Towards Defining "Postrealism" in British Literature

Williams-Wanquet, Eileen, 1951Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 389-419 (Article)
Published by Eastern Michigan University DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2007.0013

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Towards Dening Postrealism in British Literature

Eileen Williams-Wanquet
In spite of the death of the traditional realistic novel announced in the 1960s, some fashion of realism has continued to ourish. As David Lodge writes in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977),
There is . . . a certain kind of contemporary avant-garde art which is said to be neither modernist nor antimodernist, but postmodernist; it continues the modernist critique of traditional mimetic art, and shares the modernist commitment to innovation, but pursues these aims by methods of its own. It tries to go beyond modernism, or around it, and is often as critical of modernism as it is of antimodernism. (220221)

Indeed, many critics have noted the appearance of a new type of novel, one which seems to blur the boundaries between postmodern experiment and Realism (Elias 9). John Barth calls this genre the Literature of Replenishment because it takes up and transforms old forms. Malcolm Bradbury likewise insists on the coupling of self-reexive parody and realistic historical reference, or of artice and mimesis: That double haunting does seem a familiar feature of quite a lot of our writing, seeking its new relation both with the fracturing spirit of modernism and with the
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 36.3 (Fall 2006): 389419. Copyright 2006 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

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ways of nineteenth-century vraisemblance (54). This paradoxical novel is part of what has been named the turn to ethics in the 1990s (Parker 1), a sort of revival of a revised humanism in literature and in literary criticism. Linda Hutcheon has coined the now well-known term historiographic metaction to describe this new literary form, which is both intensely self-reexive and rooted in the historical world (Poetics x), while Susana Onega predicted its explosion as early as the 1980s. Following Frdric Regard in Histoire de la littrature anglaise, we can call this genre postrealist rather than postmodern, for unlike the latter, it does not simply play autonomous language games. The term postrealism has the advantage of aligning this genre with the already established tradition of realism, as it once again aims at commenting on and committing to the world after the avant-garde, formalist, and aesthetic concentration on abstraction, but nds new ways of doing so. If one distinguishes modernism and postmodernism as aesthetic paradigms, and modernity and postmodernity as historical epochs linked to an attitude or world view, both postrealist and postmodernist literature can be considered categories of ction belonging to a postmodern epoch dominated by the death of modernity as an ethos. Although Habermas construes modernity as referring to the historical epoch associated with the Enlightenment, the beginnings of which can be traced to the end of the fifteenth century, modernity can also be envisaged as an attitude, a mode of relating to contemporary reality . . . a way of thinking and feeling; a way too of acting and behaving (Foucault 100). Thus, in the rst chapter of The Rise of the Novel (1957)entitled Realism and the Novel FormIan Watt implicitly takes the term modern as referring to both a historical epoch and an attitude. However, if one considers postmodern lucidity as just the prolongation and the exacerbation of modernist formalism, then realism and the subsequent modernist/postmodernist aesthetics would each be manifestations of modernity, representing two opposite sides of the same coin. Both remain trapped in a dualistic either/or way of thinking, in the binary Cartesian logic of the same and other. Modernitys Western liberal humanistic or common sense view of the subject and of reality is the philosophical foundation for literary realism, which the modernists rejected (Belsey 17). It makes the autonomous Kantian subject or the reason-centered Cartesian subject, the transcendent index of human nature, the center of

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consciousness and of mastery, the origin and source of meaning, truth, and historyas Jacques Derrida has shown, this idea of self as center is founded on the presence of a transcendental signified (La Structure 411416). It assumes a common phenomenal world, a stable reality, external to the subject, objectively grasped by the senses, and reected by the mind as a great mirror (Rorty 12). This vision of the world is essentially dualistic, the center functioning as pivot between binary opposites which always privileged one half: white/black, male/female, self/other, intellect/body, west/east, objectivity/subjectivity (Hutcheon, Poetics 62). Thus, we have the extremes at each end of the (realist/modernistpostmodernist) spectrum: intentionalism and anti-intentionalism, mimesis and formalism, contextualism and textualism, totalitarianism and absolute relativism, subject as center and the death of the subject, absolute Truth and a total lack of meaning. Ultimately, both traditional realism and avant-garde aesthetics are now equally exhausted. Rorty speaks of postmodernism as part of a postKantian culture, or anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian revolution, and Susan Bordo notes a certain similarity . . . with the Renaissance, in the cultural awakening (67; 115). What has been challenged are the philosophical underpinnings of realism: the hierarchy in the signied/signier opposition has been reversed as the signier has been given priority over the signied, thus invalidating the interdependent Enlightenment notions of an autonomous subject and of a stable external reality that can be imitated by language. Antoine Compagnon indeed notes that the crisis of the concepts of mimesis and of the subject is linked to that of literary humanism in general (126). As the transcendental signied is no longer perceived as derived from some Absolute TruthGod, History, or Reason but produced by language, there is no source of meaning outside the text. No longer origin and source of meaning, only an effect of discourse, the subject loses its masteryover itself and over the external worldand meaning is radically indeterminate. As ideologytaken in Althussers use of the term, to mean the unquestioned condition of our existence in the world, a way of thinking and acting that works in conjunction with social poweris inscribed in language, its so-called transparency is also invalidated. If the world is mediated through language, which speaks always already in our place, if we are always already subjects before being born (Althusser 32), traditional realism is no longer possible. Not only

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has the modern basis for traditional realism been all but invalidated, but the joyous postmodern exaltation of simulacra and of the carnivalesque has run its course. As Barth explains, it is not language or literature that is exhausted, but the aesthetic of high modernism (71). As it attempts to nd a new way of conveying the world, the postrealist novel of postmodernity incorporates historical characters and events (Hutcheons historiographic metafiction), as well as characters and events from earlier ction (Hutcheons modern parody). Indeed, intertextuality is generally recognized as being one of the hallmarks of contemporary literature. The predominant type of intertextuality is what Grard Genette calls hypertextuality, whereby the contemporary text (the hypertext) is grafted onto a previous text (the hypotext), without necessarily referring openly to it (1112). Most of the time, this hypertextuality is compulsory in that the reader cannot fail to notice the traces left by the hypotext. Very often, the hypertextuality is signaled the direct presence of one text within another, whether in the form of quotation, paraphrase, or allusion, or whether in the main text or in the preface, epigraph, or epilogue. The relation between a hypertext and its hypotext can be either an imitation of stylepasticheor a transformation of contentparody. In its broadest sense, parody is rst imitating and then changing either, and sometimes both, the form and content or style and subject matter, or syntax and meaning of another work, or, most simply, its vocabulary (Rose 45). Moreover, the ridiculing imitation is only an option, rather than a fundamental denition, of parody (Hutcheon, Theory 5). Postrealist texts tend to privilege intertextual parody, reproducing previous texts with a difference. The ambiguous etymology of the term, which means both singing with (d) and against (para), itself indicates the conicting intimacy and contrast of parodywhat Steven Connor terms delity-in-betrayal (167) and Linda Hutcheon terms extended repetition with critical difference (Theory 7). Parody may be an intra-textual phenomenon, a form of inter-art discourse (2), but it is far from being a language game cut off from the world. Although parodys target text is always another . . . form of coded discourse, this does not mean that parody does not have ideological or even social implications (16). Often parody aims at a satirical ridicule of contemporary customs (11), as in what Hutcheon calls satirical parody; i. e. parody used for satirical purposes (Ironie 144). Postrealist texts are thus grounded both in a previous

