternately narrated
by Dog-Woman, a monstrous woman who breeds dogs, and by her adopted
son, Jordan, who, inspired to travel by his childhood sighting of the first
banana brought to England, sails the seas with his mentor, John Tradescant,
in search of exotic lands and fruits.6 Jordan's character thus corresponds to
one of Benjamin's archetypal story-tellers, the seaman (1968b, 85), while
Dog-Woman suggests the other archetypal storytelling figure, "the [wo]man
who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local
tales and traditions" (84). Together, like the artisan class of the Middle Ages as
Benjamin conceives it, these figures "combin[e] the lore of faraway places,
such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best
reveals itself to the natives of a place"(85). The novel thus proffers a form of
counsel: Jordan's and Dog-Woman s stories presuppose an audience, and con
struct themselves as an appeal to assumed readers/listeners already familiar
with the tales Jordan retells and with the events that Dog-Woman describes,
who are implicitly asked to re-visit these stories and re-connect them to their
own experience.
Dog-Woman's stories describe the rise of the Puritans, the Civil War, the
execution of Charles, the rule of Cromwell, and the Restoration of the
monarchy. Like the chronology that Benjamin praises in "The

Storyteller,"which is "embedded ... in natural history"(1968b, 95) because
of the regular appearances in it of death, Dog-Woman's story encompasses
death as a natural component of life and meaning. She witnesses the deaths
of her beloved King, Charles I, and of Tradescant; and she is there when the
bodies of the Puritans are hung out:
Tradescant is dead. Cromwell is dead. Ireton and Bradshaw, the King's pros
ecutors, frequently found together beneath soiled sheets, are dead.

Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw ... were dug out on 30 January and hung
up for all to see on the gallows at Tyburn. . . . Thousands of us flocked to
watch them swinging in the wind, what was left of them, decay having
made no exception for their eminence....

It did render me philosophical, though, to sit at Tyburn and watch the mer
riment and great wonder of passers-by, especially small children, who had
never thought what it might mean to rot.
And yet rotting is a common experience. We all shall, even myself, although
I imagine it will take a worm of some endeavour to make any impression.
(Winterson 1989,118)
Like Benjamin s storyteller, Dog-Woman narrates a history that works in

conjunction with a natural and divine plan: when plague erupts in London,
Dog-Woman sees it as "God's judgement on the murder of the

King"(Winterson 1989, 159). But Dog-Woman's relation to history is not
one of passive dependence upon divine intervention. As noted above, when
the Great Fire begins, her own role in it is emphasized, but as an agency in
concert with divine imperatives: "I could not have hindered the work of
God"(165).
Dog-Woman narrates her stories from a position of marginalization: she

is poor, female, large, and ugly. Her storytelling defiantly reconstructs histo
ries shattered by dominant forces, as when she sees working-class women
piece together a stained-glass window shattered by the Puritans: "They gath
ered every piece, and they told me, with hands that bled, that they would
rebuild the window in a secret place.... I left them there and walked home,
my head full of things that cannot be destroyed"(Winterson 1989, 66). Soon
after, she burns piles of Puritan newspapers, in an act which contrasts the
transience of printed information with the endurance of memory, and asserts
the existence of the stories of the marginalized, underlying dominant histo

ry and awaiting their moment of revelation.
The novel's second narrative perspective, that of Dog-Woman's son

Jordan, also calls upon storytelling strategies to question conventional views
of history. Benjamin suggests that to brush history against the grain we draw
on elements inherent to class struggle: "courage, humor, cunning, and forti
tude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every
victory, past and present, of the rulers" (1968d, 255).These qualities gain vivid
expression in storytelling, and specifically in the fairy-tale, of which

Benjamin writes, "The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the
teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale
had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the
need created by the myth"(1968b, 102). The fairy-tale employs numerous
strategies to diminish the power of the "myth"of historical progress, as in "the
figure of the fool"which "shows us how mankind 'acts dumb' toward the
myth"(102). The fairy-tale "meet[s] the forces of the mythical world with
cunning and with high spirits"in order to subvert (102); similarly, the humor
of the re-told fairy-tales in Sexing the Cherry demythologizes power struc
tures and dominant categorizations, specifically those of gender and class.
The novel rewrites, amongst others, the fairy-tale of "The Twelve

Dancing Princesses." Jordan, having spent the night at a house with no floors,
but only ceilings, seeks the dancing woman he met there. In a town whose
inhabitants "knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them
elsewhere"(Winterson 1989, 43), Jordan is directed to the house of The

Twelve Dancing Princesses, whose story he has heard, and who may know
the dancer he seeks. The eldest sister re-tells their story, how the sisters flew
every night from their beds to a "silver city"where the "occupation of the
people was to dance" (48). Their father suspected their exploits but was
unable to fathom how they escaped or where they went. Finally, a "clever
prince"caught them flying through the window. The women were betrothed
to the prince and his eleven brothers. But in this retelling, this end is not the
end: "'as it says [we] lived happily ever after. We did, but not with our hus
bands'"^).
One by one the women tell their stories, in which they abandon or kill
abusive, repressive, or unfaithful husbands. In one story, the husband is in fact
a woman, whom the Princess must kill to save her from a vengeful mob; and
in another, a rewriting of Rapunzel's story, the "witch"is an older woman
who lives in a tower with Rapunzel, and who is attacked by the prince:
Then he carried Rapunzel down the rope he had brought with him and
forced her to watch while he blinded her broken lover in a field of thorns.
After that, they lived happily ever after, of course.
As for me, my body healed, though my eyes never did, and eventually I was
found by my sisters, who had come in their various ways to live on this
estate.
My own husband?
Oh well, the first time I kissed him he turned into a frog.
There he is, just by your foot. His name's Anton. (Winterson 1989, 52)
These tales' strategies of reversal and humor reconfigure power structures: the
women violently reclaim their right to freedom and to self-narrative, and their
narratives question mythical norms. The violence of these stories demands

acknowledgement of what is at stake in narrative and historiography.7
But the novel's storyteller of the past is also, in keeping with the vision
of "Theses,"constellated with the political needs of the present. The impor
tance of historic/fairy-tale narratives for the present becomes overt toward
the novel's end, when the stories and identities of Jordan and the Dog
Woman make contact with two Londoners in 1990. Nicolas Jordan, like
Jordan, is a young man fascinated by the sea and sea-travel, while the
unnamed woman of the present draws on her visions of Dog-Woman to
negotiate her experiences as a fat, taunted child, and as an adult outraged at
dominant commercial and political powers. The sudden and significant

moments of past and present interconnection experienced by these charac
ters echo Benjamin's evocation of the "constellation"between one era and
another (1968d, 263): "The past can be seized only as an image which flash
es up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again_For
every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own
concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (25 5).
Nicolas Jordan experiences this constellation as a naval cadet on the

