Wide Sargasso Sea

 

I made mention earlier that Jean Rhys wrote a parallel novel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I also made mention that it is a worthy edition to Charlotte’s deeper narrative within her Gothic romance. (At its heart, Jane Eyre is just that, regardless its explorations of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism, wrapped within its bildungsroman format.)

So too is Wide Sargasso Sea; but where JE is rather melodramatic at times (especially in regard to its romantic exchanges), WSS is anything but. Hers is powerfully visceral in the modern sense where Charlotte Bronte’s novel is steeped in its Victorian sensibilities. Indeed, it is extremely modern in its bald-faced condemnation of what passed as normal at the dawn of the Victorian Age.

Georgian and Victorian novels rarely make mention of the British Empire’s practice of slavery on its West Indian plantations. Readers have to come to that realisation themselves. If they do. (I wonder how many do, really, as the narratives of novels of the day focus instead on how dashing the bourgeoisie were on their home shores, merely making mention that Mr. ___ make 20,000 pounds a year, and not how they made such a princely sum.) One need not guess in WSS. Edward Rochester (never named) is sent to Jamaica to land the wife of his family’s choosing, whose plantations were once explicitly called out for that practice. The family he marries into, although not slave-owning then, had history of just that prior to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, whose enacting impoverished the long-standing affluent Creole family.

The novel is largely not Edward’s story, however. It is Bertha’s, Edward’s mad wife discovered in Edward Rochester’s Thornfield attic in Jane Eyre, long since hidden away so as to bury what would surely have been a family scandal. Or should I say that it is Antoinette Cosway’s …. 

Let’s back up. Bertha Mason? Antoinette Cosway? They are one and the same. Jean Rhys had to do a little smoothing out in her rewriting our madwoman’s story. She has right to. Jean Rhys, a 4^th generation Creole of Welsh and Scottish descent, was a Dominican born (that’s the island of Dominica and not the Dominical Republic) British writer, who grew up in the West Indies. As she might thus know a thing or two about the West Indies, Jean Rhys can make some minor adjustments to Charlotte Bronte’s tale that do not meet her understanding of the islands.

Her decisions bring this novel to life. We learn a thing or two about West Indies history, about the culture there in the 19^th Century, about the stratums of race and society and poverty, and about the lingering hatred of the West Indian Blacks for the Creoles who owned them and oversaw the plantations. We’re treated to sights and sounds and smells, to dense forests, crashing seas, blinding days and humid nights aflutter with moths and abuzz with the cacophony of the unseen, and of the corruption of sickly-sweet orchids. Just enough to inform us that this is not an English novel; this is a Creole novel.

We follow Antoinette, not long after the collapse of Coulibri, the now impoverished sugar plantation she grows up on. Antoinette’s mother is forced to remarry, and their family’s return to affluence enrages those “native” blacks who once toiled under their oppression. Antoinette’s (simple-minded) younger brother perishes as Coulibri burns; her mother is driven mad by the loss. Antoinette is eventually “sold off” to an English aristocrat, who ultimately learns that his bride’s family is plagued by feeblemindedness and madness. He ceases to love her, and Antoinette’s precarious emotional state collapses, lending credence to the lies he’s heard concerning her family.

The story unfolds as we expect, its plot ultimately dictated by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Gothic novel.

The two novels are as similar as they are wildly different. As they must be. Charlotte Bronte’s novel is rooted in the English countryside she knew and understood. In Gentry and Aristocracy, in country manors and in charity boarding schools (otherwise known as orphanages). Her heroine is a governess, a calling she understood all too well. Charlotte knew little of the West Indies, a likely mythic land told of by few she knew and far between by those who very likely had interests there (sugar) but likely never set foot there personally. Hearsay, we shall say. Jean Rhys knew that world intimately from personal experience. I can only imagine how shocked and betrayed she must have felt coming “face-to-face” with Bertha Mason, that dark-skinned, animalistic, “madwoman in the attic,” and how she became compelled to humanise that unsympathetic, homicidal villain.

She did. Antoinette Cosway is as human and sympathetic as Bertha Mason can not be. I, personally, did grieve for Bertha, shut up as she was, under lock and key, denied sympathetic companionship and any pretense of humane compassion. Is it any wonder that she was mad? Were she not before being entombed, she must surely have been driven to be after years of confinement. 

I must say that I’m very happy to have read this on the heels of Jane Eyre. I wasn’t sure if I would be. I expected it to merely be a feminist rant against Charlotte’s novel. It is, I suppose. But it is so mush more, as well. One should not read one without the other, to my mind, because, in the end, both Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway are both remarkable characters. Jane is strong and pragmatic. She has a certain autonomy, ingrained in her by her boarding school upbringing. She is independent when women then could rarely claim to be. She is lucky in that regard because Antoinette was never given the opportunity to become what Jane could. She never had independence, never had control of her inheritance, no money, no marketable skills – no future; and she paid the price for that.

