Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting Vanessa Doriott Ross Chambers . Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. xxxiv + 373. In Untimely Interventions, Ross Chambers claims that the constellation of texts known as witnessing or testimonial serve as (often unwelcome) wake-up calls in the midst of a culture that would rather remain senseless to the disaster they evoke. Through his analysis of the singular workings of texts from a broad cross-section of Western disasters, Chambers proposes that the hijacking, or détournement, of already-established genres is what allows each text to stage the obscene. This generic catachresis becomes a defining characteristic of texts that necessarily reflect the very particular historical and personal circumstances of each witness who writes. Having established the singularity of the texts in question as well as the principle of generic catachresis that makes them recognizable as untimely interventions, Chambers proposes two sub-categories of testimonial writing: discourses of extremity and phantom pain. Discourses of extremity would ostensibly be written "from the midst of the situation of (initial) trauma," whereas phantom pain would be a writing of aftermath, characteristically the work of a surviving friend, relative or lover. Yet Chambers blurs this distinction even as he establishes it, since the initial traumatic event and its aftermath are in some sense co-constitutive: the initial trauma remains present in its aftermath, which it also anticipated. The variety of rhetorical devices that Chambers identifies in his analysis of individual witnessing texts underscores, once again, the singularity of each text (for only singularity will sufficiently jar the reader out of his/her culturally-sanctioned complacency); however, the uses to which these devices are put also point to a larger phenomenon of negotiation. "Twisting the trope," "flaunting the haunt," "flounting," and "im-pertinence" (among others) all serve in the delicate balancing act of confrontation and infiltration. Bringing the obscene onto the cultural stage, making a successful wake-up call (i.e. one that will be heard, and possibly answered) requires adding the right amount of sugar to a bitter dose of medicine. This negotiation is vital as it affects not only the relationship between the writer and reader (and thus the text's ability to find a readership), but also the tenuous linking of writer, reader, and "the dead" that makes haunting (and the acknowledgement of one's being haunted) possible. We are all haunted by the trauma of past and present disaster, Chambers argues; our ethical duty, then, is to become more hospitable readers, to answer the wake-up call issued by testimonial writing. Untimely Interventions repeats, in its own way, the call that will awaken us to disaster's injustices, which continue into the present. In this respect, it is an important ethical project; far from merely enumerating the characteristics of a so-called testimonial genre, Chambers elucidates its operational mechanisms so that we as readers might become more hospitable recipients of its call. Born out of the experience of a "disastrous" course Chambers once taught on witnessing, this work proposes a pedagogical approach of accompagnement that guides its students to "[hold] the door open to the haunt." In this sense, Untimely Interventions enacts the very (un)timely intervention it seeks to describe. Vanessa Doriott Duke University Copyright © 2007 L'Esprit Créateur