Degree Project
Level: bachelor’s degree
“Pourquoi êtes-vous si triste” Sasha Jensen?
Technology at Work in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
Author: Cecilia Forssberg
Supervisor: Carmen Zamorano Llena Examiner: Billy Gray
Subject/main field of study: English Literature Course code: EN2028
Credits: 15 ECTS
Date of examination: 7 January 2020
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Theory: Aesthetics and Technological Modes of Perception 7
A Futurist Nightmare: Machine and Surveillance 9
The Politics of Looking: Seeing is Knowing 12
“I want the way out”: Refusing the Exhibition 16
Autonomy of the Senses: Sasha’s Film Mind 19
Conclusion 24
Works cited 26
Introduction
In October 1937 the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life opened in Paris. Sponsored by the National Front and showcasing technological advancements and aspects of modern life from countries all around the globe its aim was to celebrate internationalism and, as Christina Britzolakis puts it, to “abolish the divide between the arts and technology” (465). However, in a period of growing international tension “the Exposition immediately became a signifier of global imperial crisis “ (465) with the pavilions of the USSR and Nazi Germany positioned exactly opposite each other in “self-aggrandising splendour”
(Holden 151). It is in this Paris that Sasha Jensen, protagonist of Jean Rhys’s fourth novel Good Morning, Midnight (1937), spends a couple of weeks of her life, and in the exhibition specifically that she finds herself towards the end of the novel. The exhibition, with its focus on technological progress and a fascist ordering of life, provides a political and technological backdrop against which Sasha’s life can be read, and this thesis will use it as a context in which to study the particular challenges and conflicts that beset her.
Sasha Jensen is an unlikely, and to some frustratingly passive, main protagonist and it has been argued that Rhys portrayal of her character may have contributed to a lack of early commercial success. Early criticism would have her grouped together with the characters of Rhys’s previous novels to form the archetypal Rhys Woman1, self-punishing and self-destructive, “a marginal, incompetent victim, wearily grasping at the illusions of youth and beauty”
1 In Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys Ellgin W. Mellown argues that “the four individuals are manifestations of the same psychological type”, referring to the four protagonists of Rhys’s pre-war novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, and that read in sequential order they form a chronological depiction of one life.
(Parsons 1847). Molly Hite agrees with notions of Sasha having little or no perceived agency or ability to transcend her “narrow social role”(25) and while early critics may have lauded Rhys’s form and style, they questioned why she focused on such “sordid little stories” of “weakness, futility, betrayal” (Carr 2).
Sasha does in many ways seem to share a kinship with what Victor Brombert refers to as the archetypal anti-heroes of modernity: “self-doubting, inept, occasionally abject characters, often afflicted with self-conscious and paralysing irony” (2), a literary character that existed in abundance at the height of modernity.
Rhys’s lack of early commercial success seems then to be about something other than Sasha’s ineptitude. The gender bias in the early critique against Rhys is best summarised by Judith Kegan Gardiner:
When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an alienated man estranged from himself, [such a figure] is read as a portrait of the diminished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged from herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even further by labelling it both pathological and autobiographical. (qtd in Carr 3)
For the feminist reader, or those in search of understanding Sasha Jensen on the basis of her gender alone, she does indeed pose somewhat of a problem. Far from the powerful and assertive heroine that some literary feminists have come to expect, she tends to disrupt “notions of an inviolable self and integrity of character”
(Emery 15) that are important to the theory. Sasha does have moments where she allows herself to react, although this manifests itself only as a strong inner voice, verbose and sharp, and never leaves the confines of her mind. In a café in Paris, she feels laughed at by some younger women and the proprietor, and while her inner
voice vows to “rip” their “abominable guts out” (Rhys 45), she just walks out and cannot even look at them. Sasha never reaches the point where she throws off her cloak of submission, and her relationship to men follows a similar pattern. She desperately wants to stand up for herself, to shout and make a scene, but something inside her is preventing her from doing so; “Much too strong, the room, the street, the thing inside myself, oh much too strong” (108). Mary Lou Emery makes the case that “if sexual difference is the main screen of interpretation, the characters and their fates conform to clichés of the feminine rather than expectations of the feminist” (11). Sasha’s gender then, appears to be just one aspect of why she finds
“the thing” inside herself so difficult to overcome.
