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There is no question that sense of traumatization is invading the mind of the boy so that he needs to expunge it by denying the existence of the unbearable witnessing of Minka’s survival of Holocaust. Denial is also similar to the concept “disavowal” in psychoanalysis. As Evans Dylan explains, “disavowal is always accompanied by the opposite attitude”(43), that is, the acceptance of reality. The denial conceals its opposite. This is how the unconscious operates inside the mind of human beings.
2.3 The Effect of Listening/Witnessing: the Expected Killing and Unexpected Response
For Minka, the unexpected response of the audience is the boy’s denial of the existence of Holocaust. For Webber, the expected response from Singer is the killing.
After he swallows Minka’s poisoned bread, Webber finds himself hard to breathe and realizes he is going to die as he has been hoped for. Still, he seems to be uncertain about the situation and asks “[h]ow . . . does . . . it end?” (Picoult 502). Singer has no idea that she has mistaken him as Reiner and says: “I will never, ever forgive you”
(Picoult 502). At this point, it is obvious that the contagious power of listening has been taken into effect. In addition, unmistakably, we can define killing as a revenge toward the storyteller. As Singer steps into Webber’s house again with Leo, she pretends she knows nothing. “I close my eyes” (Picoult 503). The particular body action insinuates a lot of the mind-working. In light of Singer’s seeing, I find it metaphorical and meaningful. She thinks she is a faithful witness throughout the whole process of Joseph Webber’s confession, but she isn’t. Her blindness attributing to her eagerness to revenge causes the very act of closing her eyes, as if closing her eyes will help her leave the death alone. Kelly Olive, in the chapter “Toward a New Vision,” brings to us a great deal of theories about seeing. Oliver borrows and seconds psychologist J.J. Gibson’s argument about “ecological optics.” She thinks Gibson
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“considers the environment in which we see as ecological optics” (Oliver 194). “Sight is the result of a relationship with, and responsiveness to, our environment” (ibid).
Rather, “[s]ight is the result of a response to differences between light and energies”
(ibid). That is to say, seeing is at a certain level as direct an impact as can be. “One sees and one hears like one touches” (Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers118).
The sensation of seeing is immensurable. Seeing itself actually correlates a lot more intensely than we think. Merlau-Ponty argues that all of the senses are interconnected:
He insists that the notion of the separation of the senses is misguided because all of the senses are interconnected in one body: each sense is really a complex of sensations that fundamentally implicates the others, and sensation operates in the reversible world of sensible and sentient, which folds the senses back onto themselves in a way that produces new levels of sensation and consciousness. . . [V]ision never works merely through the eyes. It is always the result of a coordinated effort between all senses” (Oliver 201).
Closing the eyes is equal to intentionally close the relationships between subjects.
This is how Singer responds to photic energy and how she responds to the long process of hearing. The act of closing the eyes means not witnessing it. It is the refusal of witnessing the fact that she is involved and commits a murder. She doesn’t want to “see” metaphorically what she has done. Later, the sight of the death of Joseph Webber seems to compel Singer to find out the truth that lies behind—she wants to confirm that Webber is Reiner. However, when she opens the confidential file about personal information of Reiner, she finds out that Webber is not Reiner, but Franz. Franz is Reiner’s brother and helps Minka a lot in the camp. “Had I been too stupid to notice the discrepancies? Or had I not wanted to see them?” (Picoult 505).
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Perhaps, Singer wants to see what she sees and hears what she hears. There is something provocative and dangerous about the process of witnessing and Jodi Picoult seems to points it out elusively—“Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes.
Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them” (Picoult 507). The storyteller is telling a story, a fiction. We choose to witness what we witness, choose to hear what we hear, and then we tell what we choose to tell. Ironically enough, the listener who is supposed to be there as a second witness of the storyteller when he gives testimony follows
unconsciously the same path as the storyteller does. It suddenly occurs to me that there are some forces behind all the witnessing process and I will dig deep into it.
In addition to eye-seeing and hearing, what Gibson and Oliver try to emphasize is that we are less aware of the other energies and how it affects us constantly.
