the rhetoric of disaster, bernard-donals

8/11/2019 The Rhetoric of Disaster, Bernard-Donals

1/23

Rhetoric Society of America

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd.andRhetoric Society of Americaare collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

extend access toRhetoric Society Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.125.102.33 on Thu, 12 Dec 2013 02:43:15 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancishttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis


2/23

Michael Bernard-Donals

THE RHETORIC OF DISASTER AND THE

IMPERATIVEOF

WRITING

Abstract: This essay defines

a

"rhetoricof

disaster,"

traces its origins in

Maurice Blanchot and its connection to trauma theory, explains how it

works nfigural terms to present what

otherwise defies representation,and

suggests

a relation between

the

events

of

history

and

testimonial evidence

that accounts

for

the

uncanny effect of some representationsof the Shoah.

In doing so it examines three touchstonetexts

whose sources are profoundly

traumaticevents: a

diary of

the Warsaw

ghetto

written by AbrahamLewin,

eyewitness testimonyfromthe FortunoffArchivesat YaleUniversity,and a

"memoir"

by

Binjamin Wilkomirskiwhose origin and authenticityhas been

recently and hotly disputed. The essay

argues that because an event like

the Shoah presents the writer (and her

audience) with a limit to writing

which

destabilizes what

we

traditionally think of as knowledge,

the

consequences of

a

rhetoric of disaster are troubling.

The

second half of

this

essay lays

out some

of

those

consequences

in

both

pedagogical

and

ethical terms.

If writing

the Holocaust

confronts

us with

something

"other"

than

knowledge,

in

Blanchot

's

terms,

it

is

doubtful

that we can

simply obey

the

ethical imperative never to forget

that

which we cannot remember,et

alone

know.

T

he

two most emphatic injunctions attachedto the representationof the

Shoah

appear mutually exclusive:

the first is

to burn

the

events

of the

Holocaust into

memory

so

that

they may

not be

repeated (see Wiesel;

Berenbaum);

he second is

to

resist

the

idolatry

of

representationaltogether

and remain silent

in

the face of the most horrible of atrocities

(see Koch;

Lang, "Introduction").

The first

injunctionurges

us

to

speak

of

the events

of

the Shoah, while

the

second urges us to avoid

speaking

of

them.

It is

the

impasse between speech and silence, memory and forgetting,that Maurice

Blanchot

calls

the disasterof

writing.

In

The

Writingof

the

Disaster,

Blanchot

calls the disaster

"the limit

of writing,"a limit that

"de-scribes,"

or unwrites

the

object

of

writing (7).

The

book

is an

extended rumination

on how the

events of

history

are to be found in

writing,

but in

such

a

way

that

they pre-

cede and

interrupt

he

language

of

anyone

who tries

to find

a

name,

or a

narrative,

with which to contain those events.

Writing "brings

o

the

surface

something

ike

absent

meaning,"something

"which is

not

yet

what we

would

call

thought"

because the event

precedes

the writer's

ability

to make sense of

it,

and-like the sublime

object-confounds

the

categories

that would other-

wise be available to

regularize

it

(41).

73 RSQ:

Rhetoric

Society Quarterly

Volume

31,

Number

1

Winter2001

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/23

74 RHETORICSOCIETY QUARTERLY

I intend in this

essay

to

lay

out

what might be called

a

rhetoricof disas-

ter, explain how it worksin figuralterms,and to suggesta relationbetween

the events of

history

and

testimonial evidence

taken as

history that accounts

for the

uncannyeffect

of some

representations

f the

Shoah.

In

so doing,

I'll

referto three

ouchstones,

exts whose sourcesare

profoundly raumatic vents

(though-in the

last case-they may

not be the events of the

Holocaust):

a

diary

of the Warsaw

ghetto

written

by

Abraham

Lewin, eyewitness testimony

from the FortunoffArchives at

Yale

University,

and a

memoir by Binjamin

Wilkomirski

whose

origin

and

authenticity

has

been

recently

and

hotly

dis-

puted.

If

it

is

true that

writing

an

event

like the Shoah

presents

the writer

(and her audience)with a limit to knowledge,rather hanknowledgeof the

event, and thatthis

limit

destabilizes

what

we traditionally

hink of

as

knowl-

edge,

then the

consequences

of a

rhetoricof

disaster

are

troubling.

The sec-

ond half of this

essay

will

lay

some

of

those

consequences

out

in

both

peda-

gogical

and

ethical terms.

If

writing

the Holocaust

confronts

us

with some-

thing "other" hanknowledge,

in Blanchot's

terms,

how

do

we

obey the ethi-

cal imperative

never to

forget

that which we

simply

cannot

remember,

et

alone know? The answer s that

we

cannot:a rhetoric

of

disaster,

ounded

on

a

displacement of

knowledge

rather han

ts

production,presents

us with an

impossible ethics: to remember hatwhich we cannotpossiblywriteasknowl-

edge.

The question of how

fully

a state of affairs can be

rendered

discursively

is especially

pressing

in

the case

of

historical

discourse,

in which

the verac-

ity or coherenceof

eyewitness testimony-the testimony's ability

to

render

or

represent

a series of events

in terms that

are

plausible

or

verifiable-is one

of the

pillars

on which the historical

reality

or

truthof events rests.

The stron-

ger

the

testimony-the

greater

ts

coherence and the

degree

to

which

it

can

secure

the assent of an audience

and

allow its members

to

understandwhat

happened-the

more

willing

we

are to

grant

that

the event

that

lies at its

source occurred he

way

the witness

says.

But

history's

relationto

testimony

-the relationof the events of

history

to

history

itself-has been a vexed one

from

the

beginning

of the rhetorical

tradition. To

cite

only one canonical

example,

Aristotle takes

for

grantedhistory'sstatus

as a

record of what has

happened

in

the Rhetoric

(1 360a36;

1393b25

ff.), suggesting that

the

politi-

cal orator

may

find

historical

precedent

useful for

arguing

a current ase. Yet

in the Poetics, Aristotle

makes a

distinctionbetween

poetry

and

history,sug-

gesting

that the former

is more a

philosophical

discourse than the

latter,

as it

deals with that

"which is

possible

as

being probable

or

necessary" 1451b1).

In other

words,

while

testimony may

serve as

evidence,

it is not

necessarily

the best indicationof the natureof events. The

record

of what

happenedmay



4/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC

F

DISASTER 75

not give the fullest

or most

adequaterepresentation f

the

events to which the

witness testified.

The ongoing discussion of ethos and kairos

in the

rhetorical tradition

can be seen as ways of contending with the status of

testimony (see

Bernard-

Donals, "Ethos";Sullivan). As a means of securingassent, ethos-the ex-

tent to which the speaker s able both to do justice to the

object of discourse

(to get it right), and to adhere o the good while leading the audience toward

the good as well-has traditionallybeen understoodas

deriving from the text

itself and to some degree

from

external factors

like

the speaker's history or

character.

