In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is clear that Rhys is very directly writing back to a metropolitan text, but the counter-discoure that she has honed there is present to a greater or lesser degree in all her work. I want to end with some further comments on Rhys’ ‘struggle for the sign’, and the nature and form of the counter-discourse which she evolves. Like other postmodernist and postcolonialist writers – and whilst those two categories by no means always coincide, many of their strategies do – Rhys in her fictions unpicks and mocks the language by which the powerful keep control, while at the same time shifting, bending, re-inventing ways of using language to open up fresh possibilities of being. She questions and destabilizes the hegemonic language which seeks to define her in its terms, rewriting, in her Creole hand, the metropolitan script. As Spivak puts it, ‘in post-coloniality, every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the post-colonial is citation, reinscription, re-routing the historical.’ Rhys ‘protest[s] loudly’ in her fiction, as she did in the Bromley courtroom, against intolerance and injustice, yet at the same time she recreates and reshapes language to map the unknown and uncharted world of ambivalence. Both protest and creation are integral to her writing, one of whose distinctive features is its fusion of apparently contrary elements – rage and reverie, farce and feeling, speech and poetry, satirical critique and psychic depth. If the melancholy haze through which her work is too often read has led critics to simplify and sentimentalize the psychology of her heroines, it has even more obscured the fact that she is a savagely funny writer, a witty and incisive deconstructionist, whose deconstruction is a necessary part of her struggle to find a narrative form through which to chart the subjectivity of those on the margins. The old Jew in Good Morning, Midnight, with his banjo and mocking, tender, painful songs, is perhaps an image of the kind of artist Rhys is herself, her version of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Man with the Blue Guitar’. Indeed, perhaps Serge's art as a whole is an image of hers. Like Rhys, he is an outsider, who paints outsiders: just as he/Rhys tells the story of the mulatto woman's suffering, so his paintings portray society's outcasts, the old Jew in the gutter, misshapen dwarfs, prostitutes old and young.