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Chapter 5. Rhys, the Obscure: The Literature of Celebrity at the Margins
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132 ] Back in touch with literary London she [Rhys] heard those rumors again: Jean Rhys was dead. Carole ANgier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work Rhys, the Obscure: The Literature of Celebrityat the Margins n 1956, Francis Wyndham, having not yet become one of Jean Rhys’s most ardent professional supporters and friends, published an essay referring to its subject as “the late Jean Rhys.” Ten years later Rhys completed work on and published Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys’s obscurity, that which prompted Wyndham ’s erroneous assumption and epithet, would seem to be the very opposite of fame. The obscure, far from indicating an apotheosis of the individual subject, represents a state of being in which one’s very existence is called into question. Accordingly, of the various figures this book examines in the light of celebrity and modernism, Jean Rhys is most likely to induce raised eyebrows. After all, Rhys’s self, not entirely self-fashioned, seems to read quite differently from that of the celebrity, especially when compared with those grandiose textually constructed identities of Wilde, Joyce, Stein, and Chaplin. The Rhys biography and oeuvre, though, share important characteristics with the other figures analyzed here. Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born in Dominica of Welsh and I ChaPter 5 Rhys, the Obscure: The Literature of Celebrity at the Margins [ 133 Scottish-Creole ancestry in 1894. She became an unrestrained practitioner of modernist aesthetics during her early, expatriate publishing career (1926–1938), one that immediately followed the high modernist moment. Her representational techniques, often elliptical and often nonlinear , certainly can be considered obscure. I use the term obscure here not only for its meaning as something unknown, but also because of the notion of a literary work that is difficult to penetrate for its unconventional style and thus contributes to constructing the modernist author. Delia Caparoso Konzett writes of Rhys’s “conscious deployment and appropriation of modernist stylistic techniques” (133). Rhys’s style, in other words, conforms to those modernist gestures that I have shown to correspond with the creation of the celebrity. Thus end the major parallels. For over a decade during and after World War II, at the chronological midpoint of her literary career, Rhys lived in virtual anonymity. Rhys never generated an image that became famous, never produced a style that became famously associated with her, never investigated the semiotics of famous names, and never, by twentiethcentury standards, became terribly well-known—although eventually the splash made by Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) established her literary reputation and returned her earlier writings to public circulation. Rhys’s history suggests a chronicle more of obscurity than of fame. Yet the obscurity Rhys lived in, an obscurity that finds its counterpart in the abject position of Rhys’s protagonists, can be seen as a defining obverse of the cultural currency that constitutes celebrity. Rhys offers glimpses of not only the way celebrity discourse appears in the most unlikely places during the modernist period, but also how intersections between celebrity and modernism have permeated literary culture since the end of the modernist period. In this chapter, I will argue that the syncretism between Rhys’s life and work demonstrates that the literature of celebrity underwrites her career, and that Rhys’s works figure anonymity into the structures we have seen more aurified writers using to think through the idea of celebrity. Rhys’s protagonists—Mary Cantwell calls them all “the same woman although she bears different names” (21)—are marginalized by gender, geography, nationality, and age. They are marked anonymous by the same tokens that render fame: they are objects on display—distinct, irreproducible , and non-reproducing. But they remain powerless, residing below rather than above the crowd. In Rhys’s writings, the materials of celebrity construe not the modernist exception but the abject, which in turn becomes another way of articulating the individual in the face of mass culture . Marginalization creates not Barthes’s “Platonic Idea of the human [3.218.247.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:21 GMT) 134 ] Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity creature,” but a dystopic idea, and one that does not even always seem human. Rhys participates in a mutually defining production of the individual with the figures I examine in my earlier chapters by offering up an idea of the obscure, the anonymous, as a figure just as incompletely comprehensible as the celebrity. By reading Rhys in this vein I argue that celebrity provides explanatory power for texts of modernism besides those...