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Rhetoric Society of America
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8/11/2019 The Rhetoric of Disaster, Bernard-Donals
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Michael Bernard-Donals
THE RHETORIC OF DISASTER AND THE
IMPERATIVEOF
WRITING
Abstract: This essay defines
a
"rhetoricof
disaster,"
traces its origins in
Maurice Blanchot and its connection to trauma theory, explains how it
works nfigural terms to present what
otherwise defies representation,and
suggests
a relation between
the
events
of
history
and
testimonial evidence
that accounts
for
the
uncanny effect of some representationsof the Shoah.
In doing so it examines three touchstonetexts
whose sources are profoundly
traumaticevents: a
diary of
the Warsaw
ghetto
written by AbrahamLewin,
eyewitness testimonyfromthe FortunoffArchivesat YaleUniversity,and a
"memoir"
by
Binjamin Wilkomirskiwhose origin and authenticityhas been
recently and hotly disputed. The essay
argues that because an event like
the Shoah presents the writer (and her
audience) with a limit to writing
which
destabilizes what
we
traditionally think of as knowledge,
the
consequences of
a
rhetoric of disaster are troubling.
The
second half of
this
essay lays
out some
of
those
consequences
in
both
pedagogical
and
ethical terms.
If writing
the Holocaust
confronts
us with
something
"other"
than
knowledge,
in
Blanchot
's
terms,
it
is
doubtful
that we can
simply obey
the
ethical imperative never to forget
that
which we cannot remember,et
alone
know.
T
he
two most emphatic injunctions attachedto the representationof the
Shoah
appear mutually exclusive:
the first is
to burn
the
events
of the
Holocaust into
memory
so
that
they may
not be
repeated (see Wiesel;
Berenbaum);
he second is
to
resist
the
idolatry
of
representationaltogether
and remain silent
in
the face of the most horrible of atrocities
(see Koch;
Lang, "Introduction").
The first
injunctionurges
us
to
speak
of
the events
of
the Shoah, while
the
second urges us to avoid
speaking
of
them.
It is
the
impasse between speech and silence, memory and forgetting,that Maurice
Blanchot
calls
the disasterof
writing.
In
The
Writingof
the
Disaster,
Blanchot
calls the disaster
"the limit
of writing,"a limit that
"de-scribes,"
or unwrites
the
object
of
writing (7).
The
book
is an
extended rumination
on how the
events of
history
are to be found in
writing,
but in
such
a
way
that
they pre-
cede and
interrupt
he
language
of
anyone
who tries
to find
a
name,
or a
narrative,
with which to contain those events.
Writing "brings
o
the
surface
something
ike
absent
meaning,"something
"which is
not
yet
what we
would
call
thought"
because the event
precedes
the writer's
ability
to make sense of
it,
and-like the sublime
object-confounds
the
categories
that would other-
wise be available to
regularize
it
(41).
73 RSQ:
Rhetoric
Society Quarterly
Volume
31,
Number
1
Winter2001
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8/11/2019 The Rhetoric of Disaster, Bernard-Donals
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74 RHETORICSOCIETY QUARTERLY
I intend in this
essay
to
lay
out
what might be called
a
rhetoricof disas-
ter, explain how it worksin figuralterms,and to suggesta relationbetween
the events of
history
and
testimonial evidence
taken as
history that accounts
for the
uncannyeffect
of some
representations
f the
Shoah.
In
so doing,
I'll
referto three
ouchstones,
exts whose sourcesare
profoundly raumatic vents
(though-in the
last case-they may
not be the events of the
Holocaust):
a
diary
of the Warsaw
ghetto
written
by
Abraham
Lewin, eyewitness testimony
from the FortunoffArchives at
Yale
University,
and a
memoir by Binjamin
Wilkomirski
whose
origin
and
authenticity
has
been
recently
and
hotly
dis-
puted.
If
it
is
true that
writing
an
event
like the Shoah
presents
the writer
(and her audience)with a limit to knowledge,rather hanknowledgeof the
event, and thatthis
limit
destabilizes
what
we traditionally
hink of
as
knowl-
edge,
then the
consequences
of a
rhetoricof
disaster
are
troubling.
The sec-
ond half of this
essay
will
lay
some
of
those
consequences
out
in
both
peda-
gogical
and
ethical terms.
If
writing
the Holocaust
confronts
us
with some-
thing "other" hanknowledge,
in Blanchot's
terms,
how
do
we
obey the ethi-
cal imperative
never to
forget
that which we
simply
cannot
remember,
et
alone know? The answer s that
we
cannot:a rhetoric
of
disaster,
ounded
on
a
displacement of
knowledge
rather han
ts
production,presents
us with an
impossible ethics: to remember hatwhich we cannotpossiblywriteasknowl-
edge.
The question of how
fully
a state of affairs can be
rendered
discursively
is especially
pressing
in
the case
of
historical
discourse,
in which
the verac-
ity or coherenceof
eyewitness testimony-the testimony's ability
to
render
or
represent
a series of events
in terms that
are
plausible
or
verifiable-is one
of the
pillars
on which the historical
reality
or
truthof events rests.
The stron-
ger
the
testimony-the
greater
ts
coherence and the
degree
to
which
it
can
secure
the assent of an audience
and
allow its members
to
understandwhat
happened-the
more
willing
we
are to
grant
that
the event
that
lies at its
source occurred he
way
the witness
says.
But
history's
relationto
testimony
-the relationof the events of
history
to
history
itself-has been a vexed one
from
the
beginning
of the rhetorical
tradition. To
cite
only one canonical
example,
Aristotle takes
for
grantedhistory'sstatus
as a
record of what has
happened
in
the Rhetoric
(1 360a36;
1393b25
ff.), suggesting that
the
politi-
cal orator
may
find
historical
precedent
useful for
arguing
a current ase. Yet
in the Poetics, Aristotle
makes a
distinctionbetween
poetry
and
history,sug-
gesting
that the former
is more a
philosophical
discourse than the
latter,
as it
deals with that
"which is
possible
as
being probable
or
necessary" 1451b1).
In other
words,
while
testimony may
serve as
evidence,
it is not
necessarily
the best indicationof the natureof events. The
record
of what
happenedmay
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC
F
DISASTER 75
not give the fullest
or most
adequaterepresentation f
the
events to which the
witness testified.
The ongoing discussion of ethos and kairos
in the
rhetorical tradition
can be seen as ways of contending with the status of
testimony (see
Bernard-
Donals, "Ethos";Sullivan). As a means of securingassent, ethos-the ex-
tent to which the speaker s able both to do justice to the
object of discourse
(to get it right), and to adhere o the good while leading the audience toward
the good as well-has traditionallybeen understoodas
deriving from the text
itself and to some degree
from
external factors
like
the speaker's history or
character.
Whether it
was
established
primarily through the persuasive act or
through he audience'spriorknowledge of the speaker'svirtue has been open
to speculation from the outset of the rhetorical radition
see Johnson). What
this means for someone like Aristotle is that in
the best
of
circumstances,
the
speaker
hews to the truthof the matter
and,
in
so doing,
is
more
likely
to be
seen by an audience as someone of good character. Quintilian's"goodman
speaking well" was essentially
a
responsible speaker who was
knowledge-
able not just about
his
subject, but also about virtue, both
in
himself and
in
his
audience;
the
best testimony
was both
logically coherent and adheredto
the principles of goodness.
