Title: Weight
Author: Jeanette
Winterson
Publisher: Cannongate
Publish
date: 2005
ISBN: 3
2300 0117 5777 6
‘Autobiography
is not important. Authenticity is important.’
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‘Weight’ is
part of a series (of which I’d now like to read more) of re-tellings of myths
by some of our great contemporary writers: Chiuna Achebe, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt amongst others. Jeanette Winterson was allocated the story of Atlas and
Hercules.
As a
re-telling of a myth goes, it’s very free. Winterson intersperses the
mythological narrative with an autobiographical account of the ‘weight’ or the ‘globe’
she (or ‘one’) carries around: the weight of expectations, hopes, regrets, and everything
we’ve woven for ourselves in between. The nexus of the narration possibly comes
when Atlas lies in his ruined Garden of the Hesperides, unable to get up,
weighed down by the immense mass of the tiny golden apples from Hera’s tree,
which are his past and his future. They crush him so much he can’t pick up the
third apple he needs to get: his present.
But the
message is not, by any means, to live only for the present. Indeed this concept
is embodied in the figure of Hercules, the archetypal hero, the anti-Hamlet,
the one who does everything right now, right away, without thinking. Pure
action. But even Hercules is bothered by the ‘thought wasp’ that starts buzzing
about his head once he’s marooned temporarily with Atlas’s heavy load. Even when he’s
freed of the task of holding up the world, the thought wasp still troubles him
occasionally.
Winterson’s
hero, her ideal alter-ego, is Atlas. How to reconcile oneself to the burden of
the 'world', how to learn to listen to the smallest things and feel a symbiotic
life with the whole kosmos, and how to shoulder that unmoving oppression with
grace. These are the questions that seem to be ‘answered’ with most passion.
Perhaps the surprise ending is a reward for such good behavior, and the
self-knowledge that the author at least seems to think comes with it.
I liked
this book a lot. I read it twice, mainly because iteration is the point of the
novel. ‘I want to tell the story again,’ says the author, and we get another
aspect of the story, another sediment of autobiography. It’s a personal take on
the psychology of introspection and self-creation, of the nature of choices and
what they really are as opposed to what we perceive them to be. The read has a
hypnotic, lilting quality to it, interspersed and syncopated with Hercules’s boisterous
doings which bring brusque and bawdy syntax and vocabulary along with them. I’m
giving it four out of five moose hoofs up, with the one taken away only because
it’s more an experimental piece than a highly polished one. This is unfair,
because being experimental is in its nature. But as Winterson notes within the
pages, unfairness abounds, and polish is a criterion of a moose hoof.
