“There are other worlds than this one of ours. There is an infinity of worlds. And spirit, which is God, inhabits the infinity." (Giordano Bruno, cited by Frank Waters in Book of the Hopi, 166)

“Now who says history doesn’t go in circles?" (Graham Swift, Waterland, 180)

Brian McHale, author of the critical work Postmodernist Fiction, defines the elusive and endlessly debated term "postmodernism" along the lines of a "dominant," i.e. the philosophical emphasis or the focusing element of the work of art. McHale argues that the dominant of postmodernist fiction is "ontological" (1987, 10, original emphasis), which results in the focus on issues of existence, identity and subjectivity in these texts. McHale derives his definition of ontology from Thomas Pavel’s, asserting that "an ontology is a description of a universe, not of the universe" (1987, 27), and puts the emphasis on the indefinite article. This is in sharp contrast to the dominant of modernist fiction: as McHale insists, modernist poetics focuses on describing the one world surrounding us, and its basis is on an epistemological, or cognitive, dominant. Therefore the emphasis on the definite article. The epistemological dominant results in the modernist attempt to make sense of human existence and map the limits of human knowledge within this one given system.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, describes "some" universe, and not necessarily "the universe" or a "plurality of universes" (1987, 27, original italics). McHale suggests that postmodernist fiction seems to propound the following questions: "Which world is this? What is to be done in it?" (1987, 10). Different worlds can be explored, even in confrontation with each other, but the exploration of the "violation between boundaries" can be done without the objective to find "grounding" for our own universe. Since existence cannot be limited to one specific world any more, postmodernist fiction describes certain "modes of being," found in the text as well as in the world(s) it constructs (McHale 1987, 10).

More importantly still for this paper, besides determining the dominant for postmodern narratives, ontology is also contained in dealing with time, temporality, even atemporality, as is the case with the novel selected for this analysis. Any attempt at apprehending time, its nature, as well as the relationship between time and language, by necessity has to entail the reflection on human existence. From ontology’s point of view, existence can hardly be imagined outside the bounds of temporality: it is quite a commonplace that there always is a beginning and an end for any existence, and these underlie the permanent progress of later into earlier. Once there is an earlier and a later, time is born. If we are to focus on existence in order to explore the various "modes of being" in postmodernist narratives, time and its role are to be scrutinized as well.

Elizabeth Ermarth, voices a concern that I share with her in a critical study on representational time in Sequel to History: "[t]ime is often the missing link in discussion of postmodernism" (1992, 7), and once time and its representation in postmodern discourse receive the well-deserved in-depth analysis, the role of language in these texts can be viewed from a different angle. By virtue of this argument, Ermarth sees the main task of the discussion, and the revision, of time in postmodern fiction in that the "playful" nature of language should be restored in order to regain its innovative and creative aspects. In turn, these restored capacities of this medium of expression will enable postmodernist writers to harmonize the "linear, directional, rational and syntactic powers of language"--which Ermarth rightfully labels "crippling" for the imagination in general--with "a new linguistic emphasis" on the non-linear and self-governing aspect of discourse (1992, 139).

The choice of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989) for this paper was motivated by the British novelist’s openly admitted aims to achieve just what Ermarth points out above. Winterson’s experiments with and within her text take place on two levels: on the one level she plays with language in order to liberate both language and narrative time--and through them, imagination--from its linearity, in accordance with Ermarth’s theses; and in doing so Winterson dissects questions and issues relating to human existence, time view, and the Weltanschauung that different languages induce.

Winterson’s “ play" with the narrative construct of Sexing the Cherry involves the employment of a linguistic model which delivers a unique time concept and a world view resulting from it. The novel takes this temporal concept from ethno-linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf and his analysis of the Hopi language. Whorf discussed Hopi and its grammar as possible verification for his Linguistic Relativity Principle, a theory that postulates the possible influence of the grammatical system of a given language on the thought and world view of its speakers. Whorf asserted that the Hopi language featured not only an atemporal grammatical structure, but also lacked all reference to the abstract of time, be that lexical, grammatical or morphological (Carroll 1956, 57-8). As a result, postulated Whorf, "[a Hopi] has no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past" (Carroll 1956, 57). Whorf’s Hopi time denotes a concept which, paradoxically, is characterized first and foremost by atemporality, i.e. the lack of clear-cut division of time frames and corresponding tenses. Second, it is shaped by the idea that all events and happenings that are temporal are simultaneously contained in "consciousness" (Carroll 1956, 144). The resulting time view, notes Helmut Gipper, resembles a wheel that is spinning in one place, without moving forward. This produces the cyclic ever-recurrence of the same sequence of seasons, which are never accumulated into years and decades, or the tape measure of Western linear time (1979, 11).