All relationships and all of human experience are the result of the flow and circulation of affective energy. Affective energy circulates between and among us. It is never contained. It migrates from person to person. . . For example, has it ever happened that you are upset and by talking to your lover you start feeling better, getting it off your chest, but afterward your lover feels worse? . . . Our moods and feelings are not just a
response to what is said or what happens. They are also a response to the currents of emotional energy that flow between people. (Oliver 195) The affective energy seems to be able to answer the phenomenon of contagious power of witnessing in that the power of witnessing consists not only of the hearing and eye-seeing but also of emotion. The affective energy relates people and connects their feelings, and that establishes the experience of witnessing witnesses. By feeling the every particle and vibration in the space between them, the storyteller can channel his feeling to the listener. As Joseph Webber tells her his past, she is listening emotionally
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both as a listener who takes on the burden of the narrator and as a listener who listens to her own history: “For better or for worse, Joseph Webber is part of my life. Of my family’s story” (Picoult 498). This is what makes Joseph Webber’s storytelling unique.
The whole process of witnessing is multilateral.
Finally, Singer realizes the fact that “I had killed an innocent man”(Picoult 505).
As the truth is unfolded, it leads on even more conundrum, such that “[w]hy would Franz have gone to so much trouble to paint himself as the more brutal brother?”
(Picoult 506). The answer is unknown, and the storyteller hasn’t decided how to end it yet: “How does it end? Joseph had asked. Now I realize he lied twice to me yesterday:
he knew who my grandmother was. Maybe he had hoped I’d lead him to her. Not to kill her, as Leo has expected, but for closure” Picoult 506-07). What sort of closure he wants exactly? A sense of guilt left in Singer’s mind? A redemption? Or an apology?
“I’m sorry, I whisper now. Maybe it is the forgiveness Franz had been seeking. And maybe it’s just the forgiveness I need, for killing the wrong man” (Picoult 506). In this chapter, we can conclude with certainty that killing the wrong man is the outcome of the contagious power of witnessing. It’s the end of listening and the beginning of opening more space for questions and responses. The most central concern of her monologue seems to be seeking a closure, reparation, or we say, forgiveness. The possibility of forgiveness starts to spring from the event of killing the wrong man.
From here, it is believed that the contagious power of witnessing may contribute to the possibility of bring up forgiveness as an issue to be discussed by the victims.
However, the intricate relation between the two is very much complicated, since a sense of revenge that has been satisfied with might have been a crucial factor in Singer’s sudden change of attitude toward forgiveness. Or perhaps, a sense of revenge has been done infused with a sense of guilt after the miskilling triggers the monologue
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concerning forgiveness. I am sure more extensive research would be necessary to make any definite claims along these lines, and this part of discussion will be explained and explored in the following chapter.
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Chapter Three
Reaching a Closure and Possible Forgiveness 3.1 Forgiveness in The Storyteller
Drawing on previous discussions of the predicament Singer faces after she knows she is wrong about Joseph Webber, the chapter will begins with the very statement about Singer’s attitude toward forgiveness at the first place: “‘Josef,’ I say, leaning over him and speaking loudly, so that I know he hears me. ‘I will never, ever forgive you’” (Picoult 502). Singer’s words have opened up a discussion which she obviously detests and tries to avoid—forgiveness. Before approaching the disputable concept, I would like to address a more immediate issue concerning her inability to mourn. According to Eric Santner,
The postwar generations have . . . inherited not guilt so much as the denial of guilt, not losses so much as lost opportunities to mourn losses.
But perhaps more important, along with this negative legacy of denial and repression postwar generations have inherited the psychic structures that impeded mourning in the generations of their parents and
grandparents.(34)
Santner’s proposition lays bare a clear point that the postwar generations’ feelings towards the Holocaust are way more complicated than their parents or grandparents.
Losing opportunities to mourn for losses and missing the time to apologize for or prevent what their ancestors’ crime are central to their attitudes toward Holocaust.
