Analysis of the main structural aspects of Caryl Phillip’s The Nature of Blood

“ There is nobody with whom I might share memories of a common past, and nobody with whom I might converse in the language that sits most easily on my tongue[...]There is no turning back[...]Let the storm do its work!” 

 (Phillips,2008:160) 

     Past, identity and race seem to be the key words of The Nature of Blood. The novel is interested in looking at history from a different perspective, through the suffering and confusion of those whose lives have been undocumented, that is to say who have faced persecution and involuntary migration. In addition, this novel is a form of Phillips’s autobiography. Clingman has observed how “for a young black boy growing up[in Britain], the sense of alienation and the lack of a secure identity were palpable realities”(2004:142). On that account, the author seems to explain his personal story through the words of other people who have lived tragic and traumatic experiences. Above all, Phillips found similarities between black and Jewish people. As a consequence, the book is based on the story of four different Jewish and African characters living in different historical periods. The first, which begins and ends the novel, concerns Stephan Stern who left Europe in the 1930s to help found the state of Israel, where in his old age he has a brief encounter with Malka, a young Ethiopian Jewish woman. The second, written mainly in the first person, concerns Stephen’s niece Eva Stern, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish woman who survives the horrors of the Holocaust. The third, set in the town of Portobuffole, near Venice, in the fifteenth century, recounts the execution of members of its Jewish community after being charged with the murder of a young Christian boy. The fourth and last narration, is set in the sixteenth-century Venice and is mainly a first-person account of a Moorish general named Othello. One of the purposes of the author is to underline the sense of alienation and loss of identity that the protagonists seem to experience despite their belonging to different places, centuries, cultures and races. Hence, the novel invites the readers to detect thematic connections between the narratives and the characters in different times and spaces which it juxtaposes. 

  This essay aims to suggest a general overview of Phillips’s work. As the focus will be on the key concepts of the novel, this essay will analyse the structure of the book, the relevance of space and time in the narration, the concept of cultural crossing and the importance of the Diaspora phenomenon. Moreover, the connection with the Shakespearian plays will be also evaluated. It will finally take into consideration a possible interpretation of the meaning of the title.

    The first issue to be dealt with is the complex structure of The Nature of Blood. Phillips’s stylistic decision result in the presence of different stories interlaced in a series of fragmented paragraphs characterized by juxtapositions and nonexistence chapters, which are “liable[...] to jump from one story to another without any preface or transition”(Clingman, 2004:146). There are also narratives and interventions added to the novel such as the notes of a psychiatrist who visits Eva in England or a series of encyclopedia-like entries on ghetto and other topics. As a result, one of the problematic aspects while reading the novel, is how to put all these voices together since there are no clues other than the intrinsic dynamic of these threads. Not only is there a difficulty connected to the distinction of the different stories, but the same protagonists’ own narration seems complex to follow. As a matter of fact, page after page, the book tends to express the mental disease of its characters and the reader struggles to understand them. An example of this can be found in Eva’s story. The Holocaust survivor tries to narrate her life before and after the experience in the concentration camp, but her words, especially in the middle of the novel, seem to interpret the chaos of her mind. This is mirrored both in the syntax and in the narrative style, which are characterized by shorter sentences, frequent use of commas, dots and backward and forward narration. At a certain point, the readers realize that she is an unreliable narrator and that will thus never discovers whether Gerry has really written a letter to Eva in order to marry her or she has imagined everything in her mind. Benedict Ledent (2001:187) suggests that this particular narrative technique can be compared to a labyrinth structure whose most clear expression is the rejection of the unities of place, time and action. If the structure of the novel is twisting so are the lives of its main characters. In this regard the author’s complex writing method seems to imitate the chaotic mind of his characters in order to represent the sense of alienation and the loss of identity they experience. 