B. L. Whorf’s Linguistic Relativity Principle and its tenets have fueled much controversy and debate in the past, with several attempts at verifying or disproving it altogether (cf. Alford 1978; Berlin and Kay 1969; Brown 1976; Carroll 1956; Gipper 1972 and 1979; Haugen 1977; Hoijer 1954; Langacker 1976). The research into the Hopi language in particular (Gipper 1972 and 1979; Malotki 1978 and 1983; Voegelin, et al. 1979) has rendered much of what Whorf asserted either incomplete, inaccurate, or only partially true. This paper has not been written in order to either discuss the controversy around Whorf and his theses, or to amend his observations on the Hopi language, therefore these aspects are not contemplated. His assertions and postulations are mentioned only in order to highlight, explain or draw up correlations to Jeanette Winterson’s philosophy in Sexing the Cherry.

In the experiment in her novel, Winterson confronts the Western linear temporal concept and linear narration--which result from the "linear" and “ directional" syntactic powers of the English language--with "a new linguistic emphasis" on non-linearity and non-rationalized consciousness, provided by the application of the Hopi concepts. Winterson’s de-constructing and re-constructing temporality through the new linguistic emphasis further justifies Elizabeth Ermarth’s claim that temporality in postmodernist discourse becomes independent of historical conventions; “ instead it is multivalent and nonlinear" (1992, 21, my italics). Sexing the Cherry makes full use of the multivalency of Whorf’s Hopi time concept, as far as its alleged grammatical atemporality allows for the synchronous existence of various time levels, partly made possible by the nonlinear aspect of the Hopi notion of time.

The two epigraphs to the novel portend the nature of Winterson’s experiments with language, time, and the Newtonian world view. Whorf’s Hopi time concept becomes the metaphysical basis for the ontological view of the (im)possible universe, as well as for the dismantling of the space-time continuum in Sexing the Cherry:

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, that thing the most solid and well-known, which you are holding in your hands . . . is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world? (Sexing the Cherry, epigraph)

On the other hand, the metaphysical tenets for Winterson’s experiments with the non-linear narration are provided in the text by an informant who claims with Whorf that "[the Hopi] have no tenses for past, present and future. . . . For them, time is one" (Sexing the Cherry 155, my italics). The creation of a “ one time” enables Winterson to explore a multivalent temporal concept in its full extent: several time levels can collapse into one, bridging past with present and future (seventeenth- and twentieth-century London); and the reader can get an overview of the previous and present lives of the characters, including causes and effects (cf. modern-day Jordan vs. his seventeenth-century alter-ego).

The epigraphs and their formulation simultaneously adumbrate that this experiment with time, as well as the above outlined confrontation of a temporal-linear narration and an opposing concept are not without limitations. The very fact that the author has to formulate the core ideas to her novel in the form of questions reveals the extreme difficulty, even impossibility, of the implementation of these concepts. And impossible it is because of the linear environment of the written narration; because of Winterson’s medium, the English language, which is laden with temporality, as opposed to the Whorfian Hopi, which is unbound by it; and because of the reader’s linear and material perception of existence and conventional (Newtonian) way of thinking. The way out of this Catch-22 situation is provided, first and foremost, by the very use of questions that address the focus of the experiments, and thus address the reader directly, motivating him/her to ponder upon the issues they raise. The narrative consciousness is thereby extended into the reader’s consciousness, who, in turn, becomes a simultaneous reader-creator of the text and its non-linear structure outside of the text. Also, as part of actively engaging the reader in the process, Winterson employs narrative devices and her own authorial voice in the form of a whole gamut of “ LIES" that are supposed to allow her to rise above the limitations imposed by language (see also further down). These concerns outlined here verify the statement made by Elizabeth Ermarth which posits that “ the operative constraint in postmodern writing is not any transcendent ‘reality’ beyond language but language itself" (1992, 18). And that is the essence of Winterson’s vision: to re-create an atemporal view of a universe with a medium that due to its temporal nature does not lend itself to any such brazen attempts.

