Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Sue Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350275775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

1

Routes to Rhys’s early fiction

Modernist scholarly cultures of celebrity – those around the Left Bank, Ford Madox Ford, his fabled editorship of the transatlantic review, and fin-de-siècle Vienna – have occluded the complexity and scope of Rhys’s formation as a writer, which ranges beyond Fordian impressionism.¹ In her early fiction, Rhys uses allusion and intertextual and intermedial resonance to locate and position the particularities of her authorial voice and interests for her audiences. In ‘Vienne’,² at sixty-three pages by far the longest story in The Left Bank and Other Stories, Rhys alludes to Ernst Kirchner’s paintings of dancers, the Viennese art movement kineticism and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909’. The allusions and resonance point to shared formal interests in representing, respectively, routine; movement, groupings and dynamics; and the function of the machine in thinking through the relation between the past and the future. They also signal Rhys’s differences of perspective: her interest, for instance, in the mechanics of the off-stage sexual economies in which dancers circulate; the morbid symptoms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrating under the terms of the post-war Treaty of St Germain and Treaty of Trianon; the ‘huge machine of law, order, respectability’;³ and the inescapability of the past. In the far shorter story ‘Tea with an Artist’, the narrator visits the studio of a painter she identifies as predominantly impressionist in style. Rhys explores the operation of ‘law, order, respectability’ in framings and readings of the painter and his partner, using irony to expose gaps between the authorial and narrative voices in the story. In Quartet, Rhys’s representations of the mechanics of Marya Zelli’s major depressive episode draw on broad strands of modernist thinking about the relation between the human and (in)animation through marionette theatre and about technology and mind. She also draws on motifs in R. C. Dunning’s poem ‘The Hermit’, lines from which she uses as the novel’s epigraph. Rhys explicitly denounces a ‘mania for classification’ in everyday social life,⁴ representing it as an aspect of the depersonalizing ‘machine of law, order, respectability’.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the major cities of which were Vienna, Budapest and Prague, the settings of ‘Vienne’, extended from 1867 to 1918. During the First World War Austria-Hungary was one of the Central Powers allied with Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey. Lonnie Johnson points out that in the talks and diplomacy around the post-war peace settlements of the empire with victorious Allied powers – the Treaty of St Germain with Austria (signed on 10 September 1919) and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (signed on 4 June 1920) – ‘the defeated states were objects of negotiation among the victors. In this respect, the designation “dictated peace” is an accurate description of the so-called negotiation process.’ Under the terms of the treaties, both countries lost territory as a ‘new European order’, with an ‘application of the ethnic principle of national self-determination’, was established.⁵ Inter-Allied Military Control Commissions were appointed to bring about disarmament, both by demobilizing personnel and through ‘seizure of war matériel and a prohibition against the … disposal of equipment through sales’.⁶ Rhys’s husband Jean Lenglet worked as a secretary-translator for the Japanese delegation to the Commission overseeing disarmament of ‘war matériel’. Rhys and Lenglet lived in Vienna from April 1920 to July 1921 and Budapest from July to late October 1921, travelling then to Prague. By May 1922 they were in Belgium.⁷ War matériel comprised machinery: ‘army equipment, arms, ammunition, and the means to produce them’. Distinctions were made between the appropriate handling of ‘war matériel “properly so-called”’ and ‘matériel adaptable for civilian purposes’, sales of ‘which would allow Austria to obtain credits necessary for food and economic recovery’.⁸ In ‘Vienne’, the term ‘war material’ is cynically applied to dancers by Colonel Ishima of the Japanese delegation to the Inter-allied Commission.⁹ In this context it suggests assumptions of dancers having sexual histories of servicing military personnel, adaptability for post-war use and ‘sale’ of sex to subsist and recapitalize. The assumptions are cogs in the ‘huge machine of law, order, respectability’, which produces, among other things, ‘the fiction of the “good” woman and the “bad” one’.¹⁰ The centrality of the mordant term ‘war material’ in the story is suggested by Rhys’s relocating of ‘War Material’ as the second vignette of the revised 1968 version of ‘Vienne’ published in Tigers Are Better-Looking. In the story, generally nightclub dancers are assumed to be available as part of a ‘common pool’ of women in straitened circumstances, the sexual use, exchange and conspicuous consumption of whom in front of other men secures Inter-allied homosociality among Commission members and their entourages.¹¹

