There is a city suurounded by water
with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do….find your way, which is easy to do….’
Winterson suggestively locates her greatest novel ( at least in part) in the most ambivalent city on this planet; Venice. Not for nothing did the secretive Daphne Du Maurier encode her sexual ambivalence, her lesbian attraction for Gertrude lawrence in particular, as her ‘Venetian’ feeling. The femininity of Venice with its impossible ‘roads’ and constantly transfiguring panorama contrasts with the harsh ‘masculine’ realities of its political and social hierachies. Its machismo history.
The experince of Disorientation and finding one’s way become metaphysical tropes by which desire beckons us to fulfil or thwart our destiny. Winterson’s great literary debt in The Passion must be to Italo Calvino and his monumentally brilliant ‘dialogue’ between Kubla Khan and Marco polo in ‘Invible Cities’. .In this novel, ‘cities’ are redesribed and reimagined through the elaborate processes of a mind; at bay or at play.
This investment in a ‘city’ of eternal reflection and refraction reminds us all of our own capacity for self-cosnciousness and even narcissism. Everything we do may have a designated or implied audience and Calvino like Winterson is fascinated by the blurring gap between spectacle and spectator. Who is watching and who is being watched? The masque and the masked! Who deals the cards that shape our destiny?
‘..the Queen of Spades…she smiled at me and pulling away her mask revealed a pair of grey-green eyes with flecks of gold…’ ‘somewhere between fear and sex passion is.’
Winterson like Calvino plays with the in-between spaces of the life that is supposedly ‘lived.’ All her metaphors deal with the fragility of connection and the ever shocking recogntion of our own ‘foreignness’ to ourselves:
‘ memories of a single touch. How could anything so passing be so pervasive? But Christ said ‘Follow me,’ and it was done.
Indeed!