Both the intrinsicandextrinsic raditions-what JamesBaumlinhas called
the "rhetorical"and the
"philosophical"
views of ethos-become troubled
when confronted with testimonies
of
events
like
the
Shoah,
events whose
weight
of
atrocity seem
to leave
a
hole
in
the
fabric
of narrative. Inherent n
Holocausttestimonies,
ike other estimoniesof trauma
pace
LangerFelman),
are the
"anguished
memories"that make themselves
apparent
n survivor's
attempts
to write the disaster
of
their
experiences
during
the events
of the
war. Langer's point
is that the
distance between
what has been witnessed
and what can be committed to
testimony-what
was seen and what can be
said-is often wide and always palpable: not only in the witness's state-
ments
but in the
shrugged shoulders,
the
winces,
the
tears,
and the silences
that
punctuate
he oral testimonies and that are aestheticized but not domes-
ticated
in
the written
language
of
figure.
On
extrinsic criteria
(the philo-
sophical view),
the worth of a
discourse, regardless
of its
ability
to
produce
knowledge
or to
accurately
record
an
event,
can
always
be
called
into
ques-
tion
if
we can
impeach
the characteror the
veracity
of a
speaker
who
cannot
tell us
precisely
what
happened
n
terms
we can
recognize.
How could what
they say
be
possible,
we
might
ask?
On
intrinsiccriteria
the
rhetorical
view),
a
testimony
would have
to
agree
with or at least corroborate
a
good
deal
of
other
eyewitness testimony
of the Holocaust
in
order
to
tell
a certaintruth. It
would
have
to
represent
a
reality
to which other witnesses have testified and
which is
internally
coherent.
(See
Daniel O'Keefe's
book, particularly
he
chapter
on
"Source
Factors,"
or a
description
of how this
problem
is
treated
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76
RHETORICSOCIETY
QUARTERLY
in psychology
and communicationresearch;
or views more
consistent with
contemporary ritical andhistoriographicalheory,see CarloGinzburg'sand
Martin
Jay'sessays
on the
problems
of
verifiability
of
witnesses
in
the case
of disasters like the
Shoah.)
Holocaust
testimony
is often both
extrinsically
incredible-the
events to
which the
witness testifies
seem
impossible,
un-
real- and
intrinsicallyincoherent-exhibiting gaps, silences, and disjunc-
tions.
On
an "indicative"criterion,
however-by paying attention to
what
re-
sides
behind the
language
of the discourse rather
han
n the
speaker's
virtue
or the
degree
to which the
discourse can
be
squared
with a
state of affairs
then the extent to which a discourse has an ethicalormoralauthority,andthe
extent to which we
might
say
that
the
speaker
or writer
s
"telling
the
truth,"
depends
on the discourse's
ability
to move an
audience to "see" an issue or
an event that exceeds
language's ability
to narrate
t. In
terms of
kairos,
rather hanproviding
he criteria hatwould secure
appropriate
eactions rom
an audience
based
upon
the constraints
of
time and
place
in
which
they
find
themselves, such a
discourse would
explode
time and
place,
and indicate
what Sullivan calls
a
"fullness
of
time" that
lies
beyond any definable his-
torical situation.
An
"indicative"
or
"epideictic")
criterion
can be
found
not in the Aristotelianparadigmbutin the Platonicone: in the former,ethos
finds
its source
in
the
virtue
of
the
speaker
and that
it
has an
effect
upon
the
quality
of
knowledge
that the
speech produces;
n
the
latter t
finds its source
in the speech's
ability
to indicate
(though
perhapsnot produce) knowledge,
and
to the
extent that
it
manages
to indicate
what
lies
beyond
the
contingen-
cies
of
the world the
speakermay
be considered
of
betteror
worse character.
In
Phaedrus and
Gorgias,
Plato
suggests
that
language
leads
speaker
and
listener
to Truth
by indicating
rather han
by
producing
t.
Socrates' second
speech
on love
(Phaedrus 244a-257b)
figurally represents
the
cosmology
wherebyan investmentin love and beautybringssouls closer to their
point
of
origin;
it does not
produce knowledge
of that
cosmology.
But
the
figural
effect
of
the
speech-as
well
as
the
object
of
representation tself,
a mne-
monic
whereby
the soul is
perfected
as
it
glimpses
an
object
that reminds it
of its
former
perfection-indicates
what lies
beyond
the
contingencies
of the
world (where,
in
the Gorgias [469b-c], Socrates
magines
the
possibility of a
state of affairs in which
he
may
neither do nor
suffer
harm).
The
relation
between truthas content and
what
lies
beyond
truth-what
might
be
called,
in
psychoanalytic
terms the "real"-is the matter
at issue
in
the
debate, late
in
the Phaedrus, on the
value of
writing. When,
in
Socrates'
retelling
of
the
myth
of the
origins
of
writing,
Ammon
charges
that
writing
is not
a drug for
memory,
but
for
reminding (275a),
he is
making
a
claim similar to
the one
Socrates makes
in his
second
speech
on
love aboutthe
perfection of
the
soul:
that
in
seeing
the
beauty
of the
lover,
the
soul
is
reminded of
its origin in
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC
FDISASTER
77
perfection
and is
compelled
to return
there (249b-e).
Writing cannot bring
the object of knowledge to the reader, any more than the lover can bring
about
the
perfection
of
the soul. But writing does (in
Socrates' words)
re-
mind the reader of
it,
but does not
represent
the
object.
In
fact, the conun-
drum for Plato's Socrates is whether
rhetoric
produces truth
or an
image
of
truth,
and most readersof the
Phaedrus
suggest
that
the best
it can do is the
latter.
What writing and, ideally, rhetoric can do, however,
is indicate that
which is
"really written in the soul"
(278a), what lies at the source of lan-
guage-what
lies at its
point
of
origin
but to which
language does not
pro-
vide unfetteredaccess.'
It is preciselythis relationbetweenlanguage and the events that precede
or lie outside
it
-
between
writing
and
the disaster-that
occupies
Blanchot's
attention in The
Writingof
the Disaster.
There Blanchot makes
clear
that
experience is
a
state
of
being
that
requiresknowledge. The occurrenceof the
event
in
which a
person
is
implicated
and
sees herself as
suchprecedes expe-
rience. It is immediate:
"not only
[does it] rule out all mediation; it is the
infiniteness of a
presence
such
that
it
can no longer be spoken
of' (24).
In
the occurrenceof the
event,
the
individual s "expose[d] to unity": n orderto
render he occurrenceas anexperience
at all-in orderfor
the occurrence to
be seen as an event-the individualbecomes defined as a subject. She be-
comes an
"I"
over
against
which the
event can also
be
identified, given
at-
tributes,
and
finally
named. At the
moment the individual
recognizes
the
occurrence
of the event as an
experience,
and herself
as the
subject
of
expe-
rience,
the event "falls
in
its turn
outside
being" (24).
