Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady

Abstract

The article deals with crises of transmission in some of Jean Rhys's stories included in Sleep It Off Lady (1976), more specifically ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, ‘Fishy Waters’, ‘Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose’ and ‘Sleep It Off Lady’. Their voiceless characters are discussed through the lens of precariousness, the argument relying on Guillaume Le Blanc's and Judith Butler's essays on precarious lives (Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, 2007; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 2004). I shed light on the correlations between social precariousness, invisibility and linguistic vulnerability which make the transmission of the experience of dispossession precarious itself. The stories stage ghostly, invisible characters who cannot give an account of themselves but who, on the other hand, are held accountable by society. This oppressive type of accountability based on punishment or revenge contributes something to the crisis of transmission to which Jean Rhys's fiction obsessively returns. Caught within this coercive system of accountability, the precarious self remains untransmissible, while the stories bear witness to the processes which obstruct voice, and tell tales of precariousness.