40 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
emanate from the psychologically damaged narrator. Their brevity
and disjointedness clearly convey a failing capacity to integrate the
events she is relating into a coherent chain of rational utterances.
Describing the appearance of new inmates as they arrive at the
camp, Stern offers only fragments of perceptions and thoughts. The
inmates are “Bald heads and powerful eyes. These were women who
once made love, decaying now like discarded and foul-smelling fruit.
Buried in their own filth.”^37 The significance of this style has been
commented upon by Stephen Clingman, who argues that Stern’s
“broken syntax” reflects her uncertain and fading purchase of iden-
tity.^38 However, I contend that Stern’s descriptive account is further
disjointed by the inclusion of parenthetical interjections, which both
amplify and complicate the emotional impact of the scene. The quo-
tation above continues with one such instance:
(Buried in one’s own filth.) Hungry enough to gnaw on a shoe, forever
relieving themselves, stinking skeletons. Repulsive [.. .] (Look at us! I
plead with the new-comers. Do you not understand?) [.. .] They no
longer ask the question, where will they put us? [.. .] (We were once you.
Healthy, with beautiful figures. With long hair. (Mama and Papa still
exist in my mind.) [.. .]). (p. 169)The most striking feature of these intrusions is their sudden depar-
ture in narrative voice: outside the brackets we have Stern speak-
ing in the third-person in a cold, detached register that suggests
an almost automatous mode of being in the world. Clearly she is
attempting to limit her emotional exposure to the pain of life in the
camp by keeping her descriptions as impersonal as possible. That
this task ends in failure is made visible by the intermittent parox-
ysms of personal disclosure that feature in the narrative and reveal
glimpses of her suppressed feelings. Importantly, these flashes of
emotional openness are partitioned, as is her repressed emotional
life, from the austere consciousness she has constructed to survive
the horrors of her day-to-day camp duties. Unlike the detached
third-person voice that speaks outside the brackets, the one inside
speaks in a hauntingly desperate first-person, pleading in a stifled
voice for the inmates to “look at us.” Secreted further still inside her
consciousness (inside another parenthetical layer) is Stern’s painful