Estrangement,empathic failure,and the provocation of a critical cosmopolitan vision in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

Abstract

The Nature of Blood (1997) is perhaps the most formally experimental novel Caryl Phillips has yet produced, and features an innovative combination of literary devices such as polyphony, defamiliarization, and intertextuality. In this essay, I will argue that an overlooked effect of these techniques is the provocation of a self-reflexive, historically conscious and critical view of human subjectivity that chimes with what Rebecca Walkowitz (2006: 2) calls a “critical cosmopolitan vision”. This is a way of seeing that is suspicious of the prevailing modes of interpretation and understanding that attend a given historical context, and which attempts to look beyond fixed notions of identity and belonging.

In the analysis that follows I will argue that in his celebrated novel The Nature of Blood (1997), Caryl Phillips employs a mixture of formal literary techniques such as polyphony, defamiliarization, and intertextuality in order both to raise the reader’s awareness of the limits of empathy and to provoke a self-conscious, historically aware and critical view of human subjectivity. Such a view resonates with what Rebecca Walkowitz (2006: 2) calls “a critical cosmopolitan vision”, which is suspicious of the received paradigms of seeing that are to be found in and define any given historical context, and seeks to look beyond fixed categories of identity and belonging. This conception of subjectivity also chimes with many of the ideas outlined in Paul Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic (1993: 73), some key concepts of which (particularly “double consciousness”) are central to the cosmopolitan project.

David Held (2003: 58) contributes to this refined notion of the cosmopolitan thinker when he argues that he or she must have the ability to “mediate traditions [and] stand outside a singular location (the location of one’s birth, land, upbringing)”. Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007: xii) similarly defines the cosmopolitan sensibility as “an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend [human lives] significance”. For Bryan S. Turner (2002: 57), the capacity to assert what he also labels “ironic distance”, from one’s social or cultural context is also of great importance to the attainment of a cosmopolitan vision. “The principal component of cosmopolitan virtue”, he argues, “is irony, because the understanding of other cultures is assisted by an intellectual distance from one’s own national or local culture” (2002: 57). Such ironic distance has significant socio-political bearing because it “produces a human skepticism towards grand narratives of modern ideologies” (2002: 57).

The Nature of Blood presents themes that dovetail with these ideas; but perhaps more significant is the formal composition of the novel itself, which complements and reinforces the realization of a distanced cosmopolitan view. The composition, which is also seen in a number of Phillips’s earlier novels, Higher Ground (1989/2006), Cambridge (1991/2008), and Crossing the River (1993/2006), involves the juxtaposition of polyphonic narratives whose aesthetic properties and content reflect their historical settings. However, these voices also echo each other in their themes of exile, displacement, and human suffering.

In The Nature of Blood we find the same thematic patterns of pain, deracination, and psychological trauma. However, one might distinguish the later novel in its more conspicuous and eclectic employment of intertextuality, which both draws our attention to the inevitable textual nature of history, and the ineluctable influence this has on our ability to engage empathetically with the characters. The protagonists in the novel comprise Eva Stern, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to Britain after the War but fails to “integrate” into society and eventually succumbs to mental illness and suicide. Then there is her uncle, Stephan Stern, who leaves his home and family in Germany to help found the new state of Israel. Another link to this story comes in the form of Malka, a Jewish Ethiopian who emigrates to Israel some fifty years later and meets the much older Stephan while working as a prostitute. Further complicating this already historically entangled collection of narratives are the archaic voices that tell comparable stories from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice: an African general modelled on the character of Othello, who endures subtle xenophobia, solitude, and social rejection in the city state as he awaits orders to fight the enemy Ottomans; and Servadio, who, along with some of the other Jews living in the dilapidated Portobuffole ghetto, is persecuted and put to death in one of the state’s infamous blood libel cases. With the important exception of Stephan Stern, whose story opens and closes the novel from two different points in his life, each of the narrative threads in The Nature of Blood explores the effects of a particular historical moment that exerts a visible influence on the protagonists’ lives, usually for the worse.

