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Chapter Two
Killing the Wrong Man: The Contagious Power of Listening/Witnessing
2.1 The Hearing: Hearing is a Burden
With more comprehensive knowledge of the theories of witnessing and that of trauma in the last chapter, I intend to deepen the discussion of how a process of witnessing attributes to an over-response—a miskilling—by analyzing how Singer changes her attitude toward helping Webber die. An overresponse is not simply a particular case. It can be a universal necessity. It depends on how people define the word overresponse. In the novel, the degree of overresponse is large enough to cause casualty—killing the wrong man. As a turning point of the plot, the event—killing the wrong man—becomes a kernel in my discussion in this chapter. What is important about the event is that it is precisely the outcome of the process of witnessing. It perfectly embodies the effects of contagious power of witnessing.
Foremost, I will start with the discussion of the role of the listener and the listener’s relation to the narrator. Dori Laub, in Testimony, explicates how the role of the listener plays during the process of witnessing:
The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and
heard—is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. . . By extension, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic
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event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself. The relation of the victim to the event of the trauma, therefore, impacts on the relation of the listener to it, and the latter comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels. (57-58)
The listener is “a participant” and a “co-owner of the traumatic event” and “partially experience[s] trauma in himself” through the very listening. The listener, I argue, not only accompanies the narrator in the process of giving testimony but also gradually feels what the narrator feels in the whole process. Rather, the listener has to let go off the idea of simply being the indifferent bystander to join the narrative, and at this point, the listener is eventually in the story with the victim.
In the upcoming paragraphs, I am going to analyze how Sage Singer is gradually losing herself as an impartial listener in the process of witnessing Webber’s
confession. Before meeting Webber, Singer tends to hide in the darkness: “I couldn’t stand the thought of working in broad daylight, where everyone would be staring at my face. I have been shy before; now I was reclusive” (Picoult15). She doesn’t have many friends to talk to. When Webber shares his stories with her, she gradually opens up her mind. That’s why when Singer cannot reach this friend she is really afraid of losing this partner who cares about and talks to her: “I am not sure if I’m crying because of the disaster in the kitchen or because I didn’t realize how upsetting it was to think that Joseph might be taken away from me, when I’ve only just found him. I just don’t know how much more I can stand to lose” (Picoult 47). The affinity between these two people is obvious during the process of witnessing the other’s storytelling and being witnessed.
As Singer shows the scar to him, Webber shows his to her, too. When Webber
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first confesses to Singer that he is Reiner and asks her to help him die, Singer looks confused and directly rejects him: “I don’t go around committing murder” (Picoult 51). What’s interesting in this claim is that she seems so certain. She doesn’t know how much the process of listening or witnessing will influence her. Although she tells Webber or tells herself that she won’t help him die, there is a voice inside her that reveals the burden of hearing the story that Webber uncovers: “And why does it make me sick to hear him label me; to think that, after all this time, Joseph would still feel that one Jew is interchangeable for another? In that moment, a tide of disgust rises inside me. In that moment, I think I could kill him” (Picoult 56). She never admits that she is a Jew. Joseph Webber disgusts her because he forces her to face the fact that she is always a Jew and reminds her that what happens to her race and her family is closely bound to each other no matter she admits it or not. He also reminds her of the fact that she is always the inside witness of the memories of the Holocaust. At this moment, the earlier claim about not going to help him die is wavering. The word
“could” is quite ghastly in that it forebodes a possibility of committing a crime.
What’s worth paying attention to is that what exactly sprouts the thought of
considering killing. What we know is that the listener becomes not only a general and indifferent audience but an active participant. After Webber’s confession, Singer realizes two things: first, she is deeply inside the story of Joseph Webber which bears the traumatic core of her family and unspeakable pain that she and her family wear all along;16 second, Joseph Webber is to be blamed for the misfortune of her and her
16 The painful family history of Holocaust becomes a legacy that pass down from generation to generation. Maria Roots explicates the concept of insidious trauma which is also related to
transgenerational trauma: “[t]he effects of insidious trauma can be passed down transgenerationally through stories of atrocities about what has been done to those who have come before” (374). Singer’s case is thus about the insidious trauma’s relation to the contagious power of witnessing. For her, the insidious trauma intensifies the degrees of the contagious power of witnessing, since she is definitely inside from the very beginning of the storytelling. She is not only a listener, but also an important character.
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family. Obviously, this speculation oversimplifies the whole situation.
As Webber explains why he wants to ask her for help, Singer finds herself unable to tackle with his problem. Neither does she want him to get what he wants, nor bear to see him get away with impunity. “I can’t just walk away and pretend this
conversation never happened. If a man came up to me on the street and confessed to a murder, I wouldn’t ignore it. I’d find someone who knew what to do” (Picoult 56). At this point, she is ready to “do” something rather than sitting there like an indifferent audience. Even so, we cannot gauge exactly how much personal feeling is involved in her willingness to take action and ask for legitimate assistance for now.
