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“The Whole Root Is Somewhere in the Music”: Jazz, Soul, and
Literary Influence in James Baldwin and Caryl Phillips
Gerald David Naughton
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 44, Numbers
2-3, April-July 1013, pp. 113-139 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ari.2013.0020
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Gulf University for Science __ACCESS_STATEMENT__ Technology (18 May 2014 04:45 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ari/summary/v044/44.2-3.naughton.html
113
“The Whole Root Is Somewhe re i n the Mu sic”:
Ja zz, Soul, and L itera r y Influence in
Ja mes Baldwin and Car y l Phi llips
Gerald David Naughton
Abstract: is article discusses the contemporary British Caribbean
writer Caryl Phillips and the twentieth-century African-American
writer James Baldwin within a comparative framework that
speaks to the expanding issue of international (and transnational)
American literary inuence. Baldwin has frequently been cited by
Phillips as a major literary source, but the nature of this inuence
can be dicult to frame. e article is interdisciplinary in nature
and takes its theoretical framework not from narrative theory but
from music theory. Issues of creative repetition in black music and
rhythmic counterpoint in jazz are suggested as models that can be
applied to a relationship of literary inuence. e article applies
these issues to close readings of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957)
and Phillips’ In the Falling Snow (2009), focusing on the musical
structures, themes, and motifs that permeate both texts.
Keywords: James Baldwin; Caryl Phillips; literary inuence; jazz;
blues; soul; In the Falling Snow; “Sonny’s Blues”
In his 1987 collection of essays, e European Tribe, British Caribbean
novelist Caryl Phillips describes the European home of his literary
mentor, the African-American essayist and novelist James Baldwin.
Phillips visited Baldwin in the early 1980s as the older writer was coming
to the end of his literary career and before Phillips would nd literary
fame with the publication of the 1990 neo-slave narrative Cambridge.
For Phillips, the luxurious house in St. Paul de Vence, France served as
an imaginative icon of isolation:
ariel: a review of international english literature
Vol. 44 No. 2–3 Pages 113–139
Copyright © 2014 e Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
Whenever I arrive at the tall iron gates separating James Baldwin
from the outside world, my mind begins to wander. e gates
remind me of prison bars. I wonder if Baldwin has been in
prison, or whether this exile, his homosexuality, or his very spa-
cious home are the dierent forms of imprisonment. My mind
becomes supple, it feels strong and daring, and although the
questions and thoughts Baldwin provokes are not always logi-
cal, I have always found that there is something positive and
uplifting about his presence. Baldwin, unlike anybody else I
have ever met, has this ability to kindle the imagination. (e
European Tribe 39)
e quotation raises two interesting questions for scholarship both on
Baldwin and on Phillips. First: the image of the prison, when related
to Baldwin, seems potentially illuminating if also potentially problem-
atic—why should Phillips speculate, for example, that exile, luxury,
or homosexuality should be viewed as “imprisonment” for the black
American writer? Second: how should we conceptualise the (“supple,”
“illogical,” “uplifting”) inuence that James Baldwin has on a young
writer from outside of an American or African-American context?
ough the second of these questions strongly suggests the necessity
of reading Baldwin in a comparative light, the writer, until relatively
recently, has been underdiscussed by comparativists or by comparative
Americanists. Much scholarship on his oeuvre centres on the literary
models and other sources—whether white or black—that contributed
to the making of Baldwin as an artist, but notably few critics have ex-
tended this treatment beyond the borders of American literary history.
Baldwin as a source for other writers remains a much underdiscussed
gure, though eorts to consider the writer outside of an American con-
text have emerged in recent years. In this article, I hope to address these
two striking oversights by placing the Phillips-Baldwin dialectic within
a comparative framework that speaks to the expanding issue of interna-
tional (and transnational) American literary inuence.
ere is an obvious and very striking juxtaposition within Phillips’
image. e two gures follow very dierent trajectories: social, sexual,
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
or identitarian “imprisonment” for Baldwin, creative liberation for
Phillips. e image produced thus forms a challenging model for lit-
erary inuence. Whereas traditional models associate literary inuence
with power and authority, Phillips’ image suggests a reversal—one in
which the inuential writer is consigned to a form of metaphorical pow-
erlessness at precisely the moment when he or she actuates artistic po-
tential in another author.
e purpose of this article is to analyse the Baldwin-Phillips relation-
ship with reference to the two writers’ central preoccupation with black
music. Music, primarily jazz, soul, gospel, and the blues, forms an ena-
bling rubric in the work of both writers. rough a comparative reading
of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) and Phillips’ In the Falling Snow
(2009)—a reading that will focus on the musical structures, themes,
and motifs that permeate both texts—the article will suggest a dierent
model of literary inuence. It is a model of imprisonment for the inu-
ence and liberation for the inuenced that is best located not within a
traditional understanding of literary inuence studies but within black
musicology.
“e Blind Men’s Versions of the Elephant”
Caryl Phillips is one of a number of young writers who, reaching matu-
rity in the 1970s and ‘80s, began to seek out America as a cultural icon
beyond the focus of either his West Indian background or his British
upbringing. He has described his search for a literary and cultural frame
of reference as follows:
At that time I looked for people who could help me to under-
stand what was happening amongst my generation, you know,
what was happening on the streets. I wasn’t going to nd any
clues in V. S. Naipaul, for instance. I mean, he’s a Caribbean
author, sure, but he’s a Caribbean author whose sensibility was
such that he was never going to help me understand what was
going on with the police, what was going on with unemploy-
ment, what was happening in terms of migration, what was
happening in terms of social insurrection. So I looked to the
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
United States and to what was happening in black American
society. (Conversations with Caryl Phillips 130-31)
Phillips’ striking repetition of the phrases “what was happening” and
“what was going on” here, and their (apparently) logical conclusion in
“black America,” seems to place a “natural” aura of cultural signicance
around African-American experience. In contrast, when speaking of the
literary inuences that signicantly shaped him, Phillips occasionally
dismisses Caribbean writers as comparatively provincial. He felt that
George Lamming was similarly irrelevant: “Lamming’s ction, like V.S.
