Abstract
This article is an exploration of the biofictive in Caryl Phillips’s writing, in particular in his novel The Lost Child (2015). The term “biofiction” has been in critical use for some 20 years, but is in general under-theorized. The article intends to help fill that gap by considering the biofictive in Phillips’s work as a form of postcolonial epistemology. It also introduces a new but logical dimension by setting the biofictive in conversation with biopolitics. However, whereas the dominant focus in discussions of the biopolitical (formulations from Foucault to Agamben and beyond) concerns the structures and dispositions of power, the role of the biofictive is inflected differently insofar as it both acknowledges a history of power but also creates a space of narrative alterity and resistance. In Phillips’s work this is revealed both in his nonfiction and fiction, not least where the two are combined; and it is especially evident in the multimodal operations of his fiction, dispersed across time and space in the aftermath of slavery, migration, and empire. We see all this in The Lost Child, which also introduces a complex rereading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Overall, Phillips’s version of the postcolonial is capacious, intersecting with other forms of post-traumatic and fugitive experience. The biofictive becomes a bona fide form of knowledge in our postcolonial, post-imperial moment.
Contours of the biofictive
In exploring the biofictive in Caryl Phillips’s writing, it is worth clarifying my approach to the concept. As a term, “biofiction” appears to have been in critical parlance for some 20 years, though not in any great density or profusion, and it has been applied in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is used simply as the equivalent of “fictional biography”, situated at the intersection of fiction and biography (Latham, 2012). One strain concerns the literary reworking of the lives of canonical writers, whether by way of feminist revisions of the histories of past figures (Novak, 2017), or at the conjunction of science fiction and Romantic biography (Jones, 1997). Sometimes the concern is with taxonomy — the various meta-levels in which fictive biography can appear (Nünning, 2005). There is generally some concern with the displacement of received narratives, but not in a way that engages theory. As one critic who is an exception to this pattern puts it, “biofiction” is “curiously under-theorized” (Kohlke, 2013: 4). This helps me set out a first aspect of my interest here. My aim is to explore in some depth the formal and thematic procedures of Phillips’s writing as a way of understanding what the biofictive means and implies in his work. Immediately then, I would draw a distinction. “Biofiction” concerns a genre, or a set of related genres, which one can apply as a taxonomical designation. The “biofictive”, however, concerns a process — a writing and reading process which has certain theoretical and philosophical dimensions. What that process is and what some of those dimensions are, it will be the task of this article to consider.
There is also a second aspect of my concern, and that is to put the biofictive in conversation with the biopolitical. This is the sphere in which, as Michel Foucault formulates it (1981: 141–42), the phenomena of human life enter into the “order of knowledge and power”. The connection between the two concepts — the biofictive and the biopolitical — appears natural enough, though it is not one that seems to have been made in the critical literature. Here, however, it is worth clearing up a matter of potential confusion. In their valuable collection, Biopolitics, Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze comment on the remarkable number of neologisms that entered into circulation following the biopolitical turn initiated by Foucault. These include such terms as bioculture, biomedia, bioeconomics, biotheology, and a series of others (Campbell and Sitze, 2013: 4–5). From that point of view, it may seem that the biofictive is just one more variation to add to the mix. Further, though there are various approaches to the biopolitical, one might expect the biofictive to follow the prevailing pattern in such considerations: that is, to focus on power and the constraints it applies, in this case to the world of the fictive. Power is in general dominant in the biopolitical equation, whether it concerns control of the individual body or populations at large (Foucault, 1981, 2013), or the juridical–institutional state of exception as a function of sovereignty (Agamben, 1998). Certainly, as we shall see, there are resonances for the biofictive of a history of power, constraint, and exclusion. Achille Mbembe emphasizes the history of race in the biopolitical dimension, which undoubtedly has relevance for Phillips’s work (Mbembe, 2013: 166).
