28 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
given cultural or social experience. This effectively promotes what
he labels the “democratization of cultural memory,” which encour-
ages the reader to remain open to the less audible “marginalized
voices of history.”^14 Although Eckstein’s application of Bakhtinian
dialogism is highly useful, when we also integrate into the frame-
work Macherey’s conception of subjectivity (in its relationship with
history), we can get a broader picture of the critical cosmopolitan
dimensions of Phillips’s polyphonic novels. This involves the reader
employing a self-consciously distanced vision of the sociocultural
influences that exert themselves both upon a text’s production and
its interpretation. The reader therefore begins to fashion a way of
examining events that is simultaneously aware of—but nonetheless
seeks to look beyond (or rupture)—the fabric of history. This is a
vision consonant with cosmopolitan values in that it attempts to
surpass received cultural and epistemological frameworks of inter-
pretation and understanding.
A particular human theme that recurs throughout Phillips’s work,
and which, to a certain degree, exerts a presence in all the novels dis-
cussed here, is that of trauma. Indeed, every major character in these
novels experiences a traumatic event in their lives that leaves them
emotionally or psychologically damaged, sometimes to the point of
extreme, suicidal depression. However, in depicting these characters’
mental states, Phillips persistently uses techniques that problema-
tize an empathic connection on the part of the reader (a charac-
teristic I also observe in the subsequent chapters on Coetzee and,
to a lesser extent, Roth). In the last section of Higher Ground , we
are confronted with a third-person heterodiegetic narrator who uses
free-indirect speech to channel the voice of Irene, a young Polish
immigrant and Holocaust survivor living on the fringes of postwar
English society. Deciphering exactly what has happened to Irene is a
cha llenge in itself, as Phillips presents apparently disjointed shards of
memories in a disorganized sequence. The disclosure that Irene had
been separated from her family in her teens and sent to England after
experiencing increasingly violent persecution in her native Poland
comes in partial installments, and even then there are large gaps
in the story that signify the character’s inability to reconcile herself
with her experiences and place them into a cohesive narrative.