Music and Musicality in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

This paper deals with Caryl Phillips, a contemporary British author of Caribbean descent, whose work, both fiction and non-fiction, testifies to his interest in music, both thematically and formally: countless references to music can be found in the titles of his books, in scenes involving musical performances, in the use in the narrative of musical terminology, but also in intriguing structural analogies with musical forms.
My proposal is to analyse the influence of music in Phillips’s novel Crossing the River (1993; London: Vintage), which has been described as his most jazzy text. Very much like jazz -- which is for the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite “a cry from the heart of the hurt man”-- Phillips’ writing gives a voice to the victims of history, to shattered individuals in pain whose tragic fate is viewed at once as personal and collective. The novel not only illustrates the thematic overlaps between his narrative and the issues addressed in the lyrics of the African American musical tradition, such as discrimination and family disruption, but also exemplifies the author’s formal musical influence through the recurrent and creative use of meaningful variations in rhythm and of repetitions, which are again focal constituents of jazz.
Throughout the novel, especially in the sections framing the narrative, the continual modulation of purposeful words such as “listen”, the variation of rhythm through punctuation and stressed/unstressed syllables, the reiterated elements, create a sonic pattern that goes over and over in the readers’ mind. My contention is that Phillips’ musical language crucially contributes to the emotional impact of his lyrical prose, which generates in the readers mixed feelings of sympathy and disorientation and prevents them from forgetting the characters’ stories which resonate long after closing the book.