But as much as there are echoes of the biopolitical for the biofictive, there are also aspects of interference or difference — some of the implicit reasons Phillips may have developed his forms of writing in the first place. For here the pressures of the biopolitical are met by a resistance or rewriting in biofictive form which opens up a different terrain. Strangely, in this regard, the biofictive teases out a paradox in the concept of the biopolitical itself. Campbell and Sitze comment that “biopolitics is the explicit solution to an inexplicit problem: power’s inability to fully access life” (2013: 14). This may be the secret scandal of the biopolitical — that even as a solution in the administrative or disciplinary deployment of power, life is not wholly contained in its grip. This is a reality that several theorists have recognized, starting with Foucault himself. 1 It may be this intrinsic lack that increasingly propels the drive to power — sometimes to extraordinary outrages. But I would suggest that it is because of the intrinsic doubleness of the biopolitical that biofictive space emerges. In this sense the biofictive is both an inscription of, and a resistance to, the powerful but incomplete narrative of the biopolitical. Moreover, in Phillips’s work this inscription takes place within the context of a larger postcolonial inheritance and predicament. Here the biofictive becomes nothing less than a bona fide mode of knowledge — a theory that both complements and answers back to biopolitical theory in the postcolonial field. What I offer here, in short, is a claim about a way and a process of writing in Phillips’s work — writing that has important implications for the ways we see and understand our current history.
Phillips’s nonfiction
Let me take up the first dimension of my investigation, concerning the biofictive as a specific form in Phillips’s writing, starting with (what is generally termed) his nonfiction. It should become apparent, however, just how complex the “nonfictive” in his work can be. Indeed, one of the key markers of the biofictive in Phillips’s approach is its fusion of fictive and nonfictive modes.
Phillips has discussed how his writing is characteristically drawn to the biographical — an obvious starting point for any biofictive orientation — whether in his novels or nonfiction (Clingman, 2017: 10–13). In some of his shorter essays, whether on Marvin Gaye, James Baldwin, or Chinua Achebe, this takes on fairly standard form, considering the influence of the life on the work and vice versa. 2 In longer pieces, however, Phillips not only becomes more expansive but there are also elaborations which begin to reconstitute the nonfictive in formal respects. Thus, in The Atlantic Sound, an essay entitled “Leaving Home” (2000) tells the story of John Ocansey, an African from the Gold Coast who left home for Liverpool in 1881 to track down money owed to his father by a trader. Much of the essay concerns what Ocansey finds there, and his struggles to retain his sense of identity, but because this is the city of Liverpool, it also concerns the slave trade and its operations. In addition, there is a lengthy “Postscript” to the essay in which Phillips locates himself in the present as he wanders the streets of Liverpool, constellating the nineteenth-century story with the present, and Ocansey’s story with his own. This is perhaps not exceptional in contemporary nonfiction, but note the intervals and correspondences across time and geography in this doubling, and across the biographical and autobiographical — not to mention aspects of the fictive in Phillips’s reimagining of Ocansey’s life. One element worth special mention is that Phillips, in the postscript, reflects on a fictional character, that of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (2009/1847), and Mr Earnshaw’s first discovery of him on the streets of Liverpool. Phillips acknowledges that Brontë keeps the origins of Heathcliff obscure, yet he contemplates the strange irony that the mysterious dark character, described in the novel as “dusky” and a “gypsy”, should have found himself adrift in Europe’s major eighteenth-century slaving port. Heathcliff, writes Phillips in his essay on Ocansey, was “one of the first literary characters to seize my imagination” (2000: 92), and one might well imagine the reasons. Moreover, as we shall see in The Lost Child (2015), this is then a story that works its way into his own fiction. Between one thing and another, we are in the realm of the biofictive, where the fictional and nonfictional encounter one another both as a preoccupation and as a form of exploration.
