‘This way to the exhibition’: genealogies of urban spectacle in Jean Rhys's interwar fictionстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 50–51. 2 On the geographical, historical and literary role of the Caribbean as a global crucible of capitalist modernity, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 1–20; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3 Jean Rhys, Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Voyage in the Dark (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Titles of Rhys's novels in parenthetical references are henceforth abbreviated as follows: Q, ALMM, VD, GMM. 4 See Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at World's End: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990); Coral Ann Howells, Jean Rhys (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991); Helen Carr, Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996); Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 127–66; Carol Dell'Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys (London: Routledge, 2005). 5 See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 125–47; see also Carr, Jean Rhys, pp. 40–45, on the role of France, until 1805 the colonial power in Dominica, as alternative imagined ‘homeland’ for Rhys. 6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), p. 237. 7 On Surrealism's dialogue with the Caribbean, and its impact on Francophone black Caribbean writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, see Michael Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996). 8 See Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 145–57; Carr, Jean Rhys, pp. 50–52; Jean Radford ‘Late Modernism and the politics of history’, in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 33–45; Kate Holden, ‘Formations of discipline and manliness: culture, politics and 1930s women's writing’, Journal of Gender Studies, 8, 2 (1999), pp. 141–57. 9 Carr, Jean Rhys, p. 29. 10 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The hotel lobby’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 181, 175–6, 179. 11 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1970); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). Debord, the first to use the term ‘commodity spectacle’, dates the emergence of what he calls the commodity spectacle from the 1920s. See Debord, Society, pp. 64–5, on the distinction between two forms of commodity spectacle: what he terms the ‘concentrated spectacle'of totalitarian or ‘bureaucratic’ states, and ‘diffuse spectacle’, which he links with untrammelled capitalist modernization. Arguably, the two forms of spectacle come together in the monumental mise-en-scène of the 1937 Paris World's Fair. 12 Cf. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 192–219. 13 See Tyler Stovall, ‘National identity and shifting imperial frontiers: whiteness and the exclusion of colonial labour after World War 1’, Representations, 84 (November 2003), pp. 52–72, on racial tensions in interwar France. Stovall argues that, as immigration increased during the 1930s, the presence of foreign nationals in the capital – especially the increasingly visible immigrant minorities from the North African colonies, and Jews from Germany and the Soviet Union – was seen as a burden on the Depression economy. 14 Rachel Bowlby, ‘The impasse’, in Still Crazy After All These Years (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 42. 15 See Stovall, ‘National identity’ on popular representations of the Foreign Legion, and their role in bolstering French imperial prestige in the interwar period. A body made up largely of foreigners from Europe and America, allowing recruits to the Legion to enlist under an assumed name (the anonymat), it was historically deployed in the pacification of French colonial territories. In 1937, the year in which GMM is set, the Legion was stationed in North Africa and involved in the suppression of nationalist revolt in Morocco. 16 See Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 146–8. 17 On Rhys and Creole identity, see Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 215–16; Helen Carr ‘Intemperate and unchaste: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole identity’, Women: A Cultural Review 14, 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 38–62; Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Maggie Humm, Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 62–93; Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women's Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Sue Thomas, ‘Jean Rhys, “Human Ants” and the Production of Expatriate Creole Identities’, in Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies and Robbie Goh (eds.), Postcolonial Cultures and Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 56–72. See also Peter Hulme, ‘“The locked heart”: the Creole family romance of Wide Sargasso Sea’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson (eds.), Colonial Discourse: Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 72–88, on the inherent instability of the category of the Creole in the West Indies, and the associated risks of dichotomizing ‘inauthentic’ (white) and ‘authentic’ (black) Caribbean identities in Rhys's work. 18 See J.A. Froude's The English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), pp. 159, 145, for a key example of the ethnographic discourse of the white Creole, which laments that the whites in Dominica ‘have lost heart, and cease to struggle against the stream’, leaving the island to ‘drift along’ in a ‘state of torpid content’. 19 Raiskin, Snow, p. 149. 20 See Wilson Harris, ‘Carnival of psyche: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea’, Kunapipi, 2 (1980), pp. 142–50; Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 145–55; Savory, Jean Rhys, pp. 58–84; Thomas, Worlding, pp. 100–10; Cynthia Davis, ‘Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences in the Work of Jean Rhys’, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 3,2 (Fall 2005), pp. 1–13. 21 See Rhys's memoir Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: André Deutsch, 1979), p. 50 for a description of black Dominicans as ‘more alive, more a part of the place than we were’; cf. Anna Morgan's comment: ‘being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’ (VD, 27). 22 See Thomas, Worlding, p. 103; Gregg, Creole, pp. 37–40; Humm, Border Traffic, pp. 66–69; and cf. note 12 above. 