SOURCE: "Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips's Cambridge," in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, 1993, p. 34-47.

[In the following essay, O'Callaghan treats the intertextual aspects of Cambridge by examining the novel's relation to slave narratives and travel journals or diaries.]

Post-modernism maintains that everything is fiction. Post-modernists say that there is no such thing as reality, only versions of reality. History is fiction, science is fiction, psychology is fiction.

So what about fiction itself? What is it supposed to do now? Plot and character are done for. If there is nothing to reveal but fiction, then fiction, some writers believe, can't tell us about anything but itself. So they give us metafiction: self-conscious fiction which draws attention to the fact that it's fiction. It's no longer enough for the conjurer to perform the trick without declaring that it is a trick.

Despite the rather peevish tone of this reflection on postmodernist literary theory, it raises certain issues which I find useful in approaching Caryl Phillips's latest narrative, Cambridge (1991). Firstly, this work does constitute self-conscious fiction: to a great extent, it is a pastiche of other narratives and, it seems to me, deliberately calls attention to its intertextuality. Secondly, the source narratives for Cambridge have long been considered the proper domain of West Indian historians and have been read as historical reconstructions. However, the particular nature of most of these documents—the slave narrative and the travel journal/diary, with their first-person narrators, their conventions of rhetoric and structure—emphasizes their fictionality. Finally, Cambridge itself is a "novel" that attempts historical reconstruction in order to interrogate and, possibly, rewrite the European record of the West Indies. In a sense, then, Cambridge wears the mask of fiction (as the term is commonly used), but reveals its matrix in historical narratives, which are in turn unmasked by the text's process and shown to be rather insidiously fictional in their claim to "the truth".

If my logic is tortured, this results from attempting to come to terms with a text that does declare itself "as a trick". The title, for example, refers to the eponymous character, whose real name turns out not to be Cambridge after all; neither does he recount the majority of the narrative. Rather, this centres around the experiences of an Englishwoman (Emily Cartwright) in the Caribbean, some time between the abolition of the slave trade and full emancipation. Cambridge consists of three "stories", sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue which foreshadow and echo each other. These latter combine omniscient narration with representation of Emily's thoughts and memories prior to and after the central events of the whole.

The bulk of Cambridge is the travel-journal of Emily, a thirty-year-old spinster sent by her father to survey his plantation in an unnamed West Indian island (obviously based on Phillips's native St. Kitts) before facing her fate, a loveless marriage to an elderly suitor in England. During the course of her stay on the estate and her growing intimacy with the overseer, Mr. Brown, she comes into contact with the Bible-reading slave Cambridge whose grasp of English impresses her. Her account ends with the murder of Brown by Cambridge, and "the negro … hanged from a tree, no longer able to explain or defend his treacherous act". Emily is mysteriously ill, the estate threatened with ruin and her father sent for.

Part Two gives Cambridge the chance to "explain or defend" himself. It purports to be the written testimony of the African Cambridge ("true Guinea name, Olumide"), enslaved as a youth, who, surviving the middle passage, enters into domestic service (as Black Tom) in the household of a retired English captain in London. Here he learns to adopt the English language, dress, customs, Calvinism and his latest appellation, David Henderson. He marries an English servant and after the death of his employer, lectures on the anti-slavery circuit around the country until his wife passes away. Subsequently, en route to Africa as a missionary, he is robbed, re-enslaved and finally, rechristened Cambridge, sold to the West Indian estate where he suffers the bullying of Mr. Brown and Brown's power over his "wife" (the strange Christiania who so threatened Emily in her account). He finally approaches Brown, determined to state his grievances, but a violent confrontation ensues in which Brown's "life left his body" and, as Cambridge understands, his own death will soon follow by law.

