Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliche in Caryl Phillips

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Wisdom can be expressed through the act of form-giving: it can conceal itself behind the forms and does not necessarily have to surmount itself, as irony, in the work.

—Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

The British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips seems like a gift for readers and critics interested in the theme of the black "diaspora" in contemporary literature, or the closely associated concept of the "blackAtlantic," deriving from the work of the cultural critic and theoretician Paul Gilroy. In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy proposes the Atlantic as "a single, complex unit of analysis" that organizes a critical focus away from "nationalist and ethnically absolute approaches" and toward "an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective"—a principle, and an ambition, attentive to "the structure of the African diaspora into the western hemisphere" (Gilroy, 15). Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, traveled to England with his parents while still an infant, was brought up in Leeds, and moved to New York in 1990, where he currently lives. Even more promisingly, Phillips has commented that he would like his ashes to be scattered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at a point equidistant from Britain, North America and the Caribbean, and the West Coast of Africa—three locations with which he claims the paradoxical relation of feeling at home and knowing he doesn't belong, of being both "of, and not of" (New World Order, 304, 1-4). His best-known and most frequently studied works, Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), are historical novels of slavery, dealing with transactions between those geographical points during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Gilroy, as is well known, the slave ship is an image of modernity that should be counterposed to that of the modern nation-state (4, 17). Ships, he writes, are"mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected" (16). As such, they emblematize the possibility of a nonidentitarian relation to identity, a complex that in turn suggests a critical hermeneutic oriented not around nationalism but around transplantation and movement. The politics of such a formation will not be those of representation—a speaking on behalf of—but, rather, will transect the demands of normative "fulfilment"—"that bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric" (37)—and those of utopian "transfiguration," focused upon possibilities that are "beyond the grasp of the merely linguistic, textual and discursive" (ibid.). Gilroy designates this latter orientation "the slave sublime," a term that indicates the "unspeakableness" both of the catastrophe with which it originates, and of the political "claims to truth" it extends on that basis (218, 37).

For all the conceptual richness of Gilroy's model, one of my contentions in this article is that "diaspora," the "black Atlantic," and even "postcoloniality" are not the only ways to comprehend the works of Caryl Phillips, and they may not be the best. That important characteristics of Phillips's work have been missed by the critical literature is due in part to the way these approaches have been brought and applied to it—approaches that are invited, to be sure, by the work itself, but which, perhaps for that reason, are limited in their insightfulness. "Diasporan" readings of Phillips have focused on the historical setting and narrative content of the works, precisely the elements that solicit such readings, and have neglected their significance as contemporary literary productions with their own historicity.¹ If diaspora,migrancy, and homelessness are present in Phillips's work, I will argue, it is not primarily as contextual or thematic elements, but as material or substantive ones: the circumstances of Phillips's own writing are as much a subject of his work as those of his fictional characters.

The wider argument I am concerned with...