Genealogies of Story in Jean Rhys’s ‘The Day They Burned the Books’

Abstract

Abstract Jean Rhys’s story ‘The Day They Burned the Books’ (1960) has a pivotal place in her career and in literary history. Rhys lost her sense of a literary vocation by 1949 when she was in her very late fifties; ‘The Day They Burned the Books’, written by early 1953, marked its return. In this essay I address what is at stake in her revisiting of the racialized cultural inheritances and affiliations of a white Creole storyteller in the early 1950s by tracing the composition of the story. An examination of its textual patterns and allusions and her working in of small narrative detail from her Black Exercise Book of the late 1930s complicates standard readings of the story, of the relation between its narrative and authorial voice, and of Rhys’s awareness of contemporary West Indian writing. The story is the earliest known exploration of what has been termed ‘the daffodil gap’ in the experience of the colonial schoolchild. I briefly compare Rhys’s evocation of the daffodil gap with V. S. Naipaul’s and Derek Walcott’s subsequent references to it in the 1960s.