By adopting a more pluralistic approach and widening the scope of inquest to include aspects of Sasha’s identity that go beyond merely being a victim of
“patriarchal oppression” (Emery xii), further insight into her position as outsider can be gained. Sasha’s struggle with being at ease in the world can be read with lenses taking into account aspects of her Creole heritage, the wider political context of the times (and novel) as well as the particulars of modernity. As Helen Carr notes Rhys was more interested in the difference between the “have and have- nots, the secure and the unacceptable” (60) than such clear power dynamics as female and male. The social structure for Rhys depended on a “complex interaction of economic, class, racial, national and gender privilege” (Carr 60) and many of her characters, both male and female, show this complexity. In addition Mary Lou Emery, Helen Carr and Christina Britzolakis all argue that in understanding Sasha one cannot neglect Rhys’s own experience of colonial exile and her Third world perspective. As Britzolakis points out, Rhys differed from her modern contemporaries such as Hemingway, and the literary elite of expatriates in
Paris, in that she wrote from the perspective of “the ethnic, or ethnicized stranger – the subaltern rather than the elite cosmopolitan – who is denied a passport within metropolitan culture” (458). Emery combines a post-colonial and feminist critique of Rhys’s work, identifying Rhys’s various outsider identities as the reason Sasha herself appears to not quite belong anywhere; rather she inhabits the in-between:
in-between home and the street, public and private, Britain and the colonies, coloniser and colonised.
Other research has focussed on the political elements of the novel, identifying in it Rhys’s particular brand of social critique, where she evokes imagery of war by likening organised society, with its inherent outsiders and insiders, to a machine, and linking the machine’s rationality and ordering principle to modern elements of masculinity and fascism. Helen Carr speaks of the “febrile nightmarish world of Europe on the eve of the Second World War, with its anti- Semitism, its racism, its class machinery, its nationalistic posturing” (48) and Katherine Holden asserts that “the carefully constructed historical context with its precise power dynamics is as important as the subjective consciousness of the female narrator” (143). Cathleen Maslen invokes Marx in her reading, noting Rhys’s refusal to provide specific locations or times, thus embodying “humanity’s alienation from historical and productive process” (134). These readings identify the Exhibition, mentioned in the opening paragraph, as the main location for the narrative’s malevolent force, and juxtapose its apparent message of order and cleanliness to the messy inner turmoil of Sasha Jensen.
This thesis does not deny these aspects of Rhys’s writing. Good Morning, Midnight certainly presents a critique of the racial, sexual and economic politics of the time, and uses metaphors of the machine to allude to progress and the ordering
of society. However, references to the machine can also be seen to point to a more existential and essentially modernist crisis, one that concerns Sasha’s ability to navigate in her world, quite outside her physical being and that is more directly related to how technology was changing life and human interaction in the interwar period.
Sara Danius takes on the task of problematizing the technological advent and its effect on life and culture from the turn of the 19th century to the 1920s in The Senses of Modernism (2002). She presents the modernist project as a movement that came about in an attempt to reclaim the aesthetic, in a time when the technologized monotony and tedium of mass production was influencing society and culture at large, and focusses her inquest on “the widespread assumption that there is a gap between a merely technological culture and what has been seen as a more properly aesthetic one” (2). Particularly high modernism, the post First World War literary and arts movement of the 1920s seen to include authors such as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, may well have thought its new aesthetic order to be above any influence of a technologized world.
Her argument, however, is that high-modernist aesthetics are in fact “inseparable from a historically specific crisis of the senses, a sensory crisis sparked by, among other things, late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century technological innovations, particularly technologies of perception” (3) and hers is an investigation into this modernist myth of the anti-technological bias.
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius reviews three high modernist works of literature; Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924), Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), offering evidence on how technology provides a context for modernist works of art and
how it informs both the style and content of the works produced. In her analysis she examines what she conceives of as the interiorization of technological modes of perception, that is “the ever closer relationship between the sensuous and the technological” (194), and demonstrates how inventions such as cameras and phonographs affect both the aesthetics of arts and culture, as well as the human sensorium, invariably disturbing modes of perception, and as a result also modes of knowing.
This thesis sets out to look at thematics discussed in Sara Danius The Senses of Modernism, and use these as a framework in which to analyse Good Morning, Midnight. It aims to uncover how ideas of the modernist aesthetic, especially those related to technological progress, take shape in a work of literature not normally considered part of the high modernist canon, and if the concepts arrived at in Danius’s analysis are still valid when the narrative is centred around an older woman and a conventionally more marginal character than those Danius writes about. The need for such a perspective is expressed by Danius herself, as she suggests that in modernism at large “the alienating and reifying gaze is usually associated with masculinity” (160). Danius admits to a different investigation being altogether required in order to fully explore the importance of gender in the techno-modernist aesthetic, something she only briefly touches on in her exploration of Ulysses. It is the intention of this thesis to understand how the interiorization of technological modes of perception is at work in Sasha Jensen, and what this says about her position in society; as woman, as poor and as ‘other’.
The first chapters of this thesis will endeavour to situate Good Morning, Midnight in a techno-modernist framework, focussing on the text’s themes of technology and visuality, and in relation to the latter, its motifs of surveillance and
public display. Parallel to this, it will look at Danius’s concept of the modernist disconnect between categories of seeing and categories of knowing, and how this is articulated in the novel. The last two chapters will investigate ways in which Sasha rejects the modernist narrative of the aesthetic eye. Further, in the last section it will explore Danius’s concept of the division of perceptual labour, also referred to as the autonomy of the senses, where eyes and sometimes ears become protagonists in their own right, and seeing for the sake of seeing is celebrated. It will study the particulars of how this is expressed in Sasha Jensen, arriving at an aesthetic expression more in line with the avant-garde than high modernism.
