Einstein vs Winterson

I had to read Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson for a literature class, and I took great issue with it! I can safely say that I did not prejudge the book, I was ready to love it. As I began reading and was introduced to the characters I wanted to read up on their significance - i.e. perhaps the Alice was a reference to Alice in wonderland, one of the guys is called a Don Juan, so i wanted to read up on him too, and then I thought about looking into the meanings of the astrological signs etc that are in it. I'm glad I didn't - that all would have been a waste of time.

Some people like this book, and I don't know why. It reminds me of a person who just rubs you up the wrong way - goes on about him/her-self, thinks they have it worked out, have strange ideas that you are embarrassed even to talk about because they're so ridiculous, and just an indulgence in their own art - even though they don't know anything about artists... something like this.

The book tells the story of Alice, the son of a conservative jew (i've read that she doesn't even get the Jewish culture down very well, but i know nothing of it) who is married to a scientist (a time-travel scientist... ?). Unfortunately for her, he ends up having an affair, so she throws his stuff out the window, and sleeps with the woman who took her husband... and Alice has a diamond at the bottom of her spine, which got there because her mum swallowed it while she was pregnant.

So the themes of the story (just to illustrate that I didn't miss the point) are: 1) the unconventional love triangle, and 2) the inability of science to sufficiently explain and justify human experience. I understand well the significance of these ideas, and they are good.

However, the unconventional love triangle isn't expressed too well in Winterson's writing because it seems a bit overborne by her apparent hatred of men. So the man is a 2-dimensional pig: unapologetic, unfaithful and condescending. The Alice character doesn't get heaps of sympathy because she is too vague and lacks integrity. She can throw her husband's junk out the window, and say she's upset, but you would never quite believe her.

Throughout Winterson's writing she can't help but throw in sentence fragments, references to masturbation (in walking down the street, one has to notice that a cement mixer is "jacking its load"... because that's just what one notices??) and other various unnecessary vulgarities.

Now, to what I really disliked - her use of Science. It's a good idea to talk about science and its relationship to the human experience, but if you are going to talk about science, please at least read something. In the world of Winterson, people considered the world flat until the 1600s (so why did Columbus try to find a west route to the indies... why then did Eratosthenes estimate the "circumference" of the earth around 200 BC???? - interesting story here... Columbus used a map that didn't use Eratosthenes predictions, as a result severely underestimating the size of the earth, maths is great). Also, she talks quite a lot about Einstein's theory of relativity, about time-travel and clocks, but she has absolutely no idea about it. I may as well write a story that rejects the practices of modern day schools because students are made to hang upside down and eat apples.

The fortunate upshot of this, was that it prompted me to read Einstein's Relativity since I couldn't understand how Winterson could possibly be right. Einstein's nice little book is merely an introduction, with very little mathematics. It contains the Lorenz transformation, which looks at time experienced in relation to the speed of light (it's this function that is used to make the prediction that passing the speed of light is impossible, as once speed > c, you have the square root of a negative number). Einstein is a very accessible writer, and if you're not too interested in reading Relativity and seeing what all the fuss is about, you could read his Ideas and Opinions - he's quite funny.

So my problem with Winterson, is that she's pretentious and just generally unlikeable. One of those writers who equates writing something controversial with writing something profound. She leads her readers up an unorthodox stairway to nowhere and says "see! I told you", and the less resilient will say "ah yes, you're right" rather than "i think you've confused yourself". In this way, I think post-modernism is sometimes reminiscent of The Emperor's New Clothes, they're all trying to trick us into thinking they're geniuses!