Jean Rhys’s Cocktails and the Blurring of Literary Meridians

Abstract

We are at a point in literary studies where the meridian has begun to insistently make its presence felt. But at the same time, we are approaching the field through a miscegenated lens. This essay is about mixtures and the blurring of chronologies these effect in the realm of literary studies. Both modernism and new modernist studies draw on the stimulus provided by intermixtures. One glance at our recent compendium of terms: creolity, métissage, planetarity, is a marked indicator of the direction in which modernist studies is currently headed, as much beholden to intermixtures as modernism was. I am going to approach these questions by taking as my pivot Jean Rhys’s short story – and the title itself is deviously indicative of an intervention into all the theorizations referred to – “Mixing Cocktails”. The question I intend to ask via foregrounding the liquid principle that Rhys’s story deploys is whether in the quest to meridiniaze, if one could call it that, literary studies today, especially modernist literary studies, we are in fact letting the headiness of discovery blur meridians, even as we aim to bring them into focus. Dwelling on the admixtures, montages, blurring frames and colorisms in Rhys’s fiction, I will argue that the intermixed futures that were being shaped by the global crossings of the empire are encountered in all the bleakness of an incomplete, forever deferred birthing in the writer’s fiction. Drawing on the trope of the cocktail as both suggestive of a voluptuous dispersion and yet a shaping of all the elements into a finished product in the final analysis, this essay will dwell on how intermixtures are not always a palatable draught in Rhys.