They do not duplicate the feelings their ancestors had but clutch their feelings in
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timeless, belated, and distorted manners. All the traumatic symptoms have gone worse because of repression. Repression18 is a common reaction for most survivors because
“neither culture nor past experiences provide structures for formulating acts of massive destruction, survivors cannot articulate trauma even to themselves” (Laub,
“History, Memory, and Truth” 802). Survivors cannot articulate the unacceptable, and neither can their offspring; inasmuch as survivors were not educated to deal with pogrom, they didn’t provide the solution to their descendants either. We can assume that repression and denial are the commonest effects when it comes to the mass destruction. In fact, Santner doesn’t exclude the children of victims in his discussion in light of Germans’ predicament of impossibility of mourning. He says,
“[R]emarkable similarities were discovered between the case histories of the children of the oppressed and those of the oppressors” (Santner 35). They all feel the need to perform the psychic labor of their parents (ibid). In the case of Singer, the
transmission of Minka’s trauma brings to Singer an invisible but incommensurate impact. There is an illusion among the inheritors of trauma. After such a long time away from Holocaust, they start to believe that they have a life without traumatic pasts. After so many discourses about Holocaust have been said or unsaid, there is too late for them to bring up the topic when the trend is over. In addition, the descendants of survivors are afraid of bring up the wound buried by their family members. They would find it safer not to open the unrecoverable wound and cause another
unnecessary damage to their fragile subjectivity. Hence, mourning is not an option.
There is no object to mourn for when they were not there right in the traumatic scene to see and experience what is lost. What the second and third generations see is the
18 Shoshan reports that both the first generation and the second generation are in the “conspiracy of silence” and that in cases of incessant talk, the children of survivors demonstrate repression and uncertainty as to what their parents had actually gone through (200).
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symptom of the trauma acted out by the first generation. The very indirectness of experiencing loss usually will make them disorientated and confused about whether they should be susceptible to their family’s loss or take leave of it. The loss that is so unidentifiable for them. In fact, Dominick LaCapra would address it to the experience of absence, since “one may recognize that one cannot lose what one never had”
(Writing History, Writing Trauma 50). Not knowing what to lose, the offspring still possess the trauma deep down. Once being ignited, trauma would exert its own influence in an explosive scale, such as the case of Singer. This is probably the reason why mourning has been the primary concern for the second and the third generations.
Mourning is a dire necessity to prevent more negative undercurrents in the wake of the Holocaust. LaCapra draws Freud’s concepts of morning and melancholia and develops them into acting-out and working-through—a dyadic relationship. LaCapra explains,
In Freud’s classic study, “Mourning and Melancholia,” it would seem that melancholia is ambivalent: both a precondition to (or even necessary aspect of) mourning and that which can block processes of mourning insofar as it becomes excessive or functions as an object of fixation.
Melancholia is an isolating experience allowing for specular
intersubjectivity that immures the self in its desperate isolation. In the best cases, it may allow for insights that bear witness to crisis-ridden or even traumatic conditions and have broader critical potential. In Freud, it is a state in which one remains possessed by the phantasmatically
invested past and compulsively, narcissistically identified with a lost object of love. (History and Memory after Auschwitz 183)
Foremost, he briefly explains Freud’s distinctions between melancholia and mourning.
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LaCapra notices that mourning still allow some space for potential transcendence. In fact, mourning and melancholia are not so excluded from each other. They are very much implicated as it can be instead. As mourning refers to working-through, so melancholia refers to acting-out. LaCapra tries to interpret these two trajectories of facing trauma:
I would like to argue that the perhaps necessary acting-out of trauma in victims and the empathic unsettlement (at times even including more or less muted trauma) in secondary witnesses should not be seen as
foreclosing attempts to work through the past and its loss (as well as to recognize its problematic nature) is one aspect of a complex process of working-through.(Writing History, Writing Trauma 47)
What LaCapra implies above is that the process of mourning or working-through includes a certain degree of acting out and melancholic responses. It also suggests that mourning or working-through is a constant struggle for trauma victims.
