雙重見證 : 論說書者中的創傷與原諒 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士論文指導教授: 邱彥彬先生 Advisor: Yen-bin Chiou. 雙重見證: 論說書者中的創傷與原諒 Witnessing Witnesses: On Trauma and Forgiveness in The Storyteller. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. 研究生:林亭妤 Name: Ting-yu Lin 中華民國. 106 年 1 月. January 2017. v.

(2) Witnessing Witnesses: On Trauma and Forgiveness in The Storyteller. 政治大 A Master Thesis Presented to Department of English, 立 ‧. ‧ 國. 學. National Chengchi University. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. i n U. Ch. v. e n Requirements gchi In Partial Fulfillment of the for the Degree of Master of Arts. by Ting-yu Lin January 2017.

(3) Acknowledgement I would like to dedicate this thesis to my mother, who has been a courageous woman and a great supporter in my life, and I know at this moment my father must be really proud as he sees me complete the thesis. I am grateful to Prof. Yen-bin Chiou for his guidance, for his astute listening, and for his kind encouragement. I would never finish this thesis without the help and assistance from Prof. Yen-bin Chiou. I would also like to thank the English Department for the care and help in NCCU.. 治政 classmates for accompanying me in the lonely days大 of studying and for their selfless 立 Endless gratitude toward the sublime group members, friends, and senior. sharing. Last but not least, I would like to thank my special friend Ping-jen Kao for. ‧ 國. 學. being a longtime interlocutor and encouraged me when I doubted myself.. ‧. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. v. i n U. v.

(4) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. vi. i n U. v.

(5) Table of Contents Acknowledgement .................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... vii Chinese Abstract .................................................................................................................. viiiii English Abstract ......................................................................................................................... x. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Background and Research Questions .............................................................................. 1. 治政大 1.3 Methodology.................................................................................................................. 10 立 1.4 Chapter Organization ..................................................................................................... 11. 1.2 Literature Review ............................................................................................................ 8. ‧ 國. 學. Chapter One- What Does It Mean by Witnessing?................................................. 15. ‧. Chapter Two- Killing the Wrong Man: The Contagious Power of. Nat. sit. y. Listening/Witnessing.................................................................................................. 37. n. al. er. io. 2.1 The Hearing: Hearing is a Burden ................................................................................. 37. i n U. v. 2.2 The Effect of the Listening—The Unexpected Response.............................................. 43. Ch. engchi. 2.3 The Effect of Listening/Witnessing: the Expected Killing and Unexpected Response . 46. Chapter Three- Reaching a Closure and Possible Forgiveness ............................. 51 3.1 Forgiveness in The Storyteller ....................................................................................... 51 3.2 Revenge-oriented Aspect of Forgiveness in Religion.................................................... 57 3.3 Forgiveness as Suspension of Judgment........................................................................ 61 3.4 Reaching a Closure ........................................................................................................ 64. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 67 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….73. vii.

(6) 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文提要. 論文名稱: 雙重見證: 論說書者中的創傷與原諒指導教授: 邱彥彬教授. 立. 研究生: 林亭妤. ‧ 國. 學. 論文提要內容:. 政治大. 茱迪．皮考特 (Jodi Picoult) 小說 « The Storyteller»中的女主角(Sage Singer). ‧. 身為第三代納粹大屠殺生還者經歷的複雜見證過程豐富了當代大屠殺小說系列. y. Nat. io. sit. 關於生存者見證與創傷經驗的描述，其中把錯殺當作對見證的回應更是值得深思，. er. 本文因而將其經驗置放於見證與創傷的理論框架，並且針對女主角對於原諒加害. al. n. v i n Ch 者一事的糾結展開一系列對於原諒的叩問。創傷記憶的傳承讓第三代也成為間接 engchi U 的大屠殺見證者，錯殺間接強化了這個論點，而 Sage Singer 錯殺的這起事件為存在於復仇和原諒這個永久的對立關係開闢了新的道路，因為錯殺，Singer 第一次考慮原諒的可能性，也開始仔細重新思量整個錯殺事件的意義。從原本單純的旁觀傾聽者、第二見證人到變成整個見證過程的要角，這樣的轉變證明了見證過程的感染性是不容忽視的，事實上，聽者不是單純的被動者，聽者在說者講述的過程扮演如同心理治療師的地位，藉由傾聽來幫助說者走出自己內心找不到出口的創傷深淵，然而，聽者在陪伴說者重返創傷場域的同時，聽者也深陷了，以. viii.

(7) Singer 的例子來說，復仇是對這見證經驗的反饋，因此，探討聽者該如何適當地反饋也是本文試圖想討論的重點。本文大略可分為三部分: 第一部分主要在於爬梳整理見證理論並探討見證的意義以及創傷本質的探討，這部份還是會回到大屠殺事件本身的創傷論述，第二部分著重文本分析見證的感染力如何導致錯殺事件的發生，因為錯殺事件意外地開啟了主角願意探討寬恕的向度，因此第三部分則是討論原諒的本質與意義。. 治政關鍵字: 見證、創傷、大屠殺、原諒大立 ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. ix. i n U. v.

(8) Abstract Jodi Picoult’s novel The Storyteller has enriched the discourse of witnessing and that of trauma in the contemporary Holocaust novels because of Sage Singer’s peculiar experience as a third generation survivor, a listener, and a secondary witness. What makes Singer’s experience of witnessing special is that she eventually takes revenge of her family’s misfortune by killing a Nazi officer—the act of. 政治大. revenge turns out to be a miskilling. The event of killing the wrong man is. 立. particularly the climax because it manifests the over-response of the contagious. ‧ 國. 學. power of witnessing.. I draw on theory of trauma and that of witnessing to examine how the process. ‧. of witnessing influences a listener’s mind. I observe that there is a contagious power. y. Nat. io. sit. of witnessing/listening that has been understated and underestimated. I argue that the. n. al. er. miskilling is exactly against this background of lacking awareness of the. Ch. i n U. v. significance of the contagious power of witnessing. Critics in the past seldom. engchi. focused on the traumatization of the listeners in the process of witnessing and listening but on the testifiers. In the thesis, I would like to emphasize on the listeners who play important roles in the whole process of witnessing. 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. The second witness exists to help the testifier understand the experience, just like the way a therapist does. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part of the thesis aims at building theoretical grounds of the theory of witnessing and that of trauma to further x.

(9) analyze Singer’s case in the novel. The second part of the thesis examines how the contagious power of witnessing gives rise to the event of killing the wrong man. Because killing the wrong man opens up the dimension of forgiveness, the third part of the thesis will be discussing the possibility and meaning of forgiveness.. Key words: witness, trauma, forgiveness, Holocaust. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. xi. i n U. v.

(10) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v.

