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Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James—open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude’s claim on the clamoring world.

The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville’s characters could read the weather, and James’s could spend an evening with dead companions.

By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 2, 2013
ISBN9780823254781
Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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    Quiet Testimony - Shari Goldberg

    Quiet Testimony

    A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

    Shari Goldberg

    Fordham University Press

    New York 2013

    Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

    Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publica-tion and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

    Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Goldberg, Shari.

        Quiet testimony : a theory of witnessing from nineteenth-century American literature / Shari Goldberg. — First edition.

            pages cm

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

        ISBN 978-0-8232-5477-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

        1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism.  2. Witness bearing (Christianity) in literature.  I. Title.

    PS217.W55G65 2013

    810.9’382—dc23

                                                                                                                         2013014092

    First edition

    A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: Arriving at Quiet

    1. Emerson: Testimony without Representation

    2. Douglass: Testimony without Identity

    3. Melville: Testimony without Voice

    4. James: Testimony without Life

    Conclusion: Staying Quiet

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Acknowledgments

    I would never have found as much quietness as I did without the generosity of professors, colleagues, friends, and family. I am grateful to Paul Kane, who caught me as a freshman at Vassar and taught me to read closely. The English department at the University at Albany is not known for being quiet, but its feistiness made scholarship feel urgent and consequential. I particularly benefitted from the challenging and warm environment fostered by Rick Barney, Bret Benjamin, Helen Elam, James Lilley, and Jennifer Greiman. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Arizona Quarterly 65.2 (2009): 1–26; the editorial comments I received helped me to grow my ideas.

    When upstate New York was my home, Jenn Marlow and Tara Needham provided tea, friendship, and smarts in doses that I miss almost daily. Matthew Pangborn and I spent several important hours with Melville one day, and he has been a supportive friend since graduation. In Dallas, the literary studies writing group has engaged with and improved my thoughts and my prose. I owe Lisa Siraganian special thanks for reading and prompting me to clarify many pages of this book. I am also appreciative of Marta Harvell and Mona Kasra, who have kept me close despite my hectic schedule, and Nicole Jacobs, who came to be my neighbor in a summer when I needed one and who is still willing, after many years, to read my work.

    I am especially indebted to some of the scholars whom I most admire. Eduardo Cadava was gracious enough to serve on my dissertation committee, and his kindness, patience, and sense of responsibility continue to impress themselves upon me. Mitch Breitwieser has been an exceptionally generous mentor; his confidence in this book’s premise as well as his comments upon its pages have made it exponentially better. David Wills reads like no one else—precisely, surprisingly, and with great joy—and he inspires me to think ever more carefully and to use words ever more deliberately. Branka Arsić gave me Agamben to read when I knew very little about testimony, and she has shown me where to go next, and how to sharpen my thinking, many times since. I offer a big published thanks, after many little written ones, for her devotion, her friendship, and her continual insistence that I could do even better.

    Without my parents’ commitment to my education, none of these encounters would have been possible. I am forever appreciative of their love and that of my wonderful sisters, who have made sure that I always have something to laugh about and someone to call.

    Finally, and with more heart than I can put on this page, I thank Dave, who always listens.

    Introduction: Arriving at Quiet

    Testimony tends to be thought of as loud: it is associated with declarations, depositions, and confessions, issued from courtrooms and soapboxes, and charged with exhorting, proclaiming, establishing, and convincing. Nineteenth-century America produced no shortage of testimonies possessing these characteristics of loudness, especially within its several reform movements. Yet testimony also circulated, in texts of this period, as something subdued, muted, and elusive. This quieter strain of testimony could be as staggering and life changing as its louder counterpart, even without any fanfare. The premise of Hugh Miller’s 1857 The Testimony of the Rocks, for instance, is that geology reveals theology. Miller’s revelatory rocks are not framed as laboratory specimens or material evidence but speaking sources, vibrant witnesses. This subtle distinction evades testimony’s loud characteristics; for Miller’s readers, testimony is not the exclusive purview of human beings or their institutions, and so the voice of truth may come from entities more likely to be stepped on than heard. Once the very earth is understood to testify, the soapbox and the exhortation become testimony’s sometimes associates, not its essential trappings.

