MODERNISM IN THE BASEMENT: SUBVERSIVE DISCOURSE IN WIDE SARGASSO SEA 107

of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Indigo, drastic time shifts and the
introduction of a host of new characters carries the rewriting
significantly out of the orbit of the original altogether. But while it is
possible to argue that in Rhys's text the change of locale and the
introduction of some new characters (notably Christophine) do indicate
some concrete differences from the earlier text, there is indeed very
little in Antoinette/Bertha's behaviour that is an active resistance, much
less a rebellion against the whims and injustices of the male European
authority she is pathetically subjected to, one that is entwined with
the textual authority of Jane Eyre in other words, no rebellious action
that distinguishes her from Bertha Mason in the earlier novel, even as
she gets a far larger share of space and narrative attention than 'the
madwoman in the attic' received in Bronte's novel.
 Keeping away from rebellious reversals on the level of action, Wide
Sargasso Sea instead subverts textual and cultural authority by means
at once more unobtrusive and pervasively mesmerizing discourse.
Even as one lolls in the dreamlike, sensual, elliptical prose of Wide
Sargasso Sea, one cannot help wondering over the deeper implications
of the stylistic aesthetics of the novel the political struggles it wages
are too obviously connected to the fluidity of its language and texture,
its haunting, continually unsettling lyricism. While most postwar
fictional retellings, like John Barth's rewritings of Scheherezade, Homer's
Odyssey and Cervantes's Don Quixote in Chimera and The Tidewater
Tales, Angela Carter's rewritings of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber,
and Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters employ
postmodernist techniques of reinterpretation, Jean Rhys's subversion
of textual and cultural authority through the employment of a fluid,
dreamlike discourse and consequent epistemological dislocations
become a paradigmatically modernist gesture.
 In a gesture as unobtrusive as this, even Rochester becomes a party
to this tide of dislocation, if perhaps such involvement remains outside
the range of his active cognition. (We shall examine later how
Rochestor's discourse becomes part of the fluid, modernist rebellion
the novel is waging.) It is in this context that the withholding of the
patronymic from Rochester becomes a central metaphor of this
narrative/stylistic rebellion.
 It would then be not inconsistent to read this withholding as a symbol
of return to what Julia Kristeva calls the "semiotic" discourse, that
fluid pre-Oedipal babble of the child afloat in the free-floating sea of
the womb, as opposed to the "symbolic" discourse emblematic of the
Law of the Father, that can become operative only with a stabilisation