Hearing the confession of Joseph Webber continues to disturb the palpitation of her heart. Weighed down by the contagious power of hearing, Sage Singer is looking for someone who may help her: “What if I told her? What if this burden I’ve been carrying around—this confession from Josef—wasn’t only mine to bear?” (Picoult 104). However, she has difficulty finding someone who is willing to listen to her and believe what she says about the well-known good man, Joseph Webber. No one, not even Mary, her best friend, at the present moment listens to her and be her own witness after she hears the unconceivable confession from a Nazi officer: “I feel as if the whole world is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and I am the only one who can see clearly” (Picoult 104). From here, the listener is infected and haunted in the process of witnessing the perpetrator’s confession and demands someone who will carry or lighten up the burden, but she is left alone.
In the meanwhile, Singer cannot help but call up legitimate agency in charge of the cases of Nazi outlaws. The person from the other side of the phone is Leo, who is the only person who will listen to her. This complete stranger turns out to be someone she can count on and later to be her lover, as if Leo is always on her side to listen and
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be there for her in the process of discovering and witnessing the terrible story of Joseph Webber.
After revealing his past to Singer, Webber finds out that Singer has been thinking about his request. “‘You are starting to believe me’” (Picoult132), he blurts out. This statement clearly confirms the status of a listener: Singer undergoes a horrible journey of listening and witnessing and finally becomes “the insider.” As Dori Laub reveals in
Testimony:
A witness is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event.
During the era of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the truth of the event could have been recorded in perception and in memory, either from within or from without, by Jews, or any one of a number of “outsiders.”
[. . .] Even the executioner, who was totally oblivious to the plea for life, was potentially such an “outside” witness. . . As the event of the Jewish genocide unfolded, however, most actual or potential witnesses failed one-by-one to occupy their position as a witness, and at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness what was taking place. […]
In addition, it was inconceivable that any historical insider could remove herself sufficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, unaffected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached from the inside, so as to stay entirely outside […] No observer could remain untainted, that is, maintain an integrity—a wholeness and a separateness—that could keep itself uncompromised, unharmed, by his or her very witnessing. (80-81, Laub’s emphasis)
Laub stresses the “outside” to foreground the impossibility of staying outside of the witnessing. Once one is in the event, one is unable to claim its own independent frame
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of reference. It is true in the case of the traumatic scene in which a witness lives, and it’s also applicable to the process of listening to the traumatic story. In both cases, the witness at certain degree has already involved.
As an insider, she lashes out anger at Webber in her own murmurs: “How could anyone be that vicious to others, and not have the aftereffects bleed out in tears, in nightmares, in tremors?” (Picoult133). To stay as a suitable listener, she says calmly instead: “‘How can you want to die?’” (ibid). Webber’s answer is as relentless as Singer can expect:
There was a look in their eyes, sometimes . . . They weren’t dreading the trigger being pulled, even if the gun was already pointed at them. It was
as if they ran toward it. I could not fathom this, at first. How could you not want to draw breath one more day? . . . But then I started to
understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.
(Picoult133)
Singer suddenly thinks of her grandmother: “My grandmother, had she been one of those who would walk toward the gun? Was that a mark of weakness, or of courage?”
(ibid). As if she has the picture when Webber describes the situation of those victims under the muzzle, Singer is picturing her grandmother’s suffering—a step further to know her family’s traumatic history and a step further to lose herself in the process of witnessing. Having difficulties keeping a distance from the storyteller and his story, Singer is like a vampire demanding more and more details of the Webber’s past:
“What I want is to wring information out of him, until he is dry and brittle as a bone. I want him to talk until he has blisters in his throat, until his secrets litter the floor around us” (ibid). The demand to listen is one of the phenomena that Dori Laub relates to the crisis of listening:
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Foreclosure through facts, through an obsession with fact finding; an absorbing interest in the factual details of the account which serve to circumvent the human experience. Another version of this foreclosure, of this obsession with fact finding is a listener who already ‘knows it all,’
ahead of time, leaving little space for the survivor’s story. (73)
A demanding listener listens but not really listen to the story by heart. This is one of the ways in which “the listener feels the need to protect [herself] from the offshoots of the trauma and from the intensity of the flood of affect that, through the testimony, comes to be directed toward [her]” (Felman and Laub 73). That is to say, demanding details is a defensive movement that rebels against the overwhelming traumatic witnessing. However, this defensive mechanism is really fragile and is easily wrecked by another wave of listening.