From Jeanette Winterson, 'The PowerBook': Epigraph 7.1 - Ambiguity

Today I come to the one epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me that I find it most difficult to talk about directly--because of my reluctance to divulge certain things about the final section of the novel, which it introduces. Partly as a result of this difficulty, I'll end up saying more about the general problem of ambiguity than about exactly what happens in that final section.

The epigraph comes from The PowerBook, a novel by Jeannette Winterson (born 1959) first published in the year 2000. Winterson has been a novelist (and essayist) to read and follow since three of her earliest novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry (author page at Amazon.co.uk, author page at Amazon.com). Her work (most often compared to that of Virginia Woolf, especially the Woolf of Orlando) arouses strong passions and in my experience never fails to fire the reader's imagination. I recommend her website and the rest of her work as the ideal introduction.

As with other epigraphs in Kiss, the very act of quotation gives Winterson's original sentence a change of context. First, the sentence:

There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

The context, in The PowerBook, is a description of love as a force larger and more powerful than individual subjectivity, psychology, can account for. For better or worse, its context in A Kiss Before You Leave Me (and in the rest of this post) is subjective, as a result of the proximity of both (a) a particular epigraph from Plato (which we'll talk about another day) and (b) the final chapter of Kiss.

It's a sentence that, even taken in isolation, provokes strong feelings, depending in part on (a) the reader's experiences of (and approach to) love and (b) the reader's interpretation of the sentence. From time to time I've tweeted each of the epigraphs to Kiss at least once, but this is the only one that ever triggered a strong negative response.

At first glance, the sentence (there on the screen, say, of your ebook reader, at the beginning of the last section of Kiss) does not appear to be ambiguous. There are clearly possible nuances of interpretation (just try to paraphrase it: how rational or how 'Romantic' do you want to make it?; do you want to highlight or tone down the allusion to Christ-like/Christian martyrdom?; etc.)--but it appears to say something like the following: to love another person (or group, or creature, or thing) is to be vulnerable to suffering terribly, like a martyr.

I want to suggest to you, however, that the sentence ('There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet'), in its new context, is ambiguous. And that's the relatively good news: that the sentence can be 'taken' in two ways, a bit like C. Allan Gilbert's 1892 drawing 'All Is Vanity', reproduced here, or a Necker cube (see, in addition to the article in Wikipedia, the presentation here). The bad news is that I'm barred from spelling out the ambiguity of the sentence. It's something that has to fall into place for the reader.

It's not difficult. It doesn't rest on a syntactic ambiguity. It's not richly satisfying, especially for readers who don't yet know A Kiss Before You Leave Me. But seeing the ambiguity (which I can't spell out) and knowing just one thing about ambiguity (which I can)--can put you well on the way to knowing what to make of the end of the novel.

All you have to know about ambiguity--this sort of ambiguity in art or fiction--is that your task, as a viewer or reader, is not to resolve the ambiguity. Not to find some hidden sense (to be sought out) behind some manifest one (to be discarded). It's not an either-or but a both-and... to be embraced and experienced... and understood on its own terms.

Don't take my word for it. Look again at the drawing 'All Is Vanity': we aren't fully seeing it until we see it both ways. Or work through the whole theory of the Necker cube and the lengths to which viewers go to reduce ambiguity: the price they pay. Or read Shoshana Felman's extraordinary study of ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw (here, or included here).

All this may give you a clearer sense of how you deal with ambiguity, and what your options are....

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 2.1 - The Artist, the Model - Striking a Pose

Beryl Bainbridge's novel about Samuel Johnson, According to Queeney, is the source of a second epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. (For the first, and more general remarks about Bainbridge, According to Queeney, and the real-life characters who appear in it, see here.) By the time I came to this passage in my first reading of Queeney I was so much in the habit of smiling indulgently or ironically over what Bainbridge's Johnson did and said (that's the explanation most charitable to me, at least), that I misread it. That's what I believe today, at any rate. I'll explain.

Johnson is of course best known to readers of our time as the subject of James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), considered by many the greatest biography ever written in English. It's a 'classic', part of our or 'our' cultural heritage, one of the 'great books'.

When Boswell is first mentioned in Bainbridge's novel, the future great book is but a gleam in its young author's eye. And Johnson, in this scene, shows little faith in Boswell's ability to capture Johnson's likeness in words:

"[Boswell's account of our conversation] will not be accurate, for man's compulsion is to replicate himself. Think of painting--one has only to examine a portrait to see in the sitter a resemblance to the artist."

