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‘This way to the exhibition’:

genealogies of urban spectacle
in Jean Rhys's interwar fiction
a
Christina Britzolakis
a
University of Warwick
Published online: 18 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Christina Britzolakis (2007) ‘This way to the exhibition’: genealogies
of urban spectacle in Jean Rhys's interwar fiction, Textual Practice, 21:3, 457-482, DOI:
10.1080/09502360701529085

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360701529085

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 Textual Practice 21(3), 2007, 457–482

Christina Britzolakis
‘This way to the exhibition’: genealogies of urban spectacle
in Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction
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In his essay, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, Fredric Jameson describes the

spatial dilemma of early modernism as the simultaneous necessity and
impossibility of grasping the structural connections between the daily
life of the metropolis and the absent space of the colony. ‘Colonialism
means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a
whole is now located elsewhere,’ writes Jameson, ‘beyond the metropolis,
outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in
colonies over the water whose own life experience and lifeworld remain
unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, what-
ever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its
immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions
as a whole . . . Pieces of the puzzle are missing; it can never be fully recon-
structed.’1 Jean Rhys’s interwar novels foreground this ‘spatial disjunction’
as their very condition of possibility. Her hyphenated location between
colonial and metropolitan spheres affords her a unique insight into, and
riposte to, the perceptual dilemma described by Jameson. Rhys’s trajectory
as a writer, like her fiction, dizzyingly telescopes different global spaces and
temporalities, in the Caribbean, England, and continental Europe. While
London and Paris alternate as her primary mise-en-scène during the inter-
war period, the novels construct an essentially syncopated, ironic relation
to metropolitan periodization, marking a dual predicament of creolization
and exile.2
Rhys’s first book, The Left Bank: Tales of Bohemian Life (1927), arose
from her encounter with the expatriate côterie culture of 1920s Paris. The
interwar novels, Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930),
Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1939), are
linked by the rootless and drifting ‘hotel existence’ of their various
female protagonists.3 If, however, Rhys echoes her modernist contempor-
aries in placing estrangement at the centre of her work, she does so less
from the perspective of the expatriate who pulverizes and refashions

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360701529085
 Textual Practice

metropolitan aesthetic codes than from that of the ethnic, or ethnicized

stranger – the subaltern rather than the elite cosmopolitan – who is
denied a passport within metropolitan culture. While her brand of moder-
nist cosmopolitanism is clearly inseparable from an ambiguously creolized
identity, it has a peculiarly negative character. This negativity, I shall
propose, arises less from the familiar (and reductive) identification of her
work with a female subjectivity overwhelmed by exile, trauma and loss,
than from her persistent focus on objectification and spectacle as central
to metropolitan culture.
The burgeoning and often distinguished body of scholarship on Rhys
has devoted much attention to her rewriting, now widely recognized as
inseparable from the colonial context of her work, of the sexual politics
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of modernism.4 Arguably, however, this project requires an account of

modernist practices in the interwar period that moves beyond the narrowly
Anglophone. While Rhys’s declared affinity with the nineteenth-century
French literary tradition has been noted,5 her novels, in their treatment
of urban space, suggest an active and sustained engagement with continen-
tal avant-garde formations. Their stress on the operations of the uncanny
within metropolitan daily life aligns them with the Surrealist optic,
which, as Walter Benjamin puts it in his 1929 essay on the Surrealist move-
ment, ‘perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as every-
day’.6 Rhys’s dialogue with the movement, like that of the Francophone
writers and intellectuals famously associated with Négritude, centres on
Surrealism’s attraction towards non-Western cultures, as part of its gener-
alized revolt against prevailing definitions of Western civilization.7 In par-
ticular, she engages Surrealism’s fascination with ethnography as a critical
and diagnostic tool to be employed both within and against the insti-
tutional spaces of art.
In this article, I shall discuss the Rhysian spaces of the hotel, the exhibi-
tion and the street as related sites of the global modern: of a metropolitan
culture mortgaged to a global circulation of bodies and objects. My argu-
ment will focus on Good Morning Midnight (1939), as the culmination of
her interwar novel cycle, and as a relatively neglected watershed or conjunc-
tural text in the history of modernism. Set in Paris in 1937, it crystallizes, as
many critics have commented, the mood of imminent catastrophe in Europe
on the eve of the Second World War.8 By 1937, the cosmopolitan avant-
garde, across Europe, was either under attack or aligning itself with fascist
or totalitarian movements. Like Rhys herself, Sasha Jensen, the novel’s nar-
rator, visits the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie
Moderne, the Popular Front-sponsored world’s fair, which promoted a
message of internationalism in a context of gathering international
tension. If Rhys’s insertion of this event into her text signals a particular,
highly charged moment of historical crisis, it simultaneously engages a

458
 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

much longer, tangled history of exhibitory practices informing metropolitan

spatiality. The ‘exhibition’, I shall argue, becomes a sign for the operation of
commodity spectacle more generally. It provides a key articulation not only
of Rhys’s relationship to a more broadly conceived modernist project, but
also of the terms of Euro-American modernism’s encounter with the
global horizon of an increasingly unstable late imperial world system.
Drawing on a range of Surrealist practices developed during the late
1920s and 1930s, Rhys reads the material culture of the 1937 World’s
Fair against the grain, as heralding a more general commodification and
technocratic management at work in the production of everyday life and
of metropolitan identities. Its display of internationalism rejoins what
she sees as a falsely self-naturalizing regime of metropolitan representation,
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based on practices of classification and display that move between the

realms of the commodified, the ethnographic and the aesthetic. Good
Morning Midnight explores the logic of these exhibitory practices, in the
context of newly ascendant discourses of racial hygiene, which invest the
figure of the urban ‘stranger’ with an urgent political significance. For
Rhys, then, the Exhibition condenses historical event and metaphor,
providing a powerful spatial image which allows her to reflect on the
catastrophic modernity that links colony and metropole.

The hotel

Homelessness is Rhys’s signature trope; as Helen Carr puts it, she ‘writes of
an in-between world, where identities are indecipherable, uncertain,
confused . . . her characters live in transitory, anonymous boarding
houses and hotels, strangers to those who surround them’.9 In these
novels, the hotel is a space progressively invested with allegorical
meaning. Sasha Jensen in Good Morning Midnight imagines both past
and present as a succession of more or less squalid hotel rooms and board-
ing houses. She reflects on her daily existence:

Eat. Drink. Walk. March. Back to the Hotel. To the Hotel of Arrival,
the Hotel of Departure, the Hotel of the Future, the Hotel of Marti-
nique and the Universe . . . Back to the hotel without a name in the
street without a name. You press the button and the door opens.
This is the Hotel-without-a-Name in the Street Without-a-Name,
and the clients have no names, no faces. You go up the stairs.
Always the same stairs, the same room. (GMM, 120)

The hotel, with its transient, international clientele, conflates local and
global spaces; its business is the production of sameness and

