Testimony without Intimacy

Patricia Yaeger
English, Michigan

Abstract When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly
they behave. We may also miss the odd ways a testimonys gures of speech invite
readers or listeners to misbehave: to try too hard to recover a sacred sense of witness-
ing. How do ordinary techniques of literary or conversational speech change shape
in the context of testimony? What happens when Charlotte Delbo uses metaphor,
simile, or personication to convey her experiences in Auschwitz? What happens to
oral testimony when Holocaust survivors bear witness while the camera records para-
semantic body language that swerves away from this witnessing? This essay explores
the ways that testimonies handle the ethical question of community, entanglement, or
proximity by inventing gures of speech or body language that deect an audiences
rapport even as they summon us.

Intimacy is a condition marked by close acquaintance or familiarity. It

derives from the Latin intimus, meaning inmost or deepest. The defensive
refusal of intimacy is one of the dangers (the ethical dead ends) of witness-
ing. For the testimonial process to take place, as Dori Laub (1992: 72)
says, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an
otherin the position of one who hears. It is all too easy to ward o this
intimacy by assembling a sense of the blessedness or sacredness of the sur-
vivor. Trying too hard to bond, we may give in to a ood of awe and fear;
we endow the survivor with a kind of sanctity, both to pay our tribute to
him and to keep him at a distance, to avoid the intimacy entailed in know-
ing (ibid.).
Reading Charlotte Delbo, I am struck by how often she works at the bor-

Poetics Today 27:2 (Summer 2006) doi 10.1215/03335372-2005-010

2006 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
400 Poetics Today 27:2

der between distance and intimacy, warding o both sanctity and famil-
iarity. Early in Auschwitz and After (1995), Delbo provides an exhaustive cata-
log of what it feels like to be thirsty, to be denied the smallest tincture
to drink. Thirst ends with a chill invitation to intimacy with a water-
less world:
There is the thirst of the evening and the thirst of the night, the very worst.
Because at night I drink, I drink and the water becomes immediately dry and
solid in my mouth. The more I drink, the more my mouth lls with hardening
rotting leaves.
Or else it is an orange section. It bursts between my teeth and it is indeed an
orange sectionamazing that one should encounter oranges hereit is indeed
a section of an orange. I have the taste of the orange in my mouth, the juice
spreads under my tongue, touches my palate, my gums, ows into my throat. It
is slightly acid, marvelously fresh orange. This orange taste and the sensation of
freshness owing wake me up. (Ibid.: 75)

How close we come to this orange, to its citric taste. In the turn from hard
rotting leaves, what blooms from this gure is an intense identication
with the tang of sweet fruit and the sensuous powers of its taster. The words
burst between the teeth, spread under the tongue, until the reader oats in
the innermost of orange. And then the denouement of Thirst breaks this
sweetness:
This orange taste and the sensation of freshness owing wake me up. The
awakening is horrifying. Yet the instant when the skin of the orange splits open
between my teeth is so delightful that I would like to bring back this dream. I
chase after it, corner it. But once again the paste of rotting leaves petried into
mortar lls my dry mouth. It is not even a bitter taste. When you taste bitterness
it is because you have not lost the sense of taste, it means you still have saliva in
your mouth. (Ibid.)

Having followed Delbo into the simulacrum of the oranges pleasure, I

inevitably follow her into the simulacrum of pain.Tricked by my own close
acquaintance or familiarity with the oranges ecstasy, my mouth wrenches
away from verbose, rotting leaves, but too late: I, too, taste mortar.
In Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy, Ted Cohen (1979: 6)
denes the quintessence of metaphor as the achievement of intimacy
an achievement that involves (1) a concealed invitation to gure out what
a metaphor means, (2) the acceptance of this invitation, and (3) a result-
ing transaction that creates the acknowledgement of a community of
cocreators or conspirators. But what kind of community emerges when
we encounter these gures within Holocaust narratives? In One Day,
the sixth section of Auschwitz and After, Delbo describes a woman, her legs
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 401

rag-bound and scarecrow thin, who tumbles to the bottom of a ditch. She
seeks help convulsively, but at roll call her imprisoned companions stare
back, impervious. Delbo (1995: 2425) imagines this womans bewilder-
ment: Why are all these women looking at me like this? Why are they here,
lined up in close ranks, standing immobile. . . . They cannot possibly see
me, or they wouldnt stand there gaping. Theyd help me climb up. Why
dont you help me, you standing so close? Help me. Pull me up. Lean in
my direction. Stretch out your hand. Oh, they dont make a move. Calling
for closeness, she is met by a metaphor: Her hand writhed toward us in a
desperate call for help. The hand falls backa faded mauve star upon the
snow. Once fallen, it lost its eshless look, grew soft, became once again a
living, pitiful thing. The elbow props itself up, slips. The whole body col-
lapses. Progressively dehumanized (her feet kick randomly in the air; her
eorts are quite out of proportion to her enterprise) this woman-made-
star nds, in mauve metaphor, the briefest personication. What does it
mean to be met not with a hand but with a gure of speech? Is this gure
a crossing over or a turning away? Does its concealed invitation create a
community or break one?
When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly
they behave. We may also miss the odd ways a testimonys gures of speech
invite readers or listeners to misbehave: to turn away helplessly or try too
hard to recover a sacred sense of witnessing as we scramble back into the
belly of the text. If Delbos orange invites intimacy with Auschwitzs thirst
(catching the reader unaware as pleasure turns pang), the woman as mauve
star oers a refutation of intimacy; the distancing metaphor impeaches the
survivor in her wished-for indierence. If an ordinary metaphor becomes a
contract for ordinary intimacy, what strange contract might the Holocausts
gures of speech re-create?

1. When Testimony Misbehaves

I saw more than you did when you were there (Delbo 1995: 286). I have
always felt uncomfortable with this moment from Auschwitz and After when
Pierre, the hearty husband of the Holocaust survivor Marie-Louise, acts
like the perfect trauma listener. As someone who has tried to experience
(deeply) the unreachable anguish of his wifes sojourn in Auschwitz, Pierre
acknowledges Marie-Louises experience as trauma, but he also seems to t
her trauma into the backpack of their marriage as something to be carried
upon his capable shoulders with the condence that he alone can encom-
pass what happened to her and encircle her pain.
It is also our privilege as scholars to seem to see more, to cosset and carry.
402 Poetics Today 27:2

