Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys

Carol Dell'Amico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135489076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys's modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her own as a colonial thinker only in the post-WWII period of her career, this study examines the austere insights gained by Rhys's active cultivation of her fringe status vis-à-vis British social life and artistic circles, where her sharp study of the aporias of marginal lives and the violence of imperial ideology is distilled into an artistic statement positing the outcome of the imperial venture as a state of homelessness across the board, for colonized and 'metropolitans' alike. Bringing to view heretofore overlooked émigré populations, or their children, alongside locals, Rhys's urbanites struggle to construct secure lives not simply as a consequence of commodification, alienation, or voluntary expatriation, but also as a consequence of marginalization and migration. This view of Rhys's early work asserts its vital importance to postcolonial studies, an importance that has been overlooked owing to an over hasty critical consensus that only one of her early novels contains significant colonial content. Yet, as this study demonstrates, proper consideration of colonial elements long considered only incidental illuminates a colonial continuum in Rhys's work from her earliest publications.

Chapter One

Good Morning, Midnight: Flaneur Novels and the Colonial

Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a commercial traveler—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!

—Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

To date, the feminist and anti-fascist polemics of Good Morning, Midnight have been most thoroughly explored in the criticism. Mary Lou Emery, for example, has explored how the book’s treatment of male authority is developed as a problem of “fascistic authority” (171), invoking “the temptations of order and peace at any price” (145). Kate Holden, in a related vein, has more recently argued that the novel’s preoccupation with “systems for identifying alleged insiders and outsiders” refers to “proto-fascist elements in English, bourgeois, patriarchal discourses and institutions” (144).

These readings by Holden and Emery, even as they stress Rhys’s treatment of fascist complicity within Britain, dovetail with other recent readings. For example, Coral Ann Howells reads the novel as a “critique of male modernist representations” and treatment of women’s “unbelonging” within Modernism (92), arguing that the novel demonstrates how “the woman writer [ … ] is effectively silenced [and] dispersed within a male-dominated literary space” (103). While Howells does not address the problem of fascism, her feminist reading nevertheless works well with Emery and Holden’s idea that Rhys was writing under the threat of aggressively renewed masculinist ideologies and discourses. Veronica Marie Gregg’s exploration of the novel’s treatment of the special problems of cultural “outsiders” and “Others” coincides similarly with Emery and Holden’s work, recalling, for instance, Holden’s point that the novel traces an “unmappable territory” of outsiders “vulnerable to [ … ] the powerful monological voice of fascist ideology” (151).

My reading, here, will add to this body of criticism in a number of ways. First, I demonstrate that Good Morning, Midnight is a flaneur novel, i.e., a novel employing an urban pedestrian figure (flaneur) much like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Following Walter Benjamin’s seminal writings on the literatures of “flanerie,” most critics have explored the ways in which these texts’ flaneurs indicate the works’ concern at least in part with the nature of metropolitan culture and social life, and/or the urban culture and subjects of capital more particularly. Rhys’s novel is paradigmatic in this regard, as character interactions in the novel are, as I demonstrate below, almost exclusively constructed as relations of “exchange.” As such, the novel evinces Rhys’s coincidence with contemporaneous anxieties over the burgeoning market and the societal changes this entails. This, then, points to how the novel’s treatment of complicity and submission pertains not simply to fascism, but more broadly to the way in which any number of populaces were conferring on their leadership unprecedented legislative powers and the role of savior (i.e., no matter the particular ideologies and programs espoused). Thus, at the same time Rhys presents fascist currents as the most glaring indicator of generalized political submission in Good Morning, Midnight, she subsumes this development under the umbrella of a consolidating, aggressively interpellating, market in general. Indeed, as Holden points out, fascist ideology can be understood in the same terms as attendant programs of economic renewal, as both found their inspiration in the examples of American Fordism and Taylorism, i.e., in models of intensified rationalization and standardization.

However, beyond this, the broadest context within which the specter of a perniciously unchecked market is considered in Good Morning, Midnight is global, a component of the text which can be deemed its colonial dimension, and which, as I shall also argue, calls for a reconsideration of the significance of modernist period Anglophone flaneur novels in general. Postcolonial rereadings of Benjamin and of flaneur texts are, indeed, a growing field of flaneur criticisms. But, before turning to this recent scholarship, a review of the critical foundations of flaneur criticisms will be useful, both to illuminate the relationship to them of the more recent postcolonial speculations, and to prepare the ground for this chapter’s exploration of Good Morning, Midnight’s discourse of “exchange.”