Naipaul’s, tended to be rooted in an exotic geography I didn’t recognize”
(Conversations with Caryl Phillips 48). Furthermore, while he considered
Caribbean writers as inapposite, he saw British writing as aloof and out
of touch. “e situation in England,” according to Phillips, “bespoke an
urgency that the literature wasn’t mirroring” (Conversations with Caryl
Phillips 48). Phillips is frequently disdainful of the now redundant
“old certainties” of Europe (qtd. in Adesokan 134); he prefers to posi-
tion himself as a writer of the multicultural Black Atlantic. And yet, as
Akinwumi Adesokan has argued, “Phillips denes his own intellectual
trajectory against the racial and national culture of black America” (134).
He attains his “pluralistic” understanding of identity only through his
immersion in African-American art, music, and literature.
us, at the beginning of his career Phillips turned not to the British
tradition or to the Caribbean one but to James Baldwin, who articulated
his sense of “what it meant to be a black person in an urban setting”
(qtd. in Stein 96). Baldwin’s cityscapes were seen as the locus of cul-
tural relevance in Phillips’ literary universe during the racially contested
1970s and ‘80s in Britain: “Black Americans wrote about the urban
experience I understood, and they were angry. Angela Davis, Jimmy
Baldwin: they were more in tune [than were British or Caribbean writ-
ers] with what I was going through” (Conversations with Caryl Phillips
48). He describes Baldwin as the “most important single literary inu-
ence” on him and attributes that inuence to both his life and his work
(Conversations with Caryl Phillips 25).
e issue of James Baldwin’s inuence on contemporary world litera-
ture should perhaps be contextualised here. Baldwin, it seems, is a writer
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
who inspires other writers. Chinua Achebe was only one of numerous
observers to remark upon the extraordinarily personal and widely diver-
gent reactions to Baldwin’s death in 1987:
Since James Baldwin passed away in his adopted home, France,
on the last day of November 1987, the many and varied trib-
utes to him, like the blind men’s versions of the elephant, have
been consistent in one detail—the immensity, the sheer prodi-
gality of endowment. (118)
Over twenty years after his death, James Baldwin continues to be an
impressively tractable source of literary inuence for young writers
from marginal backgrounds, within and (especially) beyond America’s
borders. His relevance is truly transnational, and in an era in which
American Studies has itself turned transnational, we nd in Baldwin a
fascinating case study. Apart from Caryl Phillips, a short sampling of
writers from various international backgrounds who nd in Baldwin
“something that kindles the imagination” would also need to include
writers from Pakistani (Mohsin Hamid), British-Asian (Hanif Kureishi),
Scottish (Andrew O’Hagan), Nigerian (Chris Abani), and Irish (Colm
Tóibín) contexts, to name only a few (Naughton 131–45).
Many of these writers have written on Baldwin and together their
critiques begin to form a basis for comparative analysis of the writer. A
quick survey of their essays points to the gamut of possible comparative
frameworks of analysis. While Phillips commends Baldwin for articulat-
ing “what it felt to be a black person in an urban setting” (qtd. in Stein
96), Chris Abani reads him in race-neutral terms as a writer of “the quiet
human moment” (Tóibín and Abani). Mohsin Hamid notes the “not in-
considerable inspiration” he took from reading Baldwin’s novel, Another
Country. Kureishi describes Baldwin as “perhaps [his] greatest inspira-
tion,” and he models his seminal essay “e Rainbow Sign” on Baldwin’s
e Fire Next Time, which he describes as “all anger and understanding”;
Kureishi identies Baldwin as a pluralist visionary of a transnational
future (Kureishi 8).
e transnational dimensions of the writer, suggested by global writ-
ers he has inuenced, have become the focus of recent scholarship
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
on Baldwin. James Campbell’s Exiled in Paris (1994) oered an early
foundation for considering Baldwin as a writer of nascent transna-
tionalism, Magdalena Zaborowska’s excellent James Baldwin’s Turkish
Decade: e Erotics of Exile (2008) refocused this project, and the recent
edited volume, James Baldwin: America and Beyond (2011), has further
extended Baldwin analysis into increasingly global paradigms. Such
volumes share an impulse both to (re)interpret James Baldwin and to
expand the framework of this interpretation. In 2000, Douglas Steward
wondered if Baldwin’s posthumous position in criticism had not become
that of a gure capable of “enabling an unrelenting critique of power in
[all of ] its multivalent national, racial, and sexual articulation” (94).
ough we may take issue with this version of Baldwin as some kind of
antidote to “power” in its manifold (cultural, historical, literary) mani-
festations, we must still be struck by this testament to his posthumous
literary relevance. e transnational aspect of this literary relevance (or
inuence) seems to be the most promising direction for forthcoming
Baldwin criticism.
e Problem of Literary Inuence
In speaking of inuence in this way, the intention is not to follow tra-
ditional literary historiography, producing a model of appropriation in
which literary “relations [are] built on dyads of transmission from one
unity (author, work, tradition) to another” (Clayton and Rothstein 3).
As a discipline, literary inuence studies has a distinctly nineteenth-
century aura (Ashley and Plesch 2). According to Louis Renza, it is a
method that “performed a conservative cultural function,” reinforcing
a canon of “classics” that is based on a model of exclusion (Renza 186).
ough the study of inuence was defended in Harold Bloom’s semi-
nal e Anxiety of Inuence, Bloom himself draws criticism on similar
grounds for upholding ideologies of “author” and “authority” while ig-
noring extraliterary inuences on and “culture-specic ideological cir-
cumstances” of the text (Renza 193, 197).