Importantly, it is their sheer embeddedness within history that provides psychological body and emotional weight to each character’s story. Indeed, we could make the simple observation that the characters in the novel are victims of their own specific historical circumstances. However, by employing particular literary strategies that disrupt an empathic engagement on the part of the reader, Phillips challenges the reader herself to penetrate the historical contextual factors that threaten to obtrude a meaningful empathic engagement — to, in the words of Pierre Macherey (1998: 102), “rupture […] and [possess] the historico-totality” that so palpably influences their lives. This subversive positioning of the reader vis-à-vis history presents clear parallels with the kind of “critical cosmopolitanism” championed by Walkowitz (2006: 2), with its “aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress [and] a suspicion of epistemological privilege”. Undoubtedly the most salient example that illustrates the impact historical forces exert upon subjectivity comes in the narrative of Eva Stern, whose account of survival in the Nazi concentration camps is delivered in a chillingly detached, disorienting register. In particular, the descriptions of her work within the camp’s Sonderkommando unit (which involves helping to cremate the bodies of dead prisoners) offer a harrowing image of a psyche being torn asunder. There are two primary techniques Phillips deploys to render this psychological condition, both of which rely heavily on the particular use of syntax. The most conspicuous is the short, barren, staccato sentences that emanate from the psychologically damaged narrator, their brevity and disjointedness conveying a failing ability to integrate her experiences into a coherent chain of rational utterances.

Describing the appearance of new inmates as they arrive at the camp, Eva offers only fragments of perceptions and thoughts. The inmates are “Bald heads and powerful eyes. These were women who once made love, decaying now like discarded and foul-smelling fruit. Buried in their own filth” (2008: 169). ¹ However, Eva’s descriptive account is further ruptured by the inclusion of parenthetical interjections, which both amplify and complicate the emotional impact of the scene. The quotation above continues with one such instance: “(Buried in one’s own filth.) […] (Look at us! I plead with the new-comers. Do you not understand?) […] (We were once you. Healthy, with beautiful figures. With long hair. (Mama and Papa still exist in my mind.)” (169). The most striking feature of these intrusions is their sudden change in narrative voice: outside the brackets we have Eva speaking in the third person in a cold, detached register that suggests an almost automatous mode of being in the world. Clearly she is attempting to limit her emotional exposure to the pain of life in the camp by keeping her descriptions as impersonal as possible by deliberately avoiding the first person. That this task ends in failure is made visible by the intermittent paroxysms of personal disclosures, which pepper the narrative with revealing glimpses of her suppressed personal state. Importantly, these flashes of emotion are partitioned, as is her repressed emotional life, from the austere consciousness she has constructed to survive the horrors of her day to day camp duties. Unlike the hauntingly detached third person voice that speaks outside the brackets, the one inside speaks in an unsettlingly desperate first person voice, pleading for the inmates to “look at us” (169). Secreted even further inside her consciousness (inside another parenthetical layer), is Eva’s painful memory of her mother and father, both of whom met violent deaths in the initial stages of the Shoah: “(Mama and Papa still exist in my mind)” (169).

Thus, not only does her persecution force her to become physically implicated in the Nazi atrocities, it also compels her to cleave her consciousness in two: the obedient, self-denying automaton coldly separated from emotional distress on one side, and on the other the terrified subject witnessing first hand her experiences in a concentration camp. Articulating this connection between the historical and the psychological is an especially important challenge Phillips lays out to the reader, and one which appears to hold the key to better understanding Eva’s character. This is not least because, while her bifurcation of self is no doubt a defensive necessity, allowing her to resist on her own terms what Hannah Arendt (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: 69) described as the Nazis’ “organized attempt […] to eradicate the concept of the human being”, it nonetheless has devastating consequences for Eva’s post-war life. Indeed, it is only when Eva vainly attempts to re-enter the world outside the camp that she finally succumbs to mental collapse, committing suicide when Gerry, an English soldier who helped liberate her, reneges on a flippant marriage proposal.

It is at this stage that the reader might begin to feel comfortable in identifying a determining relationship between the particular socio-historical forces under which Eva lives, a position from which they might then manage to build a sense of empathic involvement with the protagonist. However, Phillips complicates this process by employing narrative strategies that increasingly weaken our trust in the character. This process appears to start when Eva emigrates to England and attempts to adapt to her new life. Significantly, Phillips stretches this event over a relatively large section of the novel, spreading it among shards of other memories, dreams, and intrusions from voices of the other narrators. Brief moments of analepsis and prolepsis from various periods of the journey reverberate with one another to develop a fragmented and confusing collage of experiences in which the general sequence of events becomes confused. What we do know from the outset is that the journey to England ends with Eva’s being committed to a psychiatric hospital in which she later commits suicide.

