| Summary: | The foreign words scattered throughout the text of After Leaving Mr McKenzie do not proceed from a will to give a dash of "local colour" which would set up a cosmopolitan interwar Paris. Places, which are perceived through the female character's extreme passivity, remain undifferentiated in Jean Rhys' bare writing. The French words in italics should rather be read as traces of the character's repressed affects, or as the traces of her resistance to the wrongs that are done to her because of her precarious status as a "demi-mondaine". Foreign words are loaded with affect that can neither be translated nor articulated, as Lyotard conceives it. They are what "happens" to the sentence and to the language and become occurrences that resist both temporal and grammatical articulations, thwarting the laws of narrative and forging a hybrid poetics from the friction of the language with itself.
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