459
 Textual Practice

interchangeability. As Siegfried Kracauer argues in his essay ‘The Hotel

Lobby’, written in the early 1920s as part of an unfinished study of the
detective novel, the behaviour of hotel guests in the lobby combines
stasis and repetitive, meaningless movement. Removed from the everyday
hustle and bustle of the streets, guests ‘disappear behind the peripheral
equality of social masks’, and become ‘mannequins’, ‘ghosts’ or ‘marion-
ettes’. The hotel lobby, he claims, is an inverted or negative church, ‘the
setting for those who neither seek nor find the one who is always
sought, and who are therefore guests in space as such – a space that encom-
passes them, and has no function other than to encompass them’. The dis-
placement which the hotel lobby enshrines, its spatialization of temporal
process, and its hollowing out of subjectivities, are, for Kracauer, allegorical
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of modernity: ‘What is presented in the hotel lobby is the formal similarity

of the figures, an equivalence that signifies not fulfilment but evacuation’.10
The hotel evacuates space of social and ethical meaning, turning it into a
limbo-like space of ‘nothing’. Metropolitan daily life becomes an abstract
social mask, synonymous with the commodified space of modernity. It
involves a relentless depletion or evacuation of meaning within the
everyday.
Kracauer’s essay on the hotel lobby anticipates one of the central
themes of postmodern cultural theory: the usurpation of historically sedi-
mented ‘place’ by the increasingly abstract and homogeneous character of
‘space’ as commodity spectacle.11 The quoted passage from Good Morning
Midnight points the moral: ‘never tell the truth about this business of
rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the
whole social system. All rooms are the same’ (GMM, 33). However,
Rhys sees the process of abstraction described by Kracauer in explicitly
geospatial terms, as a global traffic in goods and people – ‘the Hotel of
Martinique and the Universe’ – inaugurated by empire, and exacerbated
by the Great War. Hence the syncopated or anachronous temporality of
her novels, which ‘cuts’ between, for example, post-Emancipation Domin-
ica, prewar London, post-Armistice Vienna or 1930s Paris. This synco-
pated temporality opens up, through the operations of memory and
interior monologue, the problem of metropolitan culture’s relationship
to those ethnic ‘strangers’ whose identity cannot be contained or deter-
mined within national boundaries. Their unhomely, or untimely, presence
in urban space – the difficulty of placing them, or of identifying their
cultural origins – marks a founding repression of other geographies and
temporalities.12
In Rhys’s fiction, interwar Paris, the cosmopolitan capital par excel-
lence, plays an ambiguous role as, on the one hand, a place of refuge for
Europeans fleeing political or ethnic persecution, and, on the other, a
site of increasing xenophobia and racial paranoia in a climate of political

460
 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

and economic volatility.13 This crisis of cosmopolitanism is most obvious

in Good Morning Midnight, in which, as Rachel Bowlby argues, ‘national
identities become part of a set of signs to be interpreted, personal coordi-
nates available for deciphering, without there being any reason to suppose
that they correspond to a truth of origin or legal fact’.14 Rhys presents the
city as filled, like Kracauer’s hotel lobby, with anonymous ‘guests’ of differ-
ent nationalities, shadowy, stateless or ‘displaced’ persons who ‘disappear
behind the peripheral equality of social masks’. Sasha’s own history is
placed under erasure: ‘no name, no face, no country’ (GMM, 38). Most
of her encounters in Paris – with the ‘Russians’, the Jewish painter
Serge Rubin, and René – involve deracinated or nomadic subjects
whose national origin, like her own, is either uncertain, or actively dis-
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sembled. The ‘Russians’, it is implied, are in political exile; Serge Rubin

is in all likelihood fleeing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. René, who
like Sasha has passport difficulties, claims to be a French-Canadian deserter
from the Foreign Legion, but may be Arab, or South American. Sasha
Jensen refers to herself as one of the ‘Legion étrangère’, and mentally
replays the Foreign Legion marching tune, whistled by both her former
husband Enno and by René.15Anonymity becomes the sign under which
the metropole contains and neutralizes the disruptively creolized identities
created at its peripheries.
Good Morning Midnight thus renders the ‘cosmopolitan’ anonymity
of urban space uncanny, suggesting a hidden, collusive relationship to
the rise of Fascist authoritarianism on the continent. The sinisterly oppres-
sive ‘Mr. Blank’, the ‘English manager’ of the Parisian department store,
interrogates Sasha as to as to whether she speaks German. Her hotel neigh-
bour, the man whom she thinks of as the commis voyageur or travelling
salesman, is also an uncanny figure – ‘the ghost of the landing’
(GMM, 13) – who gives her a ‘nightmare feeling’ (GMM 31). Associated,
through the dressing gown he always wears, with a deathly whiteness, he is
also described as ‘the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion’
(GMM, 30). Ominously, this ‘priest’, lives, like Sasha, in proximity to
the hotel’s soiled laundry, on a floor ‘cluttered up from morning to
night with brooms, pails, piles of dirty sheets and so forth – the wreckage
of the spectacular floors below’ (GMM 13). The commis serves as an embo-
diment of the seemingly deracinated, abstract space of the hotel; at the
same time he links this prototype space of capitalist modernity with a the-
matic of ritualized ‘sacrificial’ violence. Indeed, the novel’s ending, in
which Sasha welcomes him into her hotel bed, has been persuasively inter-
preted as an allegory of European culture’s willed submission to fascism.16
In Rhys’s novels, urban space shares the features of the hotel lobby
noted by Kracauer. It is dully serialized and meaninglessly repetitive,
crowded yet menacingly vacant. A regime of abstraction or unreality,

461
 Textual Practice

signalled by a cluster of related images – dream, shadow play, marionette

theatre, cinema screen, mask – governs the daily life of her female prota-
gonists. Julia Martin perceives the city as ‘the streets of a grey dream – a
labyrinth of streets, all exactly alike’ (ALMM, 84), populated by
‘shadows . . . gesticulating’ (ALMM, 16); this urban shadow play is
mirrored by the cinema in which Julia repeatedly seeks refuge. Sasha,
remembering a period of destitution in 1920s Paris, describes her
younger self as ‘plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and
only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are
pulling the puppets’ (GMM, 75). For Rhys’s women, the masquerade of
femininity provides, via cosmetics and fashion, a form of protective/
aggressive anonymity within a public space characterized by the hostile
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gaze of others. Julia sees make-up as ‘a mechanical process, a substitute

for the mask she would have liked to wear’ (ALMM, 11). In these
novels, femininity and its rituals serve, quite explicitly, as the fetish
which underpins the visual eroticism of the street. Rhys grants her
female protagonists a peculiar intimacy, indeed identification, with what
Walter Benjamin calls, in his Arcades Project, the phantasmagoria of
commodities.
The iconography of the ‘unreal city’, and its symptomatic drama of
urban femininity, rejoin a European modernist genealogy reaching back
to Baudelaire. Rhys’s exaggerated, even parodic reinscription of this
iconography is arguably inseparable from her anomalous place, as a
Dominican Creole of slave-owning descent, within the racial and
sexual hierarchies of the British Empire, and, more specifically, from
its historical construction of the ‘white’ Creole subject. The colonial
emigrée claims a certain ambiguous marginality to metropolitan
culture, whose historical disavowal of the white Creole as ethnically
impure stigmatizes her as an ‘unhomely’ figure in the imperial heart-
land.17 Late nineteenth-century European ethnographic discourses of
the white Creole were built around the motifs of passivity, drifting and
paralysis, as well as the degenerative perils of miscegenation.18 They
allowed only a self-cancelling identity, dependent on the ‘imagined com-
munity’ of a ‘mother’ nation defined in terms of displacement.19 In this
ethnographic discourse, it could be argued, the white Creole serves as the
ghostly, melancholic double of metropolitan culture, which s/he parasi-
tically inhabits and estranges from within. The postures associated with
this cultural space – rootlessness, symbolic destitution, empty repetition
– mimic the contours of modernist anomie.
The impossibility of inserting white Creole subjectivity into any
narrative of national identity invests Rhys’s fictional urban spaces with
an increasingly abstract, mask-like character. Yet, at the same time, as
critics have often noted, her writing actively dislocates the European