As Alison Lee states in her article "Bending the Arrow of Time: The Continuing Postmodern Present," the creation of an experimental universe in Sexing the Cherry "explores the notion of time as a culturally or imaginatively constructed field in which past, present and future can exist simultaneously" (Lee 1994, 222). Winterson’s universe can also be described with Michel Foucault’s terms as a heterotopia, "a kind of disorder" comprising "a large number of possible orders" (quoted in McHale 1987, 44). These orders, however, correspond only in part to the reader’s reality outside the text; a large number of them appear as impossible orders, which result from Winterson’s subversion of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. She disrupts the space and time continuum and replaces it by an arbitrary "mode of being" (McHale 1987, 10) in which the protagonist’s esoteric philosophy and the magic wizardry can hold full reign in this fictional world. As part of this heterotopia, esoterics and wizardry find an intersection with Whorf’s atemporal Hopi concept which creates the timeless framework of the protagonist’s life while freeing it and the protagonist himself from any spatial constraints as well.

The Wintersonian heterotopia in Sexing the Cherry is based on constant dual oppositions that the author calls in to establish an experimental order out of the contrasting linear and non-linear entities. These dual oppositions include the two narrators, Jordan and Dog-Woman; the worlds that the two main character occupy, and along with these, the “ outward" and the “ inward," i.e. the objective and the subjective experience of existence; and the past and the present of the two characters.

Winterson decenters the narrating personae by employing two characters to establish the basic contrast for the time experiment within the text. Jordan, the traveler-explorer, represents the nonlinear view of the world; while Dog-Woman, who lives her life along the time-space continuum, is anchored in the linear, spatial-temporal frame of reference. Dog-Woman’s world conforms to the description of the conventional view: it is definable within our space and time concept (seventeenth-century London in the years leading up to, during and after the Revolution of 1649). She, then, stands for the right-hand side of Einstein’s formula, E=mc². By contrast, Jordan, her adopted son, moves with confidence through space, just as he "moves through time" (Sexing the Cherry 100). He never uses the time(s) and dates of his adoptive mother’s world for a frame of reference. His existence alternates between the Western linear idea and the Whorfian Hopi view. Not anchored by the material and temporal world, he represents the left-hand side of Einstein’s formula, E, that is energy.

Jordan takes on the role of the hero of the novel; however, he is entrusted by Winterson to complete a quest: Jordan’s mission to find Fortunata, an ethereal dancer who teaches dancers how to become "points of lights" (103) and thus subvert matter, also includes his metaphysical quest in an attempt to harmonize the spatial-temporal and matter-related realities of the two worlds. His journeys involve simultaneous physical journeys through space and time (e.g. sea voyages and discoveries with the royal gardener), as well as spiritual journeys through various co-existing worlds (the world of the twelve dancing princesses juxtaposed to Dog-Woman’s documented England of the Revolution). Eventually, with Fortunata’s help, Jordan’s quests bring the desired result, and he unites the two worlds in becoming "light" which, as science tells us, can behave as particle, i.e. matter, and as photons, i.e. non-matter.

By trying to harmonize what he has discovered, Jordan experiences the quandary of being on the sometimes overlapping boundaries of several universes. One universe, "our outward" life (99) is regulated by the sense of time as being "flat, moving in a more or less straight line from one point to another" (98). The other universe, by comparison, as formulated by Alison Lee, "encompasses the simultaneity of all space-time" ("Bending the Arrow of Time," 222) in the mental or "inward" realm. In Jordan’s words:

our inward lives are governed . . . by an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass . . . along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain (Sexing the Cherry 99).

The duality of "outward" and "inward" lives reflects the contrast between experiencing and perceiving time. Experiencing it equals the "outward" sense, with time moving through us, like it does through Dog-Woman. The "inward" involves reflecting upon time mentally, that is, moving through it like Jordan does (cf. Lee, "Bending the Arrow of Time" 221), The “ inward" yields the subjective experience of time, that is, duration, as described by Henri Bergson in his study Duration and Simultaneity (Chapter 3: “ Concerning the Nature of Time").