Another of Phillips’s long pieces, “Northern Lights” (2007), is even more intriguing in terms of its formal and narrative development. It tells the story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who ended up living on the streets of Leeds, and whom the police mercilessly targeted and then murdered, dumping his body in the Aire–Calder Navigation Canal (an expression of biopolitics, to be sure). Again there is a correspondence with Phillips’s life, in that he grew up in Leeds. And there is also a correspondence with his fiction, in this case with the figure of the African refugee Gabriel/Solomon in the novel A Distant Shore (2003), who is murdered and dumped in a canal in the north of England. As “Northern Lights” opens, and then throughout, we encounter a profusion of voices talking about David. There is a West Indian woman who used to see David when she was 14 years old; there is an asylum inmate; a medical officer; a white woman; a Nigerian immigrant; even the voice of the racist MP, Enoch Powell. At first it is hard to place some of these voices, but more important are the fusions of narrative involved: in this instance a fusion of what we might call the frame-narrator of the story, and of these different voices. But the frame-narrator is itself a composite of sorts. At times fairly straightforward reporting on the part of this narrative presence alternates with imagined scenes — or with scenes one might imagine happened to Phillips himself when he was a young boy on the streets of Leeds, and things that might have been said to him (Phillips, 2007: 171). Sometimes the narration is in the third person; sometimes it is in second person as the narrator addresses David by way of apostrophe. If we call these narrator-1 and narrator-2, then there is also a narrator-3, in which the narrator becomes a character, revisiting sites, imagining, revoicing. It is perhaps this narrator who visits the home street of the police inspector responsible for David’s death, later retired after his three-year sentence on charges of assault. This is the voice that declares, “Enjoy your retirement, former Inspector Ellerker. Black Sheep” (2007: 225), or imagines the interior monologues of white denizens in the environs of Leeds: “Go on Sambo. Knock on the door” (2007: 227). Is this Phillips’s own voice? Perhaps. But it may be more like the voice who intrudes into the narrative of his novel, The Nature of Blood, to accuse Othello of being an Uncle Tom, “Wide receiver in the Venetian army” (Phillips, 1997: 181) — one more voice in a novel of many narratives and voices, complicating perspective, authority, and angle. Here the methods of the fictive and nonfictive fuse in a version of biofiction. Perhaps it was no accident that the book Foreigners, in which “Northern Lights” appears, was categorized by its UK publishers as nonfiction, and its US publishers as fiction.
Why is Phillips’s work geared this way? Is it simply a matter of style, a postmodern tic, a revivification of modernism? Here we get to the heart of the matter from a thematic and philosophical point of view. One might think of Phillips’s work, for instance, in a lineage reaching back to the multimodal narratives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1971/1922), or the fragmented components of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1988/1922). Phillips combines both of these methods — the biographical and the dispersed — but in highly structured and motivated ways. What those structures and motivations are will be clear if we ask the simple question of what the nucleus is around which Phillips’s narratives and interrogations circulate. In “Leaving Home”, the story of John Ocansey, we see how the biofictive form is inseparable from the legacy of the slave trade and the post-imperial, postcolonial aftermath of which Phillips himself is the inheritor. In “Northern Lights” we see something similar: here we have the postcolonial inheritance in Leeds, implicating Phillips himself, his characters, and, in different ways, we ourselves as readers, no matter who or where we are. The biofictive, in this regard, is a way of understanding the massive and dispersed but still resonant effects of past history, in which the past is by no means over but continues in fragmented form into the lives of its inheritors — in which their very lives may be an instance of that fragmentation. The biofictive is a form of understanding those lives in their strange vibrations and dissonance.
In this regard Phillips’s approach proposes particular forms of knowledge as particular forms of narrative in a postcolonial world. It is not as if that knowledge — or in some sense those versions of the world — pre-exist the narrative. Rather the narrative becomes the substance both of aspects of our contemporary world, and of our understanding of those aspects. We would not know our world in the same way without the postcolonial biofictive; it is a form of epistemology.
The biofictive and forms of knowing
Let me consider some of Phillips’s fiction in that light. It is quite clear that if his biographies take on fictional form, then his fiction is characteristically channelled through the biographical. Phillips has commented frequently on the idea that his pathway into a novel is primarily through character (Clingman, 2017: 4). Again, this is not entirely unconventional: many writers will feel that their characters come alive in their work, directing the plot in their organic unfolding and development. Character in that sense is one thing, but it is in the interplay between character and situation that the biographical element emerges. How did this particular character come to be in this situation? How does the situation both generate and constrain his or her development? This is the matter of biography, and, as Bénédicte Ledent has shown, in Phillips’s work it has been a central feature, geared compellingly towards empathy, intimacy, and dignity, reclaiming the value of generally unexamined lives (Ledent, 2011). What I shall be doing here is taking Ledent’s key insights and developing them in the direction of form and epistemology in Phillips’s consistently experimental fiction.
