Concepto de Insolvencia inminente AP Girona

16 _{Phillips, “Disrupting the Master Narrative: An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” 96.} 17 _{Caryl Phillips, “Of This Time, of That Place: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” by}

Jenny Sharpe, Transition 68 (1995): 160.

that you cannot be too judgmental about a character. You have to find some kind of trust, some form of engagement. You attempt to breathe life into these people and if you’re lucky they breathe life into you.”19

The interviews also cover common ground in their discussions of the inter- related themes that are pervasive in Phillips’s work: those of displacement, home/homelessness, race and identity, eurocentrism, victimization and com- plicity. Whether he is depicting slavery, migration, the Holocaust, or geno- cide, whether his narratives are set in England, the Caribbean, the USA, or Africa, whether he is writing about the contemporary moment or centuries ago, he is always seeking out the stories of people who have been displaced and are misunderstood and who do not have the security of belonging to a particular history. Keenly aware that the powerful desire to be rooted carries with it the violent potential for exclusion, Phillips has adopted a pluralist notion of home and advocates for a more fluid sense of human identity in his writing. His engagement with the world, as evidenced, for example, in the major reading tours he has given in twenty-one different countries in the past twenty-odd years, suggests that Phillips has moved beyond the need for af- filiation as configured in conventional terms. In so doing, he has joined the ranks of other transnational authors who write across borders and who identi- fy with a sense of belonging that emerges from the movement between spaces rather than from any particular locale. He names as his colleagues those writers who cannot be easily identified with one particular national tradition, such as J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Pico Iyer, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Rohinton Mistry. It is also significant that Phil- lips repeatedly identifies James Baldwin as a person who exerted a great in- fluence on his early writing, since Baldwin, whose interest lay in matters involving race consciousness, also declared a transatlantic identity for himself.

One final thread that runs through his interviews has to do with Phillips’s insistence on remaining true to his artistic convictions even in the face of criti- cism from various directions. A telling anecdote he recounts to Stephen Cling- man involves an African-American woman who was extremely angry at him for including the white woman Joyce as one of the children claimed by the African father in Crossing the River.20 _{Phillips refuses to invest in notions of}

racial solidarity, and a number of his works – particularly Cambridge and The

19 _{Phillips, “Caryl Phillips Interviewed by Graham Swift,” 100.} 20 _{Phillips, “Other Voices,” 133.}

Nature of Blood – demonstrate his interest in examining the way that history

has affected white people as well as black. Other unpopular views that he has willingly voiced throughout his career include an unflattering representation of Caribbean men in The Final Passage, the suggestion of a corrupt govern- ment in St Kitts in A State of Independence, the accusation of European tribal- ism in The European Tribe, the indictment of African involvement in the slave trade in Higher Ground, the critique of the African Americans’ idealiza- tion of Africa in The Atlantic Sound, and the acknowledgement of a vexed relationship between African Americans and Caribbean immigrants in Dancing

in the Dark. J.M. Coetzee has commented that Phillips’s fiction has a single

aim – “remembering what the West would like to forget”;21 _{clearly, Phillips’s}

recollecting proves challenging for many different audiences, given the com- plicated dynamics of race, class, and power in the diaspora as a whole. Phillips’s interviews also reflect shifts in his perspective that occur natural- ly over time as he moves from England to other locations, as he advances from one academic position to another, as he develops a stronger sense of himself as a writer, and as he gains a fuller sense of relationship and the inter- relationship between his fiction and his non-fiction. But, as argued earlier, it is the consistencies of his reflections over the past two decades that are more prominent, and they indicate that he likely had a general vision of his pur- poses from early on. When I asked him if he intended his texts to build on one another, he said:

I’m increasingly aware of the territory that I’m trying to cross and re-cross. In that sense, inevitably the texts do speak to each other. Or maybe I should put it this way: they will eventually all speak to each other. But right now it’s pretty much a matter of just staying on the scent of whatever it is that is pulling me forward.22

The driving forces behind Phillips’s writing seem to be his commitment to the reworking of history to reveal new layers of analysis about the past and his ethic of empathy and concern for those who have been overtaken by historical injustices. In a number of interviews, he is asked whether he thinks he sees himself as an optimist or a pessimist. While his answers vary, he more fre- quently suggests that some degree of hope does emerge from a heightened

21 _{J.M. Coetzee, “What We Like to Forget,” New York Review of Books 44.17 (6 Novem-}

ber 1997): 41.

understanding of the causes of suffering, even if that understanding cannot yet offer immediate or practical remedies. As Jenny Sharpe notes,

he is skeptical of facile solutions to the deep and pervasive problems left by history, but he holds out the possibility that, even beset by tragedy, one can and should meet these challenges open-eyed and with courage.23

Phillips’s works ultimately affirm those things that people cling to as they struggle to survive – love, faith, family – even as they call for the need of alternative social systems that do not impose unnecessary suffering on the marginalized. His is a moral imperative based on understanding and analysis which implicitly calls for reform, even if the means of transformation are never outlined in the texts themselves.