    In more explicitly political writings, too, testimonial force could derive from less auspicious sources, from slips, pauses, and fragments as much as from coherent narrative arguments. Hospital Transports, an 1863 account from volunteers caring for Civil War soldiers, is one such work of witness. It features observations made at the time, and on the spot, by those in service, in order to show the scope of the enterprise and thereby to promote the deepest solicitude that all unnecessary suffering should be avoided in carrying out the war.¹ This introduction to the book and subsequent reviews of it appear to regard it as testifying loudly, through stirring, illustrative text. As the Continental Monthly put it, The book is full of vivid interest, of true incident, of graphic sketches . . . and recommends itself to all who love and would fain succor the human race.² Upon close inspection, however, Hospital Transports turns out to be a disjointed and even obscure work. It is composed of extracts of letters, the writers of which are designated only by initials, and no editorial voice intervenes to smooth the lapses between accounts, so that dates and times, locations and events can be only shakily surmised. As a testimony, Hospital Transports lacks the clear imagistic narrative it seemed set to deliver. And yet the book’s reviewers appear not to have noticed what was missing; they read it as accomplishing its purpose, as making a testimonial impression, despite its incoherence and perhaps even because of it.³ While no rocks speak in Hospital Transports, what does speak is nothing that could be at home in a courtroom or made to resemble a proclamation.

    The Testimony of the Rocks and Hospital Transports suggest that testimony’s loud identity is too constrictive, for they lay claim to testimonial engagements that exceed direct speech and even discrete entities. This suggestion—that testimony as a concept must be enlarged to account for its various manifestations—belongs not only to these two, relatively minor period texts. In my view, opening up testimony is a task at the heart of the work of four key nineteenth-century American writers, each of whom theorizes its quieter dimensions. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry James find rocks as well as gaps to potentially claim the position of the witness, and they are even more expansive, collecting a series of entities, some everyday, some portentous, all of which allow them to reconfigure testimony’s usual outfit. These engagements proceed from the four writers’ collective investment in writing truthfully, reporting faithfully, and regarding the world with an eye to its surprising and generative formations, even as each inflects his understanding of testimony with a more intimate set of concerns. Like Miller, they recognize sources that claim their attention and devotion without literally proclaiming anything, and like the Civil War collection, they suppose obscurities sometimes more compelling than reasoned arguments.

    Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James wrote in a historical context in which The Testimony of the Rocks would not have seemed weirdly animist and in which reviewers of Hospital Transports did not need to position themselves as reading against the grain in order to make sense of its textual oddities. The four writers work, then, under assumptions that are particular to their historical period, especially with regard to the idea that ostensibly silent entities could be construed as testimonial sources. At the same time, their insights should not be understood as antique relics. On the contrary: in stripping testimony of its loudness, I believe, each writer more nearly approaches the kernel of testimony, the central point in which its meaning resides. They therefore develop positions that speak to contemporary conversations about bearing witness, those inflected toward literary analysis as well as those focused on urgent political concerns. In particular, each writer confronts the limitations of the core attributes of testimony conceived as loud: the idea that it involves a representation of the past, delivered in the first person by one who was there, performed in speech or recorded in writing, and meant to draw together a community of live listeners. For Emerson, testimony need not represent the past—indeed, it need not represent at all; he proposes a testimony that issues from simply being rather than composedly narrating. For Douglass, one’s past bodies as well as one’s present body never actually coincide with the terms that would designate them, so that testimony exists in the absence of the act of identification. Melville insists that the truth dwells in the world’s silences and, as a result, testimony must elude voice. Finally, although James’s career occupies later decades than the other three writers’, he draws from the ideas of his father’s generation to insist that the dead, too, participate in the communicative world.