This duality also represents the confrontation of the Western ("outward") notion of temporality and the Whorfian romantic description of the Hopi time notion ("inward"). Nonetheless, it is dissolved by Winterson’s treatment of time as "one" in this experimental universe. This experimental universe in Sexing the Cherry functions according to the Whorfian tenet which professes that for the Hopi, all events, past, present and future exist in "consciousness together" (Carroll 1956, 144). Winterson extends this further and creates a zone where "all space-time can exist simultaneously" (Lee, "Bending the Arrow of Time" 223). Time then, becomes a mere mental construct that allows for manipulation at will: "The future and the present and the past exist only in our minds, and from a distance the borders of each shrink and fade . . ." concludes Jordan (Sexing the Cherry 167).

Even documented reality is submitted to the simultaneous existence within the "one time." The setting in seventeenth-century England alternates with twentieth-century London, both scenes involving the alter-egos of the same characters, Jordan and Dog-Woman. What is more surprising, however, is that hardly any change can be observed in those characters, as if the passage of time has rendered them unaltered. The word alter-ego is all the more justified because of the lack of observable changes in these characters. They are not different people; much rather, they appear as duplicates. Nick Jordan of the late 1980s, three centuries later still driven by a love for sailing and an admiration for such historical figures as Sir Francis Drake and Admiral Nelson, joins the Royal Navy. Dog-Woman’s modern-day alter-ego still has no name and companions but seems to have vague memories of her previous self from what she pins down as the past. Subconsciously she appears to grasp the idea of the "continuing present" that the Whorfian Hopi time and its application by Winterson creates (and which is also the subtitle to Alison Lee’s article):

I don’t know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps this is the only one and the rest is just imaginings. Either way it doesn’t matter. We have to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdependent (Sexing the Cherry 145-6).

According to Winterson’s novel, other worlds do exist, and they exist simultaneously. It is exactly the coexistence of past and present that enables those inhabiting both to remain unchanged through time, as Jordan and Dog-Woman do. If this coexistence is just "imaginings"--and it has to be, since this is a book of fiction--then the Whorfian thesis, which professes all things temporal to be contained simultaneously in consciousness, is justified by Winterson’s imaginary universe in Sexing the Cherry. And it does so even if Whorf’s and Winterson’s assertions contradict our Newtonian theories of science. Consequently, the passage of time as it would be observable on a calendar becomes irrelevant in Sexing the Cherry, since all temporal events are contained in consciousness, allowing the continuing present to persist (cf. Lee "Bending the Arrow of Time" 1994).

However, despite the application of a "one time" and the persisting present, time does progress in the narration due to the phenomenon of "perpetual becoming later" of everything in this world (Whorf in Carroll 1956, 139). In accordance with the notion of unstoppable aging, Winterson introduces the section of the novel set in the twentieth century with the words "Sometime Later" (Sexing the Cherry 125), creating a palpable paradox in the application of Hopi timelessness: How can there be a “ sometime later" if “ time is one?" we may ask ourselves.

This question, again, leads to the main problem of this novel, as pointed out towards the beginning of this paper. The reader does not share the experience of Jordan and the Wintersonian-Whorfian Hopi notion of time, but is used to operate on the "outward" (see earlier) or Western notion of linear temporality. Narration is linear, and so is the time concept inherent in the English language. Due to these factors, Winterson has to resort to linguistic means such as the above quote that comply with the reader’s and written language’s standards of the "outward" time. This constraint implies the impossible nature of Winterson’s objective with her experiments in language and time. She cannot rise above the limits of her own mother tongue--nor can anyone else. She is then forced to employ linguistic means to at least create a sense of the “ one time" in the reader’s consciousness, which can sustain it by suspension of disbelief and by being outside of the written linear environment (though not that of a linear time-perception structure). It is through imagination that the reader recreates the unified time of Jordan’s and Dog-Woman’s existence, on all time levels, with their beginnings and ends joined into each other. Thus Gipper’s description of the Hopi wheel of time spinning in one spot does not bring a “ brand new" future but one that is already familiar, has happened before, or at least contains the causes and the effects of previous times.

The linguistic means within the English language that help Winterson imitate this wheel of time include the epigraphs to the book, which with their questions adumbrate this very problem, as well as the introductory phrase "Sometime Later" to the second part of the book. She also makes use of the various devices that McHale mentions in connection with deconstruction of space: "juxtaposition, superimposition, interpolation and misattribution" (1987, 45, original emphasis). However, synchronicity of temporal existence can hardly allow for superimposition of one temporal level on the other--rather it calls for juxtaposition (McHale 1987, 45): while the narrative focuses on one level of existence (e.g. the twentieth century), existence on other levels continues uninterrupted, but out of focus for the reader.

