Caribbean Formations in the Rhysian Corpus
In “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault reframes the author as an “author-function” that has historically been produced through its interaction with both the text and its audience. In this essay, I deploy Foucault’s unsettling of the author as origin and use it as a lens through which to make sense of the Rhys protagonist. Specifically, I examine what I call the “landscape function” in Rhys’s texts (to echo Foucault’s “author function”) in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings through which the category “human” is produced in the Rhysian corpus. This Foucaultian reading thus reveals the extent to which neither character nor the environment pre-exist their narrativisation in the diegetic logic of the text but are actually produced through their mutual imbrication in narrative.