Articulating Silence in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore, The Nature of Blood and Higher Ground

In my presentation, I seek to examine two types of silence in Caryl Phillips’s novels, one on the level of the content in A Distant Shore (2003) and in The Nature of Blood (1997) and a formal one in Higher Ground (1989). I will show the different uses of silence, which often stands for relational conflicts and more rarely for a muted understanding between people, it is also a means of resistance or a means of expression privileged above verbal language to convey excruciating pain. Phillips thus privileges silence when the unspeakable cannot be spoken, even if readers have access, through the characters’ musings or descriptions of the scene, to whatever is behind silence.
Silence is also used on the formal level, for instance through ellipses, in order to force readers to fill in the blank spaces or at least to interpret the text in spite of missing information. I believe that by associating music and silence, Phillips requires from his readers a state of listening, which enables them to hear what his characters have to say and to debunk constructed ideas about silence.