This bleak denouement is presaged by the intrusion of an apparent encyclopaedia entry, which in a self-consciously authoritative register introduces and defines the term “suicide”: “SUICIDE: An act of voluntary and intentional self-destruction” (186). This somewhat incongruous interjection becomes outright discordant when its narrator (clearly not Eva) then proceeds to absorb the term into a Christian episteme: “St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) claimed that suicide was a mortal sin because it usurped God’s power over human life and death. However, neither the Old nor the New Testament directly forbids suicide” (186). Of course, given that the pronouncement is largely occupied with Christian orthodoxy (although there is the token reference to the Old Testament, which obviously holds similarities with the Torah), the interjection appears somewhat incongruous. But perhaps more so are its attempts to establish a totalizing explanation of Eva’s experiences, assimilating her unique story within a fixed schema of meaning.

This interloper acts as a foil to yet another narrative intruder: the more sympathetic voice of a medical researcher, whose journal-like commentary on Eva presents the experiences of the protagonist in clinical terms. This historically conscious voice certainly takes us beyond the didactic Christian pronouncements of the encyclopaedia: “Eventually, of course, we found a name for the collective suffering of those who survived” (157). However, his “explanation” of Eva’s behaviour nevertheless fails to bring us closer to the character as an individual because it continues to employ strategies that attempt to “understand” the individual by using prefabricated models of human subjectivity without scrutinizing the peculiarities of the character herself. In this sense the voice of the researcher becomes little more than a sophisticated version of the encyclopaedic definition mentioned above. Indeed, during the disclosure, the researcher admits he does not “possess any intimate knowledge of her case history. I hardly knew her. I interviewed her just the once” (173).

Yet the alternative avenue we might use to understand Eva, namely by listening to her own accounts, becomes increasingly unreliable due to the progressively disordered and incoherent state of the narrative. This disorder manifests itself first in a blatant inconsistency: we are initially told that Gerry sent Eva a letter asking her to come to England to marry him, but we later learn that this letter was forged. But by far the biggest problem that threatens our “understanding” of Eva is brought about by Phillips’s rendition of the protagonist’s fractured consciousness, which lends the narrator a distinctly inaccessible quality, restricting the reader’s ability to gain a deeper sense of intimacy with the character. This form of mental foreclosure is crystallized in the muteness Eva progressively suffers upon arriving in England. On the train to London she rues her inability to respond to attempts at conversation made by a young woman sitting in her compartment and avoids looking at the other passengers, stating that “their eyes pollute my confidence” (189). Thereafter she resigns herself to a fate of being “unable to function” in society, not least because, as she puts it, “I do not talk” (191–7).

As Michel Foucault (2001: 109) brought to light in his seminal study on the issue, the Western concept of mental illness has been closely associated with literal and metaphorical silence for a number of centuries, with the “broken dialogue” of the suffering human seen as testimony to his “madness”. Indeed, many European doctors writing at the time at which Eva’s narrative is set knew that trauma victims often lose the will or ability to communicate with others. Writing in a report for the allies immediately after the war, the psychiatrist Jürg Zutt (1946: 250) advised that the “human falls silent in his agony […] surrendering to their inevitable wretched destiny”. For Stef Craps (2008: 195), the reason “Eva reverts to silence […] is to keep her inner reality inviolate from the world”, an analysis which certainly appears to tally with the psychological bifurcation I described above. It is also an interpretation that allows a clear connection to be drawn between the defensive self-compartmentalization she employs in the camp, where she “decides to put Eva away […] some place for safe-keeping”, and its escalation toward chronic schizophrenia (Craps, 2008: 195).

The emergence of her alter-ego, whom she describes as “the other girl”, who wears “a jagged slash of lipstick around her mouth, red like blood” (197) and shadows her every move, can also be considered the result of, among other things, a suppressed sexual consciousness, possibly caused by events related to her ordeal. The somewhat unpalatable suggestion that Eva might have participated in sexual liaisons with her jailers in exchange for preferable treatment gains credibility when we hear Eva explain why she warmed to Gerry’s character: “He never asked me, did you survive in the camp because you slept with a man? (Others asked this question but not Gerry)” (194). Reading along these lines, we could arrive at the interpretation that Eva’s aversion to the invasive eye of the other is a strategy to conceal the self-negating activities she was forced to perform in the camp in order to survive, such as cremating the bodies of those killed by the Nazis, and possibly compromising herself sexually so that she might escape a similar fate. However, while such speculations certainly appear viable from the narrative, Phillips by no means makes us feel we can place absolute faith in them. This is primarily because of the narrative’s epistemic elusiveness, whereby the reader becomes disoriented by a character that lies and appears unable to separate reality from fantasy.

