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Abstract
This article reads the end of Wide Sargasso Sea as a spectral portrait of the artist. As she is said to spread colour/fire, Antoinette asserts herself in a gesture where the frame of the picture replaces the frame of a mirror that is either broken, absent, or luring her with a deadly reflection. The I/eye that faces the red backdrop of the sky has stepped through the looking-glass to compose a landscape where another logic is made to prevail. The moment that is created is both a moment of meaning and a moment when meaning is resisted through a handling of colour that displaces codes and challenges the black and white world of the master/colonizer system as much as the symbolism of the mother-text itself. Colour triumphs as an event that sets all lines into motion and allows us to draw a line between modernist aesthetics and a postcolonial poetics of resistance.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life’ (Interview with Jean Rhys, Carter Citation1968).
2 ‘At least Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister’s consolidation’ (Spivak Citation1985: 251).
3 A very powerful argument for the resistance offered by Rhys to the mother-text is made by Carole Rody, who underlines that what is given the ‘force of an ending’ in Wide Sargasso Sea is ‘the moment before the burning’ (Rody Citation1993).
4 In this case, Jacques Derrida’s différance proves relevant not only because death is deferred to an inderterminate point beyond the end of the novel, but in the sense that meaning is caused to differ from itself at every step in the movement foregrounded by the dream.
5 ‘They called us white cockroaches’ (Rhys Citation1999: 13). ‘But look the black Englishman! Look the white niggers!’ (Rhys Citation1999: 25).
6 The manifestos of the avant-gardes were not only mostly written by men but display, as Anne Tomiche has shown, an aggressive masculine rhetoric (Tomiche Citation2012). By contrast, as she gives a voice to Brontë’s ‘poor ghost’, Rhys stays clear of all authoritative aesthetic discourse, allowing her text to speak for itself and blurring the line between text and metatext.
7 ‘For me (and for you I hope) [the Creole] must be right on stage […]. Another “I” must talk, two others perhaps. Then the Creole’s “I” will come to life’ (Letter to Selma Vaz Dias, 9 April 1958, Rhys Citation1984: 156–7).
8 Chapter 4 of Elaine Savory’s book is entitled: ‘Writing Colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour’. The first sentence sums up the argument which is then developed in detail: ‘Throughout Rhys’s texts, more intensely in some than others but always significantly, colour functions as a symbolic code’ (Savory Citation1998: 85).
9 My emphasis.
10 ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ (Chapter II, verse 3): ‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them’.
11 ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ (Chapter II, verse 20). Peter is addressing the crowd and reminding them of ‘that which was spoken by the prophet Joel’.
12 In the words of Grace Poole: ‘I’ll say one thing for her, she hasn’t lost her spirit. She’s still fierce’ (Rhys Citation1999: 106).
13 In the study she devotes to colour, Jacqueline Lichtenstein entitles one of her chapters ‘The Conflict Between Colour and Design’. From Plato onwards, colour is shown to have posed a continual challenge to philosophical discourse: ‘[…] fascinated by painting, philosophy has consistently scorched itself when coming into contact with the fire of its colour’. My translation: ‘[…] fascinée par la peinture, la pensée philosophique s’est toujours brûlée au feu de son coloris’ (Lichtenstein Citation1999: back cover).
14 ‘Anglo-American literature constantly presents us with these ruptures, these characters who create their own lines of flight, who create through their lines of flight.’ My translation of: ‘La littérature anglaise-américaine ne cesse de présenter ces ruptures, ces personnages qui créent leur ligne de fuite, qui créent par ligne de fuite’ (Deleuze and Parnet Citation1996: 47). What Deleuze sees as a strong feature of Anglo-American literature can be easily applied to Rhys and certainly offers an interesting way to approach a number of postcolonial texts. Deleuzian ‘lines of flight’ and Derridean spacing provide two different, yet not incompatible, theoretical frameworks to analyse the displacement at work in Rhys’s text. Both approaches unable us to locate the final moment of ‘meaning’ in the very motion which upsets meaning and opens it to undecidability.
15 The logic of dreams, as Freud described it, invites us to consider displacement from yet another theoretical perspective–one more conducive, or so it seems, to interpretation. Yet, as Didi-Huberman emphasizes, the dream involves a simultaneous process of figuration and defiguration: its power lies largely in its opacity and the resistance it offers to interpretation.
16 ‘[…] the notion of dreamwork demands that we approach form as a process of deformation or the figure as a process of de-figuration’. My translation: ‘[…] la notion de travail aura exigé de penser la forme comme processus de déformation, ou bien la figure comme un processus de défiguration’ (Didi-Huberman Citation1992: 168).
17 Didi-Huberman notes that the intensity of dream can find itself reinforced by ‘the disjunction of affect and representation’ which means that ‘the death of someone close can feel absolutely “neutral” or “disaffected” in a dream’ (‘la mort d’un être cher par exemple, peut nous apparaître absolument “neutre” ou “désaffectée” dans un rêve’).
18 The laughing Medusa which Cixous celebrates in Le Rire de la Méduse: ‘One only needs to look at Medusa straight in the face to see her: she is not deadly. She is beautiful and she laughs’. My translation: ‘Il suffit qu’on regarde la Méduse en face pour la voir: elle n’est pas mortelle. Elle est belle et elle rit’ (Cixous Citation2001: 54).