Part Three takes the form of another historical document: perhaps an anecdotal account in a report or a newspaper story, judging from the inclusion of rhetorical flourishes and sensationalizing details. It records the premeditated murder of Brown by the "insane" slave Cambridge because of an "innocent amour" between Mr. Brown and Christiania, whom Cambridge held "in bondage, his mind destroyed by fanciful notions of a Christian life of moral and domestic responsibility". Details of the actual ambush and murder are supplied by a "faithful black boy" accompanying Mr. Brown, who hid and observed the event. Emily is not mentioned in this narrative, which concludes with Cambridge's trial, hanging and gibbeting.

And so to the Epilogue, which ties up the loose ends: so much for the absence of plot and character in the postmodernist text! Emily, having lost Brown's child, lives in dereliction off the estate with her faithful slave Stella, supported by the charity of neighbouring blacks, and looks forward to death.

For those who have a nodding acquaintance with West Indian history, this brief summary will no doubt evoke similar "historical" accounts on which Phillips has drawn. In effect, Emily's (fictional) travel journal is a pastiche of similar writings by Monk Lewis, Lady Nugent, Mrs. Carmichael et al. I do not refer simply to the narrative's conventional form and use of nineteenth-century "polite" English, but to specific incidents, phrases, even whole passages in the novel which are deliberately "lifted" from the source documents. Compare, for example, the following passages in (a) Cambridge and (b) Monk Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor:

a) Sea terms: WINDWARD, whence the wind blows; LEEWARD, to which it blows; STARBOARD, the right of the stern; LARBOARD, the left …

b) Sea Terms.—Windward, from whence the wind blows; leeward, to which it blows; starboard, the right of the stern; larboard, the left …

This shipboard observation is shortly followed in both narratives by an account of a little cabin boy, his friendship with a dog, and his seasickness on this, his debut voyage. Emily's account of her ill-fated maid's illness ("she complained of feeling the motion sickness, of throbbing temples, burning head, freezing limbs, feverish mouth and a nauseous stomach") echoes that of Lewis: "My temples throbbing, my head burning, my limbs freezing, my mouth all fever, my stomach all nausea, my mind all disgust".

Then there is the obligatory storm at sea, and once again, Emily's narrative and that of Lewis are almost word for word:

I was … consulting with the captain, who took the precaution of snuffing out one of his candles and readying himself to affix the other to the table. However … the sudden lurch of the ship throw it from the table-top and for a moment we were plunged into complete darkness. And then the noise!… The cracking of bulkheads! The sawing of ropes! The screeching of the wood! The trampling of the sailors! The clattering of crockery! Everything above and below all in motion at once! Chairs, writing-desks, boxes, books, fire-irons, flying all about … (Cambridge).

The captain snuffed out one of the candles, and both being tied to the table, could not relight it with the other … when a sudden heel of the ship made him extinguish the second candle … and thus we were all left in the dark. Then the intolerable noise! the cracking of bulkheads! the sawing of ropes! the screeching of the tiller! the trampling of the sailors! the clattering of the crockery! Everything above deck and below deck, all in motion at once! Chairs, writing-desks, books, boxes, bundles, fire-irons and fenders, flying to one end of the room … (Journal of a West Indian Proprietor).

Emily's leaking cabin roof mirrors that reported by Monk Lewis; the approaching tropical weather is described as "excessively close" and "sultry" in Cambridge and in Lewis's Journal; the captain of the ship in both narratives becomes "out of patience with the tortoisepace" of progress, and so the voyage and arrival in the Caribbean proceed intertextually, as it were. Once ashore, Emily is warned to beware of the very dangers that Lewis itemizes:

There were three things against which I was particularly cautioned, and which three things I was determined not to do: to take exercise after ten in the day; to be exposed to the dews after sun-down; and to sleep at a Jamaica lodging house. (Journal)

Compare, also, reactions to the extravagance of the planter's table in Lady Nugent's Journal and Emily's account:

Such loads of all sorts of high, rich, and seasoned things, and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors as they drink!… a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hocknegus; then Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meats, stews and fries … [Lady Nugent's Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805] I have never seen such rich and heavily seasoned food: land-and-sea turtles, quails, snipes and pigeons … Dishes of tea, coffee, bumpers of claret, Madeira, sangaree, were all to be followed … (Cambridge).