In her study of trauma in contemporary fiction, Laurie Vickroy (2002: 2) notes that experiences such as Eva’s are increasingly represented in ways that echo the victim’s inability to communicate painful memories, thereby problematizing an easy empathic connection between reader and protagonist. Indeed, in a statement that chimes neatly with the dilemma alluded to above, Vickroy (2002: 3–4) declares that such writers engage in a “delicate balancing act by trying to lure readers into uncomfortable or alien material, sharing victims’ pain with readers, shifting between what can and cannot be revealed, or appealing to readers through popular forms of writing (memoir and fiction)”. Phillips therefore presents the reader with a challenge of interpretation whereby they must adopt a self-reflexive form of empathy — one that is sensitive to the fact that the individual’s peculiar experiences might preclude their ability to communicate their experiences in conventional ways. The dilemma facing the reader is therefore whether, given the incoherent state of her story, we should try to “fill in the gaps” of Eva’s narrative in order to arrive at an understanding of the character.

One method the reader might attempt to follow is an emotion-based empathy. Such a conception of empathy has recently been articulated by scholars working within cosmopolitan theory, most notably by Mica Nava (2007: 8), who makes an interesting case for defining cosmopolitanism in terms of an empathic engagement that is based upon the “unconscious, non-intellectual, emotional, inclusive features of cosmopolitanism, on feelings of attraction for and identification with otherness”. For Nava, cosmopolitan conciliation with the socially excluded (whom Eva certainly is) is therefore something that can be prompted by an emotional exchange with the other. Indeed, Nava attests that the kind of “committed opposition to racism” that one finds in cosmopolitan thought (although certainly not exclusively) is “often rooted in non-rational unconscious factors” (2007: 64). Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco (2009: 6) argue along similar lines as Nava, but place more emphasis on the role of self-awareness in the emotional response of the individual, in order that “people can actually become more cosmopolitan in ways that are both reflexive and emotional”.

However, as the experience of reading Eva’s narrative illustrates, such a formulation of empathy is inevitably unreliable due to the cultural and social specificity of “emotions” and “compassion”. Indeed Lauren Berlant (2004: 7) makes a compelling case for the limits and possible dangers of basing universal ideas on emotional conceits, arguing that “sentiments of compassion […] derive from social training, emerge at historical moments, are shaped by aesthetic connections, and take place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and contradictory”. Following a line of thought in keeping with the critical tradition of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler (2002), Berlant maintains that emotions such as compassion are performative in that they involve agents operating within particular social and political contexts performing different roles within a nexus of power. From this politicized view of the emotion, compassion tends to promote an indulgence in rather than a critical examination of gulfs in social power.

This politicized suspicion of emotion-based empathy has a strong tradition in twentieth-century formalism, with perhaps the most memorable denunciation of the concept coming from the dramatist Bertolt Brecht (cited in Robinson, 2008: 207): “I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed […] I appeal to the reason”. Following the work of Viktor Shklovsky, who pioneered the formal device of estrangement (or ostranemie), which in turn was adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s concept of defamiliarization, Brecht articulated a critical dramaturgical method known as Verfremdung, which sought to unsettle the audience from received patterns of viewing and interpretation. However, unlike Shklovsky and the other Russian formalists (although Tolstoy certainly occupies a special position within that category), Brecht’s theories represent a particularly extreme form of anti-empathic rationality. For Brecht, appealing to emotional responses promotes the kind of bypassing of reason that brought fascism to power in his native Germany and renders consciousness a mechanical operation. As Douglas Robinson (2008: 207) informs us, for Brecht, “empathy shuts down thought and transports the spectator into a receptive, malleable body state in which s/he is ideally susceptible to right-wing ideological indoctrination”. Thus, his use of Verfremdung or estrangement, with its stress on novel and often disorienting modes of representation, “awakens critical thought and so provokes the spectator to rethink and resist dominant capitalist ideologies” (Robinson, 2008: 207).