(11) Introduction 1.1 Background and Research Questions Yehuda Bauer adamantly opposes a recent statement raised by Emily Fackenheim that “the victims of the Holocaust were kedoshim, holy persons, because they were Jewish martyrs, killed because of their Jewishness, and hence suffering just like their ancestors had suffered, for the Sanctification of the Name” (15). The. 政治大. statement comes as no surprise because traumatized Jewish society seeks and awaits. 立. ready answers to their sufferings. Bauer thinks the statement ignores the fact that the. ‧ 國. 學. Holocaust is itself meaningless: “there is no meaning to the Holocaust, because the. ‧. only meaning it could have would be a Nazi meaning: for the Nazi there was a purpose in the killing, murder was meaningful. For the Jews it was totally. y. Nat. io. sit. meaningless” (ibid). In fact, Emily Fackenheim’s statement unveils a hidden reality. n. al. er. that the Jews expect to redeem themselves by elevating the victimized and oppressed. Ch. i n U. v. experience to the level of sacredness. That is, they would rather establish their. engchi. identities in the meaningfulness than in the meaninglessness. This is to say, it is exactly the meaninglessness that is what the Jews are against, inasmuch as they need to find a way to counteract the excessive meaninglessness of the concept of the Holocaust which threatens to diminish their dignities, Jewish identities, and things they have believe. With growing demands to redeem themselves, the victims are still seeking any kind of ways to go beyond the meaninglessness which also triggers my intention to find one.. 1.

(12) Apparently acknowledging the meaningless nature of the Holocaust and not intending to diminish the impact of that, most of the Holocaust novels put convenient resolution or transcendence of Shoah into question. Some of those don’t bother even to mention it. Attempting to move up to another layer of transcendence, researchers find it hard to bring forgiveness to the table because for most of the first-generation survivors, forgiveness is certainly out of question. In an interview, Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and the author of the well-known book Night, responds to the interviewer about forgiving: “No, I cannot, I cannot forgive.1” In order to deepen our. 治政 the questions of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm and to 大 reconsider the attempt of 立. understanding of the reasons behind not willing to forgive, my thesis aims to revisit. working-through and the possibility of reaching a closure or forgiveness particularly. ‧ 國. 學. from the perspective of a third generation who never hears about the ancestors’. ‧. experiences in the camps directly in the novel The Storyteller which brings forth. sit. y. Nat. another focus in this study, that is, the dynamics between a witness and a listener—a. io. al. er. crisis of the contagious power of witnessing/listening. To investigate on the possibility of forgiveness in a judiciously critical manner, I draw on theories of. n. v i n C how witnessing as my angle of view to see contagious power of witnessing shreds h ethe ngchi U new light on the discourse of forgiveness. At the same time, I manage to infiltrate the discourse of witnessing with tints of trauma theories to better understand the nature of the unspeakable trauma.. 1. Elie Wiesel gave a speech in the German Parliament commemorating the holocaust. He said to the assembled German leaders, “You have been helpful to Israel after the war, with reparations and financial assistance. But you have never asked the Jewish people to forgive you for what the Nazis did.” After a while, in an interview hosted by Krista Tippett, Elie Wiesel was to answer the question: “Is ‘forgiveness’ a big enough word or a good enough word for this?” He answered, “No, I cannot. No, I cannot forgive.” The reason why he brought up forgiveness in the German parliament was to “sensitize people not to do the same.” See more on http://www.onbeing.org/blog/krista-tippett-evil-forgiveness-and-prayer-elie-wiesel/8807. 2.

(13) The third generation in The Storyteller is represented by a character Sage Singer in the novel The Storyteller. She is a young woman who attends a grief group because of the recent death of her mother. Her mother died as a result of a car accident. The accident seems to leave Sage with a scar on her face and that makes her reticent to be seen in public. Getting used to live in the dark to cover her scar, she works at night in a bakery. She even dates at night with a man who happens to have a wife. Whatever she does gets going in the dark. It’s like her secret is never enough. In the grief group, in a time when she finally gets out of her comfort zone, she befriends an old man. 治政大 for helping him die. However, WWII. She is even more shocked for Webber’s request 立 named Joseph Webber, who later reveals his true identity as a SS officer back in. as time goes by, she gradually knows the history of her grandmother Minka and of her. ‧ 國. 學. pain in seeing her best friend dying under the gunshot of a Nazi officer. Coincidently,. ‧. Webber says he is the man that makes her grandma desperate. From a friend to an. sit. y. Nat. enemy, Singer finds herself tangled in this contradictory relation, but she still believes. io. er. she is doing the justice when she helps Webber die. Yet, when Leo, her true love, uncovers the true identity of Webber that he is not the man who kills her grandma’s. al. n. v i n C hknowing what to doUand how to deal with this mistake, best friend, she is stunned. Not engchi Singer, inadvertently, in the process of witnessing, finds herself deeply involved and unable to get out. Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller becomes the best choice of a text to develop my argument not only because it is a bestseller when it was published in 2013 in which the horrors of Holocaust are commonly dismissed with comments such as “it’s over” and “it’s done” but also because I am interested in how a popular fiction manages to deal with the most heinous event of human history. The contemporaries of the Holocaust are often divided into three categories: the perpetrators, the victims, and the 3.

(14) bystanders. “These three categories can also be applied to subsequent reactions to the Holocaust” (Jäckel 23), while the division is less pertinent when applied to research. The unstoppable force of the coming generations from the above categories makes the divisions even more opaque in terms of the attitudes and feelings individuals hold. We all agree that reactions to the Holocaust depend largely on where an individual stands. The Storyteller provides a third-generation point of view. The reactions toward the Holocaust of a third generation might be somewhat between victim and bystander based on the division of categories, since it is reasonable to suspect that the memory. 治政 generations are reached a low point. As Geoffrey Hartman observes, “three大立. of the Holocaust in the sense we understand today with the passage of time has. preoccupied with Holocaust memories” (1). However, their states of mind vary from. ‧ 國. 學. generation to generation. I am wondering whether the generation gap distances her. ‧. from her grandmother’s pain since the generations to come finds the Holocaust. sit. y. Nat. “distant, blurred, historical” (Levi 198)2. Or, on the contrary, the gap doesn’t erase. io. al. er. anything due to the irreplaceable but burdensome bond. Recognizing the subtle dynamics of generation gaps in terms of the feelings about the Holocaust memories,. n. v i n C hfrom survivors, theUsecond generation is eager Hartman continues to suggest that apart engchi to know their parents better; and the third generation, the grandchildren, with even more oblique understanding toward the family history, is getting loose with the bond of burdensome experiences that have challenged the family life (1). Singer seems to approach the memories of Holocaust with mixture of a sense of bond to her family and a sense of burden at the same time. It is a rather different psychical sate from most of the holocaust novels which provide scarce renderings on the third. 2. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi attests to his despair that “The experience that we survivors of the Nazi Lagers carry within us are extraneous to the new Western generation and become ever more extraneous as the years pass” (198). 4.