     A further element to consider is the ability of The Nature of Blood to move across space and time. The novel traces the complex journey from fifteenth-century Venice where Jewish money-lenders were persecuted, through Nazi German and post-war London, up to present-day Israel. Even if the stories are far in time, they seem nonetheless interwoven one with the other. To give some examples, a clear comparison is made between the ghetto in which the Jews live in fifteenth-century Venice and Eva’s hiding place within twentieth-century Europe; both Malka and Eva meet with prejudice and suspicion in the foreign countries; both Stephan and the African general leave behind their homeland, a wife, and a child to start a new life in a different country and both Eva and Othello lives a strong sense of alienation. Every story seems to echo in the thoughts of the other characters, thus creating a criss-cross structure which shows how “the places and temporalities the text portrays seem at first to be so ‘distant’ from one another but are in fact[...] ‘so tantalizingly close’ to one another”(Calbi, 2006:44). Although the stories are situated in different centuries, they seem to be connected by the same sense of displacement. In this way, the author manages to highlight how the hatred between men and the racial persecution has not a specific century or place collocation. 

    The comparison of lives and experiences across time and space is central to Phillips’s examination of the psychological effect of cultural crossing connected to the involuntary migration. The characters face this phenomenon in different ways. On the one hand, the African general tries to ‘forget’ his blackness and encourages a surplus of identities in order to be accepted by a predominantly white Venetian society. Whilst he understands that his marriage to Desdemona will ‘mark him off his past’, making him a target of both rejection and scorn, he does not fully understand the extent of his own vulnerability in terms of his isolation from his past(Phillips, 2008:147). According to the omniscient narrator, he ignores the warning to exist without a past: 

 “my friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal. Only the strongest spirit can hold both together. Only the most powerful heart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces. After a protracted struggle, most men will eventually relinquish one in favour of the other.[…] Did you truly ever think of your wife’s soft kiss? Or your son’s eyes? Brother, you are weak.[…] While you still have time, jump from her bed and fly away home. Peel your rusty body from hers and go home. No good can come from your foreign adventure”

(Phillips,2008:183) 

 On the other hand, Eva is totally suffocated from the traumas of her past. Like many others in the camp, she has forgotten how to think of tomorrow, her mind continually occupied by her last conversation with her mother and her sister Margot. In order to enter into the present, Eva must break with the past. However Eva’s mind is full of questions that remain unanswered and are unanswerable. By creating a protective mask, through the use of the sentence “I am not like them”(Phillips,2008) she has been able to survive the horrors of the concentration camp. Moreover Eva, like Othello, tries to divide her present self from that of her past self in order to live in the present: “I try to forget her name. I decide to put Eva away in some place for safekeeping until all of this is over”(Phillips,2008:165). Likewise, Othello’s discovery of his blackness and his developing racial consciousness coincides with the realization that he has also tried to escape and abandon his past: “You tuck your black skin away, appropriate their words, their manner[…] yet you conveniently forget your own family, and thrust your wife and son to the back of your mind”(Phillips, 2008:181). Although Eva seems to search a way to live again, her act of suicide can highlight the impossibility of cultural and post-traumatic crossings. In this sense, with her suicide, she “announces her way out of the labyrinth”(Ledent,2001:188). Through these narratives, Phillips wants to suggest that, for cultural crossings to work without violence, those that cross must find a way of connecting their past lives with their present, without the destruction of the self or others. For this reason, it can be inferred that also Othello will be not able to perform a positive cultural crossing, since in the Shakespearian play he will both kill himself and Desdemona. The only character able to cross positively seems to be Stephan for the fact that, when he understands the impossibility of a promised land, he tries to carry on with his life. However, even in the end, he is persecuted by the memory of Eva and Margot.