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text and in the real world. This rooting in the real world is itself double, as the postrealist novel refers both to an empirical past (as in Hutcheons historiographic metaction) that is contemporary to the hypotext and to an empirical present, i. e. the contemporary world, that of the hypertext. Whereas the mimesis of the traditional realistic novelcalled the readerly text by Roland Barthes (8283) or the egg-text by David Lodge (126)uses language mimetically to imitate reality objectively and uses muthos (or emplotment) to consolidate the existing social order, thereby imposing some sort of meaning onto otherwise meaningless facts, the modernist avant-garde novel severs the muthos from an irrecoverable world to evoke a highly subjective sphere. Whereas the realist novel aims for an eternal reality, the postmodernist text, perceiving art as an autonomous activity, or a superior kind of language game, creates its own reality. The postrealist novel, in contrast to all of these aesthetic paradigms, re-emplots facts that have been severed from the world, only to send them back to the world with a new meaning. As Patricia Waugh puts it, metaction is a term given to ctional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between ction and reality (2). As a way of re-viewing the world, metaction re-writes the muthos whereby brute reality is made to signify. If the world comes to us through language, it can be re-written through language as well. If the world is metaphor, it can be re-metaphoricized. The muthos of the hypotext is thus decontextualizedremoved from its original historical context (that of the hypotext)and recontextualizedset in a new, contemporary contextand thereby made to re-signify. Mimesis perceived as muthos is thus a dynamic process, an activity, which can invent what Paul Ricoeur calls a quasi-world (Temps et rcit I 9394)as rst-hand reference is abolished, a second-hand reference can come into being (Du texte laction 124129). Thus, parody, the repetition with a difference of a hypotext, can be a re-signifying practice (Butler 1314), an act of re-vision, a way of entering an old text from a new critical perspective (Rich 35), a re-writing in terms of some fundamental master code (Jameson 58). As Jacques Rancire explains in La Parole muette, the autonomy or intransitivity of literature, i. e. the fact that the written word can be cut off from its context, is what permits

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postrealist literature to re-write the world by re-emplotting it. Derrida has shown that the written word is fundamentally iterable: cut off from its original context of enunciation, it becomes a sort of machine that produces new meanings as it is grafted onto new contexts (Signature 377). A certain type of repetition can thus become citational, breaking with the prior context of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended (Butler 14). In order to examine the ways in which postrealism manages to reconcile the postmodern lter of language, on the one hand, and the insistence on a grounding in historical reality, on the other hand, I shall concentrate on Marina Warners Indigo (1992), which re-writes traditional history as well as Shakespeares The Tempest (1612), Jeanette Wintersons Boating for Beginners (1985), which re-writes the Bible, and Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which re-writes Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre (1847). All three novels represent postrealisms double rooting, both in real time and space and in a previous text, as well as its double realistic reference to an empirical past and to an empirical present. They all present true-tolife characters situated in history and evolving in a more or less plausible plot, yet the traditional notions of subject and of time and space are undermined by common narrative techniques. Moreover, they share certain themes: a desire to see things from the other side, a feminist orientation, and a blurring of patriarchal boundaries and dualisms, all linked to a call for change in point of view and to the suggestion of a possible happy ending in the future for minority groups as well. Grouping narratives which re-write sacred texts, classical literature, and traditional history to challenge their philosophical foundations from within will foreground postrealisms preoccupation with reviewing foundational texts of contemporary life. Taking each text in turn, I shall analyze the various intertextual techniques used to re-write the previous texts, and examine how this rewriting comments on the real world and revises the modern notions of the subject, as well as those of time and space. Re-Writing The Tempest as a Challenge to History and as a Feminine Reconstruction: Marina Warners Indigo The hypertextuality at work in Marina Warners Indigo (1992) is signaled by various forms of intertextuality: naming, verbal echoes, quota-

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tions, embedded pastiches, plays-within-plays, as well as parallel characters, settings, and situations. The characters, the narrative events, and the colonial theme of The Tempest (1612) are repeated; but to revisit Shakespeares play, Warner uses the techniques of classic realism (like those of a well-made plot and of carefully delineated characters) and realistically sets her true-to-life characters in geographical, historical, and autobiographical reality, connecting her novel to the world outside the page. The plot is clearly doubly grounded in geographical space and time by the use of realistic techniques. The story alternates between London in the twentieth century (in 1948, then from 1969 to the 1980s) and the West Indies, both in the seventeenth century (from 1600 to 1620) and in the twentieth century (from 1969 to 1983). Geographical details, names, and descriptions are given; a map of the islands gures at the beginning of the book; dates and historical details of the discovery of the islands and of subsequent colonialism and slavery abound; historical characters, Warners own ancestors, gure as ctional characters; details of twentieth-century London are true-to-life. All the references correspond to gures in history and geography books, lending a feeling of veriability to the ctional world. Yet the very merging of fact and ction illustrates that history is a human construct, and is therefore subject to revision. Moreover, names, dates, and historical facts, although clearly recognizable, are often approximate or deliberately falsied, as though to indicate the re-writing at work. The double temporal perspective, both twentieth-century and Elizabethan, corresponds to the two historical contexts of the hypertext and of its hypotext, which both explore the theme of power from vantage points rooted in contexts separated by over three hundred years. The double geographical grounding, both in the New World and in the Old World, indicates that Warner intends to comment on British colonization in the West Indies and on the scars that it has left behind. The narrative, which covers a time-span of almost four centuries, focuses on the before and after of colonization, repeating with a difference the narrative events and characters of The Tempest, which are thus decontextualized and recontextualized in time and in space. Such recontextualization necessarily involves a change of perspective from an imperialistic seventeenth-century point of view to a twentieth-century point of view marked by a guilty conscience towards colonization. Writing from an epoch highly conscious of the relativity of things, Warner further reverses the point of view. She pits the