But I am interested in the ways that Holocaust testimony, both oral and
written, tries to resist this carrying. I want to focus on moments that refute
our compassion and constitute zones of experience that may be sympathy-
secluded, empathy-unfriendly: that jar the act of compassion. Within oral,
recorded testimonies, we submit to gestures of ordinary or excessive body
language, when beads of perspiration or the light of pain (or pleasure) in
someones eyes become too much for the camera, when something uncon-
trolled and uncontrollable about the speaking body disrupts careful listen-
ing by creating an abrupt change in scale: a moment when body and speech
seem to move in opposite directions.Within literary testimony we encounter
similar moments: breathtaking similes that refuse to do the work of simili-
tude, that stymie our ability to create a space of similarity, compassion,
comparison.
I want to explore the ways in which the formal or structural dimensions
of written and oral testimony have an apotropaic eect; they can ward o
the very empathy that we, as readers and listeners entangled in survivors
stories, want to inhabit. I do not wish to argue that trauma, or speech reach-
ing after trauma, oers the acme of unrepresentability. Quite the reverse:
the gures of testimony enact specic rhetorical or bodily eects that push
us away even as they pull us toward intimacy. What happens to the reader
or listener as secondary witness when she gets stuck in the gap between
what is said in testimony and the way a speaking body or written text says it?
In Stenia, Delbo (ibid.: 42) uses personication to hollow out the ordi-
nary portents of sympathy:
No one can fall asleep tonight.
The wind blows and whistles and groans. It is a moan mounting from the
marshes, a sob swelling, swelling and bursting, then subsiding into shivering
silence, another sob swells and bursts out and dies down.
No one is able to fall asleep.

In this vastly personied universe, the sobbing of the wind is syncopated

by death rattles, a disembodied locution. The huge personae of nature
ignore the dying person: someone we can only know through a clich, a
diminished gure of speech.
Stenia, the blockhova, cannot fall asleep. She comes out of her room, a small
hovel at the entrance to the block. Her candle burrows through the dark passage
between the tiers where we are recumbent, stacked in rows. Stenia awaits the
tornados abatement, and in the silence where the death rattle rises she shouts,
Whos making that racket? Silence! The death rattle continues. Stenia shouts,
Silence! but the dying does not hear her. Silence! The death rattle lls the
silence between the winds waves, lls all the blackness of the night.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 403

Stenia holds up her candle, walking in the direction of the rattles, identies
the dying woman and orders that she be brought down. (Ibid.)

From the stacked rows of inmates, humanity emerges: companions carry

her out. They lay her down, as kindly as possible, close to the wall, and
then go back to lie down again. . . . Squalls of wind and rain beat down
upon the roong threatening to break it. In the barracks, no one is able to
fall asleep. The dying woman has been sent into the elements, where the
personications of wind and rain outvoice her. How do we, as readers, stay
near? Close to the wall she drifts outside the circle of the story. As much
as we may wish to feel for the dying woman or identify with her compan-
ions, Delbo refuses to give a reference for understanding this death. She
personies a world we know to be inanimate and then asks her own gures
of speech to overwhelm the perception of intimate caring that we, as ethi-
cal readers, must try to feel. It is hard, in the terms set by Stenia, to nd
a template for practicing empathy. When the wind has more vivacity than
a dying lady and feeling gets outsourced to the universe, any intimacy with
the dead has to happen in the interstices between gures.This is not to argue
that trauma is unspeakable or unrepresentable. Instead, I want to focus
on the complex formal structures inviting Delbos readers to contemplate
the apotropaic qualities of testimony. Her text maps the diculty of cre-
ating a grid or scale of reference that might allow us to enter the complex
formal grief demanded by history.
The poster for a symposium on the work of Charlotte Delbo makes
these questions about scale more transparent (gure 1). In the foreground
we see a sharply etched portrait of Delbo from the cover of Auschwitz and
After (caught between orange borders, Delbo converses mischievously with
someone outside the frame). But in the posters din we also see a blowup
of Delbos left arm, its concentration camp number an indelible smudge.
How to respond? The proportions are eye-catching, visually pleasing; they
reproduce Delbos image as forethought to the symposiums title: Disaster
and After. But something jars: everything revolves around the close-up of
the concentration camp tattoo at the center; on an arm jutting out of a book,
while the typeface describing the symposium glosses or resurfaces this arm
in the same fashion that the concentration camp number rakes Delbos skin.
The impulse to enlarge, to get a close-up of this indelible horror, mirrors a
rst response to Delbos photograph. The poster repeats the work that our
eyes perform taking in the book: look at the whole picture; oh, something
is awry; yesoh nostare at that disturbing detail.
In her photograph, Delbo sits on a low table or bench stued with papers.
Since space can shift so abruptly and numbers hover in the air, is the sym-
404 Poetics Today 27:2

Figure 1 Poster for University of Michigan symposium honoring Ross Cham-

bers, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 405

posium poster also part of the archive Delbo is sitting on? A silly question.
But when one plays with scale, funny things start to happen. An arm grows
out of a book; a concentration camp victim wags a nger at a frighten-
ing number, while department sponsors print themselves on survivors esh
and corduroy trousers become a landscapedo they resemble the elds
where Auschwitz laborers died? Or are they prison stripes? And what about
all this writing on the body? What does it mean when a breast becomes a
place for axing a date, or place, or information about a reception? On the
cover of Vogue, on a poster advertising an academic symposium, it means
nothing at all; unless, of course, that body has been previously marked for
incarceration or extermination, and then it means everything.
My point is not to question the political correctness of this poster. We
are all busy scratching our way across other peoples bodiesthe academy
likes nothing better. Instead, I want to draw attention to the ways in which
ordinary techniques of creating images, of putting letters on bodies, or of
playing with someone elses imago, corpus, or oeuvre change whenever
we write about trauma. I want to understand the ways in which these ordi-
nary techniques alter their shapes in the context of testimony. What happens when
Delbo uses metaphor, simile, or personication to convey her experiences in
Auschwitz? What happens to oral testimony when Holocaust survivors bear
witness to endurance or suering while the camera records parasemantic
body language that swerves away from this witnessing? The testimonies we
will examine ward o a too-deep rapport, a too earnest memorialization of
the act of witnessing. Accordingly, I want to produce not only a phenome-
nology of the secondary witnesss experience but also a phenomenology of
the way that testimonies themselves handle the ethical question of com-
munity, entanglement, proximity: their deliberate invocation of apotropaic
eectsof gures of speech or body language that deect an audiences
rapport even as they summon us.

