Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting
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Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting
456eBook
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Overview
Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable.
Ross Chambers is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books includeFacing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472024391 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 793 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Untimely Interventions
AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting
By Ross Chambers
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2004
University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09871-2
Chapter One Death at the Door
The trouble with death-at-your-doorstep is that it is happening to you. -Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness
Knocking at the Door
In August 1944, Robert Antelme was arrested in France as an agent of the Resistance and deported to Buchenwald, a political prisoner in the Reich. From there he was assigned to a work detail supplying slave labor to a factory at Gandersheim, some distance from the main camp. An intellectual with no trade skills, he was lucky to wangle his way inside the factory as a sweeper. Dirty and malodorous, dressed in rags and increasingly emaciated, the slaves were treated by the factory's civilian employees as either subhuman or invisible or both; they were given orders, sometimes curtly told to get out of the way (Weg!), and beaten or shouted at when they incurred anger. That was it.
As he tells it in L'Espèce humaine (The human race), he was sent one day to sweep "upstairs." There he found himself, cap in hand, in a large office where a woman handed him a broom and pointed at the floor. Ignored by her, he began to work. But new to the job of sweeping and perhaps also, as he says, performing a bit, he worked slowly and clumsily, moving gradually toward her feet as she stood, now looking everywhere except at him. She had "noticed" him, and finally could stand the tension no longer. "Schnell, schnell, Monsieur," she burst out (note the "Monsieur"). But Antelme continued his laborious progress until she snatched the broom and began to do the job herself, while he now stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips. When the floor was swept, she returned the broom; he scooped up the dust she had gathered into a neat heap, and left to get rid of it.
But he had also been told to light the stove. Now, when he returns, there are men in the room, and some of the woman's self-assurance has returned. As Antelme elaborately picks up papers near the men's feet to use in the stove, they shift position automatically, as one might brush away a fly in one's sleep-to them he is truly invisible. She, though, is "awake," as he says, and alert to what he is doing, unable either to ignore him completely or (since the whole story would have to come out) to accuse him overtly (but of what? Of deliberately needling her by doing his job badly?). As he is at last about to light the stove, she suddenly breaks off her conversation and descends furiously on him-but only to say "calmly" (getting a grip on herself at the last minute), "That will do," and to tell him to leave.
What has happened? Meeting another civilian a moment later in a hallway and being brusquely ordered out of the way, Antelme notices that now the insult "slides off" him. The curt Weg! meant, he knows, You shouldn't exist ("je ne veux pas que tu sois"); however, he reflects, "I did exist, and the insult slid off me." "Their insults can't reach me, any more than they can grasp the nightmare in the head that we are for them: constantly denied, we're still here." (But the woman, of course, came perilously close to grasping the nightmare that she would otherwise have preferred to deny. Perhaps she did grasp it.)
In 1946 or perhaps 1947 I was an ungainly adolescent, bookish and (I see in retrospect) gay-to-be, seriously out of place in a small farming town in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (Australia). Think Yonville in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and adjust for the Antipodes in the forties, and you'll be near the mark. I had some escape hatches; they included reading, music, and learning foreign languages. In contemporary, self-consciously multicultural Australia, people carefully say "languages other than English," but foreign was the word back then, and that was frankly what I liked about them; they were evidence-unfortunately entirely theoretical-that other people in another environment existed.
One day that year a young woman appeared in town who was, wonder of wonders, incontrovertibly foreign. If I knew her name, I've forgotten it now. In the horrible jargon of the era she was a "displaced person" of "Baltic" origin (that there were differences of language and culture between Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians seems to have escaped everyone). A survivor of the camps (which camps? I don't know), she had reached Australia on an assisted passage and, after surviving yet another camp, had come, completely alone and with fragmentary English-the only person in town who was not thoroughly acculturated-to remake her life. She worked as a maid in the town's single hotel, and I can imagine now-at the time I was much too self-absorbed to do so-how lonely, vulnerable, and perhaps despairing she must have felt. But she spoke some German, the lingua franca of the camps. German was not taught at my school, and I had been learning it by correspondence. That she spoke German was the only fact about her that interested me.