462
 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

genealogy of metropolitan modernity through its engagement with the

Afrocentric traditions of Caribbean carnival, reaching back to the slave
era.20 The Caribbean past is encoded in recycled fragments and traces
of expressive culture, which circulate within urban space, such as street
music, spirituals and recorded popular songs. In Good Morning Mid-
night, carnivalesque tropes – masks, fairs and allusions to West Indian
music – play a key role. The recording of Martinican Beguine music
played by the painter Serge Rubin, and the impromptu masked dance
he performs in his studio, ally him with Sasha, whose sexually transgres-
sive presence as a solitary urban woman in public space is figured in
terms of carnival performance. The embedding of these black musical
and dance forms within the Rhys text is caught up in nostalgia for a
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lost or fantasized utopian moment of carnivalesque union.21 Indeed,

some critics point to a pattern of racial cross-identification or ventrilo-
quy, which acts out the white Creole’s ambiguous predicament,
through the trope of the black Caribbean as a lost or repressed maternal
corporeality.22
For Rhys, the metropolitan optic is conditioned by the ethnographic
collection, and by ethnographic spectacle more generally. Ethnography
links metropole and colony through a complex traffic in objects (including
bodies), texts and modes of expression. Her protagonists find themselves
inserted into a bohemian script, which secures its antibourgeois claims
by linking prostitution, miscegenation and sexual perversity.23 Anna
Morgan is depicted as reading Zola’s Nana, a novel about a society pros-
titute who spreads ‘degeneration’ within the body politic (VD, 9). Her
initiation into an urban traffic in working class women conducted by bour-
geois males is explicitly interwoven with the sexual imaginaries of slavery
and ethnographic display. She is labelled ‘Hottentot’ by her fellow
chorus girls (VD, 12) in reference to the exhibiting of black women,
such as Sara Baartman, the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’, in London and
Paris during the nineteenth century. Rhys’s protagonists are viewed by
others, and indeed often view themselves, through the prism of metropo-
litan and specifically modernist investments in the ‘primitive’. Julia
Martin, for example, identifies with a nude model in a Modigliani paint-
ing, whom she describes as having a body ‘like a proud animal’ and ‘a face
like a mask’ (ALMM, 40). Julia’s fantasy reflects the centrality of modernist
primitivism to the cultural life of interwar Paris, the headquarters of art
nègre.24 The novels of the 1920s and 1930s persistently link the sexual
careers of their protagonists with a logic of ethnographic-cum-aesthetic
display. By the time of Good Morning Midnight (1939), under the pressure
of world crisis, Rhys has identified this history of exhibitory practices,
which moves across disciplinary boundaries, and between high and low
culture, as coextensive with metropolitan perception itself.

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 Textual Practice

The exhibition

In Good Morning Midnight, Rhys’s references to the Exposition Internationale

des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, which took place in Paris in
October 1937, and which she visited the same month, date the novel’s
action with a specificity unusual for her.25 The Exposition was devised by
the Popular Front government to boost a stagnant national economy, and
to promote peaceful cooperation and trade in the face of Depression and
gathering international tension. It announced a new internationalism,
being the first world’s fair to be named ‘International’ rather than ‘Univer-
sal’. Ironically, it is now famous chiefly for having provided a premonitory
image of the coming world conflict: the colossal pavilions of the USSR and
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Nazi Germany confronting each other on either side of the Champs de Mars
(Fig. 1). Intended to celebrate internationalism, then, the Exposition almost
immediately became a signifier of global imperial crisis. As Arthur Chandler
writes, ‘in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the two opponents faced off with
self-aggrandizing monuments to their nationalistic spirits’.26 The Exposition
was committed to modernism as a rational-productivist enterprise; its stated

Figure 1. ‘L’Allemagne-L’U.R.S.S’. Illuminated grounds of the Exposition

Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne Paris 1937.
Edmond Labbé, Rapport general: Exposition internationale des arts et
techniques dans la vie moderne, 11 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,
1938– 40), vol. 1, p. 245. By permission of the Bodleian Library.

464
 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

aim was to abolish the division between the arts and technology. Many of the
pavilions celebrated a modernist ‘international style’ linked with a utopian
vision of design and architecture as social arts, even if some of the most
famous buildings exemplified a fascist return to the past by way of neoclassi-
cism. The fair’s celebration of new technologies, such as the commercializa-
tion of the neon tube, was manifested in a network of pavilions – the
Pavillon de la Photo-Ciné-Phono – dedicated to the media and communi-
cations, and featuring brand names such as Philips and Mazda.27
The Great Expositions were concerned with ordering and presenting
the material and human resources of empire for a metropolitan public.
Although their heyday was the second half of the nineteenth century,
they enjoyed something of a revival on both sides of the Atlantic during
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the Depression years.28 They sought to synchronize global and local

spaces through an ideology of national and international progress, and
technological innovation. Notoriously, the inclusion of displays represent-
ing the colonies and the activities of their subjects made the display of
‘native’ bodies, alongside commodities, one of their major attractions.
The cités indigènes had featured on a grand scale in the 1931 Exposition
Coloniale Internationale, which had sought to recreate, in microcosm,
the French Empire in the very heart of Paris.29 It was during the 1930s
that Walter Benjamin, in his Parisian exile from Nazism, developed an
influential account of the world exhibitions as commodity spectacles.
His 1935 exposé of the Arcades Project describes them as avatars of ‘the
entertainment industry’. They are ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity
fetish’, providing ‘a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be
distracted’. An addition to the revised 1939 exposé underlines their ideo-
logical function as ‘a school in which the masses, forcibly excluded from
consumption, are imbued with exchange value to the point of identifying
with it’.30
For Benjamin, as for more recent historians and cultural theorists of
modernity who have built on his insights, the cultural work done by the
world’s fairs is intimately related to the emergence of commodity
culture, with its reliance on spectacle and advertising.31 Tony Bennett
describes them as ‘places in which the crowd, itself become a spectacle,
found the spatial and visual means for a self-education from the point of
view of capital’.32 As urban spectacles, and cities-within-cities, the expo-
sitions sought to re-present the metropolis, effectively, to itself. They her-
alded the nineteenth-century remaking of the metropolis as a space of
consumption and commodity display, a notable example being Baron
Haussmann’s imposition of a grid of well-lit city boulevards on the pre-
existing chaos of Paris’s medieval neighbourhoods.33 At the same time,
their claim to present, metonymically, the whole world, past and
present, through an assemblage of objects and people, constructed an

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 Textual Practice

image of the metropolis as dreamscape or locus of utopian futures.34 The

allegorical representation of technological ‘progress’ and ‘peace’ as national
and international destiny provided an imaginary basis for metropolitan
culture, meeting capitalist modernity’s need to legitimate itself through
representations. The representational dilemma of imperial culture
pointed out by Jameson – the structural dependency of the metropolitan
centre on a colonial periphery – could therefore be said to have found a
solution, of a kind, in the world’s fairs.
Rhys’s reference to the 1937 Exhibition highlights the widening
chasm between everyday life, especially for those eking out a marginal
existence as immigrants or refugees, and the staging of progress as com-
modity spectacle. The passage in which Sasha visits the Exposition at
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night with René offers an absolute minimum of descriptive detail:

