Will approach by way of the contrast between Modernism and Postmodernism.

Both Musil & Hemingway are modernists, i.e. belonging to the avant-garde literature of roughly 1909 (Pound, Personae) to 1938 (Joyce, Finnegans Wake).

Modernism a complex movement, but can be understood as a re-unification of the world around self and style.

Forces of disintegration:

• Loss of a central religious belief – Darwinism, secularism.

• Loss of a central high culture – rise of mass media, mass culture.

• Loss of a philosophical centre – relativity in science, anthropology.

• Loss of the grounded, self-confident narrator in fiction.

• Exhaustion of traditional forms in fiction and poetry.

Response of the modernists:

• Hostility to modernization – return to the primitive or archaic

• Creation of a consistent perspective on the world through a distinctive personal style – stylistic order an antidote to disorder in the world.

• The modernist writer creates himself as his own hero – novels of development like In Our Time, Sons and Lovers, Portrait of the Artist.

• Difficulties with gender – the masculine controlling artist-hero conflicts with uneasiness about feminization and castration – women are both idealized and devalued; sources of renewal and swamps of emotion. (Woolf as exception).

• These three aims are fulfilled by a depth-and-surface model of psychological reality – reader seeks for a buried truth.

• Modernist author tries to master the chaos of the contemporary world by creating his own literary universe – ambition to write a comprehensive, self-sufficient, symbolic and unified work. This work is superior to the everyday reality of mass culture, and separate from it.

A broad and disputed term for, roughly, the typical art of the past twenty years.

• Religious belief doesn’t disappear, but comes back as popular myth, irrationalism and fundamentalism.

• Artists and critics no longer fight mass culture, but accept it as their "raw material," to be worked-up further. No more "Ivory Tower."

• Loss of a philosophical centre is no longer felt as fear of the void – people embrace either a playful uncertainty, or re-organize around a political community that has a local solidarity: religion, gender, ethnicity.

• Little worry about the narrator’s loss of control.

• Traditional forms are re-vitalised through re-cycling, parody, and collage.

• Meaning is found in the play of surface elements, rather than the probing of a hidden depth.

• The artist/writer no longer aims at unification and control over the alternative world of the work of art.

Oranges is a bildungsroman, like Young Torless or the Nick Adams stories in Hemingway. The sensitive heroine breaks away from and judges her family, escapes to wider horizons at the end of the book. But the telling of the story isn’t unified or serious in the way Musil and Lawrence attempt. Nor does Winterson try to give a comprehensive, historical picture of the culture she comes from–as Hemingway does for the Middle West or Musil for pre-WWI Austria.

1. The book has an introduction that tells you how it came to be written, how to read it, and its publishing history. It is part of the novel, in a way; and as such it violates the modernist idea that the work should be a complete and consistent world in itself.

2. The body of the novel has eight sections, whose titles correspond to the first eight books of the Old Testament. But what is inside each section is either completely different from the Bible, or an implicit parody of it. The real book of Genesis begins with the creation of Adam and Eve in Paradise; this version begins with the heroine being taken from an orphanage into a strange kind of exile–and so on. The heroine begins as a fundamentalist preacher of the Bible, but then things go wrong–the true Bible turns out to be false, and the false Bible (the novel Oranges) is the truth (for the author, at least, though not for her mother, or many others.

3. The narrative is broken up into short sections, and it isn’t always clear why one follows another–a deliberately anti-linear narrative (read p. xiii).

a) A linear narrative argues that the world is a fundamentally orderly place, in which the sequence of time corresponds to a sequence of cause and effect. A traditional story therefore reinforces order and continuity, at every level from personal history (organic development of the self) to society (myth of progress) to human destiny (Christian of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Judgement).

b) Postmodernism works by collage–the narrative isn’t a river with hidden depths (cf. "Big Two-Hearted River"), but a surface on which items are "pinned up" side by side. Meaning is "spatial" and works by juxtaposition, instead of temporal and working by sequence.

c) Hard to escape the idea that postmodernist writers are influenced by television, with its intense chunks of loosely-connected material, plus the potential to fragment the world even further with the remote control (the great postmodern tool).

d) Finally, disorder is not complete but is played off against our habit of looking for sequence and order in spite of everything. Oranges does have a standard narrative of the novel of development, which peeps out from time to time and gives us a broad sense of where the heroine is going.

