Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 75authoritative narrative. This prospect of literally having to ignore
Stern’s narrative in favor of one that is more epistemologically coher-
ent is unpalatable indeed. But more discomfiting is the progressive
realization that Stern’s narrative bears some uncanny resemblances
to the true story of Anne Frank. Thus the problem of interpretation
is not confined to the choice the reader must make between fidel-
ity to an epistemologically flawed and untrustworthy narrative and
one that is unsuitably appropriative: Phillips also draws the reader’s
attention to the ways in which we are inevitably influenced by past
accounts and stories, which shape the manner in which we interpret
narratives of similar thematic substance.
By highlighting such dif f icu lties t hat a re inherent in t he empat hic
and interpretive processes, Phillips encourages strategies of reading
that are sensitive to the influences that historical circumstances
exert on the individual, but which also seek to garner an image of
the common humanity underneath. Such a self-reflexive mode of
reading not only shares much with Levinas’s ideas on empathy, but
also with the theoretical concerns of cosmopolitan theory, which
prioritizes critical and distanced forms of viewing.
The “Othello” and Servadio narrative threads further enrich
this vision. In the case of the former, we are presented with a more
conspicuous example of intertextuality, with Phillips illuminat-
ing, through more provocative means, the blurred line that exists
between fiction and nonfiction. But in the case of the latter narra-
tive, we observe Phillips depart from the first-person voice in favor
of a heterodiegetic third-person narrator, whose overt xenophobia
makes the reader’s challenge to penetrate the epistemic and cultural
biases of the (narrator’s) historical moment all the more urgent.
Although Phillips takes pains not to reduce the individual sim-
ply to their historical context, he nonetheless makes us countenance
the important role the latter plays in influencing how the individual
behaves and sees the world (Eva Stern). He also makes us acknowl-
edge that the way in which history is recorded and transmitted
can distort our faculties of interpretation and empathy (Servadio).
A great achievement of these novels lies in the writer’s insistence
that the emergence of subjectivity necessitates historical particular-
ity. This is because, following Macherey’s analysis of the nature of