Overall it will demonstrate that the interiorization of technological modes of perception cannot be articulated in a purely formal aesthetic sense, and that in Sasha’s case it must be argued that it is her position as other that rejects this aestheticization of the real.
Aesthetics and Technological Modes of Perception
A theory of technology and modernity emerges from reading Danius’s analysis of the three classic works, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924), Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), where she examines the relation of high modernism with its aesthetic pursuit in the second machine age. It is a theory that hypothesises the dissociation of the senses in modernist works of art, a severance Danius argues is brought about by “new technologized means of reproducing the real” (193) and which appears to be linked to technology moving from external to internal - elaborate. In both Mann’s and Proust’s texts the experience of technology is an external affair, a subject for
the narrative to dwell on that induces wonder and sometimes fear in the characters.
By the time Joyce publishes Ulysses, Danius argues the technological themes are incorporated into the narrative structure itself, with “Joyce’s style registering the subterranean effects of those technological inventions that Mann and Proust subject to discussion” (23). In all three cases, Danius proposes that this trajectory from Mann to Joyce is one not just of externality to internality but one which increasingly separates man from his senses, and the senses from one another. Not only do all body parts sometimes act “separately and independently from one another” (Danius, 161), but especially eyes ‘do’ things, and in Ulysses in particular
“the visual detail will always triumph over the progress of the plot” (164).
Articulated in these novels is the process of seeing becoming an aesthetic pleasure in its own right.
In Danius’s analysis, the frequent occurrences of visual themes and symbols in the works she considers, come as a direct result of the new emerging technologies of perception, and they in turn provide the setting for a rupture between seeing and knowing. While the three authors manifest this in slightly different ways, and on different narrative levels, for Danius “Ulysses represents a certain completion of the inherent tendencies that may be traced in The Magic Mountain and Remembrance of Things Past: the marginalization of the epistemic mandates of the human senses in an age where technological devices increasingly claim sovereignty over and against the sensorium” (23). Thus, technologies of perception bring about a perceptual division of labour, where apparatuses like phonographs and cameras, and the new sensory experience they produce, lead both to an autonomy of the senses, and a reliance on external apparatuses to relate
‘true’, i.e. scientific, knowledge. Danius’s critical-interpretive framework orients
itself around these questions of perception and knowing, and the effect on the human sensorium they conceptualise.
In The Senses of Modernism Sara Danius identifies themes and symbols of vision as one of modernism’s main tropes, and evidence of a culture deeply influenced by technologies of perception. In the literary works, “vision is privileged, functionalized, and in some ways reified” (62) and there is a dominance on the page given to human eyes as well as “mechanical extensions” of said eyes (88). Spectacles and types of gaze, from medical to mechanical, form subjects of their own, leading her to build on her argument of how “modernist aesthetics must be thought together with the emergence of visual technologies”
(57). Incorporating visuality into the theory of modernity, she draws on Leger and his theories of cinema “where he locates visual perception at the very heart of the experience of the modern” (168). From Mann to Joyce she gives evidence of the increasing presence of such symbols, and charts the move of this so-called technological mode of perception from an external to an internal experience.
Visuality in its many forms, becomes part of the essence of modernism.
A Futurist Nightmare: Machine and Surveillance
The events that take place in Good Morning, Midnight during Sasha Jensen’s two weeks in Paris are bookended by the narrative’s two most direct references to the machine. Sasha begins the two weeks with a nightmare where she is stumbling around the London Underground, which sets the tone for the rest of her stay,
“Everywhere the fingers point and the placards read: This Way to the Exhibition…
I touch the shoulder of the man walking in front of me. I say: ‘I want the way out.’
But he points to the placards and his hand is made of steel” (12). She walks away, ashamed, thinking “’Just like me – always wanting to be different from other people’” (12). Someone in the dream claims to be her father and at the same time accuses her of murdering him. The episode seems to refer both to the Paris Exposition, referenced earlier in the thesis, as well as Sasha’s previous hometown London, and combines Sasha’s dislike with England and her fear of exhibiting herself, while invoking imagery of military lines of soldiers. Mary Lou Emery rightly points to the dream as the moment when “the modern machine, fascistic domination and patriarchal authority become coextensive with one another” (15), setting the tone for the narrative both in terms of Sasha’s particular difficulties and the world at large.
