Abstract
Ping Su explores madness and silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003) and In the Falling Snow (2009) by focusing on two characters: Dorothy in the former and Earl in the latter. This chapter shows that both Dorothy’s and Earl’s feelings of insecurity and extreme loneliness lead them to suffer a common condition: abandonment neurosis. As a result, they both adopt silence as a coping strategy. Surprisingly perhaps, their withdrawal into madness is represented as a step toward self-restoration and self-healing. Therefore, this chapter argues that madness and silence, rather than reflecting a passive and submissive position, can be read as active strategies of resistance and subject formation, suggesting the author’s ambivalent attitude toward them.
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Notes
- 1.
The study defines “an African-Caribbean as a person who was born in the Caribbean, or whose family originated there” (Fearon et al. 1542).
- 2.
I include Zadie Smith here because, even though her novel White Teeth contains “no extended exploration of real madness,” “the overwhelming rhetoric of madness—both in the dialogue and in the narrative—and the scattered mad minor characters offer a possible and probable lens through which to read the entire novel and its major themes, particularly the theme of postcolonial migration” (Josephs 157, italics in original).
- 3.
Although madness is a social concept whose many facets cannot be encompassed within one universally acceptable definition, this chapter will simply equate it with mental conditions that can be diagnosed within Western medicine so as to reveal and highlight the psychological problems and sufferings of the characters analysed.
- 4.
These writers represent madness as a means of resisting “the hierarchies, assumptions, and values of colonial societies” (Josephs 9), which is closely related to the colonial experience, while Phillips, exploring madness in a broader context and stressing its function as a survival mechanism, treats it as creative subject formation in resistance rather than merely opposition to norms.
- 5.
Although Dorothy is white, she can be said to suffer the consequences of racism too since her life is totally shattered when Solomon, her only friend, is brutally murdered by a group of young racists.
- 6.
Although Fanon has only used it to analyse the mental state of black colonized people, this mental illness is not confined to a particular phenotype. For instance, Germaine Guex’s The Abandonment Neurosis, on the basis of which Fanon carried out his study, treated this type of neurosis as universal.
- 7.
Yet despite their non-communication, John McLeod perceptively states that “their brief encounter engenders the possibility of a significant soundless understanding” (11).
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Su, P. (2018). Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow. In: Ledent, B., O'Callaghan, E., Tunca, D. (eds) Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98180-2_4
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