(15) generation’s struggles. In addition, the protagonist, living in the same era with us, is very much close to readers. From this point, the novel’s peculiar point of view from the third generation is definitely my great interest. Responding to the particular moment in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower in her novel, Picoult has in mind Simon Wiesenthal’s encounter with a mortally wounded Nazi soldier who begs for a word of forgiveness in his deathbed, a scenario which draws hundreds of critics’ and my attention. In The Sunflower, Wiesenthal, a survivor in the Lemberg Concentration Camp, reminisces his experience in the camp. 治政大 silent refusal to let up the and the six million deaths of the innocents, Wiesenthal’s 立. and recounts the encounter with a terminally wounded Nazi. On behalf of the Jewish. Nazi soldier’s remorse leaves him burdened by the question of whether he does justly,. ‧ 國. 學. mercifully, and compassionately or not. To forgive or not to forgive, that is the. ‧. question for Wiesenthal. Brought to the deathbed of a Nazi soldier, we can assume. sit. y. Nat. that Wiesenthal’s remorse germinates from the sight of the dying man. It is reasonable. io. al. er. to premise that Wiesenthal’s case is a case of the impact of witnessing. The very seeing of the dying Nazi soldier itself forebodes the perishing era of his painful. n. v i n Cbecause history and Jews’ misery, and era is about to be a past, a history, the h e nthe gchi U witness of the dying Nazi soldier impels Wiesenthal to seek for “lessons” and. meaning, or, as what I refer earlier, forgiveness in their collective history. Stuck in these big questions, his silent refusal to the perpetrator’s request confirms the never-ending impasse of victim and perpetrator’s tension concerning reaching a closure. While some think it an impasse, some think Wiesenthal’s silence a “persecution”3, in Emmanuel Levinas word, which the perpetrator deserves. From a more positive viewpoint, Matthew Fox maintained, “this already is compassion—‘to. 3. See more about “persecution” in Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence. 5.

(16) stay and listen and even to remain silent and refuse to offer cheap forgiveness to so heinous a crime’” (qtd. in Wiesenthal 144). Yet, to conclude the above interpretations of Wiesenthal’s difficulty in giving pardonable words, the anxiety of Wiesenthal paves the road for more discourses concerning victims’ struggles toward forgiveness. Sage Singer, however, is not only forced to struggle against the victim’s guilt for not forgiving the perpetrator’s crime but also forced to feel like a perpetrator. Following the same vein of Wiesenthal’s encounter with the perpetrator, The Storyteller ends with the similar scenario, but this time, the perpetrator Joseph. 治政大 officer who has been when the truth comes out that Webber is actually the nice Nazi 立 Webber asks not a word for pardon but for a killing as a way to redemption. Only. kind to Singer’s grandmother does she notice that she has committed a crime that no. ‧ 國. 學. one but she knows. Many questions hover in her mind: “[D]id any of this excuse what. ‧. I had done? Or—like him—was I trying to justify the unjust? Why would Franz [the. sit. y. Nat. original name of Joseph Webber] have gone to so much trouble to paint himself as the. io. er. more brutal brother?” (Picoult 506; emphasis mine). All the questions and confusions. al. pop up after the killing of the wrong man. As a witness from beginning to the end,. n. v i n Singer is encountering a crisis—an C identity crisis of a witness. She is confused about hen gchi U whether she is playing properly a role of a listener, a witness. Namely, she is not certain about how she should respond to the whole process of witnessing Webber’s testimony. Singer is not an impartial witness but a perpetrator in the end because she is too involved in the process of witnessing Webber’s storytelling of his past. The witness is emotionally shattered when she knows she has killed the wrong man, executing an act that is supposed to be a response and a settlement for the perpetrator and the victim. The event, killing the wrong man, is critical in that it is the outcome of the very 6.

(17) witnessing and listening4. In the process of witnessing, the presence of a listener is a necessary component, since without a listener the speaker doesn’t have a social space to articulate. According to the plot of The Storyteller, Sage Singer as a witness or a listener unconsciously cultivates a delicate affinity with Joseph Webber. I am wondering how affiliated it is between the listener and the speaker. This premise creates even more questions: how traumatic stories spoken by the witness work to influence the listener and how the listener is unconsciously over-involved in the dynamics of give-and-take when listening to testimony. It seems a listening involves. 治政大 critics mostly appeal but the the wrong man manifests not the lack of empathy which 立 certain ethics. How should a listener properly respond to the traumatic story? Killing. appropriately empathetic witness.. 學. ‧ 國. hazard of witnessing. It also makes us rethink the ethics of a listener—to be an. ‧. Against this background, this event, though not as tremendous as the genocide,. sit. y. Nat. forces Singer to fall back to the site of Holocaust trauma. From this point, I begin to. io. al. er. wonder the inseparable relationship between witnessing and trauma in the case of Sage Singer. Since giving testimony is a way of working through for the survivors in. n. v i n C hin danger of the contagious the camp, the listeners become power of listening. What’s engchi U worse is that her inability to testify to the death of Joseph Webber throws her back to silence, an act of refusal to the event and also a sign of acting-out. No matter in terms of witnessing or testimony, she is not able to go through until she really witnesses it as she understands what she sees. In this sense, witnessing doesn’t stay in the superficial aspect of physicality of seeing. Rather, the physicality of seeing is much more 4. Aside from the event killing of the wrong man which is the climax of the novel, there is a tale inside tale which occupies many pages. The monster tale is the story Minka,Singer’s grandmother, writes to Nazi officer Frank in the camp. By updating the monster tale daily in the camp, Minka wins the trust of Frank and eventually survives. The story of monster is parallel to that of Frank. The monster is like his brother Reiner, and Frank is like the character Damian who is caught up in an ethical dilemma. The intertextuality of the monster tale and the story of Frank manifest the importance of the acute sense of readers who are also listeners in the whole process of reading. 7.

(18) profound than we think. The physicality of seeing is at the same time associated with the mind that governs our thinking and “understanding.” If seeing is believing, not seeing it as the way it is becomes not believing it. After the event of killing the wrong man, Singer at the first time “sees” the truth about Joseph Webber. She begins to “understand” a little bit of what Webber wants—a closure. Singer’s sudden realization gets her out of her own fantasy of getting justice and that of working through trauma which is inherited from her family, and it is also up until this time of cruel realization that Singer knows the truth of what forgiveness might mean. I manage to elaborate. 治政大nature of forgiveness. if there is indeed a closure in the end by interrogating on the 立. what a closure both Webber and Singer have been struggled with getting and try to see. Up to this point, it is obvious that the very witnessing of a Nazi officer’s death. ‧ 國. 學. generates many questions on forgiveness in both of the case of Wiesenthal and that of. ‧. Singer. Of key importance on this issue is that we get a chance to scrutinize on the. sit. y. Nat. contagious power of listening and to see how the contagious power of witnessing. io. al. n. journey as a second-witness.5. er. changes the character’s life and her opinion upon revenge and forgiveness during her. 1.2 Literature Review. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. When commenting on the book The Storyteller, most critics think the novel manifests a knotty moral quandary derived from forgiveness, such as a question: “Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren’t the party who was wronged?”. 5. Geoffrey Hartman explains the use of secondary witness: “In The Longest Shadow I used the expression ‘second generation witness,’ a concept that made sense because the pressure of the event on the sons and daughters of the survivors was such that ‘witness’ seemed justified. Almost imperceptibly, however, the phrase broadened to embrace what Terrence des Pres and Lawrence Langer name ‘secondary witness’—a concept without generational limit. It includes all who could be called witnesses because they are still in touch with the first generation or who look at the Shoah not as something enclosed in the past but as a contemporary issue requiring an intensity of representation close to eyewitness report” (1). Thus, I am going further to apply the secondary witness, briefly put as second witness, to the third generation and those who are deeply involved and have experienced excessive emotion arousals during the process of survivors’ testimonies. 8.