Phillips’s overall uniqueness as a writer is confirmed by the way in which he represents himself and his literary purposes in his many interviews. He is always challenging boundaries, whether in terms of racial divisions, distinc- tions of genre, or geographical identities. He resists pigeon-holing by wearing many labels at once, as seen, for example, in the way he allows himself to be identified as a black British writer, a Caribbean writer, or a postcolonial writer without feeling the need to rank his affiliations in a particular hierarchical order. He epitomizes a sense of cosmopolitanism which is based on a sense of homelessness that has over time transformed into an affiliation with multiple homes at once. The resulting complexity of Phillips’s writing and life has clearly made a significant impression upon his readers, for he has received considerable critical attention for his overarching project throughout his career. He has been given honorary degrees from Amherst College (1995), Leeds Metropolitan University (1997), the University of York (2003), Leeds University (2003), and Yale University (2006); he has received numerous literary fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992; his novel Crossing the River was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993; his fiction has been translated into eleven languages; he has been honoured at the international conference, “Caryl Phillips: 25 Years of Writ- ing,” held at the University of Liège, Belgium, in 2006, which was the im- petus behind the present collection of essays; and he has been the recipient of many prestigious prizes, ranging from the Malcolm X Prize for Literature, which he received in 1987, to the PEN / Beyond Margins Award, which he was given in 2006. Finally, a collection of his interviews entitled Conversa-

tions with Caryl Phillips, which was published in 2009 by the University

Press of Mississippi in their Literary Conversations series, indicates not just the current assessment of Phillips as a writer of considerable significance but also the realization that his reflections on his intellectual life contained in the various interviews are critical supplements that aid in understanding and ap- preciating the magnitude of his work.

W

C

Coetzee, J.M. “What We Like to Forget,” New York Review of Books 44.17 (6 No- vember 1997): 38–41.

Garrett, George. “Separate Prisons,” New York Times Book Review (16 February

1992): 1, 24–25.

Jaggi, Maya. “Rites of Passage,” Guardian (3 November 2001): 6–7. Phillips, Caryl. The Atlantic Sound (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). ——. Cambridge (London: Bloomsbury, 1991).

——. “Caryl Phillips” (1995), interview with Pico Iyer, in Conversations with Caryl

Phillips, ed. Schatteman, 36–45.

——. “Caryl Phillips Interviewed by Graham Swift,” Kunapipi 13.3 (1991): 96–103. ——. “Caryl Phillips: Reflections on the Past Twenty-Five Years,” by Renée Schatte-

man, in Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Schatteman, 160–72.

——. “Crisscrossing the River: An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by Carol Margaret Davison, A R I E L: A Review of International English Literature 25.4 (October

1994): 91–99.

——. Crossing the River (London: Bloomsbury, 1993). ——. Dancing in the Dark (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005).

——. “Disrupting the Master Narrative: An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by Renée Schatteman, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 23.2 (2001): 93–106.

——. A Distant Shore (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003). ——. The European Tribe (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). ——. The Final Passage (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). ——. Higher Ground (London: Viking 1989).

——. “Interview with Caryl Phillips” (December 2002), by Charles Wilkin, in Con-

versations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Schatteman, 118–34.

——. “An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by Louise Yelin, Culturefront 7.2 (1998):

52, 53 & 80.

——. The Nature of Blood (London: Faber & Faber, 1997).

——. “Of This Time, of That Place: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” by Jenny Sharpe, Transition 68 (1995): 154–61.

——. “Other Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips” (October 2001), by Stephen Clingman, Salmagundi 143 (2004): 113–40.

——. The Shelter (Oxford: Amber Lane, 1984).

——. A State of Independence (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).

Schatteman, Renée T., ed. Conversations with Caryl Phillips (Jackson: U P of Missis- sippi, 2009).

——. “Introduction” to Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Schatteman, ix–xviii. Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940; New York: New American Library, 1964).