Nestled in the midst of the novel’s somewhat puzzling and disturbing ending, which this thesis will return to later on, Rhys presents yet another bleak and apocalyptic dream episode. At this point Sasha has just quarrelled with her acquaintance and potential lover Rene and has sent him away. She has herself fallen asleep, and in a luminal induced state she dreams of a world where, “Venus is dead; Apollo is dead; even Jesus is dead”. The dream continues; “All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara…others have lights” (156). Kathleen Maslenreads the machine as a two-fold nightmare for Sasha, first as a symbol of Sasha’s anxieties, incorporating her own self-obsessiveness, her mindfulness “of how others see her”
(128) and her feelings of impending doom by replacing “the sense of a transcendental onlooker … by monstrous self-regard” (128). Sasha can indeed be seen to announce the death of not just the gods, but also arguably of art, youth and
beauty, as the Roman gods Apollo and Venus are both traditionally considered the gods of music, love and beauty among other things. However, Maslen also points to the image alluding to the machine of “European futurist art” (128), a reference that would situate Sasha’s dream machine outside her personal insecurities and in a broader context of technological advancement.
Maslen’s link to the Futurists carries some significance as they were among those around the turn of the 20th Century that most loudly celebrated the advent of technology as it “reconstituted previous ways of being within a more abstract framework made possible through technology” (Cooper 68). Their dream was to no longer be bound by the earthly body, but rather transcend into a Futurist one, one where ultimately “goodness of heart, affection and love … will be abolished”
(Cooper 80). Danius argues that images of the machine “grouped together with images of mortality, finitude and spectrality” (189) is a recurrent literary trope in modernist writing, used “as a way of managing and making sense of those historical processes called modernization” (189) and its positioning in the novel, close to the end, can be seen to signify a resignation from Sasha. She has just been left crying and beaten up on her hotel bed by would be lover Rene, and the resignation can be one to the observatory, scientific gaze of the world. It is as if she has accepted a world which favours the eye and theoria2 over a “Cartesian, noncorporeal and transcendental model of vision” (Danius 56). If the machine death figure of Sasha’s dream is replacing both the Gods and goodness of heart and in the Futurist sense is exhibiting and celebrating hyper-masculine qualities, it certainly gives evidence of the more bleak interpretations of the events that follow, discussed further in Autonomy of the Senses: Sasha’s Film Mind.
2 “Theoria in ancient Greek means a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, theory, but also a sight, a spectacle” (Danius 56)
However, Sasha also finds the arms and the lights “extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful” (Rhys 156) and sees the eyes sticky with mascara, to some extent subverting this futurist idea of the machine being masculine, violent and destructive force. It is not the machine itself that Sasha is afraid of. Instead it is the grey skies behind that are frightening her, suggesting rather that the thing to be afraid of is what the machine brings with it:
The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me… And the arms wave to an accompaniment of music and of song. Like this:
‘Hotcha – hotcha – hotcha. …” And I know the music: I can sing the song. … (157)
Existential philosopher Martin Heidegger maintained: “There is no demonry of technology … but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (28). The machine with its lights and all-seeing eyes, conjure up the imagery of cameras, recording and storing the events that take place. In Danius’s techno-modernist interpretation, knowledge and truth are transferred from eyes to technology, and the camera eye becomes the recorder of truth: “It carries no thoughts and no memories, nor is it burdened by a history of assumptions. For this reason, the camera eye is a relentless conveyor of truth.” (15). With this perspective the grey skies may carry with them Sasha’s true fears of surveillance, fears of what can be done at the hands of technology and fears of never being able to escape the watching eye of the world, presented in a “very beautiful” package and playing an all too familiar song, that no one can resist.
The Politics of Looking: Seeing is Knowing
In the legacy of modernist visual tendencies, Rhys provides the reader with a text resplendent with eyes and visual experiences, where seeing and being seen influence Sasha’s every day and every movement. However, as opposed to the detached, objective vision that pervades Ulysses, where seeing and hearing are aesthetic pursuits in their own right, the eyes in Good Morning, Midnight carry messages of fear and judgement and conjure up imagery of surveillance. As she walks around in Paris on one of her first nights she makes a poignant observation of how different the experience can be when, like her, you have no money;
Walking in the night with the dark houses over you, like monsters… Frowning and leering and sneering, the houses, one after another. Tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top to sneer. And they know who to frown at. They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don’t you worry… (28).
In contrast to Joyce’s writing in Ulysses, in Good Morning, Midnight Rhys politicizes eyes, through Sasha’s fear of others looking at her. It becomes clear throughout the narrative that Sasha has either abandoned, or been abandoned by, her family, that she has struggled both with love and money and that she mainly makes contact with society’s ‘others’; Jews, gigolos and penniless artists. Living in a time where the visual has taken up primacy, Sasha knows all too well the consequences of being looked at too closely: “I try, but they always see through me. The passages will never lead anywhere, the doors will always be shut. I know.