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dominant European male point of view, which underpins The Tempest, against that of jarring witnesses (Holton 251), i. e. the excluded minorities or silenced voices of history, which are female and non-European, giving priority to the latter. This inversion of point of view will inevitably lead to a different emplotment of similar events (which signify differently in a different context, informed by a different ideology) and to another poetic justice, in a re-writing of The Tempest which is also a re-writing of colonial history. Thus Indigo illustrates, in the words of one character, Xanthe Everard, Tradition is a lie. . . . Its always a selective process . . . the dominant class picks its tradition to suit (357), as the author aims at lling in the gaps and blanks of Shakespeares play; namely, the absence of female voices and the life and civilization of the other side (Warner, Indigo 57). Warner re-creates Shakespeares characters with a difference. In the colonial past of Indigo, Sycorax, who never appears onstage in The Tempest, replaces Prospero as the governing voice. Whereas Shakespeares Sycorax is an evil witch who practices black magic and copulates with the devil, Warners Sycorax becomes a healer who practices natural magic. Indigos Dul is obviously the counterpart to the monstrous Caliban: Warners character is transformed from an incubus begotten by Sycorax and the devil into an intelligent and humane boy (the victim of the real devil, slavery), delivered from the womb of a dead African slave and adopted by Sycorax. Ariel, Shakespeares male spirit, is eshed out into an Arawak girl, uprooted by the colonizers and also adopted by Sycorax. No character bears the name of Prospero, but Shakespeares central patriarch is clearly the model for the male members of the Everard family over three centuries: the contemporary Kit Everard is the direct descendant of the seventeenth-century Kit Everard, who colonizes the West-Indian island of Liamuiga, and his father, Sir Ant, represents an enduring imperialist mentalitythe very name Everard evokes continuity. Miranda is brought forward in time to become Miranda Everard, Kits daughter and the presentday central consciousness of the novel. Instead of fitting in with her fathers plans, as does Shakespeares Miranda, she is a half-caste rebel racked by the guilt of being a part of the criminal class (266). While the structure and bare plot of The Tempest is more or less faithfully reproduced and its characters re-created with a difference, the poetic justice is inversed as the play is re-emplotted according to a different point of view

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and ideology: Kit, who returns to the islands in the 1960s to make money from tourism, ends up ruined and ironically living in the same conditions as the natives before the arrival of the Europeans. In a fairy-tale happy ending, Miranda has a child by George Felix, a black actor who plays the part of Caliban, thereby literally marrying Shakespeares savage. The re-writing of The Tempest is thus used both to deconstruct the traditional historical perspective which underpins the play and to re-emplot it according to another fundamental code. This deconstruction is achieved mainly through irony. Whereas The Tempest presents things from Prosperos authoritarian point of view, Indigo opposes the points of view of the colonized people and those of the English colonizers, each being set in two totally different contexts and conceptions of life. Warner secularizes the mythical by insisting on what was there before the creation of the myth of history (Connor 190). She not only grants as much depth and complexity to the natives as to the English, but also puts readers on the islanders side by acquainting them with highly sympathetic and humane characters before the arrival of the colonizers, and by presenting the latters arrival as violent invasion seen from the point of view of peaceful and anxious inhabitants. On the other hand, the invaders are presented as having a romantic vision of themselves as civilizers and heroes, as those who have God on their side and who perceive the islands as a tabula rasa and the natives as savages. But the narrative events ironically clash with the false image that the colonizers have forged of themselves and of the world, as they are presented as the real savages and colonization is unmasked as violent and destructive. Moreover, Warner embeds pastiches of letters or of family memoirs to show that the primary sources used by history books are highly subjective and romanticized accounts of historical facts, whereas the fact that the point of view of the islanders (which is far closer to reality) has not been recorded for posterity is symbolized by Ariels muteness. The deconstruction of the traditional historical perspective goes hand in hand with that of the traditional notions of time and space and of the subject. With colonization, the natives cyclical vision of time is shatteredthe revolving the world came to an end, space and time collapsed into a point (131)and the islanders enter the same temporal world as the English invaders, a world of linear progress, which makes possible ambition, but links the experience of time to that of loss (Con-

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nor 191). For Dul, the ladder on which he teaches himself to balance is an image of graduated time and of the now impossible dream of unity with his lost past. In addition to breaking up the unity of time and space in The Tempest with a time-span covering over three centuries and with the redoubled spatial setting, Warner challenges the modern linear conception of historical time as linear progress by establishing a dialectical relationship between the past and the present. The story oscillates between history and contemporaneity, as well as between England and the West Indies. The two plots, referred to as then and now, are connected both backwards and forwards in time. The twentieth-century characters, who are the descendants of the rst colonizers, go back to visit the islands in 1969 for the 350th anniversary of the historical landing, and some of them actually settle there, working in the tourist trade, presented as a new form of exploitation. Inversely, Sycorax lives on, beyond the grave, into the twentieth century and passes her testimony on to Serafine, the English familys West-Indian maid. The two plots are also connected in space and time through the survival of an imperialist mentality in the Everard men, which is dened by the desire to possess others; this mentality persists through the ages, taking on different forms (colonization, tourism, capitalism, religious fanaticism), but remaining the root cause for the repeated violence of history. Miranda, half Creole and half English, serves as a link between the two plots (Zabus 145), being described as a slash and blurred (36, 43). Furthermore, Warner challenges the myth of essentialist origin: the image of the colonized land as a tabula rasa is shown to be an illusion, as is the original essence of the Everard male characters. Rather, the subject is shown to be a product of complex historical forces that s/he can not control, and history can backre. The uprooted foundling, Ariel, represents the ambiguous third element, forever in-between opposing sides, belonging to neither and to both: as Kits mistress, she occupies no clear position, taking on different voices; she is as exible and elusive as Shakespeares ethereal spirit; she is repeatedly described as being able to leave her body. She can be seen as a hyphen, a gure of connection and division, [which] marks a space that lies between, and, at the same time, a bridge that leads across, signal[ing] belonging as well as separation (Dring 21). Finally, the change of gender from male spirit to female child makes her an androgynous gure. The blurring of gender categories is typical of this