We go in by the Trocadero entrance. There aren’t many people

about. Cold, empty, beautiful – this is what I imagined, this is
what I wanted.
‘What’s that light up there?’ he says.
‘That’s the Star of Peace. Don’t you recognize it?’
He stares back at it.
‘How mesquin! It’s vulgar, that Star of Peace.’
‘The building is very fine,’ I say, in a schoolmistress’ voice.
We stand on the promenade above the fountains, looking down on
them. This is what I wanted – the cold fountains, the rainbow lights
on the water . . .
He says again, ‘It’s mesquin, your Star of Peace.’
We stand for some time, leaning over the balustrade. He puts his
arm through mine. I can feel him shivering. When I tell him so he
answers: ‘Well, it’s cold here after Morocco.’
‘Oh yes, of course, Morocco.’
‘You don’t believe I’ve come from Morocco, do you?’
Whatever else is a lie about him, it’s certainly true that he isn’t
dressed for this weather.
The lights shimmering on the water, the leaping fountains, cold
and beautiful. . . . (GMM, 137)

The exhibition grounds are represented in terms of vacancy, coldness and

formal abstraction; the only objects Sasha mentions are ‘the cold fountains,
the rainbow lights on the water’. She welcomes the scarcity of visitors on
the site, describing it, in terms repeated throughout the passage, as ‘cold,
empty, beautiful’. Puzzlingly, it is this vacancy or absence which Sasha
identifies, retrospectively, as the goal of her visit to the Exhibition: ‘this
is what I imagined, this is what I wanted’. In doing so, she implicitly

466
 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

assigns to the exhibitory space a phantasmatic function linked with a mod-

ernist idiom of formal abstraction.
Rhys’s depiction of the exhibitory space is dominated by the specta-
cular light imagery, which, in the rhetoric of the world’s fair, yokes
together technology, progress and the civilizational mission of empire. Illu-
minations were indeed a key part of the 1937 Paris Fair’s spectacle (Fig.1),
and central to its conception and marketing as a revelation of triumphal
modernity. ‘La Lumière’, predicted that Edmond Labbé, the General
Commissioner of the Fair in 1936, ‘will descend among us as the
sublime spirit of the Fair.’35 However, the dialogue between Sasha and
René undermines the celebratory image of Paris as the cosmopolitan
City of Light. He interrupts her reverie with a factual query about one
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of the illuminated pavilions, ‘the Star of Peace’. The reference is to the

Monument de la Paix, the only pavilion not dedicated to any one nation,
which stood surrounded by flags behind the Esplanade. René’s response
to the so-called ‘Star of Peace’ – his belittling of it as mesquin (‘trivial’
or ‘worthless’) – expresses scepticism, shared by the contemporary press,
towards a message so obviously belied by the symbolism of the Nazi and
Soviet pavilions.36
The layout of the 1937 Paris Exposition offered a panoramic view of
the Champs de Mars and of Paris beyond, with the Eiffel Tower facing the
viewer. The esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot on the Trocadero, through
which Sasha and René enter, oversaw both the exhibition grounds and the
city. Yet the pair take up their viewing position not on the esplanade itself
but within the area of the Champs de Mars overlooked by it, on the prome-
nades above the fountains, ‘leaning over the balustrade’. James Herbert, in
his study of the 1937 Paris Exposition, argues that the commanding visual
panorama offered by the Trocadero esplanade projected a totality of indus-
trial production and consumption, assuming the spectator’s identification
with the nation as transcendent subject.37 If so, it is significant that neither
Sasha nor René take up this identification. The passage effectively reverses
the direction of the exhibitionary gaze, as a specular structure modelled on
the commanding view; it positions the couple as objects rather than sub-
jects of the spectacle. René’s response, when Sasha first suggests the visit
to the Fair, is telling: ‘What should I do at the Exhibition?’ (GMM,
136); at the fairground, he is described as ‘shivering’, and complains of
the cold. His (implied) comment on the exclusive or inhospitable nature
of the exhibitory space forms a counterpoint to Sasha’s appreciation of
its formalist aesthetic. Both responses undermine the Exhibition’s claims
to a global inclusiveness of representation. It becomes an allegorical signif-
ier which places metropolitan life under the sign of that absent totality
which it both represents and mystifies. In its limbo-like summation of

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time and space, the histories of Sasha and René themselves – for instance
his alleged residence in Morocco – become fictive and tenuous.
For Rhys, the fair’s dominant idiom of modernist abstraction colludes
with the rhetoric of capitalist modernity itself as a triumphal ‘progress’,
which simultaneously opens up urban space to visibility, and polices its
internal and external boundaries. The Exposition, as I have already men-
tioned, trumpeted its commitment to the discourse of technological mod-
ernization; the Palais d’Hygiène, for example, offered contrasting dioramas
of a logement insalubre, or slum dwelling, and a logement sain, a clinically
ordered, modern apartment interior.38 If the commodity spectacle of the
world’s fair seeks to reconfigure, and sanitize, the spatial relations
between capital city, nation and globe, Good Morning Midnight insists,
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conversely, on waste and the issue of waste disposal. Sasha’s wanderings

around Paris circle compulsively around places of waste disposal, and
bring her into proximity with other abjected urban marginals such as the
homeless destitutes sleeping in a café, and the impoverished woman
whose job is washing dishes in a restaurant (GMM, 35, 87). She is obsessed
with public toilets as places of refuge from the hostile gaze of others.
Remembering her ambition to write a monograph linking women and
toilets, she comments on the queue of women waiting to use the toilets:
‘Now that’s what I call discipline’ (GMM, 10). Sasha, as Katherine
Streip points out, tends to think of herself as synonymous with waste,
and of her alcoholism and ageing sexuality as forming a blockage to the cir-
culation of urban desire.39 She draws upon a pervasive discourse of disease
and contamination which threatens language itself with symbolic collapse:

Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings,

sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a
woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad . . . or perhaps if I just
said ‘merde’ it would do as well. (GMM, 39)

Rhys’s fiction claims an anachronistic affinity with the French bohemian

tradition, symbolically organized around the bourgeois artist’s attraction
towards the city’s liminal spaces, and identification with those excluded
by its power centres. Bohemianism maps the city in terms of a strategic
revaluation of urban ‘waste’, drawing on an image repertoire including
the sewer, the nomad, the prostitute and the carnivalesque.40 What
Sasha calls the ‘nostalgie de la boue’ – the bohemian ‘craving for the
gutter’ – represents, at one level, a doomed, nostalgic attempt to pit an
alternative, revitalizing modernity of dirt against bourgeois economic
rationality.
In Good Morning Midnight, dirt, which according to Mary Douglas
symbolizes ‘matter out of place’, is both sexualized and racialized.41

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 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

Sasha’s obsession with the possible or actual vermin infesting hotel rooms
– she recalls waking on her first night in Paris to find ‘the wall covered with
bugs, crawling slowly’ (GMM, 105) – becomes increasingly ambiguous as
the uncanny presence/absence of ethnic strangers is transposed into the
register of racial ‘hygiene’. The novel contains many enfolded stories of
urban detritus, such as Serge’s anecdote of the Martinican woman ostra-
cized as ‘dirty’ (GMM, 81) by her London neighbours. Sasha’s and
Serge’s discussion of Parisian jazz venues and ‘negro music’ includes a
casual reference to a Montparnasse club as a ‘dirty place’ (77). The
Jewish Serge is of course himself a refugee, one of the ‘polluters of the
city’, who has, according to his friend Delmar, ‘lived in the gutter’ (‘la
crasse’, 156). The painting Sasha buys from Serge features a banjo
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player, described as an ‘old Jew’ (GMM, 83), standing in the gutter.