Thames Estuary, regarding the "constellations"one night with a friend, who
comments:
You know, if we were turned loose in our galaxy, just let out there one day
by ourselves, it wouldn't look like it does from here. We'd see nothing but
blackness. All those stars that hang so close together are light years apart.
Our chances of finding any star or planet at all, forget about a blue planet
like this one, would be a billion billion. (Winterson 1989,137)
Nicolas's friend thus imagines a pattern which, when one is in the midst of
it, seems empty and disparate, and exudes a sense of homelessness, like that
of the contemporary world in which storytelling no longer sustains belief in
a meaningful pattern. Nicolas is left alone on deck:
I rested my arms on the railing and my head on my arms. I felt I was falling
falling into a black hole with no stars and no life and no helmet. I heard a
foot scrape on the deck beside me. Then a man's voice said, "They are bury
ing the King at Windsor today" I snapped upright and looked full in the
face of the man, who was staring out over the water. I knew him, but from
where? And his clothes . . . nobody wears clothes like that any more.
I looked beyond him, upwards. The sails creaked in the breeze, the main
spar was heavy with rope. Further beyond I saw the Plough and the Orion
and the bright sickle of the moon.
I heard a bird cry, sharp and fierce. Tradescant sighed.
My name is Jordan. (Winterson 1989, 137)
In this moment of recognition, the character of Nicolas experiences an

instant of simultaneity with the past, with Jordan, and intuits a meaningful,
fleetingly glimpsed relationship between the two. It is an experience of his
tory that contrasts with the linear narrative of Nicolas's The Boys' Book of
Heroes, a litany of war and imperialism (Winterson 1989, 131-33).
Similarly, the Dog-Woman of the twentieth century recalls a moment

"when I was a schoolgirl and getting fatter by the day" (Winterson 1989,
146). Leaving school, she walks on Waterloo Bridge to look at St Paul's and
Westminster:
I watched the sun sliding behind the buildings, and as I concentrated the
screeching cars and the thudding people and the smells of rubber and
exhaust receded. I felt I was alone on a different afternoon.
I looked at my forearms resting on the wall. They were massive, like thighs,
but there was no wall, just a wooden spit, and when I turned in the oppo
site direction I couldn't see the dome of St Paul's.
I could see rickety vegetable boats and women arguing with one another
and a regiment on horseback crossing the Thames.
I had to get on to Blackfriars, there was someone waiting there for me.
Who? Who?
Now I wake up in the night shouting "Who? Who?" like an owl.
Why does that day return and return as I sit by a rotting river with only the
fire for company? (Winterson 1989, 146-47)
The moments of "constellation"make visible for both characters the "state of

emergency "that they inhabit, providing them with an awareness of history
and historical narrative that spurs them on to political protest.
Sexing the Cherry makes overt its attack on "historicism,"questioning the
truth and the authority of dominant historiography in a list that enumerates
"LIES"of normative historiography, including, "There is only the present and
nothing to remember"and "Time is a straight line" (Winterson 1989, 90).
Any ascription to the totalitarian mode of historical narrative, to linear and
finite understandings of time, and to a single "true"reality makes it possible

to merely exist in the present without any awareness of responsibility to the
past; Benjamin and Sexing the Cherry both emphasize the need for present
"[historical materialists"to redeem the past (1968d, 254).
Winterson's characters thus reconceptualize their historical existence,
and, acknowledging their responsibility, act r?volutionarily: the woman, now
a chemist, conducts a "one-woman campaign"against pollution in rivers

(Winterson 1989,140), and Nicolas Jordan is inspired to join her. That their
decisions participate in a historiographical resistance to the "historicist"con
ception of progressivist time can be seen in Jordan's musing in front of a
painting of men on horseback:
When I saw this painting I began by concentrating on the foreground fig
ures, and only by degrees did I notice the others, some so faint as to be
hardly noticeable. My own life is like this, or, I should say, my own lives. For
the most part I can only see the most obvious detail, the present, my pres
ent. But sometimes, by a trick of the light, I can see more than that. I can
see countless lives existing together and receding slowly into the trees.
(Winterson 1989,102)
Similarly, the protesting woman envisages escape from the present, "this fore
ground that blinds me to whatever may be happening in the distance. If I
have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won't be single, it will be mul
tiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may
inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the

past"(144). Awareness of an intimate relation to the past prompts a reconsid
eration of relation to the present and the future; both Jordan and Nicolas, ini
tially dreaming of heroic journeys like those that underwrite historicism, are
drawn instead to the "countless lives"and histories obscured by the fore

ground of historicism.
Sexing the Cherrys emphasis upon pollution and the destruction of nature
also evokes a Benjaminian critique of progressivist history and the interests it
serves.The relationship to nature embodies for Benjamin the proximity to or
distance from the world of storytelling: when storytelling flourished, man
perceived himself to be in harmony with nature; now, the exploitation of the
working classes is intertwined with "the exploitation of nature,"and the pre
vailing world view "recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not
the retrogression of society" (1968d, 259).Thus, the woman fantasizes a world
in which she might coincide with nature and its meting out of justice,
inspired by Dog-Woman as her "alter ego . . .a woman whose only morality
was her own and whose loyalties were fierce and few"(Winterson 1989,142).
When Nicolas reads in the paper about her vigil by a river polluted with
mercury he joins her, and is with her as she suggests they burn down the
offending factory. Like "the revolutionary classes at the moment of their
action"described by Benjamin, the pair are aware "that they are about to
make the continuum of history explode"(1968d, 261).
If Sexing the Cherry's characters grapple with the contrast between
received historicist narratives and their own experiences of historical and
politically charged moments, the novel itself also revises conventional histor
ical views of the Puritan Revolution. On the one hand, the novel's apparent
sympathy for Charles I and the Restoration seems to contradict a revolu
tionary perspective, underwriting a reactionary move back toward monarchy.
But, on the other, it is exactly through this revision that Winterson "brushes
history against the grain."As Greg Clingham notes, Winterson contests the
way in which, in the work of canonical historians, "the past is 'written' so as
to justify the ideological view that the revolution fulfilled a progressive polit
ical and cultural pattern"(1998, 66). Sexing the Cherry thus speaks back to a
linear writing of history. As Jeffrey Roessner comments, while "the [civil] war
can be read as part of a movement toward a more democratic form of gov

ernment based on civil law rather than divine authority,"Winterson finds an
alternative interpretation, linking "the war with the development of oppres
sive ideals of scientific objectivity and the sovereign individual"(2002,107).
Sexing the Cherry thus enacts a materialist historiography, tracing under
dominant historical narrative the development of bourgeois and colonial sys
tems of oppression. But the novel's stories foreground not only the class
struggle emphasized by Benjamin, but also the struggle of women within
patriarchal society, and of lesbian desire within a heterosexist paradigm.
Winterson's rewriting of history is feminist as well as materialist: as Roessner
points out, the novel "depicts the Revolution as a move toward ideals of
rationality and objectivity?ideals that helped establish the value of sexual
repression and the naturalness of heterosexuality"(2002,108). Dog-Woman's
gender politics and the lesbianism and sex traversing the Princesses' stories
indicate that Sexing the Cherry's challenge to historicism also requires the
gendering and sexing of narrative. The consideration of Winterson's text
alongside Benjamin's essays thus draws attention to Benjamin's elision of

