Top 100 Cool Novels, #95, GUT Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
by Ernie on 21/09/07 at 9:20 am
Top 100 Cool Novels, #95: GUT Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson (1997). This book really stands in for Winterson’s entire oeuvre, which must be read in toto to be fully appreciated. Her record is substantial, including the legendary Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), and Lighthousekeeping (2004). Her faith in poetic fluidity, multiple perspectives, and a variety of modernist techniques allows her to stand out among her contemporaries, who remain overwhelmingly devoted to either historical novels, social realism, or magical realism. Her books are dark, difficult, and unmoored from reality as we generally know it. They probe the emotional depths of characters that exist almost as ghosts or as their own journal entries. GUT Symmetries makes use of a large historical and scientific canvas to convey intense, intimate events (GUT refers to both the elusive “grand unified theory” that would combine the expansive theories of relativity with the erratic subatomic theories of particle physics as well as the “gut” of mind and body; she makes further use of the medieval belief that the cosmos is mirrored in the human body, just as the sweeping moments of history gather up the smallest emotional activities of her characters).
Jeanette Winterson attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. When her first attempt to attend the college ended in rejection, the working-class Winterson drove like a demon through the night down to Oxford to confront the St. Catz (as it’s known by members) dons and convince them of her worthiness. Convince them she did. Given that the college’s guiding saint is St. Catherine of Alexandria (not St. Catherine of Sienna, the erotic saint of the lilies), this impressed the dark-robed host as appropriate. They invited her to pack her bags and turn up that Michaelmas with some cotton underwear (as T.S. Eliot once recommended to an anxious American preparing to study at Oxford). St. Catherine of Alexandria, for those unfamiliar, was known for her persuasive rhetorical gifts. According to the various legends from which her biography has been cobbled, she converted a great number of “pagan” philosophers (they were likely Neo-Platonists). Due to her talkative nature and tendency to convert the locals, concerned citizens arranged to have her tongue cut out. Additionally, she was tortured on a “breaking wheel” which itself broke when she touched it. They wound up just cutting her whole head off. Needless to say, Winterson fit right in at Catz, a college with a reputation for encouraging a lively social life (both wild debauchery and daunting scholarly debate) at a university likewise noted for its tolerance of eccentricity and extreme crankiness.
