Introduction 15Phillips highlights the manner in which the complexities of this
relationship (between individual and historical moment) can con-
found our attempts to garner a straightforward “understanding” or
empathic engagement with each protagonist.
Of the many formal and stylistic devices Phillips employs to
achieve these effects, I identify intertextuality, defamiliarization, and
innovative uses of syntax as the most significant. As I demonstrate,
such techniques are used not only to “estrange” the reader from the
protagonists and to upset straightforward empathic readings, but
also to encourage the reader to adopt a critical and cosmopolitan
view toward history. I illustrate that these distancing effects also
stimulate what could be labeled a Levinasian form of empathy for
the protagonists, which Phillips renders by making his readers pat-
ently aware that they lack complete knowledge of the characters and
their thoughts. The empathy that is generated therefore becomes
ineluctably intertwined with a haunting sense of self-reflexivity,
with the reader being made aware of the fact that they are ultimately
responsible for its production.
Further complicating these procedures, Phillips also deploys inter-
textual elements in the interweaving plotlines. These, I maintain,
draw the reader’s attention to the degree to which the act of reading
is inevitably influenced by our previous encounters with other, sim-
ilar texts. However, the intertextual quality of some of the novels
(particularly of The Nature of Blood ) also serves to illuminate the
fact that separating historical truth from fiction is not always clear
cut. An imperative consequence of this meditation on the relation-
ship between subjectivity and history is that it requires the reader
to develop a reflexive view of reading historical accounts, one that
is critical of received codes of interpretation. This view resonates a
great deal with the critical cosmopolitan vision discussed above, in
which the subject courts “ironic” distance as a means of envisaging
a more inclusive, universal orientation to the world.
I argue that this vision vis- à -vis history also accords with
Pierre Macherey’s materialist notion of individual subjectiv-
ity. For Macherey, subjectivity could be identified in the manner
of an “event” rather than an inert concept of the human individ-
ual. Following along the lines of Foucault’s theories, he argues that