The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction

Abstract

My project here is to discuss the extent of Rhys's permeability to the voices of ‘others’, especially when it comes to quoting, inserting, using, or elaborating her own writing with a recourse to the literary authority of other writers. The postcolonial concept of ‘writing back’ obliterates the process of actual writing to the profit of the Western-constructed idea of an accusatory pattern in the literary agendas of authors from former Empires. As critical as Rhys might have been of European colonialism, a limitation of her work to a gesture of ‘writing back’ amounts to denying the polyphony orchestrated by the writer, thereby blurring any form of aesthetic purpose per se. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid a strictly postcolonial discourse, my article studies the wide scope of examples of intertextuality in Jean Rhys's short fiction (mainly in the short stories ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Hunger’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’ and ‘Temps Perdi’), in relation to the very notions of authority—both the author's, and her peers’. What is more, ‘others’ are present in her writing under the form of absent voices piercing through the fabric of the text, which results in a failure to locate the main source of authority. I shall enquire into the notion of failure as writing and reading aesthetics, rather than a simple literary motif.

Keywords:

• Jean Rhys
• short stories
• intertextuality
• authority
• postcolonialism
• polyphony
• failure

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Voyage in the Dark (1934), for example, Anna Morgan's reaction to a traumatic non-consensual kiss reads as follows: ‘My arms hung straight down by my sides awkwardly. He kissed me again, and his mouth was hard, and I remembered him smelling the glass of wine and I couldn't think of anything but that’ (Rhys 1982: 22).

2 In his Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, Glissant says about his concept of the ‘Tout-Monde’ that it is ‘the encounter of cultural elements coming from a variety of horizons that really creolize themselves, that really interlock and combine to result in something absolutely unpredictable, absolutely new, that is Creole reality’ (my translation) (1996: 15).

3 ‘Self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?’ (Bloom 1975: 5).

4 For instance:

Suddenly she got up, staggered against the table, said ‘Damn’, turned the light on and began to dress, but quietly, quietly. Out through the back door. And why was she dressing anyway? Never mind—done now. And who the hell was that knocking? (Rhys 1897: 83)

5 My translation. The original quotation reads:

De même, si je préfère l’appellation de collage à celle de citation, c’est que l’introduction de la pensée d’un autre, d’une pensée déjà formulée, dans ce que j’écris, prend ici, non plus une valeur de reflet, mais d’acte conscient, de démarche décidée, pour aller au delà de ce point d’où je pars, qui était le point d’arrivée d’un autre. (Aragon 1965: 131)