(19) The study will arrive at the forgiveness only when Singer’s miskilling has been fully inspected, and the study refuses a clear-cut binary opposition of forgiveness and revenge. In fact, I am wondering if the theory of witnessing will give us different perspective on Singer’s miskilling, and then the vengeful miskilling further influences her willingness to forgive. In addition, researchers of theories of witnessing have been focused on the first-hand witnesses—the real survivors. However, those listeners, the second witnesses, have been neglected, as if they are supplementary existences. Among all the researchers, only Felman and Laub bring out the significance of the. 治政大 because it has been rarely significance, I put the listener at the first place not only 立 listeners, but they still leave much space unexplored. Reversing the stance of. discussed, but because the listener might have encountered the same traumatic. ‧ 國. 學. experience like survivors. What’s more, the process of witnessing the witness itself. ‧. might lead to unexpected consequences, such as killing the wrong man. We should be. sit. y. Nat. reminded that the very listening or witnessing itself is contagious to a point of seeking. io. er. personal vengeance in the case of Singer. In this respect, I think the place of the. al. listener, what she might go through, deserves our attentions.. n. v i n C h of the wrong manUis the result of the witnessing. The This study suggests killing engchi. result of witnessing needs to be examined with the theories of witnessing. Critics contributing to the theory of witnessing mostly emphasize on different types of testimony, the ontology of testimony and witnessing, the event—Holocaust—that incurs the witnessing, and its moral issues under historical contexts. Michal Givoni, for instance, renders witnessing and testimony “a more politicized and historicized account” (1). He thinks that testimony is a “speech-act that brings moral and political subjects into being, sometimes almost in spite of themselves; it is one of the most prevalent devices available today for individuals to come to grips with moral 9.

(20) obligations” (Givoni 148). Annette Wieviorka suggests that we are in “an era of witness” when this era is replete with different methods of giving testimony. Concerning our comprehension of the term “witnessing,” Kelly Oliver advocates that [w]itnessing means testifying to both something you have seen with your own eyes and something that you cannot see (86). In the meanwhile, witnesses are constantly interpreting the process by which they become who they are. From the way I see it, the above comments on the witnesses are not restricted to the first-hand witnesses; instead, they are all applicable to the second witnesses.. 治政大more than the witness Kelly Oliver says, “The performance of testimony says 立. 1.3 Methodology. knows” (86). Since the thesis intends to find out what is beyond knowledge or. ‧ 國. 學. recognition that even the witness cannot perceive, without doubt it needs a lot of. ‧. studies from psychoanalysis. I find that the concept of witnessing is severely bound to. sit. y. Nat. trauma theories which derive from works of Freud and his followers. Hence, it is. io. er. necessary to draw on theories of witnessing and theories of trauma in my thesis. In. al. The Storyteller, the traumatic event that is witnessed and awaits testimony is killing. n. v i n C hman is a watershedUto the discussion of the wrong man. Since killing the wrong engchi. witnessing and working-through, the thesis will analyze how Sage Singer has been influenced in the process of witnessing, inasmuch as she eventually decides to respond to the story of Webber by seeking a revengeful killing. The reason that she tries to work through past but ends up returning to the loop of traumatic burden her ancestor left on her is that she thinks vengeance is justice, as if forgiveness is the opposite of the vengeance. By analyzing how this event influences on Sage Singer, I am already wondering on what Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben says about the grey zone in which victims 10.

(21) and perpetrators blended together. Sage Singer is both victim and perpetrator, and so does Webber. The issue of the grey zone has already been discussed for a long time.6 Yet, the grey zone between victim and perpetrator is even more oblique after the event of killing the wrong man. I call it an event not an accident on account that Singer once admits that she doesn’t know if she purposefully slights the difference between Webber and his brother. She chooses to believe what he says, so it seems not like an accident. If it is not an accident, then the event, though called killing the “wrong” man, is not that wrong. Rather, Webber is the scapegoat for Singer’s misery. 治政大and his brother’s heinous acts Webber himself, his sacrifice is a way to atone for his 立 and family history. From this understanding, Webber is sacrificed in a sense. For. in Nazi regime. For Singer, Webber is the one she thinks is responsible for the misery. ‧ 國. 學. of her grandmother, or even her own misery. That is, killing the wrong man, a. ‧. response to the witnessing of Joseph Webber’s confession, has been my focus in. sit. y. Nat. unraveling the tangles of witnessing, working-through, and forgiveness in this novel.. io. al. er. My theoretical framework of witnessing in the thesis will begin with two impossibilities of testifying and indicate that the meaning of testimony is the. n. v i n oscillation between the two C impossibilities. this point, testimony is itself h e n g cFrom hi U paradoxical. It is the rupture of the two impossibilities of testimony that opens up possibilities of forgiveness. 1.4 Chapter organization Chapter One will theorize the concept of witnessing and explicate its relation to the discourse of trauma theories. The first part of this chapter will be answering two questions: What would it mean to bear witness to the Holocaust? Concerning the authority of the witness, what would it mean to bear witness from the inside?. 6. See more in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. 11.

(22) According to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, it is impossible to testify from the very inside of the inhumanity of the Holocaust. Rather, it is impossible to witness from inside death and annihilation. However, the true meaning behind the testimony is to live through testimony, no matter testifying from inside or outside. For survivors, the process of witnessing or giving testimony brings a sense of relief, that is, a way to work through the past by telling it and breaking the wall of silence. For those who listen to their testimonies, they are instead in a risk of getting too much emotion arousals. From this point, I attempt to answer another subsequent question in the. 治政 listener’s deep involvement as a response to the testimony?大 I try to draw on the 立. second part of the chapter: How does the retelling of this particular trauma invoke the. concept of transgenerational transmission of trauma to explain the drive behind. ‧ 國. 學. Singer’s determination to revenge as an evidence of over-response. This part of. ‧. analysis recognizes the importance of the stance of listeners and will continue to put it. sit. y. Nat. at the center stage onwards.. io. er. The deep involvement of the listener aroused by the very process of listening. al. seems to actively confront me with the issue of the contagious power of. n. v i n C hSinger, the consequence witnessing/listening. In the case of Sage e n g c h i U of the contagious power of witnessing/listening embodies in the killing of the wrong man. In Chapter Two, I will analyze the event—killing the wrong man—as an evidence of overresponse and compare and contrast the state of mind of Singer before and after the event. The readers will witness how the contagious power of witnessing/ listening imposes on the Singer. Killing the wrong man is a response to the witnessing, although it is a mere misunderstanding. This response doesn’t ease any pain and anxiety caused by the history of Holocaust. This response opens up a critical question: How should Singer respond properly? In the chapter, I attempt to lay out Singer’s 12.