23 See Sander Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the prostitute: toward an iconography of female sexuality’, in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 176–108. 24 See Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 25 On Rhys's frequent visits to Paris during the 1930s, see Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 363–4. 26 Arthur Chandler, ‘Paris 1937: exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne’, in Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, ed. John E. Findling (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 288. 27 The primary documentary resource on the 1937 World's Fair is Edmund Labbé, Exposition internationale des arts et techniques Paris 1937: Rapport general, 11 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1938–40). See also James Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 3–39; Ulf Strohmayer, ‘Pictorial symbolism in the age of innocence: material geographies at the Paris World's Fair of 1937’, Ecumene, 3, 3 (1996), pp. 282–304; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Worlds' Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University. Press, 1988); Chandler, ‘Paris 1937’, pp. 283–90. 28 The literature on the World's Fairs is of course extensive; see Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, and Findling, Historical Dictionary, for a historical overview of the major events. 29 See Ezra, Colonial Unconscious, pp. 1–21. 30 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century’, in The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 7, 18. On the centrality of the Worlds' Fairs to the conceptual structure of Benjamin's Arcades Project, see Susan Buck- orss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 78–92. 31 See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertizing and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). 32 Tony Bennett, ‘The exhibitionary complex’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 130. 33 See Paul Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Culture in 19th Century France, trans. Katie Ainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 1–8. 34 See Allan Pred, Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 12–20; Curtis Hinsley, ‘Strolling through the Colonies’, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 119–40. 35 Cited in Herbert, Paris 1937, p. 27. 36 Ibid., p. 31. 37 Ibid., p. 19. 38 Labbé, Rapport general, Vol. 5, p. 156. 39 See Katherine Streip, ‘Just a cérébrale: Jean Rhys, women's humour and ressentiment’, Representations, 45 (Winter 1994), pp. 117–44. 40 See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Cultural Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830–1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Mary Gluck, ‘Theorizing the cultural roots of the Bohemian artist’, Modernism/Modernity 7, 3 (2000), pp. 351–78. 41 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 35. 42 On Surrealist cultural politics in the 1930s, see Briony Fer, ‘Surrealism, myth and psychoanalysis’, in Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood (eds.), Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Open University, 1993), pp. 171–29; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (eds.), Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 43 The paucity of recorded comments by Rhys on her reading, particularly before 1940, makes it difficult to establish with certainty the extent of her knowledge of Surrealism. However, her frequent periods of residence in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, noted in Angier, Jean Rhys, pp. 353–4, would have familiarized her with its major manifestations. The short-lived transatlantic review, edited by her mentor and lover Ford Madox Ford, in which her first publication, the story ‘Vienne’, appeared in December 1924, featured both Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tzara, frequently claimed as Dadaist precursors of Surrealism. See Transatlantic Review, Vols 1 and 2 (January–December 1924). 44 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 230–31. 45 See Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 228–9, on the importance of the work of interpretation to the Surrealist project. 46 See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 186–92. 47 See Raymond Spiteri, ‘Surrealism and the political physiognomy of the marvellous’ in Spiteri, Surrealism, pp. 52–72; Cohen, Profane Illumination, pp. 56–119; Fer, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 183–9. 48 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 112. 49 See Elena Filipovic, ‘Surrealism in 1938: the exhibition at war’, in Spiteri, Surrealism, pp. 179–203; Herbert, Paris 1937, pp. 123–62. 50 Filipovic, ‘Surrealism’, p. 191. 51 See Herbert, Paris 1937, p. 124 52 See Fer, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 188–91; Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp. 123–53. 53 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 136. 54 See Amanda Stansell, ‘Surrealist racial politics at the borders of “reason”: whiteness, primitivism and négritude’, in Spiteri, Surrealism, pp. 113–21; on the use of ethnography by the para-Surrealist group surrounding Documents, see James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 117–51. 55 See William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Parts 1, 2 and 3a, Res 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–17; 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23–45; 16 (Autumn 1980), pp. 105–23. 56 On ‘La vérité sur les colonies’, see Blake, Tumulte Noir, pp. 111–34; Carole Sweeney, ‘Le tour du monde en quatre jours: empire, exhibition and the surrealist disorder of things’, Textual Practice, 19, 1 (2005), pp. 131–47; on the 1936 Galerie Ratton exhibition, see Harris, Surrealist Art, pp. 183–201. 57 See Stansell, ‘Surrealist racial politics’, pp. 111–126. 58 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books), pp. 211–44. For a recent reassessment of Benjamin's ‘aestheticization’ thesis, see Lutz Koepnick, ‘Fascist aesthetics revisited’, Modernism/Modernity, 6, 1 (1999), pp. 51–73. 59 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the Two World Wars (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999). 60 Timothy Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 17.
Год издания: 2007
Авторы: Christina Britzolakis
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Textual Practice
Ключевые слова: Travel Writing and Literature
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 21
Выпуск: 3
Страницы: 457–482