gender politics, and testifies to what Joan Scott terms the "deeply gendered
nature of history itself"(1988,18).
Sexing History
Dog-Woman's agency within history suggests her as an exemplar of the

specific female "historical actor"whose story feminist history seeks to repre
sent (Scott 1988,25). More overtly, the many descriptions of her unusual and
huge body throughout the text emphasize the role of gender in structuring
both history and historiography. In Gender and the Politics of History (1988),
Scott has outlined two "propositions"for a feminist historiography. First, she
states, we must be attentive to gender as "a constitutive element of social rela
tionships based on perceived differences between the sexes" (43) and as

embedded in historical symbols, normative concepts, "social institutions and
organizations"(43), and "subjective identity"(44). In her personal narrative of
her first, thwarted love, in her failure to conform to dominant images of
womanhood which grants her a certain freedom, in her fierce, independent
mothering of Jordan, and in her friendships with marginalized women such
as her neighbor the witch and her prostitute friend, Dog-Woman simultane
ously embodies and defies the gendered conventions which structure her
experience and her history.8
Scott's second proposition for a feminist historiography involves under
standing the ways in which "gender is a primary way of signifying relation
ships of power"(1988,44). Such a proposition reveals the often blind depend
ence on sexual difference that has structured historicism, and that remains
unacknowledged in Benjamin's historical materialism, as at the end of

"Theses,"where he declares: "The historical materialist leaves it to others to
be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello.
He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the contin
uum of history"(1968d, 262).9 Terry Eagleton notes the "virile swagger"of
this passage, which uses "sexist mythology "to present "[h]omogenous histo
ry"as "whorelike both in its instant availability and in its barren empti
ness"(1981,45). In contrast, Eagleton insists,"It is women, not men, who are
the most exact image of the oppressed; it is in child-birth and child-rearing
that the desolate condition of the workers is most graphically figured ....
Woman, notwithstanding Benjamins fantasy, is not the whore of history but

the ultimate image of violation. She embodies the final loss, that of the fruits
of the body itself "(47).10
Benjamin elsewhere acclaimed the prostitute: he criticized society for
seeking to separate "Eros"from "culture and morality"(Roberts 1982, 31),
and held that the prostitute valuably "sexualised the spirit" (qtd. in Roberts
1982, 31). Sexing the Cherry, in making sex central to its historical revision,
strives for a similar sexualization of the spirit and condemnation of hyp
ocrites who both exploit and denounce prostitutes. The crime of Puritans
Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace, who meet such a grisly end in a
brothel at the hands of Dog-Woman, lies in their division of their public
abhorrence and repression of sexuality from their private sexual acts. But
Sexing the Cherry also challenges the location and validation of the prostitute
in a purely figurative realm, and disputes Benjamin's denigration of the

whore/prostitute figure, by presenting prostitutes as historical agents from a
potentially revolutionary class, enacting a violent retribution against the
Puritans who both oppress and take advantage of working women. The novel
also challenges Benjamin's sexist depiction of the historical materialist, by

depicting the potent female figure of Dog-Woman as the history-teller "man
enough to blast open the continuum of history."Through the very presence
of her monstrous and female body in Windsor, in the brothel, and in church,
Dog-Woman connects for us the political, the religious, the gendered, and
the sexual, warning that any truly alternative history must follow in her foot
steps or risk repeating the errors of historicism.
However, while Dog-Woman's narratives suggest the interweaving of

gender, sex, and power, her idealization of monarchy, her violent murderous
ness, and her dismissal of Jordan's historical philosophies also suggest her
inability to encompass fully the implications of gendered power structures.11
Where Dog-Woman does not attain the theoretical and critical perspective
required for feminist historiography, it is, as noted above, her constellation
with her twentieth-century alter-ego that points toward a feminist historio
graphies obligation. The woman protestor draws strength from Dog-Woman
as her "patron saint"(Winterson 1989,142): "I am a woman going mad. I am
a woman hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant" (138). She envis
ages a scenario in which she invades the World Bank boardroom and the
Pentagon, stuffing "[m]en in suits"(138) into a huge bag, taking them to "the
butter mountains and wine lakes and grain silos and deserts and cracked earth
and starving children and armed dealers in guarded places,"and training them
in "feminism and ecology": "Then they start on the food surpluses, packing
it with their own hands, distributing it in a great human chain of what used
to be power and is now cooperation" (139). In the convergence of the Dog
Woman of the past and the feminist of the present, Sexing the Cherry indi
cates how storytelling might be mobilized in the historical materialist strug
gle, but does so by attending to a feminist historiography that reveals, as Scott
envisages, relationships between gender and power.

Hybrid Cherries: Postmodern Historiography
As we have seen then, Dog-Woman constitutes a teller of (hi) stories that

disrupt historicism: she is a voice for a community of the marginalized, pro
viding what Roessner calls "a counter-memory of Charles's execution that
challenges traditional histories of the war" (2002, 107). However, Dog

Woman is also anachronistic in seeking the restoration of a prior, idealized
and monarchical condition. Her storytelling, by itself, cannot provide a truly
modern and revolutionary narrative form, for she does not connect the insti
tutions she encounters to philosophies of history: suspicious of her son's
notion of "journeys folded in on themselves like a concertina," she holds that
"the earth is a manageable place made of blood and stone and entirely
flat" (Winterson 1989, 19).
It is Jordan's perspective that complicates the certainty of Dog-Woman's
narratives, emphasizing that the kind of storytelling delineated in "The

Storyteller,"a form which we necessarily idealize from our presentist out
look, is neither accessible in the contemporary period, nor adequate to bring
about revolution. Jordan's thoughts about history exhibit a postmodern sus
picion of master narratives, linearity, and absolute truth, and in so doing open
Sexing the Cherry to the criticism that it inconsistently mandates social and
political change while undermining any given narrative, including those of
the marginalized, as inevitably constructed and contingent. But, in employ
ing the postmodern historical form, Sexing asserts the validity and political
significance of a certain, ethical, but inevitably textual, engagement with his
tory. Thus, the novel echoes the postmodern elements of Benjamin's own
critical and intellectual practices, which?while often summoning theologi
cal visions of unity, which we shall examine below?assert the necessity and
value of constantly refashioning the past in the different and imperfect lan
guages of the present.
The contingency of storytelling, its persistent refusal of single truth, per
vades the retellings in Sexing the Cherry. When Jordan finds the dancing
princess, the missing twelfth sister, she retells the fairy-tale. She commences
with the wedding day and her escape from the church, and later describes
the beginning of the story: the enchanted flying city, and its nightly anti
gravitational pull on the light-weight sisters, as well as their downfall on the
night they were to make their home in the city and "drift through space for
ever"(Winterson 1989, 111). But Fortunatas version of her flight from the
church on the wedding day conflicts with the story the sisters told Jordan:
"But the story they told me about you was not the same. That you escaped,
yes, but that you flew away and walked on a wire stretched from the steeple
of the church to the mast of a ship at anchor in the bay."
She laughed. How could such a thing be possible?

