Liberating Structures of Feeling in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge and A Distant Shore

Anglo-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips has often fictionalized the encounter of individuals belonging to different genders, racial groups and cultures. Several of his novels, which are known for their subtle explorations of mental states, bring side by side a white woman and a black man who both display affective disorders, leading to depression and alienation.
Cambridge (1991) and A Distant Shore (2003) are cases in point. The former, taking place on a Caribbean plantation in the 19th century, focuses on an English planter’s daughter and an African slave, while the latter, set in 20th century-England, stages the meeting between a white retired teacher and a black refugee. These characters’ mental issues have often been analyzed separately. For example, the black character’s inner turmoil in the second novel has been explored through the lens of trauma (Jain, 2018), while the white woman’s malaise has been read as abandonment neurosis (Su, 2018). This paper intends to demonstrate that it is worth going beyond this form of critical discrimination and rather focus on what brings the two protagonists together at the emotional level, on the “sensory entanglements” at play between them, with a view to outlining a form of virtual and conflicted solidarity, which only empathetic and serious readers are able to achieve.
Far from universalizing feelings and emotions and erasing cultural differences, then, such an approach is meant to show how these narratives, which have already been described as “unsettling the Manichean allegory” (Swanson Goldberg, 2010), complicate the traditional ethics of otherness and allow readers to focus on the protagonists’ shared outsiderness and thereby get rid of the postcolonial critical straightjacket. Particular attention will be paid to the role that form plays in offering such a possibility of liberation, for example the juxtaposition of narratives that both echo and contradict each other in Cambridge, and the alternating zooming in and out on the characters’ experience via first- and third-person chapters in A Distant Shore. As Stephen Clingman has very concisely put it, there is in Phillips’s writing “a connection between certain structures of feeling and certain structures of fiction” (The Grammar of Identity, 2009, 77).