"The term history unites the objective and the subjective side, and denotes...not less what happened than the narration of what happened. The union of the two meanings we must regard as of a higher order than mere outward accident; we must suppose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously with historical deeds and events." -- Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 60
"The insistence on historical perspective seems to be more than a mere recommendation of the attitude of objectivity...It is at least in part a claim that for the historical understanding of an event one must know its consequences as well as its antecedents; that the historians must look before and after....; that in some sense we may understand a particular event by locating it correctly in a narrative sequence." Louis Mink,"The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," 24
"The writer's function is not without its arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it" (Camus, Nobel acceptance speech).
"The specific task of the literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history -- what is happening to others -- in ones own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one's own immediate physical involvement" (Felman, Testimony, 108).
Felman writes that "something happened" is the stuff of history and "someone is telling someone else" is the stuff of narrative. She considers literature as a new form of narrative as testimony "not merely to record, but to rethink, and, in the act of its rethinking, in effect transform history by bearing literary witness" (95). Felman wants to look at "bearing literary witness" as reading to try to find out about the atrocity rather than coming to know what the atrocity, in this case the Holocaust, is. Elie Wiesel wrote in Confronting the Holocaust that "there is no such thing as a literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be." And I think Felman takes this to mean that one cannot ever know that which is unknowable or read about that which language will forever be insufficient.
What literature can do is that which the literality of history cannot. That something happened and the telling of that something is insufficient. In Camus' The Plague, his use of metaphor, the plague, in lieu of the historic referent, the Holocaust, is not what Felman calls a "metaphorically substitutive event, but an event that is historically impossible: an event without a referent" (102). In other words, the plague was an impossible event and so Camus novel is a testimony not to the literality of history, "but to is unreality, the historical vanishing point of its unbelievability" (103), and this "unreality" is based on ones frame of reference: "Because our perception of reality is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise conspicuous , remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by systematic disbelief" (103). Genocide is beyond human imagination. Felman says that "Since we can literally witness only that which is within the reach of the conceptual frame of reference we inhabit, the Holocaust is testified to by The Plague as an event whose specificity resides, precisely , in the fact that it cannot, historically, be witnessed" (104). Thus, is an imaginative medium necessary if we are to try to understand, if we are to bear witness and experience a crisis and transformation?
In Felman's chapter, "Camus' The Fall," we get a little closer to what I was hoping to discover in this book -- an understanding of the novel as testimony. Camus' The Fall, as argued by Felman, asks "What does it mean to inhabit the (exterminated) Jewish quarter of Amsterdam (of Europe)? What does it mean to inhabit history as crime, as the space of the annihilation of the Other?" (189).
- the suicide episode is an evocation of the bystander's silence (as the narrator witnesses yet continues his itinerary) -- an allegory for the "muteness of the world facing the extermination of the Jews"
- Camus' allusion to the betrayal of the "allies"or the friends of the woman who drowned is a reference to the Western allies (in addition to Sartre's betrayal as a friend)
- the setting is in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam
- "The suicide scene becomes a figure for historical occasions in which silence reasserts itself , a metaphor for history as the assertion and the reassertion -- as the displacement and the repetition -- of a silence" (192).
- a story of complicity but it is a complicity to a secret narrative, a silent narrative, and so the novel must embody the struggle to articulate what it means to be living on the site of a great atrocity
- the narrator bears witness from the position of a lawyer whose story is the history of what failed to be done (whereas the narrator in The Plague was a doctor who told the story of had to be done); the lawyer represents the victim, but a failed representation in the sense of truly speaking for the victim, whose voicelessness no voice can represent (197)
- a witness's inability to witness; the impossible historical narrative of an event without a witness, an event eliminating its own witness; narrative -- the very writing of the impossibility of writing history
To understand Shoah is not to know the Holocaust, but to gain new insights into what not knowing means, to grasp the ways in which erasure is itself part of the functioning of our history. The journey of Shoah thus paves the way toward new possibilities of understanding history, and toward new pragmatic acts of historicizing history's erasure. (253)So when we are thinking about narrative and history, we can see that testimony can work against common understanding of history - -that history is knowing -- and instead perform a narrative that resists literality and in doing supports the witness's inability to witness by providing listeners or companions for the stories. (hmmm more on this...)