"But," I said, "how could it be possible to fly every night from the window
to an enchanted city when there are no such places?"
"Are there not such places?" she said, and I fell silent, not knowing how to
answer. (Winterson 1989,106)
The shifting of stories is paralleled by an uncertainty about time and truth.

The novel opens with Jordan's "This is the first thing I saw,"followed by a
description of fog drifting toward and encompassing him (1), and Fortunata
also begins her narrative with "This is the first thing I saw,"and describes a
winter scene shortly before her wedding day (104). But Jordan's narrative
deems these beginnings impossible, and associates them with the "LIES"of
"historicism": "It was not the first thing she saw, how could it have been?
Nor was the night in the fog-covered field the first thing I saw. But before
then we were like those who dream and pass through life as a series of shad
ows. And so what we have told you is true although it is not"(106). This
uncertainty of memory extends to a concept of time that cannot be under
stood in linear terms: "MEMORY l:The scene I have just described to you
may lie in the future or the past. Either I have found Fortunata or I will find
her. I cannot be sure. Either I am remembering her or I am still imagining
her. But she is somewhere in the grid of time, a co-ordinate, as I am" (104).
For Winterson, memory and storytelling are no more guarantors of some
kind of truth or authenticity than is "historicism,"and Jordan delineates this
ambiguity of memory:
Did my childhood happen? I must believe it did, but I don't have any proof.
My mother says it did, but she is a fantasist, a liar and a murderer, though
none of that would stop me loving her. I remember things, but I too am a
fantasist and a liar, though I have not killed anyone yet. ... I will have to
assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I
remember.
Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common

knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fan
tasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. I have heard people say
we are shaped by our childhood. But which one? (Winterson 1989,102)
To proceed in the narrative mode of storytelling, to use fairy-tale and its cun
ning and high spirits to challenge the history of historians is a necessary
enterprise on the terms of this text. But it cannot appeal to the certainty that
"historicism"deems possible and desirable. The novel's oscillation between

the narratives of Dog-Woman and Jordan, then, challenges linear historicism,
but refuses to simply replace it with a singular and privileged narrative form
of its own. Rather than an idealized articulator of stories in a divine plan,
Dog-Woman is, despite her embodiment of female historical agency and

empowerment of the oppressed, "a fantasist, a liar and a murderer"as much
as any of the victors who have written history. Jordan's questioning explo
rations of narrative and interpretive uncertainty emphasize the impossibility
of any true and totalizing rendering of history.
Sexing the Cherry thus exemplifies the postmodern historical novel, or
what Linda Hutcheon terms "historiographie metafiction,"which "prob

lematizejs] both the nature of the referent and its relation to the real, histor
ical world by its paradoxical combination of metafictional self-reflexivity

with historical subject matter"(1988, 19). For Hutcheon, postmodern play
with language and imagery is a valid and valuable approach to history, for
"[t]he past really did exist"(92) but "we only know of those past events
through their discursive inscription, through their traces in the present" (97).
But at its extreme, this logic threatens to undermine any conception of a rev
olutionary historical knowledge, because "[hjistoriographic metafiction . . .
keeps distinct its formal auto-representation and its historical context, and
in so doing problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge,

because there is no reconciliation, no dialectic here?just unresolved con
tradiction" (106).
For some critics, then, the postmodern tendencies of Sexing the Cherry
undo any authentic engagement with history. Clingham notes critiques of
the novel such as Michael Gorra's contention that the novel fails to integrate
the worlds of Dog-Woman and Jordan (1998, 62), and Rose Tremain's asser
tion that "there seems to be no attempt to inhabit the age, either in image or
in language, so that in the end the choice of century seems arbitrary" (qtd. in
Clingham 1998,63).12 But for Clingham, such criticisms are based on expec
tations of realistic conventions, rather than an acknowledgement of the fan
tastical act required to ethically represent an utterly different historical peri
od. Rather than dismissing history, Clingham asserts, "textuality implies and
actually requires for its full operation an independent historical experience
and order"(68).The postmodern historical novel must thus both respect that
history's alterity and seek to connect with it: "when we understand that the
novel operates on the principle of alterity, and proposes historical and lin
guistic difference as the basis of its functionality?then we can argue that
Sexing the Cherry's remarkable poetic textuality has as its object and purpose
a representation of the seventeenth century rather than a pastiche of it or an

escape from it" (68).
Such an interpretation of Sexing the Cherry's relationship to history holds
that an "authentic"relationship to the original, the historical period in ques

tion, is not possible. Clingham considers Winterson's act of authorship as
more like a translation, and, referencing Restoration concepts of translation as
"stepping out of one present into another through art" (1998, 71), presents
artistic representation as one mode of making the past pertinent and imme
diate in the present. The act of translation is one to which Benjamin attend
ed in his "The Task of the Translator" (1968c; written 1923), where he imag
ined it as a process not of imitation but of renewal: "no translation would be
possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in
its afterlife?which could not be called that if it were not a transformation
and a renewal of something living?the original undergoes a change" (73).

In its fantastical and textual elements, then, Sexing the Cherry draws attention
to its inevitable distance from its historical setting, but also avows the possi
bility of, in Benjamin's words, "incorporatfing] the original's mode of signi
fication" (78). As Clingham argues, the novel achieves this?and denotes its
historical setting as deliberate, not arbitrary?by engaging specific philo

sophical concepts of the Restoration period, including the notion of transla
tion and, as discussed below, the sacred/secular symbol of the King's body.
In presenting translation as an act of artistic reproduction, Benjamin has
frequent recourse to metaphors of natural reproduction; a translation is cre
ated with "birth pangs"and exhibits "kinship"but not necessarily "alike

ness"to the original (1968c, 73). He also invokes botanical reproduction,
referring to the "hidden seed"of pure language (75) that is ripened by each
act of translation (77). While this inspirational vision of pure language is dis
cussed more fully below, the botanical imagery here is relevant also to the
"impure"and imperfect acts of translation employed in the material world,
and to Winterson's own botanical figure for her postmodern historiographi
cal narrative.
The titular hybrid cherry of the novel embodies and metaphorizes its
historical practice, a process of translating a remote history into the present
in a way that illuminates that history's relevance and immediacy. In the novel,
Jordan, with Tradescant, brings exotic fruits back to England, and enables
them to grow there. He learns the art of grafting:
Grafting is the means whereby a plant, perhaps tender or uncertain, is fused
into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each
other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent. In this way fruits
have been made resistant to disease and certain plants have learned to grow
where previously they could not.
There are many in the Church who condemn this practice as unnatural,
holding that the Lord who made the world made its flora as he wished and
in no other way. (Winterson 1989, 85)
Jordan defends his activity in the face of his mother's criticisms: "I tried to
explain to her that the tree would still be female although it had not been
born from seed, but she said such things had no gender and were a confu
sion to themselves .... But the cherry grew, and we have sexed it, and it is
female" (Winterson 1989, 85).
Just as exotic fruit falters in a harsher climate, storytelling cannot flour
ish in, and is not adequate to, the shocks of modern existence. Just as botan
ical grafting produces the stronger, hybridic cherry, so the artistic grafting of
fairytales and historical narrative produce postmodern historical fiction, an