In Higher Ground, for instance, described on its title page as “A Novel in Three Parts”, the three central characters are an African complicit in the slave trade, a black man in a southern US jail in the 1970s, and a Jewish woman who has survived the Holocaust (Phillips, 1989). In each case, the biofictive comes to the fore, not least because of the constellation of these three stories across time and space. Does biography, in that sense, resonate beyond the confines of the individual self in its place and time? In what perspective can we understand it? Standard forms of biography cannot raise those questions, but in Phillips’s version of the biofictive they become essential to the exploration. Phillips’s novel Cambridge (1991) takes such questions in a different direction, partly because of Phillips’s own biography as a person and writer. One of the central characters is called Emily — a distal invocation, Phillips has remarked, of Emily Brontë, who has been so important to him, to the point where he keeps a picture of Brontë at his writing desk (Agathocleous, 2015: n.p.; Clingman, 2017: 5). So fiction has leaked into (auto)biography which leaks back into fiction in Cambridge; and this is then doubled in Phillips’s most recent novel, The Lost Child, as we shall see. All of these aspects are variants on, harmonics in the key of, the biofictive.
How does it work in detail? Here I would like to consider a novel which I have discussed in depth before, because it seems emblematic of these and other questions. The Nature of Blood (1997) is a characteristic Phillips work, except raised to a fairly high exponential power. It is a novel composed of individual biographies dispersed across time and space. There is Eva Stern, Holocaust survivor, just after the Second World War; there is Othello, in Venice, in the sixteenth century; there is a “collective” biography of a Jewish community in the town of Portobuffole, near Venice, in the fifteenth century; there is Malka, an Ethiopian Jewish woman brought to Israel in the 1980s. If Phillips’s approach in each of these stories is biographical, examining the relation between character and context (inevitably a feature common to most if not all fiction), then the modalities of the novel begin to raise the banner of the specifically biofictive. Eva Stern’s narrative is told mainly in the first person: a version of autobiography. Yet if such a version implies any notion of self-knowledge or subjective plenitude, its form, in Phillips’s hands, suggests otherwise. Given the nature of Eva’s experience, her narrative, even in the first person, is a displaced one, working at various levels of memory and forgetting, of conscious and unconscious prompting. The “real” in Eva’s life is a disappearing horizon, both internal and external; the syntax of her life is a broken one, it quite literally does not make sense to her (Clingman, 2009: 81–83). Moreover, there are things about her that we do not know, that she may not know herself, except through various versions of approximation, deferral, and indirection. In and of itself this instance of the biofictive prompts various questions. How do we understand biography in any level of texture or depth? How do we understand biography in the aftermath — which is never an aftermath — of trauma? Where does the knowledge of self or other begin, and where does it end? What does it mean to inhabit undecidable space, or to try to narrate it? As Dominick LaCapra (2001: 41) puts it, trauma is “a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence”. In response, Phillips’s approach testifies to a certain kind of narrative tact, delicacy, and compassion — to allow Eva her private space of the unknowable (Craps, 2008: 197 ff.). There are inviolable boundaries beyond which knowledge of the other becomes invasion, coercion, or appropriation, something akin to a forced confession. And there is also an estimation here: the biographical understood only as the full and complete “nonfictive” may constitute that violation in and of itself. The biofictive, by contrast, may be the form that understands such a principle. This is a point that cannot be emphasized enough. Paradoxically, through its points of entry into the inner self, the biofictive finds ways to respect the inviolable rights of the character and the unknowable dimensions of anyone’s story.
This may then be the basis for the distinction between fictional biography, particularly of the kind we find in certain forms of historical fiction, and the biofictive. The former will make things up, often about well-known figures; the latter proposes a different form of understanding the self, usually (though not always) about figures who are altogether unknown. We see this enacted in the other narratives of The Nature of Blood. The story of Othello (certainly a well-known one) is also told mainly in the first person, though with other narrative intrusions, but here the very nature of his rather stilted private language appears to be othered in its enunciation — a construct or effect of the various histories into which he has entered and which have entered into him, the sign and medium of his alienation in Venice. With Malka we see an essential gap between her private enunciation and any form of public voice or presence. Her history — as is Eva’s, as is Othello’s — is a hidden one, unfound in any public arena. These characters are like Gabriel/Solomon in Phillips’s A Distant Shore, whose complex private history, told in various forms of first and third person, and present and past tense, is entirely hidden in the broader national narrative into which his silence has entered. As Gabriel/Solomon puts it in that novel, in unforgettable words, “If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps” (Phillips, 2003: 266). It is the biofictive mode that can most suggestively intimate that otherwise unknown and hidden history.