Whether it

was

established

primarily through the persuasive act or

through he audience'spriorknowledge of the speaker'svirtue has been open

to speculation from the outset of the rhetorical radition

see Johnson). What

this means for someone like Aristotle is that in

the best

of

circumstances,

the

speaker

hews to the truthof the matter

and,

in

so doing,

is

more

likely

to be

seen by an audience as someone of good character. Quintilian's"goodman

speaking well" was essentially

a

responsible speaker who was

knowledge-

able not just about

his

subject, but also about virtue, both

in

himself and

in

his

audience;

the

best testimony

was both

logically coherent and adheredto

the principles of goodness.

Both the intrinsicandextrinsic raditions-what JamesBaumlinhas called

the "rhetorical"and the

"philosophical"

views of ethos-become troubled

when confronted with testimonies

of

events

like

the

Shoah,

events whose

weight

of

atrocity seem

to leave

a

hole

in

the

fabric

of narrative. Inherent n

Holocausttestimonies,

ike other estimoniesof trauma

pace

LangerFelman),

are the

"anguished

memories"that make themselves

apparent

n survivor's

attempts

to write the disaster

of

their

experiences

during

the events

of the

war. Langer's point

is that the

distance between

what has been witnessed

and what can be committed to

testimony-what

was seen and what can be

said-is often wide and always palpable: not only in the witness's state-

ments

but in the

shrugged shoulders,

the

winces,

the

tears,

and the silences

that

punctuate

he oral testimonies and that are aestheticized but not domes-

ticated

in

the written

language

of

figure.

On

extrinsic criteria

(the philo-

sophical view),

the worth of a

discourse, regardless

of its

ability

to

produce

knowledge

or to

accurately

record

an

event,

can

always

be

called

into

ques-

tion

if

we can

impeach

the characteror the

veracity

of a

speaker

who

cannot

tell us

precisely

what

happened

n

terms

we can

recognize.

How could what

they say

be

possible,

we

might

ask?

On

intrinsiccriteria

the

rhetorical

view),

a

testimony

would have

to

agree

with or at least corroborate

a

good

deal

of

other

eyewitness testimony

of the Holocaust

in

order

to

tell

a certaintruth. It

would

have

to

represent

a

reality

to which other witnesses have testified and

which is

internally

coherent.

(See

Daniel O'Keefe's

book, particularly

he

chapter

on

"Source

Factors,"

or a

description

of how this

problem

is

treated



5/23

76

RHETORICSOCIETY

QUARTERLY

in psychology

and communicationresearch;

or views more

consistent with

contemporary ritical andhistoriographicalheory,see CarloGinzburg'sand

Martin

Jay'sessays

on the

problems

of

verifiability

of

witnesses

in

the case

of disasters like the

Shoah.)

Holocaust

testimony

is often both

extrinsically

incredible-the

events to

which the

witness testifies

seem

impossible,

un-

real- and

intrinsicallyincoherent-exhibiting gaps, silences, and disjunc-

tions.

On

an "indicative"criterion,

however-by paying attention to

what

re-

sides

behind the

language

of the discourse rather

han

n the

speaker's

virtue

or the

degree

to which the

discourse can

be

squared

with a

state of affairs

then the extent to which a discourse has an ethicalormoralauthority,andthe

extent to which we

might

say

that

the

speaker

or writer

s

"telling

the

truth,"

depends

on the discourse's

ability

to move an

audience to "see" an issue or

an event that exceeds

language's ability

to narrate

t. In

terms of

kairos,

rather hanproviding

he criteria hatwould secure

appropriate

eactions rom

an audience

based

upon

the constraints

of

time and

place

in

which

they

find

themselves, such a

discourse would

explode

time and

place,

and indicate

what Sullivan calls

a

"fullness

of

time" that

lies

beyond any definable his-

torical situation.

An

"indicative"

or

"epideictic")

criterion

can be

found

not in the Aristotelianparadigmbutin the Platonicone: in the former,ethos

finds

its source

in

the

virtue

of

the

speaker

and that

it

has an

effect

upon

the

quality

of

knowledge

that the

speech produces;

n

the

latter t

finds its source

in the speech's

ability

to indicate

(though

perhapsnot produce) knowledge,

and

to the

extent that

it

manages

to indicate

what

lies

beyond

the

contingen-

cies

of

the world the

speakermay

be considered

of

betteror

worse character.

In

Phaedrus and

Gorgias,

Plato

suggests

that

language

leads

speaker

and

listener

to Truth

by indicating

rather han

by

producing

t.

Socrates' second

speech

on love

(Phaedrus 244a-257b)

figurally represents

the

cosmology

wherebyan investmentin love and beautybringssouls closer to their

point

of

origin;

it does not

produce knowledge

of that

cosmology.

But

the

figural

effect

of

the

speech-as

well

as

the

object

of

representation tself,

a mne-

monic

whereby

the soul is

perfected

as

it

glimpses

an

object

that reminds it

of its

former

perfection-indicates

what lies

beyond

the

contingencies

of the

world (where,

in

the Gorgias [469b-c], Socrates

magines

the

possibility of a

state of affairs in which

he

may

neither do nor

suffer

harm).

The

relation

between truthas content and

what

lies

beyond

truth-what

might

be

called,

in

psychoanalytic

terms the "real"-is the matter

at issue

in

the

debate, late

in

the Phaedrus, on the

value of

writing. When,

in

Socrates'

retelling

of

the

myth

of the

origins

of

writing,

Ammon

charges

that

writing

is not

a drug for

memory,

but

for

reminding (275a),

he is

making

a

claim similar to

the one

Socrates makes

in his

second

speech

on

love aboutthe

perfection of

the

soul:

that

in

seeing

the

beauty

of the

lover,

the

soul

is

reminded of

its origin in



6/23


FDISASTER

77

perfection

and is

compelled

to return

there (249b-e).

Writing cannot bring

the object of knowledge to the reader, any more than the lover can bring

about

the

perfection

of

the soul. But writing does (in

Socrates' words)

re-

mind the reader of

it,

but does not

represent

the

object.

In

fact, the conun-

drum for Plato's Socrates is whether

rhetoric

produces truth

or an

image

of

truth,

and most readersof the

Phaedrus

suggest

that

the best

it can do is the

latter.

What writing and, ideally, rhetoric can do, however,

is indicate that

which is

"really written in the soul"

(278a), what lies at the source of lan-

guage-what

lies at its

point

of

origin

but to which

language does not

pro-

vide unfetteredaccess.'

It is preciselythis relationbetweenlanguage and the events that precede

or lie outside

it

-

between

writing

and

the disaster-that

occupies

Blanchot's

attention in The

Writingof

the Disaster.

There Blanchot makes

clear

that

experience is

a

state

of

being

that

requiresknowledge. The occurrenceof the

event

in

which a

person

is

implicated

and

sees herself as

suchprecedes expe-

rience. It is immediate:

"not only

[does it] rule out all mediation; it is the

infiniteness of a

presence

such

that

it

can no longer be spoken

of' (24).

In

the occurrenceof the

event,

the

individual s "expose[d] to unity": n orderto

render he occurrenceas anexperience

at all-in orderfor

the occurrence to

be seen as an event-the individualbecomes defined as a subject. She be-

comes an

"I"

over

against

which the

event can also

be

identified, given

at-

tributes,

and

finally

named. At the

moment the individual

recognizes

the

occurrence

of the event as an

experience,

and herself

as the

subject

of

expe-

rience,

the event "falls

in

its turn

outside

being" (24).