Experiences, recog-
nized by the witness and
named,
are
nonetheless haunted
by their status
as
events,
and "the names
[are] ravagedby
the absence
thatprecededthem"-
the event now lost to
memory
except
as a name-and "seem
remainders,
each
one,
of
another
anguage,
both
disappearedand neveryet
pronounced,
a
language
we
cannot
even attempt
o
restorewithout
reintroducing hese names
back
into
the world"
(58).
Cathy
Caruth'swork on
traumasubstantiates his
claim: what the
wit-
ness sees isn't available to
memory
because
seeing precedes
the
witness's
ability
to know what she sees. Once an
experience occurs,
it is
forever
lost,
and it is at the
point
of
"losing
what we have to
say,"
that we
speak (Blanchot
21). It
is
the point
at
which the event is lost thatwriting
begins. For we don't
remembera traumatic vent so
much
as we
forget it;
we "take eave of
it,"
in
Caruth's
erms, though
it leaves an
indelible mark on
everything
we
say
in-
cluding
the
subject
of the
narrativeof the event. The distance between what
has been witnessed and
what
can be committed to
testimony-what
was
seen
and what can be said-is often wide and
always palpable:
not
only
in the
witness's statements
but in
the
shruggedshoulders,
the
winces,
the
tears,
and
the
silences
that
punctuate
he oral
testimonies and that are aestheticized but
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78
RHETORICSOCIETY
QUARTERLY
not domesticated in the written language
of
figure.
Asked
to describe the
deathof hermotherin the Lodz ghetto, the survivor namedMaryR. lapses
into a recitationwith
which she is familiar
as docent at a
Holocaustmuseum:
"very difficult; I don't even like to
think about t. In all eleven million
civil-
ian
people
killed
in
the
concentration
camps
..."
(Stanovick
1-2).
Such an
intrusionupon narrative-typical
of
some survivor testimonies-is a
mark
of something
else,
the
event
that troubles
history.
The testimony
of Moses S. offers
another
example
of the
apparent
m-
passe
between the event and
experience,
what
has
happened
and
what can be
represented.
Two boys havingone bunk. One
said to the
other,
"Will
you watch
aftermy piece of
bread?I'm
going
to thebathroom."
He
said,
"OK."
When he come back,
was
no bread. Where was the bread?
"
I'm
sorry.
I ate it
up."
So he reported
to
the Kapo. Kapo
comes
along,
he
said, "What
happened?"
"
Look,
I
ask
him
to look after
my piece
of
bread,and he ate
it
up."
The Kapo said, "Youtook away his life, right?"
He said, "Well,
I'll
give
it back this
afternoon,
he ration."
He said, "No,
come outside."
He
took the fellow outside. "Lieon
the floor." He
put
a
piece
of
brett
[board]
on his
neck,
and
with his
boots-bang
On
his neck.
Fertig [finished] (FVAtape
T-5
11)
What is perhaps
most
chilling
about
this
tape
is not
the
content of
the
story-
of
the experience-itself,
but of what cannot be
placed
into the
narrative:
he
cracking
of the board
against
the
child's
neck,
the
quick,
almost
franticwalk
outside the barracks o the
yard,
the look of
panic
in the
boy's eyes just
be-
fore the
Kapo
sentences
him to
death.
They
find
no
place
in the
language
of
narrative,
but
they
do
have a
place
in
the
testimony
of
Moses
S.:
in
his
ges-
tures.
Here,
in
the
no-place
of the
narrative,
s the
gaping,open wound,
the
disaster of
experience
seen
by
Moses S.
(who may
be the other
boy;
we
never
find out) and that is witnessedonly
in
terms of the
ending-fertig -or the
absence
of
Moses's
own
place
in
the historical circumstanceshe
narrates.In
Langer's terms,
the self
caught up
in
the time
during
the
killing
wins the
battle
over the
present,
so
sickening
the interviewer
and Moses's
wife that
they
both
urge
him
to call
it
quits.
But
on
Blanchot's
terms,
the
witness
is
making present
an
absence that
so
disrupts
his
present
that
they become ab-
solutely inseparable,
so
much
so that Moses's
language
becomes submerged
by his gestures, and
he
actually,
with
a
motion of his
hands
and his feet,
becomes
the
Kapo
and
finishes
the
memory
with
the violence
that killed the
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F DISASTER
79
little thief forty-five years earlier.
What, precisely,is the act witnessedhere by the survivor: he momentof
the child's death? The moment that
the witness realizes
that the crime of
eating another child's
bread has led not to justice but murder?
Neither of
these historical circumstances is made
available by the testimony, though
both of these moments
are partof thenarrative.But this is
a language report-
ing not so much
a series of events buta language that nstantiates
a ruptureof
the
normal sequence
of events-in this
case, the historicalcircumstancesof
Moses S.'s
witness to murder-fertig -and
the anxiety
of forty years that
it
has caused. This
language indicates he
absence of the eventwitnessed rather
than the event itself. The abruptnessof the final word does not provide ac-
cess to
the
event itself,
but
indicatessomething
like its loss to memory,
its
unavailability in the language of the
narrative,and yet
also interrupts(in
Blanchot's
terms) that narrativewith the force of the disaster
(59, 7). Moses
S.'s
exclamation
provides a glimpse of the absence that
marks the act
of
witness and the
failure of language to
contain it.
If
testimony
like Moses S.'s works by indication rather
than by repre-
sentation,and the event to which the witness testifies bearsan obliquerela-
tion to the
language
of
thetestimonyitself, then the historian
must
find some
other
criterion
with
which to
judge
the reliability
or
truth
of
testimonial
evi-
dence
besides its
transparency.
This was the problemHayden
Whitetried to
solve in
1990
when,
at
a conference
on Nazism and the Finalsolution
held at
UCLA,
he turned o the
catalogue
of
figures providedby
rhetoric.
(Though
in this section
I
run the risk of falling
into a trap Brian
Vickers has warned
about
in his
conclusion
to
In
Defense of
Rhetoric-namely, focusing
atten-
tion on all too
few
figures,
in
this case
metaphor,metonymy,
and
synechdoche
-it will
nonetheless give some idea
of
how
the rhetoricof disasterfunctions
in
practice
and
not
only
in
theory.)
The traditionalview
of
historical
narra-
tives
and
of
testimonies
is
that their
veracity was
linked to their transpar-
ency:
the
language
of
history
is meant to providea window through
which
we see
clearly
the events themselves. But
if
languagedoesn't
yield the events
of
historythis simply-particularly
events
whose effect upon
the
witness or
historical actor is brutallytraumatic-there
must be
some way to convey
not
just
events but also to
register
or
indicate
the traumatickernel
of their effect.
White
proposes
that
the
most effective historical
writing
s "intransitive
writ-
ing,"
a
term
he
adopts
from
Lang (who
in
turnattributes
t
to Roland
Barthes;
see Act
and Idea
xii, 107-9).
It works
by drawing
he reader'sattention
o the
impossibility
of
making
the
substitution
of herself
for the historical
actor,
the
difficulty
of
saying
"I
am
here,"
I
understand.
