Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination by veronica marie gregg

Author:veronica marie gregg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Voyage in the Dark

My analysis of Voyage in the Dark will be based on a reading of the novel that includes its original ending, as it is in this ending that the text brings together the West Indies of the 1840s with Europe of 1914. In a letter of 18 February 1934 to fellow writer Evelyn Scott, Rhys says: “I don’t know if I’ve got away with it. I don’t know. Its written almost entirely in words of one syllable. Like a kitten mewing perhaps. The big idea.... [S]omething to do with time being an illusion.... [T]he past exists — side by side with the present, not behind it. . . .What was — is. I tried to do it by making the past (the West Indies) very vivid—the present dreamlike (downward career of girl) — starting of course piano and ending fortissimo” (Letters, 24).

The use of monosyllabic language, linked to the emphasis on the plasticity and sensory value of language to enact the coevalness of time, represents a form of rewriting of the dominant to make it bear the burden of “difference.” This strategy shows affinities to Deleuze and Guattaris reading of Kafka. The language of a minor literature, they argue, “stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits.” Deterritorialization of language opens it up to an intensive use which “makes it take flight along creative lines of escape ... [and produces] sober syntactical invention simply to write like a dog.” Or, in Rhys’s case, like a kitten (Kafka, 23-26).

The first-person narrative of Voyage in the Dark tells the story of a young Creole woman, Anna Morgan. Anna’s apparently transparent story, told through the use of simple language, enhances the sense of her naivete and youth, her displacement. Her inability to fit the West Indies and England together suggests a loss of temporal (historical) referents: “Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together” (8).

An important corollary to this is that Anna apprehends experiences through her senses, feelings, body, and memory: “Somebody was playing the piano — a tinkling sound like water running. I began to walk very slowly because I wanted to listen. But it got farther and farther away and then I couldn’t hear it any more. ‘Gone for ever/ I thought” (10). “I was always sad, with the same sort of hurt that the cold gave me in my chest” (15). “When you have fever you are heavy and light, you are small and swollen, you climb endlessly a ladder which turns like a wheel” (33). When Anna encounters unpleasant or painful experiences, she does not “tell” her response but is often shown reacting in a delayed mode. Each painful emotional blow is first deflected and the effects on her rendered in slow motion (e.g., being compared to a stone, the cigarette-burning incident, Vincent’s letter).

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