2. LAX: A Failure in Magnitude

In The Wreck of Time (1988), Annie Dillard tries to create a template for
communal witnessing. Within a long list of traumas, she tells us that the Los
Angeles airport (LAX) has twenty-ve thousand parking spaces:
This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when
a volcano erupted. This is one space for each of the corpses of more than two
years worth of accidental killings from left over land mines of recent wars. At
ve to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you
propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could t into the airport park-
406 Poetics Today 27:2

ing lot all the corpses from the restorm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, or
the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, or the corpses of Burundians
killed in civil war since 1993. But you could not t Americas homeless there, not
even twenty to a car. (Ibid.: 54)

Dillards analogy smacks of the absurd. And yet what kind of scale allows
us to begin to comprehend someone elses trauma? Dillard describes the
bizarre relationship of globalization and mourning. Even though we live
in an era enacting the speedup of our knowledge of other peoples disasters
or deaths, local cultures have yet to invent social mechanisms that slow
down this fast circuitry; we nd no simultaneous reinvention of the work of
mourning for those who stray beyond ones kin and identity groups. Two
million children die a year from diarrhea, and 800,000 from measles. Do
we blink? Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed
1 million Cambodians. . . . At what limit for you do other individuals blur?
Vanish? How old are you? (ibid.). Does the epistemology of trauma have
a perimeter? Is there a magnitude or scale that permits someone elses dis-
aster to speak to you? To answer by stung bodies into SUVs in LAX may
seem obscene. But Dillards point is that, lacking a lattice, grid, or imagi-
nary template for comprehending someone elses suering, it is hard to
imagine others traumas. And in this act of imagining, scale matters.
Everyday tactics of representation change meaning, shift scale, in the
apocalyptic humdrum of testimonial speaking. When we juxtapose ordi-
nary techniques of representation with the fact of trauma, why do even the
most mundane literary techniques, the most familiar speech acts, spin out
of control? And what are the repercussions of this loss of control for the
survivors audience, for the community of readers who gather around the
testimonial speaker?
Most of us are familiar with the substantial body of literature that de-
scribes the problems anyone has creatingor deninga Holocaust aes-
thetic. Celan repudiates the lilt of his early poems, Adorno repudiates his
repudiation of poetry, an entire school of criticism mysties trauma writing
as an ascent into the unspeakable, and on and on. So it is no surprise that
Delbo (1995: 30) comments on the odd status of beauty early in Auschwitz
and After, through the voice of one of her companions, a survivor whose
sister was murdered in the camps:
Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters were all gassed on
arrival.
Her parents were too old, the children too young.
She says: She was beautiful, my little sister.
You cant imagine how beautiful she was.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 407

They mustnt have looked at her.

If they had, they would never have killed her.
They couldnt have.

Beauty may be the rst order of uselessness within the obscenity that is
Auschwitz. It becomes one more attribute that will not save you; the rst
thing, in the midst of starvation, to go. Delbo poses beauty as uselessness,
but she also locates the reader in a strange relationship to the beautiful. Not
to be moved bynot to look with joy upon the faces of Delbos own beau-
tiful wordsmeans joining the victimizers, perpetuating beautys death.
(They mustnt have looked at her. If they had . . .) But to enjoy the experi-
ence of Delbos potent formal techniques in this awful context, to appre-
ciate her gorgeous aesthetic while reading about Auschwitz? (Feeling such
pleasure, should I turn the page? Without it, I cannot keep turning.) What
then? Auschwitz and After is a book that provides endless opportunities for the
literary connoisseurship of Delbos formal brilliance: her measured sym-
bols, her quicksilver control of tone and pacing, her mad, brilliant, deliber-
ate breaking of each sections frame, her ability to turn battered bodies into
poetry that smoothes the way for the next horror, the next broken frame.
Something unexpected comes from this beauty; the interpenetration (or
collision) of tenor and vehicle, of the diverse conceptual domains that we
expect to nd mingled in gures of speech.These domains go through sharp
altercations in Delbos testimonial writingas if the genre itself insists on
letting go, dropping usmaking vertiginous the abrupt shift of scale that
always takes place in moments of comparison.1
Why, in thinking about trauma, should we be interested in scale? First,
because writing (in general) and creating metaphor (in particular) turn on
a semantic impertinence, upon a heaving of magnitude or scale. The shift
from one domain to another, the emphasis on thinking through analogy, is
a powerful representational demand that aesthetic images make upon their
readers. An example from Henry Jamess The Ambassadors suggests one kind
of map. Meeting in England, Maria Gostrey and Lambert Strether seek
common ground for making one anothers acquaintance: But he didnt,
as it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a
lift; so that they were left together as if over the mere laid table of conver-
sation. Her qualication of the mentioned connection had rather removed
than placed a dish, and there seemed nothing else to serve ( James 1960: 7).
While Jamess similitude, his as if, deepens our sense of these characters
polite estrangement, to follow his meaning the reader must invisibly jump

1. On the question of dierent genres of testimonial writing, see Ezrahi 1996.

408 Poetics Today 27:2

domains, move from everyday exposition (he didnt, as it happened, know

the Munsters) to the less-familiar idea that conversation resembles a laid
table. The picture of an emptying table whose dishes are going away must
then be remapped onto our picture of Strether and Gostreys conversation
in order to amplify the readers sense of their impasse. That is, the mind
travels from one template to the other; we shift scale and shift back again.2
Later in this essay we will see how complicated this operation can be
within Delbos writing. Trying to feel at home with someones pain, try-
ing to tune ones sensorium to bear witness to reported trauma, the shift
of domain and/or scale involved in simile can create a blocked passage, an
impasse, a clue that lets you out just as youre coming in. But rst we need to
contemplate the question of scale from another angle: as a grid that helps
us recognize the need for shift in perceptual magnitudeto nd a model
that would allow us to reestimate the dimensions of trauma within increas-
ing proportional systems. This is what Dillard tries to achieve with such
irony in The Wreck of Time. She nds a grid in LAX for imagining and
measuring the people who died in the Tokyo restorm and then imposes it
ruthlessly to show how dicult it is to nd a mode of comparison that works
to describe trauma; she enacts estranging algorithms that give disaster an
approximate, comprehensibleand therefore meaningless?scale.
Holocaust survivors speak passionately about the diculty of locating
a scale of reference that permits comprehension.3 There is no proportion