artistically and blasphemously created form. Rather than naturally propagat
ing, as through seed, Sexing the Cherry's historiographie form is "unnatu
raT'kin to storytelling and history: it "transplants . . . the original"(Benjamin
1968c, 75) .Yet, like the cherry that is still female, the novel's postmodern nar
rative is also still a form of storytelling, as argued above, soliciting readers to

heed and act on its counsel.13
The concept of grafting makes possible a less pessimistic reading of the

modern world, Nicolas Jordan's world, where information proliferates, divid
ing communities and entrenching hegemonic understandings of history. A
confusion of narrative forms shapes Nicolas's perceptions: novels, history
books, paintings, and movies about war, the ocean, and space. At the same
time, in ways that recall Benjamin's "The Work of Art," the very multiplicity
of these forms makes them potential sources of alternative modes of histori
ography. It is, after all, a newspaper article that introduces Nicolas to the
modern-day Dog-Woman, and rallies him to her cause. Sexing the Cherry is
thus, as Eagleton interprets the story described by "The Storyteller,""a kind
of hybrid of the auratic and mechanically reproduced artefacts, redolent of
mythological meaning yet amenable to the labour of interpretation" (1981,
60).The most auratic stories are also those whose remoteness and compact
ness render them most available for "recycling"in the present (60).They are,
in Benjamin's own words, "seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the
chambers of pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative
power to this day" (1968b, 90). But powerful stories also show the mark of
the artisan, the storyteller: "The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the
way the hands of a potter cling to the clay vessel" (92). The production of the
hybrid cherry thus takes an exotic fruit and reproduces it through the unnat
ural but artisan-like intervention of technology, just as auratic stories and
dominant histories are grafted together by the postmodern novelist to trans
late the materialist and possibly redemptive elements of the old forms into
the modern world.
As well as a model for a new form of historiography, the hybrid is also a
model for different and productive concepts of gender.14 Because postmod
ernism is seen as deconstructive and anathema to political commitment,
some critics have felt that Sexings feminist and lesbian politics run counter
to its postmodern tendencies, reversing but also reinscribing sexual bina
risms.15 However, as Laura Doan points out, with the figure of the hybrid,
Sexing the Cherry does more than parody or disrupt patriarchal and hetero
sexist discourses, depicting a creative and political act that opens up multiple
conceptions of self and sexuality: "What [Judith] Butler pioneers theoretical
ly, Winterson enacts in her metafictional writing practices: a sexual politics of
heterogeneity and a vision of hybridized gender constructions outside an
either/or proposition, at once political and postmodern" (1994,153-54).
Clearly, then, consideration of this novel alongside Benjamin's essays illu
minates a convergence around matters of postmodern and materialist histo
riography: these are narratives that at once deconstruct dominant narratives
and articulate politically suppressed stories with an aim to revolution. But the
texts share a third, significant tendency. Even as they link practices of histor
ical narrative to material conditions of oppression?on grounds of class and,
for Winterson, gender?both Benjamin and Winterson continually invoke a
moment of transcendence or redemption, toward which the act of material
ist historiography strains. For even as Benjamin presents translation in what
we might perceive as postmodern terms?"a translation touches the original
lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursu
ing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of lin
guistic flux" (1968c, 80)?the act of translation nevertheless gestures toward
and strives to realize a linguistic unity in "pure language"(73): "it is transla
tion which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual
renewal of language"(74). The fires which constellate past and present in
Sexing the Cherry, then, also approximate and seek to bring about the
"pure"light of a kind of revelation, one which seems at odds with the polit
ical and postmodern elements of the novel, but which, as with other appar
ent contradictions, underpins the novel's hybridic power.
The Redemption of History
For Benjamin, the historical materialist practice of narrative mandates

both storytelling with an eye to subverting the totalitarian regimes that
exploit and silence the oppressed classes, and the creation of a world in which
the Messianic conjunction of past, present, and future may occur. This con
junction may ensure that the model of our relationship to the future resists
Benjamin's interpretation of Paul Klee's painting: "the angel of history"fac

ing toward the past where "historicism""keeps piling wreckage upon wreck
age "and being propelled into the future by the storm of progress (1968d,
257). Only the practice of materialist historiography can make possible the
moment of transcendence in which, according to Benjamin, "redeemed

mankind receives the fullness of its past.... [Ojnly for a redeemed mankind
has its past become citable in all its moments"(254). For Benjamin, theology
is the hunchbacked dwarf that necessarily controls the chess game from
beneath the board, even as it seems that the dwarfs "puppet," the automaton
of "historical materialism,"makes the moves (253).
As already indicated, the relationship in "Theses" between materialist
politics and Messianic redemption is much debated, with some critics assert
ing that theology is reconceived politically, others that Messianic transcen
dence becomes the ultimate means of transformation, and still others that the
essay fails to successfully reconcile such opposing perspectives.16 Certainly,
redemption implies the material world as a fallen and profane space, await
ing the Messianic arrival which will bring about paradise or utopia. This
appeal to an other-wordly intervention seems to contradict political strug
gles toward a more just worldly existence. Yet, as Susan Buck-Morss notes, "It
is no secret that the Jewish Messianic conception, which already has the
attributes of being historical, materialist, and collective, translates readily into
political radicalism in general and Marxism in particular"(1989, 231). For

Jewish intellectual and Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem,
whereas "Christianity conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual
and unseen realm," Judaism "has always maintained a concept of redemption
as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the
community" (1971,1).
The religious belief system on which Benjamin draws, therefore, makes
space for a suggestive and intimate relationship between theology and mate
rialism, in which the practice of materialist historiography is required to make
possible the redemption of history, and in which the concept of redemption

facilitates materialist historiography. Thus, in Benjamin's story, while the the
ological dwarf makes the chess moves, it is the historical materialist puppet
that "enlists the services of theology"(1968d, 253).17 Like each act of trans
lation which strives toward and glimpses pure language, each materialist nar
rative of history seeks to realize the destruction of historicism's "homoge
nous, empty time"and the redemption of history in all its fullness.

