Getting the Story Across: Jean Rhys’s Paranoid Narrative

“[P]aranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.”

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

Jean Rhys’s heroines find judgment lurking in every bar, hotel, and restaurant in Paris. Worrying constantly about how they are perceived by lovers, ex-lovers, families, colleagues, and even perfect strangers, they anxiously avoid displaying some outward sign of difference, some indication that they have been—like Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight—in the “deep, dark river” (Collected Novels 348). In Rhys’s fiction, paranoia presents itself not as a common pathology but as an important textual mode. In this essay, I shall examine the narrative strategies Rhys employs to dramatize the anxiety that propels her heroines’ movements through the city. The ability of Rhys’s street-savvy heroines to anticipate, read, and interpret other peoples’ responses, is, as I shall show, a form of paranoia dressed up as knowingness.

If paranoid knowing is, as Eve Sedgwick observes, “inescapably narrative,” then it is possible to read narrative as paranoid.¹ “Paranoia is anticipatory,” Sedgwick tells us; it wants to control all the information and will not desist from inventing information in pursuit of control; it places “an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure” (17). Freud recognizes paranoia as a “neurosis of defense,” of which the primary symptoms are distrust and verbal or visual hallucinations. The ego, shying from “primary self-reproach,” concedes to the force of “compromise systems” that incite it “to make attempts at explaining them,” attempts that Freud describes as “assimilatory delusions” (90). In other words, in the paranoid mind, past experiences of judgment must be made to serve for something, must be transformed into a protective mantle, and harnessed to the vital task of anticipating and imagining rejection. Rhys’s heroines feverishly gather knowledge about themselves to avoid the trauma of exposure. Paranoid narrative, then, engages in such acts of gathering, imagining, and narrativizing knowledge.

What distinguishes paranoid from non-paranoid narrative is its proliferation of voices and perspectives, its attempt to “read” itself in advance, even of the reader’s arrival. As Rhys’s work shows, paranoid narrative dwells in extreme proximity to autobiography: we are never so vulnerable as when we recount our life stories. Rhys’s heroines fear they will be disbelieved, thereby losing control over the possible interpretations and (mis)understandings of their stories. Ironically, this same anxiety fuels the critical doctrine underlying much contemporary Rhys criticism, according to which Rhys’s heroines should not be conceived as different versions of the same character, the “Rhys Woman,” a stand-in for the author herself. For decades, Rhys’s reliance on her life as inspiration for her fiction has been used to minimize her artistic achievement. Scholars like Mary Lou Emery, Molly Hite, Anne B. Simpson, and Nagihan Haliloglu, seeking to put this bias to rest, have done so by rejecting autobiographical speculations altogether. According to Hite, if the novels were rooted in Rhys’s biography, Rhys would appear “unable to control the form and the ideology of her own text”; this, in turn, would call into question the “innovation [and] technique” of her text, undermining the feminist view of her work as mounting “a deliberate challenge to the value presuppositions of the dominant culture” (22). The resultant taboo against autobiographical considerations has had the effect of marginalizing attention to the origin of much of Rhys’s early fiction and of obscuring an important part of Rhys’s understanding of herself as a writer. I argue, on the contrary, that Rhys anchored her critique of the dominant culture in her own experiences of marginality and humiliation.

Rhys expressed a vexed sense of the relationship between her life and her fiction: whenever she was asked to clarify the relationship between the work and her lived experience, Rhys would give a different answer. In conversation with David Plante, who transcribed her autobiography, and then painted a cruel and catty portrait of...