Inuence study seems strangely anachronistic in the wake of
Kristevian and Barthesian theories of intertextuality and the Death of
the Author respectively. Moreover, the study of race in literature should
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
be particularly vigilant in guarding against the ideological function of
canon building. However, within the discipline of African American
studies, literary inuence has re-emerged as a viable object of study.
Tracy Mishkin, who edited the volume Literary Inuence and African
American Writers, began this work of critical recovery, contending that
models of authorless intertextuality need not supplant the analysis of
literary inuence. Mishkin further questioned the notion that anxiety
and conict should be considered the primary modes of literary inu-
ence. Even before this volume, feminist and African-American critics
had in various ways challenged such prescriptive formulations. Mishkin
calls for a “more balanced view of the many types of interaction between
authors” (16). “It is time to stop taking overgeneralized, negative ap-
proaches for granted,” she writes, “and, instead, to listen to what the
authors have to say” (10).
Beyond theoretical or ideological concerns, any eort to rehabilitate
literary inuence study must equally overcome methodological chal-
lenges. Anand Patil has outlined the “limits of the literary inuence
study,” which “lacks denite methodology in general” (21). In making
this observation, however, Patil neglects to outline precisely what this
“denite methodology” should entail. Indeed, it may well be that the
imposition of some overriding methodology that could be applied to
various models of literary inuence in dierent contexts would only
lead us back to the outmoded version of literary inuence study that
upholds canonical models. It is notable that one of the shortcomings of
Mishkin’s eorts to make the case for the validity of inuence study in
African-American literature was, in the words of one reviewer, that her
volume was “less a ‘theory’ of inuence” than a “pragmatic critique of
the overgeneralizations implicit in other theories” (Hutchinson 523).
e problem of literary inuence, it seems to me, becomes most acute
when we view it as a discipline with an absent or decient methodol-
ogy or as something necessarily at odds with theory. In music theory,
however, we nd a uid model of inuence that is methodologically
grounded and therefore more sustainable. We may be reminded here
of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s observation that music “inuences me de-
spite myself” (qtd. in Christensen 416). Indeed, music has traditionally
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
served as a gure or trope to denote irresistible inuence. In examin-
ing the structures behind the seemingly organic inuence of music and
extending these structures to the analysis of literary texts, we begin to
arrive at the comparative model that best denes the Baldwin-Phillips
relationship.
Applying models of musical appropriation to literary texts may be the
only method with enough scope to encompass the rich and very diverse
inuence exercised by the iconic James Baldwin. Baldwin’s writing, as
he acknowledged on more than one occasion, aimed to replicate the
sources and structures of black music. Reecting on his years starting
out as an essayist and novelist in Paris, Baldwin said: “I’d been involved
essentially in language or rhetoric or in music, in a way, because I think
the whole root is somewhere in the music. ... it’s a curious process ...
which carries you ... simultaneously back and forward in time” (qtd. in
Murray & Maguire 44–45; emphasis added). Baldwin’s image of music’s
diachronic movement (“simultaneously back and forward in time”) is
suggestive of the larger framework of Signication, or “tropological revi-
sion,” whereby a specic trope is repeated with dierence between two
or more texts (Gates xxv). Moreover, his location of “the whole root”
of black art “somewhere in the music” points us towards a more active
understanding of inuence, appropriation, and repetition.
e process of tropological revision is crucial to understanding much
of black art. is is especially true of black music, in which motifs of
repetition and revision or refrain, far from creating “dyads of transmis-
sion” that reinforce author, authority, or canon (Clayton and Rothstein
3) actually form the basis for uidity and creativity. e blues idea of
“worrying the line,” as outlined by Sherley Anne Williams in “e Blues
Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry” (1977) serves to illus-
trate the point:
Repetition in blues is seldom word for word and the denition
of worrying the line includes changes in stress and pitch, the
addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, rep-
etitions of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues
cries which often punctuate the performance of the songs. (127)
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
us, repetition itself becomes an art form—one which enables move-
ment between and beyond registers (“stress and pitch”), sequence (“word
order”), and language (“wordless blues cries”). It becomes an art form
within an art form. It can take place within genre (“blues”), within the
song, within performance, even within the repeated line itself. Moreover,
as Baldwin’s idea of literature’s “rootedness” in music suggests, tropes, re-
frains, and inuences are frequently transmitted between artistic modes.
“Baldwin,” according to Scott Saul, “never displayed any technical fa-
miliarity with jazz music” (73). Nonetheless, jazz (as well as blues, soul,
and gospel) infuses much of his ction and nonction. His fascination
with jazz culminated in the astounding literary depiction of the jam ses-
sion at the end of “Sonny’s Blues,” which will form the basis of my read-
ing of that text. Yet his was not a formal understanding of the music: it
was engrained not in the music’s structures and construction but in its
far-reaching transformative artistic potential. In this sense alone, Saul
writes, the writer “did claim the jazz aesthetic for himself” (73). What
attracted him was jazz’s almost anarchic potential to move beyond its
own form; thus, he could claim, for example, Miles Davis as a literary
inuence every bit as important as Henry James (Saul 74).
is anarchic potential, according to Gayl Jones, nds its ultimate
expression in the antiphonal jam session. Spontaneous improvisations
symbolise a jazz motif which “oers a metaphor for freedom of move-
ment—spatial, temporal, and imaginative” (Jones 121). ere is a certain
heroism for Baldwin in the attainment of such freedoms. From the 1950s
and ‘60s onwards, the radically experimental Bebop described in “Sonny’s
Blues” gave way to the “risk-taking spirit of postbop jazz” (Saul 65) and
ultimately to the uninhibited risk-taking of free jazz—described by Karen
Omry as a “violent interruption” of our “aesthetic sensibility” (138).