Benjamin developed his theories of flaneur literatures primarily in writings on Charles Baudelaire, Paris of the nineteenth century, and various Sur-realists, with his initial readers developing most extensively his ideas concerning the perceptive mode of flaneur text authors and/or characters. This mode, as they say, bespeaks a subjectivity in crisis, as metropolitan living and consumerism shape it. The distracted gazing of the flaneur-stroller is said to present experience as the apprehension of so many momentary, unconnected impressions and sensory shocks, so that in the flaneur’s seduced, spectacle-consuming and mobilized gaze, as Susan Buck-Morss has written, “we recognize our own consumerist mode of being in the world” (“Flaneur” 105). Buck-Morss comments as follows on Benjamin’s choice of “the flaneur, prostitute, [and] collector” as the “Ur-forms of contemporary life” (“Flaneur” 101):

If the flaneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consumption (and is the source of its illusions). The same can be argued for all of Benjamin’s historical figures. In commodity society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to strangers; all of us are collectors of things. (104)

The historical flaneur is a gentleman stroller whose “original habitat” was the Parisian arcades, “interior streets lined with luxury shops and open through iron and glass roofs to the stars” (103), and his disinterested viewing of spectacle (of passers-by and commodities for sale) has been, as Buck-Morss says, “preserved in the characteristic fungibility of people and things in mass society” (105).

In the opening to Just Looking, a book examining consumer culture in the fiction of Gissing, Dreiser, and Zola, Rachel Bowlby presents the changes in commercial activity in the mid-nineteenth century that gave rise to this commodified subjectivity:

No longer do goods come to the buyers, as they had done with itinerant hawkers, country markets or small local stores. Instead, it is the buyers who have taken themselves to the product: and not, in this case, to buy, but more to “see” the things. In the 1960s, Guy Debord wrote forcefully of the “spectacle de la marchandise,” crystallizing the way that modern consumption is a matter not of basic items bought for definite needs, but of visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home. People go out of their way [ … ] to look at displays of the marvels of modern industrial production: there is nothing obviously functional in a tourist trip. (1)

Since the flaneur commemorates and embodies these developments, this figure became for Benjamin a suitable icon with which to refer to every subject under consumer-capitalism.

Turning now to postcolonial flaneur criticisms, the most common point made in them tends to be that the metropolitan space of flaneur texts refers to, as Rob Shields, for instance, has written, “elsewhere, to the colonized sites of production of the commodities on display, just as the colonial hinterland is pervaded and transformed by codes which refer to the values and domination of the metropolis” (68). According to Shields, this recognition occasions treatments of metropolitans in which both foreigners and natives, or “outsiders and insiders,” are equally “‘dis-placed,’” as neither can be said to be “properly at home in the commodified spaces of the imperial metropolis” (68). Thus, more often than not, as Shields and others have suggested, a flaneur’s pedestrianism is that of a subject whose observing gaze becomes the means by which to regain mastery of the environment, “to participate in the popular sense of empire, to master and even revel in the ‘emporium’” (Shields 74).

Yet, there are arguments (including by Shields) that the genre points to additional meanings. For instance, taking his cue from Benjamin’s “fragmentary theory of the flâneur as the privileged personification of geographic dislocation, cultural transgression, and conceptual reconfiguration,” Rolf Goebel proposes that “[i]n the flâneur’s subjectivity, instances of cultural and historical hybridity acquire self-reflexive significance for the interpretation of modernity” (378). This wilier, experimental flaneur is found elsewhere in flaneur (and other related) criticisms, in various guises. It is found in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of relation, for example, in which migratory figures and literatures (texts of “errantry” ), even those of Modernism, pose problems quite apart from those of capitalist interpellation and imperial mastery. Beginning with a consideration of the Odyssey and other related European, Icelandic and African epics, Glissant explores the way in which so many migratory literary figures indicate a text’s desire, seemingly paradoxically, to conceive of a “root identity.” Glissant does not explain this seeming paradox in a way with which we have lately become familiar, however, by proposing that all that is not “home” in these texts serves only to highlight, in a phobic way, the desirability of home and “the same” against all that is “other.” Rather, he approaches these texts’ migrations and identitarian negotiations productively, arguing that in texts of errantry a “root identity” is conceived of, crucially, through a process of “enlightenment” in relation to cultural others, “through the Other” or “by taking up the problems of the Other,” as he says (18). This other flaneur is found also in Rachel Bowlby’s reading of Woolf’s “Street Haunting” (1930), in which Woolf’s street is a “place where [ … ] simple stereotypical distinctions” between groups “are broken down” (43), and in which flanerie indicates “transgressive” thought, that which “crosses and challenges set lines of demarcation, a step from a place represented as beyond the pale, out of bounds” (29). To these formulations we can add, as well, Kieran Keohane’s characterization of Joyce’s Bloom, whose mobility is a “permanent liminality,” a “condition of coexistence with multiple Others, of mutually and self-reflexively negotiating the manifold encounters with alterity” (39).

