Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

(Romina) #1

186 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


sociocultural contexts have produced works that resonate with cos-
mopolitan themes and values in a variety of interesting ways. All
three employ distancing techniques that promote either empathic
or epistemological uncertainty (or both) toward the protagonists.
Whereas these techniques vary in style, and the effects they generate
are not identical, they each—to varying degrees—place the reader
in a position of hesitancy and self-reflexivity vis- à -vis the characters.
This results in a critical and self-conscious empathic engagement
with the narratives in ways that dovetail with the ethical formu-
lations of Levinas. Levinas’s ethical schema is complementary and
valuable to cosmopolitanism, especially in its theory that explains
the relationship between self and Other.^1
Levinas’s system of ethics prioritizes the act of perceiving an infi-
nite “gap” between self and Other, the bridging of which constitutes
an act of “transcendence.” I found that all the novels discussed above
share patterns with this equation. In Phillips’s case, this is most con-
spicuous in The Nature of Blood , with Eva Stern’s narrative being the
most salient example. This narrative involves the use of defamiliar-
ization and estrangement, employing an unreliable and, at times,
morally questionable first-person voice that makes the reader doubt
both the veracity and the ethical integrity of the protagonist. Silence
and lacunae are also crucial in achieving this effect, and I argued that
Stern’s reticence is a deliberate strategy on Phillips’s part to encour-
age the reader to draw connections between the character’s erratic
behavior and the tumultuous historical moment in which she exists.
In light of this, the self-reflexive form of empathy Phillips promotes
is one that is attentive to the degree to which historical forces impact
upon human subjectivity—with the characters’ thoughts and behav-
ior being clearly influenced by (but not reducible to) the sociocul-
tural circumstances of their own peculiar historical moment.
Interestingly, a degree of similarity can be observed in the lit-
erary methods used by Roth in his American Trilogy, with silence
being employed in strategic parts of the narratives to problematize
a straightforward ethical encounter with the protagonists (although
Roth does not seem to go quite as far as Phillips in this respect). I
demonstrate above that, utilized within the procedures of the tragic
genre, silence has the effect of provoking the reader into recognizing

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