52 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
enough to conjure strong impressions of artifice, of the theatre, and,
most crucially, of fictitiousness.
This particular distinction raises perhaps the most serious aes-
thetic problem of the novel as a whole: how can the reader recon-
cile the book’s references to the very real autobiographical work of
Anne Frank that are made in the Eva Stern narrative with those
made to the famous tragic drama, Othello? The inappropriate jux-
taposition of ethnic suffering that Mantel decried is here potentially
eclipsed by an even worse prospect—that of Anne Frank’s account
of the Holocaust being trivialized by being placed alongside a popu-
lar drama. However, I contend that this tension fulfils an important
destabilizing function that further places the category of “history”
under considerable but necessary strain. To clarify, while I have
already noted that Phillips employs narratives that encourage a crit-
ical attentiveness to the multifarious nature of experiences and the
way in which they are recorded and interpreted, I wish to stress here
that Phillips is going a step further and interrogating the seman-
tic integrity of the term “history” as an empirically viable category.
This semantic strain is brought about by Phillips’s deliberate efforts
to make the reader aware of the ambiguous and complicated prove-
nance of the “Othello” story.
Othello is, of course, clearly a work of fiction that reflects many
of the concerns of the period in which it was written: imperialism,
colonialism, the increasing phenomena of international trade, and a
burgeoning sense of cultural interaction and mixing. Much of the
play’s appeal lies in its (albeit limited) interrogation of the audience’s
fears and prejudices of the Other, features that have been debated
with particular interest over the last half century. However, as
Phillips makes us aware, through the inclusion of another intrusive
encyclopedia entry in the narrative, the play itself displays patent
instances of intertextual borrowing, being based on the novel Gli
Hecatommithi , which was written in 1566 by the Italian poet and
novelist Giovanni “Cinthio” Giraldo. This effectively adds a fur-
ther layer to the intertextual quality of Phillips’s “Othello” narrative,
making it an appropriation of an adaptation.^71
Adding yet more complexity to this lattice of (inter)texts is the
fact that many consider the source of Cinthio’s novel to have been