« My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate » : nomination et appel(lation) dans Lighthousekeeping et dans la fiction de Jeanette Winterson

• Main Author: Pascale Tollance
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2014-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Winterson; contemporary British fiction; naming; calling; voice; filiation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1262
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

Starting from the suggestions ‘packed’ in the first lines of Lighthouseekeeping, this paper examines the paradoxes that surround the question of naming in the novel and in Jeanette Winterson’s œuvre as a whole. In a fictional world which foregrounds the necessity to invent oneself, naming does not consist so much in designating what exists as in bringing to existence what would otherwise simply not be. The need to create oneself from scratch does not prevent Winterson’s fiction from claiming multiple literary filiations. Yet the debt works both ways, whilst the rigid opposition between who speaks and who causes the other to speak collapses. The play with the signifier and with the letter also involves the proper noun, as if the unique value of what it designates were best translated by the mobility and pliability of a language which is shaped by affect and blurs the difference between what is proper and what is common. That the name should not fit (a salutary fact in Winterson’s fiction) does not deprive it of its efficacy. Naming goes hand in hand with calling (‘My mother called me Silver’ …), which displaces the question of the power of the name from what it is to what it does. At the same time, calling exposes one to the possibility that the other won’t answer, and re-engages the question of origins. Far from sustaining the illusion of being present to oneself, voice and its echoes opens a breach which is reflected in Sappho’s question in Art and Lies: ‘who calls whom?’.