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type of ction, in which gender is increasingly emerging, . . . as an activity, a performance, a becoming, or a site where identities may intersect, proliferate and undo one another (Gibson 42). Indeed, the ethical emphasis on respectful non-violent encounter with alterity, central to Levinass thought, nds its most potent illustration in the gure of the androgyne that refuses closure and in doing so vindicates the taking into account of the other (Ganteau 2367). Such a destabilization of gender categories in the framing narrator is inseparable from a destabilization of narrational categories (Gibson 47), which, instead of being hierarchically opposed, are reversed then incorporated into another. Such privileging of the neither/nor, rather than the either/or, counters the strategy of domination that pits the I against the Other (44, 32), challenging the logic of binary oppositions [that] is also a logic of subordination and domination (Parker 3), as the ego is deposed . . . and enters into . . . dialogue (Gibson 25). As writing deconstructs the male myth of history as violence and the survival of the ttest, and makes reparation, a new feminine myth arises, reconstructed through the female characters. The new myth goes against the grain of the main story line, into which it weaves itself in allegorical passages and embedded tales, magical realism merging with classical realism. The alternative story is handed down through women as oral tradition, from Sycorax to her contemporary counterpart, Serane, who picks up the babble on the air that Sycorax transmits from her grave (373). Calibans the isle is full of noises (3.3.133) is repeatedly quoted in Indigo, eventually being transformed into the voices of the past calling out for recognition (211). Serane transforms these voices into fables, passing on the oral tradition of the islands. The numerous parallels with the main story signal that Seraness stories function as mise en abyme, reecting the totality of the main narrative to throw moral light on it. Their repeated moral message is hammered home by maxims and reinforced by echoes with mythology or fairytales. They illustrate the dangers of greed, selshness, and domination, and preach generosity and love as mutual respect or openness to the other. Moreover, sea, oyster, and pearl imagery, yonic symbols of femininity and spiritual rebirth, permeate the novel, calling for a sea-change, a radical transformation of imperialist mentality, in both private and public life (The Tempest 1.2.40203; qtd. in Indigo 376).

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A Re-Writing of the Bible as Parodic Satire: Jeanette Wintersons Boating for Beginners Jeanette Wintersons Boating for Beginners (1985) is similarly grounded in both a previous text and a double historical reality. Hypertextuality with the Biblical episodes of Noahs Ark and the Flood is clearly signaled by a number of intertextual devices: naming, direct quotations, allusions, references, paraphrases, narratorial intrusions. For example, the characters are called Noah, Ham, Shem, and Japeth; the narrative events are based on the story of the Ark and of the Flood; the narrative is explicitly rooted in Biblical geographical space (Ararat, Nineva, Ur of the Chaldees); the novel is framed by an epigraph announcing that two Biblical archeologists have found relics of Noahs ark and an epilogue showing these scientists at work; big chunks from Genesis 6 to 9 are quoted. Moreover, in a reexive, metaleptic paragraph in italics at the beginning of the novel, the framing external narrator explains that this narrative is a version of a Biblical story: All this was happening a long time ago, before the Flood. . . . Of course you know the story because youve read it in the Bible and other popular textbooks, but theres so much more between the lines (12). Wintersons story is set in the same historical space and time as is the Biblical story: the action takes place in Nineveh (a town on the banks of the Tigris), on and around the Tigris and the Euphrates (the two rivers framing the Babylonian heartland) and especially in Ur of the Chaldees (in the Bible, the home of Abraham in ancient Mesopotamia, which existed about 6000 years ago); when the waters retire, the Ark lands on Mount Ararat, now situated in Turkey, just as it does in the Bible. But the action is also anachronistically set in the context of a highly capitalistic Western twentieth-century society, with numerous references and allusions to contemporary authors, lm producers, literary critics, magazines, lms, soap operas, books, poems, fashions, trends, fads, television series, eating habits, technological and scientic discoveries, economic policies, or political trends. In a bewildering excess of realistic details, a profusion of frozen food, instant coffee, electrical appliances, health clinics, plastic surgery, press conferences, capitalistic speculation, etc. run riot. Thus Winterson thickly sets the Biblical story in contemporary culture patterns, which Clifford Geertz describes as religious, philosophical, aes-

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thetic, scientic, ideological blueprints for behavior situated in a precise milieu. The anachronistic decontextualization and recontextualization of the Biblical story in the contemporary Western world serves as a metacommentary on our society and is used to challenge its dominant traditional patriarchal mentality, which is upheld by the Bible, the founding text of Western culture. Indeed, the Bible is the most totalitarian, patriarchal but also the most unquestionable history of all (Onega, Telling Histories 140), the ur-text of patriarchy (Ostriker 27). Winterson describes her rst novel as a comic book. Indeed, the burlesque transposition of the story of Noah into the contemporary Western world is a parodic re-writing of the Bible, which incorporates the traditional aspect of ridiculing imitation. But the target of the parody is not the sacred text itself. Wintersons parody is most denitely a moral and political act. Revising Biblical discourse from a contemporary vantage point, she uses subversive female laughter as a revolutionary weapon against authority, as she replays tragedy as farce and makes what is sacred . . . a joke (29). To challenge dominant discourse, to laugh patriarchy away and ll in the gaps and silences of the Biblical text, Winterson creates an army of bizarre, eccentric female characters, who are nonetheless realistically described and rendered highly sympathetic. The author uses mainly a type of humor that Susan Sontag calls camp, the essence of which is love of the unnatural: of artice and exaggeration (qtd. in Guignery 162). Noahs three daughters-in-lawto whom the Bible merely refers to as the three wives of [Noahs] sons (Genesis 7:13)are given names, personalities, histories, and voices. Sheila, Desi, and Rita become a burlesque cross between modern American women and wives of Middle Eastern oil magnates, both by their preoccupations and by their outrageous clothes. For example, Rita [is] dark-skinned with a bush of orange hair and matching painted ngernails (26), and Sheila is bent double underneath the gold she had managed to attach to every spare inch of esh (57). Life is also given to the women who do all the donkeywork behind the scenes. Gloria, derisively referred to as a zoo-keeper, selects animals for the ark. Mrs. Munde, her mother, is a religious fanatic and Noahs cook. Doris, the cleaner, who calls herself an organic philosopher, is in touch with Gross Reality. Marlene is a grotesque character, a case of mistaken identity or of metamorphosis, that is at one point likened to a monstrous bat-