However, even as it dismisses formal elements such as blues structures,
chord progression, and recognisable tonality, even as it “violently inter-
rupts” the musical tradition, jazz is working within the model of tro-
pological revision. Amiri Baraka commented on this seeming anomaly,
dening free jazz experimentation not as “new music” but as a “noble
and deant return ... to the nonchordal screams, rants, and hollers of
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
the early blues” (Scott 113). In the nal pages of Blues People, Baraka
writes:
e implications of this music are extraordinarily profound, and
the music itself, deeply and wildly exciting. Music and musician
have been brought, in a manner of speaking, face to face, with-
out the strict and often grim hindrances of overused Western
musical concepts; it is only the overall musical intelligence of
the musicians which is responsible for sharpening the music. It
is, for many musicians, a terrifying freedom. (227)
e model suggested here of both a return to roots and a “terrifying
freedom” will be explored in my comparative reading of Baldwin and
Phillips. To return to the quotation at the beginning of this essay—in
which Phillips combines images of prison and separation from the out-
side world with references to Baldwin’s ability to connect with him as a
younger writer—what I nd in studying Baldwin’s inuence on Phillips
is something similar to this simultaneous “rootedness” and “freedom.”
“Living with Sound”: “Sonny’s Blues”
“Sonny’s Blues” traces a trajectory from familial fragmentation and
generational misunderstanding to mutual recognition based on family,
vocation, and tradition, and it frames this narrative through musical
discourse. At one point in Baldwin’s story, we are told that living with
Sonny “wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was like living with
sound” (126). We are also told that the sound of Sonny’s music “didn’t
make any sense” to the rest of the house. To his brother, “his music
seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded just that
weird and disordered” (127). It is precisely this supposed “disorder” that
the story strives to unravel.
Like much of Baldwin’s ction, “Sonny’s Blues” centres on a fraternal
relationship in need of reconciliation. e story begins as the unnamed
narrator (older brother) reads with incomprehension a news article
about Sonny’s (the younger brother’s) arrest for drug pushing. ough
instantly signalling his incredulity, the narrator quickly acknowledges
that it was not that he “couldn’t believe it” but rather that he had refused
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
to believe it—that he “couldn’t nd any room for it anywhere inside
[himself]” (104). Again, the inability to know the reality of Sonny’s
life is mirrored in the text by a failure to understand the music (jazz or
bebop) that Sonny embodies.
e “weirdness” and “disorder” of Sonny’s music signal nothing more
than the narrator’s intransigent refusal to listen. e “sound” that Sonny
personies is the sound of bebop—a then radically experimental jazz
form characterised by its “infamous rhythmic unpredictability” (Cook
and Pople 399). At the start of the story, as the younger brother an-
nounces his intention to become a jazz musician and identies Charlie
Parker as an icon, the older brother reacts with a mixture of ignorance
and contempt (121). He admits that he has never “listened” to Parker’s
playing. And yet, as Baldwin is at pains to point out, this sound sur-
rounds all life in Harlem. Earlier in the text, we nd the narrator over-
hearing some local children at play:
I was listening to them because I was thinking about my broth-
er and in them I heard my brother. And myself.... One boy
was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple,
it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird,
and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh,
bright air, only just holding its own through all those other
sounds. (105)
As Richard N. Albert, amongst others, has noted, the “complicated”
whistling and “bird” simile are highly evocative of Parker’s intricate
jazz solos (180). e suggestion of contrapuntal interplay involved in a
tune that “hold[s] its own through all those other sounds” is also highly
evocative of the collective interplay of jazz performance. Sonny’s explicit
reference to Charlie Parker, or “Bird” (“Sonny’s Blues” 122), therefore,
instantly evokes a music that should not sound “weird and disordered”
to Sonny’s listeners. Rather, this music is a form of the blues that is a
vital and sustaining element of their life praxis.
Sonny, however, embodies this element in a manner that is too direct
for his listeners, and the potential for musical communion breaks down.
e sound of his blues is as terrifying as it is uplifting. At the beginning
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
of his story, Sonny has struggled with a music that others fail to under-
stand. At that point in the text, he remains “all wrapped up in some
cloud, some re, some vision all his own” (126). Later, however, the
family does nd a way to share that vision. e relationship between the
two brothers transforms when the narrator goes through the loss of his
young daughter: “my trouble,” he notes, “made his real” (129). Indeed,
the description of the narrator’s trauma seems to echo with his descrip-
tion of Sonny. e daughter’s death is registered as a series of sounds:
Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that si-
lence, something happened to her to make her afraid. And she
ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the oor,
all twisted up, and the reason she hadn’t screamed was that she
couldn’t get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the
worst sound, Isabel says, that she’d ever heard in all her life, and
she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes
wake me up with a low, moaning, strangled sound and I have
to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel
is weeping against me seems a mortal wound. (129)
e thump, the silence, the scream, the low moan all seem to be regis-
tered in a blues idiom, and the sequence or progression of these sounds
seems to come from the same source. One sound leads to the next in a
necessary chain. e child’s scream echoes in the mother’s dreams, and
in turn her low moaning culminates in a loving embrace that acts as an
emotional salve even as it registers as a “mortal wound.” It is almost as if
the initial sound of the child’s pain creates a blues line of suering that
Baldwin’s text repeats with dierence or “worries” (Williams 127).
Here is the signicance of the narrator’s description of living with
Sonny as “like living with sound” (129). It is the sound of the blues, a
sound that, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, inscribes “narratives of love and loss” in
a music that records and transcodes its “broken” rhythms (201, 203). For
Gilroy, this type of narrative is associated most forcibly with the blues:
e stories which dominate black popular culture are usual-
ly love stories or more appropriately love and loss stories....
[N]arratives of love and loss systematically transcode other
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
forms of yearning and mourning associated withhistories of
dispersal and exile and the remembrance of unspeakable terror.
(Gilroy 201)
Black music, characterised for Gilroy by “its broken rhythm of life”
(203), becomes a perpetual transcoding machine. As the musician en-
codes his pain in musical performance, the audience must somehow
hear the pain behind the song and participate in that fractured history.