Emily's reportage of the hypochondria of the slaves ("a tropical doctor's life is squandered on the bizarre imaginary diseases with which the negro claims to be suffering. Monday morning is a great time for the lazy or ill-disposed …") sounds very much like Mrs. Carmichael's assertion, in Domestic Manners, that "Negroes have more imaginary diseases than any set of people I ever was amongst … Monday morning is always a great day for the sick". Consider also the similarity of the following comments on theft among the slaves in (a) Cambridge and (b) Domestic Manners:

a) His thievishness is more than a match for all the laws that can emanate from any parliament, and even when apprehended in the act the black will invariably fly into a passion if you refuse him the honour of being able to take up the book and swear to the truth of what he knows to be false.

b) Negroes will steal, cheat and deceive in every possible way … what is worse, they invariably get into a passion if you refuse to let them take the book and swear to the truth of what you know to be false.

In the case of Cambridge's story, the echoes are largely from Equiano's Travels. Equiano tells of being captured at the age of ten in Nigeria, enslaved (under various names), schooled in England, freed and converted to Calvinism, travelling as part of the anti-slavery lobby throughout England, married to an Englishwoman and involved in a projected trip to Sierra Leone, where he wished to go as a missionary; Cambridge's narrative, like Emily's, deliberately draws on the earlier autobiography. Equiano's fear that his captors will kill and eat him on the journey to the New World also haunts Olumide/Cambridge. The descriptions of conditions on the slave ship are similar in both texts:

we were to be lodged below deck … Once below our bodies received a salutation of supreme loathsomeness in the form of a fetor (Cambridge)

I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together,… I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. (Equiano's Travels)

Similar treatment is meted out to Olumide/Cambridge ("The white men came below with eatables. Those who found the strength to refuse were lashed, often to death") as to Equiano ("two of the white men offered me eatables, and on my refusing to eat … flogged me severely", p. 26). The two narratives illustrate the brutality of whites, even to each other, with the same example of a sailor being flogged to death with a "mass of rope" and then tossed overboard. Olumide/Cambridge receives instruction aboard ship "to help me smatter a little imperfect English", echoing Equiano's experience: "By this time however I could smatter a little imperfect English". At the sight of England, Equiano relates that "Every heart on board seemed gladdened", in Cambridge, the phrase recurs: "every heart was gladdened when sight of merry England was announced". Compare also the despair of both (a) Cambridge and (b) Equiano at being deceitfully re-enslaved, and at the prospect of another middle passage:

a) I very much feared the horrors that lay ahead. My former passage rose in dreadful review and showed only misery, stripes and chains. In one moment of weakness I called upon God's thunderous avenging power to direct the sudden state of death to myself, rather than permit me to become a slave and be passed from the hand of one man to another …

b) At the sight of this land of bondage, a fresh horror ran through all my frame … My former slavery now rose in dreadful review to my mind, and displayed nothing but misery, stripes, and chains; and, in the first paroxysm of my grief, I called upon God's thunder and his avenging power to direct the stroke of death to me rather than permit me to become a slave, and be sold from lord to lord.

One could continue such collation, but the textual strategy in the first two sections—one which research would doubtless expose in Part Three also—has been sufficiently illustrated. Phillips has gone to great pains to establish the historical "authenticity" of his fiction. Furthermore, the deliberate, even ostentatious, borrowing from and echoing of source material ("the conjurer declaring it is a trick") focuses attention on the connection between the fictional and historical narratives. For what purpose? I will return to this issue shortly, but it is important to note that while the reading of Cambridge is a disconcertingly echoic experience—one constantly, and correctly, feels "I've read this before!"—there is no sense of a stylistic patchwork. Each of its narratives is relatively consistent and suited to its presumed author. At the same time, what Phillips has achieved is a sense of their representative natures, their combined impressions of place and time evoke the feel of the place and period.