…” (28). As Christina Britzolakis argues “the spectacle of the abject and the marginalized is underlined through the novel’s repeated use of the word ‘exhibit’”
(469) and the text abounds in various metaphors for exhibitions, seeing and public spectacles. Rather than being the observing protagonist, objectively registering and
perceiving others, Sasha finds herself on the receiving end of such looks, suggesting that Rhys may have believed that owning the aesthetic gaze is not possible for all characters. While Danius proposes that the autonomy of the senses, the reified cinematic gaze, so championed in the three works of literature she examines, provides the characters with “the imperative to make the phenomenal new” (192), Sasha’s position as an outsider and object to gaze at creates a different experience of the visual.
Under the surface appears a fatigue with being continuously categorized or misread and the sense that Sasha is easily influenced by those who see her, those who try to frame her. In the beginning of the novel, she meets two Russian gentlemen who walk up to her to ask why she is so sad “Pourquoi etes-vous si triste?”, to which she openly replies “’But I’m not sad. Why should you think I’m sad?’” (39). In her internal dialogue with herself, however, she swings like a pendulum between not being “at all sad” and being very sad indeed, “sad like a circus-lioness” (39). As Gardiner points out “other people look into the mirror of her face and tell her how she feels” (237), while Sasha, by her own account, remains undecided, existing in-between, not content with adhering to the rules of the binary society in which she must live. As Gardiner points out, Sasha wishes to be both “desiring woman” and “old woman” (237) but society does not allow her to be both at the same time, preferably neither, just like the two Russians do not allow her to be both sad and not sad. Sasha returns to an earlier episode where she has been labelled “la Vielle” (French for “the old woman”), using it as her lament over the need for everything to have a place, to have a category;
That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?’ That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Que’est-ce
qu’elle fout ici, la vielle”’ That’s the way they look when they are saying:
‘What’s this story?’ Peering at you. Who are you, anyway? Who’s your father and have you got any money, and if not why not? Are you one of us? Will you think what you’re told to think and say what you ought to say? Are you red, white or blue – jelly, suet pudding or ersatz caviar? (Rhys 77)
If in Ulysses, as Danius argues, the autonomization of the eyes signify, if not a celebration, then at least an enthusiasm for this new way of looking, an attempt to retain the immediate (164), eyes are for Sasha endowed with judging and cruel qualities. They have become the storage units of all that Sasha wishes to escape, her failures and memories of her past, and they produce in her a desire to be uncategorized and unknown, to be un-seen.
The recurring references to mirrors and reflections are even further proof of a narrative rich in symbols of visuality, and in Good Morning, Midnight they frame yet another challenge for Sasha’s sanity. One of modernity’s more prominent thinkers Walter Benjamin once described Paris as “the city of mirrors”
where women see and perceive themselves more than anywhere else. “Before a man looks at them they have already seen themselves reflected ten times... even the eyes of passers-by are hanging mirrors” (qtd. in Buck-Morss 128). As Sasha walks into yet another lavatory that she knows “very well, another of the well- known mirrors”(142) or one with “plenty of looking-glasses, but not a soul there to watch you” (130) she seems both beset by anxiety and to find solace in these moments of solitude. Christina Britzolakis argues that Sasha’s obsession with toilets and their mirrors implies a refuge from the public gaze of others whereas Helen Carr proposes that while Sasha is not managing to fully merge “the self that is defined and the self that defines” (64) the mirrors are of importance for Sasha’s
sense of self and identity formation. At one point she is hiding both from the world outside and herself in another bathroom;
‘Well, well,’ it says ’last time you looked in here you were a bit different, weren’t you? Would you believe me that, of all the faces I see, I remember each one, that I keep a ghost to throw back at each one – lightly, like an echo – when it looks into me again?’ … But it’s not as bad as it might be. (Rhys 142)
In contrast to the more benevolent readings of the mirror, it can instead be argued, that as symbols of vanity, identity-formation, spectrality and surveillance the mirrors instead serve to create an uncertain and unstable environment for Sasha, who already feels looked and laughed at by others.
For a different protagonist, one steeped in more high-modernist aesthetic fashion, the mirror may have served as an opportunity to allow for a disembodied, objective regard. For Sasha, however, the mirror not only signifies knowing in the instant it is looked at, but seems to combine the gaze of herself and of others, throwing back a double judgement which reminds her of all the different versions of herself that she can be, or fail at being. The mirror seems to know her better than anyone, but it poses the question of what that knowing means for Sasha, as it appears to be both an unstable and unreliable knowing: “The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth” (Rhys 63). Even if the reflection itself is distorted, throwing back reality or a version thereof, the mirror for Sasha Jensen must be viewed as a symbol of some kind of truth, and Rhys therefore locates knowing firmly in vision.