Experiences, recog-

nized by the witness and

named,

are

nonetheless haunted

by their status

as

events,

and "the names

[are] ravagedby

the absence

thatprecededthem"-

the event now lost to

memory

except

as a name-and "seem

remainders,

each

one,

of

another

anguage,

both

disappearedand neveryet

pronounced,

a

language

we

cannot

even attempt

o

restorewithout

reintroducing hese names

back

into

the world"

(58).

Cathy

Caruth'swork on

traumasubstantiates his

claim: what the

wit-

ness sees isn't available to

memory

because

seeing precedes

the

witness's

ability

to know what she sees. Once an

experience occurs,

it is

forever

lost,

and it is at the

point

of

"losing

what we have to

say,"

that we

speak (Blanchot

21). It

is

the point

at

which the event is lost thatwriting

begins. For we don't

remembera traumatic vent so

much

as we

forget it;

we "take eave of

it,"

in

Caruth's

erms, though

it leaves an

indelible mark on

everything

we

say

in-

cluding

the

subject

of the

narrativeof the event. The distance between what

has been witnessed and

what

can be committed to

testimony-what

was

seen

and what can be said-is often wide and

always palpable:

not

only

in the

witness's statements

but in

the

shruggedshoulders,

the

winces,

the

tears,

and

the

silences

that

punctuate

he oral

testimonies and that are aestheticized but



7/23

78

RHETORICSOCIETY

QUARTERLY

not domesticated in the written language

of

figure.

Asked

to describe the

deathof hermotherin the Lodz ghetto, the survivor namedMaryR. lapses

into a recitationwith

which she is familiar

as docent at a

Holocaustmuseum:

"very difficult; I don't even like to

think about t. In all eleven million

civil-

ian

people

killed

in

the

concentration

camps

..."

(Stanovick

1-2).

Such an

intrusionupon narrative-typical

of

some survivor testimonies-is a

mark

of something

else,

the

event

that troubles

history.

The testimony

of Moses S. offers

another

example

of the

apparent

m-

passe

between the event and

experience,

what

has

happened

and

what can be

represented.

Two boys havingone bunk. One

said to the

other,

"Will

you watch

aftermy piece of

bread?I'm

going

to thebathroom."

He

said,

"OK."

When he come back,

was

no bread. Where was the bread?

"

I'm

sorry.

I ate it

up."

So he reported

to

the Kapo. Kapo

comes

along,

he

said, "What

happened?"

"

Look,

I

ask

him

to look after

my piece

of

bread,and he ate

it

up."

The Kapo said, "Youtook away his life, right?"

He said, "Well,

I'll

give

it back this

afternoon,

he ration."

He said, "No,

come outside."

He

took the fellow outside. "Lieon

the floor." He

put

a

piece

of

brett

[board]

on his

neck,

and

with his

boots-bang

On

his neck.

Fertig [finished] (FVAtape

T-5

11)

What is perhaps

most

chilling

about

this

tape

is not

the

content of

the

story-

of

the experience-itself,

but of what cannot be

placed

into the

narrative:

he

cracking

of the board

against

the

child's

neck,

the

quick,

almost

franticwalk

outside the barracks o the

yard,

the look of

panic

in the

boy's eyes just

be-

fore the

Kapo

sentences

him to

death.

They

find

no

place

in the

language

of

narrative,

but

they

do

have a

place

in

the

testimony

of

Moses

S.:

in

his

ges-

tures.

Here,

in

the

no-place

of the

narrative,

s the

gaping,open wound,

the

disaster of

experience

seen

by

Moses S.

(who may

be the other

boy;

we

never

find out) and that is witnessedonly

in

terms of the

ending-fertig -or the

absence

of

Moses's

own

place

in

the historical circumstanceshe

narrates.In

Langer's terms,

the self

caught up

in

the time

during

the

killing

wins the

battle

over the

present,

so

sickening

the interviewer

and Moses's

wife that

they

both

urge

him

to call

it

quits.

But

on

Blanchot's

terms,

the

witness

is

making present

an

absence that

so

disrupts

his

present

that

they become ab-

solutely inseparable,

so

much

so that Moses's

language

becomes submerged

by his gestures, and

he

actually,

with

a

motion of his

hands

and his feet,

becomes

the

Kapo

and

finishes

the

memory

with

the violence

that killed the



8/23


F DISASTER

79

little thief forty-five years earlier.

What, precisely,is the act witnessedhere by the survivor: he momentof

the child's death? The moment that

the witness realizes

that the crime of

eating another child's

bread has led not to justice but murder?

Neither of

these historical circumstances is made

available by the testimony, though

both of these moments

are partof thenarrative.But this is

a language report-

ing not so much

a series of events buta language that nstantiates

a ruptureof

the

normal sequence

of events-in this

case, the historicalcircumstancesof

Moses S.'s

witness to murder-fertig -and

the anxiety

of forty years that

it

has caused. This

language indicates he

absence of the eventwitnessed rather

than the event itself. The abruptnessof the final word does not provide ac-

cess to

the

event itself,

but

indicatessomething

like its loss to memory,

its

unavailability in the language of the

narrative,and yet

also interrupts(in

Blanchot's

terms) that narrativewith the force of the disaster

(59, 7). Moses

S.'s

exclamation

provides a glimpse of the absence that

marks the act

of

witness and the

failure of language to

contain it.

If

testimony

like Moses S.'s works by indication rather

than by repre-

sentation,and the event to which the witness testifies bearsan obliquerela-

tion to the

language

of

thetestimonyitself, then the historian

must

find some

other

criterion

with

which to

judge

the reliability

or

truth

of

testimonial

evi-

dence

besides its

transparency.

This was the problemHayden

Whitetried to

solve in

1990

when,

at

a conference

on Nazism and the Finalsolution

held at

UCLA,

he turned o the

catalogue

of

figures providedby

rhetoric.

(Though

in this section

I

run the risk of falling

into a trap Brian

Vickers has warned

about

in his

conclusion

to

In

Defense of

Rhetoric-namely, focusing

atten-

tion on all too

few

figures,

in

this case

metaphor,metonymy,

and

synechdoche

-it will

nonetheless give some idea

of

how

the rhetoricof disasterfunctions

in

practice

and

not

only

in

theory.)

The traditionalview

of

historical

narra-

tives

and

of

testimonies

is

that their

veracity was

linked to their transpar-

ency:

the

language

of

history

is meant to providea window through

which

we see

clearly

the events themselves. But

if

languagedoesn't

yield the events

of

historythis simply-particularly

events

whose effect upon

the

witness or

historical actor is brutallytraumatic-there

must be

some way to convey

not

just

events but also to

register

or

indicate

the traumatickernel

of their effect.

White

proposes

that

the

most effective historical

writing

s "intransitive

writ-

ing,"

a

term

he

adopts

from

Lang (who

in

turnattributes

t

to Roland

Barthes;

see Act

and Idea

xii, 107-9).