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like creation with wings (75). Her every appearance assures the reader of another juicy episode and language. She/he is an over-sensitive, neurotic transsexual (96), a man who has had breasts added and a penis removed, but who is nostalgic for that penis, whining to have her sleeping snake back for decoration (37). Ribaldry is added to vulgarity to further deride the male organ, as the right spare cannot be found and a sausage from a chain store called Meaty Big and Bouncy is trimmed to t (46). They all live in a world where hyperbole, excess, and fantasy transgress boundaries and where the bizarre interacts with the entirely ordinary: the houses have no walls (98), a pet elephant eats the curtains (17), or an arm is chopped off in a hamburger machine (86). Thus magic realismin which the supernatural and magical become ordinary, everyday occurrencesis used to transgress ontological boundaries, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation (Zamora and Faris 3). The Biblical story itself is re-visited through the prism of a profusion of debunking and improbable details and perspectives. The comedy, which derives mainly from the anachronisms concerning thematic concerns, characters, and language, serves to reveal the truth behind the facades, to unmask the secret ideology underlying dominant discourse and lay bare the way that those in power create the discourse that suits them, thereby violently excluding minority groups. For example, Noah is no longer the respected patriarch, a good man chosen by God to survive the Flood and re-found human society; he is irreverently pictured as a ridiculous, fanatical, vain, dishonest, greedy, selsh, capricious little man, comically becoming a four-foot tall spherical man with a bright bald head, who wears a red-and-white-spotted bow tie (50, 61). He is also described as a thriving capitalist, a lousy fascist bastard . . . right wing, suspicious of woman and totally committed to money (69). His sons are also portrayed as modern capitalists: Japeth the jewellry king, Ham the owner of that prestigious pastrami store, More Meat, and Shem, once playboy and entrepreneur, now a reformed and zealous pop singer (21). Likewise, God is a capitalist, irreverently referred to as YAHWEH the omnipotent stockbroker (30), or as that self-aggrandizing being (115). He lives in a supersonic cloud, acts like a spoilt child, and uses vulgar language: I want his ass! thundered YAHWEH (52). Miracles are transformed into publicity stunts and the destruction of this materialistic world is reduced to bank-

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ruptcy in a pun, as God pettily announces, Im going to start raining this place . . . prepare to be liquidated (91). The Ark, a caricature of patriarchal capitalist society, is in reality a technically sophisticated and luxurious yacht, lled with useless materialistic objects, like games, alcohol, television sets, cars, one-armed bandits, all of which represent the supercial civilization of a childish, irresponsible, selsh, dishonest, and petty group of men. The type of woman let on to the Ark is represented by Bunny Mix, the writer of Harlequin romance, who is a caricature of femininity as male construction. Her name is a combination of that given to a hostess in a Playboy Club and of myxomatosis, the disease so fatal to rabbits: by collaborating with men, she has contributed to murdering her own kind. Masks and disguise are comically used to illustrate how the Bible has fostered the image of attractive women as dangerous whores and witches: in the acting out of the Creation scene, Noah forces the women to wear false noses, teeth, and wigs so as to be as ugly as possible (51). Womens general exclusion from positions of power is farcically illustrated: they are knocked over the head and taken along by force, which gives rise to a good deal of low, knockabout comedy, involving absurd situations, exaggerated physical action, shouting, and buffoonery. Thus Boating for Beginners uses surprise and laughter to deconstruct the bedrock of civilization that has privileged the masculine over the years. The way that history is written, the notions of reality and of the self, are alike challenged. The novel gives us its own clue to how to read it, as the characters discuss what is in fact a favorite theme of Wintersons: whether or not you should write books . . . which outed the usual notion of time in an effort to clear the mind of arbitrary divisions (100). Desi, cast both as Bluebeards wife and as the heroine of a Gothic novel, discovers a secret manuscript written by Noah (an embedded parody of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein), describing how he created God by mistake out of a rotten piece of frozen Black Forest Gteau and a giant electric toaster. Thus God, the transcendental Signied upholding the modern binary vision of self opposed to other, is doubly debunked: he belongs to the lowest element in the Chain of Being; moreover, he is only a gment of mans imagination. The murdered mother of the Bible is restored, as God comically calls Noah, Mother. God and Noah then collaborate to write a best seller, Genesis or How I Did It (15). The baroque theme of the world is a stage is used to blur the

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boundaries between fact and ction, to out realistic conventions and comically lay bare the secret ideology upholding dominant discourse. God and his creator decide to dramatize the book. God, Noah, his sons, their wives, and Bunny act the main parts, and Bunny helps with the screenplay to increase romantic interest (20). They plan to make it into a grandiose spectacle: a lm company would be putting the whole thing on camera, not just the play itself but the making of the play (20). The Biblical charactersincluding Godthus become actors playing their own roles in their pre-written history. But if life is the enactment of a play, it can be re-written. Indeed, in the middle of the novel, God will force Noah to rewrite the world (124). Furious, because he has not been consulted about the lm and has not got a contract, God decides to ood the world for real, telling Noah, We can change the book, put it out under a new cover (9091). Noah thus writes a third version in collaboration with Bunny, although it is clearly Noah who masters the discourse. As author, lm director, and inventor of the whole story, he is perfectly conscious of his power: If weve got a new world we can tell them anything. . . . Whos to say were lying? (110111). Noah writes that the ark, in reality made out of ber-glass, is made of gopher wood (137) and then, with the deliberate aim of deceiving future generations, he actually gathers bits of wood and plant[s] them on top of Mount Ararat (151). The actors discover that the future is being re-written and start preparing for the real thing, adjusting their show, that is to say, their lives, to what they think will really happen. Thus, not only does ction invent reality, but reality also invades ction in an endless chass-crois. Real life is but illusion; conversely, illusion is disrupted by reality, which will not t in with written history. Past and present merge and mutually inuence one another; moreover, both are tailored to t the needs of the forecasted future. Noah, the hero of the biblical narrative, the subject of history, invents and writes the story of his own history as he is actually living it, thus pointing to the radical inconclusiveness of any representation and the shifting dimensions of a plural reality. The novel thus demythologizes the Bible, illustrating that Biblical history, just like any other historical narrative, is partial, selective, and subject to revision, as it presents facts only from the point of view of those who are in a position to dominate through discourse. Traditional historical discourse is further comically undermined in the epilogue. The group of eccentric women who unmasked the ofcial version

