Nearly 40 years after her death,
Caribbean-British writer Jean Rhys made her presence felt in Paris during an
international conference devoted to her work, held at the famous Sorbonne university.
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| Phillips reads from his novel about Rhys. |
The aim of the June 21-23 meeting,
titled “Transmission Lines”, was to bring the two “sides” of Rhys’ work
together: the modernist / European one and the colonial / postcolonial / Caribbean
one, said Kerry-Jane Wallart, a professor at La Sorbonne and a member of the
organizing committee with her colleagues Juliana Lopoukhine and Frédéric
Regard.
“The problem was that (A) scholars did
not interact with the other team, which seemed a shame, as academese can
petrify, and, conversely, can be much invigorated by new angles and concepts,”
said Wallart. “And (B) that this produced an odd dichotomy between Wide Sargasso Sea and the rest of the work.”
Rhys is known for her minimalist,
avant-garde style in early books such as Quartet
(based on her affair with the writer Ford Maddox Ford in Paris and published in
1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight. But her greatest
acclaim came for Wide Sargasso Sea,
published in 1966 when she was in her mid-Seventies.
Some scholars prefer to focus on her
first body of work, while others see Wide
Sargasso Sea as a “postcolonial” chef d’oeuvre, with the other novels in a
different category.
“But Wide
Sargasso Sea is also a modernist novel, and you find traces of an
in-between / estranged / unstable other / postcolonial identity in all texts,
including the letters and the autobiography,” Wallart wrote in a note about the
conference. “That’s why it was important to get all sides talking.”
Although Paris features extensively in
Rhys’ storytelling, “no one had ever organized something on her in France,
which is a country where she lived and wrote”, said Wallart.
When the conference organizers issued an
initial call for papers, they were “completely taken by surprise” at the
response.
“The number of scholars answering the
call for papers was much unexpected (for someone whose last texts date back to
the 1960s). It might have seemed that everything had been said in the 1980s and
early 1990s, but apparently Rhys insists (on attention),” Wallart said.
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| Conference organizers J. Lopoukhine and K-J Wallart. |
“We see so much in her work about the
migrant who can’t be read by the society around them,” said Helen Carr, a
retired professor from Goldsmiths, University of London.
“The way some people look at migrants as
non-humans, it seems to me that this is a moment when we need to re-read Jean
Rhys in terms of what’s happening today and to realize how important her work
has always been,” Carr added.
For researcher Floriane Reviron Piégay,
Rhys made “coherent art out of a shapeless life”. Piégay discussed the many
biographies of the writer, quoting the maxim that “you can never trust anyone
blindly when it comes to telling someone else’s life”.
The biographies about Rhys in fact
generated heated discussion, with the writer’s granddaughter Moerman declaring
that many of their assertions were “screamingly inaccurate”.
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| The conference logo: "Transmission Lines". |
Phillips, the conference’s guest
speaker, read from his novel during the event, including at the renowned
Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Company, telling listeners that he was not
particularly “interested in facts” and had no desire to write a biography.
He said he thought that Rhys was “hugely
underrated as a writer, particularly because she’s a woman”, and the novel seems
an attempt to pay homage to someone whose work he admires.
“People are more interesting than
facts,” said Phillips, who prefers Rhys’ early books to Wide Sargasso Sea.
Throughout the conference, Moerman for
her part insisted on pointing out what she saw as nonfactual elements in
different presentations. (She told SWAN
that the conference wasn’t her “cup of tea” as there was “an awful lot of
talking about people who’ve talked about Jean Rhys”).
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| One of Rhys' early novels. |
“My not entirely unrelated interest is
in the recurring critical classification of Rhys’ work in terms of either/or; black/white;
creole/European; Caribbean/continental literary tradition;
modernist/postcolonial," O’Callaghan wrote in her paper.
“Rhys and her work have been transferred
from camp to camp over time, and the issue of where they belong shows no sign
of being resolved,” she added, before examining how race has played a part in
the debate. (Interestingly, there were no black scholars presenting papers at
the conference.)
In the end, the divide on Rhys’ work may
matter little to readers and to students themselves.
“When I read Wide Sargasso Sea, I never
thought about Jean Rhys’ race,” a former student told O’Callaghan.
“What moved her instead”, according to
O’Callaghan, “was the ‘pervasive unbelonging that is experienced by many
different kinds of people in the Caribbean’.”
- SWAN
