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appears to be the voice of forgiveness. As if forgiveness is not realistic enough to put it into practice, forgiveness is only confined in the hymn, in a spiritual domain in which people praise and celebrate. This kind of suggestion is related to what Kristeva says about forgiveness remaining in a private sphere: “This can only be done in strict privacy, notably that of the analytic cure” because “[t]he social sphere . . . is that of judgment” (Kristeva Forgiveness 282). “There is a public discourse, and it must be continued as a discourse of condemnation, of settling accounts” (Kristeva Forgiveness 283), as I said it is the must-do for the benefits of the rule to be set. “The social sphere is the sphere of history; there is past, a present, and a future. In that field, forgiveness must simply follow judgment and condemnation” (Kristeva Forgiveness 285). When it comes to judgment, perpetrators are guilty without doubt. “One can arrive at comprehending the criminal, but one cannot absolve him. Fault in its essence is unforgivable not only in fact but by right” (Ricoeur 466). Thus, in the social sphere, forgiveness is being suspended instead.
3.4 Reaching a closure
Without thinking forgiveness as completely charitable, we come to a more comprehensive view of forgiveness. Between the equation of forgiveness and fault (Ricoeur 459), can we find a better claim for the victims to stay close to the side of forgiveness? Foremost, the question in exigency is “forgiving who”? In the novel, a character named Mary has been close to Sage Singer. Mary has once been a nun, but she leaves the monastery eventually. To some extent, Mary represents the conscience of Sage Singer. Because of her history as a nun, Mary speaks like a messenger of religious spirit:
You know, Sage, Jesus didn’t tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you were the one who was hit. Even the Lord’s
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Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume this means that being a good Christian means forgiving all sins, and all sinners. (Picoult 497)
Mary’s opinion of forgiveness is very down-to-earth. She recognizes what is possible for a mortal to do and not able to do—not being able to forgive all sinners. She only says that forgiveness is not addressed to someone’s wrongdoings. “[F]orgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying,
You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It’s saying, You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future” (Picoult 498). Picoult seems to
envisage forgiveness as something connected to future. Her viewpoint is not so different from the other critics. However, Picoult is more victim-oriented when it comes to forgiveness. When Kristeva talks about forgiveness, she thinks mainly about the rebirth of perpetrators and the understanding but not forgetting about their crimes.Judging from what Mary says, Picoult seems to give an answer already as I am struggling with what kind of closure can be done in the novel when Singer finally realizes Webber’s intention in the end: “[H]e had hoped I’d lead him to her[Minka].
Not to kill her, as Leo has suspected, but for closure” (Picoult 507, emphasis mine).
Taking a look at the fiction about a monster in a village, I find there is something worth our attentions. Resonating with the story between Minka, Franz, and Reiner, the fiction Singer’s grandmother writes in the camp didn’t finished because Minka leaves it blank on purpose. The end shadows the words of Kristeva on myriad and derivative questions concerning the possibility of forgiveness: “[I]t is in the continuity, in the
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perpetuation of this never-ending work of naming and symbolizing, that forgiveness takes place in the sense of incompletion and infinity” (Kristeva 284).
To conclude this chapter, I would say that forgiving is a never ending process. As I mention earlier about the fact that forgiveness is highly related to healing, I have put forgiveness under the concept of recovery in the theory of trauma. As Kristeva
remains us, forgiving is not once and for all, so does resolution of trauma. Judith Lewis Herman maintains: “Resolution of trauma is never final; recovery is never complete. The impact of a traumatic event continues to reverberate throughout the survivor’s lifecycle” (211). However, there are still some signs of recovery that could be followed. In the first stage of recovery, survivors learn to reconnect—a
reconnection to her surroundings. A survivor will become “more interested in the present and the future than in the past” (Herman 212). In addition, “[h]aving
encountered evil, she knows how to cling to what is good” (Herman 213). It’s the first step toward recovery and the first move to begin again. At this point, I can see the happening of forgiveness. If it is not the win-win situation here for victims and perpetrators, at least, it is a temporal relief as they both have a chance to continue their lives and appreciate wonderful things around them again. By witnessing a Nazi officer Franz telling his own story to witnessing his remorse representing as taking the whole responsibility of the crime did by his brother, Singer changes her mind about Franz’s unspoken wish. She is thinking about a possibility of a closure with the dead and with herself, especially. Saul Friedlander’s words seem best to conclude the chapter: it is “towards a closure without resolution, but a closure nonetheless” (263).
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Conclusion
My thesis aims to revisit the questions of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm and to reconsider the attempt of working-through and the possibility of reaching a closure or forgiveness particularly from the perspective of a third generation in The
Storyteller. I draw on theories of witnessing and that of trauma as my trajectories to
the inspection of forgiveness, transcendence, and closure. Nowadays, a growing number of researchers in both the field of trauma theory and that of the witnessing theory have already recognized the important link between the two. They areinextricably implicated in a way that the not-knowing at the heart of trauma demands to be seen and recognized (Caruth, “An Introduction to ‘Trauma, Memory, and Testimony’” 1). It is the oscillation of the knowing and not knowing that fortifies the dynamics of the testimonial transformation for trauma bearers. One thing that is definite in this relation is that the process of witnessing seems to be a way of working-through for the testifiers. Concerning testimonies and working-through, LaCapra suggests: “When the past becomes accessible to recall in memory, and when language functions to provide some measure of conscious control, critical distance, and perspective, one has begun the arduous process of working over and through the trauma” (Writing History, Writing Trauma 90). Nevertheless, I do not intend to reduce the process of witnessing simply to the process of working-through, when two
different trajectories of thinking have their own systems and perspectives.
