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ABSTRACT
This essay argues that Rhys’s “Temps Perdi” (1967) evokes modernist temporality – Proustian “lost time” – to connect the twentieth-century World Wars to the infrastructure of European imperialism. Set in England during World War II, Austria after World War I, and the “Carib Quarter” in Dominica in the 1930s, the story links the violence of the European wars to the violence of imperialism, and the “losses” of the twentieth century to the decayed Caribbean plantation, “Temps Perdi.” In the local patois, the phrase means not “lost time” but “wasted time, lost labor,” and recalls three hundred years of waste and ruin: the genocide of the indigenous “Caribs”; the devastation of African peoples enslaved in the Caribbean; and the “waste” of Europe itself – in the era of imperial collapse – in the destruction of the World Wars. All three of these historical realities are embedded in the story’s title, and though that title evokes the tradition of European modernism, it also marks a departure from it. Though structured, in its temporal shifting, by allusion to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, “Temps Perdi” also undertakes an excavation of the material structures of modernity: the infrastructure – variously concealed, ruined, lost, or missing – that marks the spot of European devastation in the Caribbean.
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Notes
1 In Jean Rhys, 412–13, Angier dates the composition of “Temps Perdi” to 1940–41, when Rhys was living in Holt on the east coast of England. Savory, Jean Rhys, 170, 260 note 21, also suggests that a portion was composed during Rhys’s one return trip to Dominica in 1936, and notes that the story first appeared in Art and Literature in 1967.
2 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 267–68.
3 In 1625, just over three hundred years before the narrator visits the “Carib Quarter” in Dominica, the Kalinago – who had been under European attack from the time of Columbus’s first contact with the Caribbean in the 1490s – launched a “defensive war” against French, English, and Dutch colonization. Honychurch, Dominica Story, 38, 20–21. Though ultimately all but annihilated, the persistence of the “Carib Quarter” on Dominica (finally renamed – since “Carib” was always a colonial designation – the Kalinago Territory in 2015 [see Dominica News Online, Feb. 22, 2015]) is a testament to their surviving power.
4 As Diana Fuss and others have observed, Proust's temporal retrievals become necessary precisely because of the losses (the sense of lost “time” and, more implicitly, lost people) imposed by the First World War. See Fuss, Sense of an Interior, 178–79 and my own account in Narrative Machine, 142–46. Though Proust, who died in 1922, did not live to see the Second World War or the period of rapid decolonization that followed, À la recherche du temps perdu registers the shock of the Great War, and with it the beginning of the end of the European empires.
5 Proust, In Search, vol. I, 59–60. In the famous madeleine sequence, the memory of “lost” time in Marcel’s youth is spontaneously retrieved by a “chance” encounter with the pastry, and the object itself is “infinitely transcended” by the recollection it evokes. In contrast, Rhys uses the Proustian structure of recollection to retrieve the material (that is, colonial) conditions on which the refinements of European society rest.
6 Pemberton, “A Different Intervention,” 87.
7 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 267.
8 Ibid., 256.
9 Ibid., 257.
10 Eliot, Waste Land, 282, line 2. Though the allusion is chiefly thematic – and ultimately literalized, as I argue below, in the references to waste management – “Temps Perdi” also recalls particular features of Eliot’s poem. Compare Eliot’s “Unreal City” to the Dantescan cold of the “Inner Circle” of Rhys’s London, and the stultified populace “[u]nder the brown fog of a winter dawn … so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,” with the unrelenting “beige” of Rolvenden and environs. Eliot, Waste Land, 284, lines 60–63; Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 263, 260.
11 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 257.
12 Eliot, Waste Land, 294, line 431. In its allusive assembly of literary fragments, the poem may be read as both an elegy for English culture and an attempted reclamation. For Rhys’s narrator – more dubious about the English past – it becomes the occasion for a critical departure.
13 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 256.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 260.
16 Ibid., 261.
17 According to the City of Vienna’s website, the capital had “923 km of public sewers” by 1914, and continued to expand its system in the interwar period.
18 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 264.
19 Angier, Jean Rhys, 113.
20 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 266.
21 Ibid., 264.
22 Ibid.
23 See Berenbaum, World Must Know, 28.
24 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 267.
25 Ibid., 271.
26 Pemberton, “Different Intervention,” 87.
27 Ibid., 98–99. When Dominica was surveyed as part of the anti-hookworm campaigns conducted by the International Health Commission/Board in 1924 (hookworm is a parasite absorbed through the feet, and prevalent in areas where there is no system for the regular disposal of human waste), Dominica “showed the highest infestation rate” in the Leeward Islands – but did not receive assistance. Pemberton, “Different Intervention,” 98, 97. Though some sanitary infrastructure – a piped water supply for the capital, for example – was built in the late nineteenth century, such systems were not constructed island-wide until the 1960s. Honychurch, Dominica Story, 192.