Such aesthetic principles bear strong parallels with the strategies of distancing and alienation Phillips uses in rendering Eva’s narrative. By depicting a character that is overtly untrustworthy, whose representation of events we cannot comfortably believe, Phillips makes any emotion-based empathy highly problematic. What further undermines the character’s empathic appeal is the knowledge that Eva physically took part in activities that do not sit well with contemporary moral sensibilities: aiding in the mass killings (albeit under extreme duress), and perhaps prostituting herself in exchange for preferential treatment. This is not to suggest that Phillips dismisses empathy altogether. Rather, by making us fail in our attempts to empathize with the protagonist, he underscores its practical and conceptual limits.

At this stage in the discussion it should also be kept in mind that definitions of empathy are not restricted solely to emotional engagements. Indeed, for Kathleen Woodward (2004: 63), empathy rests more on an intellectual than an emotional foundation. This argument is echoed by Martha Nussbaum (1997: 91), who also places emphasis on the cognitive (particularly imaginative) procedures of empathy, contending that it necessitates an “ability to imagine what it is like to be in [another] person’s place”. This more intellectually engaged notion of empathy is something Katherine Hallemeier (2013) gestures towards in her recently published monograph on J.M. Coetzee, in which she argues that the writer seeks to expand the range of empathy and sympathy by various disruptive procedures. Of particular relevance here is the fact that Hallemeier stresses the need to appreciate the ways in which different conceptions of cosmopolitanism can be brought to light in different contexts as a result of dissimilar ideas of what empathy and sympathy mean. In her own words, Hallemeier (2013: 21) contends that “discrete understandings of sympathy come to dictate and reify cosmopolitan practices”.

The measured, self-reflexive form of empathy that emerges from this critical interrogation of the faculty, and its uses to cosmopolitanism, presents parallels with the critical empathy outlined in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, in which the subject faces the infinite gulf between self and other but nonetheless attempts to bridge the divide. For Levinas (1961/1979: 51), this constitutes a genuine and important empathic experience because the self transcends the barriers that separate it from the other. More specifically, this demands the cultivation of a critical and, crucially, self-conscious mode of viewing self and other. However, linguistic and epistemic barriers are not the only obstacles to empathy in the novel. Phillips also takes pains to illustrate the fact that history itself is not immediately “accessible” in an empirical sense, but is always and necessarily mediated by texts with particular semiotic systems, ethical codes, and cultural priorities — an aspect of the novel that becomes clearer when its intertextual quality is examined. It is not enough, Phillips appears to tell us, to say “know” history and you will “know” the individual who suffers within it — a sentiment Macherey (1998: 98) echoes when he declares “it is not enough to say that the subject is in its history, from which it cannot be extricated”.

As we have seen Brecht and other formalists argue, part of the reason why formal experimentation such as estrangement (or the Verfremdungseffekt) is socially important is because it forces new and individual meditations on matters significant to life that would otherwise become calcified relics of consciousness. Provoking re-examinations and re-configurations of such ideas therefore raises the conscious level of the reader or audience, deepening our appreciation of what it means to exist in the world. In this portion of the analysis I demonstrate that Phillips broadens the scale on which his literary estrangement works by moving from the level of syntax and diction (seen for instance in Eva’s parenthetical bifurcation of self), to that of narrative structure and plot. He does this by employing strategies of intertextuality, which integrate overtly familiar stories into the fabric of the novel, but in ways that appear strange and alienating.

Such intertextual procedures are evident in the narrative thread of Eva Stern, which bears stark similarities with Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, albeit with an ultimate inversion of the latter’s optimistic tone and message. Eva, like Anne, has an elder sister named Margot, who goes into hiding at the behest of her parents; but instead of uttering the well-known line: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” (Frank, 1947/2008: 329–30), we have Margot (who has been raped by one of her male harbourers) making the much bleaker statement: “You see, Eva, in spite of everything that we have lost, they still hate us, and they will always hate us” (88). For Stef Craps (2008: 200), such departures from the source texts are deliberate methods by which Phillips attempts to further estrange and unsettle the reader by interrogating the pre-established conceptual apparatus he or she has necessarily erected to understand the Holocaust. Moreover, the intertextual quality of the novel forces the reader to acknowledge the textual nature of history itself, a notion to which Fredric Jameson (1982: 35) subscribes when he states that “history […] is inaccessible to us except in textual form”. To read Eva’s story is therefore to evoke an uncanny disharmony within the fabric of the familiar Holocaust narrative, compelling the reader to acknowledge the necessary plurality of perspectives bound up in each historical event.

