A Passion for Excess or Just Another Way of Telling

Caryl Phillips’s narrative is painfully concerned with the relationship of Empire, Colony, and the In-between; Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean; slavery, rebellion, and freedom; Men, women and children; absent or useless fathers and damaged, aimless sons. It explores what hold in common while never losing sight of the painful quotidian, the specific. It is a narrative where the picaresque shakes hands with the epic and the linearity is broken, encircled, and put fast forward or in reverse by a mise-en-abîme of sorts: the tale-within-the-tale-within-the-tale even if interrupted by the tapestry of an emergent voice that finally proposes itself as both the identity and the difference of its verbal universe. “Enter your own self and discover the world,” Phillips seems to be saying, “but also go out into the world and discover yourself.” Once that call is answered, fiction itself becomes another way of questioning truth as we strive for it through the paradox of a lie. That lie can be called the imagination. It can also be seen as a parallel reality. For it may be observed as a critical mirror of what passes for the truth in the world of convention. It certainly sets up a second universe of being, where the narrator, say Cambridge in Cambridge, has a reality greater, though no less important, than the host of hastily met and then forgotten people we deal with on a daily basis. It is in this sense that Phillips brings into light another way of telling in that his narrative gives weight and presence to the virtues and vices—the fugitive personalities—of our daily acquaintance. This is the prerogative of his style, which I try to discuss in this essay. It has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. In fact, what holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of being out of place and not quite right.