After viewing his studio, she likens his paintings to a catalogue of circus
freaks:

The pictures walk along with me. The misshapen dwarfs juggle with
huge balloons, the four-breasted woman is exhibited, the old prosti-
tute waits hopelessly outside the urinoir, the young one under the bec
de gaz (GMM, 84)

The spectacle of the abject and the marginalized is underlined through the
novel’s repeated use of the word ‘exhibit’. Sasha fears above all ‘making an
exhibition of herself’ by crying in public. She recalls a friend who, in the
1920s, took her to a café where the homeless and destitute pay for a
place to sleep: ‘“Would you like to go in and have a look at them?” he
said, as if he were exhibiting a lot of monkeys’ (GMM, 35). The poor
are converted, metaphorically, into ethnographic spectacle, implying an
analogy between the cité indigène, the roped-off areas of artisanal activity
within the world’s fair, where the colonized become human exhibits,
and Paris’s interwar working class and immigrant ghettoes.
This phantasmatic conflation of urban and exhibitory space is, I shall
argue, a move typical of interwar Surrealist cultural politics.42 Through
Sasha’s disturbed, frequently paranoid perspective, Rhys turns inside out
the sanitizing dreamscape of the Paris World’s Fair. She looks beyond
the Popular Front message of global ‘co-operation’, and reads the event
in terms of its apparent antithesis: a fascist imaginary which demarcates
metropolitan space into zones of pollution and cleanliness. For her, the
site’s attempted yoking together of global and local spaces, like modernity
itself, relies on a representation of the colony as the metropole’s internally
disavowed, ‘ethnographic’ residue. Surrealism’s aesthetics of dream and
automatism, together with its use of ethnographic tactics, offer crucial, if

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highly ambiguous, strategies for uncovering the interdependence between

metropolitan and colonial spaces within daily life.

The street

Nobody else knows me but the street knows me. (GMM, 89)

In Good Morning Midnight, dream constitutes an organizational principle

inseparable from the novel’s interior monologue, most obviously in the
series of dream episodes framing the visit to the Exhibition. Urban
locations such as the hotel, the underground station, and the department
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store are drawn into this dream text, whose spatial ur-form is the labyrinth.
As I have already suggested, Rhys’s interest in excavating a buried psychic
topography within urban space shows the impact of the Surrealists, of
whom Walter Benjamin wrote, in 1929, that ‘the most dreamed-of of
their objects’ was ‘the city of Paris itself’.43 Discussing the oneiric city
depicted in the novels by Breton and Aragon, Nadja (1928) and Paris
Peasant (1926), Benjamin writes that ‘ghostly signals flash from the
traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are
the order of the day’.44 He sees the Surrealists as developing a new kind
of urban semiology, which, like the Freudian dreamwork, calls for, even
while it frustrates, interpretation.45 For him, the Surrealist urban
uncanny seeks to mobilize a collective historical and political unconscious,
which in 1929, could still harbour hopes of apocalyptic revolutionary
transformation.46 By 1937–8, of course, when Rhys was writing the
novel, this collective unconscious had become unmistakably linked with
the threat of fascist violence and its ritual ‘cleansing’ of the body politic.
Breton’s Nadja (1928), published the year after Breton joined the
Communist party, marks the moment of Surrealism’s greatest emphasis
on the liberatory aspects of desire. The novel celebrates the inspiring and
erotic power of Nadja, the ‘free spirit’ whose natural element is the
street, yet who ends the novel incarcerated in a sanatorium. It links the
chance encounter on the street with the motif of le merveilleux, as a code
for the possibilities of revolutionary social transformation. As many
critics have pointed out, it is the wishful scenario of a woman emancipated
from practical concerns by her social marginality and mental fragility that
allows this recoding of the everyday.47 Surrealism’s politics of subversion,
here as elsewhere, is tied to a (fetishized) notion of femininity as a
privileged vehicle of the unconscious. Despite the narrator’s obsessive
observation, Nadja herself remains an absence, apprehended only
through displaced objects, texts and localities. Hence, the text’s interp-
olated illustrations and photographs – Parisian venues, ‘automatic’

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 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

drawings, reproductions of indigenous and other artefacts – while super-

ficially serving a documentary purpose, become collage-like traces and
clues which obscure more than they reveal, underlining the narrator’s
suspicion that ‘life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram’.48
Rhys’s depiction of urban space relies heavily on the ‘cryptographic’
practices of the Surrealist city narrative, which displace the narrative or dia-
chronic level of the text onto the predominantly synchronic, visual register
of the everyday. The enigmatic or unreadable character of metropolitan
culture is underlined by the incorporation of indexical elements such as
city signs, street names or cafe names. At the start of After Leaving Mr.
Mackenzie, for example, the business card of the Hotel St Raphael,
where Julia Martin is staying, is reproduced graphically within the text.
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The card stands in for, even as it occludes, her previous history and prove-
nance. Similarly, in Good Morning Midnight, Sasha Jensen dreams of a
London tube station adorned with placards bearing the sign of a pointing
finger, and announcing ‘This Way to the Exhibition’. Another passage
reproduces the numerical retail codes, or ‘hieroglyphics’ (GMM, 26) of a
shop where Sasha served as an assistant. The proliferation of these indexical
signs emphasizes the abstract, mask-like character of urban space. Argu-
ably, the Exhibition itself constitutes such a sign, being an ideological
concept-city or spectacle which substitutes itself for the lived communal
spaces of Paris.
The ‘cryptographic’ surrealism of Good Morning Midnight centres on
the trope, repeatedly invoked by Sasha, of the street itself as an ambigu-
ously gendered, treacherous and possibly even sadistic lover. Indeed, the
novel’s anti-romance plot bears a complicated parody relationship to the
Bretonian fantasy of submission to chance, Paris and the feminine.
Sasha’s liaison with René, ‘the gigolo’, who mirrors aspects of her past
self, reassigns the feminized ‘métier’ of prostitution, and the status of
fetishized object of desire, to the male. Her cynical metacommentary,
meanwhile, empties out the eroticism of the street, and marks the consider-
able distance travelled from the utopian moment of Nadja. Sasha’s and
René’s quasi-fraternal exchanges turn out to be, like those between
Breton and Nadja, a missed or failed encounter; they are accordingly sup-
planted by a darker fantasy of paternal seduction, leading to Sasha’s final,
violent sexual encounter with the sinister commis. Far from being libera-
tory, then, the hidden script of the dream narrative is disclosed as one of
confrontation with arbitrary and irrational power.
Rhys’s orchestration of the novel’s dream text around the spatial
image of the Exhibition acknowledges the fact that, by the late 1930s,
the exhibition space itself was highly politicized. A few weeks after the
close of the International Exposition of 1937, the Exposition Internationale
du Surréalisme opened at the private Galerie Beaux-Arts in January and

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February 1938. Designed by Duchamp, the show, which contained art-

works by Dali, Magritte, Ernst, Cornell and others, attacked the site of
the museum itself as an embodiment of cultural authority.49 Its manipu-
lation of the space of the gallery produced disorientating inversions of
interior and exterior, up and down, day and night. Coal sacks were sus-
pended in near-darkness from the ceiling, the floor covered with dead
leaves, dirt and vegetation, and Dali’s Taxi Pluvieux installed in the court-
yard. This Surrealist city featured a corridor lined with a collection of
female department store mannequins ‘dressed’ by the various Surrealist
artist-participants. The mannequins were posed against a wall bearing
posters, photographs, publications, and street plaques inscribed with the
names of real and fictive Parisian streets (Fig.2); one of these street signs,
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a pointing index finger, also appears in a key dream episode in Good

