Waste lands: the lost infrastructure of Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Rhys’s “Temps Perdi” (1967) evokes modernist temporality – Proustian “lost time” – to connect the twentieth-century World Wars to the infrastructure of European imperialism. Set in England during World War II, Austria after World War I, and the “Carib Quarter” in Dominica in the 1930s, the story links the violence of the European wars to the violence of imperialism, and the “losses” of the twentieth century to the decayed Caribbean plantation, “Temps Perdi.” In the local patois, the phrase means not “lost time” but “wasted time, lost labor,” and recalls three hundred years of waste and ruin: the genocide of the indigenous “Caribs”; the devastation of African peoples enslaved in the Caribbean; and the “waste” of Europe itself – in the era of imperial collapse – in the destruction of the World Wars. All three of these historical realities are embedded in the story’s title, and though that title evokes the tradition of European modernism, it also marks a departure from it. Though structured, in its temporal shifting, by allusion to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, “Temps Perdi” also undertakes an excavation of the material structures of modernity: the infrastructure – variously concealed, ruined, lost, or missing – that marks the spot of European devastation in the Caribbean.