Gulliver Revisited: The Horizon of Travel Writing in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry

Gulliver Revisited: The Horizon of Travel Writing in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry

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Jordan, one of the two enunciators in Winterson’s novel, travels round the world with famous explorer John Tradescant and records his journeys in logbooks.The narrative we are given to read, however, does not correspond to Jordan’s official travel Cayenne narrative but to inner journeys of his own into imaginary places for which he draws maps.Jordan claims to be one of those travel liars such as Gulliver whose portrait in the paratext of Swift’s novel reads: ‘Splendide mendax’, or glorious liar.The unexpected twist in the last chapter turning the seventeenth-century figures into fantastic alter egos of the contemporary characters complements Jordan’s fantasist narrative in which time and space are but mirages.Jordan’s quest turn out to be a quest for identity and subjectivity and matches Winterson’s interpretation of the relevance of Swift’s text for postmodernity.

In Winterson’s view, Gulliver among Gym Mat the Houyhnhnms faces the question ‘Who am I? What am I?’.Winterson answers in Sexing the Cherry with Jordan’s travel narrative as a celebration of fictional lies.