MODERNISM IN THE BASEMENT: SUBVERSIVE DISCOURSE IN WIDE SARGASSO SEA 109

 colonial differences in the figure of the outsider who without money,
 power or social position launches her critique against the complacency
 of authority from the margins, while her fictions offer a subjectively
 focused perspective on distinctively modernist anxieties and
 obsessions"(25).
 One of the most strikingly modernist elements in the discourse of
 Wide Sargasso Sea is its deeply sensuous, languorous evocation of a
 sense of place, no less so than in high modernists like Joyce or Eliot.
 Take for instance the following passage:

 Our Garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible the
 tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown
 and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.
 Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green.
 Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.
 One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown
 tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the
 octopus orchid flowered then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was
 a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.
 The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it. (WSS 19)

 Places pulsate with liveliness in the novel the deeply sensual,
sinister gardens at Coulibri, the champagne pool and the nutmeg pool
at Granbois, the road to Christophine's home, the huts of the plantation
owners at sunset. Spatial arrangements, arguably a paradigmatically
modernist element, is related to the political power struggle the text is
continually waging displacement becomes a major motif in the novel
- in the question of Antoinette's sense of belonging, in her and
Rochester's respective portrayal of England and Coulibri as unreal, in
the interconnection of Caribbean topography with cultural identity
running throughout the novel. One is reminded of Bakhtin's analysis of
'space' in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevski the open biographical
space in the former's fiction, the expansive living rooms and the
courtyards, and the stealthy, shadowy space in the latter's work the
cobweb-straddled hall-corners, the narrow, murky staircases and
corridors. Such spatial hermeneutics would be perfectly applicable to
Wide Sargasso Sea the wild landscape and uncultivated gardens
reflect the emotional devastation and fractured identity built of crucial
concepts like class, gender, race and nation.
 The fluid, elliptical discourse of modernism continues to be variously
symbolic of a stylistic and narrative unsettling of epistemological