Nonetheless, one can empathize with the response of a historian colleague asked to check the novel's historical verisimilitude: "But what is it?" The answer, of course, is a hybrid, a syncretic fabrication. As such, the text conforms to one definition of post-colonial literature, which sees its perspective as having "given explicit confirmation to the perception that genres cannot be described by essential characteristics, but by an interweaving of features, a 'family resemblance' which denies the possibility of either essentialism or limitation" (The Empire Writes Back,) as do the cultures such literature grows out of.

Elsewhere in The Empire Writes Back, the authors postulate that "much of post-colonial literature … is 'about' a void, a psychological abyss between cultures". Certainly, this permeates the structural arrangement of Cambridge. The novel also treats of "gaps" within cultures, significantly between male and female on both sides of the Sargasso Sea. For all the "bond" felt by Cambridge for his "wife" Christiania (whom, even he accepts, is a "heathen"), he tells her nothing about his past for fear of tainting "my Anna's memory by association" and his attempts to convert her fail because "her undeniably spiritual nature was absorbed in an entirely different direction", a direction that finally leads her to mock his Christian beliefs. This angers Cambridge "for, as is well known, a Christian man possesses his wife, and the dutiful wife must obey her Christian husband."

The same perception of woman as innately subservient pervades Emily's world, and the "void" between cold male authority and resentful female obeisance is introduced in the Prologue to Cambridge: "A woman might play upon a delicate keyboard, paint water-colours, or sing. Her father conducted himself as a stern audience"; "she had once overheard her father insisting that sensible men should only trifle with these children of a larger growth. And then he laughed. To reside under the auspices of a 'petticoat government'!" Both Christiania and Emily have "buried feelings", unarticulated thoughts which "unspool in silence". The metropolitan and plantation societies of the nineteenth century confined and silenced women.

To an extent, Cambridge gives them voice. One may ask what prompts a black male West Indian writer—the author's photograph is prominent on the dust-jacket—to reflect on his country's past through the memoirs of a white female English persona? Again, The Empire Writes Back suggests an answer: "In writing out of the condition of 'Otherness' postcolonial texts assert the complex of intersecting 'peripheries' as the actual substance of experience". So, of course, do female-authored texts. In attempting to shed light on the past, Phillips has chosen to explore the voids, gaps between cultures, races and sexes. In terms of gender, then, Emily's account is a useful perspective from the periphery. On the one hand, she does read the West Indian island and its inhabitants according to imperialist and racist discourse; on the other hand, her place within this discourse is clearly established as marginal. The text stresses her ignorance (had not "Stella informed me" on numerous occasions, she would be lost), her frequent mystification ("By now I was so confused that my feverish head had begun to spin anew"), her false conclusions and, above all, her powerlessness at home and in the Caribbean (the estate overseer has her bodily carried off the field by a slave when she annoys him).

So one can perceive, through her narrative, some of the cracks in the edifice of colonialism: its contradictions and inconsistencies, the holes in its "logic" are inadvertently exposed. For example, in the Epilogue, Emily reflects on her position: "They were kind, they journeyed up the hill and brought her food. Cassava bread and bush tea mixed with milk. The mistress. Six months, six weeks, six days, it mattered little for her status was secure". Yet her own narrative has demonstrated the insecurity of her status, the indeterminacy of the title "mistress": the deposed estate manager acknowledged that "the mistress" "lacked the power of either censure or discipline" on her father's estate. Indeed, the irony of the term and her assertion of the identity it confers is explicit in her situation at the end of her tale: deserted by the man whose "mistress" she had become, shunned by white society for her illegitimate pregnancy, alone in a derelict cottage and dependent on her servant and the charity of strange blacks. Even as she has come to recognize the truth of Mr. Brown's assurance that "when I had spent more time among them I might come to understand that everything is not as in England", she clings to the imperialist myth of the natural supremacy of white and English. But her own narrative has exposed this, as it has so many other "truths".