Alan Rice has described the “jazz aesthetic” as the “mode most appro-
priate for the telling of stories from deep in the past,” which the black
writer is apparently “only just now (at the very moment she does it) tell-
ing out loud” (177). “Sonny’s Blues” builds towards what Ralph Ellison
would term a “true jazz moment” within a text that ultimately must be
structured through music. e “true jazz moment” is dened by Ellison
as an act of “individual assertion within and against the group”—the
performance of identity “as individual, asmember of the collectivity and
as a link in the chain of tradition” (234).
To embody such a sound is Sonny’s dicult fate. His very walk—a
“slow, loping walk, something like the way Harlem hipsters walk,
only he’s imposed on this his own half-beat” (131)—characterises this
music. e narrator’s description of the walk is suggestive not just of
the “broken rhythm” described by Gilroy but of polyrhythmic coun-
terpoint, which is distinctive of jazz. Much of jazz theory is, in fact,
based around counterpoint, where the central harmony, created by bass
tones, is augmented by improvisations on the same theme. In jazz, “[t]
he beauty ofcounterpoint lies in the interest created by the voices and
the harmony that arises from them” (Berg 43).ough it is common
to many forms of Western music, counterpoint is recongured in jazz.
“Melodic counterpoint,” as has often been noted,“is not essential [or
exclusive] to jazz. Rhythmic counterpoint is, on the other hand, and can
be savoured in all jazz” (Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley 562).
e specically rhythmic contrapuntal structure could perhaps be
dwelt on here. If we were to translate these terms into narrative theory,
rhythm would be understood as the way in which a text deals with time,
the ways in which it accelerates and slows down. Gilles Deleuze denes
rhythm as the “Unequal or Incommensurable, always in a process of
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
transcoding” (qtd. in Bogue 18). In narrative, rhythmic counterpoint—
a quintessential jazz technique—undergoes multiple processes of trans-
coding. e rhythms dovetail to form a multiplicity of both voice and
time, and the act of transcoding, as Deleuze suggests, remains necessar-
ily perpetual. Just as the jazz collective must interpret and reinterpret
the lines of their music, so the jazz listener must transcode meanings
within jazz music.
e logic of “Sonny’s Blues” presages the structure of In the Falling
Snow, in which individual narrative strands must form their own
rhythm, and the individuality of each rhythm naturally builds towards
a larger totality through counterpoint. Just as Sonny’s trouble nds an
echo in his brother’s loss, just as that loss is gured as a sequence of
sounds between three members of the same family, so must Sonny’s
transcendental jazz playing build from the rhythm of individual suer-
ing towards communal exchange.
While Sonny’s bebop produces a “rhythm” that is “infamously unpre-
dictable,” it does so very deliberately (Cook and Pople 399). e unpre-
dictability is “conceived as local disruptions of an unwaveringly secure
underlying pulse” (Cook and Pople 399). As Charlie Parker dened it,
bop was dierent from other music precisely because it had “no steady
beat” (qtd. in Cook and Pople 399). e unpredictability, disruptive-
ness, and unsteadiness of this musical form all stem from its manifold
beat and contrapuntal rhythmic structure. Sonny augments the general
pulse of Harlem life with “his own half-beat” and thus establishes an
aesthetic that is both personal and communal.
“Music is our witness and our ally,” writes Baldwin. “e beat is
the confession which recognizes, changes and conquers time” (qtd. in
Gilroy 203). However, this beat, this confession, must be polyphonic.
ese stories must be articulated together. As James Snead reminds us,
the rhythm and beat of what he terms “black music” are profoundly and
necessarily relational (150). According to Snead:
e typical polymetry of black music means that there are at
least two, and usually more, rhythms going on alongside the
listener’s own beat.... Because one rhythm always denes an-
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
other in black music, and beat is an entity of relation, any “self-
consciousness” or “achievement” in the sense of an individual
participant working towards his or her own rhythmic or tonal
climax “above the mass” would have disastrous results. (Snead
150; emphasis added)
Snead’s model of “polymetry” forms a pivotal point of convergence be-
tween the two protagonists of this essay. Both texts attempt to draw
familial narratives that illustrate a rupture within the familial group.
e narrators of both texts attempt, in Snead’s terms, to operate “above
the mass”—to narrate their tales without adapting to the “rhythms” of
other family members. us, in both texts, the narrative drive is towards
re-establishing this “entity of relation.” e point of this comparative
reading will not be so much to show how Caryl Phillips is inuenced
by James Baldwin—a model of analysis that would depend on “dyads of
transmission” between authors/authorities (Clayton and Rothstein 3)—
but rather to show how both writers build on and revise ideas already
germane in the music(s) that infuses their texts.
e Black Atlantic and Soul Music: Caryl Phillips
e intersection between musical and literary inuence in these two
writers is characterised by the musical forms adapted by each. Broadly
speaking, our focus must shift from jazz (Baldwin) to soul (Phillips) so
that we may establish the relationship between the two genres and, by
extension, between the two writers. In nding this musicological lan-
guage, however, we should not attempt to distinguish the two genres
(or the two writers) absolutely. Examples abound of points of conver-
gence between soul and jazz. In her study of improvisation and interac-
tion in jazz, for example, Ingrid Monson extends her analysis to other
“African American musics” (including soul), emphasising that “[w]hile
the character of bass and chordal parts—that is to say, of the groove—
may vary signicantly ... all of these musics tend to emphasise the o-
beats” (28). Soul, like jazz, requires the musician, in Ralph Peterson’s
phrase, “to absorb a large amount of rhythmic variants without being
thrown” (qtd. in Monson 28). In other words, the necessity of rhyth-
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
mic variations cited above should apply—as Snead’s model suggests—
to both genres.
What distinguishes soul music, however, is in what Gayle Wald de-
scribes as the “celebrat[ion] of individual vocal personality” (148). Soul,
according to Wald, inaugurated a “new popular musical sensibility, de-
ning a newly dynamic relationship between performer and audience,”
creating a musical performance in which the singer must “touch his or
her audience through the performance of emotional authenticity” (148).