(23) struggle to be a proper listener and a proper secondary-witness, and the cause-and-effect of the relation between the contagious power of witnessing and the over-responding will be carefully investigated. Finally, Chapter Three will analyze on the nature of forgiveness in a down-to-earth manner. That is, I attempt to examine it from the perspective of a certain kind of settlement unsettled. By reflecting and reevaluating on the vengeful stance of Singer, the definition of forgiveness I come to conclude will encompass lager dimensions. To talk about forgiveness, the study cannot leave the fantasies of. 治政大denying traumatic events that through. They are distorted methods of avoiding and 立 revenge and forgiveness untouched. Those fantasies are not truly ways of working. have been haunting the sufferers. The truth is that forgiving is neither forgetting and. ‧ 國. 學. nor exonerating the crime of the perpetrators. The most significant argument of this. ‧. chapter is that forgiving is based on the acknowledgement of the fact that the. sit. y. Nat. survivors and their offspring will never return from the memories of the Holocaust. io. er. unscathed. However, the survivors can choose to renew their lives by suspending. al. judgments, moving forward without lingering on the irremediable tragedies. They. n. v i n forgive, only for the sake ofC themselves. it seems a rather limited step, that’s h e n gAlthough chi U at least what a human being traumatized on the scale of the Holocaust can be asked to do. To conclude, In the end of Bernard-Donals and Glejzer’s work, they show us some problems of Holocaust discourse concerning the respect of lessons that we learn and healing the damages that the war done to the world: In the years since 1945 we’ve heard a lot of answers: so that we never forget; so that something like this could never happen again; so we remember those who perished; so that we can heal or redeem the damage 13.

(24) done to the world through anti-Semitism or racial hatred or any number of other symptoms of genocide. We’d like to suggest that although these answers, and others like them—answers that focus our attention on the events of the Holocaust and the broad ethical consequences of it―are compelling and useful, they are nevertheless impossible. (157) The Storyteller does demonstrate the struggles, both for Singer and for Webber, of answering those big questions. Those questions are impossible to answer in the sense that any supposedly generalized judgment would be rendered futile when it comes to the Holocaust. That’s why going beyond, suspending the judgment, is the only way to. 治政大 working-through unravel the intricate questions. I hope the issue of going beyond, 立. induced by witnessing provides us a broader picture of how the traumatic symptoms. ‧ 國. 學. work to intervene in people’s sense and sensibility. Through the horizon of theories of. ‧. witnessing, I expect to analyze the workings of a witness’s witnessing and thereby. sit. y. Nat. map out a new way to cope with trauma; and by recognizing the consequence of the. io. al. er. contagious power of listening, I hope the listeners’ traumatization will be noticed,. n. heard, and treated with respects like the ways survivors deserve.. Ch. engchi. 14. i n U. v.

(25) Chapter One What Does It Mean by Witnessing? The noted French historian Annette Wieviorka has referred to the present as the “era of the witness.” The number of testimonies after WWII has undergone a “big bang” process. Different kinds of testimonies start burgeoning. Though different in. 政治大. methods, every type of testimony or witnessing seems to face with common. 立. disconcerting counteraction during the process of witnessing and giving testimony,. ‧ 國. 學. which makes the whole process of witnessing/giving testimony even more challenging. It is a great task for our era of the witness.. ‧. “To speak is impossible, and not to speak is impossible” (Schreiber Weitz).. y. Nat. io. sit. Survivors are often in predicament when it comes to describing to us the death camp.. n. al. er. The demand to speak comes from the sense of responsibility as a survivor who. Ch. i n U. v. survives in order to tell people what happened and to speak as a proxy of the dead. It. engchi. is a voice of life, “the ultimate resistance against death and oblivion” (Wieviorka 22). Testifiers honor an implicit testament that “must be understood in the Hebrew sense of ‘covenant’ –not with God, but a covenant of the living with the dead” (Wieviorka 27). A covenant represents a responsibility to the dead. What fuels the testimony is “a protest against death, a need to leave a trace and to assure a legacy” (Wirviorka 23). In Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth records an interview with Robert Jay Lifton. During their interview, Lifton also confirms a witness’s responsibility to the dead: Carrying through the witness is a way of transmuting pain and guilt into 15.

(26) responsibility, and carrying through that responsibility has enormous therapeutic value. . . And its therapeutic value becomes a very central agent for reintegration of the self. One has had this experience, it has been overwhelming, the self has been shattered in some degree; the only way one can feel right or justified in reconstituting oneself and going on living with some vitality is to carry through ones’ responsibility to the dead. (Trauma: Explorations in Memory 138) In other words, carrying through the witness somehow helps the survivors themselves.. 治政大 survivors, to speak is to live as a person again. 立. Giving testimony makes them feel important and makes their lives meaningful. For. However, one of the reasons why “to speak is impossible” is that language is not. ‧ 國. 學. enough to describe the whole event. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben. ‧. sit. y. Nat. [T]estimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way. io. er. says,. al. to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness.. n. v i n C his a language that U The language of testimony e n g c h i no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance - that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness. To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense. . . . It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the “lacuna” that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing 16.

(27) witness—that which does not have language. (39) That is, the survivors have difficulties trying to reconstruct the event and telling the impossible. The language of testimony is beyond everyday language. In other words, a language can be a language only when there is a community, a nation, a large group of people, that speak this language. Since the history of the Holocaust has been buried by perpetrators, onlookers, and survivors who dare not to reveal their cruel past, there is no language found to bear witness. Every single word seems to betray the reality of the unspeakable past. It is an event that “consisted in a radical failure of witnessing, an event to which [a] witness ha[s] no access” (Felman and Laub 194). That is to say,. 治政大of the testimony is itself resisting what makes language malfunction is that the content 立. interpretation and any formulated, systematic, and logical narrative. Thus, the real. ‧ 國. 學. quandary behind Agamben’s statement is: “How can survivors testify to something. ‧. they have difficulties articulating?” The definition of “testimony”, which appears to. sit. y. Nat. us unique in its nature, starts to set in when the testifier is navigating between the two. io. er. conflicting impossibilities, the impossibility to speak and impossibility not to speak.. al. Given that the impossibility of speaking is so certain, besides the responsibility that. n. v i n Ctohtell the stories, is U the survivors survive in order e n g c h i there any other reason so powerful. as to propel the fact that “not to speak is impossible”? Rather, what is the significance of giving testimony? Why bother to tell a painful past? The questions touch on both the theories of trauma and that of witnessing. I will start first with theories of witnessing. Foremost, what constitutes witnessing is a primary issue. Agamben points out the ordinary meanings of the word “witness”: In Latin there are two words for “witness.” The first word, testis, from which our word “testimony” derives, etymologically signifies the person 17.

(28) who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (testis). The second word, superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it. (17) For a Holocaust survivor, he or she is not a third party. We can also assume that the testimony of the survivor in holocaust “has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts for a trial” (Agamben 17). That is to say, a survivor’s testimony is never about restoring the truth or facts7. Agamben makes sure to clarify this nature of testimony, and he says,. 治政大 and truth and as such The witness usually testifies in the name of justice 立 his or her speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet, here the value of. ‧ 國. 學. testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains. ‧. something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the. sit. y. Nat. survivors of authority. The “true” witnesses the “complete witnesses,” are. io. al. witness to a missing testimony. (34). er. those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. . . [T]hey bear. n. v i n C hin what it lacks” because The “value of testimony lies essentially e n g c h i U a witness restores a context in which humanity, reason, and meanings are not found. A context with extreme inhuman massacre exists in this acclaimed western civil society. The chronic uproot of humanity produces enormous backlash insofar as the humanity is hard to be recognized in the body of prisoners in the camp. They are numbing toward Nazi’s 7. The meaning and function of testimony here involves ethical issues. Concerning how we respond to them ethically, my suggestion is that we should understand there are two levels of comprehending testimony: one is the nature of witnessing belatedly, and the other is the nature of telling, testifying, in the present. The retrospection of the past involves psychological factors. That is, when testifiers excavate the memory of the traumatic scene, they will tell others what they see and feel, not what historians see and feel. From this point of view, I am not suggesting that their testimonies are not close to the truth and facts. I am saying the most ethical attitude toward the true witnesses is to recognize the fact that we cannot underrate the historical values and that at the same time we cannot ignore the importance of emotional frame of reference in testimony . 18.

