Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 183causal connections between character and historical circumstance.
This complicated presentation of the individual is therefore achieved
in a somewhat paradoxical manner—one that involves the sleight-
of-hand move of employing a narrative form that anchors the pro-
tagonists to their peculiar historical context but in ways that are
patently restricting and artificial. This subsequently works to dis-
courage complete suspension of disbelief in the narratives’ inter-
pretive mechanisms. Shostak is therefore right when she describes
Levov as a “tragic [... ] instrument of history,” or when she makes
the more general declaration that the trilogy portrays the fact that
“even ordinary America is driven by its repressed moments of histor-
ical trauma.”^98 But Levov, along with the other heroes in the trilogy,
is also very visibly an artistic instrument of Zuckerman and Roth.
In a sense, then, we are presented once more with a paradox that
is now a familiar feature in cosmopolitan thought, and which finds
expression in the preceding discussions on both Phillips and Coetzee.
As I explain, both authors are, like Roth, sensitive to the role his-
tory plays in influencing human subjectivity, but they also simul-
taneously make us aware of the shortcomings of a straightforward
reduction of the individual to sociohistorical circumstances. As is
mentioned in the chapter on Phillips, this balance of historicomate-
rial awareness is important to cosmopolitan thought because, in the
fashion of Macherey, it values instances of individuality asserting
themselves in spite of pressures to conform to the prevailing cultural
and social norms. Acquaintance with different cultural and social
norms is therefore required in the first place if such a cosmopoli-
tan subversion of the commonplace, and expression of cosmopolitan
agency, is to be detected.