While one may take issue with Wald’s presentation of the “newness” of
this performative dynamism—the interrelationship between performer
and audience could equally be traced back (via jazz) to gospel, blues,
and early spirituals—the important triumvirate of “vocal personality,”
“emotional authenticity,” and “dynamism” are certainly characteristic
hallmarks of soul.
Another notable hallmark of soul, according to Gilroy, lies in its
inherently internationalist tendencies. In e Black Atlantic (1993),
Gilroy notably positioned soul within his larger cultural matrix of the
Black Atlantic, a “single, complex unit of analysis” (15). is model
famously organised critical focus away from “nationalist and ethnically
absolute approaches” and towards an “explicitly transnational and inter-
cultural perspective” (Gilroy 15). Such ideas have become so engrained
in subsequent racial and national analyses that it would seem unneces-
sary to recount them here, were it not for the striking ways in which
Caryl Phillips’ career has formed an exemplary case study of the Black
Atlantic model (Adesokan 133–55). Phillips was born on the Caribbean
island of St. Kitts but travelled to England with his parents while still an
infant. He was brought up in the North of England before moving to
London, journeying between America and Europe, returning for a time
to St. Kitts, and nally “settling” (although he still retains a multiple
sense of home) in New York in 1990. His identity is so bound up with
transatlantic movement that he claims to have professed a wish to his
lawyer that his ashes be “scattered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
at a point equidistant between Britain, Africa and North America” (New
World Order 304), each of these three locations reecting a sense of both
belonging and non-belonging.
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
In his essay “A New World Order,” Phillips describes his postnational
sense of dwelling in the world:
e old static order in which one people speaks down to anoth-
er, lesser, people is dead. e colonial, or postcolonial, model
has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which
there will soon be one global conversation with limited partici-
pation open to all, and full participation available to none. In
this new world order nobody will feel fully at home. (5)
As Gilroy has repeatedly observed, this concept of Black Atlantic
“home,” which can only be understood as a form of crossing, transgress-
ing, and exchanging, nds its most natural aesthetic representation in
music. An analysis of “black music,” Gilroy claims, “requires a dierent
register of analytic concepts” (78). In musical performance, “identity
is eetingly experienced in the most intensive ways” (78). e eeting,
yet intense sense of identity that is produced eschews the importance
of territorial rootedness, and indeed, for Gilroy, music proves to be the
ultimate example of an art form that “overowed from the containers
that the modern nation state provides” (40).
is extra-territorial history is one of the biggest attractions that soul
holds for Phillips. ough Baldwin is acknowledged as perhaps his great-
est literary inuence, African-American literature was by no means his
only transatlantic inspiration. Soul music, he has acknowledged, was “as
important to me as any writers” (Conversations with Caryl Phillips 80):
And it seemed to me that the people who had the strongest nar-
ratives and the most profound insights were people like Stevie
Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Curtis Mayeld, artists who were
writing music that was not just passionate, but music that was
incredibly socially engaged. So I guess that as a young kid, part
of my education was listening to that type of music and trying
to understand it all by some process of transatlantic exchange.
(Conversations with Caryl Phillips 131)
e process of transatlantic exchange is of vital importance to Phillips’
emergence as a writer. “My model if I have a model,” he has claimed, “is
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
music.” He goes on to explain that “with music, my interest was always in
form” (Conversations with Caryl Phillips 108). For Phillips, musical form
is characterised most notably by refrain: “It’s how you score emotion basi-
cally—how you move and keep a theme going. You keep going forward,
but remind us where we’ve been; there is a variable parabola, and it rises
and it falls away gently to a conclusion” (Conversations with Caryl Phillips
109). Again, the double movement of progress and remembrance bears
a strong echo of Baldwin’s description of black music. However, Phillips’
interest in refrain suggests more than this—it is most strongly and sig-
nicantly underscored by the performative dynamism of soul music, but
it also bears strong traces of the jazz technique of rhythmic counterpoint
that had so inuenced the construction of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”
Performative Dynamism and Rhythmic Counterpoint: In the
Falling Snow
As Baldwin had in “Sonny’s Blues,” Phillips uses black music in In the
Falling Snow as ballast for a family narrative. Phillips’ novel presents
us with a multi-generational story of the West Indian experience in
Britain. We nd the protagonist, Keith Gordon, a British-born son of
a West Indian immigrant father, having a midlife crisis. Attempting a
long-cherished writing project on twentieth-century music, Keith nds
himself omitting both gospel and the blues, “having nally admitted
that he knows precious little about either genre” (65). His book shrinks
further when he decides to also omit jazz, which he fears is too emo-
tional and too contentious to be assimilated into his project. “[E]ven the
most level-headed people,” he wryly observes, “tended to become either
very defensive or unusually aggressive when explaining their convictions
about jazz” (65). Keith simply does not possess similar “convictions.”
e jazz that he does listen to is “light jazz”—music that is “neither too
abstract nor too dicult”—because, he decides, it is “perfect for back-
ground atmosphere,” as it “never seems to disrupt” (71).
On Keith’s listening, the music becomes insipid and anaemic. e
“necessary and violent interruption” of the aesthetic sensibility iden-
tied in Omry’s analysis of free jazz is totally inverted. Keith, at this
point in his narrative, is not ready to be disrupted, much less to be vio-
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
lently interrupted. At the opening of the text, his self-narrative has stag-
nated. A black man living in a predominantly white, upper-middle class
suburb, Keith is introduced to us as an outsider: he suspects that for
many, “he simply does not belong in this part of the city” and wears dark
sunglasses, so that white people do not see his eyes (3). At the beginning
of the novel, he “understands the detached role that he [is] playing” (5).