It
brings
to the surface
of the
historical
narrative
the
aporias
that exist between
subject
and
object, agent
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80
RHETORIC
SOCIETY
QUARTERLY
andpatient, iteral
and
figurative anguage,
and
makes
thatcase for the
reader
than it is not one or the other of these poles thatought to be the object of
historical nquirybut rather he writing itself and
the
way that
it resists
read-
ing, or naming, or
knowledge.
In
other words,
it
resists
verisimilitude,
the
will to
representation.
One
way
to think of verisimilitude s
in
terms
of
the
rhetorical
or
poeti-
cal figure,andthe
degree
to which
figure
makes
present
a
state
of
affairs and
holds the reader's attentionon matters of
language. Metaphor s tradition-
ally understoodas
a
figure
that
works
by way
of
substitution:
n
Aristotle's
example,
"therestands
the
ship,"
the
term
"anchored" s
substitutedfor the
term"stands,"andthrough he difference betweenthe spoken word and the
unspoken(butintuited)one,
our
attention
s
focused not
only upon
the
close-
ness of one set of experiences(whichwe may
recognize) and another which
we may not); it is also
focused upon
its
dependence
upon language. Depend-
ing on the number
of
terms that are substituted
n
the
silence
of
the analogy
(and
in
Aristotle's
understanding
of
poeisis,
the skilled
speaker
could hold
four terms
n
a relation
of
similarity
n
a
single
figure)
the
readeror
listener's
ability
to
individuate
the
terms
in use
becomes
jarring
as the
distance be-
tween
them
in
the
analogy grows.
In an
extreme
circumstance-kenosis,
in
which a set of terms is so farremoved, in terms of similarity,from another
that it
begins
to
systematically
undo
their claim to
order-metaphor
"breaks
up
a
totality
into
discontinuous
fragments" (De
Man
275), disordering
our
illusion
of the
coherence
of the
real supplied by figure, andforcing upon us
the realization that the chain of
signification (founded
upon metonymy,
a
relation
of
contiguity
rather han
substitution)
s
just that,
a chain that
is un-
hitched
from
the
world
of
the real.
White's
assumption
s
that the
metonymic
relation-in
which the
terms
substituted
or
one anotherare
so
closely
relatedthat
they repeatthemselves
endlessly-is that upon which "normal"discourse (or, perhaps,historical
discourse)
is
founded. In an
essay
on
figurative
language,
Thomas
McLaughlinsays
of
metonymy
that it
"accomplishes
ts transfer
of meaning
on the basis of associationsthat
develop
out of
specific contexts,"
and
"that
t
relies
on
connections that buildup over time and
the associations of usage"
(83, 84).
For
White,
the
importance
of
metonymy
is that the terms
placed
in
relation
("sail,"
"ship")
are assumed to be related in
the
given context, and
because of
what
he calls this extrinsic relation
(that
there
must be
some
order
of
reality
outside
the discursive
situation that
provides
the context
in
which
these
terms
may
be
related),
the reader s able to
understand
more
clearly
the
aspects
of the
reality
he
metonymic igure
s
meant
o
distinguish Metahistory
34-6).
In
other
words, metonymy, hrough
a
repetition
of
differentaspects of
the same
reality,
offers the
readera
clearer,more direct
understandingof the
nature
of
the
reality being described. With
metonymy, cause-effect relation-
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC
F DISASTER
81
ships
are so well established that we are lulled into
believing
that
what we
are being given is a description of the real under a paradigm. Metaphor
distances us from our ability to regularize our assumptions about the
reality
purportedlybeing
described.
Metonymy
is
transitive,
whereas
metaphor
s-
or
at least has the capacityto be-intransitive (see White, Metahistory
37-8);
metonymy assumes that history (the context presumed to be exterior to dis-
course)
is the
origin
of
language, whereas metaphorassumes
that
language
is
the origin of the historicalreal.
But Blanchot tells
us
that
when an
individual bears witness to an
event,
particularly
an event like
the
murder of
a child or the destruction
of
one's
culture, the event itself, lost to memory and to knowledge, exerts such a
pressureon narrative hat it destroys it. In rhetorical erms, the disaster is an
effect
of
discourse that focuses the reader's attentionon the impossibility of
substituting
oneself
for
the "I" of
the narrative. One implication of the
disaster's effect upon the narrativeof history is that regardless of the
rhetori-
cal vehicle
in
which we place the event-either in the transparent,metonymic
language of chronicle or
in
the denser,metaphoric anguage of poetry-none
can
do justice to
the
events
that
precede writing.
Even
the language of
chronicle,
the
relentless shorthand ecordof the events that
take
placebefore
the witness's eyes, would on Blanchot's account be unable to contain the
disaster,
the
irretrievable vent.
An
example of just such a chronicleis AbrahamLewin's account, pub-
lished
in
1988 under
the title A
Cup of Tears, of
his
years
in
the Warsaw
ghetto. Thataccount was one of several othersthatwere eventuallyburied in
milk
cans
in
basements
n
the
ghetto and
retrieved
n
the
years following
the
end of
the
war.
Lewin's account, along with the remembrances of
others
who survived the
deportations
and the
camps (and many
others who
didn't),
form the core of the historical
accounts of
the
liquidation
of
the Warsaw
ghetto.
Like
the videotapedtestimonies provided by survivors,
the
descrip-
tions
given by
Lewin are oftentimes
harrowing:
of ruses used
by government
forces to
separate
children
from
their
parents,
acts of
brutality
both
by
the
German
military police
and
by
the
Jewish
police,
and
the
political
and
theo-
logical convolutions of the Jewish councils and other civic organizationsas
they
tried to
justify
a
consistent response to the
orders
to be "resettled." But
Lewin's
account,
more so even than those found
in
the Fortunoff
Archive,
offers extremes of
metonym,
abbreviationsso
transparent
as to
put pressure
on White's
distinctions
between normal
history
and
figural representation.
Lewin
writes,
"A
night
of
horrors.
Shooting
went
on all
night.
I
couldn't
sleep,"
andthen lists
the
names of the families
whose members were rounded
up
and led
to
the
umschlagplatz,
where
they
would be
loaded onto trains and
sent to
Treblinka.
The
metonymic language
of lists
is
difficult to make sense
of,
and
exceedingly
difficult
to "read
hrough"
as
a
window
into the
experi-
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82 RHETORICSOCIETY
QUARTERLY
ences
of someone
like
AbrahamLewin
for
threereasons:
the
context
in
which
the items on the list are meaningful to the writer s unspoken; he events that
surround hose listed by
the
writers are simply unknown
to him
(the experi-
ence of the
trains,
and the
camps);
and the occurrence
of
events,
and their
impact upon the witness, is simply lost to
memory,
and
all
we have
are
traces
in
the language of the narrative estimony.
Though
Lewin
sometimes does provide a historical (or
more
often than
not a cultural)context
in which
to understand
he event
by
making compari-
sons between objects or events
from
radically
different
paradigms
n
his en-
tries (as he does when he compares the liquidation
of the
ghetto in 1942 to
the worst ordeals of the Jews in the land of Mitzrayim),he more often lists
them in shorthand.