    Testimony without representation, testimony without identity, testimony without voice, and testimony without life—however unusual this array, it signals a flexibility that may be as germane to the twenty-first century as it is characteristic of the nineteenth. A 2012 collection titled After Testimony seeks, its editors explain, not to designate a new, testimony-less frontier but to suggest that because [in] a few years, there will be no living survivors of the Holocaust, writing on the subject cannot claim immediacy but must still in some way come to terms with the historical reality that the accounts of survivors have tried to communicate.⁴ In other words, without the first-person voices of survivors, and without their lives, there must be a way for something with the power of testimony to be produced. A 2007 study of human rights fictions, Beyond Terror, concludes by suggesting that the reader’s responsiveness may not consist in a loud action so much as a change of consciousness, begun in outrage or an activated sense of pathos and initiated not always by more representation but often by less.⁵ Finally, in a 2011 volume featuring prominent literature scholars focused on life narratives, Leigh Gilmore looks to bring out those selves and stories that might otherwise seem impossible to hear because they are difficult to hear, insufficiently transparent, and thus untranslated.⁶ Gilmore indicates that voiceless testimony may be that which most demands our attention. This brief collection of recent and representative works implies that a space must be carved out beyond loud testimony, for testimony today must be theorized, for several reasons, on a quieter register. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James, in texts that are at least a century old, did this work painstakingly, with assumptions and ideas that are inextricable from their cultural matrix and that, nonetheless, continue to speak to ours. These four writers are not the only ones of their era to propose dynamic and fruitful approaches to testimony, but together they provide a coherent theory, a point from which to begin thinking again, and thinking anew, about bearing witness.⁷

    American literature, critical theory, and human rights

    As I have begun to indicate, this book engages three scholarly discourses to address its concern with bearing witness: nineteenth-century American literature, critical theory, and human rights. To develop my central claims, I want to explain how the study speaks from and to each discourse and, perhaps more importantly, how it understands them to overlap and converge.

    Quiet Testimony may be primarily situated as a reading of nineteenth-century American literature. Its focus on testimony partakes of a long critical tradition of studying truth, language, and subjectivity in the works that compose the American canon. Starting with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, questions about what constitutes the self of an American writer, such as how such selves come to know the world and how they come to express it, have been lasting and generative. The answers have evolved, especially in response to key events that followed Matthiessen’s 1941 book, namely, the perpetration of the European genocide, the advent of the civil rights movement, and the concomitant and continuing growth of critical theory, which may be understood as responding to such signal occasions in the developing history of Western power and personhood. Perhaps the most major shift in analyzing truth, language, and subjectivity has resulted from increased attention to the social, historical, and political contexts in which American literature was written and disseminated. While Matthiessen, for example, excuses himself for neglecting facts about average Americans in his study,⁸ many of his successors have been invested in shifting the weight of the canon to accommodate writing from nondominant cultures and social positions. As a result, it has become clear that Emerson’s approach to what it means to speak the truth must not be conflated with, or broadly applied to, Douglass’s and, moreover, that Douglass’s experience provides a perspective on truth, language, and subjectivity that demands recalibration of the entire field of study.

