‘Boundaries. Desire’: Philosophical Nomadism in Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods

Abstract

The narrator asserts in Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook (2000) that the body’s inner-space, a site of orgasmic pleasure, is an ‘orderly anarchic’ world without frontiers that is free to exist in harmonious equilibrium beyond the death-dealing binaries imposed by nation states, where a sense of belonging is often constructed at the expense of an alien other. Of course, this inner-space is simultaneously acknowledged to be ‘Utopia’, meaning a non-existent no place, or an ideal good place. Indeed, it is interesting that Winterson applies this metaphor of the inner body ‘space which is inside you and inside me’, for, according to Chris Ferns in Narrating Utopia, ‘utopia embodies the longstanding human dream of a return to paradise — a paradise which is in its turn a metaphor for the prenatal security of the womb’ (Ferns 1999, pp. 4–5). I would argue, however, that it is Winterson’s particularly socio-political treatise in this text — in her application of the body as ‘the model of government’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 175) for the Body Politic — to throw down the gauntlet to Western culture and beyond in seeking to promote a utopian land of make-believe through the equally ideal space of fiction. In doing so, she urges us to ‘imagine there’s no countries’ in a cosmopolitical vision of deterritorialized citizens of the world.

In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen beyond bed. This is the model of government for the world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.

Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too scared to do anything else.

But it isn’t power — it’s sex. (Winterson 2001b, p. 175)