Furthermore, Winterson also makes use of her very own voice in the narration, and includes several smaller treatises on, for instance, the “ Nature of Time" (98), and “ Hallucinations and Diseases of the Mind" (88). This latter contains a list of "LIES," which, like the putting forward of questions in the epigraph, serve to undermine the linear concept of existence and time, and the principles of Newtonian world view, and also serve as narrative devices of the “ one time," e.g.:

LIES 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.

LIES 4: We can only be in one place at a time. . . .

LIES 6: Reality is something which can be agreed upon (90).

These authorial intrusions establish and constantly remind the reader of Winterson’s very own temporal environment, as well as the reader’s own temporal level of existence outside the novel. This is set in opposition to the fact that characters in books resist aging despite the Whorfian "perpetual becoming later" of the material of the book itself (Lee, "Bending the Arrow of Time" 224). The real paradox, however, to which Alison Lee calls our attention is the fact that while the reader is reading "forward" as necessitated by the "arrow of time," s/he obtains a retrospective look at the past, and all this is set in the continuous present ("Bending the Arrow of Time" 224). The book in its material form perpetuates the constant present time frame within the reader’s consciousness while its being read and reread.

The linear environment of the written language may fortify the above mentioned lies, and may render their refutation and the written presentation thereof impossible. However, the reader’s consciousness outside the text revokes this problem. In his essays, Whorf condemned written language as a culprit in forming our "objectified" view of time (Carroll 1956, 153), which in Sexing the Cherry is described by Jordan as our "outward" experience of it (99). Whorf’s theory boldly suggests that the Newtonian tenets of space, time and matter "are recepts from culture and language" (Carroll 1956, 153, my italics), and Newton "got them" directly from language. Refuting them within language, the very same medium from which they originate, is at best impossible. Ermarth puts the blame on language for being an “ operative constraint" the linearity of which “ cripples" both imagination and artistic effort. She offers the restoration of the playful capacities of written language as a possible solution to this problem.

Winterson restores the “ playfulness," the innovative and creative aspect of her narration by employing a unique temporal, or atemporal, concept that helps her put human existence in a different perspective. The Hopi time concept enables Winterson to refocus the ontological dominant of her text and to view life in its multi-generational, ever- recurring entirety as the wheel of life keeps turning in one place, and dismisses the view as a short, single time span in which the past is detached from the present (as seen on a larger scale, of course, than years or decades). Operating with a “ one time" within a heterotopia allows Winterson to explore the entirety of existence in various universes and worlds, to confront various aspects of reality, time notions and quests for meaning of life.

In the closing words of the novel Winterson creates the harmony between the "inward" and the "outward" notions of time, matter and non-matter, as well as the left- and right-hand side of Einstein’s formula E=mc². Jordan’s magic transformation into the only perfect form that combines these characteristics in itself, i.e. light, is symbolic of the reader’s acquiring the notion of unified time for the duration of the reading experience. In the reader’s consciousness the “ one time" can take its full effect. Consciousness thus revokes linearity in every aspect, in language, narration, and human existence. The questions that Winterson raises in the epigraphs are answered in part by the reader’s acquisition of the “ one time," and in part by Jordan’s transgressing the boundary between matter and energy that can only happen in a book of fiction. The two harmonies then are finalized in a third one which brings the novel and its experiments to a laconic, yet effective finale, and hammers home Winterson’s idea of our world being an illusion: "And even the most solid of all things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light" (167, my italics).

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory. Trans. Leo Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

Carroll, John B. (ed.) Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge: Technology Press of MIT, 1956.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

Gipper, Helmut. "Is there a Linguistic Relativity Principle? On the Verification of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis." Indiana 5 (1979): 1-14.

Lee, Alison. "Bending the Arrow of Time: The Continuing Postmodern Present." Historicité et metafiction dans le roman contemporain des Îles Britanniques. Ed. Max Duperray. Aix-en-Provence: U de Provence, 1994.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987.

Malotki, Ekkehart. Hopitutuwutsi. Hopi Tales. A Bilingual Collection of Hopi Indian Stories. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1978.

---. Hopi Time. A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language. New York: Mouton, 1983.

Voegelin, C.F., et al. "Hopi Semantics." Handbook of North-American Indians. vol. 9. Ed. Alfonso Ortiz. Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1979.

Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.