The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Second Edition by Arthur W. Frank

Author:Arthur W. Frank [Frank, Arthur W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1995-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

Testimony

I once spoke at a conference for persons who had cancer or were in remission. One of the organizers opened the conference by posing the question of what we—he himself was currently in treatment—should call ourselves. He proposed “survivors,” dating ones survival from the time of diagnosis. I have no quarrel with the notion of survivors, but my first choice as a designation is “witness.”

Survival does not include any particular responsibility other than continuing to survive. Becoming a witness assumes a responsibility for telling what happened. The witness offers testimony to a truth that is generally unrecognized or suppressed. People who tell stories of illness are witnesses, turning illness into moral responsibility.

Bringing back the “boon” at the end of the quest narrative is self-concious testimony. The chaos narrative requires a listener who is prepared to hear it as testimony; Nancy’s immersion in her frenzied telling of her multiple interruptions (chapter 5) prevents her from hearing herself as a witness. The restitution narrative is the least obvious form of testimony, but it too tells a truth: the will to live, to cure and be cured.

The postmodern affinity for testimony is one response—and often a frustrated one—to the accumulated chaos stories of modernity; testimony tells these stories.1 Thus testimony, for all its commitment to truth and its ability to break through the limits of what its times attend to, is itself another construction of its times. The more that is told, the more we are made conscious of remaining on the edge of a silence. How much remains that can never be told is unknown.

But to observe that testimony is incomplete and only possible at a particular cultural moment in no way diminishes the force of that testimony. To paraphrase the quotation from William James that orients this whole inquiry, no analysis can ever “settle the hash” of testimony. Any analysis is always left gazing at what remains in excess of the analyzable. What is testified to remains the really real, and in the end what counts are duties toward it.

POSTMODERN TESTIMONY

Shoshana Felman describes testimony as “composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.”2 The sentence’s repeated “that” phrases seem to chase what can never quite be said; Felman’s own language seems overwhelmed, especially as I read it aloud. Testimony has that effect: it overwhelms even as it is overwhelmed.

Felman’s description evokes what is postmodern in contemporary testimony: even as “truth” is told, we now find uncertainty. Even in testimony, consciousness struggles to gain sovereignty over its own experience. Felman’s book is one example of current academic interest in testimony; books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II3 and films like Schindler’s List exemplify the popular culture of testimony But as a form of testimony, the proliferation of Holocaust materials is dwarfed by the self-help movement with its various forms of “recovery.

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