A journey through The Nature of Blood's places

Places seem to shape our existence. Human life is based on moments connected to a specific temporal and spatial fragment. As S. R, Sanders, in his book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World(1994), has pointed out: 

“In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what the Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down. I am suspicious of any philosophy that would separate this-worldly from other-worldly commitment. There is only one world, and we participate in it here and now, in our flesh and our place”. 

These words seem to echo The Nature of Blood where Phillips focused his attention not only on human beings but also on physical and mental places. As a matter of fact, the traumatic events experienced  by the novel's characters are determined by the presence of several places with historical importance.Westphal defined the “third place” as a creation of literature and mimetic arts which “reveal the unseen potential of space-time somewhere between reality and fiction”(2011:73). In this regard, Murat Oner and Mustafa Bal suggested how Phillips has created “ghettoized places” as an example of this “third place”(2013). In the novel each site or city becomes a labyrinth from which the characters try to find a way out. 

What are the novel’s places? 

In The Nature of Blood there is a large number of places where the characters face their traumatic experiences.

At the beginning of the novel, in a war scenary, Stephen and Moshe talk about Israel as a “a promise land” where they can start a new life. It is in this promise land that they will finally be able to “take the fruit straight from the branch”(Phillips,2008:3). This land is immediately compared with the city of Cyprus which is used as a location for refugees after the war. One of the soldiers explains that “the old war is dead. The survivors are here. Up there, gathered together on a hillside in Cyprus”(Phillips,2008:9). The city is here depicted as a sort of container for the survivors. Soldiers desire to go to Israel but they are obliged to stay on the isle. Therefore, as Ledent has observed, “Cyprus [becomes] a liminal place, a border zone, halfway between the West and the East”(2002:150).

This city reappears in another part of the novel: the unnamed African general, who can be recognize as Othello, is sent to work in Cyprus. The moor is worried about his departure since he knows that he will be alone. For this reason he asks the Doge to take his wife with him.

After the scene set in Cyprus, the character of Eva, an Holocaust survivor, appears in the plot.  She recounts her traumatic experience in and out of Bergen Belsen which was located in Northern Germany. If at the beginning it was merely a prisoner war camp, it then became a concentration camp. Since Eva has lived many years in Bergen Belsen, now she does not know how to live again. In other words, Eva is not able to exit from the labyrinth embodied by the camp. When she is finally free, she decides to go to London. Here the holocaust survivour thinks that she can start a new life with Gerry. Unfortunately the soldier seem not to meet her desire to restart. Hence Eva, accused to have mental problems, is confined in a London hospital depicted as another “ghettoized place” where, once again, she does not have a possibility to be free. Unable to build a new existence, Eva finally commits suicide.

Portobuffole

 The events unfold also in Portobuffole, which is a small municipality in the province of Treviso in the Italian region of Veneto. This setting is primarily used to narrate the story of three Jewish men who were charged with the murder of a child and eventually condemned to death in 1480. Caryl Phillips's source was probably Salomone G. Radzik's Portobuffole,in which the episode was faithfully reconstructed on the basis of numerous texts of the sixteenth century.

 The case of the Jews is connected not only to the small village of Portobuffole but it is also linked to the city of Venice. Here the Jewish are submitted to a second trial and sentenced to death: "The Grand Council finally decided that the Jew of Portobuffole should submit to a second trial, this time in Venice”(Phillips,2008:106).They are burned in St Mark’s Square in front of the

Venetian population. This “piazza”(Italian name of St Mark) has been the city centre for centuries. Nowadays it is considered one of the most beautiful squares in the world, a real marble salon and the city’s main symbol.