    It is irresponsible, if not impossible, to read and think today without attending to such shifts in the field. Yet I worry that delimiting Emerson’s scope according to his racial and material privilege risks missing the provocative philosophy offered within his texts.⁹ In fact, what might be missed is Emerson’s understanding that all things testify, including vegetables and trees in one essay and dust and stones in another. The idea that what appears to be without language not only speaks but speaks the truth already effects—or ought to effect—a substantial change in our reading practice. For Emerson’s formulation alerts us to a major literary and ethical question that surfaces throughout the nineteenth century, the question of whether things can speak. As I read Douglass’s autobiographies, he understands his own body as a thing that cannot speak its experience—because the words are as yet unavailable that would make such communication possible—but that might be brought closer and closer to language and might one day produce the testimony that Emerson tells us can exist. Together, the two writers suggest that American literature develops not through a voice in the wilderness (as Perry Miller had it) or even through competing voices in a complex society (as more recent criticism emphasizes) but through essential questions about precisely what, in addition to whom, has voice at all. Moreover, the possibility that the voice of the what was a serious literary concern, one that is also woven through Melville’s writing and that of Henry James, suggests that the stutter in American literature to which Susan Howe refers, the sound of what is silenced or not quite silenced, may not be found exclusively among marginalized persons.¹⁰ Or, put differently, the stutter may be constitutive of the literature, not only because certain voices were silenced to produce it but because the dimensions of voice and silence, person and thing, are being negotiated within it.

    In weighing the questions put by the text more heavily than the experiences circumscribing the writer’s life, I follow the gesture of many recent works that have the canonical converse with the less canonical and the privileged with the subjected.¹¹ My aim is to extend the pathways that may consequently be forged, and one way I do so is by hewing to the advice of Edgar Dryden in his recent Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (2004). Dryden calls for scholarship that is unobstructed by an erstwhile fashionable distaste for close reading, that performs the painstaking process of examining a primary text with patience and care, taking into account its seemingly unaccountable and inexplicable details with the intention of discovering its law, that which marks it as unique or special.¹² Dryden’s position is that such a patient and generous process is in no way at odds with—that it rather serves—an investment in realizing a text’s historical or social or political import.¹³ In the case of my study, this method brings to light forms of testimony that might not otherwise be considered.

    These new forms of testimony, while particular to their American context, emerge most starkly in comparison with signal works on witnessing from the more European discourse of critical theory. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1991), Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002) have delineated an important field of testimonial study that responds to the Shoah as a limit situation.¹⁴ These works begin with the premise that testimony has historically been understood to require the presence of a first-person subject who recollects and reports past events for archival wealth or juridical judgment. Under such criteria, the massacre of millions, as well as the shattering of the psyches of those who survived, renders witnessing the Shoah an impossibility. The critical task thus becomes studying how, given ostensibly devastating conditions, testimony may still be understood to take place. Accordingly, an in spite of logic has come to frame the field: the studies just listed ask how testimony can still be a meaningful category of speech or experience in spite of the historical and psychic violence that has challenged it.¹⁵ Dori Laub’s example of this in spite of logic has become paradigmatic. He writes of an Auschwitz survivor who describes the explosion of four chimneys during an uprising, even though there is no other evidence of such an insurrection. In spite of the inaccuracy, Laub understands the survivor to testify to the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. . . . She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.¹⁶ In effect, this conclusion does not reevaluate the conditions for testimony so much as the conditions for recording history. Laub makes the breakage of a framework equivalent to events that more usually generate historical representation, admitting as testimony what might otherwise be considered personal recollection (or invention).

    Laub’s cowriter, Shoshana Felman, turns to Freud to reevaluate the conditions for producing testimony, again in order to conceive of testimony as taking place in spite of traumatic experiences that seem to prevent direct representation of events. She writes that psychoanalysis "profoundly rethinks and radically renews the very concept of the testimony, by submitting, and by recognizing for the first time in the history of culture, that one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it; that speech as such is unwittingly testimonial; and that the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a truth that nonetheless continues to escape him."¹⁷ In proposing knowledge that belongs to the unconscious while also being broadcast by it, Freud undoubtedly presents an important model of subjectivity that frees testimony from certain juridical and archival constraints. Yet I must protest that his renewal of testimony is hardly the first in the history of culture. If we look back to Freud’s American predecessors, we find that neither Emerson nor Douglass, Melville nor James understand truth as owned, they negotiate the terms of testimony in all kinds of text, and they do not assume that testimony can be read by its speaker. Moreover, these four figures do so without the in spite of formulation that has come to seem essential today.¹⁸ Just as the reviewers of Hospital Transports never argue that the text is testimonial in spite of its incoherent form, the earlier writers do not position themselves as rescuing an endangered form of truthful speech. Thus, they do not reconsider testimony so much as offer a reading of testimony consistent with nineteenth-century thought from which we have become estranged. Emerson, for example, fascinated by Swedenborg, understands natural objects to testify by virtue of being, and James extends his premise to the dead. This intellectual lineage allows testimony to circulate among entities that are not generally distinguished as human, let alone fully self-conscious.

