Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 49estrangement works by moving from the level of syntax and diction
(evidenced for instance in Eva Stern’s parenthetical bifurcation of
self ), to that of narrative structure and plot. He does this by employ-
ing strategies of intertextuality, which, as Craps maintains, integrate
overtly familiar stories into the fabric of the novel, but in ways that
appear strange and alienating.^62
Such intertextual procedures are evident in the narrative thread
of Eva Stern, which bears stark similarities to Anne Frank’s Diary
of a Young Girl , albeit with an ultimate inversion of the latter’s opti-
mistic tone and message. Stern, like Anne, has an elder sister named
Margot, who goes into hiding at the behest of her parents. However,
instead of the well-known line: “I still believe, in spite of everything,
that people are truly good at heart,”^63 we have Margot (who has been
raped by one of her male harborers) uttering the much bleaker state-
ment: “You see, Eva, in spite of everything that we have lost, they
still hate us, and they will always hate us” (p. 88). For Craps, such
departures from the “source texts” are potent methods by which
Phillips further attempts to “estrange and unsettle” the reader by
interrogating the preestablished conceptual apparatus he or she has
necessarily erected to understand the Holocaust.^64 Indeed, I argue
that the novel’s intertextual quality forces the reader to acknowledge
the textual nature of history itself, a notion that Jameson subscribes
to when he states that “history [... ] is inaccessible to us except in
textual form.”^65 The act of reading Stern’s story therefore generates
uncanny dissonance with the familiar Holocaust narrative, one that
compels the reader to acknowledge the necessary plurality of per-
spectives bound up with each historical event.^66 Indeed, this is a
point that will bear further stressing at this stage in the argument.
For, while Phillips positions the reader in such a way as to appreciate
t he sig n i f ic a nc e of pec u l ia r h i storic a l ci rc u m st a nc e so a s to bet ter put
into practice a critical cosmopolitan vision of human subjectivity, he
also places emphasis on the fact that such historical circumstances
will be experienced and refracted in manifold ways, depending on
the individual who endures and relates them. Indeed, in The Nature
of Blood , Phillips makes the reader acknowledge what Catherine
Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt argue is the diversity of expe-
riences to be found in singular historical contexts and encourages