Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again," muses Anna Morgan, the émigré narrator of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark.¹ This 1934 novel about a Creole demimonde illuminates a complex but overlooked genealogical moment in twentieth-century literature: the point when the exhausted limits of modernist form revealed the lineaments of postcolonial fiction. Rhys's semicanonical tale of a chorus-girl-turned-prostitute has generally been read as a key to pre-War London, a novel of female flânerie, or one among the author's several fictions of feminine self-destruction.² In this essay, I argue that in order to understand the English novel's "postcolonial turn" in the middle of the twentieth century, we should revisit Voyage in the Dark and its interventions into British literary modernism. The novel's complex transnationality—the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the West Indies—gives rise to its transitional literary quality: Rhys produces a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of modernist formal accomplishments, and, simultaneously, inaugurates what would soon become the central goals of postcolonial literature in English. And although Voyage in the Dark has been overshadowed by Rhys's 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, it is the earlier novel that shows us a crucial transformation in the aesthetic priorities and political thrust of twentieth-century English fiction. As this fleeting, slight work gradually renders obsolescent the longstanding modernist worship of form, it announces the visionary and revisionary work of a nascent postcolonial literature.

Voyage in the Dark maps two overlapping arcs: Western imperialism's rise and decline over four centuries, and British modernism's rise and decline over four decades. The novel's very title invokes two earlier modern-imperial texts: Voyage in the Dark looks back to Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad's famously inconclusive meditation on colonial praxis, and The Voyage Out (1915), Virginia Woolf's anti-Bildüngsroman in which a young female protagonist dies abruptly in South America. But the title of Rhys's novel also suggests the uncertain future of aesthetic modernism itself, which by the mid-1930s was no longer able to purchase artistic triumph with its cache of experimental techniques and was, accordingly, voyaging in a kind of darkness. Tyrus Miller's Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars argues that experimental writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s begins to distance itself from the literature that preceded it; this writing, Miller claims, "loosens the modernist dominance of form and allows a more fluid, dialogic relation with the immediate historical context. It accomplished this unbinding of the work at the cost of abandoning the modernist gold standard: form as the universal currency in which aesthetic value could be measured and calculated."³ Voyage in the Dark turns away from the wonted sacredness of literary form and registers the urgency of engaging an "immediate historical context"; Rhys's novelistic outcry against the limits of modernism anticipates György Lukács's polemical attack on the generation of authors who esteemed form to the near-exclusion of other considerations. And while Rhys does not privilege a Lukácsian return to social realism, Voyage in the Dark elucidates the dark consequences of what Lukács would soon criticize as the "opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended" aestheticization of everyday experience.⁴

As Voyage in the Dark breaks modernism apart by refusing to privilege artistic form, it lays the groundwork for a developing literature of postcoloniality through the many-shaded voice of a Creole protagonist-narrator. Indeed, the novel's opening claim that to arrive in London is "almost like being born again" foretells the defining quality of postcolonial English literature: the advent of the twentieth-century postcolonial novel would not be a literary genre's triumphant renaissance, but would be, like the newly formed nation-states it described, the complicated emergence of a literature inextricably bound to the very culture it sought to escape. To be Creole...