Weight. Jeanette Winterson

      

      Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. Since then she has published many other novels, including The Passion, Written on the Body, andThe PowerBook, a collection of short stories, a book of essays, children's picture books, and the memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She adapted her work for TV, film and stage. In 2006 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

      Source note: the author referred to Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Volume One and Volume Two in her research for this book.

       For Deborah Warner, who lifted the weight.

      Sedimentary rock is formed over vast expanses of time, as layer upon layer of sediment is deposited on the sea bottom.

      Being formed in this way, such rock is usually arranged in a succession of horizontal bands, or strata, with the oldest strata lying at the bottom.

      Each band will often contain the fossilised remains of the plants and animals that died at the time at which the sediment was originally laid down.

      The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete. The process of sedimentation in any one place is invariably interrupted by new periods in which sediment is not laid down, or existing sediment is eroded. The succession of layers is further obscured as strata become twisted or folded, or even completely inverted by enormous geological forces, such as those involved in mountain building …

      The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book …

      Each with a record of contemporary life written on it …

      Unfortunately the record is far from complete …

      The record is far from complete …

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      I want to tell the story again

      Weight of the World

      Heracles

      Thought-Wasp

      Three Golden Apples

      No Way Out…

      But Through

      Leaning on the Limits of Myself

      Private Mars

      Hero of the World

      Woof!

      Boundaries

      Desire

      I want to tell the story again

       Introduction

      Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.

      Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.

      These chance sightings, these portents, these returns, begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face.

      When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realised I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written.

      Re-written. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’

      My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text.

      Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.

      Of course I wrote it directly out of my own situation. There is no other way.

      Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

      Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

      Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.

      Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.

      Against all this, a writer such as myself, who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide rather like Siegfried rowing against the current of the Rhine.

      The Myth series is a marvellous way of telling stories – re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature. All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul’s journey.

      Yes, I want to tell the story again.

       I want to tell the story again

      The free man never thinks of escape.

      In the beginning there was nothing. Not even space and time. You could have thrown the universe at me and I would have caught it in one hand. There was no universe. It was easy to bear.

      This happy nothing ended fifteen aeons ago. It was a strange time, and what I know is told to me in radioactive whispers; that’s all there is left of one great shout into the silence.

      What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

      Your first parent was a star.

      It was hot as hell in those days. It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist. Those ceaseless burning fires and volcanic torments are lodged in us as ultimate fear. The hells we invent are the hells we have known.