The Raceless and Restless Novels of Caryl Phillips:The Nature of Blood on French Ground

Abstract

In this article, I examine the mitigated reception of The Novel of Blood when it appeared in French translation. Indeed, while The Nature of Blood encountered huge success in the anglophone world, Caryl Phillips’s sixth novel was translated into French as La nature humaine, and has a cover illustration also diverging significantly from the original one. A double shift consequently occurs, with significant repercussions for the reception of the novel. First of all, it reduces the novel being a further fiction on the Holocaust, an interpretation reinforced by the cover illustration which diverges from the original. Phillips has paid attention to merge the story of European antisemitism in another context, racism towards people of colour since the 15th century in Europe, more specifically in Venice, where the first ghetto was established.

Keywords

• Black and Jewish Diasporas
• paratext and biaised reception
• knot of memory
• packaging postcolonial literature
• intertextuality and the (mis)use of translations and illustrations
• “lieu de mémoire” and noeud de mémoire (knot of memory)