Ten years ago, I smiled ironically (and wrongly, I believe) at the skepticism Johnson (Bainbridge's character) expresses about Boswell's accuracy as a verbal portraitist; today, I think, I can better entertain a 'straight' reading of the passage. I used to set more store by Boswell; today I'm more conscious of the tension between Boswell's Johnson and Hester Thrale's--i.e., between the classic, 'great books', canonical version of Johnson on one hand, and Johnson as captured by the other chronicler, who was at one time categorized by some simply as his 'mistress' but whose own writings about him and her era form an alternative account increasingly appreciated in our own time.

What first recommended these lines to me as an epigraph, though, was their introduction of the notion of involuntary self-portraiture, the muddying of distinctions between artist and model, portraitist and 'sitter'. When we first see Miranda posing for Jack, their conversation takes off from his sense that her place is to be nude, his to be clothed; hers to pose, his to depict. While he sketches (and lectures) her, she gives free reign to her imagination... inadvertently planting the seeds for one of his first 'sensations': some fifty pages later, we find him--them--at work on a diptych entitled 'His and Hers', in which artist and model appear to switch roles: in the second panel, he is portrayed as her model, nudity and all. Their differences, their dissymmetry, are by no means dissolved or even suspended: the less expected of the two panels is still an elaborate joke or stunt, and his exhibitionism cannot be cast as a simple corrective. Of course, his career and their relationship are still in the early stages.

But what about the claim made by Bainbridge's Johnson, that the portraitist transforms the sitter, in the sense that portraiture is always to some extent self-portraiture? There may well be some truth to this. Perhaps the (male, let's say) portraitist skews the portrait in his own direction--whereas the (female, let's say) model guides the development of the artist in a less predefined way. This is, at least, one possibility.

From Hanif Kureishi, 'Gabriel's Gift': Epigraphs 1.2 and 5.2 - Art, Imagination and Absence

Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) won international fame (and an Oscar nomination) as the author of the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which Londoners variously marginalized (by ethnicity, class, sexual orientation...) meet, clash, love and, for the most part, find mutual understanding--in Margaret Thatcher's England. I find the film as fresh and powerful (and funny) today as I did over 25 years ago.

Before Laundrette, Kureishi was already playwright-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, and his subsequent career has defied those who would pigeon-hole him as any one thing: novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenplay author or playwright. I drew two epigraphs for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me from his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift (2001; UK Kindle edition here, US paperback edition here). Like Laundrette and Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Gift is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of familial wrangling. Like Buddha, it features prominently a Bowie-like rock icon--in this fourth novel the father's former bandmate, who presents the 15-year-old Gabriel with a sketch that the boy, a budding artist, copies perfectly as the first step in a demonstration of the power of art to mend what's broken.

Accordingly, the two epigraphs we're talking about today resonate more optimistically in Gabriel's Gift itself than when they appear in the context (out of context) of A Kiss Before You Leave Me.

Epigraph 5.2: 'Art is what you do when other people leave the room' (from Gift, chapter 1). In Gabriel's Gift, this is the boy's recollection of a sentence heard on television the night before, now turned into a comforting accompaniment for the solitary creative process of an artist in the making. True, there have been traumatic departures from his household: his twin brother who died as a toddler, and his father, whom his mother has sent packing. But the emphasis in the sentence is on the rightness, the appropriateness of solitary artistic work, and in Kureishi's novel the power of art is, as we've said, fundamentally restorative.... In A Kiss Before You Leave Me, this epigraph introduces the section entitled 'Solo Show', which begins with an inventory of paintings done by Jack Emery in preparation for his first one-man show, but is also about departures affecting or involving him, dissolutions of ties, in both the past and the present, and, to some extent, about the reasons for those dissolutions: rightly or wrongly, art may seem to at least one character in A Kiss Before You Leave Me like what you can finally do when you've left the others behind.

Epigraph 1.2: '"What does an imagination do but see what isn't there?"' (from Gift, chapter 3). In Gabriel's Gift, rock icon Lester Jones is speaking to Gabriel, polymorphic icon to fledgeling artist, affirming the boy in his creative identity and reassuring him of the powerful value of his differentness. (It's a rare 'creative' who receives this message at the age of 15, but it's never too late to read this scene, in its entirety.) Where the question is inserted in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, however--as an epigraph to the first section, 'Seeing Someone'--the reader knows nothing of the 'art' plot and can associate the quotation only with the tortured power and play of the voyeuristic imagination as seen in the culmination of that section. (See the second half of my Sartre post of three days ago, and the earlier discussion of the lyrics of 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'.)

Absence, separation and negativity come to the fore at these moments in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. They may well not be the dominant notes in the novel as a whole--but at these moments in particular the novel feels very different from Gabriel's Gift, which most readers would call Kureishi's sunniest work to date. It's all in the context.