“I want the way out!”: Rejecting the Exhibition
Refusing to be seen, and refusing to see, appears to be two methods in which Sasha defies the modernist narrative of aesthetics. The first is seen most clearly in the interplay between Sasha and Rene, a gigolo she has made the acquaintance of and who seems intent on getting her into bed, despite the fact that Sasha has made it clear she has no money: “He isn’t trying to size me up, as they usually do – he is exhibiting himself, his own person (…) I think, this is where I might be able to get some of my own back” (61), she muses when they first meet. To begin with she enjoys this new kind of spectacle: “He is going to say his piece. I have done this so often myself that it is amusing to watch somebody else doing it” (62). Rene may well inhabit the same social space as Sasha, and Rhys has written him as a penniless and homeless bad boy, a “mauvais garçon” (62), someone that Sasha might be expected to feel an affinity to. However, regardless of his personal motives, this initial reversal of roles, where Rene is the object and Sasha the subject, soon return to a more recognisable power dynamic where Rene, as Katherine Maslen puts it, tries to force her to “inhabit the stereotype of the sexually frustrated woman” (140).
The relationship to Rene is one where seeing equals power, and the power struggle between them is the struggle throughout the novel where they try to own the gaze, and thus own the right to define the other person. After a discussion at one of the Paris bars, where Rene has tried to tempt Sasha to talk about her previous love life, she proclaims “I’m no use to anybody” and “I’m a cérébrale, can’t you see that?” (135), rejecting Rene’s thinly veiled sexual invites by jokingly calling herself a brainy person, a thinker, not one amused by corporal desires.
Rene replies:
‘A cérébrale,’ he says, seriously, ‘is a woman who doesn’t like men or need them.’
‘Oh, is it? I’ve often wondered. Well there are quite a lot of those, and the ranks are daily increasing.’
‘Ah, but a cérébrale is a woman who likes nothing and nobody except for herself and her own damned brain or what she thinks is her brain.’ (…)
‘In fact, a monster.’
‘Yes, a monster.’ (136)
For Sasha, the mere act of looking comes to signify the process of being identified, boxed in and made one dimensional, even by those who could have been her friends. Her own words are used against her and she has to fight to own the narrative of herself. She tries to get her own back, but Rene does not respond kindly when Sasha refuses to play his game: “You haven’t looked well at me”
(151) he says as he accuses her of emasculating him. Yet more evidence that in marked difference to Danius’s protagonists, eyes are a weapon in the fight for survival and to stay outside the system.
If Sasha’s attempts at not being seen are hindered by Rene’s persistent attempts of seeing and defining her, her alternative strategy to regain control reveals itself as the act of ‘not seeing’. After the previously mentioned interaction, where she has been insulted and cajoled in equal measures, and Rene has turned on her only two friends in Paris, she becomes very vexed, announcing internally to herself that she has had enough; “I want to get away. I want to be out of this place”
(136). Outwardly she says that she wants to go one last time to the Exhibition, the same International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life described in the opening paragraph of this thesis, and she wants to go on her own, to “look
down at the fountains in the cold light” (136). Rene takes no heed and comes with her to the site. When Sasha stands with Rene on the viewing platform late at night, looking over the Exhibition grounds, she sees none of its more menacing aspects.
The Nazi German and the USSR pavilions which according to Britzolakis took up most of the view in an attempt to promote their own power and prowess, are peculiarly absent from Sasha’s view: “There aren’t many people about. Cold, empty and beautiful – this is what I imagined, this is what I wanted” (137). The scene seems to momentarily provide her with a moment of peace. Mary Lou Emery claims that the two of them on the platform serves to reinforce their taking part in the Exhibition, as it “effectively reverses the direction of the exhibitionary gaze, as a specular structure modelled on the commanding view; it positions the couple as objects rather than subjects of the spectacle” (151). Instead, this paper argues that Sasha’s refusal to look at and engage with the more prominent and menacing buildings at the Exhibition, can be read as her attempt to reject the Exhibition’s commitment to making her an object, as well as a more general rejection of the progressive and technologically innovative ideals the Exhibition stands for.
While Danius argues that in the world of Ulysses blindness is viewed as a
“curse visited on the living” (176), Sasha seems to seek it, even find it a saving grace. Sasha refuses to see anything but emptiness at the Exhibition, and in her interaction with Rene, especially towards the end, she escapes to the unseeing world as a coping strategy. At one point Rene, who she says goodbye to at the entrance of her hotel, begging him not to come with her, follows her up the stairs, turns off the light and surprises her on the landing. There in the darkness, she can finally let go of her misgivings about him and is for a moment happy: “everything
is in my arms here on this dark landing”, as she embraces him she has “love, youth, spring, happiness, everything I thought I had lost” (Rhys 148). The surrender is so instant and so complete that something significant seems to happen in the moment when the lights go out. It is as if the darkness frees her and she can feel true happiness. When the lights are switched on again she instantly becomes awkward: “uneasy, half of herself somewhere else” (148), her paranoia setting in and the friction and aggression returning in her interactions with Rene. He accuses her of playing a comedy, of not being clear in her intentions and eventually the two end up in a physical struggle on Sasha’s bed. During this act of abuse from Rene, Sasha’s mind switches between seeing it all happen as a sort of comedy act, aloof and detached, and being trapped under his knees, crying and worried as he looks at her like a wicked person, a “m’echant” (152). During the struggle, Sasha maintains the importance of keeping her eyes shut, because “she is strong as the dead” and “dead people must keep their eyes shut” (152), reverting to the only power she feels she can control, refusing to see Rene. While Good Morning, Midnight certainly places a lot of attention on eyes and seeing, Sasha, as opposed to the protagonists of Danius’s analysis, emerges as a protagonist who seeks nothing other than blindness and to get away from said eyes.
