THERE IS A city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face. This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so, it will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you here. Your course in compass reading will fail you. Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to squares they have never heard of, over canals not listed in the notes
If you want to produce something immediately freeing and strangely interesting, let your characters or readers get lost!
Losing yourself allows for the intervention of chance and the joy of being found: perhaps in a rather different way than you were originally lost!
Here in the extract above, if Venice is a city of masks and masquerades, then it is a perfect setting for the unconventional; for the love affair that renders losing one’s heart a literal occurrence, so that a metaphor becomes actualised and forces the reader to rethink the metaphors we live by.
For here in Winterson’s wonderland of Venice, we ‘hear’the rhythm of wandering and wondering through the climb and fall of Winterson’s prose. We sense the experience of disorientation through a narrative which strips away our co–ordinates of the real.When the real falls away we are left with unconstrained fancy and imagination: a life lived through the liberation of ‘what if?’
If we have lived our lives through our own carefully monitored compass of being, then what happens when a traveler finds themselves in an unfamiliar place where habits are no longer reliable, and we dare to risk being ‘lost’ in as many ways as we care/dareto imagine.
I love the idea of substitutions in Winterson’s version of Venice. She suggests that this city’s signs are suggestive of things other than their conventional interpretation; she makes us blink at the possibility of a shifting world, where the boundaries between the possible and impossible become permeable and shifting.