‘We all tell the stories of ourselves all the time and this is part of the experience of life,not simply a secondary reflection of it…’ ( Elspeth Graham, Her own Life)
Rereading The Passion I was struck by its rhythm. And this rhythm owes so much to its ‘echoic’ quality. For the narrative is retrospective and as such, is a re-experiencing of the original life-lived . The narrators have heard their words in their heads perhaps many many times and this invests the novel’s langauge with resonance and power. It reads as if every word is inevitable and fully formed. The words are emerging out from some private world of the head, and moving out there, into a world beyond the solitude of self-hood. Silence erupts into speech.
This sense of replay is wonderfully felt through the beat of the novel. It is one of the most memorable books I have ever read and this is because I can hear it in my head. And just as we say of someone, I like their voice, I could listen to them all day, so it is with Winterson’s barely separate narrators in The Passion. It works as it synchronises with something within the reader, making us feel yes that is just it, that is what it is.
‘ I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong.’
You hear the meaning as much as read it? Wonderful.