Cambridge by Caryl Phillips

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: Early nineteenth century

Locale: West Indies and England

Principal Characters:

• Cambridge, a black man educated in England who is sold into slavery in the West Indies
• Emily Cartwright, an English spinster who visits her father’s West Indian estate
• Arnold Brown, the overseer of the Cartwright estate
• Stella, Emily’s faithful black servant

The Novel

Cambridge, Caryl Phillips’s fifth novel, is a complex feat of historical imagining. Cambridge attempts to reconstruct the spirit of the age in which it is set. This ambitious, and largely successful, attempt conditions the work’s language and form. The book is written in a style that reflects not only the literary fashion of the novel’s time period but also the habits of mind of the time. The absence of, among other salient details, the name of the Caribbean island on which the greater portion of the book’s action takes place also emphasizes the novel’s focus on the palpable, but largely uncataloged, human experiences to which the colonization of the New World gave rise.

While Cambridge continually draws attention to the resources of language and literary form, revealing them to possess greater power than the characters’ subjective implementation of them can control, the novel also uses these resources to meet some of the requirements of orthodox historical fiction. The fact that three of its four parts take the form of various kinds of nonfictional documentation is not a mere novelty but rather an economical means for the author to establish the novel’s fictional world. A case in point is the longest of these three narratives, that of Emily Cartwright, which opens the novel and which reproduces the form of the ethnographic journal. Emily’s travel narrative serves a dual purpose. First, it introduces readers to the outlook and mentality of one of the chief characters, thereby establishing one of the novel’s fundamental emphases, which is less on material reality than on perceptions of reality. Second, Emily’s journal is a vivid pastiche of the ethnographic, sociological, and botanical catalogs that typically make up narratives of travel to exotic places.

Thus, while the attention that Emily pays to her surroundings is continually filtered through her awareness of her own foreign and superfluous presence, a strong sense of the superficial features of her world also emerges. Picturesque vistas abound, as does a great deal of other heterogeneous and semidigested information, from the making of sugar from sugarcane to the ritual practice of obeah. The author is careful not to provide Emily with the analytical ability necessary to form a fully synthesized view of the way of life upon which her father’s fortune and her own well-being depend. Phillips is equally careful to reveal that Emily is by no means morally insensitive to what is being effectively perpetrated in her name. The result of such strategies is that Emily is implicated in the plantation world long before the plot reveals to her that this is the case.

The other narratives in Cambridge confirm, from different perspectives, the unavoidable and profound degree of implication that slave shares with master and master with slave. The slowly developing plot concerning the relationship between Arnold Brown and Cambridge, and its inevitably violent outcome for both the antagonists, shows how all-consuming the moral entanglements of slavery are. The narratives that constitute the aftermath of the violent confrontation between overseer and underdog, for all their brevity, supplement the comprehensive sense of interdependence, entrapment, and incomprehensibility that convincingly demonstrates the institutional, and consequently depersonalizing, character of slavery.

For all concerned, this condition of depersonalization becomes a life sentence that none of the characters successfully escapes. The stories of Cambridge and Emily Cartwright can be seen to be intricate counterparts. For all their superficial differences of race, gender, and class, and even despite their eventual fates, the novel makes a strong case for the moral congruity of their stories. Their stories are not the narratives that they compose in their own voices. At that level, the degree of interaction between the two is limited and indecisive. When the manner in which both their narratives conclude is considered, however, the resemblance between them emerges, though even here it is not quite in terms of a shared physical reality that the similarity is encoded but in terms of how comprehensively victimization pervades slavery. Emily, despite seeming to be far removed from and culturally immunized against exploitation and confinement, proves just as susceptible to these features of the moral landscape as Cambridge is, thereby calling into question the reliability of the various structures that appear to differentiate them.

The Characters

The prominence given to Emily Cartwright, whose story opens and closes the novel, should not draw attention away from the character for whom Cambridge is named. Cambridge earns his central status in the novel by virtue of having experienced what Emily can hardly conceive. His comparatively brief testimony, which is offered to readers after, and possibly as an antidote to, his trial for the murder of Brown, recounts in pitiable terms a saga of deprivation and manipulation that is more compelling for its cultural and psychological effects than for its physical details. Cambridge’s testament acts as a legend of the various effects that slavery has upon the spirit. It is these that the novel memorializes in its title.

The crucial feature of Cambridge’s experience is that he is unable to consider himself a slave. Many of his experiences after his initial enslavement contribute to this inability. The story of his acculturation in England, and his complete identification with Christianity, the principal means of such an adaptation, may perhaps be considered a satire on the hypocrisy of articulating a doctrine of charity in an age when economic welfare depended on kidnapping and exploitation. On the other hand, the legitimacy of Cambridge’s voice in his own story depends on an appreciation of his desire for faith and for the ratification of identity that espousing the faith of his masters provided. The subsequent revelation of the vulnerability of rectitude, and of the frailty of an assumed identity, contributes significantly to the sealing of Cambridge’s fate.

