Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History by S. Felman; D.
Laub
Lawrence Normand

The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 46, No. 181. (Feb., 1995), pp. 135-136.

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 REVIEWS

the values typically assigned to analytic thought, logic, and science, while narration is
seen to embody the opposing values of poetic thought. List-making is thus equated
with discontinuity, divisiveness, and abstraction; it is the natural product of a literate
society while narration, the mode of thought particular to oral cultures, offers
complementary integrative qualities in the temporal unfolding of the story. O'Banion
suggests that rhetoric, and Quintilian rhetoric in particular, is the only medium to
bridge these key cognitive modes through the functions of narratio and dispositio
(rhetorical correlates to story-telling and list-making respectively) and to hold them
together in an all-important dialectic through the means of ordo (the ordering of proof
and narration in an ideal balance).
O'Banion admittedly draws heavily on the work of Walter Ong and other
rhetoricians-Ong's Ouality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Itbrcl (1982) is
perhaps the best in-depth discussion of the change in rhetoric from oral cultures to
literate ones-but he derives most of his direction and inspiration from the work of
Kenneth Burke. Some mention must be made of the somewhat problematical
relationship of Reorienting Rhetoric to the work of Kenneth Burke, if only for the
simple reason that O'Banion feels the necessity to do so himself in the preface to the
book. Here O'Banion claims that his primary goal is not to interpret Burke's prolific
career, but to employ many of Burke's insights into the relationship of 'dramatism'
(Burke's term for narration) and logic to underline rhetoric's potential to integrate the
two. This chief objective is successfully achieved by O'Banion, but only through what
at times seems a sycophantic adaptation of Burke's work to his purpose. For instance,
at the book's conclusion O'Banion remarks: 'Though sharing much with scholars such
as Goody, MacIntyre, Becker, Ong, Eisenstein, Steiner, Schutz, Grassi, Verene,
Pepper, Kuhn, Whitehead, Collingwood, Rorty, May, and Fromm, Burke differs
considerably from them. Though their work, when considered as a whole, supports
his efforts, his career encompasses all such efforts and more' (p. 276).
This comment, which is not taken out of context, is indicative of the overall tenor of
O'Banion's book, and constitutes an unfortunate drawback to some otherwise fine
scholarly work. Especially useful is his discussion of Quintilian rhetoric, a solid
reading of classical rhetoric's pivotal dependence on the element of persuasion. That
is to say, for Quintilian and other classical rhetoricians, no use of rhetoric was
considered beautiful or successful if it failed to move its audience in the desired
fashion, thus ensuring that the narration of facts assumed at least as much importance
as the truth content of those facts. While for some audiences Reorienting Rheton'c
perhaps may suffer from its over-riding concern with Burke and other analytical
philosophers, it is a helpful addition to a growing body of work on rhetoric, a
discipline no longer of peripheral interest to literary scholars.
Edinburgh NA\.I\A KRISHNX HOOKER

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.

By S. FELMAX and D. LAUB.Pp. xxf294. New York and London: Routledge,
1992. Cloth, £35; paper, £12.99.
For Felman and Laub the Holocaust is 'an event without a witness' (p. xvii),
because on the one hand the Nazis enveloped their Jewish victims in delusions as to
what was actually happening and also destroyed the evidence of their genocide, and on
the other hand Jews had no conceptual frame or world-view in which the truth of what
was happening might appear. T h e crises of witnessing with which this book is
concerned are the after-shocks of this historical trauma as they register in the minds of
the survivors and those who hear their testimony-Camus, de Man, and Lanzmann's
film Shoah. Felman and Laub work with the twin assumptions that history is
'reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the
 REVIEWS

text' (p. xv) (not merely reflected or represented), and that context as well as text
needs to be read. For the authors, the Holocaust is the prime historical event of the
twentieth century whose full impact on post-war history is prevented from becoming
fully felt by the conditions which were imposed on the events at the time. It is against
the immense power of these negating conditions that testimony, the voice of someone
who was a witness and who then tries to communicate the truth of that witness to
others, has to assert itself. Testimony becomes almost impossible.
T h e book's origin lies in a crisis which occurred during Felman's course at Yale on
'Literature and Testimony', when the students reacted to a video of a Holocaust
survivor's testimony by estrangement from each other and emotional disorientation,
which Felman interpreted as a crisis of witnessing: the students' sense of reality was
unequal to grasping what they had seen. The authors claim that the book's greatest
originality lies in showing how art and culture, like psychoanalysis, may be
performative by calling into being something not yet known and perhaps not
knowable in conventional ways.
Laub traces the effects that massive psychological traumas have on individual
minds, and the processes by which these may be gradually undone in order to bring to
light, for the speaker as well as the listener, unspoken or unconscious memory. T h e
particular difficulty of Holocaust witnessing, however, is that, at the time, it was
nullified by reports to the outside world being disbelieved; and, even worse, by
victims themselves secretly believing Iiazi propaganda about their subhumanity.
True witnessing thus becomes articulating the inconceivable, and overcoming the
shame which works to silence people even as they are victimized. For Laub's patients,
and the contributors to the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale which he
co-founded, speaking is not a simple recording of memory but rather a speech act
which reconstructs the very possibility of speaking and being heard by another, which
is in turn the condition for being able to hear oneself. Such speaking is dangerous, as
the deaths of Celan, Levi, and Bettelheim instance, but its effect is to make the events
knowable, perhaps for the first time, to the speaker and others. And through this
route testimony is released into history.
Laub's chapters demonstrate the Nazi success in destroying the possibility of a
'communitj~of seeing' (p. 211), and thus of witnessing. Felman's long, brilliant
concluding chapter on Lanzmann's Shoah argues that Lanzmann uses the very
incommensurability and dissonance of particular acts of witnessing from the
Holocaust to compose a work of art which lets the viewer see what first made the
events possible. The viewer gains access not to the full truth of history but to a sense
of the possibility of encountering what was previously dead and inaccessible.
Survivors speaking from the sites from which they were supposed to have disappeared
both reconstruct and undo the actions of the past, and recover the power of testimony
in the voice of someone who was there. The artistic and testimonial achievements of
Shoah lie in the way it overcomes silence by entering the crisis of testimony and
undoing it from within.
Like Shoah, the book itself is performative. Quotations, and even a photograph, are
repeated and each time they return with the possibility and offer of new meaning. T h e
accretion and accumulation of meaning in the text may be experienced by readers as
forming and reforming their understanding. Change is the crux of the book, uniting
the diversity of its materials. It also directs the mode of its writing (articulation and
rearticulation, repetition, expansion, and extension) to the affect it will have. The
authors' passion is resolved into the application of intense, prolonged intelligence
which itself becomes a moving testimony to the difficulty and importance of the
material they treat.
Unicersity of Uhles, Lampeter L.AU.RENCE NORMAND