Extending the theories above to the analysis of a listener, a second witness who involves in a testifier’s process of giving testimony, I intend to discuss the peculiar
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experience of listening/ witnessing a testifier’s traumatic story. What I try to emphasize is how the event heard and witnessed influences the position of the listener or the second witness. In The Storyteller, Singer as a listener and a second witness kills the wrong man because of the contagious power of witnessing, which is anything but working through. That is, during the testimony, the testifier is working through at the expanse of the listener’s overdose of emotional arousal. In fact, for a testifier, a second witness or a listener in the process of testimony is in a position comparable to that of the therapist in terms of the therapeutic value in a process of witnessing. As LaCapra claims, “Testimonies are significant in the attempt to understand experience and its aftermath, including the role of memory and its lapses, in coming to terms with—or denying and repressing—the past” (Writing History, Writing Trauma 86-87).
The second witness exists to help the testifier understand the experience, just like the way a therapist does. Knowing the therapeutic function of witnessing/testimony, the study suggests that this ascertained argument can be applied not only to the survivors but also to the listeners who listen and witness the stories told by survivors. Rather, what I want to emphasize in this thesis is not real survivors who come back alive from the camps, since experiences of survivors have been getting a lot of attentions and obtaining more complete discussions. My emphasis lies in the listeners’ experiences as survivors alike. When he ponders on problems popping out from the representation of an interview, LaCapra recognizes the burden of an interviewer, another kind of a second witness, by pointing out a difficulty many interviewers face—representing and coping with survivors and victims’ emotionally laden affect during the process of testimony (ibid). It is a “problem that involves the tense relation between procedures of objective reconstruction of the past and empathic response, especially in the case of victims and survivors” (ibid). Certainly, the outcome of tense relation mentioned
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above only proves the fact that interviewers and victims are worried about not knowing where the emotional arousal during the process of testimony will lead them to. Because in the process of testimony the victim uncontrollably relives the past, “it is as if there were no difference between it and the present” (LaCapra, Writing History,
Writing Trauma 89). The sense of present and past collapses when the victims are
telling what they have undergone. The point is “he or she was there.” The details or the truth of the exact events are not the primary concerns. The point is never about what he or she says, but what he or she felt back then. The hazard of listening therein germinates from the overdose of emotion laden affect during the storytelling. That is, if the survivors were there in the process of giving testimony, “so were the listeners”.It’s saying that no matter what survivors relive the experience or repeat the devastating event, listeners are there to accompany them, which makes all the
experience meaningful. However, because of being there with the survivors, listeners are getting involved and traumatized, too. They must in one way or another feel what they feel. This situation applies to Singer and many second witnesses to come.
However, one may argue that an attentive and empathetic listener may not assume the voice of the victim and that the traumatized experience of listeners is not tantamount to that of the survivors. The dubious question makes no allowance for vicarious fashion of traumatization. The fact is that there are a lot more under-developed areas in this field about the arduous process listeners bear. What I attempt to emphasize in this study is that how we should tackle with the contagious power of listening which to an extent traumatizes those who listen. It challenges critics’ call for empathetic listening. Because Singer’s case represents not the indifferent listener, but exactly the empathetic listener which critics have acclaimed and promoted. It makes us rethink the ethics of listeners. When we bring up the ethics of listeners, response is a pressing
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issue (LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma 98). Response is indeed a pressing issue both for the survivors as first witnesses and for listeners as second witnesses.
Neither over-response nor not responding is an apt attitude in the process of
witnessing or listening. Listeners must bear in mind that they are accompanying the narrators through their testimony with compassion but still keep a certain distance to the testimony. As to how the listeners manage to measure the distance, I think it warrant more extensive studies in the future.
If there is something that we can learn from the process of witnessing in Sage singer’s case, I suggest that readers must not only bear in mind the contagious power of listening but must hold dubious attitude about the truth of the testimony while at the same time being attentive and empathetic listeners. As LaCapra suggests, testimonies “may involve distortion, disguise, and other permutations relating to process of imaginative transformation and narrative shaping, as well as perhaps repression, denial, dissociation, and foreclosure” (Writing History, Writing Trauma 89). Still, keeping some distances to the contents of the testimonies dose not neglect the value of the testimony itself, since “these issues have a bearing only on certain aspects of her account and could not invalidate it in its entirety” (ibid). Keeping some distances is also crucial for survival: “To witness, one must live. Yet to live, one must leave the community of the dead” (Laub, “History, Memory, and Truth”804). To leave the community of the dead is a necessary expulsion. leaving the dead and forgiving for victims’ sake are not tantamount to forgetting, but only allows some space for a closure.
To conclude, by attentive listening, responses from the listeners can be
empathetic enough to arouse vengeful emotion which reminds us the importance of keeping apt distance in the process of witnessing and listening. This understanding of
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the contagious power of listening can be served as a significant guidance to think about forgiveness. In other words, without undergoing the process of contagious witnessing, Singer would never get to ponder on the meaning of forgiveness and the subsequent questions and doubts derived from the issue. The contagious power of listening brings our discussion to another level of transcendence. Although Joseph Webber doesn’t attain the words of forgiveness and neither does Sage Singer, the double-forgiveness situation leads Singer to understand what Webber wants and rethinks the possibility of forgiveness with a sympathetic mind. In this sense, she has already transcended the knotted relationships between victim and perpetrator, the vengeful stance and the wish to be forgiven. Briefly, to forgive or not is not an
imperative problem in the end for Singer. It’s about the mutual understanding between Webber and Singer. It remains an unsettled settlement, but still a settlement, a closure with a silent voice.
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