2. The editors of Poetics Today have suggested that a shift of magnitude or scale and a shift
of domain or object set may dier conceptually, diverging sharply even on the quantita-
tive/qualitative axis. And, of course, shift of domain belongs to the standard conception of
metaphor, whereas magnitude or scale seem to introduce a new equation, twist, or variant
(Sternberg 2005). This is a useful critique, but I want to suggest that in many similes and
metaphors, a shift of domain also initiates a change of scaleso that we are unsettled along
two dierent axes. In Wallace Stevens Esthtique du Mal, the phrase his rm stanzas
hang like hives in hell takes us from the miniature space of the writing desk to the vastness
of Pandemonium. Hives in hell and rm stanzas cannot be compared using the same
quantitative/qualitative template, nor can sun and clown in Stevenss verse the sun, in
clownish yellow, but not a clown, / Brings the day to perfection and then fails. The sun
shrinks toward clown, the clown swells toward sunthe scale of the cosmic contaminated by
the diurnal. As the poem continues its sun meditation, so do these shifts: a giant bird pecks
at the globe of light, which turns into the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit / Dropped down
from turquoise leaves (Stevens 1972: 253, 255, 256). Part of the satisfaction of parsing these
verses is shifting maps (or domains) and scales (or orders of proportion or magnitude) so fre-
quently.The pleasure of the poetic game is to compare/palimpsest objects from dierent idea
sets as well as dierent orders of magnitude and to make ones own Mbius strip. I am argu-
ing that this pleasure can become utterly painful in reading Holocaust testimony, because
the falseness of the continuityas well as the guilty pleasure of playing the similes game
becomes so palpable.
3. Nadine Fresco describes another problem that magnitude or dimension presents to the
children of survivors. Remembering a brother lost to the Shoah, she (1984: 424) explains the
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 409

between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which pity is aroused,
Primo Levi (1989: 56) says. A single Anne Frank excites more emotion than
the myriads who suered as she did but whose image has remained in the
shadows. Charlotte Delbos (1995: 262) companion in Auschwitz, Mado,
wants to escape from these myriads: My son is their son, he belongs to all of
them. He is the child they will not have had. . . . How can one be alive amid
these masses of dead women? Even in pain, Mado seeks comparability. To
make sense of the past, she wants to be sorted with, seem interchangeable
withbut also to escapethe many.
But for Mado history is also illogical, distended; what is over is too endur-
ing. To describe this distention requires a shift in expressive registers. If
Mados son journeys from present to past, if she must share him with the
dead, he becomes, in her temporal logic, someone elses son. Meanwhile,
these masses of dead women grow vampiric. Reverently dead, they are
also time travelers, behind and ahead of the living. In The Ambassadors,
Jamess table emerges briey for the sake of a simile, deepens the readers
sensibility, then gracefully recedes again. But in Holocaust testimony, noth-
ing recedes; inconsistent worlds coexist simultaneously; foreground and
background become interchangeable. And when two or more memories
come together that demand a shift between incommensurable domains
(zones dicult to hold in the mind simultaneously)will language still do
its work? After all this I got married, had a son. . . . All those I met since
I came back do not exist. Theyre not close to these I call mine, the real
ones: our comrades. Theyre peripheral. They belong to another universe
and nothing will allow them to enter ours. Sometimes, it seems that theyre
about to rejoin us. Then they utter one of those supercial . . . empty words,
and they plunge headlong into their world, that of the living (ibid.: 265).
For Mado, everyday speech thrusts the living out of hell, while she alone
remains in a spatial abyss: At any moment, carried by a smell, a day from
over there returns. . . . One day Im walking by the kitchens . . . I left a
potato rotting at the bottom of the vegetable basket. At once everything sur-
faces again: the mud . . . the blows of the truncheons . . . because walking in
a certain direction was forbidden (ibid.: 266). In the rst instance, Mado
describes incompatible worlds that cannot merge; in the second, exitless

scale of her familys trauma as something that ickers in and out of sight: I no longer knew
whether in fact it was a just a personal family drama, something quite ordinaryunfortu-
nately people do lose young childrenor whether it was part of the global death of millions
of unknown people, people who were beginning to take up all the room, as if they had invaded
the house. I felt as if I was constantly swinging between two kinds of death. But as she moves
into adulthood, she sees this brother who died before she was born as a face among millions
of annihilated faces.
410 Poetics Today 27:2

worlds that hinge on one another. Something in the here and now swings
her body into the there, via a demonic portal with no connecting order
of words, no Jamesian table.
This missing table disrupts the conventions, the stock-in-trade, of the
scholar/reader. One can allude to the world of the here, the universe of
the there, but in parsing a survivors testimony, the secondary witness can
only experience an extreme dissonance, a failure of magnitude. To gloss
these sentences, I have tried to imagine Mados personal and epistemologi-
cal position and get near it in words. But the result is violence by dimi-
nution, a fall into the math of diminishing simile. Does it help to invoke
Jamess adequate gures to gloss Mados sense of dwelling in the inadequate
surreal? Does every attempt at secondary witnessing result in the violence
of the miniature, in death by guration? The ethical reader nds herself
responding like Dillardstung corpses into cars (into the vehicles run-
ning her sentences)in the very moment she is trying to retrieve the voices
of the disappeared and respond to those who have endured their vanishing.

3. The Ethics of Nearness

After such self-pity, what forgiveness? What happens to the reader, listener,
or secondary witness in such a moment? My sense of the good-enough
witness is that she sees this abyss and still wants to listen well, to enter a
terrain of empathy, nearness, openness to anothers pain. What I want to
locate (within both Delbos writing and a series of oral recordings from the
Fortuno Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies) is the constant pres-
sure of aesthetic estrangement that takes this nearness away, reinforcing the
gap between primary and secondary witnessing and asking readers and lis-
teners to shed our comforting illusions of empathy, to negate compassions
thrill.
How can a gure of speech as minor as simile do this work? In a sec-
tion of Auschwitz and After (1995: 19) called The Dummies, Delbo gives us
emotional facts; she describes the terror of block 25, that obscene place in
Auschwitz where women who were sick, inrm, mador simply too tired
to go onwere sent into a deeper hell of hunger, thirst, death:
The living had to pull out into the yard those who died during the night, because
the dead had to be counted also.The SS walked by. He enjoyed setting his dog on
them. This was the howling heard at night. Then silence. The roll call was over.
It was the daytime silence. The women still alive went back. The dead women
remained in the snow. They had been stripped naked. Their clothes would be
used by others.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 411

Every two or three days, trucks arrived to take the living to the gas cham-
ber, the dead to the crematorium. Madness must have been the nal hope of
those who entered there. Some, made canny by their stubborn desire to survive,
escaped at the outset. Sometimes they would last several weeks, never more than
three in block 25.They could be seen at the barred windows begging: Something
to drink. Something to drink. There are ghosts that talk.
Look. Im sure she moved.That one, next to the last. Her hand . . . her ngers
are opening, Im sure of it.
The ngers open slowly, the snow blooms like a discolored sea anemone.
Dont stare! Why are you staring? Yvonne P. pleads, her eyes open, riveted
to a living corpse.
Eat your soup, says Cecile. These women no longer need anything.
I look too. I look at this corpse that moves but does not move me. Im a big
girl now. I can look at naked dummies without being afraid.