Autonomy of the Senses: Sasha’s Film Mind
The narration in Good Morning, Midnight takes the form of Sasha’s sometimes ironic, sometimes depressed and sometimes funny, internal commentary which runs parallel to the events that take place, and invites the reader to see the discrepancy between the actions of her external persona and the wishes of the
other inside her. Emma Zimmerman alludes to her “façade of sanity and detached indifference” and claims that she embodies something of the “uncanniness of the automaton” (81). This can be seen in the repeated incidents throughout the novel where she works hard to make her mind “vacant, neutral” and herself “invisible”
(GMM 16). Much of her personality is seen only through her thoughts, as she plays up scenarios in her mind, scenarios where she can be either much braver or much happier. The incident of a woman laughing and pointing at her in a café creates feelings of rage and discomfort, yet all she can do is keep her eyes down and leave:
I would give all that’s left of my life to be able to put out my tongue and say:
‘One word to you’, as I pass that girl’s table. I would give all the rest of my life to be able even to stare coldly at her. As it is, I can’t speak to her, I can’t even look at her. I just walk out. (45)
Sasha does indeed seem to acknowledge what her Russian friends say is her sad face, but claims she can take off the “tortured and tormented mask” (37) she wears at any time. While Sasha may not be internalizing the technological modes of perception central to Danius’s theory, per se, she is, internalizing other machinistic features, in her specific case it seems in order to leave out chance in any aspect of her life: “I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life” (9), she proclaims in the beginning pages of the novel, treating her life, as Zimmerman points out, as a computer program.
A psychic split seems to occur, expressed in Sasha through her inner complex and lively world and her complacent and apathetic exterior. Cristina Voicu argues from a postcolonial perspective that Sasha’s “fragmented perceptions
and disjointed voices present the modern experience of exile and the decentered self” (86). Mary Lou Emery echoes these thoughts, adding that it is caused both by the external pressures of a tense social context of “order and peace at any price”
(145), and by a fragmented and isolated mind, borne out of “Sasha’s destroyed attempts at reconstructing her life” (145). Both these readings would seem to place Sasha’s fragmented persona as the battle ground not only for Sasha’s own sanity but for the modern world at large.
While it is clear throughout Good Morning, Midnight that Sasha’s life has not been an easy one, in fact there are plenty of suggestions through the text of a life on the breadline, hints to a rupture with the family in London and the heartbreaking loss of her child, the split can also be seen to manifest itself in technological terms. The internal dialogue often takes the shape of pictures and melodies appearing as memories, floating through her mind risking her to betray herself, with little control from the protagonist herself. Sasha is constantly disappearing into little daydreams, and as she and Rene are on their way from the Star of Peace in the taxi, she evokes the following;
I’m in a little whitewashed room. The sun is hot outside. A man is standing with his back to me, whistling that tune and cleaning his shoes. I’m wearing a black dress, very short, and heel-less slippers. My legs are bare. I am watching for the expression on the man’s face when he turns around. Now he ill-treats me, now he betrays me. He often brings home other women and I have to wait on them, and I don’t like that. But as long as he is alive and near me I am not unhappy. If he were to die I should kill myself.
My film mind. … (‘For God’s sake watch out for your film-mind…’) (Rhys 147)
Whether her thoughts are actual past events or a dramatic take on something much more everyday, remains unclear. This is the first and only occasion Sasha directly refers to her own mind as her film-mind, beginning to acknowledge and name that other presence. The cinematic reference seems to be of importance. Gardiner argues that “It speaks her desires in terms of fictionally-coded possibilities that her rational, well- socialized and cynical self constantly rejects” (238) and it does indeed relay a fictional sense to her daydreams. However, the cinematic reference would, in Danius’s terms, also convey a sense of truth, in as much as the photographic eye is the bearer of truth in the visual age. Sasha’s ideas of herself as a “bit of an automaton” (14), her desire to strip herself of all emotion and her film- mind as the conveyor of truth suggest a different type of interiorization of matrices of perception, one which is based much more around survival than aesthetics.