This is not to say, however, that any of these latter writers would necessarily argue against the notion that the flaneur’s mobility and mobilized gaze is indicative of homelessness or of the modern subject’s captation by commodity spectacle; the point, rather, as I see it, is that any given flaneur text must be scrutinized for any number of negotiations. Further, what this means is that, at the same time any flaneur’s mobility might indicate plight, the street in these texts might at the same time be functioning as the “privileged place of the performance of history” (Liston 1). In other words, the teeming metropolitan thoroughfare at any given moment in a flaneur text is the site of the individual’s divestiture or the place where a salutary “collision” occurs between the individual and the “collective” (Liston 3). Indeed, as we see in Benjamin, the value of throwing oneself into public space—of the Dallowayan “plunge,” as it were—is that one type of shock one might experience is an “awakening,” allowing for a “critical deconstruction of the myths of modernity the city seeks to perpetuate” (Liston 6). Thus, in terms of these notions of reconnecting with the collective, of resuscitation, and of negotiations with alterities, those personages with whom textual flaneurs encounter in significant ways in these texts must be scrutinized. With whom, exactly, are an author’s flaneur figures interacting in their perambulations? And why? To sum up, then, to the extent that a flaneur text might be exploring identity or its reconceptualization in terms of a cognizance of alterities alongside its consideration of intensifying market forces projected on a global scale or as imperial formations, the text might also include a consideration of the identitarian and other challenges following from the developing complexity of cross-cultural and geopolitical relations. This point becomes clear by a look at Conrad’s The Secret Agent, an exercise that will, as well, provide useful points of comparison with my exploration of Rhys’s novel.

The Secret Agent is a story about an agent provocateur, Verloc. Verloc has infiltrated the London anarchist and communist undergrounds and reports on their activities to his employer, a bureaucrat at the Russian Embassy. The novel begins with this Russian bureaucrat instructing Verloc to organize a bombing of a major London landmark, to the end of shocking the British authorities out of their complacent attitude as to the underground threat. He suggests the first meridian, the Greenwich Observatory, as target. Verloc is dismayed, knowing that this complacence is fully justified, but he capitulates to the plan in a bid to hang on to his job.

Verloc enlists the aid of his simple brother-in-law Stevie. When Stevie accidentally kills himself near the Observatory, the police are initially stumped, as they know, like Verloc, that the anarchist underground is dormant. Nevertheless, they learn quickly enough the true outlines of the case and set out to track down the malefactors (Verloc and his employer). The novel, however, ends inconclusively. As the Assistant Commissioner, the novel’s detective, is closing in on Verloc, Mrs. Verloc, sister and caretaker of Stevie, kills her husband in a fit of sorrow and rage. The detective disappears from the novel because without Verloc he has nothing, and the novel’s close follows Mrs. Verloc in her desperate attempt to flee London—which fails and culminates in her suicide.

Beyond this, there is the novel’s principal flaneur, the detective in charge of the case, the Assistant Commissioner. A few suggestive details concerning this figure’s curious profile, activities, and experiences—as well as the nature of Conrad’s London—are worth compiling here. First, this figure is nameless, known only as the “Assistant Commissioner” throughout, and much, on many pages, is made of his appearance and personality in the novel. He is “dark,” a “strange foreign fish,” a “square peg in a round hole,” a “thoughtful Don Quixote,” and so on. The commissioner, furthermore, is an ex-colonial who hankers after his days in the “tropical colony,” where, apparently, instituting control was a most satisfying matter, as societal divisions and standards of law and order were so clear-cut and artificial: “His career had begun in a tropical colony. He had liked his work there. It was police work. He had been very successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret societies amongst the natives” (78). He is, indeed, as Conrad puts it at one point, an Anglo-colonial situated at the center of “the Empire on which the sun never sets” (155). Yet, in London, by contrast, the commissioner is thoroughly frustrated with his work (that is, frustrated not simply with this case in particular). This frustration pertains to his lack of grasp: he is unable to get a clear fix on the metropolis he is supposed to be ordering, a plight compounded by the fact that his inferiors for various reasons keep him only nominally informed. His investigative forays into the streets and haunts of London, indeed, only intensify his sense of helplessness, his sense that he is unable satisfactorily to read and classify that which he encounters. Finding himself in an Italian restaurant in Soho, for example, he is said to make “to himself the observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private characteristics. And this was strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution” (111). In this restaurant, equally notable, albeit less ironic, the commissioner sees “himself in a piece of glass, and [is] struck by his foreign appearance,” thereby “los[ing] more of his identity,” an identity already eroded, presumably, by his earlier movements through the city. Conrad’s London, in short, which is also the commissioner’s, is “anarchic,” opaque, no longer neatly classed, apparently no longer definitively British, mutable and mutating.

Considering these few suggestive details, it seems reasonable to say that Conrad’s nameless, colonial, foreign-looking Assistant Commissioner is Shields’s flaneur, a “‘dis-placed,’” native-cum-foreigner figure serving Conrad to close “the gap between the (distant) foreign and the (local) intimate, violating the division of near and far and forcing us to rearrange our cognitive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Good Morning, Midnight: Flaneur Novels and the Colonial
• Chapter Two: Voyage in the Dark: Unhomely
• Chapter Three: Rhys/Deleuze—Rhys/Conrad: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Almayer’s Folly, and the Problem of Masochism in Rhys
• Chapter Four: Reading Quartet: “Phobic Nationalisms” and a Postcolonial Ethics
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index