    Another important aspect of the novel is the exploration of the concept of Diaspora as an historical and psychological phenomenon that links both Jews and blacks in their experience of racial persecution and involuntary migration. As Craps has noticed, Phillips’s “interest in the persecution of the Jews can be traced back to his experience of growing up black in Britain. Having no access to any representations of colonialism of slavery, Phillips tried to make sense of his own history through the prism of Jewish suffering”(2008:199). Throughout The Nature of Blood, the author joints the experience of two different ethnic groups revealing the respective specificities and similarities such as the disruption of families, the sense of displacement and the presentiment of loss. The stories of the protagonists of the novel reveal the similarity of the racial persecution during different centuries and places. Moreover, so as to better interlock Jews and black experience, Phillips creates the figure of Malka. In the 1980s this young Ethiopian woman with Jewish roots still has to face prejudice and suspicion of a foreign country. By introducing this character at the end of the book, Phillips tends to imply that African and Jews will probably always have to deal with racial discrimination. Mantel believes that the author commits a mistake by suggesting the idea that when someone talks about Jews he is also talking about blacks ( Clingman, 2004:147). Nevertheless, the author only seems to compare the two experiences. As Zierler has pointed out, Phillips’s novel argues for continuity not for the presentation of black and Jewish experience as equal(Craps, 2012:140). Furthermore, the author explains how the involuntary migration and the racial persecution lead to a displacement feeling. For instance, Eva is not able to discern the difference between the invention of her mind from the reality. Othello wants to delete his blackness in favour of the whiteness superiority of the European. And Malka is obliged to work in a club in order to survive in a foreign country. These stories have in common the humiliation that minority groups have lived through the human history. This feeling is expressed by Eva's words: "There was humiliation. There was the daily anxiety of being easy prey for groups of men who ran through the streets yelling slogans"(Phillips,2008:85). This respect for the two communities' inherent sense of exile may explain why the novel was hailed as bringing "the most startling, imaginative and largely unherlded advance in black-Jewish understanding"(Walcott,1976:111)

     A key component in the analysis of the novel can be found in its connection with Shakespeare. In actual fact, Phillips takes two of the most famous Shakespearian characters as emblems of his book. On the one hand, the story of the African general can be considered as a prequel of the Othello play. Even if Phillips’s moor is unnamed, he can be identified with Shakespeare’s Othello. As a matter of fact, Phillips’s narration regards the arrival of the African general in Venice, his following marriage with Desdemona and the departure for Cyprus. Therefore, Shakespeare’s Othello seems to continue the story interrupted by the author. Moreover, whilst in the play it can be quite hard to conceive with whom Shakespeare tends to side, in the book Phillips chooses to support Othello. This allows the Caribbean author to give to the moor the faculty to narrate his story by conferring him the subjectivity denied in Shakespeare’s play(Amstrong,2008:124). 

The story is a first-person narration of Othello’s most private thoughts and feelings in which he reveals his own fears and preoccupations: “I remained unclear about much of the world in which I was living”(Phillips,2008:134).To confer on him even more intimacy and humanity, the novel imagines the existence of a wife and a child in his native country. On the contrary the structure of the play, with its multiple voices, does not give a clear access to the general’s intimate thoughts. The main characteristic of Shakespeare’s Othello seems to be his oratory rather than his capacity of introspection. Nevertheless through the play, he loses the power of language regaining it only when he finally kills Desdemona.
Also the Portobuffole narrative seems to be a prequel of The Merchant of Venice. Phillip’s story can be interpreted as a probable explanation for the several stereotypes connected with the Jews. The novel outlines how in Venice there was a strong sense of suspicion towards strangers ,and that the Jews were obliged to lend money in exchange for permission to live in the Venetian territory(Phillips,2008:53).However, as the novel reveals, following the destabilization of the Venetian economy after the war with the Turks and the failure of expansionist projects in the Orient, the Venetian Grand Council realized that it could not afford to alienate the Jews if it was to benefit from large-scale capital investment for commercial and economic prospects inland. As Ledent pointed out, the Venetian Republic fights anti-Semitic feelings for the need to have the Jews around as usurers(2002:145). For this reason, before condemning the Jews of Portobuffole for the murder of the young Sebastian, the Venetian tries to collect real evidences. The narrative initially appears as a objective, third-person chronicle. However, it is soon clear that everything is based on gossips, murmurs and suppositions. In this sense, Phillips seems to stress that, even if the Venetian trial has tried to collect objective proofs, the Jews’ death sentence was based on prejudices. Likewise, in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is object of scorn by the Venetian: 

 “Signor Antonio, many a time and oft 

 In the Rialto you have rated me 

 About my moneys and my usances. 

 Still have I borne it with a patient shrug 

 For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe. 

