96
PARTISAN REVIEW
subterranean terror and despair seem about to burst through–
remain strictly moments, done briefly, without comment or fuss
from the outside. Her mind flicks away from them, quick as a fly ,
and settles on some small detail off to one side: her makeup is
wrong, the light falls oddly, a bell rings , a car hoots . ... And
this ... is far more unnerving than any full-throated howl of
anguish can ever be .
To Alvarez, the withdrawals of consciousness are precisely the
point. According to Alvarez, it is just when the author abandons the
effort to render the heroine's feelings that they become most vivid to
us, just when the heroine abandons her claims on life that we
become aware of the depth of her needs. And yet as we can see from
the dialogue leading up to Anna's withdrawal, the disappearances of
the heroine and her author do not come at "moments of drama and
confrontation-when the subterranean terrOr and despair seem
about to burst through." They come at moments when the linguistic
and emotional energy is already low. Anna can't get a job, can't
want a job, can only throw herself on the mercy of her
helpful/superior lover: "I want to be with you. That's all I want."
When Anna averts her eyes from the inevitable response to her
meagerness, her withdrawal is not a sudden and striking gesture of
giving up.
It
is another step in the continuous retreat that is the form
and content of Rhys's work.
Anna is the heroine of
Voyage in the Dark,
Rhys's first novel. This
book describes Rhys's first love affair and was initially written in
journal form . In
Smile, Please
(1978), Rhys's posthumously published
autobiography, she comments on that affair as follows:
When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem:
I didn't know.
I didn't know .
I didn't know.
Then I settled down to be miserable.
But it still annoys me when my first object of worship is supposed
to be a villain .. . .
On the contrary, I realise now what a very kind man he must
have been. I was an ignorant girl, a shy girl. And ... I realise I
was also a passive, dull girl. Though I couldn't control my
hammering heart when he touched me, I was too shy to say "I
love you." It would be too much , too important. I couldn't claim
so much.
Rhys here describes both her biographical self and the heroine of her
