46 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
the emotion, compassion tends to promote an indulgence in—rather
than a critical examination of—gulfs in social power.
This politicized critique of emotion-based empathy has a strong
tradition in twentieth-century formalism, with perhaps the most
memorable denunciation coming from the dramatist Bertolt Brecht:
“I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their
hearts warmed [... ] I appeal to the reason.”^50 Following the work of
Viktor Shklovsky, who pioneered the formal device of estrangement
(or ostranemie ), which in turn was adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s con-
cept of defamiliarization, Brecht articulated a critical dramaturgi-
cal method known as Verfremdung , which sought to discourage the
audience from relying on received patterns of viewing and interpre-
tation. However, unlike Shklovsky and the other Russian formalists
(although Tolstoy certainly occupies a special position within that
category), Brecht’s theories represent a particularly extreme form
of antiempathic rationality. For Brecht, appealing to emotional
responses promotes the kind of by-passing of reason that brought
fascism to power in his native Germany and renders conscious-
ness a mechanic operation. As Douglas Robinson informs us, for
Brecht, “empathy shuts down thought and transports the specta-
tor into a receptive, malleable body state in which s/he is ideally
susceptible to right-wing ideological indoctrination.”^51 Thus, his
use of Verfremdung , with its stress on novel, and often disorienting,
modes of representation, “awakens critical thought and so provokes
the spectator to rethink and resist dominant capitalist ideologies.”^52
Brecht’s ideas bear strong parallels with the strategies of distancing
and alienation that Phillips uses in rendering Stern’s narrative. By
depicting a character that is overtly untrustworthy, and whose rep-
resentation of events we cannot comfortably believe, Phillips makes
any emotion-based empathy highly problematic.
What further undermines the character’s empathic appeal is the
knowledge that Stern physically took part in activities that do not sit
well with contemporary moral sensibilities: aiding in the mass kill-
ings (albeit under extreme duress) and, perhaps, prostituting herself
in exchange for preferential treatment. This is not to suggest that
Phillips dismisses empathy altogether; but rather, by making us fail