Utopianism and political action thus co-exist, for the fact that Messianic his
tory is a violent break with historicism?rather than the inevitable conclu
sion of historicist progression?mandates urgent political and historiograph
ie intervention. In Buck-Morss' words,
this Utopian desire can and must be trusted as the motivation of political
action (even as this action unavoidably mediates the desire)?can, because
every experience of happiness or despair that was ours teaches us that the
present course of events does not exhaust reality's potential; and must,
because revolution is understood as a Messianic break from history's course
and not its culmination. (Morss 1989, 243)
The capability and responsibility to create revolution resides with us: "Like
every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak
Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim"(Benjamin 1968d, 254).
We can find a point of contact between Benjamin's theologically

informed visions and Winterson's Utopian glimpses in the imagery of light.
Discussing the Kabbalah, a mystical belief system informing Judaism,

Scholem describes how, in creating the world, God "emit[ted] beams of
light"into vessels, "but the vessels could not contain the light and thus were
broken."Consequently, the light was scattered, some "sparks of
holiness"falling into the material world, where they "yearningly aspire to rise
to their source but cannot avail to do so until they have support"(1971,45).18

Peter Brier contends that, rather than accepting this teaching as "literal
truth,"both Benjamin and Scholem "saw in it a metaphysical, ethical, aes
thetic, and even political model for the "repair of the world"(2003, 82). This
spiritual narrative thus uses pure light to evoke the realm of redemption and
unity, and figures "sparks"of light and fire as the presence ofthat realm in the
material world; such figures may gesture towards a beyond, but advocate a
materialist politics attuned to the sparks of alternative histories, times, spaces.
It is also through images of light that Sexing the Cherry provides glimpses
of a realm in which time and history are redeemed and simultaneously

undone. Jordan confronts this vision when he comes across his ideal and fig
mentary dancing Princess:
At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to become points
of light. . . . She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She
says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. . . .
It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the
legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues
of flame.... [A]t a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long
hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each
has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning
seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infin
ity. (Winterson 1989, 77)
In our seemingly solid and fallen world, space and light provide impressions
of an infinity within matter and time. The novel's two epigraphs articulate
worldly facts which testify to another reality: the first references the "Hopi,
an Indian tribe, [who] have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tens

es for past, present and future"19; and the second asserts that "Matter, that
thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your
hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty
space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality
of the world?"Winterson's "points oflight,"like the Kabbalic "sparks of holi
ness,"index a realm of pure light, a utopie realm glimpsed in the "time of
the now. " Winterson, like Benjamin, strives to imagine a historical practice
constantly guided by visions of a radically different relationship to matter,
space, and time.
As with Benjamin, the extent to which this Utopian vision is religious
remains unclear in Sexing the Cherry. Winterson grew up in a Pentecostal
household, but moved away from religion. Just as Benjamin held a theologi
cal view of language, touched upon in "The Task of the Translator,"that in
our fallen world, acts of language may aspire upwards toward the Word of
God?the pure language of creation and naming, "the magical language of

things" (Roberts 1982,112)20?so Winterson thought of language as a point
of contact between the material and the divine, writing in Art Objects, "I
grew up with the Word and the Word was God. Now, many years after a sec
ular Reformation, I still think of language as something holy" (1996,153). As
well, Clingham points out, Winterson's novel is fascinated with "the medieval
idea of the king's two bodies?the sacred and the secular"and the ways "the
symbolic and religious power of this fiction is shattered in Charles's sacrile
gious execution"(1998, 71). Rather than adhering to a conservative defense
of monarchy's divine right, however, Clingham suggests that Winterson
attends ethically to the historical significance of this concept: "her critique
draws on a seventeenth-century appreciation for the symbolic significance of
cultural forms (including monarchy), as well as the contingency of knowl
edge, scientific as well as humanistic, that recognized the metaphorical con
straints of language"(72). Winterson adapts the sacred status of the King,
"appropriating his symbolic significance into a critique of the historical and
cultural movements that begin with the Civil War" (72).
Winterson thus respects and draws upon the symbolic powers of lan
guage and religious belief, but, like the historical materialist puppet, enlists
that power to break open received histories, all the while straining to illumi
nate the spiritual transcendence of which the sacred-secular body of the

King is but a profane spark. Significantly, Jordan's vision of the dancers and
their points of light follows immediately upon the King's execution, suggest
ing the Utopian power Winterson hopes to unleash with her blasphemous
translation of the Puritan Revolution. The artistic act of yoking together past
and present is thus also a political act, in keeping with Buck-Morss' vision of
Benjamin's "negative theology,"which "replaces the lost natural aura of the

object with a metaphysical one that makes nature as mortified glow with
political meaning."Buck-Morss continues, "Unlike natural aura, the illumi
nation that dialectical images provide is a mediated experience, ignited with
in the force field of antithetical time registers, empirical history and

Messianic history"(1989, 244-5). Winterson's use of the fairytale of the
Dancing Princesses and other stories thus acts politically and metaphysical
ly, both uncovering the marginalized voices of women and lesbians and
using images of light to assert the transformative powers of feminist and les
bian narratives.
Despite having consonance with theological discourse, the transcen

dence figured in the novel is, like the hybrid cherry, irreligious: Jordan
declares, "I'm not looking for God, only for myself and that is far more com
plicated. . . . [I]f the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought
home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all,
He has no need for us, being complete"(Winterson 1989, 115-16). The

potentially redemptive forces embraced by the novel revolve rather around
love, passion, and an honest evaluation of one's fantasies and desires: Jordan
asks "Was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I
searching for the dancing part of myself?" (39). Sexing the Cherry's tales of
desire and love?idealized, passionate, romantic, imperfect, unrequited?con
struct human passion and interconnection as forces that shape, and can per
haps redeem, history. The visions of sexual difference and desire that perme
ate Sexing the Cherry are powerful dynamics in upsetting hegemonic, patriar
chal history, and creating alternative histories and visions of a redemptive
moment. For Winterson, therefore, historical narrative practice does not sim
ply make possible the entrance of the Messiah. It may also itself bring about
the redemption of history. If Benjamin ultimately insists on the seed of pure
language and "the precious but tasteless seed"of time in the "nourishing
fruit of the historically understood"(1968d, 263), Winterson foregoes these
originary and pure seeds for worldly acts of artistic grafting inspired by fan
tastical visions.
As already noted, the uncertain relationship of the mystical to the polit
ical has been criticized in both Winterson and Benjamin's texts. Just as, for
some, Benjamin undercuts his historical materialism with appeals to an out
side, Messianic element, so, for example, Roessner faults Sexing the Cherry for
seeking to escape the material identity of the gendered body with "an essen
tially Romantic drive to locate a ground of being outside time, space, and
material existence" (2002, 112). For Roessner, Winterson s effort "to kick
over the traces of patriarchal order by denying the categories of time and
space on which it is based"(119) dissolves into a counter-sexism that privi
leges irrationality and desire and" elide [s] the material existence of her char
acters, particularly women" (110).
But if Winterson's novel fails to reconcile its feminist politics with its
philosophical fantasies, it does so in the same way that entire schools of phi
losophy have failed to settle, finally, upon a single ontological or epistemo
logical narrative. Roessner's critique does not acknowledge the dialectical

