Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 39disintegrating influences of modernity.^34 Phillips elicits this image
of subjectivity in such a way that once again demands a distanced
and self-reflexive view of history and society: one that also presents
significant parallels with the critical cosmopolitan vision defined in
the introduction. However, he by no means makes this task straight-
forward. Indeed, one of the novel’s signal achievements lies in the
demands it makes on the reader to reconcile the universality of the
themes with the particularity of the historical context in which they
are put into effect. Such a reconciliation is itself impeded by the dis-
tance Phillips places between protagonist and reader, using inscru-
table, unreliable, or unsympathetic characters. Such distancing
techniques (recall for instance Rudy Williams’s unpalatable views
toward women and white people) have the effect of disrupting the
reader’s ability to understand and to empathize with the characters.
In keeping with the well-established literary tradition of defamiliar-
ization, Phillips seems to insist that if any universa l vision of human-
ity is going to be gained by reading the novel, it will not be served
to the reader through easily decoded tropes. Rather, any such vision
will have to emerge by way of a challenging and self-ref lexive aware-
ness of the kind that Levinas articulates in Totality and Infinity.^35
For Levinas, distance between self and Other is important for self-
conscious empathy because it abnegates the role of the ego and is
thereby more metaphysically robust.^36
An additional trait of the self-reflexive empathy that Phillips
appears to promote is its attentiveness to the influences of history,
which shapes not only the consciousness of the narrator, but also
(as I further illustrate below) that of the reader. Undoubtedly, the
most salient example that illustrates the impact historical forces
exert upon subjectivity comes in the narrative of Eva Stern, whose
account of survival in a Nazi death camp is delivered in a chillingly
detached, disorienting register. In particular, the descriptions of her
work within the camp’s Sonderkommando unit (which involves help-
ing to cremate the bodies of dead prisoners) present a harrowing
image of a psyche being torn asunder. There are two primary tech-
niques Phillips deploys to render this psychological condition, both
of which rely heavily on a particular use of syntax. The most conspic-
uous comes in the form of the short, barren, staccato sentences that