The story of the African general is also set in Venice. When he walks around the city, the moor is fascinated by its streets and alleys:

“At night, when abandoned to serenity, her breathing light and regular, Venice presented herself as a sleeping babe upon whom one might spy with proprietorial glee.[...] Some corners of Venice appeared to have been specially chosen to be blessed with this celestial gift of light and shadow.”(Phillips,2008:121)

Rialto bridge

He also mentions the Rialto bridge for its economic connotation:
 “I dressed quickly and soon found myself on the wintry Rialto bridge, from whose vantage-point I was able to watch a lean cut scurry noiselessly into a blind alley”(Phillips,2008:121).
The Rialto bridge, whose name derives from rivo alto(high bank) was one of the first centres of habitation and commerce. In this area, which originally housed the food market, there has always been a canal crossing, at first, a simple bridge of boats, and later a real wooden bridge. The current Rialto Bridge, a stone arch, was constructed under the supervision of Antonio da Ponte, between 1588 and 1591. The construction was made difficult by the conditions of instability and by the depth of the sea bottom.

The last place mentioned in the novel is the Ghetto. In the Othello’s story there is a long description of this part of the city:

Venetian Ghetto

"what a strange place was this walled ghetto[...]The rich and the destitute lived together, the denizens bound only by her faith. Nothing stirred, and I felt as though I were wandering about a village that had been quickly abandoned in a time of plague[...]All outwards signs of devotion were absent in this dark place, which led me to conclude that religious imagery of any kind probably constituted a particular sin for these people[...] My exploration had unnerved me somewhat, for it was known that the Jews were fortunate in their wealth.. Why they should choose to live in this manner defeated my understanding.(Phillips,2008:130-131)

The African general seems shocked by the Jews’ conditions of life. Furthermore he is not able to see any similarities between his own situation and that of the Jews, who, like him, have been ostracized from the socio-political centre of the Venetian community.

During the sixteenth-century the numbers and importance of the Jewish population in Venice grew considerably and the Republic found it necessary to enact a decree to organize their presence: the Jews were therefore obliged to live in the area of the city where the foundries, known as “geti”, had been situated in ancient times. Many other onerous regulations were also included, in exchange for which the Community was granted the freedom to practice its faith and protection in the case of war. Their guttural pronunciation mangled the Venetian term "geto" into "ghetto", thus creating a word which is still used today to indicate various places of emargination. 

 Why did Phillips choose mainly Europe? 

This itinerary through the places mentioned in Phillip's work shows that it is set in many European places. Becker suggested that the novel is a “profound critique of European ideologies of race, blood and skin color and of obsession with racial purity, compulsory endogamy and lineage”(2010:125). The Nature of Blood seems to underline the predominance of whiteness over blackness in human history. The African general explains that “a great number of strangers from various exotic corners of the known world had, over the years, chosen to reside in Venice. However, the Venetian aristocrat remained confined about the superiority of his traditions over those of any other”(Phillips,2008:120).Venice functions as a powerful and extensive centre of colonial empire. The centre of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ is reconfigured in Phillips’s text as an immense political and economic power, fuelled by cultural racism and colonization. The other important city mentioned in the novel is London. Ledent pointed out that the choice of these city could stand for Europe’s impurity. She also adds that Phillips focuses on the failure of the Mediterranean and thus by extension, of Europe(2001:193). In the lights of this, places seem to be used not only as a background of the characters’ experiences, but also as a synonym of racial discrimination.

Michela Pezzini

SOURCES: 

• BALL M AND HONER M(2013),Isolated Spaces, Fragmented Places: Caryl Phillips's Ghettos in The Nature of Blood and The European Tribe, available at:source
• BECKER, B.B. (2010), An Everblooming Flower: Caribbean Antidote to a European Disease in the Works of Caryl Phillips, South Atlantic Review, Vol.75, No.2.: 113-134 
• CALIMANI R.(1987), Ghetto of Venice,M Evance& Co
• LEDENT, B. (2001), A fictional and Cultural Labyrinth: Caryl Phillips's "The Nature of Blood". Ariel: A Review of International English Literature. Vol 31. No 1:185-195 
• LEDENT, B(2002), Caryl Phillips, Manchester University Press 
• MORRIS, J.(1993), Venice, Faber & Faber 
• PHILLIPS, C.(2008), The Nature of Blood, London:Vintage 
• WESTPHAL, B.(2011), Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, New York:Palgrave Macmillan. 
• SANDERS S.R(1994), Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Beacon Press