Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods: A Postmodern Warning

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Jeanette Winterson attempts to provoke a new consciousness of existence in her 2007 novel The Stone Gods and stir the masses to re-evaluate the human condition under the encroaching shadow of death awaiting our mother earth. The Stone Gods can be read as the continuation of her 2005 novel Weight where she already implied an alternative perception of space/universe. Along with its apparent postmodern tissue, The Stone Gods offers a lament for the human condition which is acutely suffering from the deprivation of dreams, future hopes and sense of reality on one hand, the ongoing corruption of our ecological system on the other. In the novel the citizens of Orbus (an unknown future world) are presented as dehumanized figures for whom “age is only an information failure” stemming from the body’s loss of fluency, nerve disconnection and cell mutation occuring in DNA nucleus. This paper aims at analysing how Winterson detects the postmodern superficiality, obsession with appearance, lack of hope, memory and conscience in The Stone Gods which, contrary to being a postmodern text, concentrates on giving a moral message with its satiric as well as parodic double voice about the changing experience of ageing for man and mother earth in the new millenium.

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The Stone Gods , postmodern fiction , satire , ageing , ecology

Gaziantep University Journal Of Social Sciences

983

Gaziantep University Journal Of Social Sciences