38 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
in issues of colonialism, ethnic discrimination, and repression. Not
only do characters like the African narrator problematize a simplistic
division between colonizer and colonized (and also undercut essen-
tialist ideas of ethnic “heritage”), but they also force us to recog-
nize the great degree of influence that historical circumstances wield
in the development of human subjectivity. This has the effect of
making us pay closer scrutiny to the processes by which we engage
empathically with the character, thereby encouraging us to venture
a self-conscious and historically attentive approach to the Other in
the text.
In The Nature of Blood, we find a more conspicuous attempt on
the part of Phillips to draw comparisons between different mani-
festations of ethnic oppression, particularly the African and Jewish
Diasporas and their respective experiences of discrimination in the
modern context—a strategy that somewhat paradoxically handles
history and subjectivity as abstractions. As in Higher Ground , the
novel is also highly intertextual. However, in the case of The Nature
of Blood , the intertextual references are used both to create a sense of
distance between the reader and the characters and to draw our atten-
tion to the inevitably textual nature of history. 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 histori-
cal moment that exerts a visible influence on the protagonists’ lives,
almost always for the worse. In this light, Fredric Jameson’s famous
declaration, “History is what hurts,” takes on a double meaning in
that not only are all the protagonists, to varying degrees, victims of
history in the sense that each is oppressed within their social and
political contexts, but also in the sense that each becomes painfully
haunted by the past and its incompatibility with the present.^33
As in Higher Ground , each character is given psychological body
and emotional weight by virtue of their sheer embeddedness within
their particular historical circumstances. To a certain extent, this
vision of the individual struggling in their historical context evokes
the argument put forward by Gilroy (albeit using slightly differ-
ent terminology) concerning the plight of black Europeans and
Americans who must each, in their own way, come to terms with the