Testimony Without Intimacy

Testimony without Intimacy Patricia Yaeger English, Michigan Abstract When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly they behave. We may also miss the odd ways a testimony’s figures of speech invite readers or listeners to misbehave: to try too hard to recover a sacred sense of witnessing. How do ordinary techniques of literary or conversational speech change shape in the context of testimony? What happens when Charlotte Delbo uses metaphor, simile, or personification to convey her experiences in Auschwitz? What happens to oral testimony when Holocaust survivors bear witness while the camera records para- semantic body language that swerves away from this witnessing? This essay explores the ways that testimonies handle the ethical question of community,entanglement, or proximity by inventing figures of speech or body language that deflect an audience’s rapport even as they summon us. Intimacy is a condition marked by close acquaintance or familiarity. It derives from the Latin intimus, meaning inmost or deepest. The defensive refusal of intimacy is one of the dangers (the ethical dead ends) of witnessing. ‘‘For the testimonial process to take place,’’ as Dori Laub (1992: 72) says, ‘‘there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears.’’ It is all too easy to ward off this intimacy by assembling a sense of the blessedness or sacredness of the survivor. Trying too hard to bond, we may give in to ‘‘a flood of awe and fear; we endow the survivor with a kind of sanctity, both to pay our tribute to him and to keep him at a distance, to avoid the intimacy entailed in know- ing’’ (ibid.). Reading Charlotte Delbo, I am struck by how often she works at the bor- Poetics Today 27:2 (Summer 2006) doi 10.1215/03335372-2005-010 © 2006 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 400 Poetics Today 27:2 der between distance and intimacy, warding off both sanctity and familiarity. Early in Auschwitz and After (1995), Delbo provides an exhaustive cata- log of what it feels like to be thirsty, to be denied the smallest tincture to drink. ‘‘Thirst’’ ends with a chill invitation to intimacy with a water- less world: There is the thirst of the evening and the thirst of the night, the very worst. Because at night I drink, I drink and the water becomes immediately dry and solid in my mouth. The more I drink, the more my mouth fills with hardening rotting leaves. Or else it is an orange section. It bursts between my teeth and it is indeed an orange section—amazing that one should encounter oranges here—it is indeed a section of an orange. I have the taste of the orange in my mouth, the juice spreads under my tongue, touches my palate, my gums, flows into my throat. It is slightly acid, marvelously fresh orange. This orange taste and the sensation of freshness flowing wake me up. (Ibid.: 75) How close we come to this orange, to its citric taste. In the turn from hard ‘‘rotting leaves,’’ what blooms from this figure is an intense identification with the tang of sweet fruit and the sensuous powers of its taster.The words burst between the teeth, spread under the tongue, until the reader floats in the innermost of orange. And then the denouement of ‘‘Thirst’’ breaks this sweetness: This orange taste and the sensation of freshness flowing wake me up. The awakening is horrifying. Yet the instant when the skin of the orange splits open between my teeth is so delightful that I would like to bring back this dream. I chase after it, corner it. But once again the paste of rotting leaves petrified into mortar fills my dry mouth. It is not even a bitter taste. When you taste bitterness it is because you have not lost the sense of taste, it means you still have saliva in your mouth. (Ibid.) Having followed Delbo into the simulacrum of the orange’s pleasure, I inevitably follow her into the simulacrum of pain.Tricked by my own ‘‘close acquaintance or familiarity’’ with the orange’s ecstasy, my mouth wrenches away from verbose, rotting leaves, but too late: I, too, taste mortar. In ‘‘Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,’’ Ted Cohen (1979: 6) defines the quintessence of metaphor as the ‘‘achievement of intimacy’’— an achievement that involves (1) a ‘‘concealed invitation’’ to figure out what a metaphor means, (2) the acceptance of this invitation, and (3) a result- ing transaction that creates ‘‘the acknowledgement of a community’’ of cocreators or conspirators. But what kind of community emerges when we encounter these figures within Holocaust narratives? In ‘‘One Day,’’ the sixth section of Auschwitz and After, Delbo describes a woman, her legs Yaeger • Testimony without Intimacy 401 rag-bound and scarecrow thin, who tumbles to the bottom of a ditch. She seeks help convulsively, but at roll call her imprisoned companions stare back, impervious. Delbo (1995: 24–25) imagines this woman’s bewilder- ment: ‘‘Why are all these women looking at me like this? Why are they here, lined up in close ranks, standing immobile....Theycannot possibly see me, or they wouldn’t stand there gaping. They’d help me climb up. Why don’t you help me, you standing so close? Help me. Pull me up. Lean in my direction. Stretch out your hand. Oh, they don’t make a move.’’ Calling for closeness, she is met by a metaphor: ‘‘Her hand writhed toward us in a desperate call for help. The hand falls back—a faded mauve star upon the snow. Once fallen, it lost its fleshless look, grew soft, became once again a living, pitiful thing. The elbow props itself up, slips. The whole body col- lapses.’’ Progressively dehumanized (her feet kick randomly in the air; her efforts are ‘‘quite out of proportion to her enterprise’’) this woman-made- star finds, in mauve metaphor, the briefest personification. What does it mean to be met not with a hand but with a figure of speech? Is this figure a crossing over or a turning away? Does its ‘‘concealed invitation’’ create a community or break one? When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly they behave.We may also miss the odd ways a testimony’s figures of speech invite readers or listeners to misbehave: to turn away helplessly or try too hard to recover a sacred sense of witnessing as we scramble back into the belly of the text. If Delbo’s orange invites intimacy with Auschwitz’s thirst (catching the reader unaware as pleasure turns pang), the woman as mauve star offers a refutation of intimacy; the distancing metaphor impeaches the survivor in her wished-for indifference. If an ordinary metaphor becomes a contract for ordinary intimacy,what strange contract might the Holocaust’s figures of speech re-create? 1. When Testimony Misbehaves ‘‘I saw more than you did when you were there’’ (Delbo 1995: 286). I have always felt uncomfortable with this moment from Auschwitz and After when Pierre, the hearty husband of the Holocaust survivor Marie-Louise, acts like the perfect trauma listener. As someone who has tried to experience (deeply) the unreachable anguish of his wife’s sojourn in Auschwitz, Pierre acknowledges Marie-Louise’s experience as trauma, but he also seems to fit her trauma into the backpack of their marriage as something to be carried upon his capable shoulders with the confidence that he alone can encom- pass what happened to her and encircle her pain. It is also our privilege as scholars to seem to see more, to cosset and carry. 402 Poetics Today 27:2 But I am interested in the ways that Holocaust testimony, both oral and written, tries to resist this carrying. I want to focus on moments that refute our compassion and constitute zones of experience that may be sympathy- secluded, empathy-unfriendly: that jar the act of compassion. Within oral, recorded testimonies, we submit to gestures of ordinary or excessive body language, when beads of perspiration or the light of pain (or pleasure) in someone’s eyes become too much for the camera, when something uncon- trolled and uncontrollable about the speaking body disrupts careful listen- ing by creating an abrupt change in scale: a moment when body and speech seem to move in opposite directions.Within literary testimony we encounter similar moments: breathtaking similes that refuse to do the work of simili- tude, that stymie our ability to create a space of similarity, compassion, comparison. I want to explore the ways in which the formal or structural dimensions of written and oral testimony have an apotropaic effect; they can ward off the very empathy that we, as readers and listeners entangled in survivors’ stories, want to inhabit. I do not wish to argue that trauma, or speech reach- ing after trauma, offers the acme of unrepresentability. Quite the reverse: the figures of testimony enact specific rhetorical or bodily effects that push us away even as they pull us toward intimacy. What happens to the reader or listener as ‘‘secondary witness’’ when she gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony and the way a speaking body or written text says it? In ‘‘Stenia,’’ Delbo (ibid.: 42) uses personification to hollow out the ordinary portents of sympathy: No one can fall asleep tonight. The wind blows and whistles and groans. It is a moan mounting from the marshes, a sob swelling, swelling and bursting, then subsiding into shivering silence, another sob swells and bursts out and dies down.

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