Crossing generic boundaries in Jeanette Winterson's "The poetics of sex"

Resumen

Jeanette Winterson is a born storyteller who denies autobiography its right to represent the self as single and fixed. Her short story "The Poetics of Sex" explores the multiple ways in which a writer's life and work may be confused. The lesbian love story of the narrator, Sappho, and a painter called Picasso is unusually presented as a combination of genres. On the one hand, it parodies the form of the interview. Two unnamed voices take turns in the text, asking questions and providing answers. Both speakers use the same code, English, but the communicative situation is unsuccessful because the speakers approach one another from utterly different cultural perspectives, which modify what would otherwise be the same reality. On the other hand, the narrator in "The Poetics of Sex" codifies her responses and presents them as an eroticized romance narrative that the interviewer -intratextually- and the reader -extratextually- will have to decodify in their search for autobiographical details, since characters are presented as "subjects-in-process" (Kristeva) intent on the mutual (re)presentation of each other's identities.