 You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, 

 And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, 

 And all for use of that which is mine own” 

(Shakespeare,2014:1:3:44) 

 Therefore, it can be argued that Shylock embodies the stereotypes connected with the Jews of Portobuffole. In the novel the Jews are linked to money. In the same way, in the play, Shylock is depicted as a greedy usurer. Indeed, the first words pronounced by the Shakespearian Jew are: “Three thousand ducats”(Shakespeare, 2014:35). Another element to evaluate is the contrast between religion and race. In The Nature of Blood, the Jews are condemned mostly for prejudices connected to their different religious ceremonies while in the play, there is a constant antithesis between Christians and Jews outlined through Shylock’s words and his final forced conversation: “I hate him for he is Christian”(Shakespeare,2014:38). Not only is there a connection between novel and play through Jewish characters, but Phillips also tends to prompt that what happened in Portobuffole can be used to explain the discrimination towards Shylock. In fact, in the play the hatred for Shylock seems to have ancient roots which are probably understandable through a deep evaluation of the Jews of Portobuffole prejudices. In this degree, it can be asserted that Phillips has used some features of Othello and The Merchant of Venice to stress the main themes of his novel namely the racial discrimination and the effect of migration. 

    The last aspect to take into consideration is the meaning of the title The Nature of Blood. It has been argued that the blood in the novel acts as a “multifaceted metaphor, as something that both unites and separated people”(Ledent,2002:139). In an interview with Renée Schatteman, Phillips himself clarifies that blood “is deeply ambitious because on the one hand it does create family and bonds which sustain but on the other hand[…] it creates the very divisions, the very hostilities, the very exclusions that in a sense lead one to find kinship with others”(Becker,2010:125). The novel seems to abound with images of blood which are firstly connected to the notion of menstruation. During the Portobuffole trial, two layers affirm that for the Jews “nothing is more impure than blood[…] even from their own women”(Phillips,2008:149-150). Malka reports that in Israel “at a certain time of the month[…] women pollute the place with their presence”(Phillips,2008:209). Also for Eva the menstrual blood is connected with negative feelings. During her journey to a concentration camp, she sees a girl who, in her period of the month “could no longer hide the blood”(Phillips,2008: 162). When Eva arrives at the camp, she observes the constant presence of blood: “Blood everywhere. Shame. Shame”(Phillips,2008:164). And, eventually, menstruation can even cause death for women: “an unaesthetic drop of menstrual blood signals death”(Phillips,2008:168). The blood is linked not only to the concept of menstruation, but it is also connected to other images. For instance, it is associated with the death of Sebastian New, the victim of the Jews of Portobuffole; or with the death of Eva who dies in “a lot of blood”(Phillips,2008:188); or with Othello’s “royal blood”(Phillips,2008:107). Hence the experiences of the different characters seem to be joined by “the tragic nature of blood”(Clingman, 2004:160). The book tries to find an answer to Eva’s question: “How is it possible to be so angry with people who have done you no wrong?”(Phillips,2008:162). In this regard, the persistent and unsettling question that permeates the book seems, in turn, to invoke another question: “What is the nature of race?”. The novel does not propose any fixed or absolute answer. However, Phillips seems to allude to the fact that the future of every human being is written in the genetic connotation of blood. Moreover, he invites the reader to reflect on and not forget what happened during human history, suggesting that a probable answer concerning the nature of blood can be found in the analysis of the traumatic experiences of the survivors. 

   This general analysis of The Nature of Blood has tried to point out the key aspects of the novel. In particular, it has been proved that Phillips’s work has a tendency to be focused on the psychological aspect of migration and racial persecution. The use of a complex structure seems to underline that the protagonists’ traumatic lives lead to a sense of bewilderment. Through different times and spaces, the characters are forced to face a cultural crossing. Moreover the author wants to expose the parallels between African and Jewish Diaspora. In this regard, Phillips employs the Shakespearean Shylock and Othello to reinforce his thesis. In the lights of all these issues, the meaning of the title can be interpreted mainly as a suggestion to evaluate all the possible connotations of being born with a certain blood rather than with another. Unfortunately, Phillips tends to imply that the current world is still more concerned with the external appearance than with the internal appearance. In order to change the collective mind of human beings, the author exhorts to find a possible solution in past experiences. In this perspective, only the memory seems to offer any form of future hope.

Michela Pezzini

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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