Morning Midnight. During the Exhibition’s opening night, the dancer
Hélène Vanel simulated ‘hysteria’ in a main hall whose four corners
were occupied by beds. Her convulsive dance, titled ‘The Unconsummated
Act’, was performed to a soundtrack, combining recorded screams – pur-
portedly of asylum patients – with loudspeakers blaring German parade
marches.
The event was designed as a visual and aural installation, whose
sensory attack on the spectator sought to break down the gap between
art and everyday life. Elena Filipovic has argued, in her discussion of the
exhibition, that ‘the street – Breton’s strategic point of disorder and that
site so important to the Surrealists as the ground of revolutionary energies,
collective action and chance encounter – was brought intra muros’.50 With
its recurrent motifs of darkness, dirt and hysteria, the show obviously
refuted the official Exposition’s faith in enlightenment rationalism as a
guarantuor of global ‘progress’.51 At the same time, as Filipovic points
out, it formed a riposte to the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhi-
bition, which had opened in Munich less than six months earlier in July
1937, and which pilloried modernist primitivism and abstraction. Refus-
ing modern and Nazi exhibition practices alike, it challenged the categories
and taxonomies of the art gallery and museum, and highlighted their poli-
ticized nature within the increasingly volatile public sphere of the 1930s.
Surrealism thus sought to confront the public with the spectre of a
crisis-ridden international and national body politic, by deranging the
exhibitory space itself.
Although there is no evidence that Rhys, during her stay in Paris,
visited the 1938 Surrealist Exposition, Good Morning Midnight shares its
tactical surrealization of urban space. In both, a phantasmagoria of com-
modities renders street, bedroom and psyche interchangeable sites, threa-
tening to colonize the furthest reaches of interiority. The novel is filled
with frozen and fetishized part-objects, including the shop-window full

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 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction
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Figure 2. Photograph captioned ‘The corridor of mannequins’, Exposition

Internationale du Surrealisme, Paris 1938. Raymond Cogniat, ‘L’exposition
internationale du surrealisme,’ XXe siecle, 1 (1 March 1938), p. 27. By
permission of the Bodleian Library

of artificial limbs in the Gray’s Inn Road, and the shoes of the commis voya-
geur placed outside his hotel door. Sasha is fascinated by simulacra, such as
the mannequins in Mr Blank’s department store, where she once worked as

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a sales assistant. She identifies with the store mannequins, thinking ‘what a
success they would have made of their lives if they had been women’
(GMM 16). She also describes herself, at the outset, as ‘a bit of an automa-
ton’ (GMM 10), and repeatedly refers to consciousness and memory in
mechanical or automatist terms, as her ‘film-mind’ (GMM 147), or as a
‘gramophone record’ playing in her head (GMM 14 –15).
The Surrealist fascination with mannequins and automata has been
seen as a strategic response to the Taylorist and Fordist disciplines of the
industrial body.52 Once removed from the context of industrial production
and circulation, these objects disclose their uncanny, compulsive aspect.
During the 1930s, this ‘becoming machine and/or commodity of the
body’, in Hal Foster’s phrase, is increasingly overtaken by that of ‘the
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armored body become weapon-machine’.53 Images of mannequins and

automata frequently appeared, during the 1920s and 1930s, in the
photo-assemblages of magazines such as La Révolution surréaliste and
Minotaure, juxtaposed with other machines and with tribal, folk or child-
hood objects. This tactic, which drew on evolving ethnographic practices
of display, sought to short-circuit the notion of the modern as rational,
ordered and productive.54 It depends on a Marxist-Freudian displacement
of the ethnographic language of fetishism, through which objects and prac-
tices encountered in colonial contact-zones have historically been read and
represented in the metropole.55 Surrealism’s heterogeneous mixing of
‘primitive’ and modern objects characterized a number of other exhibitions
during the 1930s, notably the 1931 counter-exhibit, ‘La Vérité sur les
Colonies’, a direct response to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris,
and the 1936 Exposition surrealiste d’objets at the Galerie Ratton.56 Yet
despite the avowedly anti-colonial politics informing these interventions
in the exhibitory space, the movement’s investment in ethnographic dis-
courses, as a vehicle of critique, remains controversial.57
Surrealist practices of juxtaposition rely heavily on the mask as both
object and figure of ethnographic inquiry. Inhabiting the registers of
dream, fantasy and the unconscious, it becomes a key avant-garde device
for estranging metropolitan forms of sociality and daily life. Indeed,
many of Rhys’s novels refer, obliquely or explicitly, to the key role
played by African and Oceanic masks in the evolution of avant-garde aes-
thetics. When Sasha visits the painter Serge Rubin’s studio, she notices
what appear at first sight to be West African masks but turn out to be
his artworks. When she inquires whether the masks are West African, he
ironically replies, ‘Yes, straight from the Congo . . . I made them’. The
status of the masks in the scene is unclear, oscillating between ritual
object, artefact and commodity. They elicit a moment of terrified, or para-
noid, recognition on Sasha’s part: ‘He takes it down and shows it to me.
The close-set eyeholes stare into mine. I know that face very well; I’ve

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 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

seen lots like it, complete with legs and body’ (GMM, 76). Her response
deploys a register of visual juxtaposition, or collage, akin to the Surrealist
‘photo-spreads’; the mask becomes, for her, a sign of the menacingly
abstract, indeed dehumanized character of metropolitan daily life.
The juxtapositional and ethnographic tactics of Surrealism also
inform the pivotal dream episodes in Good Morning Midnight. These
dreams, which frame Sasha’s visit to the Exhibition, translate its message
into the predominantly iconic terms of a Fascist imaginary. In the first,
which occurs early in the novel, Sasha finds herself in a crowded passage
of a tube station in London, looking in vain for the exit:

I am in the passage of a tube station in London. Many people are in

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front of me; many people are behind me. Everywhere there are pla-
cards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition, This Way to
the Exhibition. But I don’t want the way to the Exhibition – I want
the way out. There are passages to the right and passages to the left,
but no exit sign. Everywhere the fingers point and the placards read:
This Way to the Exhibition. I touch the shoulder of the man walking
in front of me. I say: ‘I want the way out’. But he points to the pla-
cards and his hand is made of steel. I walk along with my head bent,
very ashamed, thinking: ‘Just like me – always wanting to be differ-
ent from other people.’ The steel finger points along a long stone
passage. This Way – This Way – This Way to the Exhibition.
(GMM, 12)

Rhys’s use of the tube station as a dream substrate of the city exploits the
psychic anxiety evoked by subterranean spaces, with their interauterine/
deathly coding. Here, the labyrinth maps out a disciplinary scenario, with
a distinctly persecutory aspect. When the protagonist asks for the way out
of the station, a man with a steel hand – an automaton – points at the
message on the surrounding placards (‘This Way to the Exhibition’); in
response, the speaker ‘walk[s] along with . . . head bent, very ashamed, think-
ing: “Just like me – always wanting to be different from other people”’. In
this interpellation, the subject is at once ‘recognized’ by an ideological appar-
atus which at once dictates the terms of subjectivity, and threatens punish-
ment for deviation. The paranoid perspective enforced by the dream
models a collective self-observation. It conflates two different urban
centres, Paris and London, making the time-space of the Exhibition seem
total and inescapable. Metropolitan space itself becomes a labyrinth to
which the only possible exit is supplied by totalitarian politics.
The dream episodes of Good Morning Midnight highlight not only the
disciplinary function of commodity spectacle, but also its reliance on tech-
nologically mediated forms of mass communication. In the final dream