(29) annihilation of their dignities. The “complete witnesses” Agamben refers to are Muselmann, the living dead. Amery explains this jargon of the camp as follows: The so-called Muselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. (9) The complete witness is exactly the one who cannot speak and perform what it takes. 治政大is the site of an experiment in exactly in the disconnected physicality. “Muselmann 立. to be human. The Muselmann completely stripped of humanity in the camp embodies. which morality and humanity themselves are called into question” (Agamben 63).. ‧ 國. 學. They are the drowned, the submerged.8 For Agamben, Muselmann is the complete. ‧. witness and insider in all time9. Some critics have rendered fruitful comments about. sit. y. Nat. the border of inside and outside of the witnessing.. io. al. n. 8. er. It is well-known that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s groundbreaking work,. i n U. v. Primo Levi views the Muslims as the drowned. He suggests: “We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. . . We who were favored by fate tries, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate but also that of the others, indeed of the drowned; but this was a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen at close hand, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death. Even if they had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (83-84). That is, in a perplexed position, survivors are the lucky ones who survive to tell not only their own survivals but the vast majority who are drowned in the bottom. Rather, the drowned is the core of the whole testimony instead of the survivals of the saved. 9. Ch. engchi. When Agamben speaks of the Muselmann as the “the complete witness,” he actually pinpoints the term the Muselmann as a figure and a philosophical idea, between life and death, outside and inside, human and inhuman, sense and nonsense. However, generally speaking, the Muselmann is still an insider because the Muselmann is the “core” of the camp which is manufactured by and becomes manufacturer of fear and shame for those who witness its appearance. In this sense, the Muselmann is the border breaker, an abject, who makes still-conscious prisoners question their own humanity and subjectivity. Hence, for this thesis, the Muselmann symbolizes the core of the unseeable truth in the process of witnessing. It is the reason why people resist listening and witnessing. 19.

(30) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, lays bare delicate nature of witnessing/ testimony. Concerning what it takes to be a witness, I have already mentioned Agamben’s perspective. Different from Agamben’s main emphasis and discussion of a complete witness as a deformed figure Muselmann who cannot act like a human being and threatens to ignite fear among prisoners, Shoshana Felman focuses on how the Holocaust establishes a systematical psychological framework in which witnesses force to confront with inside and outside otherness: The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which. 治政大But when one cannot possibility of appealing, or of turning to another. 立 extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the. turn to a “you” one cannot say “thou” even to oneself. The Holocaust. ‧ 國. 學. created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself.. ‧. The Nazi system turned out therefore to be fool-proof, not only in the. sit. y. Nat. sense that it convinced its victims, the potential witnesses from the inside,. io. er. that what was affirmed about their “otherness” and their inhumanity was. al. correct and that their experiences were no longer communicable even to. n. v i n C hperhaps never tookUplace. This loss of the themselves, and therefore engchi. capacity to be witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exists se well. (“Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle” 66) From the inside, victims are not able to see what happens because they are turned into objects and the dehumanized. An inhuman witness whose self is annihilated is not able to testify.. 20.

(31) It is therefore in reality impossible to testify from inside otherness10, or from inside the keeping of a secret, from inside amnesia or from inside deception and the delusion of coercive self-deception, in much the same way as it is impossible to testify, precisely, from inside death. (Laub 231) Namely, the above statement makes it unthinkable that an inside witness could exist to give an independent frame of reference and observation. However, be it Agamben’s theory of Muselman or Felman and Laub’s statement that there is no such thing as clear-cut inside witness in the Holocaust, they all pinpoint the difficulties of giving. 治政 objective manner. Beside Muselman, who is able to大 tell? For Laub, the answer is 立. truth-based testimony on account of the very difficulties of articulating the event in an. plausible:. ‧ 國. 學. Who would be in a position, then, to tell? The truth of the inside is even. ‧. less accessible to an outsider. If it is indeed impossible to bear witness to. sit. y. Nat. the Holocaust from the inside, it is even more impossible testify to it from. io. al. er. the outside. From without, the inside is entirely ungraspable, even when it is not simply what escapes perception altogether . . . . (232). n. v i n C hto see and comprehend Because an outsider is not able e n g c h i U the whole thing and because there is no possibility for an insider, the drowned, to bear witness, the event has inherently no witness. If the event has no witness in a philosophical manner, does the statement render futile the survivors’ attempts to testify? In light of the predicament, in the chapter three of the book, Dori Laub says: What ultimately matters in all process of witnessing, spasmodic and continuous, conscious and unconscious, is not simply the information, the 10. To testify from inside otherness here means to be prepared to speak from within the Other’s tongue, which we do not speak and do not understand (Laub, Testimony 230-31). One has to understand the Holocaust as “a world in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible” (Laub, “Truth and Testimony”66). That is, testifying from the inside is like testifying with the language we do not speak. 21.

(32) establishment of the facts, but the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony. The testimony is, therefore, the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness: reconstitutes the internal ‘thou,’ and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener inside himself. (85) Living through testimony is what Laub thinks the most important point of the whole process of witnessing. Living through testimony is the meaning of giving testimony itself. The urge to outlive the testimony is the whole point of speaking. That is,. 治政大 they could tell their The survivors did not only need to survive so that 立. according to Laub,. stories: they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There is. ‧ 國. 學. […] an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story,. ‧. unimpeded by the ghost from the past against which one has to protect. io. er. one’s life. (Felamn and Laub 78). sit. y. Nat. oneself. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live. al. This comprehension could not take place coincidental with the event precisely. n. v i n C h and deceptive psychological because “the inherently incomprehensible structure of engchi U [the Holocaust] precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims” (Felamn and Laub 80), the statement which also supports what I said earlier. The time discrepancy of witnessing is also underlined by Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer: “The act of witness is only available in another place and in another time: the time of the nightmare and—in testimony—the time of the writing or of the speaking to the interviewer” (58). This belated nature of witnessing is similar to that of trauma on which I will return to discuss. For now, we have already known what triggers the fact that “not to speak is 22.