Yet mourning, although continually threatened by melancholia, may counteract the melancholic-manic cycle, allow for the recognition of the other as other, and enable a dissolution or at least loosening of the narcissistic identification that is prominent in melancholy. In mourning one recognize a loss as a loss yet in time is able to take(partial) leave of it,
begin again, renew interest in life, and find relatively stabilized objects of
interest, love, and commitment. Moreover, one remembers and honors the lost other but does not identify with the other in a specular relation that, however ecstatic or self-sacrificial, confuses the self with the other”(History and Memory after Auschwitz 184, emphasis mine).
LaCapra recognizes mourning as something accepting loss as loss, but at the same
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time, mourning allows a future to come by taking leave of the past, beginning again, and renewing interest in life. From what LaCapra says, mourning or working-through has been very much similar to the effect of forgiveness. In fact, what he says about working-through bellow not only corresponds to mourning but also directs to the unsaid expectation toward possible forgiveness by addressing it in a subtle manner—transcending the unjust:
I would reiterate that I envision working-through as a mode of immanent critique( involving aspects of deconstruction) that engages both personal and collective problems, including posttraumatic symptoms. In
working-through one does not totally transcend but rather attempt to generate counterforces to melancholia and compulsive repetition, both through psychic ‘work’ on the self and through engagement in social and political practice with others, from mourning (which may have a political valence) to more directly sociopolitical forms of action directed toward institutional change and what might be termed the situational
transcendence of unjust or incapacitating structures and contexts.
(LaCapra, History and Its Limits 84)
Working through seems to involve immanent critiques, counterforces, institutional change, transcendence of unjust, and incapacitating structures and contexts. It occurs to me that the immanent critiques come from the never ending interrogations of whether forgiveness means exonerating the crimes and faults; and from many
questions after that. To talk about forgiveness, or say transcendence19, we need to find out the root of the evil first in order to have a better knowledge of what has
19 I believe forgiveness is based on knowledge and mastery of the truth of the crime itself. After fully understanding the nature and the meaning of the crime, victims can choose to go over or letting go of the mastery of the knowledge of the crime—so to speak, a sense of transcendence. That is, if victims do not understand what’s hurting them, they won’t know in the end what they are forgiving.
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overwhelmed us. The interrogation begins when Singer starts to embark on the
journey of seeing where is the haunting ghost, what is behind the curtain, the unseen.
As Singer begins to know Webber, she also experience what Hannah Arendt said about the banality of evil: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (253). In the novel, Webber is not only a terribly “normal” person but a prestigious good man. A good man happens to carry the most heinous sins of human history. This great disparity perfectly embodies the
banality of evil and threatens to obfuscate the distinction of what’s good and what’s evil. In fact, when Singer commits the crime of murder, the positions of victims and perpetrator reverse. When the position reverses, Singer begins to think in different ways. As she realizes her error of recognizing him as Reiner, the person who once so firmly believes that there is no way for forgiveness to exist between them enunciates:
“I’m sorry, I whisper now. Maybe it is the forgiveness Franz had been seeking. And maybe it’s just the forgiveness I need, for killing the wrong man” (Picoult 506). The word “forgiveness” deserves further elaborations. The forgiveness Joseph Webber had been seeking seems to come after the price of Singer’s sense of guilt. Webber’s, or Franz’s, forgiveness becomes thus more complicated.
In terms of the definition of forgiveness, psychologists have been made efforts to explore this issue. Some suggest that forgiveness should be distinguished from
pardoning, condoning, excusing, forgetting, and denying. For Panu Minkkinen,
“Pardoning is an immediate and singular majestic intervention by the sovereign, and so it falls outside of the normal scope of what Kant understands as law” (514). For this point, pardoning is more close to the nature of forgiveness. It is close but not to
“Pardoning is an immediate and singular majestic intervention by the sovereign, and so it falls outside of the normal scope of what Kant understands as law” (514). For this point, pardoning is more close to the nature of forgiveness. It is close but not to