Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 43somewhat incongruous interjection becomes outright discordant
when its narrator (clearly not Stern) then proceeds to absorb the
term into a Christian episteme: “St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
claimed that suicide was a mortal sin because it usurped God’s
power over human life and death. However, neither the Old nor the
New Testament directly forbids suicide” (p. 186). Of course, given
that the pronouncement is largely informed by Christian orthodoxy
(although there is the token reference to the Old Testament, which
obviously holds similarities with the Torah), the interjection appears
quite out of place. But, perhaps, stranger still are its attempts to
establish a totalizing explanation of Stern’s experiences, assimilating
her unique story within a fixed schema of meaning.
This intruder acts as a foil to yet another voice: that of the more
sympathetic medical researcher, whose journal-like commentary on
Stern presents the protagonist’s experiences in clinical terms. This
historically conscious voice certainly takes us beyond the didac-
tic Christian pronouncements of the encyclopedia: “ Eventually, of
course, we found a name for the collective suffering of those who sur-
vived ” (p. 157). However, his empirical “explanation” of Stern’s
behavior nevertheless fails to bring us closer to the character as an
individual because it continues to employ strategies that attempt to
“understand” the individual by using prefabricated models of human
subjectivity without scrutinizing the peculiarities of the character
herself. Indeed, during the disclosure, the researcher admits he does
not “ possess any intimate knowledge of her case history. I hardly knew
her. I interviewed her just the once ” (p. 173). In this sense the voice of
the researcher becomes little more than a sophisticated version of the
encyclopedic definition mentioned above.
Yet, the alternative method we might use to understand Stern,
namely, by listening to her own accounts, becomes increasingly
unreliable due to the progressively disordered and incoherent state of
the narrative. This disorder manifests itself first in a blatant incon-
sistency: we are initially told that Gerry sent Stern a letter asking her
to come to England to marry him, but we later learn that this letter
was forged. However, by far the biggest problem that threatens our
“understanding” of Stern is brought about by Phillips’s rendition of
the protagonist’s fractured consciousness, which lends the narrative