In these novels, the individual narratives indicate that questions of perspective, frame, disjunction, and interruption are specific propositions of the biofictive. But then there is the composite nature of the novels themselves, comprised of the interaction of the various stories. In such a “composition” — in The Nature of Blood, for instance — we might ask, who is the subject of the novel as a whole? Whose biography, if we want to think of it that way, is the novel? In such a constellated structure, the biographical is inseparable from its form: it is the biofictive as a collective, dispersed, fragmented compilation across space and time in which no single biography is reducible to any other, but in which all are linked in the broken route of the novel’s explorations. 3 Such a form proposes something significant about how identity and subjectivity — “subject matter” in a precise sense — are constituted across space and time in the postcolonial and transnational moment of our complex inheritances. For that is surely the point. These are not just any biofictions. They are biofictions that are the product of the history of Europe in relation to itself and to the rest of the world, in which the present is connected to the past not in a linear or continuous way, but in forms of synaptic overlay and gap. These are stories of Africans and Jews, slaves and slave traders, migrants and refugees. The biofictive becomes the biography of our time, in our postcolonial, post-imperial aftermath. How would you write such a story in purely nonfictional form? Perhaps it cannot be done. In that light, the biofictive is not only essential to the story, it becomes the story itself — a way of seeing, a way of telling, a way of understanding the world.
There are other writers who invoke similar territory in their work — W. G. Sebald, for instance, who writes forms of the biofictive in The Emigrants (1997) or, most particularly, Austerlitz (2001a). If the latter is written in modes that shadow the biographical, this is only biography as rendered through various transmissions, gaps, and concealed subject matter, so that the object of the story is not one that can finally be told. Sebald too works the interplay between the fictive and nonfictive, which is why he refused to call Austerlitz a novel, but rather described it as “a prose work of an undefined nature” (Sebald, 2001b: n.p.). Both Sebald and Phillips write in the aftermath of historical trauma — a trauma that created the narrative splits and incompletions that their biofictions trace. To be sure, the trauma to which Sebald responds is primarily the Holocaust, though with certain imperial and post-imperial overtones. Phillips’s primary address is to the post-imperial, yet his own response to the history of Jews in Europe is well documented, both by himself and others, and is readily visible in novels such as Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood. 4 In this regard we see how the postcolonial edges into other histories, into other spatio-temporalities, and it is absolutely characteristic of Caryl Phillips that he should explore these, interested as he is in metonymies of linkage as a way of recovering otherwise suppressed histories. The biofictive approaches of Phillips and Sebald create a composite image of our time, as long as by “our time” we understand the layered moments and experiences, the non-contiguous continuities that have created the world we inhabit. 5
There are ramifications in such approaches. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) writes of the chronotope as the ground of the novel as a form. In Phillips’s fiction, or in Sebald’s, the chronotope is the biofictive, dispersed and linked across time and space. But as much as their stories involve trauma and loss, these are not entirely narratives of suppression. In Giorgio Agamben’s account, the biopolitical is the means whereby sovereignty creates subjection — the bare life of the homo sacer who is included in the realm of power only by way of exclusion, the foundation of sovereignty itself. In writing such as Phillips’s and Sebald’s, however, the biofictive renders the effects of sovereignty on the subject but also — in the very form of its writing — becomes a mode of resistance to pure abjection or total negation. This is partly because of the way it links disparate lives, partly because of the way the individual lives are conceived, recovered from the oblivion of history. Instead of being included only by way of exclusion, their biopolitical exclusion becomes a principle of biofictive inclusion. This is where we catch a glimpse of “power’s inability to fully access life” (Campbell and Sitze, 2013: 14). The biofictive becomes an alternative, resistant conception of the bio-sphere, the form in which the human bios can be told. This is its own, deeper form of politics.