Any notion that Sasha’s internal film-mind, and her external, automaton- like world, would connect into a whole being again, appears to become less and less likely as the novel moves on. As Adorno argues regarding the concept of technology, “The senses, which all have a different history, end up poles apart from each other, as a consequence of the growing reification of reality as well as of the division of labor. For this not only separates men from each other but also divides each man with himself” (qtd in Danius 89). Danius builds her theory of the dissociation of the senses in part on this, and while she sees many instances in Ulysses of this separation, in terms of autonomous body parts, for Sasha the split can be seen to occur instead in her mind. As she is struggling with Rene on the bed in the last pages, refusing to let him take advantage of her, she acknowledges another presence inside her for the first time. As she tells Rene to just take the money and go, she is at the same time telling herself “Don’t listen, that’s not me
speaking. Don’t listen. Nothing to do with me – I swear it…” (153). Keeping her eyes firmly closed, she hears Rene leaving the room;
When he has gone I turn over on my side and huddle up, making myself as small as possible, my knees almost touching my chin. I cry in the way that hurts right down, that hurts your heart and your stomach. Who is this crying?
The same one who laughed on the landing, kissed him and was happy. This is me, this is myself, who is crying. The other – how do I know who the other is?
She isn’t me. (154)
The other sarcastic lively presence that has kept her company, entertaining and tricking the reader as the ironic narrator of her life, in the end becomes its own protagonist, with Sasha repeatedly mentioning “Her voice in my head” (154). The other “her” is present throughout the novel, but the actual split comes at the end of the novel, when Sasha’s everyday struggle for survival culminates in the very physical struggle with Rene on the bed. While not altogether equivalent to Danius’s dissociation of the senses, it is a separation of sorts, a nod to Adorno’s
“separation of man from himself”, from a sensorium under assault from modernity, and may be Sasha’s own way of interiorizing technological modes of perception.
In the following chapter, having finally freed herself from Rene, such is her confusion that Sasha instantly tries to will him back into her bed through the power of her mind. Instead she welcomes the commis in to her arms, a shadow figure and an uncanny presence that has been lurking about her throughout the entire novel, someone she describes as “the ghost of the landing…thin as a skeleton” (13). He frightens her and makes her think of a “priest of some obscene, half-understood religion” (30). There are multiple readings of the final
scene in terms of Sasha’s embrace meaning either salvation or death, or complete nihilism. Katherine Maslen maintains that as the commis is an ambiguous character, “at once diabolical and piteously human-like”, Sasha’s surrender to the commis is an attempt to accept humanity’s, and her own, flaws and means more than “the triumph of evil” (146). Mary Lou Emery argues against the more positive readings, saying that “if this final scene suggests birth, it is that of a machine with mascaraed eyes, an artificial woman like the shop dummies Sasha has cynically admired, and an automaton who dances to a debasing tune” (171).
Applying Danius’s theory, the embrace of the commis can be seen as an attempt to move salvation into the realm of the corporeal, having rejected to do so with Rene. The ghost of the landing does not appear to be a less unsavoury character than Rene, so it is unclear why Sasha is willing to embrace him, but it may be that in this final scene she is attempting to transcend her technological mode, her sense of being an ‘automaton’, having momentarily been freed of her film-mind and through embodied experience save herself. As the Futurists attempted to free themselves of the constraints of the body, and the machine of war tried to free itself from responsibility of the other, Sasha is seeing the embodied experience as the only solution, to fight abstraction and fragmentation, and welcomes the commis in to her arms. “I look straight into his eyes and despise a poor devil of a human for the last time” (Rhys 159).
Conclusion
The purpose of this thesis has been to employ Sara Danius’s theory of technological modes of perception to a work of literature less considered a
canonical piece of high-modernist writing, yet fundamentally still of the modern time. All the previous research and writings on Rhys’s work pointed to a novel which, inhabiting a fundamentally outsider position, both in terms of author and protagonist, may have trouble fitting into Danius’s techno-modernist narrative. It was the purpose of this thesis to use her framework to investigate what the interiorization of matrices of perception may mean for someone like Sasha Jensen.
As this thesis has argued, there is a strong technological theme running through Good Morning, Midnight and its narrative. This theme is apparent in both direct references to machines, as well as Sasha’s reactions of angst against these instances. Techno-modernist ideas of visual dominance have also been traced, with occurrences of eyes and the gaze seen as central to the novel’s theme of surveillance. The assumption of the aesthetic, reified gaze of modernity being predominantly masculine can be seen to be supported in Sasha’s lack of such a detached view of vision. However, other aspects than her gender also seem to play into her experience of the now.
For Danius, the interiorization of technological modes of perception ultimately means that machines change the ways human beings perceive things. In Sasha’s visual world there is little evidence of seeing for the sake of seeing or attempts to make the phenomenal new, however Rhys’s use of a narrative device such as Sasha’s film mind does point to an interiorization of sorts, creating an unstable and surreal experience for Sasha.
Ultimately Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight expresses the existence of someone on the receiving end of the reified view. For women and other
‘others’, the act of looking becomes twofold as they become the objects being looked at. It is a complicated relationship, unable for some shake off in pursuit of
Danius’s aesthetic of immediacy. In Sasha Jensen’s world, the interiorization of technological modes of perception appear to have more to do with internalising surveillance and control.
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