1. Different styles are mixed up together, e.g.

a) Some sections use narrative and description to tell you what went on in the heroine’s home life, what people eat and drink, what their possessions are, etc.

b) Some passages are didactic–the author tells you directly what she thinks about life–for example, the whole of Deuteronomy is an essay on history, where it seems to be Jeanette Winterson talking to us directly, rather than the heroine of the novel (she’s called Jeanette too–but she’s only about seventeen at the time of that section, and wouldn’t at that point in her life have been capable of writing it).

c) Then there are the fairy-tales and re-tellings of the story of King Arthur & his nights. Novels were supposed to have left that behind, but here it is again.

2. The styles are not unified so as to give the impression of a coherent personality at work, with a single vision of the world. For example, the book is saturated with religion, but also makes fun of it; sometimes its a kind of politically correct pamphlet on lesbianism, but at other times sex is a joke; it is a feminist novel with a monstrous woman at its center and an amiable, absent father.

3. To go back to the remote control, with each new section it’s as if you’ve flipped to a new program, and it will take a while to figure out what’s going on, whether it’s a comedy or a drama or a documentary.

The justification for this? One could just say that it’s the spirit of the age, what the postmodernists call the loss of "grand narratives"–such as the Christian narrative of the Last Judgement (of the individual, and the whole world); the 18th century narrative of social progress; the Marxist narrative of revolution and utopia; the Freudian narrative of understanding your present condition in terms of childhood experience.

Or, that the conventional narrative such as we have in Sons and Lovers can no longer be repeated–it’s been done too well and too often.

Or, that settling into a single style and way of explaining yourself is a kind of living death–because so much must be excluded and denied.

Or, finally, the crucial point that Winterson makes at the end of "Exodus" (p. 48): "that no emotion is the final one."

3 sections to "Exodus":

1. "This child’s not full of the Spirit - she’s deaf." J. discovers that the world doesn’t run on simple lines, as she had thought (p. 26) [Grove Press 26]

2. Elsie teaches J. "the great effect of the imagination on the world" (30) [30] The two worlds: inner and outer (32) [32]

[p. 36 [36-37]: tucked in here is Mother’s loss of social position when she married–Sons and Lovers in a nutshell, but Winterson’s mother reacts very differently (though not so differently in looking to her child for compensation, p. 3 [3])]

3. 36-48 [37-48]: J. tries to be "ordinary" at school and fails - "tendency towards the exotic" - but the pain of being an outsider is not the final one, because eccentricity, failure to perceive as others do, creates the artist, and even the genius. J. is justified by the hostility of Sir Joshua Reynolds to the two greatest artists of his time, Blake and Turner. As Blake said, "The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees."

After "Genesis" and "Exodus," the remaining sections are a love story, or series of stories–conflict between the mother and the beloved, as in Sons and Lovers, but also between love, the Church, and society.

Again, it’s not presented straightforwardly–another interpretation of the spiral is that you circle around and return to the same point–but this time at a higher or at least different level. E.g., p. 3 [3]: mother doesn’t want to give birth; p. 10 [10]: gets Jeanette at the orphanage; 98-99 [100-101]: the natural mother visits–a "carrying case."

Spirals overlap–between, for example, adoption and Jeanette’s love story, which are connected by her mother’s hostility to sex.

Beginning of "Leviticus" (51) [53-55]: "strange noises, like cries for help, coming from Next Door"–sex and religion are opposites, but also related–they both involve strange and noisy rituals, attempts to get in touch with something higher. Mother sees it as sacrilegious; Jeanette is curious, eventually chooses sex over religion.