motion between the embodied, earthy, Dog-Woman, at once revolutionary
and reactionary, and her son Jordan, with his metaphysical wanderings
through oceans, fairytale worlds, and beams of light. On the one hand, Dog
Woman repeatedly reminds us of the dangers of idealism: "The Puritans, who
wanted a rule of saints on earth and no king but Jesus, forgot that we are
born into flesh and in flesh must remain"(Winterson 1989, 70). On the
other, Jordan tells Greek myths which invoke mystical and alchemical trans
formation: "the transformation from one element to another, from waste
matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mys
terious. No one really knows what effects the change"(150). Committed

engagement with the material and political world and visions of alternative
and Utopian realms thus reach out to one another. As the female protestor of
1990 concludes: "I don't know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps
this is the only one and the rest is just rich imaginings. Either way it doesn't
matter. We have to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdepen
dent" (146). Somewhere between those possibilities lies a hybridic, imperfect,
ethical, materialist historiography, a way of narrating that breaks open linear
history in favor of the fragmented voices of the many and in hopes of revo
lution, and, simultaneously, dreams idealistically of a more holistic, liberating
place in space and time.
In examining Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin's essays together, then, we
find strong commonalities in their concern for the politically marginalized
and their forgotten stories alongside their evocations of transcendent and
otherworldly redemption. The texts' interrelationships, however, do not pro
vide a clear and indisputable conclusion as to what will bring about the spir
itual and political liberations they envisage. Certainly, we can trace in their
inner contradictions a dialectical process, a movement spiraling upwards
towards a synthesis?the nature of which is uncertain but relates to some
kind of redemption for history's forgotten and oppressed. But, given the
irresolution of those contradictions within the texts, the ongoing dynamic
between potentially conflicting philosophies, and the necessary contingency
that thus attends our interpretations, it is also important to understand the
texts in relation to the kind of political postmodernism described by

Hutcheon, in which the textual and political effects of materialist and reli
gious discourse signify as much as the "real"existence of a mystical sphere.
In their crossings between spiritualism and secularism, religion and pol

itics, transcendence and materialism, both Benjamin and Winterson generate
glimpses of principles which could shape an ethical and even revolutionary
narrative and historiographie form. Further, their narratives provide a model
for their own renewal and transplantation in the act of interpretation. In jux
taposing these theoretical/fictional texts we respond to their invitation to
constellate past and present, producing a blasphemous hybridic re-reading
which seeks to honor the alterity of the original texts and pass along their
counsel, while inevitably reconceiving them in line with our own political
concerns and metaphysical desires.
Notes
The author thanks those whose commented on earlier versions of this essay, par
ticularly John Mowitt and the readers of College Literature.
1 An extensive body of work in English analyzes the range of Benjamin's writ

ings and philosophical ideas: important texts include Terry Eagleton (1981); Richard
Wblin (1982); Julian Roberts (1982); Susan Buck-Morss (1989); Graeme Gilloch
(2001); and Margarete Kohlenbach (2002).
2 The essay's tide is sometimes translated as "On the Concept of History."
Benjamin did not intend "Theses" for publication, fearing "enthusiastic misunder
standings" (qtd. in Buck-Morss, 1989, 252). But the essay's powerful suggestiveness
has rendered it one of his most widely discussed works, mandating its continued,
careful consideration.
3 In the same vein, Roberts states, "Lesskov's art, and his world view, were beau
tiful; but in accordance with Benjamin's theory of beauty, they were beautiful pre
cisely because their historical redundancy was making them fade away"(1982, 180).
4 Benjamin also writes about shock and modern existence in "On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire" (1968a; written 1939). For more detailed considerations of the differ
ent kinds of "experience"invoked in Benjamin's work, and of his notion of

"shock"and its relation to Freudian theory, see, for example, Eagleton (1981),
Roberts (1982),Wolin (1982), and Howard Caygill (1998).
5 This essay focuses only on Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, but similar themes
can be and has been fruitfully considered in relation to Winterson's many other nov
els, which also explore sexual and gender matters in postmodern narrative forms, as
well as Winterson's essays about writing in Art Objects (1996). Along with those
employed in this essay, useful articles on Sexing the Cherry include Alison Lee (1994);
Christy L. Burns (1996); Marilyn R. Farwell (1996); Susan Onega (1996); Elizabeth
Langland (1997); and Bente Gade (1999).
6Tradescant is an historical figure: see Greg Clingham on John Tradescant, father
and son, both royal horticulturalists and travelers (1998, fn. 9, 80-1).
7 Winterson's strategy of rewriting fairytales to undermine dominant patriarchal
narratives echoes Benjamin's own use of the Sleeping Beauty tale to assert class
struggle as the galvanizing force in history. In a letter to Gershom Scholem,
Benjamin wrote: "I would like to tell in a different way the story of the Sleeping
Beauty. She is asleep in her thorn bush. And then, after so many years, she awakes.
But not to the kiss of a prince charming. It was the cook who awakened her, when
he smacked the kitchen boy; the smack resounded with all the pent-up force of those
long years and re-echoed throughout the castle" (qtd. in Eagleton 1981, 44).
Comments Eagleton, "The sound that will stir [truth] to life is the rough noise of
class violence, issuing from the lowliest quarter of the castle" (44).
8 As a historian of the lower-class, Dog-Woman also fulfils Scott's mandate of
attending to the overlapping of issues of class with the symbolic register of gender.
9 This image, read against "The Storyteller "confirms Benjamin does not view
story telling solely through nostalgic and idealizing lens: the metaphor aligns the
fairy-tale, with its generic opening line "Once upon a time,"with mythic or histori
cist narrative that simultaneously severs and conflates past and present, rather than
constellating them in politically productive ways. In Eagleton's words, "In a single ges
ture, the past is at once relegated to a safe distance and, robbed of its turbulence, sur
rendered to the hegemony of the present"(1981, 45). The image suggests that, what
ever the past values of fairy-tale, it alone is not adequate for contemporary needs.
10 Similarly, Roberts notes that while Benjamin questioned conventional views

about prostitutes, he approached their exploitation in "quasi-religious"rather than
"socio-economic"terms (1982,30), asserting that the prostitute valuably "'sexualised
the spirit'"(31), but "entirely pass[ing] over the material context of prostitution" (32).
Still, Benjamin elsewhere considers more consciously the entwinement of gendered
and sexual fantasies with conceptions of the past, most clearly in "A Berlin
Chronicle" (1978a; written 1932) where Berlin's prostitutes shape his reminiscences
about the city of his childhood. And, as Eagleton points out, Benjamin more astute
ly acknowledges women's double oppression under capitalism in a review of Brecht 's
play The Mother (1981, fh. 87, 47). For more extended analyses of gender, the femi
nine, and the figure of the prostitute in Benjamin's texts, see Christine Buci
Glucksmann; Buck-Morss; and Helga Geyer-Ryan.
11 Here, too, Dog-Woman recalls a characteristic of Benjamin's work, embody
ing a violent tendency in his writing discussed by Peter Demetz:
there was in his character and in his thought a half-hidden thirst for violence (more
poetic than political). His studies of Sorel and his defense of anarchist spontaneity
(as suggested in his essay on violence) against any Marxist 'programming' of action
reveal something in him that precedes all political theory and perhaps has its ori
gins in a mystic vision of a Messiah who comes with the sword to change the world
into white-and-golden perfection. His recurrent images of barricades, exploding

