“I want to tell the story again:” The Palimpsests of Jeanette Winterson’s Weight

Weight is Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of the myth of Atlas. Winterson writes over the familiar story of Atlas in Weight and creates a unique narrative, still retaining the traces of the myth, which gives it a palimpsestuous structure. The novella links storytelling to a geological process through the image of the palimpsest. Winterson also brings together different genres, narrative worlds, and modes of discourse in the novella. The palimpsest is a term that explicates this pluralistic, multi-layered nature of the text, and it is also a device the author uses as a strategy to comment on the nature of storytelling; the palimpsest both shapes the structure of the text and functions as an element that informs the content. In other words, the author creates a palimpsestuous text which embodies distinct but connected palimpsests and invites the reader to read the text and its constituents as palimpsests that operate on several levels of signification. This study argues that the palimpsest, an oxymoronic structure of fragmentation and wholeness, constitutes the basis of Winterson’s Weight, a text which epitomises this concept. Drawing on various critics’ ideas on the concept, this paper aims to read Weight as a palimpsest and to explore the various palimpsests embedded in the text.