The Listener

To bear witness --

To testify --

Trauma -- 

Crisis -- 

If teachers are to see teaching as testimony as Shoshana Felman suggestions in Testimony, and if we are teaching children, then we must consider the child listener as we assess how to access the crisis and how much crisis the class can sustain.

Dori Laub, M.D., the co-author of Testimony,  testimonial interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and child survivor of the Holocaust,  examines what it means to bear witness to a testimony, and here I would like to suggest, because I am interested in thinking about what a novel can do, that we think of the listener as the artist or novelist. And this is important because I think if the artist is the listener, the he or she can render it for the child reader, can align the witness for material evidence of an event in a way that one testimony cannot. And we can also think of the listener as the child or adolescent reader, the listener to the narrative of human pain. In both the novelist and child reader, the testimony to the trauma of the victim is inscribed anew; despite the historical documents and artifacts about an event, in the hearing of a narrative the "knowing of the event," Laub explains, "is given birth to" (57). The listener, our student, comes to be what Laub calls a "co-owner" of the event and thus partially experiences it. The listener then has to address all the feelings that the victim experiences if the trauma is to emerge and for witnessing to take place. How can a child reader address the "bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels"? How can the child reader assume the testimony (and maintain perspective that he/she is not the victim) -- the enabler of the testimony and the guardian of its process? Here is that with which the listener is charged:

• trauma survivor has no prior knowledge, no comprehension, and no memory of what happened
• he or she fears the knowledge
• knowledge dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and place
• speakers of trauma prefer silence to protect themselves; silence as as a sanctuary and as a place of bondage.

The listener, thus, is a companion for the survivor. The reader is also a companion listening to the speaker in his or her silence and speech, the testifying to the reality of something unimaginable. Laub cautions the listener when he recounts an experience interviewing a Holocaust survivor. The historians viewed her testimony as incomplete and potentially misleading but Laub, a psychoanalyst, found value in her silence or that which she did not know.  He talks about having to listen to her testimony careful not to impose an agenda or shape her story with questions about that which she was silent. The women did not convey knowledge that existed, knowledge was becoming as she was testifying. She came to know the event by the very process of bearing witness. The tension with the historians was that because she did not know about the betrayal of the Polish underground or the number of chimneys that blew up in the defeat of the Auschwitz inmate rebellion, they say she knew nothing. However, Laub suggests that her testimony of the removal of the dead and her memory of helping people and of surviving was her way of breaking out of Auschwitz, that her testimony was reenacting (63); this was knowing something. And so is this the same for the reader. Does the reader or listener reenact in his or her roles as a companion for the survivor? What is happening in this dialectic between what the listener and the survivor knows and does not know, for no testimony occurs in solitude?

Laub talks about the "secret password." He says this is "a signal that we both share the knowledge of the trauma, the knowledge of what facing it and living in its shadow are really all about" (64).The trauma, he writes, "has no beginning,no ending, no before, no during and no after"; therefore,"trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, had no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect" (69). This is a new trauma -- the survivor is entrapped in the sense that constructing a narrative  is reconstructing a history. The telling is "a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and of a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim " ( 69). So we see that because of testimony, history is never ending.

Listening, however, has its hazards. Once the listener engages authentically, he or she cannot ignore

the question of 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 responsibilty to and for our destiny; the question of loving and its limits; of parents and children; and so on. (72)

 And so Laub lists a series of listening defenses: paralysis, outrage, withdrawal, awe avoiding intimacy, foreclosure through facts (obsession with fact finding or knows it all), and hyperemotionally. While the defenses may be conscious or unconscious, there is this awareness as a listener that we are frightened by the testimony. Laub asks, "What can we learn from the realization of our fear? What can we learn from the trauma,from the testimony and from the very process of our listening?" (74).  There is, indeed, a history that threatens the present, because we know that history is never ending; we can never know its implications and what discoveries will be made in time because of a survivor has chosen now to tell his or her story, because you will be the listener while another survivor will choose another time and another listener.  We can never know the implications.

In Laub's chapter, "An Event Without a Witness," he explains how the survivors could not bear witness during the actual occurrence. And this seems so fascinating to me and helpful in understanding why we should read about history and why history -- and historical fiction -- is essential to modern education. History is not in the past. The survivors did not have the capacity to be aware or to comprehend the event during the occurrence -- "its dimensions, consequences,and above all, its radical otherness to all known frames of reference" (84). To give and to listen to the testimonies -- some forty years after the Holocaust, for example -- calls attention to the human will to live and desire to know the "circumstances designed for its obliteration and destruction" (84).  What was the totality of the event?

A novel might be considered a historical endeavor much like the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies from Yale. If the Video Archive was designed to enable the survivors to bear witness, then what is a historical novel about genocide designed to do?  The Video Archive sets the "stage for a reliving, a re-occurrence  of the event, in the presence of a witness." In the series of books by Skrypuch and Never Fall Down by McCormick, both authors listened to testimony of survivors as part of a historical endeavor, but beyond listening, they aligned the testimonies and crafted a novel. Laub suggests that the video project can  or might be able to be the witness that "opens up historical conceivability" or what he calls a "historical retroaction" that is much more than establishing facts. The experience of the historical endeavor like the Video Project, I think he is saying, is "the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony" (85), so can a novel do the same thing? Can an artist craft testimony into experience for the child reader so that he or she can be the listener, can be the companion to the survivor? Can an author create the crisis for his or her child reader that helps him or her bear witness to the testimony that allows for a transformative experience but does so in a way more appropriate for a child listener?

Laub ends his chapter with what I think is going to be incredibly important in arguing for a literature of atrocities in our schools for what it can do for human beings and our citizenry:

It is the realization that the lost ones are not coming back; the realization that what life is all about is precisely living with an unfulfilled hope; only this time with the sense that you are not alone any longer -- that someone can be there as your companion -- knowing you, living with you through the unfulfilled hope, someone saying, 'I'll be with you in the very process of your losing me. I am your witness.'" (92)