They
are often
tiresomely, gruesomely
similar
events,
and names
appear
after
names,
lists
that
should,
on White's
accounting,
lull
the reader
nto
understanding
hat
what
is
being repeated
s
simply
sameness:
"Today he Germans
have surrounded he
following
streets:
Gesia, Smocza,
Pawia, Lubiecka,
and took
away
all the
occupants. Yesterday
he
following
were
taken away: Khanowicz, Rusak,
and Jehoszua
Zegal's
whole
family"
(Lewin 146). It takes a footnote by
the
editor
to make the
reader
understand
that Johoszua
Zegal
was
the
grandfather
f Lewin's wife
Luba,
and
no
notes
establishthe context for the names of the streets that were surrounded,and
what
events
took
their
toll
upon
the
inhabitantsof the
houses on
those
streets
bordering
the Jewish
cemetery
on
the
western
side
of the
ghetto.
It
is
the
effect of
repetition-of
the
"transitivity"
of
metonym,
the
figure
that lulls
one into thinking
that
"I know
this,"
and that
allows us to
forget
that
"I
was
not there"-that seems
to work
against
White's
claims
for
transitive
writing.
In
Blanchot's
terms-in
terms
of the rhetoric of
disaster-the
position
of the writer
(the position
of the
"I")
is here annulled
by
the
zero-point
of
language,
the
point
at which the events become written
and
named and si-
multaneously-as they
are
written-dissolve as
experiences.
The
repetitive
language
of
metonym here,
in which street names and
family
names are run
together
as a
litany
of
destruction,
seem alien to
both the
writer and to the
reader.
It
is a
language
unconnected to the network of other words or
signs
that
might
make
possible
even an
imaginaryposition
from
which to see and
understand
heir
object. Writing-any writing-involves
two moments
that
work
against
each
other: the moment
in
which we
create a
name for the
ob-
ject,
and
that
in
which the
object itself,
which
becomes
lost in the
moment
of
writing, exerts a pressure upon the language
of
the name, or
narrative,
of
history.
In
Lewin's
diary
we see this
entry,
written on
the
day
after his wife of
fourteen
years
is taken
away
and
transported:
Eclipse
of the
sun,
universal blackness.
My
Luba was taken
away
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F
DISASTER
83
during
a
blockade on 30
Gesia
Street. There
is still
a
glimmer
of
hope
in front of me. Perhaps she will be saved. And if, God forbid,she is
not?
My journey o theUmschlagplatz-the appearance f
the
streets-
fills
me with dread. To my anguish there is no
prospect
of
rescuing
her.
It looks like she was
taken directly to
the
train.
Her fate
is to be
a victim
of
the
Nazi bestiality, along with hundreds of
thousands of
Jews.
I
have no words
to
describe my desolation.
I
ought
to
go after
her, to die. But I have no strength to take such
a step. Ora-her
calamity.
A
child who was
so
tied
to
her
mother,
and how she
loved
her.
The "action"goes on in the town at full throttle. All the streets are
being emptied of their
occupants.
Total chaos. Each German
actory
will
be
closed
off in its
block and the people
will
be
locked
in
their
own
building. Terrorand blackness. And over all
this
disaster
hangs
my
own
private anguish. (Lewin 153-4)
Here
writing obeys the obligationto name: Lewin tries
desperately
to
build a
position from which to write ("myown
private anguish,"
"my desolation")
at
the
same time that he tries to
imagine
the other individuals and events
that
form the context for his writing ("thepeople will be locked in their build-
ing," "God
forbid,
if
she is not [saved]?"). But neither
position
is
finally
fixed,
in
part because neither name nor any part
of
the
historical narrative
Lewin
tries
to write
can be understood n
terms
of
any
other. This
is
not
due
to the
historical circumstances in which Lewin is
involved,
circumstances
that
prevent
him from
understanding
he
enormity
of the
disasters
(his
own
and that of
the
ghetto).
It is due instead
to
writing'sinability
to
renderwhat
he
sees without
reducing it
to
narrative. At the moment of
writing,
Lewin
displacesboth the
"I"
and
the "other"
rom
which, and
to
whom,
he writes
as
well
as the historical
event of the disaster. It is this moment
of
displacement,
the moment of
writing
and of
loss,
that
produces
a
violence,
"the
rupture,
he
break
the
splitting,
the
tearing of
the
shred-acute
singularity,single point"
(Blanchot
46).
It is
here that events-Luba's
deportation,
he
terrorof their
daughter
at
being
made
motherless,
the mechanical and
awful
willingness
to
continue to
speak
in
the
face
of
all this-are
omitted from the
language
of
the
writing
but are made
present
in
the absence
of
the
writing.
The intention
to
write
is shatteredby the event's
ability
to elude
writing.
In
both Lewin's diary andin the
testimonies by
survivors,
in
both liter-
ary representations
ike Primo Levi's or
in the
painful
extemporaneity
of the
diary
or the oral
testimony,
there is
something
in
the events
of
the
Shoah that
resists
vraisemblance,
and that makes itself
apparent
n
figural (that is,
rhe-
torical)
terms.
This
is true
not
only
of
accounts
which,
in
Langer's terms,
"remind
us that we are
dealing
with a
self-consciously
representedreality"
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84
RHETORIC
SOCIETY
QUARTERLY
(Langer 40) through the language
of
metaphor,but also those
which
are
de-
signed to be, in White's terms,"read hrough." f we takeBlanchot seriously,
we need to recognize that there is a certain intransitivity hat occurs even
metonymically-even
in
language
that
on
the face
of it
seems
to
regularize
the
narrative,
vraisemblable historical world-in
historical
texts
that rends
open
that
apparently
historicalorderand confrontsthe readerwith
the disas-
ter.
The pedagogical implicationof a rhetoricof disaster s
complicated and
potentially troubling. Theoristsof writing have paida good deal of attention
in the last several
years to
the
ways
in which
the events
of the Holocaust, as
rendered
in fiction and in testimonial
accounts,
can be seen as points
of de-
parture
or discussions of
diversity,
or race
hatred,
or the role
of
resistance,
or
any
number of
other
controversial opics.
The
assumption
we generally
make
in
courses
like
these is thattheirgoal should be to produceknowledge
of the events of
the
Shoah and,
whenever
possible,
to
connect that
knowl-
edge
with other
knowledges-of
the
dynamics
of
poverty,
or of racism, or
of
other
disasters
or
genocides.
But
while
there is clear documentaryevidence
available, for example, to suggest to us the operationsof the mobile killing
squads
that
followed
behind the
invasion
of the Russianand Polish
pale,
and
though
there is
enough testimonialevidence
to
suggest
to us the
experiences
of
individuals
involved in the
killing (both survivors
and
collaborators),
hat
evidence
cannot bring
knowledge
into accord with the events themselves.