I am suggesting, then, that rather than utilize a symmetrical white male account to balance that of the slave, Cambridge, Phillips's choice of a "mistress" rather than a master-narrative far more tellingly exposes the "complex of intersecting peripheries" that informed nineteenth-century plantation life.

At this point, I would like to return to my earlier suggestion that Cambridge calls attention to its intertextuality, the connection between its fictional narratives and its "historical" source documents. As stated earlier, travel-diaries and planter journals and slave narratives, some of which Cambridge draws upon, have long been used by historians as sources for the reconstruction of social relations in Caribbean plantation societies. Of course, historians have been aware of the danger of bias in such narratives. Witness Elsa Goveia's general warning:

Among the historians of the British West Indies, most of the earlier writers tend to claim authenticity, while the later ones usually lay claim to impartiality as well. The need for a narrative which should be true to the facts was well established as an essential element of historical writing. What varied was the judgement of the nature of the facts …

But what must also be taken into consideration is the essentially "fictional" nature of these texts, particularly in terms of the way conventional formal structures shape the manner in which the "objective" narrator shapes and judges the "facts". Again Goveia's study notes this conventionality:

The diversity of subject and method in British West Indian historical writing is comprehended under a certain regularity of form … the diversity of temperaments, motives and opinions among the historians, was, to a significant extent, overlaid by a regularity of interpretation. (Goveia).

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written about the similarity of content and structure across slave narratives; of the influence on each new writer of "other slave authors who preceded them"; of the apprenticeship in rhetoric and oratory many writers served while on the anti-slavery lecture circuit (evidence of this is explicit in Cambridge); of common rhetorical features such as metaphor, irony, apostrophe, chiasmus and—in the case of Equiano and Cambridge—"the use of two distinct voices". In addition, Gates touches on both the appropriation by the slave narrative of other literary forms (the popular sentimental novel, for example) and the appropriation of the slave narrative by novels such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976). In so far as the printed texts of the slave narratives were often "formal revisions of their spoken words organized and promoted by antislavery organizations" (Gates) and that such lectures were organized according to some of the conventions and rhetorical strategies mentioned above, we have come a long way from a perception of the slave narrative as a bald account of historical facts. The narratives were, rather, highly crafted and self-conscious works (sharing many features with other fictional genres) that filter, as it were, "facts".

The same can be said of the travel-journal. Eve-Marie Kröller has recently catalogued some rhetorical strategies in travel-writing by Victorian women, including the use of the "poetic" and "objective" modes to shore each other up, the use of set-pieces of natural description to familiarize the exotic environment, the use of servants' explanations to translate "a foreign epistemology", the advertisement of the partial nature of the account and the mixture of genres (the account may incorporate lyric rhapsody, botanical information, cookery recipes, missionary story and adventure tale!).

My point in emphasizing the constructed, fictional nature of the "source narratives" in Cambridge is that in both Emily's and Cambridge's accounts, the narrating "I" is evasive, as is the "truth" of her/his relation. As Kröller points out, the traveldiarist is doubly self-conscious as protagonist in both an alien geographical environment and a potentially unsettling, even embarrassing narrative environment. Emily's account is self-referential because she must make herself, as narrator/protagonist, an object of consciousness; like Cambridge, her self-consciousness accounts for certain gaps, ambiguities, discreet omissions and self-protective explanations in her text. Thus our attention is drawn to both the fictive nature of the narratives in the novel and, by their faithfulness to the conventions and discursive strategies of the originals, to the storylike quality of these originals.

