Possessed by the Past: Agency, Inauthentic Testimony, and Wilkomirski's Fragments

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For reflection on the exposure of Wilkomirski's text as inauthentic, see Geller (2002 Geller , Jay . “The Wilkomirski Case: Fragments or Figments?” American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 59 ( 2002 ): 343 – 65 . [Google Scholar]); for discussion of genre, memory and the Holocaust memoir, see Hungerford (2001) and Suleiman (2000 Suleiman , Susan Rubin . “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel.” Poetics Today 21 ( 2000 ): 543 – 55 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Murphy (2004) interrogates the relationship between history and trauma theory; Whitehead (2004 Whitehead , Anne . Holocaust Fiction . Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP , 2004 . [Google Scholar]) considers Fragments in the context of Swiss cultural memory. See Lappin. For a discussion of the Holocaust as an “event without a witness,” see Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth Testimony and Survival.” I am referring here principally to the work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman as having had a founding influence. By “theories of trauma and testimony,” I wish to indicate a distinctive field of inquiry but do not intend to suggest that the critical positions it includes are identical in approach and emphasis. Louis Montrose delineates the relationship between literature and history as follows: “By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing. … By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question … and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are constructed as the ‘documents’ upon which historians ground their own texts, called ‘histories’”(20). The extent to which these theories achieve their stated objectives is, of course, subject to debate. Dominick LaCapra has offered necessary and cogent critical evaluations of work on trauma and testimony, expressing a concern that “so great has been the preoccupation with testimony and witnessing that they have in some quarters almost displaced or been equated with history” (11). However, perhaps especially in the context of such critiques, it is important to recognize the theoretical context within which this emphasis emerges. LaCapra has offered a powerful critique of Felman's work on testimony on the grounds that it is implicated in a problematic transferential relationship; this concern is most uncompromisingly expressed in LaCapra's assertion that Felman's reading of Lanzmann's Shoah is “one of celebratory participation based on empathy or positive transference undisturbed by critical judgement” (112). My interest is in the way the listener to or reader of testimony may retain a degree of agency even (and perhaps especially) when appearing to abdicate such agency through over-identification with the testifier. With regard to Fragments as a contested testimony, we might ask what desires might be invested in a wish to suppress Wilkomirski's text, to deny it a readership, and to erase the memory of its reading? Equally, what desires might be invested in a wish to recover or preserve the experience of reading Fragments as meaningful in the face of its discrediting? Indeed, to what extent might the intellectual energy invested in the production of this paper represent an unconscious attempt on the part of the author to recuperate and redeem an “innocent” initial reading of Fragments? Amy Hungerford suggests that the author of Fragments “absorbed the accounts of camp life, the stories of extreme violence, the testimonies and histories and photographs, and they finally became him, finally made him Binjamin Wilkomirski” (88). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRachel CarrollRachel Carroll lectures in English Studies at the University of Teesside in the United Kingdom. Her research interests are in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, feminist theory, and representations of subjectivity, memory, and history.