Spectral Echoes in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

In A New World Order (2001) Caryl Phillips claims that “every writer discovers that his or her main struggle is with this one world: form” (293). His struggle with form bears on questions such as how to write about unbearably painful lives, how to mirror the trauma undergone by his characters, or how to speak about the unspeakable. Phillips seems to have found a stylistic device enabling him to offer the readers a sense of his characters’ traumatic experience and mirror their emotional state: the musicalization of his prose. Phillips’s use of what I call musical writing is striking in his 1997 novel The Nature of Blood, especially in the sections devoted to Eva. This essay offers an interpretation of Phillips’s musical prose through close readings of Eva’s story and explores how the author’s musical stylization can also reflect the two different ways of approaching traumatic experience suggested by Dominick LaCapra’s: “acting out” and “working through” (Writing 21–2, History 54,104). This piece also shows how through stylistic devices akin to music Phillips resorts to a language which both seeks and defies the reader’s understanding, thereby avoiding any easy identification with Eva.