The
problem
is a
rhetorical
one: the
severity
of
the
events witnessed defies
the
historically transparentwriting we generally assume to be the best
ve-
hicle for reportingthem. The testimony of even the most reliable witness
succumbs to
the
displacement
of the events
from
the
language
of the narra-
tive, and
the
effect
of
such
a
narrative-of
its
intransitivity-is
what Saul
Friedlanderhascalled, in another ontext, uncanny. Through t,"we are
con-
fronted with [an uncertaintybroughton by the representation]
f
human
be-
ings of the most ordinarykind approaching he state of automataby eliminat-
ing any feelings
of
humanness and
of
moral sense .... Our sense
of
Unheimlichkeit
uncanniness]
s
indeed triggeredby this deep
uncertaintyas
to the 'true nature"'of
the referent
of
the narrative tself (Friedlander
30).
The
effect of
the
uncanny
n
the
writing class
is
that,faced
with
the enormity
of
the
events as
described
in
halting, incomplete and yet horrifyingtestimo-
nies
and
documents,
studentshave a
very
difficult
time
evaluating
that
writ-
ing,
let alone
trying
to find
language
with which to write themselves.
How
can
you possibly
assess
the
authority
of
the sources
you
read,
and the charac-
ter of
the witnesses who
have
writtenthem, when you are absolutely shat-
tered
by
their
effect?
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC OF DISASTER
85
To take only one recent example of this
problem, Andrea Freud
Loewensteinwrites that during he springsemester of 1996 atMedgar Evers
College,
her
introduction
of
Spiegelman's
Maus
in a
second-semester writ-
ing courseproduced
ome startling eactions rom
classmembers.
In
addition o
seeing the
book
-
a
depiction
of Art
Spiegelman's
collection of
testimonies
from his father,who
survived he Holocaust
n
Poland,
n
comic
book form-as
a
way to prompther
students o writing, she also saw the section of the course
in
which she used
the book as an opportunity o "challengethe anti-semitism
I
heard from my
students,"and
to "thinkmore
widely about the origins and
effects of stereotypesand
prejudice,
o
see
themselves not
only as victims of
stereotypingand prejudice,but also as perpetrators"419). By asking her
students
to
write about the
book,
and about their identities as
"minorities,"
Loewenstein'sstudentsbeganto find
a
language
with
which to
express
knowl-
edge
of
Judaism,
of the events of the
Holocaust,
and
of
their own
very
com-
plicated positionsas individualsdefinedby color,or
ethnic category, or gen-
der,
or
variouscombinations thereof. She concludes that several of her stu-
dents "embarkedon their own
projects: writing
comic-strip texts, making
films, or writingcreatively about their own family situations"
(419).
The
account of the class includes
transcripts
of
her students' conversations and
some excerptsfrom theirwriting, writingwhich seems to indicate a desire to
come
to conclusions about the
subject
of
the Shoah and of their
experiences
but which
falls short
of
the
mark
for various
reasons,
one
of which may be
the
pressure-the
disaster-of the circumstancesof the
writing
itself.
But Loewenstein's postscriptpoints to
the
greater
difficulty
of
seeing
a
relationbetween the
events
of
history-in
this
case,
Spiegelman's attempt
o
work throughhis father's experiences
in
the camps
and
his own
very difficult
experiences as the son
of
a Holocaust survivor-and the
writing
of
those
events
into
a
narrative
of
history
or of
experience.
There
she tells
her
readers
that one of her
colleagues
at
Medgar
Evers drew
her
aside to show
her a
paper
n
which one of her studentshad
"'really
made
a
leap
forward n
under-
standing,"'
n
which the student,
one of those who'd been in
Loewenstein's
class a
year earlier,
had lifted sections of
a
paper
from
the earlier
class and
grafted
them
into the paper for
the second
instructor's course
on
an
alto-
getherdifferent
subject.
Loewenstein
provides
two
possible
reasons for this:
the student was
pleased
with
her
insight
and
"merely
decided to
recycle it,"
or that
t was a
cynical
exercise in
giving
the
(second)
teacher
what
she
wanted.
But there
is
another,
more
fundamental,explanation:
the
student's sense of
the material
from
the
classes on
Maus,
and her
ability
to record that sense in
conventional
terms,
are
irremediably
divided
by
the
passage
of
the events of
the class
from
event to
experience. Loewenstein,
like most
teachers,
is will-
ing to see her student's writing
as a faithful record of an
insight
or
under-
standing-of
learning-that
came
to the student
in
class,
and
that to have
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86 RHETORICSOCIETY QUARTERLY
grafteda passage from thatwriting nto an essay for a differentclass is tanta-
mount to a "recycling"of the insight. This is to miss the point, however, that
at best writing s indicative of events, or
in
this case of ideas, that precede the
writing itself, and that the studentmay well have seen the recycled passage
as bearing the imprintof
an
event or experience that could not otherwise be
narrated. The passage, in other words, may be related both to the "leap for-
ward in understanding" xperienced in the second class as well as to the
insight gained in the first, but it is a relation that can only be surmised.
Topress the point a little, it's also possible to suggest thatthe student's
writing marksa universal knowledge that stands n place of a particularone,
that it substitutesa conventional knowledge for a more traumatic,compli-
cated, and unwritablesense thatis impossible to know except as a moment
that precedes language altogether (for a more troubling
view of this same
point,
see
Gourevitch, "What hey Saw...").
The
passage reads,
in
part:
We
were both
[Blacks
and
Jews] packed
like sardines
and
sent
away
from ourhomelands, he Jews by trainsand the Blacks by boat. ...[T]he
German solution
for
the Jews was
total
destruction;
the White solu-
tion for the
Blacks
was
total
utilization.... Unlike the
Jews,
Blacks
were considered more useful alive then [sic] dead. Now wheneverI
pass the intersectionof New
YorkAve
and EasternParkway
I
can ob-
serve the Jews with new
insight, comprehension,
and realization of
our common
experience. (Loewenstein
41
1)
Though the student expresses a sense of her "common experience"
as an
African
American student
with
those
of Jews
during
the
Holocaust, there
is
clearly
more
going
on here: an
expression
of
anger,
a sense of
discontinuity
between the historical circumstancesof the Shoah and
the
middle
passage,
a
connection between the
geography
of
New York and
the
machinery
of de-
struction
n
Europe
and
the Atlantic. The student'sconclusion
is an
attempt
to
forge
a
knowledge
from her
particular
and
very
difficult
position
in
the
midst of an experience she
is
at pains to fully understand.
What she
has
written,
in
otherwords, respondsto the disciplinarydemands of the writing
course,
and
of the
pedagogical
demandsof
a
teacherwhose
trajectory
or this
section of the
class
is
to foster a
sense
of
diversity
and to work
against
stereo-
types.
But the
language
of this
passage
marks
a
limit
to these imperativesby
writing against them, by exerting a pressure upon them that can't be con-
tained
by
the
essay's language.
In
short,
there seems to
be
some other
event,
some
other
insight,
that
functions
as the
origin of
this
narrative, o
it should
come as
no
surprise
to Loewenstein that the
narrativecould
be
used
as a
markerof
something that she herself may not be able to recognize.
