Expression in a diffuse landscape: contexts for Jeanette Winterson's lyricism

Knowledge such as this is allowed to anchor only someone who is not suffering from the disease. Sontag notes that a diagnosis of cancer heightens our sense of the body's opacity; only a specialist, such as Elgin, can look at and interpret symptoms and test results, and the patient is often kept unaware of the diagnosis (Illness 12). It is thus narratively appropriate that the narrator forces Louise to disappear once s/he learns of the diagnosis; if Louise's body is a blank slate, what has been definitively written on it is disease--not love--and disease at first seems to defeat the impulse toward lyricism, setting a different scene for language entirely.

With Louise gone, poetry leaves the text; the lover moves into an ugly cold hovel (as opposed to a novel?) in Yorkshire and works in a wine-and-fish bar. The narrator will now try, once again, to read Louise. Just as lyrical love transcends the physical facts of the body, so does the narrator, reading about Louise' s illness, find poetry transcending the dry language of the medical anatomy texts: "Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise" (111). For several pages then Written on the Body breaks into a series of short excerpts from anatomy books, which are set apart in small capital letters and followed by lengthy excursi applying this clinical knowledge to the body of the beloved:

   THE SKIN IS COMPOSED OF TWO MAIN PARTS THE DERMIS AND THE EPIDERMIS.

   Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The
   cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without blood
   vessels or nerve endings. [...] Your sepulchral body, offered to me
   in the past tense, protects your soft centre from the intrusions
   of the outside world. I am one such intrusion, stroking you with
   necrophiliac obsession, loving the shell laid out before me. (123)

This passage contains a number of familiar elements: the use of the lyrical "you," the question of time, and the heavily metaphoric imagery. These stylistic elements have changed, however; "you" does not immediately introduce a moment of lyricism but instead a passage in which the narrator applies the cool clinical language to Louise's body. It is only when the body is "offered to me" that lyricism begins--but this time it is a limited poetic moment, taking place "in the past tense" rather than in the collapsed timescape of the lover's usual lyrical monologues. And even the elaborate metaphor insists on death, the sense of things past; moreover, Louise is now a shell, and however the narrator might try to intrude upon her, s/he is left stroking the surface, unable to read what is written there. And, paradoxically, this frustration of the desire to enter the body seems to enable (or perhaps force) him/her to enter the language--to write lyrically since it is impossible to seduce lyrically.