Such an interpretation is by no means new to Phillips studies. Timothy Bewes (2006: 34), for instance, has made a strong case that the writer has persistently employed references to famous texts, particularly in conspicuous or clichéd ways (often involving what he labels narrative “ventriloquizing”), so as to draw the reader’s attention to their own historically- and culturally-learned preconceptions about certain subjects and historical periods. While Bewes raises important points here, I would argue that the “clichés” he identifies also encourage the reader to put into practice a critical cosmopolitan vision of human subjectivity — one that highlights the fact that the historical circumstances depicted in the narratives will be experienced and refracted in manifold ways, depending on the individual who endures and relates them. Indeed, in The Nature of Blood, Phillips makes the reader acknowledge what Stephen Greenblatt argued was the diversity of experiences to be found in singular historical contexts, and encourages us to think beyond a mono-voiced representation of history (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000: 16).

This new historical approach for which Greenblatt is best known also resonates with some of the theoretical tenets of Mikhail Bakhtin and his conception of dialogism. For Bakhtin (1981: 326), texts and indeed language itself are dynamic, interpersonal phenomena that reflect the cultural, social, and class-based circumstances that exert influence in their field of use. Applying a dialogical framework to interpret Phillips’s polyphonic novels (itself a Bakhtinian term) offers up a number of important critical possibilities. In particular, it adds greater socio-linguistic weight and specificity to the process and places greater emphasis on the individual act of reading as a socio-political activity conducted in a field of opposing views, interests, and values (Bakhtin, 1981: 326–7).

This application of Bakhtinian dialogism to Phillips’s polyphonic novels is argued robustly by Lars Eckstein in an essay on Cambridge. For Eckstein (2001: 54), Phillips juxtaposes different voices from historical periods in order to adumbrate the “silences and ideological delusions” on each side. Furthermore, Eckstein claims that Phillips deliberately advertises the textual influences that have been “borrowed” and integrated into the novel, such as autobiographical works by “Monk” Lewis and Olaudah Equiano. According to Eckstein (2001: 62), Phillips “wants to be found out by the reader” in order that this “will awaken the reader to the multi-dimensional textuality of the novel, incorporating as it does a slew of different voices (even when uttered by the same character)”. This awakening also has political ramifications, as the reader becomes more aware of the limits of singular voices that dictate a given cultural or social experience. This effectively promotes what he labels the “democratisation of cultural memory”, which encourages the reader to remain open to the less audible “marginalized voices of history” (2001: 62).

While Eckstein’s application of Bakhtinian dialogism is highly useful, I argue that when we also integrate into the framework Macherey’s conception of subjectivity (in its relationship with history), we can get a broader picture of the critical cosmopolitan dimensions of The Nature of Blood. This involves the reader employing a self-consciously distanced vision of the socio-cultural influences that exert themselves upon both a text’s production and its interpretation, thereby rupturing the fabric of history in order to gain a critical mode of seeing — one that is able to look beyond the received cultural and epistemological frameworks of interpretation and understanding. Eva’s narrative encourages such a break through Phillips’s use of intertextuality, which again reminds the reader of the inevitably textual nature both of historical record and interpretation, therefore underscoring the fact that every historical event necessarily involves and creates multiple understandings. By encouraging a reconstitution of received aesthetic presentations of the Holocaust in this way — that is, by alienating the reader through an encounter with an uncanny intertextual rendition of the Shoah — Phillips shocks the reader into a heightened sense of awareness as to the dangers involved in allowing events of such magnitude to become ossified into overly familiar “univocal” narratives. For Walter Mignolo (2002: 181), acts of this kind yield substantial intellectual benefits highly conducive to critical cosmopolitan vision because they promote what he terms “Epistemic […] diversity”, which enables “new forms of imagining, ethically and politically, from subaltern perspectives”.

As was mentioned at the outset of the discussion, Eva’s narrative is juxtaposed with two other intertextual stories from vastly different epochs, both highly dissimilar in terms of voice, register, and historical reference. The introduction of the voice that channels the “Othello” narrative presents a clear aesthetic departure from the register used by Eva Stern. The bleak, ascetic, and fragmented voice of the latter, which is more consonant with contemporary late modernist prose, is suddenly counterposed with the grandiloquence of the African general. The romanticized style and patriarchal ideology that is attributed to Shakespeare’s original work, and which Phillips conspicuously replicates, is perhaps most apparent during the scene in which the general proposes to Desdemona:

