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406 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
I have never gone without food for longer than five days, so I cannot amuse you any longer.It's easy to take for granted how long some writers survive. You'd think, after reading the histories of Mary Wollstonecraft and Yvonne Vera and Malcolm X and John Keats and Roberto Bolano, we would be more grateful that the systematic barriers of race, gender, apolitical environments artificially induced via assassination, and unequal socioeconomic access to curative situations don't stamp out more of those whom we read and raise up as classics. Jean Rhys had no reason to go on for as long as she did, as the cute little story found on many synopsis of a Bright Young Thing sucked up, spat out, and (fortunately for the modern (white) man) "rediscovered" thirty years later is a brutal joke at best, when taking into account the sheer number of stories, some of them most likely autobiographical, of starvation and marginalization and suicide ideation. With a life such as that, Rhys had no time to waste on being "redisovered". It is much better, then, that one reads through the various novels and collected short stories with an eye on the chronology of 1927 (publication, no copyright) to 1976 (publication, yes copyright) and think upon what it took to go through WWII, post WWIII, postcolonialism, civil rights movements, second wave feminism, and all that jazz, and take what you will from that.
How rum some English people are! They ask to be shocked and long to be shocked and hope to be shocked, but if you really shock them...how shocked they are!
But when I discovered that though they never believed the truth, they swallowed the most fantastic lies, I amused myself a good deal.
You're always going on about respectable people, but you know you are respectable, whatever you say and whatever you do, and you'll be respectable till you die, however you die, and that way you miss something, believe it or not.For all the time that passed between first and last, Rhys' stories don't show their shifts in evolution overtly. The themes of a life lived on the cusp of white supremacist, gynephobic respectability were, unfortunately, stable throughout a sizable chunk of the 20th century, and the kernels of both Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen in more than one story. More than a few of the stories are nasty and/or blackfacedly appropriative in the way the unedited 1940's edition of Disney's first Fantasia is (google Fantasia (1940) Sunflower comparison if you don't believe me), so I won't be doing anything with regards to analysis of race. The introduction to this edition criticizes Rhys for being unfriendly and cynical, but considering how I doubt anyone pulls that shit with Dostoevsky or Franzen or an other disaffected white boy, I'm not interested. What I am interested in is what the webs of riches and pain, isolation and colonialism, those conditioned to wear dresses and those conditioned to lord over those in dresses, all the attachés of reality associated with such fearfully protected tools of divided and conquer, all through the words of one white woman who took what she could get and drained it to the drop. What her readers make of her is really up to them, so long as they aren't foolish enough to believe they are doing any "rediscovering".
Why do people so expert in mental torture pretend blandly that it doesn't exist?
A woman supposed to be starving ought not to go about in silk stockings and quite expensive shoes.I've reached the stage of reading Rhys where I am far more interested in engaging with her nonfiction after a successive string of fictions, which means I can't get my hands on Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography quick enough. Biographers are all well and good, but unless they're on the level of Alice James and know how to be subjective in the humanity affirming way, I trust them about as far as I can throw them. I definitely prefer Rhys in the long but not too long form, but it was indeed very interesting to see all the precursors to the one of the novellas that first granted her critical appreciation and the much later work that gave her fame. She's far from my favorite, but she's certainly not boring, and with her turns of phrase, she's most certainly worthy of remembrance.
'There!' said Roseau in triumph, for the argument had been about whether anything excused the Breaking of Certain Rules.
'That's all nonsense,' said Mr Wheeler.
'But you excuse a sharp business deal?' persisted Roseau.
'Business,' said Mr Wheeler, as if speaking to a slightly idiotic child, 'is quite different, Miss, er...'
'You think that,' argued Roseau, 'because it's your form of emotion.'
Mr Wheeler gave her up.
Now I am almost as wary of books as I am of people. They also are capable of hurting you, pushing you into the limbo of the forgotten. They can tell lies — and vulgar, trivial lies — and when there are so many all saying the same thing they can shout you down and make you doubt, not only your memory, but your senses.
'I'm destroying my feminine charm,' Elsa said. I thought I'd make a nice quick clean job of it.'
[Y]ou can't die and come to life again for a few hundred francs. It takes more than that. It takes more, perhaps, than anybody is ever willing to give.