Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
(1 the Emperor)
5 Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to
keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.
5 I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
5 I go to confession but there’s no fervor there. Do it from the heart or not at all. [Henri’s
stories are fervored confession, complete with lust and crime.]
8 Not people, Louise, just the enemy. (Words that keep pain at bay) (cf. 5)
8 Domino says that being near [Napoleon] is like having a great wind rush about your
ears. He says that’s how Madame de Stäel put it and she’s famous enough to be right.…
Bonaparte had her exiled because she complained about him censoring the theatre and
suppressing the newspapers. {de Stäel is storyteller, like Henri wants to be. People
believe her because she’s famous.)
89 I once bought a book of hers from a traveling pedlar…I didn’t understand it much, but I
learned the word “intellectual” which I would like to apply to myself.
9 Domino laughs at me.
9 I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no
answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back
and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with
passion. [Priests tell stories, but there’s no passion. Henri’s stories address a different
kind of parish.]
11 Everyone else in the village had strings of relations to pick fights with and know about.
I made up stories about mine. They were whatever I wanted them to be depending on
my mood. [Winterson does same with novel. Henri always manufacturing reality from
stories.]
12 He was a good man but lukewarm. I would have preferred a burning Jesuit, perhaps
then I might have found the extasy I need to believe. [For Henri, stories must be fevered
for people to believe them. That’s why he keeps saying, Trust me. Believing stories is
accepting him.]
13 What would you do if you were Emperor?…[direct address of reader. Asking for stories
back.]
13 I’m telling you stories, trust me.
16 The priest said we were living in the last days, that the Revolution would bring forth a
new Messiah and the Millennium on Earth. He never went as far as that in church. He
told me. Not the others. [Priest has passion only to kid with passion, can’t stir up the
congregation with stories, or doesn’t.]
19 Gets cook standing. Napoleon says, “See to it that this boy waits on me personally.”
19 I wrote to my friend the priest straight away. [Validates experience by writing, priest
shares passion for narrative.]
23 Patrick said he could see the weevils in the bread. Don’t believe that one. [Some stories
he won’t believe.]
25 Do you ever think of your childhood? [Asks reader. Trying to make dialog, not
monologue. Wants to share passion with reader.]
26 This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but
there is no passion in them. [They don’t have stories.]
26 Now, words and ideas will always slip between me and the feeling. [Stories don’t
resonate as deeply on the Rock. Stories are inadequate representation of what
happened.]
28 They [new recruits] do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning
summer in their bodies and all they have instead is lust and rage. [Lust and rage doesn’t
include passion.]
28 It was after the disaster at sea that I started to keep my diary. I started so I wouldn’t
forget. So that in later life when I was prone to sit by the fire and look back, I’d have
something clear and sure to set against my memory tricks. [Stories will hold onto his
past. Validate his experiences and emotions.]
28 Domino said, “The way you see it now is no more real than the way you’ll see it then.”
28 I couldn’t agree with him. I knew how old men blurred and lied making the past always
the best because it was gone. Hadn’t Bonaparte said so himself. [Faith in stories. By
recording his present emotions, he wouldn’t falsify the past later on. Concerned with
holding onto the truth of his feelings.]
28 Domino: “What gives you the right to keep a notebook and shake it at me in thirty
years , if we’re still alive, and say you’ve got the truth?”
29 I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change. I
want to remember that. [Emotions contribute more to identity than facts, maybe.]
29 Domino: “I tell you Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment
you have lost forever. There’s only now.” [Few stories from Domino, despite his wild
past.]
30 It’s always been the way with me. Either everyone ignores me or they take me into their
confidence. [Readers included. Trust me, trust me, he says. Don’t ignore me. Love me,
since Villanelle doesn’t.]
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30 At first I thought it was just priests because priests are more intense than ordinary
people. It’s not just priests, it must be something about the way I look. [Intensity
important. Some priests get riled up over their stories. For a boy in the early 1800s,
priests were about the only passionate story telling available (outside the military). The
way he looks is like a book. He looks like a story.]
30 I should admit I wept when I heard him speak. [Napoleon had great power in speaking.
Henri wants this same power. Also shows his fondness for oral discourse that appeal to
emotions. Even though he hated him, Henri was moved by N.’s force.]
30 In my soldier’s uniform I was treated with kindness, fed and cared for, even given the
pick of the harvest. In return, I told stories…I embroidered, invented, even lied. Why
not? It made them happy. [Nothing wrong with telling story to please
listeners/readers. Their happiness can be exchanged for his own.]
32 Time is a great deadener. People forget, grow old, get bored.
36 She [Josephine] eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to
write about Napoleon instead. N, also enigmatic, had a more tangible narrative power
over Henri. He was a kind of God, too. Writing stories about the great story teller.]
39 Patrick’s goblin story.
40 Patrick: “Trust me I’m telling you stories.”
42 Domino’s right, there’s only now. Forget it. You can’t bring it back. [The past can’t be
well represented in stories.]
423 They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on.
How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder
of it?
43 By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and
nothing to remember. [This would seem to invalidate stories as a form of discourse.]
(2 the Queen of Spades)
49 She will tell your fortune, depending on your face. [Reader as you, Winterson as fortune
teller.]
49 This is the city of mazes. [Book, as well, circles around, changing narrator repeatedly.]
4950 Tells story of mother as though she had nothing to do with it. [Removes self from story,
as thought o make it more objective, matter of fact.]
50 Villanelle’s stories more fantastic than Henri’s. Venice.
52 We became an enchanted island for the mad, the rich, the bored, the perverted. {So has
book.]
