Caryl Phillips' The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection

Abstract

Abstract: Through a reading of Caryl Phillips' most recent novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at the heart of Phillips' work: the tension between the ruptures and continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records even as their ghostly traces haunt today's British society and indeed the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire. These texts include Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) as well as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips' earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991). Keywords: Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child, Wuthering Heights, intertextuality, family I. This essay focuses on loss as a condition and consequence of the violent meeting of the northern and southern hemispheres and, more specifically, Britain and its African others in the theatre of the Caribbean. We ask how it might be possible to conceive of the of those who centuries ago were brought from one world to another under coercion, or who came with expectations of transformative possibilities that often proved devastatingly illusory, and who were all bound together by a sense of exile in whatever home they found themselves. It would appear that, in the absence of a balanced and unbiased official record, the most effective imaginative evocations of this state of lostness have been articulated in Caribbean literature. Writers like Maryse Conde, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott--to name only some of the best-known--have engaged with the (historical and literary) colonial archive of this world-changing contact and clash of cultures and races. Such an engagement is framed by the dialogue between two literary traditions, that of the British canon and that of the tropical south, which revisits and rewrites the narratives of the former, thereby claiming those lost, silenced, and invisible children of Empire whose presence (or absence) haunts the pages of British fiction. We focus on Phillips' latest novel, The Lost Child (2015) and how it combines such historical loss with connections between these two worlds. Paradoxically it is set exclusively in England and covers a time span that ranges from eighteenth-century Liverpool, through nineteenth-century Haworth, to Leeds, London, and Oxford between the 1950s and 1980s. In particular, we consider how this many-stranded narrative puts the northern English realm of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) in conversation with writing from the Caribbean and its diaspora, thereby performing what Walcott calls the gathering of broken pieces to restore shattered histories (Antilles 69). For Phillips, as for Walcott, this re-membering is at the very heart of Caribbean writing. From its opening, The Lost Child calls attention to the lost children of the first encounter of eighteenth-century northern England and the Black Atlantic, meaning formerly enslaved Caribbean people who, for various reasons, found themselves in Britain; it also tells the story of their lost children and their children's children. Through our discussion of the text's conversation with Wuthering Heights and works by other Caribbean writers (specifically those of Rhys and several of Phillips' earlier works), we unravel how The Lost Child engages in an intricate web of intertextuality and elaborate on the structural and hermeneutic patterning of its dialogue with other writers and their books. …