I asked her if she might consider becoming my bride. To my great surprise, the child fell immediately to her knees and clasped her hands together in front of her bowed head. It was then that she told me that her greatest wish was that I should become her lord and master, and protect and honour her for the remainder of her days. (144–5)

This infantilizing of Desdemona (“the child”), combined with the patriarchal subordination of women (“her lord and master”), clearly offers a cultural and ideological break from the Eva Stern narrative, which, in spite of illustrating the ultimate destruction of a female character nonetheless portrays a comparatively strong-willed, independent woman. But perhaps the greatest contrast presented by the two narratives is brought about by virtue of the ostensible incompatibility of their source texts: the stylistic grating of Anne Frank’s sober, autobiographical Diary against the ornately-rendered histrionics of Shakespeare’s celebrated play. Although Phillips never quite takes the plotline to the thespian excesses of the drama (nor does he employ Shakespearean blank verse), the allusions to Othello are enough to conjure strong impressions of artifice, of the theatre, and most crucially, of fictitiousness.

This particular distinction raises perhaps the most serious aesthetic “problem” of the novel as a whole: how can the reader reconcile the text’s references to the very real autobiographical work of Anne Frank that are made in the Eva Stern narrative with those made to the famous tragic drama Othello? The inappropriate juxtaposition of ethnic suffering Hilary Mantel (1997: 39) decried in her critique of the novel is here potentially eclipsed by an even worse prospect — that of Anne Frank’s account of the Holocaust being trivialized by being placed side by side with a populist drama. However, I contend that this tension fulfils an important destabilizing function that places the category of “history” under considerable but necessary strain. To clarify, while I have already noted that Phillips employs narratives that encourage a critical attentiveness to the multifarious nature of experiences and the way in which they are recorded and interpreted, here Phillips is going a step further and interrogating the semantic integrity of the term “history” as an empirically viable category. This semantic strain is brought about by Phillips’s deliberate efforts to make the reader aware of the ambiguous and complicated provenance of the “Othello” story.

Othello is, of course, clearly a work of fiction that reflects many of the concerns of the period in which it was written: imperialism, colonialism, the increasing phenomena of international trade and a burgeoning sense of cultural interaction and mixing. Much of the play’s appeal lies in its (albeit limited) interrogation of the audience’s fears and prejudices of the other, features which have been debated with particular interest over the last half-century. However, as Phillips makes us aware through the inclusion of another intrusive encyclopaedia entry in the narrative, the play itself is a work of intertextuality, being based on the novel Gli Hecatommithi, which was written in 1566 by the Italian poet and novelist Giovanni “Cinthio” Giraldo. This effectively adds a further layer to the intertextual quality of Phillips’s Othello narrative, making it an appropriation of an adaptation.

Adding yet more complexity to this lattice of (inter)texts is the fact that many consider the source of Cinthio’s novel to have been the true story of Christofal Moro. As Gunnar Sorelius (2002: 59) brings to our attention, a fifteenth-century general named Moro, which connotes “blackamoor” in Italian, was appointed governor of Cyprus “at a time when an attack from the Turks was expected, a situation very like that found in Othello”. However, a more intriguing coincidence is the purported fact that Moro’s wife “died in Cyprus under very mysterious circumstances” (Sorelius, 2002: 59). So if the “Othello” story Phillips references in The Nature of Blood has its basis in genuine events, the notion that truth separates the “source text” of Eva’s narrative from that of the African general becomes somewhat problematic. Of course, this is not because the veracity of Anne Frank’s Diary is questionable (although the work is highly subjective in its presentation and style), but because the perceived fictitiousness of the Othello narrative’s source is now thrown into doubt. By referencing a story with such a complex intertextual heritage, some of which is considered to be based on factual events, Phillips is therefore intentionally challenging the reader to perform the impossible task of separating historical truth from fiction.

