Caryl Phillips's Jazzy Prose: The Nature of Blood

Caryl Phillips's oeuvre has a social and political agenda: to give a voice to those who were forgotten by history and to make their story resonate through time and space. The musicalization of his writing seems to be a way to achieve this ambitious goal. My paper will be devoted to Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood, in which music is present both thematically (with an explicit reference to Louis Armstrong and scenes of dancing) and formally. I will mostly explore the formal aspect by addressing the techniques with which Phillips musicalizes his literary text. In order to do so, I will rely upon Emily Petermann’s The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction [2014]. In this monograph, she defines three different ways of imitating jazz music: sonic effects in prose (alliteration, rhyme, meter), structural patterns (the riff, the Call-and-Response pattern, chorus) and the performance situation (imitating orality, improvisation, use of repeated lexical items). All these features are present in Phillips’s novel.