The eort to encompass such inhumanity creates something like an attempt

at community formation on the part of the reader; the will to look hard,
listen closely, to see. What we see is a pile of bodies and ordinary words that
string together a story: Every two or three days . . . Madness . . . Some . . .
Sometimes . . . They could be seen . . . Something . . . There are: locutions
that are paratactic, that assemble a story at once coherent and insane. That
is, Delbo provokes our attempt as readers to enter the grid of this camp,
to understand its reference points, to greet her words as a tabula that will
allow things to be juxtaposed so we can assemble a story, create an order,
even imagine similarities (every two or three days . . . sometimes . . .)
between our world and that one. There are ghosts that talk. Yes, we who
read literature know about ghosts. But suddenly, in this space where we try
to imagine even the most inhumane form of community, one of the dead
seems to move, her ngers open, and Delbo summons a similea mode for
heightening vision but also a device that asks us to compare this event with
some other space. And everything that should happen when we encounter a
similethe interaction between objects of comparison, the mapping of one
conceptual domain onto another, the sense of transitivityshatters, goes
at. This is a dead body, one that will never climb along the evolutionary
seascape back into life; we are not underwater; these ngers are discolored,
but they can never be a sea anemone.
My argument looks something like this. The reading audience is try-
ing hard to be good readers, to be hospitable, to acclimatize the read-
ing self to the most painful and dicult-to-imagine conditions of torture,
cruelty, trauma. The listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a
co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to
partially experience trauma in himself (Laub 1992: 57). But Delbos gures
412 Poetics Today 27:2

of speech disrupt this illusion of co-ownership, destroy the reality eects

that her intimate address to the reader as thou help to create.4 Just as we
are trying so hard to bear witness, to come to know by concentrating on
the voice of a subject in pain, a simile enters the text like a missile or void.
It initiates an abrupt change of reference, where the reader, trying so hard
to pay attention to the survivor through her narrative, gets dropped from
this story into some other dimensiona domain of comparison where
the vehicle feels so far from the tenor that they might as well be in dierent
operas, as distinct as night and day.5
This simile, like the opening hand, is tiny, but it is also like a coup that
forces the mind to enter a dierent register, space, or conceptual sphere.
It changes the scope of the readers attentivenesscreating what we might
call an inhospitality eect: as if, while one is trying so hard to give ones
full attention to a hostess at some dinner party, her little dog is growling at
ones feet, tearing ones shoes or pants, rending the fabric of the social.6

4. Although Delbo does not explicitly deploy this intimate form of address, it is implicit
throughout her memoir whenever she draws the reader close to her; when she calls the reader
to be near. I should add that the rhetorical choices made within Holocaust testimonies
vary widely over time and space (see Rothberg 2000). For example, in The Drowned and the
Saved, Levis similes work to corroborate and deepen the cognitive clarity (and the community
eects) of his memories. See, for example, the description of the Nazis deliberate imposition
of humiliations that make prisoners denied cutlery feel like animals (Levi 1989: 114): With-
out a spoon, the daily soup could not be consumed in any other way than by lapping it up,
as dogs do. . . . In Judges 7:5 . . . the warrior Gideon chooses the best among his warriors
by observing how they behave while drinking at the river: he rejects all those who lap up the
water as does the dog . . . and accepts only those who drink standing up, lifting their hands
to their mouths.
5. I do not wish to argue that every gure enacting estrangement or distance has this dis-
phoric eect. In Miltons Counterplot, Hartman (1966: 104, 106) describes a series of
extended similes in Paradise Lost that alter the readers sense of place in the poems space-
time continuum. As Miltons fallen angels build Pandemonium in Hell, the poet oers as
counterpoint the fall of Mulciber:
from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star
On Lemnos thAegaean Isle. (I, 74246)
Hartman notes that Milton rarely uses straight analogy, in which the observer and observed
remain relative to each other, on the same plane. Indeed, his nest eects are to employ mag-
nifying and diminishing similes. Like Delbos similes, Miltons not only magnify or diminish
the doings in hell, but invariably put them at a distance. . . . Milton varies point-of-view shift-
ing in space and time so skillfully that our sense of the reality of hell, of its power vis--vis
man or God, never remains secure. Hartman notes that simile as counterplot in Paradise Lost
lets us slip into something more comfortable: From the presence and pomp of hell we have
slowly slipped into a pastoral.
6. See Ross Chambers (2002) for a reading of genre and hospitality eects in testimonial
writing; see also Chambers 2004: 34149.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 413

My dinner party example is trivial because our reading practices are

often trivializingturn the page, make a cup of coee, weep for the sur-
vivors, open a Diet Coke. Delbo breaks into our ordinary reading practices
by wielding her small gure of speech with the force of a blow, initiating
a form of conceptual stutterance or spatial dissonance where testimonial
violence becomes at once nauseating and mimeticwhere the text swal-
lows its own gestures toward empathy.
We nd dozens of similar examples throughout Delbos writing. In a sec-
tion simply called Auschwitz, Delbo describes a brief exodus from the
camp into a strange city and out to beet silos where she and her compan-
ions work. Again the reader gets caught up in story-time, story-space. Simi-
les and metaphors pass by (these faceless beings, a child was carrying a
milk can tall as his legs [Delbo 1995: 87]) like so many refuseniks, ow-
ing away from political prisoners who are neither recognized by the towns-
people nor able to recognize themselves. But once again the dematerial-
izing accuracy of the nal similewe were taken to work / on the other
side of the town / we had walked through like a wave of morning sickness
(ibid.: 88)changes the tempo. The pleasure in working out the math of
the equationwhere is the resemblance, the point of commensurability?
gets washed away by the strength with which this math both intensies and
calls us away from the complex task of readerly empathy. I am suggesting
that when such a gure of speech breaches Delbos frame, when it changes
our reference point from the rhythm of the story to another plane, it creates
a new mode of nausea. Any attempt to walk in proximity, to approach testi-
mony with compassion, with nearness, is displaced by an enforced distance,
by the introduction of another conceptual domain that does not permit the
easy return to narrative that Jamess table makes possible.
Is registering an unempathic or a discompassionate response to testi-
mony unethical? Does it matter if overwrought academics get stuck in the
gaps between what is said in Holocaust testimony and the way a speak-
ing body or written text says it? If recent scholarship on trauma teaches
us anything, it is that testimony demands more in the way of nearness,
proximity, entanglement: not less. As Ross Chambers argues in Terror-
ism and Testimony (2002: 5), residual people (i.e., survivors), residual
phenomena (such as memories), residual sites (present-day Auschwitz or
Dachau, ground zero in Hiroshima or New York, the former killing elds
in Cambodia), and residual objects (all the detritus of disaster) can be,
and often have been, regarded as insignicant in the context of aftermath
denial. But Chambers reminds us that, even though testimonies are out-
law genres, they can be vulnerable to the rhetoric of counterdenial and
can serve, like other memorials, as de facto alibis for forgetting (ibid.: 13).
414 Poetics Today 27:2