That this task is inevitably futile is of course down to the ineluctably textual nature of history itself, which is always mediated, and forever being revised, re-written, and subsequently interpreted and re-interpreted in different ways depending on time and place. However, by interweaving these disparate narrative threads, Phillips appears to suggest that there remain strategies the reader could adopt to facilitate a more sensitive and critical manner of interpretation. This will allow us to “pierce through” the fabric of history, irrespective of its “veracity” or presentation, and perceive an abstracted image of the human subject. Such moments resonate with Macherey’s conception of human subjectivity, which is achieved by engaging critically with the cultural, epistemological, and ontological parameters found in particular historical contexts. Again, the role of empathy is of great importance here, with Phillips making the reader aware of the degree to which our perception and sympathy for the different characters can be manipulated by changes in register and presentation. Perhaps the most patent example of this can be seen in Phillips’s use of deliberately heavy-handed and clichéd methods of characterization. Like Shakespeare, Phillips’s approach in the Othello narrative clearly attempts to guide the reader’s moral judgement of the character, putting beyond doubt the fact that Othello is virtuous and ought to attract sympathy. Not only is he romantic and passionate, he also exhibits good grace and reserve, at one point taking a prostitute up to his rooms not to have sex but to practise his Venetian, paying her for the trouble but refusing any extra-curricular services. However, given the well-known tragic outcome of the story, there are overtones associated with the Othello character that present conceptual obstacles to our empathy. Yet Phillips employs a number of literary strategies that compel us to view the character in another, more conciliatory light. The scenes leading up to the character’s murderous rage are deliberately elided. Neither is there an Iago figure exerting a malevolent influence on the character. Instead, Phillips portrays the courtship and successful marriage of Desdemona as something of a symbolic triumph of the character over the prejudices of the Venetians.

It is at this point that Phillips appears to reveal more conspicuously the full extent and ramifications of the character’s “double consciousness”, which also provides a loose psychological explanation of how the character progresses from the successful general to the enraged, jealous murderer. Phillips achieves this with impressive subtlety by adumbrating the extent to which Othello draws a sense of patriarchal pride from his marriage. In keeping with the prevailing patriarchal orthodoxy, he views his new bride as a significant “acquisition”, perhaps one which confirms his legitimacy and self-worth in a vaguely hostile society. However, this acquisition, as he sees it, inevitably brings with it the fear and jealousy of her being lost to competing males: “I now possess an object of beauty and danger, and I know that, henceforth, all men will look upon me with a combination of respect and scorn” (148). Being an outsider, and a black one at that, the character’s paranoia would have been particularly acute, a fact that goes some way towards if not justifying, then at least explaining the murderous rage the reader anticipates. Such a contextualization, which is not provided to the same extent in Shakespeare’s play, is outlined in more explicit terms in an essay Phillips wrote on Venice a full ten years before The Nature of Blood. As he writes in The European Tribe (Phillips, 1987: 46): “You cannot expect a man with [Othello’s] history to behave rationally. And he does not […] Othello’s military reputation, already established as well earned and unchallengeable, is undermined by the bitter lack of respect for him as a man”.

Phillips closes the Othello narrative with the inclusion of an intrusive voice, ostensibly that of an African or African American, who disproportionately rebukes Othello for leaving his “home” continent and moving to far-away Venice: “My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal. [You] run like Jim Crow and leap into their creamy arms. […] Peel your rusty body from [Desdemona’s] and go home” (183). For Maurizio Calbi (2006: 49), these words emanate from a “disembodied, ahistorical, and decontextualized […] black super-egoic voice that fails to respond to the multilayered experience of the outsider”. Such a static and reactionary sense of ethnic identity presents parallels with the increasingly extreme racial politics espoused by the incarcerated Rudy Williams in Higher Ground (2006: 66). But they also echo the type of deleteriously essentialist notions of minority identity Gilroy (1993: 188) criticizes in The Black Atlantic, which rely heavily on a “defensive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy”. Such rigid and reactionary conceptions of identity politics are harmful, Gilroy argues, because they do not countenance the social and psychological realities (especially as regards “double consciousness”) of black and other minorities living in Europe and the United States. Importantly, Gilroy also maintains that such realities involve cultural mixing and hybridity — concepts which are also of chief aesthetic concern to cosmopolitan thought (1993: 82).

The conspicuously incongruous quality of this intrusive voice is also significant in that it presents a violent break from the Othello narrative’s original setting. The labels “Jim Crow”, “grinning Satchmo”, and “Uncle Tom”, are clearly derived from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture (181). This has the effect of presenting an immediate anachronism that reminds the reader of the context-specific nature of even some of the most politically-charged concepts such as racism and, indeed, “race”. It also, to reiterate a point made earlier, draws our attention once more to the fact that any engagement with a historical text occurs within a highly contested epistemological and ideological field. Penetrating the prevailing cultural and social influences that dictate ways in which stories such as Othello’s or Eva’s are read, and, indeed, attempting to empathize with the characters recounting events, is therefore a task that requires the ability to establish critical cosmopolitan distance.