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of Genesisthe tragic story of a good man and his family singled out by God to survive and recreate a better worldas a lie, manage to survive the Flood on a raft, but are then excluded from sacred history, which is revealed to be a tissue of lies. Ironically, Soames, a Biblical archaeologist looking for remains of the Ark on Mount Ararat, triumphantly brandishes the piece of gopher wood deliberately left by Noah to manipulate posterity, as it ts in with his theory of the Ark as having been built by primitive people. Yet he furiously throws away precious clues as to the real nature of the inhabitants of the Ark, namely a one-armed bandit and what looks like an ancient bottle-dump. When Gardner, his assistant, nds a message in a bottle, which reads Hey girls, I made it, . . . love D. . . , Soames turn[s] on him, his face purple with rage, and accuses him of some cheap hoax before tearing up the precious parchment. When he later comes across what looks like part of a romantic novel, he gives up and asks to be sent home. Thus, historical discourse is comically shown to be partial and selective. Not only do the people in power choose to write what suits them, but they are themselves ironically manipulated by the actors of history. (159160) The humorous re-writing thus functions as what Hutcheon names Parodic Satire (Tronie 168), as Winterson challenges a whole way of life, intermingling a profusion of comic effects and intertextual references ranging from Punch and Judy Shows and Dallas to irreverent allusions to the Romantic poets and botched quotations of their titles of poems. Some aspects of contemporary Western society which are criticized include materialism, capitalism, political and religious manipulation, the power of the media, the preoccupation with physical appearance, narcissism, romantic love, illusions and irresponsible attitudes, disrespect for manual labor and emotions, and the importance given to the intellect. More generally and fundamentally, Winterson denounces all forms of tyranny of totalitarianism, of fanaticism, of fundamentalism all monologic discourse (see Reynier 26), and all belief in a unique legitimating Truth. She unmasks what Ren Girard, in Des choses caches depuis la fondation du monde, calls the victimization processes set up in Biblical discourse, whereby scapegoats and marginal groups are unjustly condemned in order to ensure the survival of a dominant group (205). But Wintersons revision goes far beyond the power struggle involved in the overturning of the Biblical myth. As the traditional notions of reality and of the self are challenged, a new way of being is suggested, one that

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calls for a radical transformation of mentality. Going against the grain of the main storyline, of linear history, is another parallel story, that of the development of Glorias self. Her bildungsroman is punctuated by three dreams, echoing the baroque theme exemplied by Shakespeares We are such stuff as dreams are made on, in which an orange demon (which represents authorial intention) keeps appearing. The dreams are given a mythical dimension: they all tell the story of some quest that Gloria keeps on trying to fulll, but in vain, as her self will not be pinned down to any one trajectory. As the world moves towards destruction, Gloria, in a reverse movement, can come into being. As the male self is progressively deconstructed, the repressed female self can reconstruct herself retrospectively. As in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story moves . . . from the monologic and totalizing history of the creation of the world by God to the individual story of the redemption of a woman (Onega, Telling Histories 141). To afrm her self, Gloria gradually frees herself from her mother and from her obsession with her body, from modern societys stereotypes of women as objects, which are male constructs. But the reconstruction of her female self is set in terms of what seems to be a personal and satirical reading of Northrop Fryes classic Anatomy of Criticism. It is, of course, ironical that Gloria should reconstruct her female self according to a classic of literary criticism, which is read as supporting Western civilizations patriarchal division of reality into the metaphysical and the phenomenal world, originating in Platonic dualistic philosophy and embodied in literature in the split between mind and body, between reason and emotion. As Gloria approaches Fryes third and last stage, that of continuous prose, she indeed becomes more self-assertive, grows more purposeful (48), begins to think (61) and expresses herself better (45). But ironically, what she calls her development into a fully rounded person is in fact a gradual setting aside of instinct in favor of the intellect (55), one accompanied by smugness, by mistrust of her instincts (48) and by learning to lie (57). Gloria, in trying to construct her self after a male model, is obviously on the wrong track, as she reects: Until her epiphany with Northrop Frye shed been an emotional amoeba. Now . . . subject and object, herself and what she did, were very much split (62, 73). Northrop Frye is the object of ridicule, as artists and intellectuals are in general. The target of the novels satire is not only the male model of the self, which relegates women to the role of the other. It is also the feminist who tries to imitate men, thereby

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lapsing back into the masculine symbolic, resetting the trap of rigid gender identities. What Winterson seems to propose is a radical change in perception, a liberation from the very notion of either/or. This new way of thinking is expressed through philosophical discussions between Gloria, the demon, and the marginal, subversive, fantastic female characters, who turn out to be wise and enlightened. Marlene is both man and woman, her grafting itself being a metaphoralso used by Winterson in Sexing the Cherryfor the reconciliation of the traditional binary opposition of the sexes. It is not a question of reinstating gender identity for a political purpose: the issue is not equality between men and women, neither is it a question of a reversal of power; it is a call for a change in mentality, for challenging the fundamental laws of culture through which the human subject is sexed (Cornell xxxxvii, 11, 1718). Glorias subversive yet ctional life-story undermines the concept of the bourgeois individual subject and challenges Platonic dualistic philosophy, as it aims at a typically baroque reconciliation of body and spirit and of emotions and intellect. It redenes reality as complex and plural, and the self as always in becoming. The personal and political, the individual and universal, merge, as Western patriarchys stereotyped images of female identity are challenged, as is the violent and linear ofcial narrative of human history as a survival of the ttest. Boating for Beginners seems to belong to what Steven Connor terms post-apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic novels at once (199245). It is post-apocalyptic because it is the narrative of survival, the ending suggesting a new starting point. It is also pre-apocalyptic: the temporal contortion, which consists in situating a clearly capitalistic twentieth-century narrative before the Biblical ood, can be read as a fable, as a sort of parallel imaginative history (231), denouncing the crasser moral and political aspects of modern life and warning humankind of possible or even imminent catastrophe if we do not change the behaviors founded on patriarchal discourse. A Re-Writing of Jane Eyre from the Other Side: Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea Like both Indigo and Boating for Beginners, Rhys already familiar Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is rooted both in a previous text and in histori-

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cal reality. Jane Eyre (1847)although without Jane, the central consciousnessis clearly signaled as being the hypotext for Wide Sargasso Sea by a number of intertextual references. Rhys protagonists are carbon copies of an earlier cast and the narrative events are similar to those of Bronts novel. In both texts, the marriages take place in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and Part III of Wide Sargasso Sea is actually set in Jane Eyres Thorneld Hall. Rhys takes up Bronts imagery of re and ice, as well as her use of color symbolism. There are a number of eerie verbal echoes between the two novels, mainly concerning the description of Antoinettes transformation into Bronts Bertha Mason. These echoes become actual quotations once the narrative has moved inexorably to Thorneld Hall, thus back into the previous book. Rhys re-contextualizes Bronts story in time and space. The characters and narrative events of Jane Eyre, which take place in England between 1799 and 1809 (Oates 45), are brought forward in time to 1830s and 1840s British West Indies (Jamaica and Dominica), the post-slavery period. Right from the opening pages, personal tragedies are grounded in historical conditions, which are realistically expressed through dramatization, characterization, and imagery, as economic factors condition life: indeed, [a]ll the human relationships are marked by slavery and the plantation society, and all are constructed, for the most part, within these parameters (Gregg 8586). Thus, whereas Indigo and Boating for Beginners are rooted in separated periods of time, respectively, by over three hundred and fty years and by about six thousand years, Wide Sargasso Sea is rooted in only one period of history, the same as that of its hypotext, the temporal decontextualization and recontextualization concerning only a question of some thirty years. Nevertheless, the vantage point is denitely situated in the second half of the twentieth century, like in the other two texts. Also, whereas Indigo alternates between two settings and Boating for Beginners anachronistically transposes the ancient Middle Eastern setting of the hypotext into the contemporary Western world, Wide Sargasso Sea mainly lls out the West-Indian setting which is kept offstage in Jane Eyre. Rhys re-writing is thus closer to its hypotext: it is actually situated inside it, but presents events from the opposite, silenced point of view, a device which is typical of a twentieth-century mentality highly conscious of eurocentricism and of patriarchal oppression. As a white Creole from Dominica, Rhys once declared that Bront is