A comparable combination of vulnerability and properness undoes Emily Cartwright. Her inability to identify completely with either the world of the slaves or the world of their owners, and her inconsistent though quite understandable alienation from both, result in her eventually becoming merely an embodiment of her own powerlessness. The moral agnosticism of Emily’s detachment from the world around her is the counterpart of Cambridge’s immersion in that world. The weakness of her position appears very readily between the lines of her journal, so that when Brown’s exploitation of her sexuality takes place, it seems more a confirmation of her status than an offense against her person.

Such a conclusion is suggested by the fact that Emily unthinkingly lends herself to Brown’s experience, just as she has lent herself to various other scenarios that others, all of them men, have proposed to her. Her visit to the West Indies was her father’s suggestion, and there are other indications of Emily’s vulnerability to the ways of patriarchy, even as her journal notes her awareness of those imposing and oppressive ways. The ease with which she seems to be led by the social and cultural norms gives rise to an uneasiness of equal and opposite force once the leading has taken place. The conflict arising from the irreconcilability between what Emily affirms and what she experiences is what makes her vulnerable and, at the end of the novel, leaves her a victim, her life as a potential moral agent terminated as conclusively as Cambridge’s.

In contrast to the central twosome, Cambridge and Emily, and providing a perspective on them are a pair of characters who are embedded in the slave world, rather than existing in critical relationship to it. These two characters are Arnold Brown, the plantation overseer, and Stella, a slave and Emily’s devoted servant. As opposed to the individually contradictory and mutually complementary status that Cambridge and Emily share, making the world with which they are associated a challenging, complex, and dangerous place, Brown and Stella perceive their status and their roles in a very literal manner. This manner provides them with a rooted and self-justified presence that provides the slave world with a patina of stability and normality, a world in which hierarchies are uncontroversially and unproblematically observed and enforced and in which there is none of Cambridge’s implicit provocation and none of Emily’s latent questioning.

Stella’s fidelity to Emily, the expression of which effectively means that the slave is nothing in herself and only of value by virtue of the services she performs for her mistress, is one version of the institution’s success. On the other hand, Brown’s ability as an overseer, his rigid sense of system, and his faceless and enigmatic malevolence, which emerge as tantamount to complete amorality, are an equally consummate expression of the institution’s effects. In order to live up to the institution’s demands, Brown has no alternative but to deny Cambridge his sense of his own identity. Similarly, Stella clearly has no alternative but to give continually of herself. These two characters define the moral territory to which Emily and Cambridge are confined.

Critical Context

The 1992 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the poet Derek Walcott and the mid-1980’s resurgence of interest in the critical and theoretical writings of C. L. R. James has given greater visibility to West Indian literature. Part of this effect is to draw attention to the important developments that have been made in West Indian fiction beginning in the 1960’s by such writers as Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, George Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul. These novelists not only reveal various aspects of the richly complex culture and history of the extensive colony formerly known as the British West Indies but also have brought home to white audiences some of the colonizers’ legacy. It is in the context of this development that Cambridge must be evaluated.

The comparatively small island population in the United States has not given rise to a distinctive Caribbean literary subset within African American culture. In England, however, Caribbean literature is of obvious importance, a fact stressed in the novel by Emily’s problematic embodiment of the values of the mother country. Caryl Phillips is one of the generation of black writers who, although reared and educated in England, retain a strong sense of attachment to the history and culture of their birthplace. The retelling of stories of empire from the standpoint of the colonized is an obvious act of cultural reclamation with various long-term repercussions, among which is the potential for a reevaluation of the purpose and prospects of the novel in England. Together with its considerable artistic merit, Cambridge is a particularly illuminating contribution to the kinds of intellectual and cultural reorientations that are central to contemporary literary debate.

Bibliography

Eckstein, Lars. Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Analyzes Cambridge’s use of slave narratives, travelogues, and other historical texts to intervene in the collective memory of of transatlantic slave trade. Juxtaposes the novel with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999).

Jaffrey, Zia. “Colonial Fiction.” Review of Cambridge, by Caryl Phillips. The Nation 254, no. 11 (March 23, 1992): 385-387. Lengthy, appreciative review of Cambridge, identifying its aesthetic attainments and its relation to both postcolonial literature and the realities of industrial capitalism.

Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Important postcolonial study of Phillips that emphasizes the extent to which his fiction redefines both Caribbeanness and Britishness.

Pinckney, Darryl. Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2002. Study of Phillips, J. A. Rogers, and Vincent O. Carter by the author of High Cotton (1992). Emphasizes the importance of Phillips’s trip to America in shaping his life and fiction.

Thomas, Helen. Caryl Phillips. Tavistock, Devon, England: Northcote House, 2006. This monograph—an entry in the Writers and Their Work series—reads Phillips’s work as an attempt to decolonize the interior by responding to the lasting traumatic effects of racial and economic exploitation by British colonialism.

Walters, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Study of the black literary diaspora that includes a chapter on Phillips’s representation of memory.