“Atom and Dream”: Meatspace and Cyberspace in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook

Abstract

With an air of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism, Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000) spans countries and centuries in an endlessly shifting narrative that formally mirrors the settings’ and characters’ kaleidoscopic identities. Immersed in the Internet’s opportunities for transformation and switching between cities and the Internet as sites of global circulations and cosmopolitan encounters, The PowerBook takes globalization’s redefinition of location further to juxtapose meatspace and cyberspace and establish an imagined transterritorial, transtemporal community. Using the rapidly growing body of cosmopolitan theory with a tinge of geocriticism, this essay aims at analyzing the novel’s conceptions of meatspace and cyberspace, its independence of location, its focus on community as being-in-common, and the ever-changing cellular narrative structure typical of what Berthold Schoene calls a new cosmopolitan modus operandi for British fiction (97). The article wishes to show that, despite Winterson’s exploration of privileged forms of existence, The PowerBook is a political cosmopolitan fiction on place, space, identity, community, and love as a recurrent trope of “cosmopolitan empathy” (McCulloch 10).