It works

by drawing

he reader'sattention

o the

impossibility

of

making

the

substitution

of herself

for the historical

actor,

the

difficulty

of

saying

"I

am

here,"

I

understand.

It

brings

to the surface

of the

historical

narrative

the

aporias

that exist between

subject

and

object, agent



9/23

80

RHETORIC

SOCIETY

QUARTERLY

andpatient, iteral

and

figurative anguage,

and

makes

thatcase for the

reader

than it is not one or the other of these poles thatought to be the object of

historical nquirybut rather he writing itself and

the

way that

it resists

read-

ing, or naming, or

knowledge.

In

other words,

it

resists

verisimilitude,

the

will to

representation.

One

way

to think of verisimilitude s

in

terms

of

the

rhetorical

or

poeti-

cal figure,andthe

degree

to which

figure

makes

present

a

state

of

affairs and

holds the reader's attentionon matters of

language. Metaphor s tradition-

ally understoodas

a

figure

that

works

by way

of

substitution:

n

Aristotle's

example,

"therestands

the

ship,"

the

term

"anchored" s

substitutedfor the

term"stands,"andthrough he difference betweenthe spoken word and the

unspoken(butintuited)one,

our

attention

s

focused not

only upon

the

close-

ness of one set of experiences(whichwe may

recognize) and another which

we may not); it is also

focused upon

its

dependence

upon language. Depend-

ing on the number

of

terms that are substituted

n

the

silence

of

the analogy

(and

in

Aristotle's

understanding

of

poeisis,

the skilled

speaker

could hold

four terms

n

a relation

of

similarity

n

a

single

figure)

the

readeror

listener's

ability

to

individuate

the

terms

in use

becomes

jarring

as the

distance be-

tween

them

in

the

analogy grows.

In an

extreme

circumstance-kenosis,

in

which a set of terms is so farremoved, in terms of similarity,from another

that it

begins

to

systematically

undo

their claim to

order-metaphor

"breaks

up

a

totality

into

discontinuous

fragments" (De

Man

275), disordering

our

illusion

of the

coherence

of the

real supplied by figure, andforcing upon us

the realization that the chain of

signification (founded

upon metonymy,

a

relation

of

contiguity

rather han

substitution)

s

just that,

a chain that

is un-

hitched

from

the

world

of

the real.

White's

assumption

s

that the

metonymic

relation-in

which the

terms

substituted

or

one anotherare

so

closely

relatedthat

they repeatthemselves

endlessly-is that upon which "normal"discourse (or, perhaps,historical

discourse)

is

founded. In an

essay

on

figurative

language,

Thomas

McLaughlinsays

of

metonymy

that it

"accomplishes

ts transfer

of meaning

on the basis of associationsthat

develop

out of

specific contexts,"

and

"that

t

relies

on

connections that buildup over time and

the associations of usage"

(83, 84).

For

White,

the

importance

of

metonymy

is that the terms

placed

in

relation

("sail,"

"ship")

are assumed to be related in

the

given context, and

because of

what

he calls this extrinsic relation

(that

there

must be

some

order

of

reality

outside

the discursive

situation that

provides

the context

in

which

these

terms

may

be

related),

the reader s able to

understand

more

clearly

the

aspects

of the

reality

he

metonymic igure

s

meant

o

distinguish Metahistory

34-6).

In

other

words, metonymy, hrough

a

repetition

of

differentaspects of

the same

reality,

offers the

readera

clearer,more direct

understandingof the

nature

of

the

reality being described. With

metonymy, cause-effect relation-



10/23


F DISASTER

81

ships

are so well established that we are lulled into

believing

that

what we

are being given is a description of the real under a paradigm. Metaphor

distances us from our ability to regularize our assumptions about the

reality

purportedlybeing

described.

Metonymy

is

transitive,

whereas

metaphor

s-

or

at least has the capacityto be-intransitive (see White, Metahistory

37-8);

metonymy assumes that history (the context presumed to be exterior to dis-

course)

is the

origin

of

language, whereas metaphorassumes

that

language

is

the origin of the historicalreal.

But Blanchot tells

us

that

when an

individual bears witness to an

event,

particularly

an event like

the

murder of

a child or the destruction

of

one's

culture, the event itself, lost to memory and to knowledge, exerts such a

pressureon narrative hat it destroys it. In rhetorical erms, the disaster is an

effect

of

discourse that focuses the reader's attentionon the impossibility of

substituting

oneself

for

the "I" of

the narrative. One implication of the

disaster's effect upon the narrativeof history is that regardless of the

rhetori-

cal vehicle

in

which we place the event-either in the transparent,metonymic

language of chronicle or

in

the denser,metaphoric anguage of poetry-none

can

do justice to

the

events

that

precede writing.

Even

the language of

chronicle,

the

relentless shorthand ecordof the events that

take

placebefore

the witness's eyes, would on Blanchot's account be unable to contain the

disaster,

the

irretrievable vent.

An

example of just such a chronicleis AbrahamLewin's account, pub-

lished

in

1988 under

the title A

Cup of Tears, of

his

years

in

the Warsaw

ghetto. Thataccount was one of several othersthatwere eventuallyburied in

milk

cans

in

basements

n

the

ghetto and

retrieved

n

the

years following

the

end of

the

war.

Lewin's account, along with the remembrances of

others

who survived the

deportations

and the

camps (and many

others who

didn't),

form the core of the historical

accounts of

the

liquidation

of

the Warsaw

ghetto.

Like

the videotapedtestimonies provided by survivors,

the

descrip-

tions

given by

Lewin are oftentimes

harrowing:

of ruses used

by government

forces to

separate

children

from

their

parents,

acts of

brutality

both

by

the

German

military police

and

by

the

Jewish

police,

and

the

political

and

theo-

logical convolutions of the Jewish councils and other civic organizationsas

they

tried to

justify

a

consistent response to the

orders

to be "resettled." But

Lewin's

account,

more so even than those found

in

the Fortunoff

Archive,

offers extremes of

metonym,

abbreviationsso

transparent

as to

put pressure

on White's

distinctions

between normal

history

and

figural representation.

Lewin

writes,

"A

night

of

horrors.

Shooting

went

on all

night.

I

couldn't

sleep,"

andthen lists

the

names of the families

whose members were rounded

up

and led

to

the

umschlagplatz,

where

they

would be

loaded onto trains and

sent to

Treblinka.

The

metonymic language

of lists

is

difficult to make sense

of,

and

exceedingly

difficult

to "read

hrough"

as

a

window

into the

experi-



11/23

82 RHETORICSOCIETY

QUARTERLY

ences

of someone

like

AbrahamLewin

for

threereasons:

the

context

in

which

the items on the list are meaningful to the writer s unspoken; he events that

surround hose listed by

the

writers are simply unknown

to him

(the experi-

ence of the

trains,

and the

camps);

and the occurrence

of

events,

and their

impact upon the witness, is simply lost to

memory,

and

all

we have

are

traces

in

the language of the narrative estimony.

Though

Lewin

sometimes does provide a historical (or

more

often than

not a cultural)context

in which

to understand

he event

by

making compari-

sons between objects or events

from

radically

different

paradigms

n

his en-

tries (as he does when he compares the liquidation

of the

ghetto in 1942 to

the worst ordeals of the Jews in the land of Mitzrayim),he more often lists

them in shorthand.

