Introduction: Jean Rhys: Writing Precariously

England was terribly cold when I first came there. There was no central heating. There were fires, but they were always blocked by people trying to get warm. And I’d never get into the sacred circle. I was always outside, shivering.

(Rhys 2008: 221)

‘She’ll be all right’, says the doctor at the end of Voyage of the Dark (159). Or perhaps she won’t—if one goes by the ‘other’ end, kept in the archives at Tulsa. The ambivalence of the two versions taken together mirrors a number of instabilities which Jean Rhys’s textual practices may be found to reverberate. The gap between the two versions speaks of the dialectics between coercive voices, and her own resilient silence; of the rift between what Foucault calls a ‘biopolitical’ discourse on the female body, and her own experience of physical pain; of the oscillation between failure to signify (through a hackneyed sentence) and new frames of meaning-production; or more materialistically, of the slipperiness of publishing her work.¹ Dispossession, symbolic erasures, dependence, the betrayal of others and the sole company of one’s own destitution—these are, in many ways, overarching themes and patterns in the oeuvre. Taking their cue accordingly, peopling Rhys’s pages are an array of outcast figures, women, children, impoverished or elderly people, the sick and the ‘mad’ objects of both physical vulnerability and of a social precariousness that entails a failure to be ‘recognized’ (Butler 2004: 43). Attending to the dislocations and erasures caused by such varied forms of precariousness appeared to us as a means to cluster, and re-think, the elements of the culture wars which have raged around Jean Rhys’s writerly positionality. Prominent among them, the debates surrounding the ‘Rhys woman’: the paradigm of the autobiographical victimhood was largely inspired by what Athill, in a moving account of her work as Jean Rhys’s editor in the later part of her writing career, termed ‘the dreadful conditions in which she was living’, her ‘gruelling poverty’ (Athill; see also Rhys 1985: 47, 49, 59). Jean Rhys’s persistent staging of disempowered characters drifting from one ephemeral stay to another has been central to an establishment of typologies, even when such dysphoric, often autobiographical readings, of Jean Rhys’s fiction, came to be questioned (Carr 2012; Emery 1990; Moran, Savory 1998; Thomas 1999). The critics who, in the 1990s, challenged the categorization of Rhys’s characters as the passive victims of imperialistic and patriarchal power structures have laid the ground for a range of new takes on her work, including an ongoing debate on Rhys’s writing of precarity and precariousness.

In ways that are not entirely dissimilar, Rhys’s inclusion within, or exclusion from, postcolonial praxis hinged on her ‘terrified consciousness’ (Ramchand 1983: 223–36) of the white Creole, and on her dealings with privilege, be it material or symbolic—but also on the characteristically postcolonial exposition of invisible bodies that gives vulnerability ‘glaring representation’ (Maurel 1998). The inbetweenness pointed out by Spivak (1985) in her analysis of Rhys’s difficult agency (‘between the English imperialist and the black native’) can also be enlightened by the twin notions of precarity and precariousness—Butler’s conflation of the two terms having been contested (Korte and Regard 2014: 9). The notion of precarity is premised upon a material lack which warrants an absence of perspective, both in the sense of a point of view, and of a future. This hollowed site from where the precarious can speak seems apt at re-shuffling a range of issues raised by an oeuvre playing with perspective in ambiguous ways. The postcoloniality of Rhys is lodged both in her writing on precarity, understood as an objective socio-economic vulnerability, and on precariousness, which Judith Butler defines as the ontological and ethical fragility of human life, ‘the precariousness of life itself’ (Butler 2004: 134). This vulnerability is transcended in Rhys’s text in the form of its fluidity and porosity—possibly the quality which provoked such critical wrangling, and certainly a signposting of her Caribbeanness.