The Lost Child
We see aspects of all these patterns in Phillips’s novel The Lost Child. One of its major characters is Monica Johnson, a woman who evokes many of Phillips’s female characters, such as Eva Stern in The Nature of Blood, or Dorothy Jones in A Distant Shore. Monica is the woman as outsider — if not the homo sacer, then in some ways the femina sacra who is both inside and outside the cultural regime that simultaneously includes and excludes her. She is the white woman who is marginalized because she has dared to approach the margins of her world in marrying, and then leaving, a man from the West Indies. She is also the mother of Tommy, who is murdered in a fictional allusion to the Moors murders in the northwest England of the 1960s. Tommy’s murderer is a man Monica had taken up with, whom Tommy was taught to think of as his “Uncle Derek”; it is some time after Monica hears that her son’s body has been found that she commits suicide, by taking an overdose of pills. Monica’s story, like Eva’s or Dorothy’s, is told in various loops of time and interiority; like Gabriel/Solomon in A Distant Shore, she returns to tell her own first-person narrative after she herself is dead. Like Eva and Dorothy, she ends up in an asylum — the place of refuge also a place of surveillance, the biopolitical enacted in her life. As for Tommy, in a new variation for Phillips, his story is told completely through silence — his silence — or alternatively through the rather loquacious but also agonized first-person narrative of his brother Ben — a narrative organized according to various music titles punctuating his life at different stages. Tommy’s silence evokes the silenced histories that Phillips’s fiction works to recover, and one music title is present only in its absence: The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1969), whose “deaf, dumb and blind boy” is abused by his Uncle Ernie, analogue to Uncle Derek in the novel. 6 These are elements of the novel’s allusive (and often elusive) microtexture to be sure, but in Phillips’s world the micro is macro, and vice versa.
In other words, we have again the constellated biofictive of a Phillips novel, but this is only heightened in its most alluring and suggestive feature: the incorporation of a narrative at once fictional and nonfictional, in the story of Emily Brontë — who becomes a character in the novel — and of the character she created in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff. Some of the meta-levels of the biofictive may be apparent here, and I will try to enumerate them. Emily Brontë is presented in the last days of her life, and as such the biofictive quality of the novel is enormously complex as the text rotates through various perspectives, focalized through Emily’s consciousness, yet modulated in a free indirect style that invokes not only her perceptions, but also her suppositions of what others might perceive. Emily is being taken care of by Charlotte Brontë, who mentions their sister Anne, elsewhere in the house: “Perhaps she might welcome a visit from tenderhearted Anne?” (Phillips, 2015: 97). 7 Here is the focalized, free indirect style. But whose perspective is this, and whose adjective is “tenderhearted”: Emily’s or Charlotte’s — or in some form, either more muted or intrusive, the narrator’s? And in what tone is it rendered? Similarly, in Emily’s revolving consciousness we get different images of her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë. We learn that “[h]is stern demeanour and distant sentiments appear to be entirely unaffected by the predicament of his poor child” (106). Yet whose view is this? In context, it appears to be Charlotte’s, yet the passage modulates back into Emily’s perspective as we learn how close she and her father once were: “It is now wrong of him to hide away and edge furtively into her room at the dead of night when he imagines that she is asleep. Or has she been dreaming this?” (106). These undulating ripples of the narrative destabilize yet also enrich the very concept of biography. When Emily’s story ends with her dying — “She lives now in two worlds. She understands” (112) — it resonates as a model of the biofictive itself.
It is instructive then that The Lost Child has occasioned some criticism on the grounds of its factual inaccuracy. According to Patsy Stoneman (2016), writing in Brontë Studies, Phillips’s novel is full of misrepresentations. 8 Emily Brontë never took to her bed, except perhaps on the last day, and kept both Charlotte and Anne at an anguished distance. Charlotte and Emily did not travel to Belgium alone; their father Patrick went with them. The Reverend Patrick Brontë did not keep an aloof distance from the people of Haworth but cared deeply about his parishioners. Stoneman invokes Linda Hutcheon, saying that what Hutcheon calls “‘historiographic metafiction’ — fiction which builds on and weaves through known facts — is only plausible when those facts are scrupulously observed” (Stoneman, 2016: 275). Yet Hutcheon herself provides a different rationale for historiographic metafiction, observing that it generally sets up a non-resolved dialectic with the historical in order to problematize orders of knowledge and representation: “It both installs and then blurs the line between fiction and history” (Hutcheon, 1987: 293). She also points out that in some historiographic metafictions, factual details are deliberately falsified (she mentions J. M. Coetzee’s Foe [1986], but we might equally add Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children [2000/1981]). 9 That is surely part of the point of the “meta” in “metafiction”: to ambiguate orders of the known, to unsettle both fact and questions of perspective. In altering the historical record — particularly in ways that are easily discoverable — the fictiveness of fiction is asserted. But that is also a way of encouraging us to consider the constructed nature of our received narratives. All of this is part of Phillips’s biofictive method, and perhaps for a particular purpose: isn’t it the case that by altering the “real” the biofictive can recover narratives not in the historical record?