They

are often

tiresomely, gruesomely

similar

events,

and names

appear

after

names,

lists

that

should,

on White's

accounting,

lull

the reader

nto

understanding

hat

what

is

being repeated

s

simply

sameness:

"Today he Germans

have surrounded he

following

streets:

Gesia, Smocza,

Pawia, Lubiecka,

and took

away

all the

occupants. Yesterday

he

following

were

taken away: Khanowicz, Rusak,

and Jehoszua

Zegal's

whole

family"

(Lewin 146). It takes a footnote by

the

editor

to make the

reader

understand

that Johoszua

Zegal

was

the

grandfather

f Lewin's wife

Luba,

and

no

notes

establishthe context for the names of the streets that were surrounded,and

what

events

took

their

toll

upon

the

inhabitantsof the

houses on

those

streets

bordering

the Jewish

cemetery

on

the

western

side

of the

ghetto.

It

is

the

effect of

repetition-of

the

"transitivity"

of

metonym,

the

figure

that lulls

one into thinking

that

"I know

this,"

and that

allows us to

forget

that

"I

was

not there"-that seems

to work

against

White's

claims

for

transitive

writing.

In

Blanchot's

terms-in

terms

of the rhetoric of

disaster-the

position

of the writer

(the position

of the

"I")

is here annulled

by

the

zero-point

of

language,

the

point

at which the events become written

and

named and si-

multaneously-as they

are

written-dissolve as

experiences.

The

repetitive

language

of

metonym here,

in which street names and

family

names are run

together

as a

litany

of

destruction,

seem alien to

both the

writer and to the

reader.

It

is a

language

unconnected to the network of other words or

signs

that

might

make

possible

even an

imaginaryposition

from

which to see and

understand

heir

object. Writing-any writing-involves

two moments

that

work

against

each

other: the moment

in

which we

create a

name for the

ob-

ject,

and

that

in

which the

object itself,

which

becomes

lost in the

moment

of

writing, exerts a pressure upon the language

of

the name, or

narrative,

of

history.

In

Lewin's

diary

we see this

entry,

written on

the

day

after his wife of

fourteen

years

is taken

away

and

transported:

Eclipse

of the

sun,

universal blackness.

My

Luba was taken

away



12/23


F

DISASTER

83

during

a

blockade on 30

Gesia

Street. There

is still

a

glimmer

of

hope

in front of me. Perhaps she will be saved. And if, God forbid,she is

not?

My journey o theUmschlagplatz-the appearance f

the

streets-

fills

me with dread. To my anguish there is no

prospect

of

rescuing

her.

It looks like she was

taken directly to

the

train.

Her fate

is to be

a victim

of

the

Nazi bestiality, along with hundreds of

thousands of

Jews.

I

have no words

to

describe my desolation.

I

ought

to

go after

her, to die. But I have no strength to take such

a step. Ora-her

calamity.

A

child who was

so

tied

to

her

mother,

and how she

loved

her.

The "action"goes on in the town at full throttle. All the streets are

being emptied of their

occupants.

Total chaos. Each German

actory

will

be

closed

off in its

block and the people

will

be

locked

in

their

own

building. Terrorand blackness. And over all

this

disaster

hangs

my

own

private anguish. (Lewin 153-4)

Here

writing obeys the obligationto name: Lewin tries

desperately

to

build a

position from which to write ("myown

private anguish,"

"my desolation")

at

the

same time that he tries to

imagine

the other individuals and events

that

form the context for his writing ("thepeople will be locked in their build-

ing," "God

forbid,

if

she is not [saved]?"). But neither

position

is

finally

fixed,

in

part because neither name nor any part

of

the

historical narrative

Lewin

tries

to write

can be understood n

terms

of

any

other. This

is

not

due

to the

historical circumstances in which Lewin is

involved,

circumstances

that

prevent

him from

understanding

he

enormity

of the

disasters

(his

own

and that of

the

ghetto).

It is due instead

to

writing'sinability

to

renderwhat

he

sees without

reducing it

to

narrative. At the moment of

writing,

Lewin

displacesboth the

"I"

and

the "other"

rom

which, and

to

whom,

he writes

as

well

as the historical

event of the disaster. It is this moment

of

displacement,

the moment of

writing

and of

loss,

that

produces

a

violence,

"the

rupture,

he

break

the

splitting,

the

tearing of

the

shred-acute

singularity,single point"

(Blanchot

46).

It is

here that events-Luba's

deportation,

he

terrorof their

daughter

at

being

made

motherless,

the mechanical and

awful

willingness

to

continue to

speak

in

the

face

of

all this-are

omitted from the

language

of

the

writing

but are made

present

in

the absence

of

the

writing.

The intention

to

write

is shatteredby the event's

ability

to elude

writing.

In

both Lewin's diary andin the

testimonies by

survivors,

in

both liter-

ary representations

ike Primo Levi's or

in the

painful

extemporaneity

of the

diary

or the oral

testimony,

there is

something

in

the events

of

the

Shoah that

resists

vraisemblance,

and that makes itself

apparent

n

figural (that is,

rhe-

torical)

terms.

This

is true

not

only

of

accounts

which,

in

Langer's terms,

"remind

us that we are

dealing

with a

self-consciously

representedreality"



13/23

84

RHETORIC

SOCIETY

QUARTERLY

(Langer 40) through the language

of

metaphor,but also those

which

are

de-

signed to be, in White's terms,"read hrough." f we takeBlanchot seriously,

we need to recognize that there is a certain intransitivity hat occurs even

metonymically-even

in

language

that

on

the face

of it

seems

to

regularize

the

narrative,

vraisemblable historical world-in

historical

texts

that rends

open

that

apparently

historicalorderand confrontsthe readerwith

the disas-

ter.

The pedagogical implicationof a rhetoricof disaster s

complicated and

potentially troubling. Theoristsof writing have paida good deal of attention

in the last several

years to

the

ways

in which

the events

of the Holocaust, as

rendered

in fiction and in testimonial

accounts,

can be seen as points

of de-

parture

or discussions of

diversity,

or race

hatred,

or the role

of

resistance,

or

any

number of

other

controversial opics.

The

assumption

we generally

make

in

courses

like

these is thattheirgoal should be to produceknowledge

of the events of

the

Shoah and,

whenever

possible,

to

connect that

knowl-

edge

with other

knowledges-of

the

dynamics

of

poverty,

or of racism, or

of

other

disasters

or

genocides.

But

while

there is clear documentaryevidence

available, for example, to suggest to us the operationsof the mobile killing

squads

that

followed

behind the

invasion

of the Russianand Polish

pale,

and

though

there is

enough testimonialevidence

to

suggest

to us the

experiences

of

individuals

involved in the

killing (both survivors

and

collaborators),

hat

evidence

cannot bring

knowledge

into accord with the events themselves.