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55 It’s somewhere between fear and sex. Passion, I suppose. [Passion different for V and
H. For H it is for stories. For V, it’s for itself.]
66 You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.
69 I’m telling you stories, trust me. [Just mentioned beggar who saw young man walk
across water. Tries to give legitimacy to her story about herself. Wants to be believed,
perhaps like a poker face.]
74 Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right?
Without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed, I think, but not passionate. [Fits, to a
degree, with Henri. Henri says priests are “more intense”. Obsession v Passion comes
up again at very end of novel.]
75 What was she trying to see? Her future? Another year? Or was she trying to make
sense of her past? To understand how the past had led to the present. [re: woman lover.
Doesn’t have stories, has to draw it out of lines in hand. Stories help Henri understand
how past led to present, though this breaks down when he looks back on perhaps most
intense experience of his life, i.e., when he kills the Cook.]
76 The laws of the real world are suspended. [in stories as in Venice as in the novel]
(3 the Zero Winter)
79 No more coalitions, no more marches. Hot bread and the fields of France. We believed
him. We always did. [The power of Napoleon’s stories. No need for him to say, Trust
me.]
81 I have to stop writing now. I have to take my exercise. [Tense shift, shows Henristill
writing.]
86 I started my little book then the one I still have and Domino turned on me and called the
future a dream. [Now he’s in the future, and often absorbed by his dreams, haunting
him from the past.]
88 Re: Napoleon. He trusted me and I had never given him reason not to. [The great
storyteller trusted him, Henri never had to say to him, Trust me. Reason not to trust
Henri for reader is that he’s a character in a novel, and he early on professes his love of
telling stories, true or false.
89 This was her story. [Lets V’s discourse take over his own.]
107 Re: Patrick. He was always seeing things and it didn’t matter how or what, it mattered
that he saw and that he told us stories. Stories were all we had. [Great faith in the
power of narrative to get him through hard times. Identity, maybe. Ways of knowing
you’re alive. Passion worked this way for V. For him, passionate stories asserts that
he’s alive. Contrast with his discussion of dead voices on the rock. “The dead have no
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future, etc. Easy to lose oneself in the army or in Venice. Stories give you a context, an
affirmation of your identity. H needed this more than V. For V, passion was enough.
Intensity. H had to explore the intensity, understand it’s connections.]
108 Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?
Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel
we are not a lukewarm people any more. [Loved him for his power of narrative.]
112 I threw the filthy water I used along with the remains of my beard into the canal and
prayed that my past had sunk forever. [Except he keeps writing stories in his little book,
preserving the past, and with the novel immortalizes it.]
122 I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my
past in light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am
suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is
ignorant of what she does. [She is, or would be, the story of his life. Everything else, all
other stories, are gauged by her. He needs stories to explain himself to himself. She
does so wordlessly, just with her passion. He needs words to explain his passion. She
doesn’t even have to think about it, and he obsesses over it for years.]
127 What happened next is still not clear to me even though I have had years to think about
it. Calm years with no distraction. [The big intensity is beyond explanation. V doesn’t
need it explained.]
(4 the Rock)
Henri
133 They say the dead don’t talk. Silent as the grave they say. It’s not true. The dead are
talking all the time. [They speak from the past, in which he lives through his writing
and the production of the novel.]
134 He [Napoleon] talks obsessively about his past because the dead have no future and
their present is recollection. [Henri, by this definition, is dead.]
139 Villanelle: “Do you know what you’re doing?”
Henri: “I told the truth, that’s all.” [His story of the stabbing cannot be elaborated or
further explained.”
Villanelle
146 And what of Henri? As I told you, for the first few months, I thought him his old self.
[Also addresses reader.]
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146 I wonder if things would be different for him if I could return his passion. [Probably not.
Unless she means return his kind of passion, i.e., storytelling. Her passion is much
rawer than his.]
Henri
151 He overestimated himself. Odd that a man should come to believe in myths of his own
making. [Precisely what H does. His past, in which he lives os the rock, is all what he
makes of it, if we are to believe Domino who said it’s only the present.]
152 The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map. [Stories vast, etc. Maps to
the cities of the interior, perhaps.]
153 What am I interested in? Passion. Obsession. (see above, with God and V.)
154 To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
[Reach a point where you don’t need stories to validate your identity.]
157 I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making. [Hard for
him to say for sure. So caught up in stories, he can’t really tell, can he? Trying to draw
distinctions between the storied and the real probably isn’t a real good idea for him
anyway.]
158 Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
[Henri aware of the way he manufactures people in his stories. Deals with idea of the
other / author. Separates self from her.]
158 My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference
between inventing a lover and falling in love. [He sees her without needing a story. His
passion, for once, is not selfaware. All other objects of love, he invented for himself.
Napoleon’s story power, for example, is Henri looking for ideal story teller, so he
invents one.
158 The one is about you, the other about someone else. [Self/Other. Realizes distinctions.]
158 Hearing about [Josephine’s prison garden] comforts me. [Not the garden, but the story
comforts him.]
158 No one really knows what buildings are there from one day to the next.
159 You don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.
159 I reread my notebook today and I found:
I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my
past in light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am
suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is
ignorant of what she does. (122) [Studying himself, Not only validating what he does,
but what he wrote about what he does.
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159 I go on writing so that I will always have something to read. [Needs stories, because he
doesn’t have V any more. Needs to continue to convince himself of his
identity/existence.]
160 I’m telling you stories. Trust me. [Closing words. Final appeal.]