(33) impossible.” It is by speaking that the storyteller starts to establish an internal “thou.” It seems that in the book, Laub has been stressing a lot on the form and performance of testimony11 and avoids talking about the content of a testimony which is probably a main focus for many disciplines, such as history and law12. Although his way of thinking—living through testimony—is illuminating, he doesn’t quite explain how the content of the narrator’s testimony serves to influence the mind of the listener, an important factor in the novel The Storyteller which directly causes the event killing the wrong man. How does this particular trauma invoke the listener’s deep. 治政大 process of getting tangled up in traumatic aporia? Since the whole 立. involvement? And how do the narrator and the listener live through testimony without. witnessing/testimony is not a solitary activity, the process must involve a lot of. ‧ 國. 學. interactions and produce unexpected dynamics for both the testifier and the listener.. y. Nat. 11. ‧. However, what if witnessing displays at the expense of the falling of the listener13? As. sit. n. al. er. io. See Felman and Laub: “What the testimony does not offer is, however, a completed statement, a totalizing account of those events. . . Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement. As a performative speech act, testimony in effect address what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance, and what in happenings is impact that dynamically explodes any conceptual reifications and any constative delimitations” (5). 12 “We of course, seek knowledge of traumatic events from testimony and even from bearing witness. . . And it is well know that testimony and witnessing may be unreliable with respect to an accurate reporting of events, in large part because of the uncontrollable, disorienting effects of trauma itself” (LaCapra, History and Its Limits 62), in light of the perspective of a historian. In addition, Wieviorka also recognizes that “[h]istorians have rarely drawn on the testimonies of survivors of the genocide and have in fact treated them with considerable mistrust” (xii). 13 I am alluding to Camus’s The Fall in which Felman explains, “the narrator was the chance witness of a suicide: a woman he had just passed by suddenly jumped off the bridge into the Seine. Stunned, the narrator froze for a brief moment, then continued his itinerary: this involuntary witnessing was not part of his life. But the scene has kept haunting him and, in its very absence, has brought about a radical disorientation and a gradual disintegration of everything that, in his life before it, had seemed safe, familiar, given” (165). Felman later analyzes ‘the fall” in a metaphorical way: “The narrative moment of ‘the fall,’ as the crucial turning point, can be read, in that way, as an allegory of the Second World War as a turning point in history. But the question could be asked: at the moment when the narrator/witness sees the woman fall into her death by drowning, whose fall is being told? Is the fall narrated the fall missed, the literally missed fall of the drowned, or is it rather, at the same time, the fall, precisely, of the saved ? Does the title designate, in other words, the woman’s fall or the narrator’s own fall? What the novel in fact dramatizes is the way in which, when the woman is precisely not seen falling off the bridge, at the moment when her fall is being missed, when the body strikes the water—and when history strikes—with no seeing and no hearing, with the failure of the passerby—of 23. Ch. engchi. i n U. v.

(34) we have known that in an era of witness survivors are responsible to bear witness to survival, another undercurrent of bearing witness is the question: “how does one survive the witnessing?” (Felman and Laub 165). In Chapter two of the book Testimony, Laub ventures the nature and responsibility of a listener. In the meanwhile, he also warns listeners “the hazards of listening” (72). After listing out a few defensive feelings a listener may experience, he doesn’t say anything further about what if the defensive feelings collapses and the listener becomes in a certain way “traumatized”, to render it in a more extreme manner. In fact, the status of a listener. 治政大 the process of witnessing. As Laub formulates, “To a certain extent, 立. merits more attentions in that a listener is the one who makes the happening of the. interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the. ‧ 國. 學. narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out” (“Truth and Testimony”. ‧. 69). A listener is a helper who gives the testifier a chance to form the internal “thou”. sit. y. Nat. by accompanying the testifier to enter the dark hole of trauma but risking the danger. io. er. of getting melancholic. “It is in listening through the ear of such a second-degree witness that the speaker may begin to hear the very foreignness of her own words”. al. n. v i n C ha crucial role in theUprocess of witnessing, “a (Levine 166). Although a listener plays engchi witness to the witness” is never the main focus. If the testifier needs to form an. internal listener, does that mean the outside listener needs an internal “thou” too? The answer seems to be positive. In the novel The Storyteller, the protagonist Sage Singer has been a faithful listener of Joseph Webber. She is too response-able to call out for Leo’s help and too involved to agree to help the testifier die. Sheshana Felman, Dori Laub, and many theorists elaborate a lot on how to be a testifier but don’t teach us how to be an. the historical bystander—to be a witness” (199). 24.

(35) appropriate listener. As a matter of fact, Felman has once encountered the unexpected responses in the class when she introduced different testimonies to her students. One of the objectives of the course was to “make the class feel, and progressively discover, how testimony is indeed pervasive, how it is implicated—sometimes unexpected” (7) and to let them know “a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life” (2). In fact, the class overreached that goal because students were penetrated by a Holocaust videotape recounting a story of a woman14. After seeing the videotape, Felman found that the students “were set apart and set themselves apart from others. 治政大and to one another” (48). alone, suddenly deprived of their bonding to the world 立. who had not gone through the same experience. They were obsessed. . . They felt. Felman was surprised by the effect of screening the video, which turns out to be a. ‧ 國. 學. “psychoanalytical enhancement of the way in which the class felt actively addressed. ‧. not only by the videotape but by the intensity and intimacy of the testimonial. sit. y. Nat. encounter throughout the course” (ibid). The fact that they felt they were actively. io. al. er. addressed is worth noticing, as if they, the listeners, are needed in a certain way. A sense of burden burgeons in the process of screening and witnessing. Determined to. n. v i n bring the students back into C significance, told the whole class that the h e n g Felman chi U. responses they had was something like an “anxiety of fragmentation” (49). A sense of being cut off into pieces is a reaction when a person encounters something overwhelming. The videotape was not just “painful, but very powerful” (ibid) in that it threatened the listeners’ sense of being. They were lost and disconnected. Felman eventually saved the whole class by inviting them to testify to that experience and asked them to act like the traveler in Celan’s poem by “discharg[ing] himself of the testimony of an accident known and pursuing him. . . ”(qtd in 52). Indeed, Felman. 14. See Felman and Laub’s Testimony on page 47-56. 25.

(36) demonstrates to us how the testimony pervades through the listeners’ mind and also confirms that a listener is not a bystander to the witnessing. The crisis of the class indirectly proves that when listeners are emotionally involved, they do need a witness, represented as Felman herself—helping them constitute internal “thou.” To wit, the protagonist Sage Singer needs to go through her own process of witnessing and establishe an internal “thou” but she can’t. She can’t. Because once she confesses to everyone about the truth of the death of Joseph Webber, they will view her as a murderer. The listener hereby has hard time living through the testifier’s testimony.. 治政大 In the following discussions, I suggest the somewhat traumatized listeners, the 立. This is the impasse of Sage Singer.. second witnesses, be seen as survivors alike, since the listener has hard time living. ‧ 國. 學. through the testifier’s testimony—feeling isolated, helpless, and abandoned. They do. ‧. share a great deal of similar traumatic symptoms. Hence, I contend that a listener is a. sit. y. Nat. survivor of witnessing the unspeakable and incomprehensible, so to speak. Going. io. er. back to the previous statement about internal “thou,” the listener or the survivor is. al. urgent to establish one. As we know, to reconstruct the self—establishing an internal. n. v i n is ahreason of the statement “thou” through giving testimony— C e n g c h i U that “not speaking is. impossible.” As a matter of fact, survivors’ selves are shattered not only because the traumatic event questions the very essence of them as human beings when what they encounters undervalues them, but because the genocide “no longer means simply the destruction of a particular community or the death of a particular person. It means the total abolition of a collectivity, of a culture, of a way of life” (Wieviorka 25). A total uproot of one’s origin. “Everything that allows individuals to orient themselves—a language, a history, a land, a social network—and that normally provides the framework for memory and memorialization—is effaced” (25), Wieviorka says. From 26.