The

problem

is a

rhetorical

one: the

severity

of

the

events witnessed defies

the

historically transparentwriting we generally assume to be the best

ve-

hicle for reportingthem. The testimony of even the most reliable witness

succumbs to

the

displacement

of the events

from

the

language

of the narra-

tive, and

the

effect

of

such

a

narrative-of

its

intransitivity-is

what Saul

Friedlanderhascalled, in another ontext, uncanny. Through t,"we are

con-

fronted with [an uncertaintybroughton by the representation]

f

human

be-

ings of the most ordinarykind approaching he state of automataby eliminat-

ing any feelings

of

humanness and

of

moral sense .... Our sense

of

Unheimlichkeit

uncanniness]

s

indeed triggeredby this deep

uncertaintyas

to the 'true nature"'of

the referent

of

the narrative tself (Friedlander

30).

The

effect of

the

uncanny

n

the

writing class

is

that,faced

with

the enormity

of

the

events as

described

in

halting, incomplete and yet horrifyingtestimo-

nies

and

documents,

studentshave a

very

difficult

time

evaluating

that

writ-

ing,

let alone

trying

to find

language

with which to write themselves.

How

can

you possibly

assess

the

authority

of

the sources

you

read,

and the charac-

ter of

the witnesses who

have

writtenthem, when you are absolutely shat-

tered

by

their

effect?



14/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC OF DISASTER

85

To take only one recent example of this

problem, Andrea Freud

Loewensteinwrites that during he springsemester of 1996 atMedgar Evers

College,

her

introduction

of

Spiegelman's

Maus

in a

second-semester writ-

ing courseproduced

ome startling eactions rom

classmembers.

In

addition o

seeing the

book

-

a

depiction

of Art

Spiegelman's

collection of

testimonies

from his father,who

survived he Holocaust

n

Poland,

n

comic

book form-as

a

way to prompther

students o writing, she also saw the section of the course

in

which she used

the book as an opportunity o "challengethe anti-semitism

I

heard from my

students,"and

to "thinkmore

widely about the origins and

effects of stereotypesand

prejudice,

o

see

themselves not

only as victims of

stereotypingand prejudice,but also as perpetrators"419). By asking her

students

to

write about the

book,

and about their identities as

"minorities,"

Loewenstein'sstudentsbeganto find

a

language

with

which to

express

knowl-

edge

of

Judaism,

of the events of the

Holocaust,

and

of

their own

very

com-

plicated positionsas individualsdefinedby color,or

ethnic category, or gen-

der,

or

variouscombinations thereof. She concludes that several of her stu-

dents "embarkedon their own

projects: writing

comic-strip texts, making

films, or writingcreatively about their own family situations"

(419).

The

account of the class includes

transcripts

of

her students' conversations and

some excerptsfrom theirwriting, writingwhich seems to indicate a desire to

come

to conclusions about the

subject

of

the Shoah and of their

experiences

but which

falls short

of

the

mark

for various

reasons,

one

of which may be

the

pressure-the

disaster-of the circumstancesof the

writing

itself.

But Loewenstein's postscriptpoints to

the

greater

difficulty

of

seeing

a

relationbetween the

events

of

history-in

this

case,

Spiegelman's attempt

o

work throughhis father's experiences

in

the camps

and

his own

very difficult

experiences as the son

of

a Holocaust survivor-and the

writing

of

those

events

into

a

narrative

of

history

or of

experience.

There

she tells

her

readers

that one of her

colleagues

at

Medgar

Evers drew

her

aside to show

her a

paper

n

which one of her studentshad

"'really

made

a

leap

forward n

under-

standing,"'

n

which the student,

one of those who'd been in

Loewenstein's

class a

year earlier,

had lifted sections of

a

paper

from

the earlier

class and

grafted

them

into the paper for

the second

instructor's course

on

an

alto-

getherdifferent

subject.

Loewenstein

provides

two

possible

reasons for this:

the student was

pleased

with

her

insight

and

"merely

decided to

recycle it,"

or that

t was a

cynical

exercise in

giving

the

(second)

teacher

what

she

wanted.

But there

is

another,

more

fundamental,explanation:

the

student's sense of

the material

from

the

classes on

Maus,

and her

ability

to record that sense in

conventional

terms,

are

irremediably

divided

by

the

passage

of

the events of

the class

from

event to

experience. Loewenstein,

like most

teachers,

is will-

ing to see her student's writing

as a faithful record of an

insight

or

under-

standing-of

learning-that

came

to the student

in

class,

and

that to have



15/23

86 RHETORICSOCIETY QUARTERLY

grafteda passage from thatwriting nto an essay for a differentclass is tanta-

mount to a "recycling"of the insight. This is to miss the point, however, that

at best writing s indicative of events, or

in

this case of ideas, that precede the

writing itself, and that the studentmay well have seen the recycled passage

as bearing the imprintof

an

event or experience that could not otherwise be

narrated. The passage, in other words, may be related both to the "leap for-

ward in understanding" xperienced in the second class as well as to the

insight gained in the first, but it is a relation that can only be surmised.

Topress the point a little, it's also possible to suggest thatthe student's

writing marksa universal knowledge that stands n place of a particularone,

that it substitutesa conventional knowledge for a more traumatic,compli-

cated, and unwritablesense thatis impossible to know except as a moment

that precedes language altogether (for a more troubling

view of this same

point,

see

Gourevitch, "What hey Saw...").

The

passage reads,

in

part:

We

were both

[Blacks

and

Jews] packed

like sardines

and

sent

away

from ourhomelands, he Jews by trainsand the Blacks by boat. ...[T]he

German solution

for

the Jews was

total

destruction;

the White solu-

tion for the

Blacks

was

total

utilization.... Unlike the

Jews,

Blacks

were considered more useful alive then [sic] dead. Now wheneverI

pass the intersectionof New

YorkAve

and EasternParkway

I

can ob-

serve the Jews with new

insight, comprehension,

and realization of

our common

experience. (Loewenstein

41

1)

Though the student expresses a sense of her "common experience"

as an

African

American student

with

those

of Jews

during

the

Holocaust, there

is

clearly

more

going

on here: an

expression

of

anger,

a sense of

discontinuity

between the historical circumstancesof the Shoah and

the

middle

passage,

a

connection between the

geography

of

New York and

the

machinery

of de-

struction

n

Europe

and

the Atlantic. The student'sconclusion

is an

attempt

to

forge

a

knowledge

from her

particular

and

very

difficult

position

in

the

midst of an experience she

is

at pains to fully understand.

What she

has

written,

in

otherwords, respondsto the disciplinarydemands of the writing

course,

and

of the

pedagogical

demandsof

a

teacherwhose

trajectory

or this

section of the

class

is

to foster a

sense

of

diversity

and to work

against

stereo-

types.

But the

language

of this

passage

marks

a

limit

to these imperativesby

writing against them, by exerting a pressure upon them that can't be con-

tained

by

the

essay's language.

In

short,

there seems to

be

some other

event,

some

other

insight,

that

functions

as the

origin of

this

narrative, o

it should

come as

no

surprise

to Loewenstein that the

narrativecould

be

used

as a

markerof

something that she herself may not be able to recognize.