What this suggests is that while we may glimpse a trace of the event's
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICF DISASTER
87
horror,
we
do
so at the
expense
of
knowledge. Or,
to
put
this another
way,
writing he disastermay indicate he event thatrupturesnarrative,but it doesn't
build
knowledge
of
it,
and in fact works
against knowledge's grain.
The
injunction o see the Holocaust as an event that must never be forgotten, and
that acts
as
a
paradigm
or race
hatred,
or
antisemitism,
or
the cultural
logic
of
fascism, seems to insist uponfinding
a
language with which the events of
the
Holocaust can
be
written,
understood,
dentified with
or
against.
But
if
the
events
of the
Shoah are paradigmatic
of
the intransigenceof events to
writing, or of the way testimony
both creates and destroys the language of
witnessing, then any attempt to
integrate
the
Holocaust into a pedagogy of
writing needs to deal with the possibility thatin asking students to write (on)
the
Holocaust we
are
asking them
to
do
something utterly impossible
or
at
the
very least traumatic.
What this means forpedagogy is that we need to resist the temptationto
think of
writing
as
a
medium
that
represents
states of affairs.
This
is
true
both
of the writing our students read
-
in
testimonies, histories, and other
narratives and the writing our
studentsproduce. Identificationof the kind
evidenced by Loewenstein's studentsis only one example of what happens
when
one attempts
to
bring the traumatic
effect of
figural displacement (in
her case, in Spiegelman's Maus) undera universal knowledge. What the
Holocaust shows, perhaps more
clearly than other traumaticevents, is that
discourse
cannot
representwhat has been
seen,
and
that
at best it
indicates
the
effect
upon
the witness
of
what she
saw. Even
the most
explicit attempt
to
regularizethe horrible
particularity,
o
elide what resists
naming
with a
knowledge, indicates,
n
its incommensurabilities,
what
lies behind
t:
"eleven
million
...
six million ...
one and
a half
million";
"Unlike
the Jews, Blacks
were
considered more useful alive
than dead ...
[I realize] our common ex-
perience."
Blanchotworries that by reading the testimonies of events as The Holo-
caust,
we
destroy
the
effects of the
particular:
Fragmentation, he mark
of
a coherence all the
firmer in
that it has to
come undone
in
order to be
reached,
and
reached
not
through
a dis-
persed system,
or
through
dispersion
as
a
system,
for
fragmentation
s
the
pulling
to
pieces (the tearing)
of
that which never has
preexisted
(really
or
ideally)
as
a
whole,
nor
can it ever be reassembled
in
any
future
presence
whatever.
(60)
There
is,
in
the
disaster,
the
beginning
of an ethics: the disaster
occurs
when
one's
particular mplication
in the
event
is held
up
as
everyone's implication,
making
it a universal
experience,
and
producing
a
knowledge
of the whole
in
contrast to the
impasse
itself.
We are better off
focusing
our attention on
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88 RHETORICSOCIETY
QUARTERLY
those impasses-as revealed in the synechdochic or metonymic stutters
n
diaries like Lewin's, or testimonies like those of a Moses S. or a Mary
R.-
and
deferring
our students' desires to
produce knowledge
of the event, to
act
as though we can ourselves make sense of an event we did not
see and did not
experience. If we see writing as an indication of an event rather han a repre-
sentationof it, and we make clear to students that even the best
writing pro-
duces impasse as much as it produces nsights, thenperhapsthe best
we
can
hope
for
is
that our students produce writing
that
makes
clear the gap
or
impasse between the representationand represented,and see
their response
to such incongruitiesas the site of knowing
and
teachingthat keeps
horror
itself recognizable.
I
want to conclude by indicating one of the ethical
implications of
a
rhetoricof disaster. As
I
intimatedat the beginning
of
the essay,
I think those
implications complicate
some
assumptions
we
generally
hold about
the
eth-
ics
of
Holocaust remembrance-and of redemption-that are
usually associ-
ated with the
injunctions
"never
forget," and
"never
again."
If
Blanchot
is
right, and a witness's participation
n
the events
of
history-particularly
traumaticorhorribleevents like those indicatedby testimonies and diariesof
people like AbrahamLewin-are irrecuperable xcept throughhe fragmented
and troubled narratives hat fail to
contain them,
then the
only
connection
between the
event,
as
"in-experienced,"and
the
testimony
of the event,
as
the
writing
of the
disaster,
is
tenuous
at
best.
In
the
case
of the Lewin
diary,
it
may well serve evidence of the events comprisingthe concentration
and
liquidationof the Warsawghetto, insofar as it stands as
an
"eyewitness
testi-
mony"
to those
events.
And
the historical circumstances
of the
diary itself,
found as it was on a site
recalled
by
other
witnesses
long after the authorhad
been killed andeverytrace of the ghettohad beenannihilated,would seemto
bear out and
confirm
its
status
as evidence. But what
if,
for whatever
reason,
those
historical circumstances-corroborating witnesses,
documents, place
namesrecollected-could not be recovered? In such a case, the best we can
do is
to
rely upon
the effect of the
diary
itself.
Hayden
White would argue
that its status as evidence
depends
in
part upon
its
effect,
and that effect-
producedmetonymically either by design or by circumstance-is, in the case
of the Lewin
diary,
a
profoundly disturbing
one.
The
case of the Wilkomirski"memoir"Fragments-initially
believed to
be an
account
of
the author's
horrifying experiences as
a child in
the death
camps,
it
turns out to
be
either a willful
fabrication
or
a compilation
of night-
mare visions and
voyeuristic research by someone who believes himself to
be
a
survivorof
Majdanek
andAuschwitz
(see accounts
of
the controversy
n
Lappin;Gourevitch,
"The
MemoryThief')-puts even more
pressureon the
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICFDISASTER 89
relation between the effects of a testimony and its source. If we only judge a
testimony by its effects, Fragments works metonymically rather han meta-
phorically, and it produces in the reader
an
uncanny response that could be
likened to the effect of the disasteron White's or Blanchot'sterms. The book
is a series of horrifying ableaux hatmove between the atrocitiesof the camps
and the nightmareof an adoption after the war
in
which those aroundhim
urge
the survivor
to forget
his
experiences.
But such a
result
is
disturbing-
Wilkomirski
may be a liar,
after
all;
no one would
say
the
same of
Abraham
Lewin or Moses S.-and it is all the
more
profoundlyso
if
it leads, as Philip
Blom has
suggested, to
an
"ero[sion of]
the
very ground
on which
remem-
brancecan be built" (Blom) andleads eventuallyto "anew revisionism that
no
longer attacks the truth
of
the
Holocaust but
only individual claims of
survival" (Peskin). Does the ambivalent
relation
of
narrative
and the inac-
cessible real of
history, the difficulties
inherent
n
writing
an
event
and the
elusiveness of the event itself, allow
for such a
radical reading of the
Wilkomirski
memoir, and of eyewitness
testimonies as a
genre?
It is, in fact, entirely consistent
with
a rhetoric
of
disaster hat the nature
of events
rendered
n
discourse can only
be
established
ndividually: hat t
is
impossible to understandwhether or
not
"the Holocaust"occurred n all of
its horrible detail because any rendering of the event-either through eye-
witness testimony or with the broad
brushes of
history
or
panoramic films
like
Schindler's
List or
Shoah-risks giving
us the
mistaken
mpression
that
what
we
hear
or
see in the testimony
is what the
eyewitness herself saw, or
that
the individual narrative
can
stand
as a substitute or the
larger
historical
narrative.
