Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030282233
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Before, After, and Beyond Windrush

Arriving in England in 1907, Rhys preceded emigrants such as Una Marson, Claude McKay, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris by decades. Her writing participates in a circuitous and relational modernism that extends from the 1920s and 1930s through the 1960s. It includes Marson, McKay, and James in an early transatlantic Caribbean modernism developed in counterpoint to the Anglo/European/US modernism of the period.5 Experiencing the exile so often considered a requirement for modernist writers, they created innovative, experimental fiction and poetry that broke with conventions of Standard English, incorporated blues and jazz, reflected on modernist visual aesthetics, and portrayed the interwar years from the sharply illuminating perspectives of colonial outsiders.

Later émigrés of the Windrush generation, such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, and Harris, have been credited with inaugurating Caribbean modernism. And critics have read their metropolitan novels in dialogue with Anglo/European/US modernists such as T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce.6 However, these writers of the 1950s also looked back to the interwar Caribbean modernists. For example, Lamming’s writing in The Emigrants , published in 1954, echoes scenes in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, published 20 years before. In a passage reflecting on the novel as a genre, Lamming’s narrator comes close to quoting the last lines of Voyage, gesturing to Rhys while vowing to “start all over again … start all over? … again…” (14). Portraying the perceptions of new arrivals as they journey by train to London, Lamming seems again to pay homage to Rhys, evoking the train’s rhythms in a collage of voices and advertisements for Ponds cold cream, razor blades, paint, and insecticide. The lengthy passage recalls Anna Morgan’s ironic commentaries on Bourne’s Cocoa and especially the streaming interior monologue conveying her perceptions, intercut with her voice and that of her stepmother, as she views England for the first time through a train window: “This is England, Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else—what are those things—those are haystacks—oh those are haystacks—I had read about England ever since I could read—smaller meaner everything is never mind—…” (17). Lamming’s arrival in England along with others of the Windrush generation created, in turn, a more collective “West Indian” cultural identity for writers and artists. Theirs was an identity different from, yet pioneered by, the experiences of earlier emigrants, including Rhys.

Recalling that Kenneth Ramchand described Voyage in the Dark as “our first novel of Negritude” (3), and considering Claude McKay’s role in sparking that movement, it also seems important to at least mention the relational networks generating transatlantic Anglophone and Francophone modernisms. These would include the Harlem Renaissance and the surrealism and environmentalism of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. And given the post-slavery plantation setting of Wide Sargasso Sea, the possibility of a trans-American plantation modernism linking Rhys with writers such as William Faulkner and Jean Toomer also emerges. Though we may not

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