What this suggests is that while we may glimpse a trace of the event's



16/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICF DISASTER

87

horror,

we

do

so at the

expense

of

knowledge. Or,

to

put

this another

way,

writing he disastermay indicate he event thatrupturesnarrative,but it doesn't

build

knowledge

of

it,

and in fact works

against knowledge's grain.

The

injunction o see the Holocaust as an event that must never be forgotten, and

that acts

as

a

paradigm

or race

hatred,

or

antisemitism,

or

the cultural

logic

of

fascism, seems to insist uponfinding

a

language with which the events of

the

Holocaust can

be

written,

understood,

dentified with

or

against.

But

if

the

events

of the

Shoah are paradigmatic

of

the intransigenceof events to

writing, or of the way testimony

both creates and destroys the language of

witnessing, then any attempt to

integrate

the

Holocaust into a pedagogy of

writing needs to deal with the possibility thatin asking students to write (on)

the

Holocaust we

are

asking them

to

do

something utterly impossible

or

at

the

very least traumatic.

What this means forpedagogy is that we need to resist the temptationto

think of

writing

as

a

medium

that

represents

states of affairs.

This

is

true

both

of the writing our students read

-

in

testimonies, histories, and other

narratives and the writing our

studentsproduce. Identificationof the kind

evidenced by Loewenstein's studentsis only one example of what happens

when

one attempts

to

bring the traumatic

effect of

figural displacement (in

her case, in Spiegelman's Maus) undera universal knowledge. What the

Holocaust shows, perhaps more

clearly than other traumaticevents, is that

discourse

cannot

representwhat has been

seen,

and

that

at best it

indicates

the

effect

upon

the witness

of

what she

saw. Even

the most

explicit attempt

to

regularizethe horrible

particularity,

o

elide what resists

naming

with a

knowledge, indicates,

n

its incommensurabilities,

what

lies behind

t:

"eleven

million

...

six million ...

one and

a half

million";

"Unlike

the Jews, Blacks

were

considered more useful alive

than dead ...

[I realize] our common ex-

perience."

Blanchotworries that by reading the testimonies of events as The Holo-

caust,

we

destroy

the

effects of the

particular:

Fragmentation, he mark

of

a coherence all the

firmer in

that it has to

come undone

in

order to be

reached,

and

reached

not

through

a dis-

persed system,

or

through

dispersion

as

a

system,

for

fragmentation

s

the

pulling

to

pieces (the tearing)

of

that which never has

preexisted

(really

or

ideally)

as

a

whole,

nor

can it ever be reassembled

in

any

future

presence

whatever.

(60)

There

is,

in

the

disaster,

the

beginning

of an ethics: the disaster

occurs

when

one's

particular mplication

in the

event

is held

up

as

everyone's implication,

making

it a universal

experience,

and

producing

a

knowledge

of the whole

in

contrast to the

impasse

itself.

We are better off

focusing

our attention on



17/23

88 RHETORICSOCIETY

QUARTERLY

those impasses-as revealed in the synechdochic or metonymic stutters

n

diaries like Lewin's, or testimonies like those of a Moses S. or a Mary

R.-

and

deferring

our students' desires to

produce knowledge

of the event, to

act

as though we can ourselves make sense of an event we did not

see and did not

experience. If we see writing as an indication of an event rather han a repre-

sentationof it, and we make clear to students that even the best

writing pro-

duces impasse as much as it produces nsights, thenperhapsthe best

we

can

hope

for

is

that our students produce writing

that

makes

clear the gap

or

impasse between the representationand represented,and see

their response

to such incongruitiesas the site of knowing

and

teachingthat keeps

horror

itself recognizable.

I

want to conclude by indicating one of the ethical

implications of

a

rhetoricof disaster. As

I

intimatedat the beginning

of

the essay,

I think those

implications complicate

some

assumptions

we

generally

hold about

the

eth-

ics

of

Holocaust remembrance-and of redemption-that are

usually associ-

ated with the

injunctions

"never

forget," and

"never

again."

If

Blanchot

is

right, and a witness's participation

n

the events

of

history-particularly

traumaticorhorribleevents like those indicatedby testimonies and diariesof

people like AbrahamLewin-are irrecuperable xcept throughhe fragmented

and troubled narratives hat fail to

contain them,

then the

only

connection

between the

event,

as

"in-experienced,"and

the

testimony

of the event,

as

the

writing

of the

disaster,

is

tenuous

at

best.

In

the

case

of the Lewin

diary,

it

may well serve evidence of the events comprisingthe concentration

and

liquidationof the Warsawghetto, insofar as it stands as

an

"eyewitness

testi-

mony"

to those

events.

And

the historical circumstances

of the

diary itself,

found as it was on a site

recalled

by

other

witnesses

long after the authorhad

been killed andeverytrace of the ghettohad beenannihilated,would seemto

bear out and

confirm

its

status

as evidence. But what

if,

for whatever

reason,

those

historical circumstances-corroborating witnesses,

documents, place

namesrecollected-could not be recovered? In such a case, the best we can

do is

to

rely upon

the effect of the

diary

itself.

Hayden

White would argue

that its status as evidence

depends

in

part upon

its

effect,

and that effect-

producedmetonymically either by design or by circumstance-is, in the case

of the Lewin

diary,

a

profoundly disturbing

one.

The

case of the Wilkomirski"memoir"Fragments-initially

believed to

be an

account

of

the author's

horrifying experiences as

a child in

the death

camps,

it

turns out to

be

either a willful

fabrication

or

a compilation

of night-

mare visions and

voyeuristic research by someone who believes himself to

be

a

survivorof

Majdanek

andAuschwitz

(see accounts

of

the controversy

n

Lappin;Gourevitch,

"The

MemoryThief')-puts even more

pressureon the



18/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICFDISASTER 89

relation between the effects of a testimony and its source. If we only judge a

testimony by its effects, Fragments works metonymically rather han meta-

phorically, and it produces in the reader

an

uncanny response that could be

likened to the effect of the disasteron White's or Blanchot'sterms. The book

is a series of horrifying ableaux hatmove between the atrocitiesof the camps

and the nightmareof an adoption after the war

in

which those aroundhim

urge

the survivor

to forget

his

experiences.

But such a

result

is

disturbing-

Wilkomirski

may be a liar,

after

all;

no one would

say

the

same of

Abraham

Lewin or Moses S.-and it is all the

more

profoundlyso

if

it leads, as Philip

Blom has

suggested, to

an

"ero[sion of]

the

very ground

on which

remem-

brancecan be built" (Blom) andleads eventuallyto "anew revisionism that

no

longer attacks the truth

of

the

Holocaust but

only individual claims of

survival" (Peskin). Does the ambivalent

relation

of

narrative

and the inac-

cessible real of

history, the difficulties

inherent

n

writing

an

event

and the

elusiveness of the event itself, allow

for such a

radical reading of the

Wilkomirski

memoir, and of eyewitness

testimonies as a

genre?

It is, in fact, entirely consistent

with

a rhetoric

of

disaster hat the nature

of events

rendered

n

discourse can only

be

established

ndividually: hat t

is

impossible to understandwhether or

not

"the Holocaust"occurred n all of

its horrible detail because any rendering of the event-either through eye-

witness testimony or with the broad

brushes of

history

or

panoramic films

like

Schindler's

List or

Shoah-risks giving

us the

mistaken

mpression

that

what

we

hear

or

see in the testimony

is what the

eyewitness herself saw, or

that

the individual narrative

can

stand

as a substitute or the

larger

historical

narrative.

