SAIKAT MAJUMDAR


 Rhys's retelling of Jane Eyre seems to be considerably different from
much of the practice of rewriting earlier works of fiction that is a
significant feature of postwar literature which has sought to establish
an important link between history and novelistic narrative. In much
contemporary fiction, telling has become compulsorily belated,
inextricably bound up with retelling, in all its idioms: reworking,
translation, adaptation, displacement, imitation, forgery, plagiarism,
parody, pastiche. Representative examples are Alain Robbe-Grillet's
reworking of the Oedipus story in The Erasers, Paul Auster's reworking
of Beckett's Trilogy of novels in his New York Trilogy, D.M. Thomas's
reworking of Freudian case-history in The White Hotel, the retellings of
the Biblical story of the Flood in Jeanette Winterson's Boating for
Beginners, not to speak of countless feminist reappropriations of science
fiction and detective stories. Parodies of technique and narrative orders
include John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Susan Hill's The
Mist in the Mirror, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things. In Rhys's novel, however,
there is something at once more subtle, unobtrusive, and complex than
the mere reduplication or replenishment of narratives in terms of
concrete action or characters. Anyone expecting any form of direct
rebellion against the traditional imperialist male power centres in Jane
Eyre on the level of plot or action is bound to be disappointed by Wide
Sargasso Sea, more so because reworkings of earlier canonical texts
are usually expected to provide such active subversion in the plot,
whether by means of the introduction of new characters, by investing
the power of discourse into a character mute or marginal in the older
text, even by drastic reversals in the course of action. Golding's Lord of
the Flies drastically subverts the naive optimism and the smug, Victorian
assumption of the constructive calibre of English schoolboys expressed
in R.M. Ballantyne's Coral Island with a breakdown of the fragile veneer
of civilization the boys who construct civilization on the deserted
island in the earlier book turn into savages in the latter. In Brian Aldiss's
Frankenstein Unbound, the subversion of Mary Shelley's novel takes
place in terms of dislocations in the ontological and narrative
framework, but there are considerable reversals on the plane of action
too the installation of the narrator, Joe Bodenland in early nineteenth-
century Switzerland, the appearance of Shelley, Byron and Mary Shelley
as characters within the fictional framework, the cataclysmic floods
caused by convulsions in the space-time continuum that opens up
timeslips flinging Bodenland between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries, and finally, in Bodenland's destruction of both the male and
the female monsters. And in such a novel as Marina Warner's retelling