I followed her around, insisting that she respond with her camp German to my own conversational gambits in student German. She did so, perhaps unwillingly-it did not occur to me to wonder what connotations the German language might have for her-or perhaps out of kindness toward a kid she may have perceived as being a fish out of water too, albeit nowhere near so lonely and unprotected as she (and certainly not an uprooted survivor of traumatic events). In my enthusiasm to practice putting the grammar and lexicon I had painstakingly acquired to use, I gave no thought whatsoever to the events and experiences she must have lived through, or to her feelings, preferences, and desires in the present. Yet, as a bright kid, I had followed the history of the war with interest, in the newspapers, over the radio, through the conversations of worried adults; and I knew, for example, what the advancing allies had discovered at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and the rest; I'd seen the newsreels. In the (European) spring of 1945, Australians were of course still quite concerned with the Pacific war, but that's no excuse. There is no excuse: what I knew of, I couldn't imagine, and I certainly couldn't connect it with this solitary woman who was so interesting and important to me because she spoke German and was the first foreigner I'd ever met.
There's a symmetry between these two stories. My story is about how easy it is not to acknowledge what one knows, however horrible it may be (and perhaps particularly if it is horrible), when it has happened or is happening to someone other than oneself. (Sometimes it is hard to acknowledge, easy to deny, even when it is oneself it is happening to; and to acknowledge that what is happening to others is also happening to oneself is most difficult of all.) Antelme's story is about what it takes, how hard it is, to break through the wall of denial and to lead human beings to notice the pain in which other humans are living and dying, rather than consigning it to the very edges of their consciousness. I tell the story about myself because I've come to realize that critical work always has personal underpinnings and entails emotional investments that can't and shouldn't be ignored: part of my motivation in writing this book is to make some sort of symbolic reparation for my past blindness and insensitivity. (One can't make amends, but one can acknowledge one's desire to do so.) The story about Antelme I tell, although Antelme tells it better than I, because it is an allegory of my book's subject matter, which is the act of witnessing conceived performatively in the context of a strong proclivity, on the part of those who understand themselves as unaffected or involved, to ignore, not only suffering itself such as Antelme's, but even the stories of suffering, as if such suffering was not also happening (in a certain sense) to them. What kind of performance does it take-analogous to Antelme's irritatingly inefficient sweeping ("je jouais," he says)-to breach the careful defenses put up by those (all of us?) who dismiss the pain of others as a sleeping person unconsciously brushes away a fly?
Yes, the book in your hands is mostly about AIDS writing as a form of witnessing. More particularly it is about that genre as it has been practiced in France, North America, and Australia in roughly the ten years between 1986 (when the first testimonials began to appear) and 1996 (when the arrival and relative success of combination therapy began to change the AIDS landscape, at least in the West). Yet I have been talking about the camps: not specifically about the Holocaust, but also and by implication about the Nazi genocide, carried out with unparalleled efficiency and savagery on European Jews, as well as other despised groups, Roma, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses among them. You may feel that the two-AIDS and the extermination camps-have very little in common, and I would agree with you; yet I am not mixing apples and oranges. My topic is testimonial, and I will not hesitate, therefore, to refer to Holocaust writing again; there will also be a chapter about wartime witnessing, specifically the witnessing of trench warfare in Great Britain in 1914-18. So to avoid misunderstandings, let me offer immediately a brief explanation of my practice of lumping together writing about different kinds of painful and traumatic historical experiences, since there are those to whom doing so may appear promiscuous, unjust, unwise or pernicious.
In particular the uniqueness of the Holocaust is an article of faith for some, who do not like to see it compared with other atrocities; and certainly, for whatever reasons, the Nazis' vast genocide has been for more than fifty years the case, at once exemplary and uniquely horrifying, around which all thinking about twentieth-century atrocity has revolved. But the twentieth century (I limit myself to that period) was also an era perhaps unparalleled in the number and variety of extreme and horrendous events and experiences to which people were subjected (I limit myself to the human species), in many parts of the world. To try to list them-the massacre of the Armenians; 1914-18; the Great Depression; the rape of Nanking; Coventry and Dresden; the concentration and extermination camps; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Vietnam; Cambodia; brutal dictatorships in Central and South America and elsewhere (notably Africa); and so on-is a self-defeating task. (I forgot Bosnia, didn't I? And Kosovo. And the gulags; all the genocides and ethnocides of indigenous peoples in many parts of the globe; the effects of religious intolerance, racism, political terrorism, unrestrained capitalism; the pain of exile, deportation, mass migration and other displacements. Did I mention Changi and the Burma Railway?) Most of these events have been the object of witnessing writing, so that there is by now a huge corpus of testimonial texts, whose surface my research has not scratched.