This is where The Lost Child becomes so intriguing in its approach to Wuthering Heights, particularly in its reinscription of the story of Heathcliff. As represented in The Lost Child, Heathcliff is the son of an African mother, a former slave abandoned in the streets of Liverpool; his father is Mr Earnshaw, a married man whose business dealings in the shipping trade of Liverpool link him with the slave institutions of the West Indies. In Earnshaw’s first sexual encounter with the African woman, her mind goes back to the captain of the ship who bought her and brought her to England, keeping her shackled on the floor of his cabin for his pleasure. Earnshaw is thus the metonymic father of the slave child: a profound way of capturing and expressing the history. When the African woman dies, desperate and destitute, it is Earnshaw who “rescues” Heathcliff and brings him home to Wuthering Heights — a comment perhaps on the doubled nature of empathy and morality in the era of slavery. Apart from the intrinsic interest of this, the biofictive dimensions of the novel go through something akin to a multiplier effect. For one thing, a fictional character in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, whose story has come down in the “real” of literary history, is re-biographied and given a different, perhaps historically more “real” story in The Lost Child. This re-biography then is also a form of simultaneous reading and writing: a different evaluation of the lost story of Wuthering Heights, even as it becomes a fictive component in Phillips’s own novel. We might think of this as a form of recovered history — fictive to be sure — suppressed but also invited in Brontë’s original: the biofictive in action. Here is the intersection of one fiction with another, one “real” with another, where in a kind of chiasmic interchange both “reals” intersect with each other’s fictions, and vice versa. This is where the biofictive meets not only the metafictive but what we might term the hyperfictive.
But if we are tempted to think of the “original” Heathcliff story — its inclusion only by way of exclusion — as a version of the biopolitical handed down in the received traditions of the literary, then part of the genius of The Lost Child is to suggest that Emily Brontë’s construction of the story was in its own way a form of the biofictive. How this is so returns us to the microtextures of Emily’s consciousness. In this account, part of the impetus for the appearance of the lost child, Heathcliff, in her novel, was the life of her dissipated brother, Branwell, also a lost child of sorts. It is while she is waiting for Branwell to come home at night that “she once again climbed the short, steep staircase of her imagination, and again she found herself dreaming of the boy who came from the moors” (105). In the extremity of her last days, life and fiction are utterly fused in her mind: her brother with Heathcliff, Earnshaw with her father. Emily asks Charlotte whether she remembers when their father deserted them and returned with the boy: “Papa wrapped him in his cloak and brought him to us, do you remember?” (109) — to which Charlotte tells her she is confused. It is worth paying attention to these oscillations of consciousness for what they tell us about the biofictive impulses and structure of Phillips’s novel as a whole. In Emily Brontë we have an author/fictional character who in her own biofictive form has created biographies in her novel out of her “real” life. And all this leads into a new novel, The Lost Child, which repeats that process at another level. For The Lost Child too has drawn on the author’s biofictive experience: the reason Phillips was drawn to Liverpool and the hidden story of Heathcliff in the first place. Insofar as Emily Brontë is both character and author, Phillips has been drawn to her and/as her own “lost child”. Across the two novels and the two histories the result is an Escher-like construct in which the staircases of the fictive and nonfictive go up and down at the same time, leading into one another in a recursive progression of mutual invocation.
