Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 25uses in achieving this effect in Higher Ground and The Nature of
Blood is intertextuality, and both novels deploy the method to draw
our attention to the inevitably textual nature of history. At the close
of the analysis, the focus turns toward A Distant Shore , a novel that
immediately follows The Nature of Blood in Phillips’s oeuvre, but is
formalistically and, to an extent thematically, a very different piece
of work. Whereas the latter juxtaposes narratives from different
epochs, A Distant Shore brings together the disparate national and
historical experiences of two contemporaries who come to live in the
same quiet village in semirural northern England. The juxtaposition
in this case involves contrasting experiences of belonging—at the
individual, familial, and national levels—within the same territorial
space. I contend that an important effect of this juxtaposition is that
it undermines the various proportions of place-based loyalty, with
the signifier “home” being deliberately interrogated to promote an
open, fluid, and, indeed, cosmopolitan vision of human belonging.
In developing this last point, I demonstrate that Phillips’s novel pro-
ceeds even further in this direction than critics had previously noted
by undermining the very impulses that inform all exclusive notions
of community.
The chapter closes by illustrating how the text’s subversive qual-
ity encourages the same critically minded and autonomous vision of
history that is promoted in Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood.
Therefore, whereas these two novels promote a critical cosmopolitan
vision by urging the reader to be aware of history’s influence on indi-
vidual subjectivity (to better envision a common sense of human-
ity), A Distant Shore critiques the very ontological scaffolding that
would rigidly bind the individual to a single sociohistorical context
in the first place. While Macherey’s work is put to use in this last
argument, Gilroy’s theories of minority subjectivity and their rela-
tionship to modernity also provide an important complementary
framework.
To begin this discussion, I now examine some of the narrative
procedures used in Higher Ground. In this novel, Phillips employs
formal strategies very similar to those used in Cambridge (1991),
Crossing the River (1993), and, indeed, The Nature of Blood. To
varying degrees, each of these novels features polyphonic narratives