an image

winterson once wrote that there're 3 endings to any story: revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness. her stories have always been bounded within boundaries, trapped in desires, and told stories within stories within stories. and it is precisely only from within such walls and fences and ceilings that her characters could break free and flee: in Sexing the Cheery, Fortunata escapes by cutting and retying her rope as she descends her castle of mutable ceilings and shifting floors; in The Passion, Villanelle transcends the realities, if not fixities, of her mortal worries by, like and unlike Christ, opening her webbed feet and walking on water.

but what about happiness?

it is said booklovers are romantics and they are so because they read books in search of lost happiness. and because true happiness is unfixed its devotees never cease their pilgrimage. winterson's readers are no different. yet when they come to the ending of each winterson the variable of happiness so integral to the function of fiction has become a non-issue, overlooked, forgotten, read into non-existence.

but has the element of happiness in fact disappeared?

in Written on the Body, Louise's appearance at her unnamed and ungendered lover's kitchen window is real but illusory, precisely because for illusions to exist they have to first be real. to be able to grasp the significance of that window scene is to sense the significance of Literature. that illusion is framed into a sort of permanence when the lover ends thus the story: i do not know if this is a happy ending but here we're let loose in open fields.

this is where the story starts.

it is too for those of us in search of happiness - this is what happiness is - in these open fields we glimpse the first ripples of a rainbow - that otherworldly arc in the sky, empty space and coloured points of light - an illusion, an image, imagic, magical.