jean rhys invented tiktok

why I love short novels

I have been obsessively reading all of Jean Rhys’s early novels and I can’t stop thinking about how strikingly twenty-first-century her pacing is. I also keep thinking about how her heroines would use TikTok. I know, it’s a logical jump, but hear me out. These books are insanely minimalist in style, and are essentially about doing nothing — and that kind of modernist prose isn’t usually very good at being about nothing. Yes, there is certainly domestic tedium; there are characters wrapped in their thoughts and their pasts to the extent that action is impossible: Hemingways’s louche young men mostly drink and suppress their feelings, even when there is a war to be fought; Daisy Buchanan and Clarissa Dalloway — for all their complex inner lives — do a fair amount of lounging around. But this immobility is portrayed as a symptom rather than a diagnosis; in different circumstances, these characters could have done so much more, the texts seem to be saying. Their passivity is what makes them a shadow of who they might have been.

But Jean Rhys’s characters really are passive, like dormant non-entities sitting quietly the corner of better-know European literature from the interwar period. They lie in a room; perhaps they go for a walk. They wait for days for a man to write and send them money. Invariably, they drink to forget or in order to not have to think. Anna, in Voyage in the Dark, must work as a chorus girl to fund her life in chilly England as she daydreams of her Caribbean island home; but the novel is more concerned with the bureaucracy of renting a room in a boarding-house; of the maid who will come to clean said room at a certain time; of whether the room is light or dark. Julia, the older and more weathered protagonist of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (while 19-year-old Anna is forced to undergo a botched abortion, Julia is nearing middle age and is haunted by the baby she lost years before) does make a longer journey in the course of the novel, returning from Paris to her native London. She confronts her sister and addresses childhood trauma; her mother dies and she attends her funeral. But these actions are beside the point of the plot; most of the focus of Julia’s journey is on her quest to find nihilistic stability — a peaceful room to lie in where she can feel safe. If she needs a man to be there to hold her hand, she will make that happen; if not, she doesn’t care.

I love those pre-screen books — from Jane Austen onwards — in which reading is framed as a vice; where parents scold their adult children for spending all day reading novels instead of doing something productive (embroidery? I’m not sure). It tickles me that spending your afternoons reading novels was a bit like bingeing Game of Thrones. And the thing is that Rhys’s protagonists do indeed (sometimes) read novels and consume other mass culture: they go to cinema or watch musicians in bars; Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight obsessively listens to a record of “Gloomy Sunday” as she wallows in her own gloomy thoughts. By and large, though, the culture does nothing for them. These pieces of art are neither guilt-inducing depraved vices nor windows into the characters’ souls. Instead, they really are neutral ways of passing the time. Indeed, in Voyage in the Dark, the garrulous Vincent recommends bestselling contemporary romance novel The Rosary to Anna; Anna refuses to engage. Not because it is inconceivable that she would read a book like that, but because it makes little difference to her whether she does or not. Vincent, in a patronising letter, tells Anna that “a good book can make a lot of difference to your point of view” (Rhys 75). Anna doesn’t care; she doesn’t want to improve — just as she doesn’t want to be left alone.

And so my thoughts turn to TikTok; and I imagine these women who lie in their beds and want nothing except for when they want everything. For them, even watching a whole series of Breaking Bad would be too much stimulation. They need the algorithm that would show them whatever soothing, unproductive, meaningless clips in which they could find refuge. This is the ultimate nothing. This is why Otessa Moshfegh had to set My Year of Rest and Relaxation before the rise of social media. Consuming something can be more passive than doing nothing.

Jean Rhys’s early novels are a little like TikToks in themselves. Not much happens in terms of plot because the focus is purely on vibes. They play on a loop; Sasha, Julia and Marya (the heroine of Quartet) all end their stories exactly as they began them — alone in a Parisian boarding house. Meanwhile, Anna’s life is in danger at the end of Voyage — but the narrative does not even allow the definite full stop of a death.

All of this is partially a way of justifying why I like short novels, even though I also know that I simply like short novels because my attention span is so broken. But nevertheless, just as there is something so deliciously Instagrammable about an Emily Dickinson verse, Jean Rhys’s fantastically morose sketches of angst seem to predict a complex world in which we want to avoid complexity; avoid entire story lines; and cling to repetition and pleasing visuals. This is sometimes what I want.