A third and last bone of contention in Jean Rhys criticism can be found in her potential belonging to a corpus of Gender Studies. Here again, precariousness forms a nexus of aesthetic and ethical dynamics. On the one hand, her literary practices resist monumentalization and commodification in ways that could be identified as ‘feminine’—in the Derridean sense of the word, i.e., as an indeterminacy resisting and challenging all fixations and fetishisations (Derrida 1979: 57). The minimal resistance of female characters who do not recognize the masculine power structures relegating them to passivity is a forceful assertion of gendered precariousness, although Rhys never considered herself a feminist. On the other hand, the debate about the vulnerability of Jean Rhys’s characters and its ethical implications, opened by such critics as Coral Ann Howells (1991) and Mary Lou Emery (1990), be it with opposed views, was continued by Carol Dell’Amico’s Deleuzean analysis of masochism in Rhys’s texts (Dell’Amico 2005) as a deliberate exhibition of humiliation with a critical potential, rather than a complicity with forms of traditional female subjugation. The present issue ponders the formal paradigms of writing and reading which Rhys explored at a time when the marginalized of the modernist city and the Empire were grappling with an irrevocable loss, and their voices resisted silencing, and when, in the minor mode, female subjectivity was being re-shaped. In itself, the vulnerability of female characters can be seen as refuting the doctor’s diagnosis (‘she’ll be all right’), and also the male imperative (‘You want to survive, don’t you?’, Rhys 2000: 135): Rhys’s bodies—physical and textual—were not temples of integrity, immune to transmittable infections.

The eight articles included in this issue draw lines of investigation that map out precariousness, as a theme and a writing strategy, in Jean Rhys’s texts. Precariousness is not only an ‘attitude’, as they say in the Caribbean. It becomes a site where silenced voices and dismissed bodies may be retrieved; a space where the wretched may find an abode and speak, after they have been denied socially valued places of belonging; a means to think about the individual’s relation to the group. Indeed, precariousness suggests isolation, seclusion, or even exclusion, but its etymology also recalls how the precarious subject is perceived as ‘begging’, ‘imploring’, ‘praying’ the other. Therefore, precarious existences act both as a confirmation of social inequalities, and as a dislodging force whose effect is to criticize the ‘power structures’ and make them precarious in turn. This is illuminated by Helen Carr’s formulation: ‘the power structures of organized society depend on a complex interaction of economic, class, racial, national and gender privilege […] a fault-line […] between the haves and have-nots, between the secure and the unacceptable’ (55). Jean Rhys’s textual achievement is that she manages to ‘recover silenced voices’, as Lindsay Pelucacci writes, from the very heart of the power structures; and to give visibility to what has become invisible, as shown in Andrea Zemgulys’s focus on the poverty of women as the object of the disgust and indignation of ‘socialist Gwen’. The voices of Rhys’s characters are ‘obstructed’, Sylvie Maurel (1998) contends, while Elsa Lorphelin argues that they are also ‘borrowed, traded, sold, adapted, inserted, questioned’. They have become mere goods in a merchandizing system, as when Selina’s song of Holloway, a song that is not even actually hers but can be read as a collective ‘wordless vocalization of suffering’ (Butler 2004: 134), is bought from her for a few pounds at the end of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’.

The same subjugation happens to bodies, which are disposed of along ‘the exigencies of a life-administering power’ that has the right ‘to foster life or disallow it’ (Foucault 1979: 136, 138). Bodies remain the mere objects of a ‘dehumanizing authority’ (Carr [1996] 2012: 55) which is ‘crushing those who defy it as well as those who conform to it’ (Carr [1996] 2012: 53). The aesthetic surprise works against such ‘crushing’, as Pascale Tollance shows: colour, which has been used as a means to discriminate and humiliate (‘black’ and ‘white’), is also given back its artistic visual dimension (‘red’—which rimes with ‘read’) in Wide Sargasso Sea. In her own article, Floriane Reviron-Piégay juggles with the possibility of creative displacements and linguistic re-directions as she offers to read Smile Please as prosopopeia, using Paul de Man’s theorization of the rhetorical device. Following the lead of Patricia Moran, both Free and Lorphelin argue in favour of failure and defeat giving shape to a particular aesthetics. In keeping with this idea of wretched resistance, Pelucacci analyses the cigarette burns made by Anna on men and walls in Voyage in the Dark, literally writing an aesthetics of silent protest on the very power structure itself.