Cynthia Ozick (1997: 78) derides the politics of forgetting or bad iden-
tication in Who Owns Anne Frank? by arguing that, without statistics
to expose the numbing atrocity and epic scale of Auschwitz or Buchenwald
(without an education in the magnitude of Nazi evil), no one should read
Anne Franks diary: To come to the diary without having earlier assimi-
lated Elie Wiesels Night and Primo Levis The Drowned and the Saved (to men-
tion two witnesses only), or the columns of gures in the transport books,
is to allow oneself to stew in an implausible and ugly innocence. Ozick
demands another order of thinkingcolumns of numbers that would force
Franks readers to recognize her small place in the annals of deportation
and death:
Our entry into those crimes begins with columns of numbers: the meticulous lists
of deportations, in handsome bookkeepers handwriting, starkly set down in
German transport books. From those columnsheaded, like goods for export,
Ausgangs-Transporte nach dem Osten (outgoing shipments to the east)it is pos-
sible to learn that Anne Frank and the others were moved to Auschwitz on the
night of September 6, 1944, in a collection of a thousand and nineteen Stcke (or
pieces, another commodities term). That same night, ve hundred and forty-
nine persons were gassed. (Ibid.)

When Anne Frank becomes, in Japan, a code word among teen-agers for
getting ones period, identication becomes usurpation: the conversion
of Anne Frank into usable goods. Ozicks essay ends by urging upon us the
uselessness of Franks narrative. Miep Gies, the woman who found Franks
papers, said that if she had read them during the war, I would have had to
burn the diary because it would have been too dangerous for people about
whom Anne had written. Ozick (ibid.: 88) yearns for this burning, yearns
to save Franks diary from a world that made of it all things, some of them
true, while oating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited
evil. This argument, that numbers wedded to capable witnessing could
enfold Franks diary in the right ery frame, oers one model for seeing
Holocaust narratives that embrace a similar dualityinviting a sense of
compassion or community while enacting its active conagration, a pyrrhic
refusal of ordinary mourning.
But my message diers from Ozicks in an important way. Instead of
demanding that one pass a test before reading Anne Frank, I want the
reader of Holocaust testimonies to notice those moments when the witness
switches gears and drops the reader from a familiar frame. The reader con-
tinues interacting, but she or he cannot get in, cannot get it, cannot be
intimate. The wheels of testimony keep turning, but a gure of speech, a bit
of body language, thrusts reader or listener away. The result is a glimpse
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 415

of desuetude, of ones own uselessness, of failed intimacy. Laub (1992: 71)

explains that there is so much destruction recounted, so much death, so
much loss, so much hopelessness, that there has to be an abundance of hold-
ing and of emotional investment in the encounter, to keep alive the wit-
nessing narration: otherwise the whole experience of the testimony can end
up in silence, in complete withholding. But if the scale of communication
is always awry, if we are split in two by a simile, then an awareness of the
mechanics of withholding and an acknowledgment of the validity of the
withheld must also be part of our equipment for listening. Proximity with-
out intimacy can be an ethical stance; it may be what testimony wants, what
it tries to invent.
In The Stream, Delbo tells a story that evokes the readers empathy
and then burns it away, as if she, too, is eager to dispense with the easy com-
passion that can be evoked by the memoir as form, as if she, too, wants to
set her own writing aame. Delbo fastens upon an exceptional moment in
Auschwitz when she was allowed to bathe; she arrests us with bodily loath-
ing. Her limbs are covered with diarrhea, her dirt so scummy and thick that
even river grit will not grind it away. Again, she invites the aching attempt
on the part of the aching reader to empathize by taking us step by step
through a searing experience. And then comes the coup, the reversal:
Scooping up more water in my cupped hands, I started to rub. My pubic hair,
shaved on arrival, had grown back. It was matted by diarrhea, and I had a hard
time disentangling it. . . .
As for the face, the behind, Id thought it all out, but been unable to bring
myself to use a handful of sand in lieu of soap. The skin of the thighs and legs
is harder. My hand full of wet earth, I started to rub the right thigh, directly
above the knee. My skin was getting lighter, redder. Yes, it really looked lighter.
I rubbed with all my might, particularly the knee. I had to go on rubbing else-
where when I noticed some drops of blood. I was rubbing too hard, and the sand
was too rough. I was about to turn my attention to the other knee, when the kapo
blew her whistle. Fall in! The pause was over. Quickly I pulled my panties back
on, dried my feet on the grass, pulled up my stockings with its nails, got into my
shoes. I grabbed my jacket and scarf to get into ranks. It must have happened
like this, but I have no memory of it. I only recall the stream. (Delbo 1995: 153)

Its all a ctionor rather, an approximation. In this insistence on the

dierence between two reality claims (the rst quite denite, I, in my
dehumanization and bodily pain, I was taking a bath; the second, quite
ambiguous: it must have happened like this, but I have no memory of it)
the text drops us from intimacy. The reader experiences an acute attempt to
identify with the sensations of a very concrete experience, when suddenly
there are no grounds for this identication or feeling. In Delbos testimo-
416 Poetics Today 27:2

nial writing, the ordinary literary device (here reversal or peripety), gets
magnied and suggests the loss of a common residence, the repeated loss
of hope for a speech community in ordinary gures of speech.7 Two dimen-
sions open at once, and they seem incommensurable in the very space where
the reader has been straining for some foothold of commensurability.
So, what happens when one deploys familiar tropes or rhetorical tech-
niques in trauma time? We think of gures of speech like simile heightening
an aesthetic experience in order to defamiliarize or make it strange, in order
to add signicance or give emphasis. But in testimonial writing we nd a
situation of reverse or double defamiliarization, where two zones fall open,
and the contract between writer and reader can fall apart as well. These
bodies refuse to blend, even as parataxis beckons, so that even the most
beautiful gures of speech can resonate between two voids: so gorgeous and
hollow that we cannot beat our way back to the beautiful.