In a reading of ‘Vienne’ still haunted by the critical stereotype of Rhys as confessional autobiographer ‘unfold[ing] an impressionistic personal remembrance of things past’, GoGwilt does not separate the narrative and the authorial voices of the story in arguing that the ‘narrative perspective’ is ‘nostalgically attached to personal memories of postwar Vienna in 1921’.¹² The first and last vignettes of ‘Vienne’, though, feature dancing in a narrative arc that pointedly positions the story in relation to the poetics of three modernist movements – Die Brücke, kineticism and futurism – all of which were animated by experiment with the representation of movement and with abstraction. Not recognizing Rhys’s engagement with Ernst Kirchner and kineticism, GoGwilt argues that Rhys elides an ‘Austrian German cultural-historical perspective[s]’.¹³ The opening vignette of ‘Vienne’ as published in the transatlantic review in 1924 is titled ‘The Dancer’.¹⁴ With some changes to the punctuation and a renamed husband for the narrator Frances, the vignette, untitled, opens the far longer 1927 version of ‘Vienne’, which is set in 1920–1. One of the dancer’s spectacular drilled moves – jumping ‘[f]our, five feet’ from the ground and landing ‘without a sound’ – is drawn from the repertoire and technique of Grete Wiesenthal, a Viennese free dance pioneer and post–First World War choreographer.¹⁵ The unnamed dancer has ‘Kirchner girl’s legs’, an allusion to Die Brücke leader Ernst Kirchner’s stylized and signature representation of regimented dancers’ legs in artworks such as Tänzerinnen (Dancers) (1906) and Sechs Tänzerinnen (Six Dancers) (1911).¹⁶ The signature legs, one of his ‘linear and planar abbreviations for forms in nature … which he called hieroglyphs’ were developed as part of the ‘painting vocabulary’ of a more abstract ‘two-dimensionalized style’.¹⁷ Later in his career Kirchner would characterize his stylistic innovation as ‘a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion … I practised seizing things quickly … and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself’.¹⁸ ‘The image of dancing was for Franz Cizek the key to achieving’ a ‘synthesis (or “simultanism”) of aesthetic styles’ – ‘expressionist, cubist, futurist, and constructivist’ – that he called kineticism, Karl Toepfer writes.¹⁹ For F. T. Marinetti in ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909’ the speeding car is a sign of ‘the beauty of speed’ in a machine age that would be a subject of futurist art and writing and the car ride is a metonym of an aesthetic celebrating ‘the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness’.²⁰ In ‘Vienne’, the car, chauffeur-driven in Vienna and en route from Budapest to Prague, is a symbol of ‘The Spending Phase’ of Frances and Pierre’s time in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.²¹ For Marinetti, the car ‘is attached to … a sense … of a present moment that is freed from the drag of the past’;²² the tree-tops ‘dancing madly’ above Frances in the story’s final vignette are a sign of a sudden suicidal impulse to be freed from a future determined by ‘the old hag Fate’ and the ‘huge machine of law, order, respectability’.²³ The story’s closure suggests that at the human level the drag or pull of the past is inescapable.

Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman observe:

Vienna’s glamorous fin de siècle … is almost invariably presented as a golden age of cosmopolitanism, when subcultures became mainstream and the effects of Viennese innovations reverberated around the world. Most often evoked by the names and achievements of a series of great men (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler), this view of Vienna is not only an idealized version of the fin de siècle itself but has become so overdetermined that it is fixed in our imaginations as the example par excellence of modern cultural intersections in Austria’s capital, eclipsing all others.²⁴

Kineticism is one of those eclipsed artistic movements. Cizek produced no manifesto of or essays about kineticism; rather, he elaborated kineticism in the classroom. The primacy of dance in kineticism accords with a wider early twentieth-century interest in dance as ‘the key medium of all arts trying to reflect the new technological age as an era defined by motion’.²⁵ A yearly exhibition of student work in Cizek’s department of ornamental form theory took place at the Kunstgewerbeschule from 1920 to 1924.²⁶ Located in Fichtegasse, the School was very close indeed to places which the Lenglets frequented (the Sacher Hotel) and where they lived in 1921 (the Hotel Imperial). The exhibitions were advertised through visually striking posters. The fullest contemporary account of kineticism is Der Formwille der Zeit in der Angewandten Kunst, by Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski (1922), a slim book of 104 pages with 93 black-and-white illustrations of student art. The book was reprinted in 1980, but it is only in the last eighteen years that contextualizing and substantial studies of kineticism have begun to appear.²⁷

The Formwille (will for form) of kineticism is the representation of the beautiful; drawing out its blind spots, Rhys places the beautiful alongside transnational consumption, dispossession and exploitation. Remembering Vienna, Fra...