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立 政 治 大 學
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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.
2.2 The Effect of the Listening—The Unexpected Response
A listener’s response has been crucial for a storyteller. However, it doesn’t always come as the way we expect it to be. I will describe two distinctive episodes of listening. For the first one, the storyteller is Minka, whose storytelling experience is different from that of Webber. In a conversation between Sage Singer and her grandmother Minka, Singer asks her grandmother about how she deals with it and views it: “‘You’ve held this inside you for so long,’” I whisper. “‘Wouldn’t it be better to talk about it?’” (Picoult 136). Minka’s reply is as follows:
“I talked once about it, when I was much younger, to my doctor, who saw this. He asked if I would come to speak at his wife’s class. She was a history professor at a university,” she says. “The talk went well. I got over my stage fright enough to deliver it without throwing up, anyway.
And then the teacher, she asked if there were any questions.”
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“A boy stood up. Truth be told, I thought it was a girl, there was so much hair, down to here. He stood up and he said, ‘The Holocaust never happened.’ I did not know what to do, what to say. I was thinking, How
dare you tell me this, when I lived it? How dare you erase my life just like that?’’ I was so upset that I could barely see straight. I muttered an
apology and I walked right off that stage, out the door, with my hand pressed up against my mouth. I thought if I didn’t hold it there, I would start to scream. I went to my car and I sat inside until I knew what I should have said. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?” She shakes her head. (Picoult 136-37).
Earlier, I’ve gone on at some length about how the contagious power works to influence the listener. In this case, it seems to show that the contagious power of witnessing/ listening is not working at all. To be sure, in this case, there is an ineluctable denial by an audience. In the face of a boy’s denial, Minka experiences what Laub writes in Testimony about Haim Guri’s film The Eighty-first Blow which portrays a man who goes public with his own suffering in the camp and hears his audience say: “All this cannot be true, it could not have happened. You must have made it up” (qtd. in Laub 68). Laub continues to explain this relentless response:
This denial by the listener inflicts, according to the film, the ultimate fateful blow, beyond the eighty blows that a man, in Jewish Tradition, can sustain and survive. The absence of an empathic listener, or more
radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story. And it is, precisely, this ultimate annihilation of a
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narrative that, fundamentally, cannot be heard and of a story that cannot
be witnessed, which constitutes the mortal eighty-first blow. (68)
Certainly, according to Laub, the “absence of an addressable other” is what constitutes the eighty-first blow. Without a listener, the storyteller as well as the story that has been told is of little consequence. In the end, the voice that survives the whole traumatic event “cannot be heard,” and the story “cannot be witnessed.” Basically, it is the act of uprooting the narrator’s existence in the traumatic past because no one believes that the traumatic space which the survivor has outlived even has existed. For the survivor, the denial is heartbreaking.
In the respect of the listener, the boy, his denial is the easiest way to block out the overwhelming testimony of the survivor. It’s a mechanism that prevents the listener from falling into the crisis of listening17. It is the resistance against the hearing and its contagious power of listening that I try to emphasize. What is important about the denial is that the intensity of denial is determined by the degree of the terror of the traumatic hearing. The fear of annihilation is the primary source of the fierce denial since“[t]he immediate psychological responses to such trauma include terror, loss of control, and intense fear of annihilation” (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 40). Viewed in this light, the contagious power remains unabated in the boy’s denial. Instead, it is easy to find its trace in this case. As Kai Erikson’s interpretation of traumatization puts it,
[t]o describe people as traumatized is to say that they have withdrawn into a kind of protective envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness, in which the traumatic experience is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expunged by acts of denial and resistance. (186)
17 The crisis of listening is that “the listener can no longer ignore the question of facing death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning and purpose of living; of the limits of one’s omnipotence;
of losing the ones that are close to us; the great question of our ultimate aloneness; our otherness from any other; our responsibility to and for our destiny; the question of loving and its limits; of parents and children; and so on (Laub, Testimony 72).”
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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.