4. Orality without Intimacy

The case with oral testimony is somewhat dierent. In interviews recorded

in the Fortuno archives, we have the illusion of direct address: the survivor,
facing the camera, seems to be speaking to me. He or she tells a horrify-
ing story, until the feeling of being-with, of being-there, is quite intense.
At the same time, the body of each witness moves in a rhythm of its own,
sometimes apart from the story, sometimes not. In this epiphanic embodi-
ment, the very site that allows us to feel the weight of story so intensely
(the presence of a proprioceptive being, of someone who has survived) also
allows us to bear witness to the ways in which a story can break apart in
the face of its speakers materiality. The body moves one way, the words
can go another. In this archive, Paul D., a once hidden child, describes
his parents sacrice so he could survive. They allowed his enforced bap-
tism by a Greek Orthodox priest in order to attain for the family the right
to pass as Christian. As a child, Paul D. responded to this conversion with
an overwhelming vision of his own annihilation as a Jew:
Paul D. From that time I have a vision . . . the whole image is very clear in my
mind. I am on a meadow and there are Jewish kids playing around me and at

7. In locating the way that Delbos text pivots on precise (even graphable) gures of speech, I
diverge from Lawrence Langers (1993: 26869) assertion that if we cannot nd an aesthet-
ics for Auschwitz, we must be content with that Lyotard calls an anesthetics. But I agree
with the spirit of Langers analysis when he suggests that if art is concerned with the cre-
ation of beautiful forms, Holocaust testimony, and perhaps Holocaust art as well, deals with
the creation of malforms though I would insist that Langers analysis should also admit
that form and malform are not oppositional, but interpenetrating terms.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 417

Figure 2 Paul D.

one point they move away from me and I am alone on this meadow and God
appears before me, and he is a mountain. And God holds in his hand an ax . . .
and with a full swing splits me in half, and I just break in two.
Interviewer Jew and Christian?
Paul D. I think its more like killing me, like punishment. Whew. It . . . feels like
annihilation, thats what it feels like. (Fortuno Video Archive 1992)

Throughout this testimony, Paul D.s body is crowned by clouds of sweat

that sway across his face, cling to one earliquids unimportant but impos-
sible for the person watching this video testimony not to see. Can we mop
his brow, relieve this experience of compulsive heat? Watching Paul D.
speak, it is hard not to fasten on the sweat, to feel its liquidity both deep-
ening and drifting away from his story (gure 2).
In a world where analogy does not work, let me suggest one. There is
a moment at the end of Ridley Scotts movie Blade Runner (1982) when
the replicant played by Rutger Hauer is dying, winding down. It is rain-
ing, and his whole body glistens with water while, caressed by the glit-
ter of the worlds tears, he gives an incredibly moving speech: Ive seen
things you people wouldnt believe. Attack ships on re o the shoulder
of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhausergate. All
those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. And he
418 Poetics Today 27:2

does. In Blade Runner the visual eects amplify our emotions; the rain oper-
ates as a simile, as if the world is crying for the loss of this robot-replicants
brilliant almost-life. But in Paul D.s story we experience, instead, the body
as the blind spot of speech. Can we articulate the uncanny eects of the
beads of perspiration covering Paul D.s esh and glistening at the tips of
his hair? This sweat seems to speak, like the rain covering Rutger Hauer
in Blade Runner, of moments . . . lost in time, like tears in rain. Knowing
that many of the Fortuno archives early recordings took place in com-
plex conditionsunder glaring lights, in drenching heatthis glistening
that Paul D. does not wipe away makes his body seem at once beset and
otherworldly. But while the rainwater in Blade Runner draws us closer to the
replicant and becomes an analogue for tears he is unable to cry, the sweat
that makes Paul D.s skin glisten suggests that his body lives elsewhere, that
it harks back to an unfamiliar intensity. What was this past experience that
can still drench the present body or make the one who bears witness so
unconscious of sweat? As I write about it, this bodily detail seems minor,
but on the screen, as Paul D.s body glitters, it seems epic. His body and
his words strain toward separate dimensions that require separate scales of
comprehension.
What I am trying to capture is the eect of a gesture or glance, an unde-
cidable moment when the act of witnessing confounds identication. As
secondary witnesses, we may feel a redoubled empathy in such a moment,
and yet it is exactly in this moment that a witnesss body language marks our
nonentry into the place of intimacy.8 In another early recording, Hanna K.
describes her rst day in the camps: The day we arrived the SS people
came in, the soldiers, and we were stark naked. We were waiting to have
our heads shaved, and he recognized the opera singer, she was Jewish,
and he got very hysterical, a smirk on his face, and he made that woman,
a middle aged woman, get up, stark naked, and sing (Fortuno Video
Archive 1992). I cannot capture the wry cadences of Hanna K.s voice
the way she comes closer and fades with each pause in her speech. But I
can register, at the end of her story, the moment when her face (luminous,
engaged with the act of telling) goes away. I do not mean that the camera
leavesin fact, it lingersbut that her face itself moves out of relation-

8. Not all of the videos from the Fortuno archive capture this moment so immediately. The
videos that were edited for the PBS production Witness: Voices from the Holocaust (2000) show
sections of the testimonies that I describe here but intercut these interviews with documentary
lm clips. The moments of bodily disconnection that are so arresting in the longer interviews
may be truncated or buried as the lm cuts to other archival material. Ironically, the clips
of Nazi soldiers or Jewish prisoners are often designed to give the audience a sense of the
magnitude or scope of the witnessed events.
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 419

ship; it folds itself inward and reminds us that, while language is going one
way (self-expressive, it reaches toward the listener), the body goes another.
This parasemantic chora, this act of self-closure that occurs regularly in oral
testimony, nds its echo in the multidimensional qualities of metaphor or
simile that we encounter in written testimony. Here is intimacy, nearness,
entanglement, that deep sense of sharing someones suering that we call
compassion. But there is the historical body, the speech gure that sends
us in some other direction, the disconnected face that refuses to blend with
its story.
Other moments are just as unnerving. Jacob K. looks in one direction, his
wife Bessie K. in another. As he talks about his brothers death, she keeps
wiping her eyes while he looks up, looks down, looks to the left. She gives
him a handkerchief, he puts it down, she takes it up. While he speaks, she
looks so far away that it feels as if she is in another world. But then she tells a
story about a baby the Nazis murderedher babywhose loss was so pain-
ful that she forgot its existence for years: Baby, what baby? she repeats,
again and again.9 Her body is so composed, her narrative so perfect, so
complete in its beginning, middle, and end, that, as her tongue repeatedly
touches her bottom teeth, I am overwhelmed by the facticity of her esh; I,
too, look away. This recurring discomfortwatching her tongue touch her
teeth so repetitivelywould be an absence, an unimportance, in everyday
speech. But in trauma time every tick and touch becomes heightened; the
tongue a gentle reminder that you cannot get everything this survivor is say-
ing; there are interstices, inconsistencies, terms that tick toward the incom-
mensurable. As Shoshana Felman (1983: 21) explains in her book on speech
acts, the body is an entity that acts in excess of what is said, so that the
act is redoubled in the moment of speech: there is what is said, and then
there is a kind of saying that the bodily instrument of the utterance per-
forms. There is what is said, while at the same time there is an insurrection
of the body in speech.

