Modernism in the basement: subversive
 discourse in Wide Sargasso Sea

 Saikat Majumdar


 In A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak talks
 of an 'Oedipal exchange' in the relationship of Edward Rochester
 and his father in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys denies to
Bronte's Rochester the one thing that is supposed to be secured in the
Oedipal relay: the Name of the Father, or the patronymic. In Wide
Sargasso Sea, the character corresponding to Rochester has no name"
(129). This is surely interesting in a text where much 'anxiety of
influence' is at work between Antoinette and Annette as much as
between the Rochesters, not to speak of the struggle between Rhys's
novel and its textual ancestor -Jane Eyre. What do we therefore read
into this withholding of the patronymic? A strong possibility would be
that it is a narrative/stylistic gesture of rebellion against the same
textual ancestor with, to use Spivak's terms, its 'dominant culture'
feminist individualism and its successful 'foreclosure' of the 'native
informant.'
 It is useful to note Spivak's response to Mary Lou Emery's suggestion
that specifically Caribbean stylistic strategies enrich Rhys's novel and
that its textual practices enact the practices of Obeah. While Spivak is
enthusiastic about the first suggestion, she is tentative about the other,
'bolder' one, as she says it "complicates my conviction that the
other cannot be fully selfed. I can only see this as a mark of the limits
of the desire to self the other..." (132).