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only presenting one sidethe English side (Letters 297). She clearly states her intention of reversing Bronts text to tell the story from the mad wifes point of view: The Creole in Charlotte Bronts novel is a lay gure . . . off stage. For me . . . she must be right on stage (156). Rhys revision of Bronts novel thus aims at giving a voice to the doubly silenced other (silenced as woman and as Creole), whose discrepant narrative has been bracketed by the dominant patriarchal and imperialistic discourses. Rhys restaging and resignifying of the offensive [text] is thus a kind of counter-speech, a kind of talking back (Butler 1415). Indeed, whereas Jane Eyre can be described as a realistic romancethe resolution of Janes journey to self-realization depending on Bertha, her dark double or monstrous other, being killed off so that reason and social order can triumph over an excess of chaotic passionWide Sargasso Sea is a tropical romance, which gives free rein to everything that is suppressed in the order of the world (Stone 102; Maurel 149, 154). Since Wide Sargasso Sea writes back to a precursory novel, which is one of the classic texts of nineteenth-century British imperialism, it can be read as a post-colonial statement of resistance to an imperialist text (Howells 21). Rhys brilliant play with Bronts novel makes a comment on colonization, not only as a political phenomenon but, more signicantly, as the direct result of an underlying imperialistic mentality affecting all spheres of life. The ghosts are not only those of previous characters; they are also the ghosts of colonialism and its underlying psychic structures. Rhys characters are thus doubly trapped: by historical forces and by the previous text, whose underlying ethos is imperialistic. Their emancipation from Jane Eyres mid-nineteenth-century point of view into a vantage point situated at the end of the 1960s reveals to what extent their individual psychic history is bound up with historical and political forces. Both Antoinette and her English husband are victims of familial, societal, cultural, and more generally of ideological discourse, which drives them inexorably to their tragic fates and makes the novel a complete study of tragic incompatibilities (Thorpe 184). The characters realistically represent the social and racial categories that are a legacy of the colonial system, categories which condition their vision and determine their relations: The levels of betrayal range from the cultural and historical implicit in the relationships between blacks and whites to the familial and lial levels (OConnor 198). Antoinette goes mad because she is betrayed by

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everyone. Moreover, madness is literally written into her, reinforcing the heredity which binds her, just as language (in the Foucauldian concept of power) is used as an instrument of the strong against the weak, . All of the characters keep repeating to her English husband that she is going the same way as her mother, until he also begins to perceive her as mad and to call her mad, nally actually engendering the mad woman in the attic as he re-names her Bertha. Of course, the main agent in Antoinettes descent into madness is her husband, whose very identity is engendered by the imperial tradition underpinning Bronts text. Rochester embodies all of the characteristics of the colonizer, presenting many of the imperializing desires deeply embedded in the education of privileged Englishmenthe narcissism, the will to domination, and the inevitable tragedy that it breeds (Gregg 106), as well as typifying many of the characteristics which the ethnologist Octave Mannoni groups under the label of the Prospero complex (9). Right from the start, Rochester feels insecure, uneasy, and unhappy in the island, which, like Antoinette, is [n]ot only wild but menacing (39). A victim of his sex and birth, he mistrusts everyone and feels superior to his wife, whom he treats as an object, replacing love and reciprocity with sex and domination. To survive, he has to assert his ego and assure his dominance. Thus, through the agency of her husband, who is guilty mainly because he conforms to the Empire-founding ideology that fashioned him, Antoinette becomes disjointedAll you want is to break her up (99), repeats Christophinedriven mad by an encompassing ideological system. She is trappedlike her island, she is colonized, her independence an autonomy subsumed to British culture and to British law (OConnor 193). In delineating the common workings of fascism, racism and bourgeois patriarchy, the persecutory power of the modern religion of intolerance (Carr 62), Rhys echoes Virginia Woolf, who in the Three Guineas argues that patriarchy, racism, pomposity, militarism, economic exploitation, autocracy and fascism are all part of the same process (51). Sexual politics are thus caught up in a wider system of power relationships and, within that ideological discourse, gender is only one factor alongside class and money (OConnor 12). Moreover, the philosophical underpinning of the imperialist mentality that engenders violence and domination, namely the traditional notions of the subject and of time and space, are challenged by modernist/postmodernist narrative methods. As Rhys answers back, she suggests another way

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of being in the world, of challenging the traditional all-knowing Kantian subject. Janes authoritative voice and central consciousness is replaced not only by Berthas voice, but also by a mosaic of voices and of points of view, as a similar event is recounted several times and conicting views and interpretations are made to cohabit in endless dialogue and unsolvable equivocation in a world where certainties dissolve and characters lose their bearings (Maurel 156157). Rhys reverses the identity-building process of Jane Eyre: Janes activity and control give way to Antoinettes passive, non-judgmental nature and increasing loss of control as Antoinette moves from the tentative identity that she embroiders in a medley of colors in the convent school to a nal loss of identity, to become only a ghost (111), a voiceless doll or marionette deprived of liberty and autonomy (112, 100). Her dark not-self (which was never an autonomous self in the rst place) turns out to be her true self. Moreover, Bertha has no real existence: she represents the unconscious aspect of Jane Eyre, the monstrous other, or dark continent, repressed in the patriarchal order of the world (Regard, Lcriture fminine en Angleterre 146147). Furthermore, far from being in control of herself or of her world, she (along with Rhys other characters) is trapped in a plot of predestination (Maurel 131). The text is shot through with a sense of obligation, as though the characters are mere puppets of a tragic fate. It also abounds in internal echoes, forebodings and premonitory signs and dreams, as the characters have an eerie knowledge of their pre-written end. The fact that the text is literally haunted by Jane EyreRhys initially thought of calling the book Le Revenantfurther challenges the myth of essential origin, especially when Antoinette nally becomes Bertha, the ghost that engendered and haunts her. Traditional patriarchal notions of time and space, logic and reason, are also challenged. Wide Sargasso Sea, written in 1966, gives the illusion of being situated before Jane Eyre, written in 1847. The end of Rhys novel is transferred to another text, which precedes it in time: Antoinette/Bertha does not die in Rhys text; she only jumps from the roof of Thorneld Hall in her dream, but she never reaches the ground and will only be killed in Jane Eyre. Time becomes reversible and uncertain in this dream of a future in the past. Past, present, and future are conated in a dizzying whirl of uncanny repetitions, as experiences are distorted in a mirror-like eddy of connections and separations, until the future of the text

