Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

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48 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


within it—a sentiment that Macherey echoes when he declares, “It
is not enough to say that the subject is in its history, from which it
cannot be extricated.”^56 Indeed, speaking in an interview about the
characters in his novels, Philips describes what he calls a “tension”
that exists between individuals and the larger historical narratives
in which they operate. This tension is brought about “because the
individual is often mired in an ambiguous situation that historical
narratives don’t capture.”^57 To provide a fuller account of the nature
and mechanisms of this “tension,” I now turn to the topic of inter-
textuality in the novel and the role this literary procedure plays in
enabling Phillips to illustrate this somewhat difficult relationship
between history and subjectivity.
In her review of The Nature of Blood , the famously outspoken
author Hilary Mantel took issue with Phillips’s apparent compar-
ison of the Holocaust with aspects of the transatlantic slave trade,
charging the writer with attempting to “lay claim to other people’s
suffering.”^58 Such criticism has by far been in the minority, with
Wendy Zierler among the number of commentators coming to
Phillips’s defense. For Zierler, Mantel’s reproach is f lawed because it
conceives of the Holocaust as “a coherent, univocal” historical phe-
nomenon.^59 Although there are certainly other grounds upon which
Mantel’s argument can be repudiated, it will be particularly illumi-
nating to spend some time on this facet of Zierler’s rebuttal because
it will simultaneously allow a number of other important theoretical
issues that are pertinent to the main concerns of the discussion to be
raised. The first of these takes us back to the analysis of the relation-
ship between empathy and form, explored above.
As we have observed Brecht (as well as Shklovsky and other
formalists) argue, part of the reason why formal experimentation,
such as estrangement (or the Verfremdungsef fekt and Ostranemie ), is
“socially important” is because it forces new and individual medita-
tions on matters that are significant to life, which would otherwise
become calcified relics of consciousness.^60 Provoking reexamina-
tions and reconfigurations of such ideas therefore raises the reader’s
or audience’s “conscious level”, deepening their appreciation of what
it means to exist in the world.^61 In this portion of the analysis, I
demonstrate that Phillips broadens the scale on which his literary

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