At the same time, even as we discover that history is yet another fiction, Phillips's deliberate echoing of his "parent narratives" forcibly reminds us of their historical nature: to borrow a term from deconstruction, the fact that the appellation "historical" is "under erasure" does not eliminate the concept of "historical" when we approach the fiction. Accordingly, the informed reader will judge Cambridge, at least in part, according to its faithfulness to the form and tone of the originals, to the "facts" of history. It must be said that the tone of the novel's language is accurate and deftly manipulated to specific purposes. One may query whether any planterclass West Indian newspaper or anecdotal account (the form suggested in Part Three) would consider it necessary to mention that Mr. Brown was a Christian; on the other hand, narrative irony—and symmetry—is facilitated by the adjective, which nicely contrasts with "the Christian Cambridge" later in the account. Again, the apparently random italicization of the earlier nineteenth century lends a "period tone" in this instance as well as serving to underscore the irony of contrasting "Christian" behaviours.

I referred earlier to the sense of familiarity, of déjà vu which the informed reader experiences in Cambridge. This, as noted, is largely due to the deliberate incorporation into the novel of certain conventional narrative and attitudinal features proper to the "parent documents", and results in an acceptance of Emily's and Cambridge's accounts as historically representative. Yet, in drawing attention to the several discursive strategies through which past "facts" have been filtered, and to the evasive, even enigmatic, nature of the first-person narrators of the tale, Phillips lulls us into a sense of familiarity only to jolt us out of it.

As I also suggested earlier, the self-conscious artificiality of the slave narrative and travel diary-forms helps to account for certain holes and silences, certain contradictions and ambiguities in this novel which draws on them. For example, the deliberate evocation of Equiano's classic slave narrative underscores the public, rhetorical, missionary quality of the testimony of black Tom turned free David Henderson: "Truly I was now an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy of complexion! Africa spoke to me only of a history I had cast aside". But, in the next breath—well, paragraph—the narrative is coloured by the voices of the effaced Olumide and the disillusioned, re-enslaved Cambridge, with devastatingly ironic effect: "We who are kidnapped [by Englishmen] from the coast of Africa, and bartered [by Englishmen] on the shores of America, enjoy a superior and free status in England". Likewise, the sentiments of the Christianized Cambridge who thanks God "for granting me powers of self-expression in the English language" are undercut by his reportage of Olumide's fate in the hands of "so-called Christian customers" whose English "resembled nothing more civilized than the manic chatter of baboons"; of course, this also qualifies Emily's reference to "the incoherent slobber of negro speech".

As for Emily's narrative, contradictions and revisions abound. At one moment, she salutes the tropical climate and foliage; at the next, she rails against its strangeness, the heat, the insects. The dualities of England and the unfamiliar Caribbean estate are sometimes reversed, so that their opposition in terms of "home" is dismantled: for example, the creole menu soon becomes one that

gave so much pleasure to the palate that I began to wonder if I should ever again adjust to the fare of England. Was I doomed to become an exotic for the rest of my days? This, it now seemed to me, would be no bad thing …

The slave she admires as "Hercules" is revalued when she discovers that "this Cambridge is lettered, can read his Bible, and even endeavours to teach it to his fellow blacks. which leads me to conclude that … [he] is no ordinary negro"; later he is a "treacherous" villain. And in Part Three, he is an "insane" murderer. Emily's repulsion at the brutal whipping of a slave is followed by her trite assertion, on viewing a negro village, that

If I were to be asked if I should enter life anew as an English labourer or a West Indian slave I should have no hesitation in opting for the latter. It seems to me manifestly worth abandoning the propriety and civility of English life for the pleasant clime of this island and the joyous spirit which abounds upon it.

No wonder a recent review of the novel cites Emily as "one of the most skilfully created unreliable narrators in contemporary fiction"!

