110 SAIKAT MAJUMDAR

certitudes, the continuous process of dislocation, the feminine and
post-colonial disturbance of white male reason in general, a
disorientation of a stable Victorian narrative order. "In Jean Rhys's
practice," says Sylvie Maurel, "the dialogue between fantasy and
plausibility is exacerbated in order to subvert the patriarchal
categorization of the real and also to palliate what consensual
taxonomies fail to apprehend: it gives utterance to all that is not said,
to all that is unsayable within the dominant order, to all that it registers
only as absence"(page reference). Full of a deliberate lack of signifiers,
gaps between signifiers and signifieds, a Beckettian abundance of
"nameless things" and "thingless names", the text destroys all
possibilities of epistemological certitude. No authoritative, omniscient
voice resolves conflicts created by fragmented, multiple viewpoints.
Antoinette is "undecided, uncertain about facts any fact." The letters
of Daniel Cosway, the Obeah voice of Christophine, the unsettling effect
of the ambience on Rochester, the recurring motifs of madness, all give
but a hallucinatory glimpse of the "truth." In a novel where the historical
and colonial setting amplifies opposition nature/civilization, female/
male, black/white, inner/outer, madness/sanity, dream/reality,
Antoinette continually transgresses the boundaries of each opposition.
She longs to be black when she is white, asserts her sexual "nature" in
an arranged marriage, shows us the logic in her madness, the reason
in her magic, and finally transforms her dream into reality, her inner
vision into an outer event. In such a world of disturbed binaries, any
kind of certitude remains a far cry.
 The dreamy fluidity is worked out in the finer nuances of language,
where the fantastic undermines predictable relations between the
signifier and the signified. It is perhaps the same verbal fluidity which,
pushed to the extreme, becomes synonymous to the primal energy
that lies at the heart of such celebrated archetypes of modernist
discourse as the reverie of Molly Bloom that concludes Joyce's Ulysses.
"After the rules of science, empiricism and theology, which are at the
essence of 'Ithaca,'" Zack Bowen points out, "the language of 'Penelope'
flows in one continuum with the thoughts of the protagonist, the
ultimate female" (549). Rhys's language in Wide Sargasso Sea becomes
a gesture towards such a destabilizing epistemological continuum.
 Such creative instability becomes doubly interesting when examined
in the light of the tangled web of deterministic relationships the text is
caught in the way in which its intertextual determinism is reflected
in a similar tension in the blood kinships among its characters. A
glimpse at historical precedents of such literary/textual 'influences'