19 Myth has it that Medusa was a beautiful woman before being turned into a monster. See Jean Clair’s study on the multiple and shifting faces of Medusa (Clair Citation1989).
20 My translation. ‘En réalité, l’anti-Narcisse de Cézanne plongé dans la contemplation des couleurs est un Narcisse délivré, véritablement cosmogonique’.
21 My translation. ‘Qu’est-ce que le ‘vert, en effet, le ‘vert ’ de la nuit, le ‘vert ’ dans ‘J’ai rêvé une nuit verte’, sinon le terme d’un mouvement par lequel un signifiant, le mot vert, a été détaché de ses connotations et dénotations habituelles; par lequel, donc, un signifié a été biffé: si bien qu’un référent est là devant nous, soudain dépouillé de ce voile et ouvrant à de l’‘Inconnu’, mais associé sur ce seuil à un de nos mots tout de même, ainsi rendu à la poésie : ce mot vert sur la page, où des ‘épouvantes’ se pressent ? L’au-delà de la couleur-sens est un mot encore, mais un mot neuf. La sensation rédimée par le ‘travail’ du voyant, c’est dans la langue d’abord qu’elle va souffler, de toute part, son vent de résurrection’ (Bonnefoy Citation1993: 354).
22 Maria Olaussen, in particular, has expressed discomfort with the use of two main stereoptypes: the black woman as whore (Amélie), the black woman as mothering figure (Christophine) (Olaussen Citation1993).
23 This fantasy of blackness appears in several places in Rhys’s texts. One may remember in particular Anna in Voyage in the Dark: ‘Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’ (Rhys Citation2000: 27). In Smile Please, Rhys remembers the carnivals of her childhood and writes: ‘I used to long so fiercely to be black and to dance, too, in the sun, to that music’ (Rhys Citation1981: 53). By contrast, the colour ‘red’ can be connected with mixed blood in a Caribbean context— like chabin, in French, which designates someone with pale freckled skin but with African blood.
24 Goldman is quoting a passage from ‘Pictures’ in The Moment and Other Essays. Woolf declares: ‘[…] no painter is more provocative to the literary sense, because his pictures are so audaciously and provocatively content to be paint that the very pigment, they say, seems to challenge us’.
25 My translation: ‘La tentative d’approcher une réalité tant de fois occultée ne s’ordonne pas tout de suite autour d’une série de clartés. Nous réclamons le droit à l’opacité.’
26 ‘[…] the coloniser and the deadly transparency he sets up as a model, which may have given me a taste for the obscure and triggered in me something like a necessity to provoke the opaque’. My translation: ‘[…] le colonisateur et sa transparence mortellement proposée en modèle, d’où est né peut-être un goût de l’obscur, et pour moi comme une nécessité, qui est de provoquer l’opaque […]’.
27 ‘Transparency no longer appears as the bottom of the mirror where Western man used to reflect the world in his own image; at the bottom of the mirror there is now something opaque […]’. My translation: ‘La transparence n’apparaît plus comme le fond du miroir où l’humanité occidentale reflétait le monde à son image; au fond du miroir il y a maintenant de l’opacité […]’ (Glissant Citation1990: 125). In Poétique de la Relation, a whole chapter in entitled ‘Transparence et Opacité’.
28 My translation: ‘Le texte littéraire est par fonction, et contradictoirement, producteur d’opacité […]. Le texte va de la transparence rêvée à l’opacité produite dans les mots’.
29 ‘In fact, opacity is no blessed blindness, but an accumulation of layers. It even holds a promise, it offers us a chance to build a poetics of relation which delves at the heart of Caribbean diversity and hybridity’. My translation: ‘En fait, l’opacité n’est point opaque et bienheureuse cécité, mais accumulation de strates, promesse même, et chance, et poétique de la relation au cœur du divers et métissé de l’Antillanité.’ (Aranjo Citation1990: 102).
30 My translation. ‘La parole a pour but […] non point de volatiliser l’opacité dans le sens d’une quelconque transparence, mais de l’orienter et de la dynamiser le long d’un dévoilement lui-même parfois difficile […]’. We come close here again to another possible formulation of Derridean différance.
31 In Le Discours antillais Glissant talks about his version of Antillanité in these terms: ‘plus qu’une théorie, une vision’. Michael Dash in his monography on Glissant strongly underlines this point: ‘Antillanité is not a manifesto for a post-negritude ideology, it is a vision’ (Dash Citation1995: 277). We may incidentally remember that the Greek root of the word ‘theory’ is the verb theorein, which means to look at, to contemplate.
32 Helen Tiffin’s Citation1978 article was already based on that opposition between black and red dress, but Tiffin opposes the efficacy of the red dress to the fact that the black dress of the earlier heroines ‘ultimately provides no armour’ (Tiffin Citation1978: 339). The protection afforded by the red dress lies for Tiffin in the possibility for Antoinette to identify with the slaves that set Coulibri on fire—an identification which other critics have commented on as misplaced and illusory.
33 To borrow D.H. Lawrence’s words (Letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Citation2002: 183).
34 ‘Rhys thought of writing at the end of her life as an autonomous and irresistible power: as David Plante reported, “My books aren’t important … Writing is”’ (Savory Citation1998: 17).
35 My translation. ‘Le monde d’Hultberg est comme une maisonnée de possibles’ (Glissant Citation1997: 259).