Good Morning, Midnight: A Story of Soul Murder

Abstract

Of the four novels Rhys composed in the period between the wars, Of the last in the sequence, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), poses the most strenuous challenges to those who crave in an aesthetic encounter some form of epistemological certainty. Recurring confrontations with the disjointed, the symbolic, and the elliptical work to structure the reading experience of this novel. Rhys thereby exhorts her audience to share in the overdetermined chaos, and the attempts to exert control, of the protagonist Sasha Jensen’s life. Inviting a close attentiveness to echoes of the unsaid, the narrative loops through time to place central importance on Oedipal dynamics even as multiple, related sites of trauma are located throughout the text.

The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered usually it has already been written down elsewhere.

—Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”