28 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 268.
29 See Leslie Tilden Smith’s map, reproduced in Hulme, “Islands and Roads,” following page 24: Though paved roads were partially constructed along the coastline, these “roads for motors” were still less common than “roads for horses.” Though drawn from memory, Smith’s representation of the motorable road as it extended toward the “Carib Quarter” agrees with Rhys’s in “Temps Perdi.”
30 Hulme, “Islands and Roads,” 27–30 and “Map of the Imperial Road,” following page 23.
31 In Smile Please, 89–90, Rhys remembers “Mr. Hesketh” as “a very energetic administrator,” recalls (incorrectly) that he “triumphantly carried through his … idea of an Imperial Road,” and contrasts this putative success with his failure, significantly, to “tackle the sewage problem.”
32 Hulme, “Islands and Roads,” 29–30.
33 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 271.
34 Honychurch, Dominica Story, 161.
35 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 271–72.
36 Ibid., 272.
37 Honychurch, Dominica Story, 161–62. See also Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 155–203.
38 Honychurch, Dominica Story, 162.
39 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 272. Though the firing of the police station seems to be conflated with the “trouble” of the “Carib War” in “Temps Perdi,” a 1935 article in the Dominica Chronicle reports that a station under construction had been burned down in the “Carib Reserve,” and links the event to the “regrettable incident of September 1930,” which is “not yet forgotten. The Caribs say they asked for a hospital, and instead are given a police station.” Quoted in Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 235–36.
40 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 272.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 268. Embedded in the narrator’s attitude to the policeman may be a historical awareness that the British raid in 1930 was conducted by five Black officers of the Leeward Islands Police Force. See Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 185. Unmoored from the historical specifics of the event, however, the narrator’s remark (also) reads as racial prejudice.
43 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 270, 269.
44 Ibid., 272, 273.
45 Ibid., 272. See Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 220, for a reading of the “almost violent use of the camera” in “Temps Perdi.”
46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 69–71.
47 Rhys, “Temps Perdi,” 272.
48 Although anxiety to preserve the Kalinago of “pure race” was central to the British creation of the “Carib Quarter” (see Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 121–22), the narrator’s internalization of the same priorities not only implicates her in colonialist thinking but – in a story published after the Holocaust – reads as disturbingly eugenicist.
49 Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, 217. As far as I have been able to learn, all of these areas are called – in an alternate patois formulation – “Perdu Temps.” See for example Thomas, Worlding, 154 note 6, who traces the name “Temps Perdi” – which, in the story, is “carved … on a tree” near the plantation – to a legal dispute over five acres between Rhys’s grandmother at Geneva and “Mrs. Shillingford, owner of [the adjacent] Perdu Temps estate.” While the jury decided for Shillingford, a surveyor – based on testimony that an early survey had marked the boundary of her property by a specific tree – confirmed that the “land in dispute belonged to Geneva.” Technically, then, Geneva and Perdu Temps overlap – a circumstance that may further confirm a recollection of Geneva embedded in “Temps Perdi.”
50 According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery database maintained by University College London, Lockhart enslaved a workforce varying in size from 250 to 300 people at Geneva between his purchase of the estate in 1820 and abolition.
51 Personal email from Lennox Honychurch, April 30, 2019: “Perdu Temps … is the old name of the mountain directly east of Geneva that separates the valley from that of Delices and Pointe Mulatre. Today it is written on the maps as ‘Foundland.’ It is one of the boundaries of Geneva Estate. The river is named thus because it flows from the slopes of the mountain. There is also the Perdu Temps trail which is the old walking track from Geneva to Delices used up until motorable roads got to the east coast in the 1960s. And it means in Creole, as you have deduced, lost time and effort and work etc. As we knew it when I was a boy from villagers who had to carry everything on their heads up and over that ridge including farm produce which would be bruised and spoiled on the way it was indeed lost work and effort.”
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Zena Meadowsong
Zena Meadowsong’s research focuses on the relationship between technology and narrative innovation in nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction. She recently published Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel (Routledge, 2019) and her essays have appeared in such venues as Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, James Joyce Quarterly, and The Conradian. Her second monograph in progress is Writing the “Way Out”: Language, Technology, and Anticolonial Modernism, on the impact of machines in anticolonial and postcolonial fiction. She is Associate Professor of English at Rowan University.