Keith’s failure to engage with the jazz tradition is indicative of a general
failure on his part to meaningfully deal with his own history. ough he
wants to write the history of black music—the way that“black cultural
heritage is passed on from one generation to the next” (95)—the past
is something that he is unwilling or unready to confront. He remem-
bers his mother, who died when he was just six, only vaguely, and his
cold, remote father, who lives in the north of England, remains, at this
point in his story, a stranger to him. Keith’s failure to allow blues, jazz,
or gospel to “disrupt” him is suggestive of the distance that he feels
from the generation of his parents. He persistently identies himself
with the soul music of the 1970s, yet his personal isolation means that
he cannot achieve the “performance of emotional authenticity” to which
this music aspires (Wald 148). His writing stagnates because he insists
on looking at soul in isolation and rejects the mid-twentieth-century
forms that helped to give birth to this music. Similarly, his fraught and
“detached” relationship with his son, Laurie, nds an echo in his refusal
to listen to hip-hop, which he glibly views as “evidence of a general
cultural malaise” (13). is being the case, he is forced either to listen
to his own music alone or to “accustom himself to silence” when in the
company of others (12).
Remembering Baldwin’s diachronic framing of black music, which he
believed carried one “simultaneously back and forward in time” (qtd. in
Murray & Maguire 44–45), we can see the diculty of Keith’s position.
His temporal and generational dislocation is, to a large extent, carried in
the narrative by his seemingly formless ruminations on the music of his
own generation. Indeed, the apparent formlessness of Phillips’ narrative
was noted in several press reviews of the novel. However, this seeming
absence of structure reveals the extent to which the form and structure
are infused with a musical sensibility.
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
Two of the novel’s structural anomalies serve to illustrate the point.
First, and perhaps most notable, is the sharp change of pace and rhythm
evident as the novel develops. Much of In the Falling Snow represents the
internal reections of a single character who attempts, in a self-reective
manner, to change the seemingly destructive patterns of his personal re-
lationships while beginning the task of writing his book. As the novel
develops, however, Keith’s “plodding” (Tayler) self-narrative breaks into
an urgent and more engaging story involving his son’s entrapment in the
world of South London gangs. is represents, as one reviewer put it, an
“arresting change of form and tone” (Tayler). Far from being a aw in the
construction of Phillips’ text, the disturbance of narrative pace is entirely
appropriate, given the novel’s central preoccupation with black music.
It is notable that this structural shift is coupled in the text with a
second narrative departure: the novel’s long lapse into unnaturally ex-
tended monologues by Keith’s father, Earl Gordon. is section of the
text deals with the transatlantic roots (and routes) of the Gordon family.
As Earl recounts the painful story of his journey to England and of
the “damn life” that he has had to live there, we have the sense that he
is, for the rst time, breaking a silence that has long surrounded the
family. is silence, it is implied, has been learned by Earl as part of
his immigrant experience in England, where, “they don’t know nothing
about you, or where you from, or who you be” (270). So much of the
novel has been taken up with trying and failing to nd the words to tell
one’s story (67, 87, 114, 127, 221, 272, 282, 316), but it is only now
at the end of his journey that Earl can speak, and it is only as a coun-
terpoint to the narratives of the younger generations—emblematised by
Keith and Laurie—that he can be heard. Like “Sonny’s Blues,” the novel
presupposes that painful experiences must be “performed” and “heard”
in order for characters to constitute relationships based on “emotional
authenticity” (Wald 148).
As in Baldwin’s text—and the music that inspired it—Phillips’ novel
progresses diachronically with narrative tenses that can suddenly shift,
depending on whose story is being told. Earl’s long memoir, for in-
stance, is recorded in an erratic mesh of grammatical tense. e follow-
ing exchange between Earl and his son is an example:
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
“You listening to me?”
He looks down at his father’s face.
“I want to go home, Keith. I don’t mean to some stupid
English house. I mean home. Home, home.” His father stares
up at him. “You understanding what I mean? I’m not from
here. I land in England on a cold Friday morning. It is April
15, 1960, and only three weeks before this I put my father in
the ground.” (269)
Here we nd multiple abrupt shifts in narrative chronology, none of
which are easily signposted. Earl’s intimate and personal oral perform-
ance functions as a soul vocal and creates a new bond with his “audience”
(his son, Keith). Up to this point in the text, Keith’s personal story had
been narrated obsessively in the present tense—a narrative decision that,
as Amy Hungerford has noted, adds a solipsistic and detached texture to
the novel (169). Keith’s consistency of tense, coupled with his “relent-
lessly even tone,” leaves the novel in a condition of “relentless neutral-
ity” (Hungerford 169–70). “e eect,” according to Hungerford, “is to
infuse the present with an overload of portent as the tiny details pile up”
(170). Yet the narrative cannot forever be buried under these details. e
novel cannot sustain Keith’s temporal and emotional detachment. Earl’s
intrusion into the text, which disorients our steady sense of chronology,
acts as a necessary counterbalance or counterpoint.
Phillips’ narrative engagement with music has been highlighted by
some of his critics. Bénédicte Ledent, for example, has attempted to
“focus on the musicality of [Phillips’] writing” (160). is, she believes,
surfaces in a “restless pace that quickens as [Phillips’ writing] switches
from one character to the next” and through “repeated textual echoes
between sections” (161). Ledent identies such characteristics as part of
a “melodious quality” in Phillips’ narratives, but it is really more indica-
tive of rhythm than of melody.
ese rhythmic narrative shifts are also very much in evidence in
“Sonny’s Blues,” in which, as critics have noted, the very essence of “live”
jazz performance is to access the blues as “a form which contains his-
tory” (Sherard 703). Both narratives move through multiple rhythms.