dynamite, and the furies of civil war (as, for instance, in the essay on Surrealism) have
an almost sexual if not ontological quality, and should not be obfuscated by pious
admirers who would like to disregard the deep fissures in his thought and person
ality. (Demetz 1978, xii)
Thus, Dog-Woman carries out a fantasy of divinely mandated and justified violence
that exceeds any programmatic uprising of the proletariat or oppressed women, in
keeping with the contradictory elements of the historiographie practice envisaged
by Benjamin and Winterson.
12 For the original sources noted here, see Gorra (1990) and Tremain (1989).
13 Thus, as Eagleton reads Benjamin,
It is not that we constantly revaluate a tradition; tradition is the practice of cease
lessly excavating, safeguarding, violating, discarding and reinscribing the past. There
is no tradition other than this, no set of ideal landmarks that then suffer modifica
tion. Artefacts are inherently available for such reinscription, just as Benjamin's mys
tical theory of language sees 'translatability' as an essential quality of certain texts.
(Eagleton, 1981,59).
14 The continued relevance of gender and sexuality to Jordan's postmodern his
toriography is also made clear in his temporary assumption of female guise in order
to understand relations between women and men, and women's role in the world
and its history.
15 See, for example, Roessner (2002); Sara Martin (1999).
16 For example, Scholem found in the piece a despair with secular politics pre
cipitated by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, and a corresponding "leap into transcen
dence" (qtd. in Roberts 1982, 198). But Bertolt Brecht, who lamented the "ghast
ly"mystification of historical materialism in other Benjamin works, concluded of the
"Theses"that "the small work is clear and avoids confusion (despite all metaphors
and judaisms)"(qtd. in Buck-Morss 1989,246; fh. 179, 451). RolfTiedemann's 1975
essay contends that Benjamin's Messianism is here conceived in secular terms, but
that the text fails in its attempt to "unite the irreconcileable" (1983-84, 96), and falls
back upon "the enthusiasm of anarchists"rather than "the sobriety of Marxism" (95).
Roberts is frustrated with the essay's apparent return to an earlier transcendentism,
its reduction of political revolution from "the locomotive of world history"to "'grab
bing the emergency cord', which would have as its consequence the 'messianic ces
sation of events happening'"(1982, 219). Such a position, Roberts believes, is refut
ed by "the work of Benjamin's maturity "(219), which validates careful analysis of his
torical processes over "uncontrolled visions"(221) and eschews "sudden mass illumi
nation"in favor of "the rational encouragement of an underlying historical

process,""the organic climax of processes in humanity's 'second nature'"(222). Susan
Sontag provides an overview of Benjamin's practice perhaps most useful for our con
sideration of Sexing the Cherry: "Passionately, but also ironically, Benjamin placed
himself at the crossroads. It was important for him to keep his many 'positions' open:
the theological, the Surrealist/aesthetic, the communist. One position corrects

another: he needed them all"(1979, 27).
17 See Kohlenbach (2002,187).

18 This particular conception of creation comes from the Kabbalist school of
Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-72) (Scholem 1971,43).

19 For the interrelationship between Sexing and the works of Benjamin Lee
Whorf on the Hopi language, see Peter Buru (1997).

20 For Benjamin's comments upon language, as well as "The Task of the
Translator,"see "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"(1978b; writ
ten 1916); and "On the Mimetic Faculty"(1978c; written 1933).
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Benjamin: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New
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Illuminations. Walter Benjamin: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.
Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
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Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
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Benjamin: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New
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Fiery Constellations: Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry" and Benjamin's Materialist Historiography

Author(s): Angela Marie Smith

Fiery Constellations: Winterson's

Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin's

Near the end of Jeanette Winterson's

Angela Marie Smith is assistant

redeeming fire links two historical

tors, the mammoth dog-breeder Dog

of which seem manifest in London's pollu

Studies at the University of

Utah. She has published on the

Depression-era fiction, and most

ability in New Zealand cinema.

takes her opportunity: "I did not start the fire

. . . but I did not stop it. Indeed, the act of

have been said to encourage it. But it was a

burned away. I could not have hindered the

work of God"(165). In 1990, an unnamed

cal alliance to Dog-Woman has been estab

22 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

powerful"alter ego (142), camps by a mercury-contaminated river. Disgusted

enact an historical practice that challenges a linear history upholding the

on the Philosophy of History/'produces its own powerful constellation:

Angela Marie Smith 23

these texts' interrelationships, then, is a matter of attending to their contra

The critical and philosophical heritage of Walter Benjamin is much

debated. Scholars have noted in his works influences of neo-Kantian ideal

ism, German Romanticism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxist historical materi

alism, all developed in relation to his religious background, thwarted aca

"Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1968d; written 1940, published

historiography"(262)?that is associated with "the struggling oppressed

Fascism, as the only possible history: "the adherents of historicism . . .

The continual privileging of the present by "historicist"narrative makes

24 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

"The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov"( 1968b;

sented as a vanishing mode of historiographical narrative related to the

historian. Benjamin invokes and commends in the chronicle mode of histo

apparently mourns the loss of "communicable experience"(84) and dis

as an opportunity as well as a death-knell, and conceives of the world as a

Angela Marie Smith 25

his resurrection (1005); nevertheless, until that moment of redemption anoth

A more complex and materialist understanding of "The

Storyteller" emerges in considering it alongside Benjamin s "The Work of Art

in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(1968e; written 1936). This piece

storyteller is enhanced as he diminishes. Contemporary art, Benjamin con

dependence on ritual .... Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be

nolent relationship to the past, rendering art immediate and political.

eration, on the other. What is certain, though, is a mandate to employ the

forms at hand?those of tradition and modernity?to counter linear and

Sexing the Cherry resists the categorization of "novel"as delineated in

26 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

vein, undermining dominant modes of historical narrative, asserting the

execution of Charles, the rule of Cromwell, and the Restoration of the

monarchy. Like the chronology that Benjamin praises in "The

ecutors, frequently found together beneath soiled sheets, are dead.

made no exception for their eminence....

I imagine it will take a worm of some endeavour to make any impression.

Angela Marie Smith 27

Like Benjamin s storyteller, Dog-Woman narrates a history that works in

Dog-Woman sees it as "God's judgement on the murder of the