9. Van Alphen (1997: 46) describes Bessie K.s testimony in terms of its epistemological
impasse. He argues that Bessie K. was unable to tell this story before 1979 because of the
limitations of the language available to her . . . the language fails to let her experience a
position where subjectivity and objecthood are ambiguous. Should she bear responsibility
for the loss of her baby, or was she a victim of the situation? . . . She does not know what her
role as an actor was. Was she the subject, which means that she had an active role in the loss
of her baby; or was she merely the object, a passive victim of the event? While both of us
examine testimony in terms of enforced acts of splitting, van Alphen explores the problem in
terms of nomination. He argues that language does not allow one to take on the simultaneous
role of subject and objecthence the Holocausts unnarratability. In contrast, I suggest that
Bessie K.s narrative (as word and as embodied discourse) is all too ample in its power of
representing the very act of self-splintering.
420 Poetics Today 27:2

Its something that we have; its in our mind, we cant forget that,
Jacob K. explains in one of the early recordings from the Fortuno archive
(1992). I dont want to live with that pain. . . . But its there, its there, it
forms its own entity and it surfaces whenever it wants to. I go on a train
and I will cry. Ill read something, and Ill be right back there where I came
from. Im not asking for it; I cant erase it; it comes all by itself. It has formu-
lated something in me. Im a scarred human being among human beings
(Fortuno Video Archive 1992). This meta-story traces the phenomenology
of what it means, here and now, to be a survivor who still lives within an
overwhelming there. And yet this transcript cannot capture Jacob K.s
body language as it dramatizes and draws away from his story. His body
language also bears witness. While Jacob K.s words pull the listener in one
direction, the particularity of his speaking body conjures a dimension that
tugs him elsewhere; when it gestures, we cannot follow. Jacob K. oers a
way of knowing, both particular and meta-historical, that says come with
me, know with me, even as his embodiment charts the listeners alienation,
our inability to enter in.
The Fortuno Video Archive is a collection intended to address the
insurrection of the body in speech, to make us intimate, as Georey Hart-
man (1996: 140) explains, with the clash between the assumptions and
vocabulary of the present world of survivor interviewer and the word-
breaking realities of the concentration camp universe. Without trivializing
this clash, I want to ask, once more, what happens to the secondary wit-
ness in this moment? She or he may ache to be close, proximate, intimate,
to understand. But even as the words reach out to us in video testimony,
the speakers body is often going away. It may ask us to follow, and we may
feel compassion for the speaker in the present, our present. But in its way,
the speakers body has already disengaged from us, has taken its own jour-
ney into the pastor into some other valence where we are no longer its
listeners. Instead, we may watch the witnesss refusal to be here, or per-
haps more accurately, we see the eort of the body to stay here, even as it
is intensively somewhere else. To put this even more simply: the body has
been through this history, but the words have not.
Laub suggests that in testimonial listening the listener must become a
participant and co-owner of the survivors experience so that a community
is formed between listener and trauma victim as testimony speeds along. I
have been examining the other side of this project, the way that something
very dierent insists on happening in both the interstices between written
gures of speech and the gap in oral testimony between what is said and the
body as instrument of saying. The possibility for such community is simul-
 Yaeger Testimony without Intimacy 421

taneously sought and elided. We cannot be the guardians of this experi-

ence. It is locked in a dimension away from us, perhaps even away from its
speaker. These spoken and written texts contain their own formal devices
for preventing the formation of a community of comfort.
Let me give a nal example from Paul D.s testimony, this time a story
with a joyous ending:
My rst memory of the horror of deportation was this. We were warned there
would be a deportation . . . and we went into hiding. And I remember we were
in an attic of a gentile, a friend of the family, and I saw through a little crack in
the window Jews being herded toward the railroad station. And when this was
over, we went out, we came down again, and all the other Jews somehow came
back that were not deported, and . . . some children . . . went looking to the
houses that people were deported from, and we went to the house of the shoy-
khet of Hummene, who lived in a very small house. The window was so low to
the ground that even as a small child I could look through it, and I saw there
was nothing but rubble; everything was broken up, and all over the oor there
were his little books that he used to tear up to give you tickets as a receipt. Some
were blue, some were green. And I remembered that all I wanted to do was to
get one of them; they looked very desirable. And then I crawled in through the
window and I took some of the books and somehow then I remembered that this
man was taken away.
Two years ago, when I was down in the chasm, the feeling that overwhelmed
me was that there were people who only lived in my memory, and I was the only
link to the world for those people, the shoykhet of Hummene. The feeling was
so awful that what I did was I called in my son. I was still in bed then, and I told
him about the shoykhet of Hummene, and I said what I want you to do is to hear
about the shoykhet of Hummene so you will also remember him. And I told him
about the shoykhet of Hummene, and my son said to me, oh, I will remember
him. And I know he will. (Fortuno Video Archive 1992)

This is an amazing story. The child is fascinated with the colored receipts
thatworthlessstill promise access to food, to the illusion of plenty. The
immediacy of these tickets subdues the childs recollection of the shoykhets
departure, but the act of touching them also means, for the child, abso-
lute loss. To end as the only ticket holder in this chasm of the disappeared
becomes so painful for the grown-up Paul D. that he asks his son to take
up this story. He also asks, by extension, that the interviewer and the video
audience carry his terrible loss. We encounter a gesture that is the oppo-
site of Hanna K.s: instead of going away, Paul D.s face becomes luminous;
it grows so bright that the camera cannot encompass it. That is, Paul D.s
body, engaged elsewhere, disengages. Here compassion may instantiate our
hope for community, but it is also irrelevant.
422 Poetics Today 27:2

I have described two dierent things. First, the use of gures of speech so
beautiful that their reception becomes painful. Second, a rupture between
the speaking of the body and the language of testimony that creates, even
for listeners who reach toward the video screen, a parallel loss of commu-
nity. Is simile, then, like the body in speech acts? Yes and no. My conclusion
is simpler. One: the ordinary techniques of inventing images and of moving
ones body in space change radically when someone writes or speaks in the
genre of testimony. Two: the secondary witness may, in these moments,
be dropped from the context of testimony, experience the texts heat or con-
agration, its refusal to draw near. But we are not forced to fall o these
formal precipices. Even as this double defamiliarization feels like a viola-
tion of the etiquette of reading or listening, our only choice is to plunge
down the precipice and then scramble back againinto the next sentence,
the next trial by re. The failure to fall, the failure to try for entanglement,
proximity, or painful intimacy with the Shoahs obscenities (that is, the fail-
ure to embrace testimonial speech acts that both demand and deny identi-
cation), would mean that all these moments will be lost in time, like tears
in rain.

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