    Nonetheless, the nineteenth-century circumvention of the in spite of formulation with something closer to a testimony of plenitude is not totally irrelevant to the critical theory that appears to exclude it. The drive to find text that bears witness beyond the strictures of first-person speech underpins work on testimony in both contexts. It is common to both a thinker like Agamben and one like Douglass. Following Douglass past their common undertaking reveals a hopefulness that Agamben does not quite propose but also does not prohibit. Similarly, I find that Emerson’s and James’s ideas resonate with Emmanuel Levinas’s situation of testimony in the ethical encounter, even as they extend testimony’s purview to include entities he would never have considered. Melville, too, engages the idea of silence laid out by Roland Barthes, developing the silence of the wind beyond Barthes’s brief note. The more flexible, extensive reach of the earlier thinkers may be construed to challenge but also broach the concerns of the later.

    I am suggesting that reading through the nineteenth century may enrich our current theoretical approaches to studying testimony. The American writers speak to the concerns of critical theory, even if they do not speak from them. Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James thereby provide us with an opportunity to rethink the very process of our thinking, and to emphasize or draw out less familiar strains of it that still have the potential to be isolated and developed.¹⁹

    That same opportunity may also be available in the field of human rights. Hospital Transports invokes the language of humanitarianism, and it was produced by the volunteer-driven Sanitary Commission just one year before the first international Geneva Convention, which created provisions for neutral care-taking of wounded soldiers. Indeed, a representative of the Sanitary Commission attended that convention and, to hear him tell it, virtually established the International Committee of the Red Cross on the model of the U.S. civilian organization.²⁰ Thus, one could position Hospital Transports in a genealogy that includes the text of the fourth Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To make the connection would be to situate the odd, fragmented testimony of Hospital Transports within a movement that now assumes bearing witness to horrible events to be the condition for eradicating them.

    The older text might not be quite at home there, since directly, graphically representing atrocity has been, at least since the middle of the twentieth century, the signature of the human rights movement.²¹ Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith describe how explicit accounts are pivotal: Rights workers and rights campaigns make use of life narratives as they bring forward claims of human rights abuses. Stories provide necessary evidence and information about violations. They put a human face to suffering.²² Without narrative testimony, from this perspective, suffering is illegible, unrecognizable. Yet the book I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg’s Beyond Terror, suggests that we may have arrived at the limit point of the logic of exposure. She explains that the dull nullity of response to the circulation of images of torture from Abu Ghraib indicates that the human rights movement’s fundamental commitment to testimonial exposure has been seriously compromised, if not outright negated.²³ If those horrific photographs circulated without prompting demands for the eradication of American torture, then perhaps, she reasons, presenting evidence and information about suffering no longer suffices to induce indignation about it. The alternative, literary approaches to narrating torture that Goldberg considers may signal, or call for, a turn away from directly representational text and toward the relative obscurity that seems to have been compelling to 1863 readers.

    While only my chapter on Melville engages explicitly with human rights discourse, all of my readings have been undertaken with a sensitivity to the urgent questions Goldberg raises. Since there is a strand of thought within human rights discourse that always wants to know, as James Dawes puts it, When does the story become real enough to change you?²⁴ my readings of what may testify and how testimony registers are necessarily, if often implicitly, in conversation with that field.²⁵ If, as my reading of Goldberg suggests, nineteenth-century texts have something to contribute to a conversation about whether aggressively loud testimony has reached its limits,

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