The biofictive: Loss and resistance
Beyond formal accomplishment — at the level where form becomes a form of meaning — what is the significance of this all? Here we have to think not only of the individual stories in The Lost Child but, as in The Nature of Blood, of their relationship in the novel as a whole. In The Lost Child, the resonances across the different stories are poignant and acute. We see many “lost children”, including Monica, Tommy, Ben, Emily Brontë, Branwell, Heathcliff. When Emily dreams “of the boy who came from the moors […] [t]he boy who went back to the moors” (109), that boy is Heathcliff, Branwell, and Tommy. Even the parents in the novel are lost children of a kind: Heathcliff’s mother, Monica’s father, Patrick Brontë. Silence connects the stories of Tommy, Monica, the African woman, Heathcliff, and Emily Brontë’s own hidden narrative. On this issue, Caryl Phillips himself has been clear, remarking that part of the logic of his fictive method is to recover the lost and silenced stories that have never been “in the history books” (Agathocleous, 2015: n.p.). Linda Hutcheon makes the same point about historiographic metafiction more generally — that a key aspect of its purpose is to recover the stories of the silenced and excluded (1987: 287–88). The Lost Child, therefore, is an assemblage of narratives silenced through biopolitical history, but as much as we absorb the silence, we should also see the connective links — the collective and dispersed biofictive across space and time, including literary time.
Certain moments in the novel provide insight into how we might proceed. Ben recalls Tommy telling him that their mother might visit them in their foster home: “I suppose it all depends on her nerves” (132). When Earnshaw first has sex with the African woman, his dexterity helps to soothe “her nervous condition” (10). The reference in both cases is surely to Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition” (Sartre, 1967: 17). 10 There is an implicit fictional connection here between a white freeborn Englishwoman in the late twentieth century, and a formerly enslaved nineteenth-century African, seen through a Fanonian (as channelled by Sartre) postcolonial lens. This is an index of a generosity and capaciousness in Phillips’s vision, and some of its implications are clear. Ledent and O’Callaghan argue persuasively that The Lost Child should be seen in the context of a postcolonial and post-imperial aftermath in which what is at stake are all the lost children engendered by its history — and also a new version of literary parenthood. Phillips, they suggest, wants us to build bridges across and between his different narratives to see the links between stories of “those creolized and miscegenated, often illegitimate, children of empire, in most cases unwanted and unacknowledged, who are still wandering in search of a textual home” (Ledent and O’Callaghan, 2017: 240). To this cogent point I would add some others. First, that such a syntactic version of abandonment and reclamation is one that only the biofictive, in this form, can tell. Second, that in these accounts of subjection to a history of power which at the same time asserts the possibility of a different form of epistemology and narrative, the biofictive recognizes, and also stages its own resistance to, the force of the biopolitical. And third, as we see in the crossovers between a Phillips and a Sebald, or in the resonances among the different stories of The Lost Child, that the postcolonial must be seen not only in its core domains, but also at its edges, where it intersects and resonates with other frames of experience, whether diasporic, post-traumatic, migrant, or fugitive. Such forms of dispersal and linkage are part of Phillips’s larger fictional project.
In The Lost Child, thus, there are a number of issues and dimensions to contemplate. There is the slave trade; there is a set of twentieth-century fictional characters; there is a nineteenth-century author who may have created her most iconic and disturbing character as a transmutation of her own experience — and of a history both invoked and elided; there is a reading of all these relations from the twenty-first century, an era which has inherited this past history, simultaneously fictive and nonfictive. There are the lost children of the novel whose stories are linked in metonymic connection, even as this is disrupted by the broken routes of a wider inclusive/exclusive history. This is the form of the biofictive in Phillips’s hands. What we have here is not just a question of “alternative facts” — which might be the stuff of fictional biography, a certain genre of historical fiction — but an investigation into the nature of the real and of inheritance in a highly complex world. Here the interpretive and the real are not mutually exclusive but are functions of one another, so that the biographical and the fictive are never entirely complete but must be understood together as a way of seeing, of approach. The novel’s essay — I use the term deliberately to return it to its original meaning of a trial, a testing, an attempt — is by no means accidental, but involves registrations and calibrations from the most intimate to the largest scale in a world of postcolonial and post-imperial intersections. The Lost Child constructs a form of investigation which is also a way of understanding the world we inhabit in the time and space of this moment, our chronotope. It indicates that such a “we” is both fragmented and asymmetric, and yet intrinsically linked. It suggests how “we” might conceive and think of this moment, the biofictive, which is both our inheritance and our contemplative obligation.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.