Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 27already historically entangled collection of narratives are the archaic
voices that tell comparable stories from fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century Venice. These comprise an African general modeled 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 Portobuffole ghetto, is persecuted and put to death in
one of the state’s infamous blood libel cases.
The term “polyphonic” is particularly apt for describing the nar-
rative procedures of these novels not only because the works feature
multiple voices recounting numerous stories, but also because they
foreground language as a dynamic, dialogical phenomenon that
reflects the cultural, social, and class-based circumstances bound up
in its use. Applying Bakhtinian concepts to interpret the novel offers
up a number of interesting and potentially valuable theoretical pos-
sibilities. His idea of dialogism, which is related to polyphony in its
emphasis on the dynamic and multilayered nature of language, is
especially useful in this regard because it also admits into its pro-
cesses the divergent linguistic, epistemological, and ethical “systems”
of the reader.^11 Maintaining focus on the reader is an important pri-
ority of the argument that follows because I contend that Phillips
employs techniques of intertextuality, estrangement, and polyphony
to provoke in the reader a self-conscious and critical cosmopolitan
vision of subjectivity and its relationship with history.
The application of Bakhtinian theory to Phillips’s novels has
a precedence in literary criticism. In an essay on Cambridge , Lars
Eckstein contends that Phillips juxtaposes different voices from his-
torical periods to adumbrate the “silences and ideological delusions”
on each side.^12 Furthermore, Eckstein claims that Phillips deliber-
ately 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, Phillips “wants
to be found out by the reader” so 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 charac-
ter).”^13 This awakening also has political ramifications, as the reader
becomes more aware of the limits of singular voices that dictate a