Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 31she tells Louis, a rare friend and fellow é migr é , that she keeps “see-
ing a girl (not I) making up her face, preparing herself for her first
date” (p. 217). She then discloses that she “can’t forget Irina,” and
“You don’t know her” (p. 217). The image of Irene’s fractured self
becomes more extreme in other scenes, with the character appear-
ing to acquire symptoms of schizophrenia. She talks to herself in
her solitary bedroom, often falling into fits of hysterical laughter,
seemingly without reason (pp. 177–206). What makes such episodes
all the more unsettling, however, is the way in which they are pre-
sented to the reader. Using the free-indirect mode (often in a style
that recalls Virginia Woolf or James Joyce’s deployment of interior
monologue), the narrator recounts the memories of Irene’s child-
hood and early adolescence in a way that channels her thought pro-
cesses, adopting words and phrases that reflect her state of mind.
A simple example would be the use of the child-like designations
“Moma and Papa” in place of “Irene’s mother and father” (p. 177).
However, on more than one occasion, these reminiscences become
interrupted by the outside voice of Irene’s aggressively xenophobic
neighbor, who shouts at her from the other side of the wall: “Stop
talking to yourself, you crazy Polish bitch” (p. 177). Such sudden
intrusions have the effect of foregrounding the uniqueness of Irene’s
experiences as well as her isolation in living with the memories asso-
ciated with them: Irene is clearly suffering in an inner world from
which she cannot escape. These, I argue, are intentional effects of
Phillips’s narrative and signal the author’s goals of encouraging us
to cultivate an empathic faculty that is more open and less reliant
on the contingencies of mutual commonality. This chimes with the
critical empathy expounded by Levinas, whereby the subject faces
the infinite gulf between self and Other but nonetheless attempts
to bridge the divide. For Levinas, this constitutes a genuine and
important empathic experience because the self transcends the bar-
riers that separate it from the Other.^20 More specifically, it demands
the cultivation of a critical and, crucially, self-conscious way of view-
ing both the self and the Other—one that resonates with the kind
of detached, distanced, critical, and ironic view of the world that is
advocated by Turner, Walkowitz, and Anderson, and which they
believe is crucial to the cosmopolitan project.^21