The Call and Response Pattern in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

According to Schuller, the “call and response, also known as antiphony, is another central feature of jazz and related musical traditions. As a form of interplay between soloist and ensemble, between two soloists or sections of a band, or even between the band and its audience, this pattern contributes a conversational or dialogic element to jazz” (Schuller 27 qtd in Petermann 90). Petermann argues that such a structure occurs on different diegetic levels when applied to literature, such as between characters/narrative voices within the novel or between the narrator and the readers (9). I would add that in Crossing the River the call and response manifests itself within the novel, but also intertextually between several novels by Phillips and also between Phillips’s novel and texts by others writers, such as Kamau Brathwaite and Toni Morrison.