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is nally swallowed up by another text situated in the past. There is neither origin nor center, as neither Jane Eyre nor Wide Sargasso Sea comes first. Geographical categories also dissolve. Both England and Antoinettes island are called a dream and Antoinette loses her way crossing over to England in the Sargasso Sea, a no mans land situated between the old and the new worlds, full of asexual, ungraspable slippery eels and giant sea-weed that traps ships and kills sailors: They tell me Im in England, but I dont believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I dont remember but we lost it (117). More than simply holding opposite categories in unsolvable oxymoronic paradox, Wide Sargasso Sea is a mad text (Maurel 158): it suggests that everything is constantly and instantaneously reversible and ambiguous. The dichotomous either/or structure upholding patriarchy is replaced by a simultaneous both/and structure, as limits are abolished, dissolving the oxymoronic structure. Everything is also at the same time its opposite: as Antoinette says, There is always the other side, always (81). This is a world where boundaries overlap: between life and death, between sleep and wakefulness, between good and bad, between love and hate, or between truth and lies. Frdric Regard interprets this haunted text as being more than a fantastic destabilization of categories, preferring Freuds term Unheimliche (Lcriture fminine en Angleterre 152) to dene its instantaneous, ungraspable, substitutive process of doubling, which Derrida refers to as a taking place typical of the operation of the feminine (H. C. pour la vie 71). As Rhys writes back to Bronts text, she countersigns further, marking her text off from the hypotext by the symbolical echoing of the related words secret, hidden, silence, truth, lies, and nothing, as well as by her subversive use of color symbolism and her ambiguous ending. The secret, that is, love as reciprocal sharing, is the truth. But in the dominant patriarchal order, which is upheld by the power of the word, love is hidden or silenced and reduced to lies, in effect becoming nothing. Thus the genesis and nature of madness is unmasked as repression of all that is other. Nonetheless, Rhys is not content with simply making visible the secret lie of patriarchy. The unnamed husband is himself reduced to nothingness, as his life and text . . . decompose at the end of his narrative into a Nothing . . . annulled, reabsorbed into the Eurocentric discourses of narrative and history (Gregg 101102), and An-

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toinette is given the last word as her voice takes over the nal section of the novel. Moreover, in Part III, the feminine subtext symbolically explodes to the surface in a blaze that destroys the dominant discourse. Red, which metaphorically signies reprehensible passion in Jane Eyre, is associated with Antoinette throughout Wide Sargasso Sea. Whereas red as symbol is repeatedly repressed by the unnamed husband, it literally suffuses the text in the last part of the novel. The red of ames invades the nal pages, as Antoinette dreams that she sets re to their world . . . made of cardboard (116), thus symbolically destroying the dominant patriarchal order that is upheld by discourse and opening the way to a different vision of reality. Instead of actually setting re to Thorneld as Bertha does, Antoinette metaphorically sets re to the discourse which perpetuates the repressive patriarchal order, and to the book which engendered her. In her dream, she does not jump to her future in a past text. Instead, she lands in the past with Tia in the pool at Coulibri (123). Thus Eurocentricism is reversed, the past cancels out the present, and dream triumphs over realityThen I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it (123). Only then does she walk along the passage with her candle to accomplish the ending in another book. She does not cross the gap from dream to reality in Wide Sargasso Sea. She remains in her natural element, the dream, leaving Bertha and Bront to inhabit reality (Angier 529533). But since it is a reality made of cardboard, it can be destroyed by the ames. The most obvious common feature of Indigo, Boating for Beginners and Wide Sargasso Sea is the use of metaction to make a moral and political comment. The repetition with a difference of a hypotext aims at a re-vision of the worldview or of the master code underpinning the hypotext. The decontextualization and recontextualization of a previous text inevitably leads to a different vantage point, as similar narrative events are re-written or re-emplotted according to a different point of view, informed by a different context. The secret ideology of a text is unmasked and deconstructed, before another way of being can be suggested. Such re-writing, which seems to be typical of postrealist texts, has a double aspect: it is both an answer to a previous text and an entirely new text; it is both imitation of and challenge to; it has both a commemorative function and a deconstructive function.

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Yet the subversive function clearly predominates, as the postrealist texts of this postmodern age re-write discourse that is perceived as tyrannical. Literary postrealism belongs to a postmodern epoch that does not completely reject modernitys notions of subject and of reality, the prex post indicating a break within continuity. Rather, these have to be redened, in what is a revision of enlightened modernitys world-vision. The past is repeated, not as copy, nor as negation, but rather as subversive ghost, which is always already present within it as a possibility which hollows it out (Miller 9). This type of repetition is to be distinguished from what Kierkegaard terms recollection: Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly is repeated forwards (Brooks 124). Whereas recollection corresponds to a Platonic form of repetition grounded in a solid archetypal model which is untouched by the effects of repetition, the other Nietzschean mode of repetition posits a world based on difference and [s]imilarity arises against the background of this disparit de fond (Miller 67). The repetition found in postrealist texts is not of the rst sort, which Deleuze calls a work of forgetting (29), but rather of the second, which is a reworking of the past to call for a new way of being in the future. The prex post indicates neither a return to the past, nor a rejection of the past, but an endless questioning of the past, which aims at going beyond it. As Butler puts it: The disjuncture between utterance and meaning is the condition of possibility for revising the performative, of the performative as the repetition of its prior instance, a repetition that is a reformulation (87). Critics have spoken of the turn to ethics of the 1990s. Indeed, whereas [f]or a traditional, moral criticism of the novel, . . . the key texts were largely nineteenth-century. . . . for the ethical critic, it is twentiethcentury texts that are of cardinal importance (Gibson 1718). Whereas morality is concerned with deontology, with consolidating existing rules of conduct, ethics operates a kind of play within morality, holds it open; whereas morality is associated with the universality of nal authority, ethics concerns the undetermined and plural; whereas morality is linked to conformity, ethics is associated with subversion. In questioning the past, and in being concerned with an ought rather that an is, ethics is utopian and turned towards the future: At the dead center of ethics lies

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the ought, . . . which seems to embody a wish that things become different (Harpham 18).

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