One of many scenes in which the religious characters spy on others in order to ferret out sin–suggests that religion needs sin and the forbidden as a kind of fuel–as Luther said, "No Devil, no God." But also, that religion is fascinated and attracted by it, at some level. [cf. Simpson, Homolka trials]

The particular sin in Oranges is lesbianism: being sexually different, or perverse from the Church’s point of view.

Winterson gives an analytic judgement on this in the introduction: the novel "illustrates by example that what the Church calls love is actually psychosis and it dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people’s."

Blake: "he who desires, and acts not, breeds pestilence." (read from Blake, MOHH)

The issue is not what is right or wrong in sexual behavior, but how we react to other people’s–much of Oranges is taken up with this. The "psychosis" is being stimulated by someone else’s sexual acts to perform corresponding acts of you own–which are quite strange in their own right.

Suggested, also, that the mother has had lesbian impulses: p. 36 [36], the picture of Eddie’s sister; p. 104 [106], "women’s feelings." But she suppresses them, and channels the energy elsewhere (Freudian over-compensation): into dislike of men, passion for the church, control over her daughter. The effort of suppression has literally made her mad.

You might want to argue that society is to blame for this: that the mother is a victim of the homophobia of an earlier age, without which she might have liberated herself in the way her daughter succeeds in doing. But Winterson doesn’t take this path:

1. Not writing a social novel that focuses on changes in society (as DHL does).

2. To see the mother as a sad or frustrated or tragic figure would change the whole balance of the book–the arrogance and cruel humor of youth, making parents into monsters.

3. Blakean morality: people must be radical and ruthless or they will be lost–those who have broken free don’t have much sympathy for those who are still bound–cf "Soldier’s Home" or DHL.

Oranges as a lesbian novel:

1. Lesbianism is a metaphor for difference, for issues of conformity and self-assertion. Certainly not a pornographic book, or even one that explores sexual experience in any depth.

2. Lesbianism is continuous with the mother, and loyal to her, in its thorough rejection of the male sphere. 121 [124], "no quarrel with men"; 126 [127-28], "a man is a man."

Lesbianism is therefore, in a sense, the opposite of homosexuality–the gay male often crosses gender lines, identifies with the female; Jeanette stays inside her own sphere (except for trousers).

3. J comes to it "by accident" (126) [128]–a discovery of her own nature, and of pleasure (75, 86) [77, 89]. Not a choice or an act of will, so it cannot be a sin. 120 [123]: antinomianism, "to the pure all things are pure."

4. Winterson also "normalizes" lesbianism by being faithful to the standard narratives of "true love"–including the betrayal by Melanie. But this leaves one with the question: are lesbians different, or the same? If the novel says they are the same, then it’s perhaps conventional rather than radical–or both at the same time?

The last three sections of the book–Joshua, Judges, Ruth–present a complex struggle of self-definition and escape. The struggle goes on at different levels of the psyche, and is described in different styles.

86-87 [88-89]: end of "Numbers"– happiness with Melanie is a golden age that will soon be overthrown, like the Russian aristocrats in the Winter Palace or King Arthur’s Round Table (127) [128-29].

In "Joshua," 110-111 [112-14] is a crucial passage–association of ideas during a fever, after having been caught with Melanie.

Joshua made the walls of Jericho fall down by blowing his trumpet. Jeanette needs to break down the walls of her home, and to create the magic circle that will protect her soul from the world. She also needs the pebble–something left over from the wall, a magic token, but also a weapon, like the stone David used to kill Goliath.

133 [135] –Jeanette leaves the Church.

"Ruth"

The tale of Winnet – 1. The chalk circle protects the soul; 2. Magic powers are to be taken out into the world–the vocation of the writer?

The death of Elsie – breaks Jeanette’s ties with her town.

The journey to the beautiful city, that is, Oxford (149, 156) [153. 158]. J’s decision to live away from home, and to be prophet rather than priest.

164-65 [170-71]: the summing-up – what she no longer believes, what she believes.

Ending returns to irony – the mother’s reality, like Melanie’s, has been left untouched by their encounter with Jeanette.