SAIKAT MAIJUMDAR


achieved at the cost of the repression of the flowing and rhythmic
drives. This symbolic return to the pre-Oedipal "semiotic" discourse,
to wit, the "fantastic destabilization" (Maurel 155) of the prose of Wide
Sargasso Sea, thus becomes a gesture of rebellion against the many
patriarchal tyrannies it is fighting that of intertextuality and that of
imperialistic complacence all united in its post-colonial feminist
agenda to use Spivak's words, its project of foregrounding the 'native
informant.'
 Whether or not we are adventurous enough to accept Mary Lou
Emery's suggestion of Obeah techniques, it is obvious that Wide Sar-
gasso Sea's relationship with the discourse of modernist fiction, where
the sensual lyricism of its language obviously belongs, is pregnant with
such political implications and perhaps much more.
 Jean Rhys's relationship with modernism has often been seen as
problematic, often for the wrong reasons. While motifs of alienation
and estrangement have been acknowledged as paradigmatically
modernist in writers like Joyce and Eliot, with Rhys they have been
narrowly perceived as merely being depictions of the female experience,
further narrowed by labels like "pathological and autobiographical"
(Gardiner). As indicated by Helen Carr, the stereotypical image of Jean
Rhys, "the inward-looking chronicler of private pathos, ignorant of literary
culture, untutored even if intuiting the tone of her times," has also been
seen as inconsistent with the highly self-conscious, elitist literary
movement of modernism, thereby left in the periphery even in such
perceptive studies of women modernists by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and
Shari Benstock, making only fleeting appearances as a "ghost among
the expatriates" and "outsider among outsiders" (Benstock 450, 448).
 However, as pointed out by Coral Ann Howells, as modernism has
continued to be redefined in terms of its latent multiplicity, frequently
from feminist and post-modern perspectives, "the deconstruction of
the male modernist metanarrative has opened up spaces within which
her feminine poetics of alienation and compromised resistance may
be accommodated" (25). Even her European fiction of the '20s and '30s
had the characteristic modernist focus on urban space, like Joyce, Eliot
and Baudelaire as well as the cubist collage of multiple voices, myth
and memory, inner fragmentation. But it is in her Caribbean fiction
that her modernist discourse becomes more deeply loaded with
political meaning. Howells succinctly sums up Rhys's post-colonial
feminist project of giving a voice to the native informant that her
rebellious return to a pre-Oedipal "semiotic" discourse signifies when
she goes on to say "Her version of modernism encodes gender and