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episode, at the end of the novel, Sasha drunkenly hallucinates an ‘enor-

mous machine’:

All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white

steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin
arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with
mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the
arms have these eyes – others have lights. The arms that carry the
eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible
and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terri-
fies me . . . And the arms wave to an accompaniment of music and
song. Like this: ‘Hotcha – hotcha – hotcha . . ..’ And I know the
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music; I can sing the song. (GMM, 156– 7)

The novel’s other spaces – hotel, street, department store, exhibition – are
subsumed by this despatialized machine-body, which resembles a mutated
swastika. In its confusion of the realms of human and mechanical, living
and dead, the image evokes the Surrealist aesthetics of dream and automa-
tism. It condenses or collages in dreamlike fashion an array of key motifs in
the novel, such as whiteness, the pointing steel hand, cosmetics, the bodily
deformations of Serge’s paintings, the fair’s illuminations, and jazz music.
Moreover, the apotropaic and iconic elements of the ‘machine’ – particu-
larly the arms tipped by eyes – identify it as a mask or fetish, a textual
parallel to the Surrealist object.
The ‘machine dream’ alludes on many levels to the dominance of
technological forms of spectacle in the modern polis. On the one hand,
the conjunction of multiplied body parts, lights, cosmetics and synchro-
nized music suggests forms of mass entertainment, such as an industrialized
chorus line; on the other, these elements point towards the fascist rally with
its synchronized mass salutes. Its hieratic and visual character elides per-
formance and spectators, drawing together the commodity spectacle and
the racialized cult of the nation. As in the tube station dream, the armoured
machine-collective offers a solution to a puzzle constructed by the urban
dream text. Rhys depicts the space of the commodity spectacle on the
verge of collapsing into its seeming antithesis, the ritualized space of irra-
tionalist politics. This view of the spectacle, as uniting capitalist and fascist
modernities, resonates with Walter Benjamin’s insights of the same period
on fascism as the aestheticization of politics.58
As a product of what Tyrus Miller has called ‘late modernism’,59 Good
Morning Midnight announces the passing into history of the avant-garde’s
utopian aspirations. Its conversion of the 1937 Paris Exposition into a
dream text, conflating urban and exhibitory space, at once pays tribute
to Surrealism and makes explicit the failure of its emancipatory project.

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 Christina Britzolakis Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

The ongoing Surrealist critique of the politics of public display confirms

and extends Rhys’s long-standing intuition of the role of ethnographic
thinking as a crucial link between capitalist and fascist modernities. Her
hyphenated location between colonial and metropolitan spheres enables
her, from the outset, to inquire into the conditions of knowledge –
particularly the ethnographic collection – that enable metropolitan spati-
ality, and to place the latter, notably in Good Morning Midnight, under the
sign of catastrophe.
Timothy Mitchell has argued that ‘the colonial-modern involves
creating an effect we recognize as reality, by organizing the world endlessly
to represent it’.60 The 1937 Paris Exposition sought to shore up the auth-
ority of a late imperial global order through an imaginary dreamscape
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based on the commanding gaze. Mounted in the shadow of imminent

world conflict, it could not help but reveal its staging of ‘international’
modernity as an ideology effect in crisis. It encoded, instead, a crisis in
the specular structure through which the metropole seeks to hold and tax-
onomize its colonized subjects within its gaze. This crisis is reflected in
Rhys’s treatment of urban space as a cryptogram, which interrogates the
self-legitimating claims of modernity and draws attention to the constitu-
tive role, in the establishment of these claims, of a history of exhibitory
practices. Her concern to anatomize what Mitchell calls the ‘colonial-
modern’ leads her to demarcate the time-space of the interwar European
city as a haunted terrain, in which the histories of metropole and colony
interpenetrate, and which she persistently discloses as constitutive of mod-
ernism itself.
University of Warwick

Notes

1 Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric

Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 50–51.
2 On the geographical, historical and literary role of the Caribbean as a global
crucible of capitalist modernity, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Simon Gikandi, Writing in
Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1992), pp. 1–20; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities
of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
3 Jean Rhys, Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); After Leaving
Mr. Mackenzie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Voyage in the Dark
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Titles of Rhys’s novels in parenthetical
references are henceforth abbreviated as follows: Q, ALMM, VD, GMM.

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4 See Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at World’s End: Novels of Colonial and Sexual
Exile (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990); Coral Ann Howells, Jean
Rhys (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991); Helen Carr, Jean Rhys (Plymouth:
Northcote House, 1996); Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms:
Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Dislocation
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 127–66; Carol Dell’Amico, Colonialism
and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys (London: Routledge,
2005).
5 See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Mod-
ernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 125–47; see also Carr,
Jean Rhys, pp. 40 –45, on the role of France, until 1805 the colonial power
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in Dominica, as alternative imagined ‘homeland’ for Rhys.

6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’,
in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), p. 237.
7 On Surrealism’s dialogue with the Caribbean, and its impact on Francophone
black Caribbean writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, see Michael Richardson,
Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996).
8 See Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 145–57; Carr, Jean Rhys, pp. 50 –52; Jean Radford
‘Late Modernism and the politics of history’, in Women Writers of the 1930s:
Gender, Politics and History, ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), pp. 33–45; Kate Holden, ‘Formations of discipline
and manliness: culture, politics and 1930s women’s writing’, Journal of
Gender Studies, 8, 2 (1999), pp. 141–57.
9 Carr, Jean Rhys, p. 29.
10 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The hotel lobby’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), pp. 181, 175–6, 179.
11 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red,
1970); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
Debord, the first to use the term ‘commodity spectacle’, dates the emergence
of what he calls the commodity spectacle from the 1920s. See Debord,
Society, pp. 64 –5, on the distinction between two forms of commodity spec-
tacle: what he terms the ‘concentrated spectacle’of totalitarian or ‘bureaucratic’
states, and ‘diffuse spectacle’, which he links with untrammelled capitalist
modernization. Arguably, the two forms of spectacle come together in the
monumental mise-en-scène of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.
12 Cf. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in
Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 192–219.
13 See Tyler Stovall, ‘National identity and shifting imperial frontiers: whiteness
and the exclusion of colonial labour after World War 1’, Representations, 84
(November 2003), pp. 52 –72, on racial tensions in interwar France. Stovall