134134
Gerald D av id N au gh to n
In Phillips’ text, Earl Gordon’s monologues, with their extended, un-
broken paragraphing, short, staccato sentences, unconjugated verb
structures, and abrupt chronological shifts, represent a departure from
the more languid rhythm of Keith’s narrative. It is a rhythmic break
demanded both by Earl’s idiom and by a life narrative that constitutes,
what Gilroy would term, a “love and loss story” (201). In telling his
story, Earl Gordon establishes this tradition for his own family and cre-
ates the possibility for transgenerational understanding between his son
and grandson. In the Falling Snow achieves this only by insisting on the
emotional “authenticity” of Earl’s “performance” of his story. Phillips,
here, is reaching for a “celebrat[ion] of individual vocal personality”
(Wald 148).
Moreover, in the multiplicity of voice (counterpoint) and heteroge-
neity (rhythm), we nd the liberational edge of both the jazz and soul
structures that Phillips’ text carries forward into narrative. Allowing his
novel to move from traditional realist piece narrated from a single narra-
tive point of view into a three-part counterpoint, he brings his work into
the territory of music. Each of the three generational narrative strands of
the text is carried forward with its own rhythm. It is only in the coun-
terpoint of these narrative rhythms that the novel can become a single
collaborative—though dissonant—(musical) performance.
e Music of Imprisonment
e structure (or anti-structure) of In the Falling Snow bears traces of
“Sonny’s Blues.” In both texts, the potential of disastrous results high-
lighted by Snead (150) is provisionally averted, and in both cases, music
is the modality through which this happens. At the end of In the Falling
Snow, we nd the protagonist back in the house of his child and ex-wife.
e family have briey come together to deal with the dangers to which
Keith’s son has been exposed and to ease the dicult passing of Keith’s
father. At the end of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator nally listens to his
brother’s playing in a contrapuntal jam session and nally begins to un-
derstand the signicance of that playing. e performance centres on
improvisation between Creole, the drummer, and Sonny on the piano.
At one collaborative moment, we are told that the musicians “all c[o]
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
me together again” and that Sonny is “part of the family again” (141).
e family metaphor indexes a greater connection between Sonny
and his brother in the audience. When Creole changes the beat to a
blues rhythm that “hits something” in the other musicians, the narra-
tor acknowledges that it “hits something” in himself too, as “the music
tighten[s] and deepen[s]” (141). e narrator has nally perceived just
how important it is for him to listen to the “broken rhythm of life”
underlying Sonny’s playing. He has nally been moved to truly hear his
brother’s story.
However, both texts display an awareness of the transience of such
moments. In Phillips’ novel, Keith Gordon ends his narrative with an
incipient feeling of encroaching dislocation and isolation. Again, he
begins to feel that he does not “belong” (313), and he resolves to return
to the single-bed apartment of his secluded and solipsistic life. Similarly,
isolation is never far from the communities created through perform-
ance in “Sonny’s Blues.” Towards the end of Baldwin’s story, the musi-
cian condes in his brother that some of his most desperate and isolated
moments had come while being totally immersed in the act of playing
jazz: “Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of
the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play
or I didn’t really have to play, it just came out of me, it was there” (135;
emphasis added). e simultaneous sense of connection (“I was in it,
I was with it”) and of disconnection (“I was most out of the world”)
is both a product of his heroin abuse and a statement of his existential
condition. A profound sense of being alone in the world is a part of
Sonny’s life, even as he is on the stage playing music that forges impro-
vised communities.
Baldwin craved an art that was based on “creative interdependence”
or the “active, actual, joyful intercourse” between the artist and society,
and he believed that the “atmosphere sometimes created among jazz
musicians and their fans during ... a jam session” was its truest pos-
sible example (Nobody Knows My Name 25–26). However, he also ac-
knowledged that though such communion may have been provisionally
attainable, musical performance also left the jazz player in a state that
he described as “ghastly isolation” (26). For Baldwin, this is the terrible
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Gerald D av id N au gh to n
paradox of music and musical performance. In performance, the musi-
cian says for the audience “what they themselves [can]not say” (e Price
of the Ticket 323). e musician performs a truthful, though aestheti-
cised, version of the life of his or her audience. He or she thus enables a
moment of transient freedom but does so at a terrible cost.
Music, Baldwin has said, “produces an atmosphere of freedom which
is exactly as real as the limits which have made it necessary” (e Price of
the Ticket 322). At the intersection of this freedom and these limits, we
nd the musical performer as a gure of isolation. Even as the musician
struggles for the freedom that is created in the “true jazz moment,” there
is an awful awareness that this freedom is only a moment—and that this
freedom also contains its own antithesis. ough the ending of Baldwin’s
story is typically simply read in positivist terms, such positivism needs
to be tempered. e freedom indicated in Sonny’s performance remains
elusive, “lurking” around both audience and performers, without reveal-
ing itself (“Sonny’s Blues” 142). “I understood, at last,” the narrator tells
us, “that [Sonny] could help us to be free if we would listen, that he
would never be free until we did” (142). ough the realisation contains
the promise of freedom, it is a freedom that has yet to be—and perhaps
never will be—attained. “Sonny,” in Walton Muyumba’s neat phrase, “is
left between grace and suering” (122).
In this in-between space, we nd the protagonists of Baldwin’s and
Phillips’ musical narratives. And indeed, it could be argued that Baldwin
himself, as an icon for Phillips of both inuence and, paradoxically, iso-
lation, occupies similar conceptual territory. Phillips’ speculation, with
which I began this article, on the “dierent forms of imprisonment”
which Baldwin may have undergone (e European Tribe 39) is close
to Baldwin’s description of the “ghastly isolation of the jazz musician”
(Nobody Knows My Name 26). Furthermore, the concomitant “sup-
pleness,” “daring,” and “imagination” that Baldwin engenders in the
younger writer (e European Tribe 39) nds an echo in Baldwin’s de-
scription of the “atmosphere of freedom” that is created by the black
musician (e Price of the Ticket 322). Like Sonny with his sidemen and
with his audience, Baldwin himself inspires writers like Phillips with a
vision of creative freedom that contains its own antithesis.
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Jazz , So ul , an d Li te ra ry I nf lu en ce i n Ba ld wi n an d Ph il li ps
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