Media and communication concepts and applications

¶ … advocate a qualitative methods of analysing a text - like those who advocate quantitative methods for such an analysis - often appear to be fighting for the soul of the reader and even of literature themselves as they passionately argue for one form of analysis over the over.

But, while the impassioned literary warriors on either side might not want to admit to this fact, it might well be that there is no single correct way to analyze a text. Or rather there may well be no single correct way to analyse every text. There may be one best way for each text, requiring us to consider local definitions of analysis rather than universal ones.

Before we look more generally at this issue, let us attempt to apply this principle to an actual example. We may perform a qualitative analysis of a Jeanette Winterspoon novel as a way of demonstrating that it would perhaps be impossible to analyse this particular text from a quantitative point-of-view.

It is no accident that Jeanette Winterspoon means to seduce us with her slim novel Written on the Body. For the book is meant to convey to us what physical love means through the act of making us complicit. While the work is certainly meant to be admired as a very clever act of literary craft - and legerdemain - it is also intended to lure us into the world of passion that we tend to think of as absolutely individual but that is in fact collective.

Whether or not Winterspoon has read the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim is not clear, but it is impossible to read Written on the Body and not think of Durkheim's work on suicide. Initially one might think that the two have nothing whatsoever in common, but in fact they are tied together by one of the most profoundly important understandings of human nature. "I love you is always a quotation," Winterspoon writes, and by this she means not the sayer of these words is in any way insincere or mocking. But rather that even in our most intimate moments we remain a part of society, we remained touched by culture. Durkheim found that this is true even in that most profoundly singular of acts, suicide. Winterspoon looks not to death but to life and to passion. And she suggests that we can through passion escape social constrictions. But in the end we do not believe her, for even her peculiar narrator is imprisoned - and given life - by being among the company of humans.

Which does not mean that Winterspoon is not capable of making us think very deeply about the balance in each person between what seems to be individual and unique and what seems to be socially and culturally conditioned by the use of a very peculiar sort of narrator - one who has in fact no body upon which to write.

The novel tells the story of Louise, who is the object of the narrator's passion and love (not, of course, always the same thing). Louise, who is married to a brilliant cancer researcher, is diagnosed with leukemia. The narrator believes that his or her presence in Louise's life endangers that life by perhaps preventing her husband from offering the life-saving treatment to his unfaithful wife, and so the narrator - in the name of love rather than passion - leaves Louise so that her life might be saved.

But once the narrator has left Louise, she or he becomes saturated with loss, intoxicated by the desire that can no longer be enacted, and so begins a study of female anatomy in a series of chapters that are intimate and yet more than a little tinged with the clinical. By reducing (or elevating) Louise's body parts, the narrator hopes to find in them something of the wholeness of love.

It is fascinating to compare the ways in which the narrator catalogues Louise's body with the ways in which Natalie Angier catalogues the bodies of all women in her Women: An Intimate Geography - telling us, for example, that the clitoris is more capable of conveying intense pleasure than is the penis. There is about both authors a sense of the clinical in descriptions of the female body that seems as if it should be off-putting but is in fact fascinating. Angier is creating a quantitative mode for analysis that stands very much in contrast to Winterspoon's.

The great skill involved in this telling of love and loss and the attempted reconstruction of the self in the midst of denial is that the narrator is given neither name nor gender. Certainly we conceive of the narrator as a real person (this is no ghost or dream lover of Louise's but a lover with a body). But without a designated gender we are left with two very different choices in reading this book. We can assume that the lover is either a man or a woman, depending on our own experiences, preferences, and the intratextual clues that Winterspoon gives to us (although these are, it need hardly be said, ambiguous).

Or we can assume that the narrator is meant to be a proxy for ourselves. This is probably easiest for straight men and lesbians to do, of course, given that the objects of their passions are already women. It is harder for gay men and straight women, who must reconsider the ways in which the body and love may be joined together. For those who have never considered the idea of taking a woman as a lover, for those who have never considered the body of a woman to be the possible site for all passion, the book thus serves as a personal way of investigating new avenues of sexuality (and thus of love). Angier demonstrates through her scientific knowledge that male pleasure is linked to sites on the X chromosome, but Winterspoon goes beyond even this dramatic revelation to suggest at the complex ways in which male and female physical pleasure is intertwined and interdependent.