The fact that the characters seemingly ‘do not attempt to break out’ of the ‘social structures in which they are trapped’ (Howells and Du Plessis qtd 13 as quoted by Carol Dell'Amico 2005: 58), although they sometimes challenge them from inside (Johnson and Wilson 2013: 14), has been troublesome to generations of readers. The articles of this issue work ways of interpreting this paradox: what Andrea Zemgulys characterizes as ‘an admixture of critique and acceptance’, while Imogen Free proposes ‘to reveal Rhys’s textual awareness of the structures she is working to disrupt’. Rhys’s narratives of trapped bodies can be read as strategies of exposure, and of taking a political position. Those precarious lives and voices are turned into a minimal, almost imperceptible strength, which French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard calls the strength of the weak, ‘la force des faibles’, a ‘very small strength that does not deserve to be counted’² but which ‘incessantly disrupt the hierarchies’ (Lyotard [1976] 2010: 27, 22).

All eight articles outline how, while the structure is never toppled, the absence of any subjective acknowledgement of its power by the precarious voices gives it a nudge that makes it vacillate on its foundations. This is also to be observed in Rhys’s own ‘tampering with authorial hierarchy’ (Lorphelin) analyzed by both Elsa Lorphelin and Catherine Rovera (2015)—whose genetic research has done much to excavate the resilient and persistent practices of Rhys the writer. Jean Rhys exposes unseen and unheard voices that ‘[point] somewhere else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a precariousness that they could not show’ (Butler 2004: 150), to give the reader ‘a sense of ethical outrage’ (150). Similarly, in Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes, Didi-Huberman (2016) takes up Benjamin’s concept of the ‘dialectical image’ to turn it into a dominant feature of the aesthetics of the 30s: l’appel aux larmes (a call to tears) is always un appel aux armes (a call to arms). Emotion is what conditions rebellion, the exposure of the other’s pain is always the beginning of an ethical and political reaction and call to action.

Despite all the obstacles, which are still at work today through the lack of new critical editions of her work (Thacker 2012), posing a threat to the survival of her legacy as a writer, the interest in Jean Rhys is echoing transnationally and transculturally. Although a renewed interest in her work has sometimes been attributed, at least in part, to the rise of postcolonial studies (Hearne 1974; Hulme 1994; Spivak 1998; Raiskin 1996) and the current boom of ‘decolonial’ literature (Mignolo 2007), we argue that rather than being shaped by contingent shifts in readership interests, the enduring power of Jean Rhys’s legacy stems from a more inherent, intrinsic quality, whose clue might be found in Diana Athill’s description of Jean Rhys at work, when she ‘felt herself too old and weary to read proofs properly’ and listened to them being read to her instead: ‘She sat leaning forwards, intense concentration personified’ (Athill 2012). The act of transmission, although never testamentary with Jean Rhys, appears here as including bodily disabilities and their compensatory strategies. The full dedication of the body and the mind to the creative act not only contradicts any allegation that the famously passive female characters in her novels were mere autobiographical projections of herself: it issues an authorial voice whose intensity reaches out to us beyond everything that has made it vulnerable (time, old age, financial difficulties, subjective alienation, addictions of every kind, marginality as a colonial subject and as a woman, effacement by literary and cultural institutions, both deliberate and as acts of carelessness). It is an incoercible presence, which claims the little space where it is relegated; it is an existence which will ‘give an account of itself’ (Butler 2005); and it is a voice which resists, insists, and persists.

Notes

1 The two endings of this novel being only a harbinger of how Wide Sargasso Sea might never have reached us at all, suspended as its release has been to two undictated sentences while its author was in hospital under serious threat; and of how the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea was itself key to the accidental rediscovery of her interwar work (Athill 2012: 402).

2 Translation ours, from ‘une très petite force qui ne mérite pas d’être comptabilisée’, ‘les faibles défont inlassablement ces hiérarchies’.