(37) a larger picture of history of Jews, the survivors are not only facing difficulties of believing the faith and the world after Holocaust, but they find themselves isolated from their offspring: the survivors of the Holocaust “who came from a Yiddish world found themselves with a culture bereft of meaning. The broken bridges behind them prohibited any return, and the transmission of this culture to new generations appeared extremely problematic” (Wieviorka 27). They cannot trace and find themselves in the past and cannot do so in the present and future. What their descendants inherited is not the Yiddish faith, but the reality of ashes in the crematoria.. 治政大 are in need of “taking up themselves. Survivors who are subordinated and oppressed 立 The purpose of giving testimony thereby is to help the survivors reconstruct. as a position as speaking subjects” (Oliver 7), rather than silent objects. There is a. ‧ 國. 學. demand to recognize who they are, to recognize not only as survivors, but also as the. ‧. inheritors of the trauma. In fact, Kelly Oliver has recognized the importance of. sit. y. Nat. something beyond recognition of witnessing. Oliver endeavors to work out how. io. al. er. witnessing helps to transform traumatized mind. According to her, “[W]itnessing is a process of reinventing experience, of making experience what it is, through. n. v i n C logic witnessing the structure of the of repetition driving the psyche, particularly the hen gchi U. psyche of victimization, is transformed” (93).If we say Felman and Laub opens up a gate for theories of witnessing to enter the field of trauma recovery, then Oliver must be the one behind the gate to lead the road. When Felman, Laub, LaCapra, and Agamben15 are struggling with the question “who is entitled to tell,” Kelly Oliver’s rendition of witnessing seems to be focused. 15. According to Han-yu Huang, Felman, Laub, and LaCapra define testimony on the base of psychoanalysis. LaCapra, especially, relates giving testimony as a process of working through. However, Agamben’s viewpoint of testimony lacks aspects from psychoanalysis. In addition, Agamben’s analysis of witnesses generally revolves around the complete witness the Muselmann and ignores the part of discussion about those who testify by proxy and who makes the impossibility of testifying possible. 27.

(38) more on the bond between subjectivity and witnessing than those of the others when she says, “[T]rauma is part of what makes subjectivity othered. . . Witnessing works to ameliorate the trauma particular to othered subjectivity” (7). Namely, trauma undermines subjectivity and witnessing restores it (ibid). After identifying the importance of the witnessing’s function to subjectivity, Oliver continues to elaborate extensively on what she pictures witnessing to be: Witnessing is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the action of bearing witness or giving testimony, the fact of being present and. 治政大 or auditor of witness, to testify, to give evidence, to be a spectator 立. observing something; witnessing is from witness, defined as to bear. something, to be present as an observer, to see with one’s own eyes. It is. ‧ 國. 學. important to note that witnessing has both the juridical connotations of. ‧. seeing with one’s own eyes and the religious connotations of testifying to. sit. y. Nat. that which cannot be seen, in other words, bearing witness. It is this. io. er. double meaning that makes witnessing such a powerful alternative to. al. recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and therefore ethical relations. . .. n. v i n The double meaning ofC witnessing—eyewitness h e n g c h i U testimony based on. firsthand knowledge, on the one hand, and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can’t be seen, on the other—is the heart of subjectivity. (16) For Oliver, witnessing contains two meanings: first, it is the eye-seeing that constitutes a witnessing of a witness; second, it is the attempt to see with fully acknowledging the there is something beyond recognition in the event the narrator tells. It is the recognition of the unrecognizable which is closely related to the formation of subjectivity. When an individual bears witness, he or she has already 28.

(39) occupied a particular historical position, and it is his or her subject position that incites historians’ interests in their testimonies (ibid). Oliver conceives subjectivity as a process of witnessing within which the dynamics of responding and addressing between the testifier and the listener constitutes the formation of the subjectivity of the traumatized storyteller. Hence, for Oliver, working-through has been the primary goal in the process of witnessing, because the reconstruction the traumatized self is the purpose and meaning of witnessing. Since what’s embedded in the idea of reconstruction of the self is to tackle with the traumatic core, I would like to elaborate. 治政大witnessing having positive value Sharing the similar view with Oliver in terms of 立. trauma theories and to put it under the discussion of theories of witnessing.. for traumatized psyche, Dominick LaCapra suggests,. ‧ 國. 學. [T]he ability to give testimony is itself one important component of. ‧. survival. It requires a distance from a past that nonetheless remains all. sit. y. Nat. too pressing, painful, and at times unbearable. . . [D]espite the forms of. io. er. breakdown, bewilderment, and seeming recapture by the past that mark. al. many testimonies, giving testimony is an indication that one is not simply. n. v i n bearing witnessC to h trauma by reliving U e n g c h i the past and being consumed by its effects. It is also performative in that it helps to provide some space in which one may gather oneself, engage the present, and attempt to open viable possibilities. Testimony is also and importantly a social and. perhaps a political relation in that it requires the actual or virtual presence of others to whom one tells one’s story or gives one’s account. . . [Giving testimony] may be bound up with complex processes of mourning and working through in general. (History and Its Limits 76, emphasis mine). To see witnessing in a therapeutic manner, LaCapra approves that giving testimony is 29.

(40) a way of working-through and mourning. Giving testimony is not about reliving the past, but about regaining a sense of time frame in which the survivor acknowledges where he or she is standing. However, speaking of not reliving the past in the case of the survivor, I would like to go back to earlier discussion of “the hazard of listening.” The listener definitely doesn’t relive the past. Instead, the listener experiences it freshly, as if he or she is part of the story. In terms of the reasons that the listener semi-experiences the trauma, LaCapra attributes it to imagination:. 治政大 but after the event the provide momentary release or an avenue of escape, 立 During the occurrence of traumatic events, the imagination may at times. imagination may be overwhelmed by hallucinations, flashbacks, and. ‧ 國. 學. other traumatic residues that resist the potentially healing role of. ‧. memory-work. For both survivors and those born later, the imagination. sit. y. Nat. may seem to be superfluous, exhausted, or out of place with respect to. io. er. limit-events.( History and Memory after Auschwitz 181). al. There are two layers of imagination from the above paragraph. For the survivors,. n. v i n Cconnects imagination becomes an agent which h e n gto cthehtraumatic i U past. For the later born, imagination is activated at the point when they sense their last generation’s taboo. As a listener, ethical imagination is necessary. The later born takes on the task of the listening will need to put themselves in their ancestors’ shoes. Empathy itself, as an imaginative component not only of the historian’s craft but of any responsive approach to the past or the other, raises knotty perplexities, for it is difficult to see how one may be empathetic without intrusively arrogating to oneself the victim’s experience or undergoing (whether consciously or unconsciously) surrogate victimage. (Laub, 30.