House of Leaves

 “Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Once you reach a certain age, modern media can appear pale compared to the panoply of the rose-coloured array of what came before, be it film, tv, whatever. Even books. You’ve experience so much! What can possibly compare to your first viewing of Star Wars? Your first reading of Lord of the Rings?

It comes as a surprise, then, when something exceeds your expectations. It comes to even further surprise when something “blows your mind”!

I’ve recently had such an experience. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

How can I describe this book? That’s a hard task. At its heart, it is a novel. Is it Fantasy? One might make a case for that. It’s Horror, too. So too a – dare I say it? – a Love Story. It’s presented as erudite non-fiction. Epistolary, in places. A multiple frame narrative. It’s so many things at once. If it’s so indescribable, so lacking in genera appeal, why am I drawing your attention to Mr. Danielewski’s debut work? Because I believe it is worth your time, and your extreme effort. It’s going to take extreme effort to read it! It ought to; he spent 10 years of his life perfecting it before publication.

It has unusual formatting, at times, and personalised fonts clambering for attention and leading you down unexpected paths. The text itself can be a maze, directing you to appendices, and to pages far forward of where you happen to be reading, sometimes even back to the beginning of the chapter, to collages, to exhibits, and to an altogether perplexing index.

Have I scared you off? I hope not. That’s not my intent.

I hope you have the curiosity to read on: The novel is about a young man who finds and compiles a dissertation by a blind old man concerning a supposed documentary detailing the altogether horrific experiences of a family who buys a house on Ash Tree Lane that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a house that contains an infinite and eternally altering labyrinth that suddenly appears within it, a dark, cold, and almost featureless maze that attacks and warps the psyche of all those who enter it.

Does this description intrigue? The book obviously left a colossal imprint on my psyche. I experienced the dizzying thrill I once did delving in those first labyrinths of my first foray into Dungeons & Dragons, all those years ago. It is altogether different, however. Our protagonists do not face down monsters within that malleable maze. What they face is far more disturbing. They face something altogether surreal, a Lovecraftian, non-Euclidean universe. The maze shifts, never the same twice. But it can be traversed repeatedly. Certain features can, and will, be visited, time and again, so long as the explorers stays a path threaded by a line that never breaks however many times the passages twist and shift, regardless whether doors appear and disappear; because perhaps the maze WANTS them to find the central staircase that spirals down into its depths, a stairwell sometimes only fifty feet across, sometimes a hundred, and at other times five hundred feet across. Where it may be a mere one hundred feet deep once, it may descend a staggering thousands of feet another, even miles, thousands upon thousands of miles. And all the while they wander within, a growl stalks them. Like the Minotaur.

“Little solace comes

to those who grieve

when thoughts keep drifting

as walls keep shifting

and this great blue world of ours

seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Is it real? Figuratively speaking? The Labyrinth? The House? That depends on your interpretation: Do you believe the tale Johnny Truant tells us about Blind Zampano’s book about a film that was supposedly in wide release, but no one has ever heart of? Zampano added hundreds of footnotes. As did Johnny. As did the later Editors. The footnotes even have footnotes. (They are hilarious, BTW. Some critiques have called them a parody of literary criticism - which they most surely are.) Some of the books referenced are even real (not many, but those few lend credence to the body as a whole, itself an absurdist maze). The thing is, Johnny declares early on that he spins tales to entertain, calling question that everything that follows. He admits to changing Zampano’s text, further eroding our faith in him. Johnny is a liar. Or is he?

Johnny’s mother, Pelafina, is institutionalised. Certified. That calls Johnny’s state of mind into question, to say nothing of his tragic, and heartbreaking, tale. Johnny is also perplexingly omniscient. One wonders how he could be, given the life story he relates to us. Does Johnny even exist or is he himself an elaborate fiction? Zampano too, our Historian of “The Navidson Record,” is also called into question as his hinted at history somewhat mimics that of Fellini’s Zampano in “La Strada.”

Questions arise: Who actually wrote House of Leaves? Zampano? Or Johnny? The book is a case study of Echoes. Phrases repeat, in Johnny’s life story, in Zamano’s text, and even more importantly, in Pelafina’s letters to her son, calling into question everything you’ve read. Is this all a confession, steeped in metaphor and myth? In the subtext of Echo, Error, the Minotaur and his Labyrinth? And in Yggdrasil, the ash tree that spans planes of existence?  

It’s altogether dizzying.

The book defies description, and categorising.

But it may also be one of the most extraordinary works you will ever have the good fortune to have undertaken.

It is thrilling, horrifying, and heartbreaking too. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves