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 In both the novelist and child reader, the testimony to the trauma of the victim is inscribed anew; despite the historical documents and artifacts about an event, in the hearing of a narrative the "knowing of the event," Laub explains, "is given birth to" (57).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)

Teaching With and Through Crisis

In Felman's "Story of a Class" in Testimony she tells us that she had two objectives for her literature course:

1) to make the class feel, and progressively discover, how testimony is indeed pervasive, how it is implicated -- sometimes unexpectedly -- in almost every kind of writing; 2) to make the class feel, on the other hand, and -- there again - progressively discover, how the testimony cannot be subsumed by its familiar notion, how the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter -- and make us encounter - strangeness; how the concept of testimony, speaking from a stance of superimposition of literature, psychoanalysis and history, is in fact quite unfamiliar and estranging, and how, the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly, we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was. (7)

 The key question for Felman, and for me as I pursue my work in literature of atrocities is this: "Is the testimony, therefore, a simply medium of historical transmission, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspected medium of a healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene, pragmatically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically) and clinically" (9)?  So here, I am wondering if Felman is asking whether or not literature can be a sort of cognitive intervention of sorts. Can we use literature as something more than art, as a social intervention to raise consciousness? Can we use literature, the "alignment between witnesses," to enact history -- a complex, or thick historicity beyond places and dates?

Felman, in the context of a classroom, discusses the unpredictability of testimony. She says that the class itself "broke out into a crisis" (47).  After screening testimony from Holocaust videotapes, the students were silent, but "what was unusual was that the experience did not end in silence, but instead, fermented into endless and relentless talking in the days and weeks to come" and  outside the walls of the classroom. She notes phone calls from students at odd hours and a need to talk  without knowing quite what to say, and the students turned to each other  and yet "felt they could not reach each other. They felt alone, suddenly deprived of their bonding to the world and to one another" (48).

Pedagogically, the teacher had to support the students as they worked through the crisis. (And Kumsahiro will have more to say about this in Against Common Sense.) What was the significance of the event of witnessing testimony? Language was insufficient in processing the experience. Felman calls it a suspension of the knowledge -- that somehow the access to the knowledge that would help make sense of the content was lost. However, the discovery seems to be that knowledge "does not exist" but can"only happen through the testimony: it cannot be separated from it" (51). Therefore, the students wrote about their own experience of the testimony, of the experience of the class. Felman concludes that teaching takes place only through a crisis:

If it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness  of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught: it has perhaps passed on some facts, passed on some information and some documents, with which the students or the audience -- the recipients -- can for instance do what people during the occurrence  of the Holocaust precisely did with information that kept coming forth but that no one could recognize, and that no one could therefore truly learn, read,  or put to use. (Felman 53)

Teaching has to do more than transmit or bank (as Freire would argue as well). And this text, this book, seeks to make the parallel between teaching and psychoanalysis in that in both, one must "live through a crisis. Both are called upon to be performative, and not just cognitive, insofar as they both strive to produce, and to enable, change. Both this kind of teaching and psychoanalysis are interested not merely in new information, but, primarily, in the capacity of their recipients to transform themselves in function of the newness of that information" (53). Teaching the literature of atrocities offers this transformative experience because students can witness something that may be "cognitively dissonant." It can help us move from "oh, that's so sad" to a much more authentic response that only comes from crisis. The question for the teacher according to Felman (and others like Kumashiro) is how to access the crisis and how much can the class take on?  When we are talking about adolescents and children/young adult literature that question seems that much more essential.

Testimony and Democracy

Testimony, by Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, examines pedagogical and clinical lessons on listening to human suffering and listening to traumatic narratives. They askWhat are the possibilities for liberation from traumatic human experiences? How can we keep memories alive so that we can learn from them? Instead of erasing memory and forgetting history (or selectively sharing some memories while silencing others), the harsh realities of the ideology that drives our history, the history of America's violence and domination, need a place in the classroom. In the classroom, we generally ignore the voices and experiences of students, many of whom have their own traumatic narratives. How can we, teachers, bring testimony -- what Felman and Laub call bearing witness to a crisis or trauma -- to the classroom? By reading and telling stories.

 Claude Lefort, in Democracy and Political Theory  (1988), writes that modern democracy is a contested space of power, knowledge, and the law arguing that modernity is marked by the loss of all "markers of certainty," which means that knowledge and the law depend up on the contested discourses that articulate them. In the larger project of my work about thick democratic pedagogy and using the novel to teach about atrocities, I see this notion of democracy playing out in the classroom. It may seem an unfair analogy to define the classroom as a microcosm of the state, but traditionally the teacher has claimed a near totalizing power in the classroom speaking over the voices of the students. Lefort argues that the only remedy to totalitarianism in the state is a democratic space "wherein no one can claim to know the truth, no one can claim to occupy the space of power"; in other words, the plurality of voices debate "what has been established and what ought to be established" (Lefort 18). Arendt, on the other hand, challenges this remedy suggesting a "factual truth" as the foundation of this debate, which can be established only through testimony of witnesses. (This testimony, you will see in the gacaca of the Rwanda genocide trials where witnesses testify in community courts.)

Birmingham argues that "by testifying to factual reality and thereby making its impact felt, bearing witness breaks into the passive "spectatorship" of those who view this suffering, awakening them to the shock of reality" (212). How do most people understand testimony, however? Felman, in Testimony, explains:

In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context -- in the courtroom situation -- testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question.  The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. (Felman 7)

Birmingham, however, clarifies that the "crisis of truth" is not the "crisis of relativism." What is relative is the "unpredictability and unprecedented nature of the events themselves," so bearing witness works to make known that which exceeds our frame of reference and challenges cultural values, political institutions, and social mores because we are asked to bear witness to a testimony for which we, ourselves could not give. We can see the trauma of bearing witness to the event and the trauma of hearing the testimony. Birmingham writes of Arendt, "To bear consciously the burden of our century is to bear the shock of reality that, she argues, has exploded our traditional categories of understanding" (213).  Only by bearing witness to the unprecedented, will we be able to 'take our bearings in the world' (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem 322). What is useful about Felman's explanation of testimony is her notice that language is in process. Testimony is not the verdict or the knowledge but is rather a discursive practice -- to testify is to tell, to promise, to produce a speech as material evidence for truth. It is a speech act. Birmingham writes, "As a discursive practice, testimony requires a plurality of witnesses who testify to the event, to what happened, and yet there is not definitive or conclusive account: (213). And this is why I see narrative as so valuable to the thick democratic pedagogy and fiction as one way of weaving together the plurality of witnesses who testify to the event. Democracy is as Lefort said "marked uncertainty" and a democratic space must embrace the discursive practice of bearing witness rather than the comfort of a historical fact or plot so ubiquitous in textbooks and encyclopedic sources.  Of course, this brings up the relation between testimony and history. LaCapra suggests that all memory is "both more and less than history" because traumatic memory is difficult to assimiliate into a speech act and thus a historical discourse. The language will remain insufficient for rendering a memory that is unrepresentable and incomprehensible. Can a witness craft a testimony that situates the individual testimony within a larger narrative framework so that "we" can derive meaning?  For this reason the artistic skills of a novelist can support this process, but then is it any less than history once a memory is re-rendered? Does the production of a novel constitute an act of witness? And can that production facilitate the construction of a global education?

Martin Jay presents a distinction between "first order narrative" and a "second order narrative" ( "Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgements"). First order narratives are testimonies that provide material evidence for factual reality. Second order narratives  rely on this material evidence for their accounts.  He states that there are no "linguistically unmediated facts" in that facts require a witness and the language of testimony is discursive; in other words, facts are narrated by witnesses. To hear the first order narrative, requires that one has a voice and that this voice has space to speak testimony.  Does the novel create a fiction from these voices much as America has silenced voices in its history? How can we help students to distinguish between truth and a lie? If we can create a thick democratic space of learning  -- and by thick I mean beyond thin democratic approaches of majority rules and certainty -- students can learn the discipline of bearing witness to events and bearing witness to testimony"what is and appears to them because it is" (Arendt, "Truth and Politics" 229).

Felman suggests that literature can be an alignment between witnesses.  In her research about the response of American graduate students to videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors, Felman discovers how the symptoms of trauma appear to be mirrored in the students to demonstrate how traumatic narrative affects both the writer and reader. Felman argues that traumatic narrative does that work that few other mediums can -- it erases differences of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, cultural and national to unite humanity to some degree. There is a material of truth in this testimony that creates a material of humanity -- one that is complex and powerful and, in many ways, undeniable. Perhaps this is a utopian vision of community because even thought in testimony the silenced or marginalized voices can speak their stories of trauma, the question remains who is authorized to hear and interpret those stories. What if the listener is to distant from the trauma to have this response that Felman examines?  The question is "how can the witness be heard"?  How should the listener or the witness to the witness listen? Is this question too deep? Is it possible that there will be a visceral response much like that which Felman describes in her graduate students witnessing the stories of Holocaust survivors? Can teachers and students do what Spivak asks in The Post-Colonial Critic?

What we are asking for is that....the holders of hegemonic discourse would de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, 'O.K., sorry we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks.' That's the kind of breast-beating that is left behind at the threshold and then business goes on as usual. ( 121 )

I think this where we, teachers and students, have to go if we are to engage in thick democratic practice. We do a lot of "this is so awful" and "this makes me want to cry" only to go home to our lives, which are not all without trauma, but we certainly move on to the usual.  Can trauma be a universal signifier? Are there democratic conditions we need to satisfy in the classroom to welcome testimony, or is the ability to beat witness inherent in humanity?

• Arendt, Hannah.  "Truth and Politics,” 227–264. In Between Past and Future. Enlarged edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963.
• Birmingham, Peg. "Elated Citizenry: Deception And The Democratic Task Of Bearing Witness." Research In Phenomenology 38.2 (2008): 198-215. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 July 2012.
• Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and  History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
• Jay, Martin. “Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments,” 97–107. In Probing the Limits of Representation.
• LaCapara,  Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 20.
• Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988. Print.
• Spivak,  Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 121.