Context
Reading Jean Rhys
Martha Haas
The act of reading Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and what one may do with this reading afterwards are two very different things. Rhys’s critics have waded in with a variety of mechanisms—from squeezing her into the role of a minor modernist to elevating her to an unheralded feminist. But the critics, as usual, in their attempts at interpretation undermine the nature of the art and what the experience of reading is. While Rhys’s fiction has the appearance of complete simplicity, it is not simple. Yet her elusiveness is of a completely different kind from the tradition established by Stein, Barnes, Joyce, and Woolf, and for that she is perpetually ignored by critics of the experimental, even though she is also ignored by the critics of realism because she doesn’t fit easily into a realistic tradition either.
Her closest modernist counterpart is Hemingway—both mistrust language, critique its inadequacies even while they use it, depend heavily upon "empty" words (Hemingway liked nice, Rhys liked etcetera), and both, at their best, invent characters who are just hanging on, trying to survive to the next day, trying to numb themselves. Unlike Hemingway, Rhys doesn’t employ romantic trappings—no bullfights, no falling in love. The closest she comes to the latter in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is a gigolo, far removed from Hemingway’s Brett Ashley.
Reduced to story essentials, Good Morning, Midnight is about Sasha Jansen, a down-and-out woman renting a room in Paris in the late 1930s, a place she can afford only because a friend has given her the money for it. At some ill-defined point in her life, she had what was apparently a small inheritance, though we are not told who died in order to provide it. Several years before she lived in Paris with her lover Enno, the father of her only child (who died a short time after birth). Given the constant refrain of where she will get her next drink, one might guess that she is an alcoholic (one might also guess any number of other things), but her alcoholism is not foregrounded. She lives next-door to a man of whom she is terrified, though we are never told why. Most of the novel gives disjointed episodes from both her present and her past—failed loves, failed jobs. Late in the novel we find out she is a writer. Little or none of the information I have just provided is easily accessible in the novel itself, however. In other words, this synthesis falsifies what it is like to read the novel.
The art of Jean Rhys is difficult to get at because her work seems so "artless," flat prose, episodic, even offhanded. What do you do with a writer whose sense of story, to quote from Good Morning, Midnight, is "this happened and then that"? Which is very close to how one reads her, akin to listening to someone ramble who provides little or no context for who was doing what or when; even while you can follow the ramblings clearly line to line, without the context you cannot attach significance to anything in particular. For instance, in Rhys the name of someone (Enno, her lover) is mentioned early on but no information is provided about how this figure relates to the narrator; fifty pages later we find out, almost in an aside, that he was the father of her child. The displacement of such information alters how we read or interpret the information, and what connections we can or cannot make as we read.
Let’s see how this method of displacement might work in a novel and what it does to the reader:
1. On page 5 we find out that the narrator went to the movies with Bill; he touches her hand; she feels uncomfortable;
2. On page 50, the narrator mentions that she lived with Bill "at that time," but doesn’t specify when "that time" was;
3. On page 75, she has dinner with Bill;
4. On page 125, the narrator vaguely refers to "the time I was raped";
5. On page 150, she refers to Bill as her brother;
6. On page 200, she refers to the night her brother raped her.
Assuming this structuring is not done for the sake of surprise, shock, and therefore manipulation, but instead registers how the character’s mind works and how it makes (or doesn’t make) connections, what effects does this have upon the reader, how we read, and what we think we "know" at any given point? Let’s also assume that, as is the case with Rhys, nothing is ever disguised and that in fact everything relevant to a scene is told us. In other words, it’s neither Rhys’s nor her narrator’s problem that we do not know things in a certain sequence, or that more information isn’t made available. We know them in the order that is essential to the author’s art. We know them in the order that they impress themselves upon the mind of the character.
Rhys’s method for doing this, which originates in character, is to make all things (events, objects, people) equal, or at least present them to us as equal. Where the narrator is going to go for her next drink is just as significant as the death of her baby: they all exist on the same plane. In fact, at one point the narrator’s friend tells her that things do not all exist on the same plane, but indeed they do for this character and they do for the method of ordering and narrative information in the novel.
Because of this method, the structure of Good Morning, Midnight is Shandian in nature. Time and casual relationships, like everything else in the novel, are reflective of character, and for Sasha Jansen (whose real name is not even Sasha, though this fact, buried in an aside of sorts, seems to have eluded most of her critics), time also exists on a single plane. Though Sasha does not differentiate between what happens in the present and what happened fifteen years ago, how the reader might react would be affected if time sequences and relationships were clearer. But in Sasha’s world, events and experiences repeat themselves, and so the difference between what happened between her and a lover fifteen years ago is, for her, only another manifestation of what is happening now. Therefore, "this happened and then that," but the "this" and the "that" do not follow a causal pattern. Is there a relationship among her father (mentioned once in a dream), her lover Enno, the gigolo lover in the present, and the menacing figure who lives in the room next door and with whom she winds up in bed on the novel’s last page? Probably, or maybe, or no: Sasha makes no connections and any connections the reader might try to make are impeded by the method Rhys uses. What isn’t available to Sasha is not made available to the reader. In short, we are forced to read the novel the way that Sasha experiences things: fragmented, elliptical, confused.
If you ignore what happens in the act of reading Rhys and instead refashion the novel the way that critics are wont to do, you find a minor writer who fits nowhere, perhaps little more than a failed Ford Madox Ford, who was her mentor during the early years; however, if you pay attention to that act of reading, you recognize the staggering range of fictional problems that Rhys set for herself and the unique body of work she created.
