Haunting Memories Voiced through Mnemonic Prose in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood’

My paper seeks to examine how Caryl Phillips’s use of formal devices akin to music enables the story of Eva from The Nature of Blood (1997) to resonate through time and space and how musical prose can mirror her emotional state. Through musical stylistic devices such as sonic patterns (poetic techniques based on reiterations such as alliteration, chiasmus), structural analogies with musical forms (riff, polyphony) and a use of repeated lexical items (which can imitate a musical improvisation), Phillips resorts to a language which both seeks and defies the reader’s understanding. He enables the call of his traumatized character to be seen and heard, notably by resonating in the reader’s psyche, which is struck by the vivid sonority of Eva’s story.
The first part of my paper will be devoted to exploring the formal aspect of Caryl Phillips’s prose by addressing the techniques with which he musicalizes his literary text, my own examination of Phillips’s creative prose is informed by Jeppe Stricker’s observation that the “notion of music in novels should somehow be significant, carry meaning, and influence the way we read the novel” (Stricker 243). My main endeavour will therefore demonstrate that the musicalized passages occur when Eva goes through or reflects upon very traumatic experiences. For instance, when Eva arrives at the concentration camp.
Phillips’s musical devices in fact enhance the emotional effect of his narratives by creating an acoustic foregrounding which inexorably haunts the readers’ memory, just as it does the characters.