Coming from a small-ish town in Lancashire I remember my shock when I learnt that Jeanette Winterson was from Accrington. To know that a CBE, OBE, globally-known author grew up twenty minutes away was astounding.
I was around twelve years old when I first ‘discovered’ her, completely by myself, picking up a random book in the library that I had no idea was a Winter’s Tale retelling, nor that the author had written — and would go on to write — books that are perfectly up my street. Even then, I was struck with the richness of the writing and the way she managed to articulate human emotion.
Seeing Jeanette Winterson in person, almost ten years since I discovered her, sat amidst a huge crowd in a dim theatre, felt like I was lucid dreaming. She comes onto stage and with scarcely an introduction begins to read from her new book, One Aladdin, Two Lamps. I am immediately struck with the familiar lilt of the Northern accent that colours her ‘o’s and ‘t’s. The hour-long session flits from her reading, to talking, to a Q&A. She dwells specifically on her new book; after a medical scare, she told herself that she cannot go until she finished it, which I think is possibly the best way she could have sold it to us. When she reads from it it is apparent that the physical act of holding that book in her hands is treasured, that this is a prized possession — her words manifest, after all.
I am hardly surprised that she speaks just as she writes — surprised, if slightly envious. Her words, like her books, are visceral, rich, and do not shy away from confrontation. In the hour she manages to talk about everything from Arab folklore to technology, to identity, to the terribly irksome deal of life-living. And there is nowhere to hide, either. I could swear she is speaking directly to me at times, though maybe that is just the effect of her. The theatre is a sea of people that have arrived on a rainy evening to witness the magic of the spoken word and one of the people lucky enough to have — I believe — harnessed it.
The session is comforting, above all. In her reading Winterson mentions how she took some sort of refuge in Accrington Library, where she first got her hands on One Thousand and One Nights. She even mentions the smell of Vimto, which elicited some endearing chuckles from the audience. At one point she encroaches onto the lines — “We are mortal, but we must live as though we are not.” She removes her reading glasses to say this, briefly lowering the book and looking us all in the eye. It isn’t that she is a disconcerting figure at all, but there is something about her presence that sees you entirely.
Then she talks about writing and creating itself, announcing that when you create, you are imbuing something with magic. To her, everything we make must be a necessity, and she makes a point of stressing that though it may seem feeble to worry about our next book or poem, it is needed. She traces storytelling, and — in keeping with the theme of One Aladdin, Two Nights – Arab folklore, which started in Arabic, and travelled through transmission. “The untidy exuberance of these stories is emblematic of humanity itself,” she smiles. The human success story is in our “inventive and ceaseless” adaptations. Winterson oscillates between a pessimism for the current state of the world and an optimistic, pragmatic view of what we have and what we can do. She notes happily that our visible, human world is only part of a larger invisible world, where different life forms collide with the human endeavour for meaning.
And this is also what One Aladdin, Two Lamps is about — the power of the imagination, or “the grand citadel of the mind”, as Winterson puts it. Where everything begins.
Yet in most narratives, the rather cliché timeline goes that there is an awful situation, and a strong (typically male) hero will swoop in to save the day. “Even in politics, we look for this figure.” But this isn’t how the story is always fleshed out. In One Aladdin, Two Lamps, it is human interactions that make or break the outcome. What matters is how you treat these random encounters. This leads her to deliberate the role of fate. Growing up in a strong Christian household, it makes sense for her to dwell on the perplexing thought that our fate is fixed before we even begin to play a part. But she quietly protests this: “I can change the story, because I am the story.”
It is this part of storytelling that most seems to captivate her — and us, our audience. With a sort of wide-eyed exuberance she happily professes that our minds are always swerving, constantly moving around in time. And this is how stories are conjured. We cannot cope with being trapped by the clock. In a theatre, we accept the illusion in front of us; in an art gallery, we look at a picture to stop time. “We’ve always done this, when everything else was at stake.” And whether it is drawing woolly mammoths on a wall or wondering who pushes the sun up the hill or why the rivers move as they do (nymphs, of course), we have a human tendency to reject the “dismal conditions of being trapped in the here and now.” In fact, she even laughs at our absurdity sometimes — “Of course Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th of December in Bethlehem!” But she attributes this, again, to our desire to tell stories — and we laugh along with her. To cultivate this hunger for creativity and stories she says that we have no excuse not to read poems — “They’re like shots of espresso for me, I can just knock it back and go.”
Many of Winterson’s speeches are received with thunderous rounds of applause, but it isn’t until her digressions that the theatre really reverberates. Somehow she draws similarities between One Thousand and One Nights and today’s zeitgeist, fantasising that perhaps men from Silicon Valley will upload their consciousnesses onto computers, thus becoming a genie in a lamp. And suddenly she turns serious, and somehow she is looking every one of us in the eye again. “Most of us live lives too small for us, too cramped,” she says rather sadly. We forget that we are something much more than our 9-to-5. We have been much more for 300,000 years, always engaging in something much bigger than us. “We are such things as dreams are made of.”
And in typical, hilarious, Jeanette Winterson fashion, she finishes her wondrous digression with “…anyway, never mind,” and again, the dark theatre ripples with laughter and applause. Maybe someday I’ll bump into her on campus. But, for now, for me, she is a story-conjuring, witty, word-alchemist, genie-like figure, that walks exactly where I walk but that I have never met.
One Aladdin, Two Lamps, is now available to buy.