The texture of the novel as a whole is that of a web. One can easily identify links (between Christiania and Emily; between Cambridge and Brown, who both lose a "wife", a child and finally their lives) and parallels (the sea voyages of sickness and death, the two arrivals on the island and journeys to the estate, of Emily and Cambridge) and contrasts (Brown's view of Cambridge as a thief, liar and troublemaker, against Cambridge's view of Brown as "a bullying brute of an overseer", a violent rapist determined to crush all spirit in the slaves). Such an interconnected network is fertile ground for irony: Emily comments on the blacks' promiscuity and their difference "from us in their disregard of marriage vows"; ironically, Cambridge's account informs us that "Mr. Brown had taken no interest in … Miss Emily once the details of the latter's condition had been discovered by the physician". Emily mentally admonishes her father's laxity ("Does he have no conception of what would claim us all in the tropics were we to slip an inch below the surface of respectability?") and feels only contempt for the poor whites, "these pale-fleshed niggers"; she ends up in a similar predicament as a result of her own moral turpitude. Throughout, the narrative challenges first impressions: the stock "mammy" figure of Stella turns out to have been Brown's mistress and the mysterious Christiania, his supposed mistress, as only a pawn in his humiliation of Cambridge. The "safe" society of doctor and reverend with whom Emily surrounds herself in fact masks a "clown and his oafish friend … engaged in some manner of feud for my favours".

Without further catalogue, it should be clear that the text's apparent familiarity (of form, of known "facts") is subtly destabilized by strategies such as those outlined above so as to shock the reader into awareness of incongruities and discordance below the conventional surface. In this, of course, Phillips is being true to the dualities of plantation culture. Expectations are frustrated—the virtuous lady becomes a shunned sinner; her "romance" ends in degradation; Cambridge's history of moral upliftment and Christian missionary zeal ends in murder, madness and execution—just as the brutality, debasement and self-deceit hidden behind imperial truisms about plantation life are unmasked. All the facts, the statistics and the explanations are given but the whole "story" of the enigmatic Cambridge remains a mystery.

The incidental image of "Two sorry horses, one perhaps of fourteen hands and white in colour, the other a rough brown beast resembling a Shetland pony,… often to be observed shackled incongruously together" may serve as a metaphor for this text, Incongruity and discordance arise from the "shackling together" of unlike races, genders, cultures, economic and philosophical systems, narratives. And yet, as in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, the insistence on giving "the other side"—not simply as a mirroring of opposites, but as a demonstration of how the same horror corrupts in different ways—is perhaps the least imperfect methodology a writer can adopt in delivering a glimpse of our chaotic and puzzling past.

Finally, as noted earlier, it is worth situating Cambridge within certain concepts of post-colonial literary theory. In The Empire Writes Back, such theory—of the type practised by Bhabha, Spivak, JanMohammed etc.—is seen as offering "ways of dismantling colonialism's signifying system and exposing its operation in the silencing and oppressing of the colonial subject". According to Bhabha, the authors explain, "the colonized is constructed within a disabling master discourse of colonialism which specifies a degenerate native population to justify its conquest and subsequent rule". Such a "signifying system" or "master discourse" informs most of Parts One and Three of Cambridge and, indeed, a sizable portion of Cambridge's own narrative, particularly after he acknowledges that "Africa spoke to me of a barbarity I had unfortunately fled".

At the same time, in calling attention to the "parent narratives" that inform these sections, texts which intend a particular (Eurocentric) historical construction of the colonized Other; and simultaneously exposing the "fictionality" of such accounts; and enabling both colonized Other (Cambridge) and colonizing Other (the woman, Emily) to speak through such discourses while evading reductive labelling (objectification) by the retention of incongruity, discordance, contradictions, silences in their narratives, Cambridge casts doubt on the very possibility of definitive historical construction. As such, the novel fulfils another criterion of post-colonial literature:

it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and between two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. Thus the rereading and the rewriting of the European historical and fictional record is a vital and inescapable task at the heart of the post-colonial enterprise.

Cambridge enables us to see, with Foucault, that there are no "true" discourses only more or less powerful ones. And while I recognize that the discovery of fictional elements in the type of source narratives utilized in Cambridge does not essentially alter the power of the tradition to which they belong, I would maintain that after careful reading of Cambridge one will never read the other versions (Lewis, Carmichael, Long and the rest) in the same way again.