Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 29One such event is the physical assault her sister endures on her
way to school, the significance of which, given the tone in which
it is described, appears at first rather minor. When her father asks
Rachel for more information about the attack, which outwardly
appeared to result in only a few bruises, she shrugs her shoulders “as
if completely unmoved by the affair.”^15 However, later in the narra-
tive, the narrator persists in returning to this event, each time pro-
viding more details of Rachel’s psychological state after the attack.
The descriptions of her sister’s increasingly unsociable and depressed
state portend Irene’s own experiences of trauma and social isolation;
but no sooner does the reader feel comfortable in having made this
connection than the narrator makes another sudden proleptic jump
in the story (pp. 202–203). The effect Phillips creates here is that
of a large, chaotic jigsaw puzzle comprising poignant and often dis-
turbing images that do not quite seem to fit together into a clear
and discernible pictorial whole. For Timothy Bewes, the awkwardly
incomplete manner of Phillips’s narratives emblematizes the inade-
quacy of language to express the complexity and conflicted nature
of the individuals. In such narratives, “identity becomes unmoored
from its language of expression.”^16 Bewes also argues that Phillips
consistently employs a narrative style that draws attention to its fic-
tional and textual nature, to the point where the characters appear
to be conspicuously “ventriloquized” by the author. This analysis
certainly has its merits, and we can observe in Irene’s narrative (and,
indeed, the other narratives in the novel) the overt presence of the
author, who provides it with what Stephen Clingman labels a “cli-
ch é d” register^17 —we could recall, for instance, the domestic argument
between Irene’s parents that reaches a level of slightly incongruous
abstraction: “Mama shouted at Papa that he was not clinging to his-
tory but history was clinging to him” (p. 91). However, I would add
that an important element in Phillips’s narrative that deserves more
critical attention (and this holds for a number of his other works) is
the manner in which they disrupt the reader’s feelings of empathy
toward the protagonists.
In her study of trauma in contemporary fiction, Laurie Vickroy
notes that experiences such as Irene’s are increasingly represented
in ways that echo the victim’s inability to communicate painful