AIDS, then, and AIDS witnessing figure in a long list that might go on endlessly, in part because modern history has been so prolifically atrocious and in part because one doesn't know where or how to draw a line between the (truly?) atrocious and the (merely?) horrible. Each item on the list has its historical specificity, a specificity that determines the characteristics of the witnessing associated with it in key ways. Indeed, because witnessing tends to take the form of personal narrative, and each person's experience of events like Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or the AIDS epidemic is individual, narrative accounts of historical events and experiences that we like to think of and name as units ("Hiroshima," "the Holocaust") vary strikingly among themselves. Binjamin Wilkomirski, supposedly aged at most five or six when he emerged from Auschwitz and whose memoir-now revealed to have been very probably a deluded "recovered memory"-was not published until 1995, does not and could not have the same vision of things as, say, Elie Wiesel, the authenticity of whose testimony is unquestioned despite divergences between the memoir he originally wrote in Yiddish, then rewrote in French, or Tadeusz Borowski, who was an adult, non-Jewish political prisoner and published his Auschwitz fiction in 1948, or Charlotte Delbo, who was also a political prisoner and not Jewish, but a woman, a Communist, and French and whose Auschwitz et après (Auschwitz and after), mostly written in the 1960s, appeared in three volumes in 1970-71. Not only the historical experiences themselves but also the accounts of given historical experiences are thus significantly different, and in many different respects, including the time and circumstances of their publication. Such specificity is a distinctive generic marker of witnessing, as opposed to, say, documentary or historical writing.
Yet the witnessing of atrocity, I argue here, is also a practice that presents significant regularities, independently of the vast range of circumstances in which people live through (or succumb to) atrocious and traumatic events and the equally large number of variables that govern the projected audience and the overall conditions of their coming to witness. There is no representative subject of testimony, no story that can stand for all the stories, no experience of the atrocious that can count as exemplarily atrocious. Singularity is the general rule. But there is always an experience that the sufferer judges atrocious and is in a position to bear witness to; there is likewise the act of witness itself (for practical purposes in this book a written or filmic text), and finally there are cultural regularities in the circumstances that condition such an act as a discursive possibility-broadly speaking, the conditions of its reception. It is out of the relations (themselves variable) between these constants (an experience of a certain kind, the witnessing of the experience, the anticipated and real reception of the witnessing) that the possibility of generalizing about witnessing as a practice emerges.
Or, to put it another way, these regularities of a relational kind constitute testimonial as a genre (albeit, as we will see, a peculiarly parasitic one), and it is the genre of witnessing-rather than the occasions of witness-that is my topic. What war writers like Wilfred Owen and Erich Maria Remarque, Holocaust witnesses like Primo Levi or Robert Antelme or Elie Wiesel, and Rigoberta Menchú writing by proxy about the oppression of her people in Guatemala or AIDS writers like Paul Monette and Pascal de Duve have in common, despite the vast differences between both the occasions of their writing and the rhetorical characteristics of their texts, is that they tell a story about atrocious circumstances to an audience whose readiness to hear the story or capacity to imagine its import is dubious, given the "unimaginable" extremity of the events related but also the mechanisms of willed or unconscious rejection, the unwillingness to hear, that is generated in the audience by the very character of those events.
If I argue any single proposition in this book, then, it is that witnessing's generic character arises, not from the supposed "unsayability" of the event but from the presupposed cultural "inaudibility," in this sense, of the testimonial message. With respect both to the textual occasions of witnessing and to the texts themselves, we readers of testimonial narratives are all in a position that lies somewhere on a continuum between the highly "proximate" denial that Antelme experienced and on at least one occasion combatted in the Gandersheim factory, and the "distanced" insensitivity and ignorance I displayed at the age of fourteen. There is a nightmare in the head, as Antelme puts it, and it is not easy to "grasp" the nightmare; yet that's what is asked of us as readers. Nor is it easy for writers to find strategies that will make the nightmare, like death at the door, impossible to ignore because such strategies produce the sense that it "is happening"-as Harold Brodkey puts it-not only to others, but through witnessing, also to ourselves. Certainly the staging of these problematic relations in AIDS texts is determined in certain respects by the historical specificities of the disease and the social context in which it is understood, as well as the personal circumstances of the AIDS witness; but my claim is that it is also a variant of recognizably similar problems of relationality that can be seen at work in other texts of witnessing, which is why it can be illuminated by comparison with them.
(Continues...)
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