42 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
Articulating this connection between the historical and the psy-
chological is an especially important challenge that Phillips presents
to the reader, and it is one that appears to hold the key to better
understanding Stern’s character. This is not least because, although
her bifurcation of self is no doubt a defensive necessity, allowing
her to resist—on her own terms—what Hannah Arendt described
as the Nazis’ “organized attempt [... ] to eradicate the concept of
the human being,” it nonetheless has devastating consequences for
Stern’s postwar life.^44 Indeed, it is only when Stern vainly attempts
to re-enter the “normal” human world outside the camp that she
finally succumbs to mental collapse, committing suicide when
Gerry, an English soldier who helped liberate her, reneges on a flip-
pant marriage proposal.
It is at this stage that the reader can feel comfortable in identi-
fying a determining relationship between the particular sociohis-
torical forces under which Stern lives and her unique subjectivity,
with the character’s insanity being clearly bound up with the psy-
chological strategies she deploys as a matter of survival in the camp.
Thus her psychological state is patently a “product” of her specific
historical context and her unique experiences of Jewish persecu-
tion. However, Phillips also complicates straightforward historical
deductions of this sort by employing narrative strategies that make
us doubt the character’s reliability. This process appears to start
when Stern emigrates to England and attempts to adapt to her new
life. Significantly, Phillips stretches this event over a relatively large
section of the novel, spreading it among shards of other memories,
dreams, and intrusions from the voices of the other narrators. Brief
moments of analepsis and prolepsis from various periods of the jour-
ney reverberate with one another to develop a fragmented and con-
fusing collage of experiences in which the general sequence of events
becomes confused. What we do know from the outset is that the
journey to England ends with Stern’s being committed to a psychi-
atric hospital in which she later commits suicide.
This bleak denouement is presaged by the intrusion of an appar-
ent encyclopedia entry, which, in a self-consciously authoritative
register, introduces and defines the term “suicide”: “SUICIDE: An
act of voluntary and intentional self-destruction” (p. 186). This