This
was a
point
made over
and over
again during
he debates that
followed
the
release of Schindler's
List
in
1994. Critics
complained
either
that the
film
was too brutal
in
its
use of detail
in
sequences,
for
example,
depicting
the
liquidation
of the Kracow
ghetto or, especially,
those
involving
the showers at Auschswitz; or they complained it wasn't detailed enough,
and that
even
the violence
of
the
liquidation
scene omitted atrocities that
would have
given
the
film a
greater
historical
authority.
Reviewers
in
a
roundtable
discussion
printed
n the
Village
Voice
n
Marchof
that
year
wor-
ried
that
the
American
viewing public
would
equate
the movie with
the
event,
and conclude
that,
in
the
end,
it wasn't
all so terrible
Hoberman).
What
was
remarkable
about
that
roundtable
discussion,
and about
nearly every
discus-
sion that took
place
after the film's
premiere,
s
that
every participant
n
the
debate
"saw"
something quite
different
in
the
film. This
is
partly
due
to the
nature of
taste,
as Kant
pointed out
so
clearly
over two
hundred
years ago.
But it is also
partly
due
to
the nature
of the rhetorical
enterprise,
on
at least
one
reading (and
I
hope
a
non-idiosyncraticone).
We do
not
establish
truth
through
discourse
as much
as we
produce
ar-
guments
for a
certain
view of
it,
and
no
argument,
no matterhow
strong
and
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90 RHETORICSOCIETY
QUARTERLY
no matter the integrity of the
speaker, will settle a
matter once and for all.
Argumentsproducecontingent ruths hat can be latertested for consistency,
but
those
contingent truthsareestablished through he
argument
tself.
It
is
significant that in this view of
rhetoric here are
few
guarantees
hat what
is
understood n one "conversation" r, for our purposes
here, testimony, will
be
understood he same way in
anotheror by different
witnesses
to the testi-
mony.
To returnto where we
began this essay, such a view
of
the rhetorical
enterprise
s
not new: in the Phaedrus Plato's Socrates is at
pains
to show
that,
ideally, writing is indicative
of what lies behindknowledgeratherthan
productive of knowledge. The successful rhetor s the one who is able to
convince an audience not that
what he says
is
true, but that what
he
says,
while
not true, has an effect thatpoints to what occupies
a place outside
of
language: t points to what is
real. And thiseffect-writing as a reminderof
what
was once inherent n the soul but is now
inaccessible to
it
(Phaedrus
277e-278a)-is a radically
individualone, an effect which is
different
from
soul to
soul,
from
listenerto
listener, rom witness to witness.
To
returnnow
to
Philip
Blom,
he
worries thatthe Wilkomirskinarrative ntroduces
a
new
sort of
Holocaustdenial, one that
doesn't question he occurrenceof
the
event
but the veracityof individualtestimonies which, taken together, might tes-
tify
to the event.
And he is rightto be concerned. He
is
right
to
say
that
if
we
can undermine he authorityof
the writer of a Holocaust
testimony,
and
say
with
certainty hat he was never
there and that he did not see what he claims
to have seen, we have
eliminated one piece of evidence thatwe can use to
argue that
the atrocities of the Shoah occurred. Such testimonies-in the
form
of
eyewitness accounts,
documentaryevidence,
trial
transcripts,
and
diaries-taken
togetherform thetapestryof sufferingthat
we
have
inherited
as the
narrativeof the
Holocaust. But such
testimonies,
as
accounts
of hor-
rible
events that are inaccessible
even to the memories of those who sur-
vived,
let alone those who claim to have done so or those who read their
accounts,
function in
similar
ways and
have similar effects:
they
establish
the
credibility of the speaker,and indicate an event as it
occurs prior to
her
ability to
speak it, not so much in their accordancewith
the facts of history
(facts
which
are
accessible
only
through narrative)
but
in the
way they
dis-
rupt
the
narrativeof history and
force the reader,or the
interviewer,
to see
something horrible,perhaps
a
trace
of the
traumatic vent
itself.
These effects
are only
available
one
witness, one reader,
at a time. As
in
the
case of the
Wilkomirskimemoir as much as in the case of the Lewin
diary, we may well be able to
undermine he authorityof the
speaker
if
we
take him
to be
trying to establish a narrativeof the circumstances of the
Holocaust that will
settle the
matteronce and for all. The converse is also
true: a
lack of
credibility seems to throw open to question the
veracity
of
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BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICFDISASTER
91
testimonies of
othersurvivors.
But this
is
not
to
say
that t
lessens the disas-
trous effect of thetestimony,or the testimony's ability to indicate something
about the natureof the
event, though
that disaster
may
not
be
the
historical
object whose "content"we take to be coequal with the narrative's shape.
Elena Lappinsuggests thatthe authorof Fragments has indeed suffered some
shocking
accident in the events
surrounding
his
separation rom
his
mother,
or the
years
in
which he lived
in
orphanagesor foster care or in the care of
adoptive parents.
Such
an
"accident"would render he
uncanny effect of the
memoir's metonymic language
as
an indication of an event that is not only
inaccessible
to
his
readers
but inaccessible to
himself
as
well.
As I say, Philip
Blom has reason to worry about the effect of Wilkomirski's ack of credibil-
ity.
But
to a smallerdegree he should worry about the very same problem in
each and
every
survivor
testimony:
an
analysis
of
the
rhetoric
of
disaster
simply does
not
give
us
access
to
history; it only gives us (figurally) some
access
to its effects.
The
testimony
of a witness
to
disaster is a
narrative hat simply cannot
provide us access to
the
circumstances
hat lie at its
source, though it may or
may not accord with the historical record. Thatan accountis inaccurate, or
that it
is
inconsistent
and
markedby gaps
and
plain inaccuracies(or even,
in
the case of the Wilkomirski
"memoir," ies),
should not be
surprising
if we
take
seriously
a
rhetoric
of
disaster.
For it is
only
in
the
obliterationof events,
in
effacing
them from the realm
of
the
sayable
and
by acknowledging them
as
irretrievably
ost to
knowledge,
that the
writer s
brought
o
language.
The
language
to which
he
is
brought
does not
necessarily
adhere
o
what
we think
of
as
the
historicallyaccurate,
or the
verifiable,
or
even the circumstances
of
the
writerhimself.
But
this
is
a
troubling
act
about
history
and
memory
that
may give us
no
way
to
adjudicate he traumaticexperiences we read in mem-
oirs,
or
diaries,
or other
narrativeaccounts
of the
Shoah.
The
gaps
in
a
narra-
tive cannot be said
simply
to
represent naccuracies;
rather-as
Caruth
sug-
gests, speaking
of
Freud-they represent
and
"preserve history precisely
within this
gap
in
[the]
text"
(Caruth 190).
The fact is that
each encounter
with the
memory
of the
event repeatsthe initial trauma,