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argues that, as immigration increased during the 1930s, the presence of foreign
nationals in the capital – especially the increasingly visible immigrant min-
orities from the North African colonies, and Jews from Germany and the
Soviet Union – was seen as a burden on the Depression economy.
14 Rachel Bowlby, ‘The impasse’, in Still Crazy After All These Years (London:
Routledge, 1993), p. 42.
15 See Stovall, ‘National identity’ on popular representations of the Foreign
Legion, and their role in bolstering French imperial prestige in the interwar
period. A body made up largely of foreigners from Europe and America,
allowing recruits to the Legion to enlist under an assumed name (the anon-
ymat), it was historically deployed in the pacification of French colonial ter-
ritories. In 1937, the year in which GMM is set, the Legion was stationed in
North Africa and involved in the suppression of nationalist revolt in
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Morocco.
16 See Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 146–8.
17 On Rhys and Creole identity, see Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and
its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 215–16; Helen Carr
‘Intemperate and unchaste: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole identity’, Women:
A Cultural Review 14, 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 38–62; Veronica Marie Gregg,
Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Maggie Humm, Border Traffic:
Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1991), pp. 62–93; Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s
Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996); Sue Thomas, ‘Jean Rhys, “Human Ants” and the Production of
Expatriate Creole Identities’, in Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies and Robbie
Goh (eds), Postcolonial Cultures and Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2002),
pp. 56–72. See also Peter Hulme, ‘“The locked heart”: the Creole family
romance of Wide Sargasso Sea’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret
Iverson (eds), Colonial Discourse: Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994), pp. 72–88, on the inherent instability of the category
of the Creole in the West Indies, and the associated risks of dichotomizing
‘inauthentic’ (white) and ‘authentic’ (black) Caribbean identities in Rhys’s work.
18 See J.A. Froude’s The English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses (London:
Longmans, Green, 1888), pp. 159, 145, for a key example of the ethnographic
discourse of the white Creole, which laments that the whites in Dominica ‘have
lost heart, and cease to struggle against the stream’, leaving the island to ‘drift
along’ in a ‘state of torpid content’.
19 Raiskin, Snow, p. 149.
20 See Wilson Harris, ‘Carnival of psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Kuna-
pipi, 2 (1980), pp. 142–50; Emery, Jean Rhys, pp. 145–55; Savory, Jean Rhys,
pp. 58 –84; Thomas, Worlding, pp. 100–10; Cynthia Davis, ‘Jamette Carnival
and Afro-Caribbean Influences in the Work of Jean Rhys’, Anthurium: A
Caribbean Studies Journal, 3,2 (Fall 2005), pp. 1–13.
21 See Rhys’s memoir Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: André
Deutsch, 1979), p. 50 for a description of black Dominicans as ‘more alive,

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more a part of the place than we were’; cf. Anna Morgan’s comment: ‘being
black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’ (VD, 27).
22 See Thomas, Worlding, p. 103; Gregg, Creole, pp. 37 –40; Humm, Border
Traffic, pp. 66–69; and cf. note 12 above.
23 See Sander Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the prostitute: toward an iconography
of female sexuality’, in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race
and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 176–108.
24 See Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in
the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir:
Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Ezra,
The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000).
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25 On Rhys’s frequent visits to Paris during the 1930s, see Carole Angier, Jean
Rhys: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 363–4.
26 Arthur Chandler, ‘Paris 1937: exposition internationale des arts et techniques
dans la vie moderne’, in Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions,
ed. John E. Findling (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 288.
27 The primary documentary resource on the 1937 World’s Fair is Edmund
Labbé, Exposition internationale des arts et techniques Paris 1937: Rapport
general, 11 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1938 –40). See also James
Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1998), pp. 3–39; Ulf Strohmayer, ‘Pictorial symbolism in the age of
innocence: material geographies at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937’, Ecumene,
3, 3 (1996), pp. 282–304; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions
Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Worlds’ Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester:
Manchester University. Press, 1988); Chandler, ‘Paris 1937’, pp. 283–90.
28 The literature on the World’s Fairs is of course extensive; see Greenhalgh,
Ephemeral Vistas, and Findling, Historical Dictionary, for a historical overview
of the major events.
29 See Ezra, Colonial Unconscious, pp. 1–21.
30 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century’, in The Arcades
Project, ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 7, 18. On the centrality of the Worlds’ Fairs
to the conceptual structure of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, see Susan
Buck- orss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 78– 92.
31 See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertiz-
ing and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990);
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (London: Routledge, 1995).
32 Tony Bennett, ‘The exhibitionary complex’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Culture/
Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 130.
33 See Paul Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Culture in 19th Century France,
trans. Katie Ainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire (Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1992), pp. 1 –8.

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34 See Allan Pred, Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present

(London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 12 – 20; Curtis Hinsley, ‘Strolling through
the Colonies’, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael
P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 119 – 40.
35 Cited in Herbert, Paris 1937, p. 27.
36 Ibid., p. 31.
37 Ibid., p. 19.
38 Labbé, Rapport general, Vol. 5, p. 156.
39 See Katherine Streip, ‘Just a cérébrale: Jean Rhys, women’s humour and ressen-
timent’, Representations, 45 (Winter 1994), pp. 117–44.
40 See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Cultural Politics and the Boundaries of
Bourgeois Life 1830 –1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Mary Gluck,
‘Theorizing the cultural roots of the Bohemian artist’, Modernism/Modernity
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7, 3 (2000), pp. 351– 78.

41 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 35.
42 On Surrealist cultural politics in the 1930s, see Briony Fer, ‘Surrealism, myth
and psychoanalysis’, in Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood (eds),
Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press/Open University, 1993), pp. 171–29; Hal Foster, Com-
pulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Raymond Spiteri and
Donald LaCoss (eds), Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2003); Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics
and the Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
43 The paucity of recorded comments by Rhys on her reading, particularly before
1940, makes it difficult to establish with certainty the extent of her knowledge
of Surrealism. However, her frequent periods of residence in Paris during the
1920s and 1930s, noted in Angier, Jean Rhys, pp. 353–4, would have famil-
iarized her with its major manifestations. The short-lived transatlantic
review, edited by her mentor and lover Ford Madox Ford, in which her first
publication, the story ‘Vienne’, appeared in December 1924, featured both
Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tzara, frequently claimed as Dadaist precursors
of Surrealism. See Transatlantic Review, Vols 1 and 2 (January –December
1924).
44 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 230–31.
45 See Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1995), pp. 228–9, on the importance of the work of interpretation to the Sur-
realist project.
46 See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of
Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993),
pp. 186– 92.
47 See Raymond Spiteri, ‘Surrealism and the political physiognomy of the
marvellous’ in Spiteri, Surrealism, pp. 52 –72; Cohen, Profane Illumination,
pp. 56 –119; Fer, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 183–9.
48 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960),
p. 112.

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49 See Elena Filipovic, ‘Surrealism in 1938: the exhibition at war’, in Spiteri,

Surrealism, pp. 179–203; Herbert, Paris 1937, pp. 123–62.
50 Filipovic, ‘Surrealism’, p. 191.
51 See Herbert, Paris 1937, p. 124
52 See Fer, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 188–91; Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp. 123–53.
53 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 136.
54 See Amanda Stansell, ‘Surrealist racial politics at the borders of “reason”:
whiteness, primitivism and négritude’, in Spiteri, Surrealism, pp. 113–21;
on the use of ethnography by the para-Surrealist group surrounding Docu-
ments, see James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament
of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 117–51.
55 See William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Parts 1, 2 and 3a, Res 9 (Spring
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1985), pp. 5–17; 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23–45; 16 (Autumn 1980), pp. 105–23.
56 On ‘La vérité sur les colonies’, see Blake, Tumulte Noir, pp. 111–34; Carole
Sweeney, ‘Le tour du monde en quatre jours: empire, exhibition and the sur-
realist disorder of things’, Textual Practice, 19, 1 (2005), pp. 131– 47; on the
1936 Galerie Ratton exhibition, see Harris, Surrealist Art, pp. 183–201.
57 See Stansell, ‘Surrealist racial politics’, pp. 111–126.
58 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books), pp. 211–44. For
a recent reassessment of Benjamin’s ‘aestheticization’ thesis, see Lutz Koepnick,
‘Fascist aesthetics revisited’, Modernism/Modernity, 6, 1 (1999), pp. 51 –73.
59 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the Two
World Wars (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
60 Timothy Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy
Mitchell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 17.

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