Of Gross Reality and Personal Myths: Agential Realism in Jeanette Winterson's 'Weight'

Known for her many retellings of canonical works, in 'Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles', Jeanette Winterson re-elaborates on what is possibly the most traditional of literary forms: myth. By speculating on how fact and fiction merge into unexpected aesthetic representations of the real, the author explores the ideological nature of myths as prompted by their contextual proximity to reality. The result, as this paper aims to demonstrate, is a text where the emotional and affective value of fiction reinstates the realist genre by raising some of the fundamental ontoepistemological questions concerning humanity today. Put differently, oscillating between the non-linearity of the fantastic and the situatedness of the real, Winterson lands on an agential form of realism, intended as the material-semiotic potential of a reverse mimesis to forsake the canon and challenge the totalizing objectivity of individualist metaphysics.