This

was a

point

made over

and over

again during

he debates that

followed

the

release of Schindler's

List

in

1994. Critics

complained

either

that the

film

was too brutal

in

its

use of detail

in

sequences,

for

example,

depicting

the

liquidation

of the Kracow

ghetto or, especially,

those

involving

the showers at Auschswitz; or they complained it wasn't detailed enough,

and that

even

the violence

of

the

liquidation

scene omitted atrocities that

would have

given

the

film a

greater

historical

authority.

Reviewers

in

a

roundtable

discussion

printed

n the

Village

Voice

n

Marchof

that

year

wor-

ried

that

the

American

viewing public

would

equate

the movie with

the

event,

and conclude

that,

in

the

end,

it wasn't

all so terrible

Hoberman).

What

was

remarkable

about

that

roundtable

discussion,

and about

nearly every

discus-

sion that took

place

after the film's

premiere,

s

that

every participant

n

the

debate

"saw"

something quite

different

in

the

film. This

is

partly

due

to the

nature of

taste,

as Kant

pointed out

so

clearly

over two

hundred

years ago.

But it is also

partly

due

to

the nature

of the rhetorical

enterprise,

on

at least

one

reading (and

I

hope

a

non-idiosyncraticone).

We do

not

establish

truth

through

discourse

as much

as we

produce

ar-

guments

for a

certain

view of

it,

and

no

argument,

no matterhow

strong

and



19/23

90 RHETORICSOCIETY

QUARTERLY

no matter the integrity of the

speaker, will settle a

matter once and for all.

Argumentsproducecontingent ruths hat can be latertested for consistency,

but

those

contingent truthsareestablished through he

argument

tself.

It

is

significant that in this view of

rhetoric here are

few

guarantees

hat what

is

understood n one "conversation" r, for our purposes

here, testimony, will

be

understood he same way in

anotheror by different

witnesses

to the testi-

mony.

To returnto where we

began this essay, such a view

of

the rhetorical

enterprise

s

not new: in the Phaedrus Plato's Socrates is at

pains

to show

that,

ideally, writing is indicative

of what lies behindknowledgeratherthan

productive of knowledge. The successful rhetor s the one who is able to

convince an audience not that

what he says

is

true, but that what

he

says,

while

not true, has an effect thatpoints to what occupies

a place outside

of

language: t points to what is

real. And thiseffect-writing as a reminderof

what

was once inherent n the soul but is now

inaccessible to

it

(Phaedrus

277e-278a)-is a radically

individualone, an effect which is

different

from

soul to

soul,

from

listenerto

listener, rom witness to witness.

To

returnnow

to

Philip

Blom,

he

worries thatthe Wilkomirskinarrative ntroduces

a

new

sort of

Holocaustdenial, one that

doesn't question he occurrenceof

the

event

but the veracityof individualtestimonies which, taken together, might tes-

tify

to the event.

And he is rightto be concerned. He

is

right

to

say

that

if

we

can undermine he authorityof

the writer of a Holocaust

testimony,

and

say

with

certainty hat he was never

there and that he did not see what he claims

to have seen, we have

eliminated one piece of evidence thatwe can use to

argue that

the atrocities of the Shoah occurred. Such testimonies-in the

form

of

eyewitness accounts,

documentaryevidence,

trial

transcripts,

and

diaries-taken

togetherform thetapestryof sufferingthat

we

have

inherited

as the

narrativeof the

Holocaust. But such

testimonies,

as

accounts

of hor-

rible

events that are inaccessible

even to the memories of those who sur-

vived,

let alone those who claim to have done so or those who read their

accounts,

function in

similar

ways and

have similar effects:

they

establish

the

credibility of the speaker,and indicate an event as it

occurs prior to

her

ability to

speak it, not so much in their accordancewith

the facts of history

(facts

which

are

accessible

only

through narrative)

but

in the

way they

dis-

rupt

the

narrativeof history and

force the reader,or the

interviewer,

to see

something horrible,perhaps

a

trace

of the

traumatic vent

itself.

These effects

are only

available

one

witness, one reader,

at a time. As

in

the

case of the

Wilkomirskimemoir as much as in the case of the Lewin

diary, we may well be able to

undermine he authorityof the

speaker

if

we

take him

to be

trying to establish a narrativeof the circumstances of the

Holocaust that will

settle the

matteronce and for all. The converse is also

true: a

lack of

credibility seems to throw open to question the

veracity

of



20/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICFDISASTER

91

testimonies of

othersurvivors.

But this

is

not

to

say

that t

lessens the disas-

trous effect of thetestimony,or the testimony's ability to indicate something

about the natureof the

event, though

that disaster

may

not

be

the

historical

object whose "content"we take to be coequal with the narrative's shape.

Elena Lappinsuggests thatthe authorof Fragments has indeed suffered some

shocking

accident in the events

surrounding

his

separation rom

his

mother,

or the

years

in

which he lived

in

orphanagesor foster care or in the care of

adoptive parents.

Such

an

"accident"would render he

uncanny effect of the

memoir's metonymic language

as

an indication of an event that is not only

inaccessible

to

his

readers

but inaccessible to

himself

as

well.

As I say, Philip

Blom has reason to worry about the effect of Wilkomirski's ack of credibil-

ity.

But

to a smallerdegree he should worry about the very same problem in

each and

every

survivor

testimony:

an

analysis

of

the

rhetoric

of

disaster

simply does

not

give

us

access

to

history; it only gives us (figurally) some

access

to its effects.

The

testimony

of a witness

to

disaster is a

narrative hat simply cannot

provide us access to

the

circumstances

hat lie at its

source, though it may or

may not accord with the historical record. Thatan accountis inaccurate, or

that it

is

inconsistent

and

markedby gaps

and

plain inaccuracies(or even,

in

the case of the Wilkomirski

"memoir," ies),

should not be

surprising

if we

take

seriously

a

rhetoric

of

disaster.

For it is

only

in

the

obliterationof events,

in

effacing

them from the realm

of

the

sayable

and

by acknowledging them

as

irretrievably

ost to

knowledge,

that the

writer s

brought

o

language.

The

language

to which

he

is

brought

does not

necessarily

adhere

o

what

we think

of

as

the

historicallyaccurate,

or the

verifiable,

or

even the circumstances

of

the

writerhimself.

But

this

is

a

troubling

act

about

history

and

memory

that

may give us

no

way

to

adjudicate he traumaticexperiences we read in mem-

oirs,

or

diaries,

or other

narrativeaccounts

of the

Shoah.

The

gaps

in

a

narra-

tive cannot be said

simply

to

represent naccuracies;

rather-as

Caruth

sug-

gests, speaking

of

Freud-they represent

and

"preserve history precisely

within this

gap

in

[the]

text"

(Caruth 190).

The fact is that

each encounter

with the

memory

of the

event repeatsthe initial trauma,

the rhetoric of disaster, bernard-donals

Documents