Representation and Authenticity of Testimonial Literature: Geoffrey Hartman on Holocaust Studies

本文集中关注20世纪80年代后当代美国学者杰弗里·哈特曼的批评主旨。作者指出,哈特曼更多地关注文学批评的社会功能,他在主张赋予审美以其应有的尊严的同时,也反对文学研究对社会学的过度忽视。因此,他以大屠杀研究为突破口,将维护艺术自身形式要素特征和杜绝艺术麻木不仁的防御姿态结合起来,选择了证词录像作为再现大屠杀历史的方式。作为一种文学叙事,证词录像既克服了实证主义史学家所称的客观真实,又克服了现代媒体文化带来的思维和精神惰性,以艺术的真实和想象唤起大众对外在世界的强烈感受,从而实现了其独特的述行功能。


countries. Later years have seen a series of publications on the Holocaust by
Hartman as a literary critic who develops penetrating insight into modem media from the perspective of testimonial narrative and its authenticity of representation.

II . Shift to Holocaust Studies
As Nicolas Tredell commented, the 1980s saw a crisis in English and American literature during which literary studies in the traditional sense was challenged with renewed eyes on established paradigm, its method and limitations since 1960s. [ 2 1 The crisis designated by Terredel is, in essence, largely generated by the shift of paradigm from purely literary text study to cultural text or socialized text study.
With the paradigm shift, Hartman moves his focus accordingly from the uncertainty and diversity of literature and literary criticism to the social functions of it. To him, cultural studies makes invisible the boundary between literary studies and social studies, thus theorizing or ideologicalizing literary criticism. To reverse this homogenizing tendency, Hartman turns to urge the necessity and importance of artistic studies, or human studies in a general sense. As far as Holocaust studies are concerned, he insists on an artistic method which could both helpfully defend the independent status of art on its own and avoid a defensive thus exclusive posture taken by art for its own.
While the prevalence of cultural studies is contributive, as an external factor, to Hartman's shift to the Holocaust, his steadfast belief in truth and concern of the memory issue are the two major factors from within. Benjamin's theory on art replication and Jean Baudrillard's ideas on simulacra have exerted great impact on Hartman, with the latter's influence being more obvious. According to Baudrillard, all popular cultures and their representation in a postmodem society, television or film included, disguise and distort the reality instead of reflecting it, to the extent that the absence of reality is totally obscured. People in this culture just feel or experience a non-teal world as if in a world of simulacra. This non-authentic feeling lifts the barrier between them and their illusion, collapsing the reality in hyper-reality. Consequently, a profound sense of fracture in time and flatness in depth is fostered that makes themselves less imaginative and their everyday life less substantial but more virtual. The symbol, which has been traditionally thought to point to an equivalent in the real world, has lost its referential value with the lack of a reality. In other words, representation is no longer possible in a world of simulacra as it was.

ill. Representation and Authenticity
Trauma studies were first introduced into medicine to wake up and bring back the To begin with, Hartman disagrees with historians on their insistence of objective truth. Historians hope to disclose the truth concerning the traumatic event by way of empirical research and regard it as the only effective way to recover the historical truth. In their view, it is not advisable to restore the historical context of the event through individual or collective memory because memory takes place here and now and is no more than a mere reconstruction of the past experience. Memory is counter-historical, thus nothing but faithful representation of the past. To avoid subjective factors, empirical historians propose to trace exhaustively the files and material evidence on the past to retrieve the original scene, as is opposed to memory which exclusively rely on the way the individuals mind works. Maurice Halbwach, a French philosopher and sociologist who is famous for studies on collective memory, believes that collective memory is not a true record of what has happened to a group of people. On the contrary, it is a social construct ignoring the discrepancies between the present and the past, even going so far as to simplify history into a myth prototype. Likewise, Kali Tal, an American scholar, believes that the survivor talking truthfully in front of the public may pose a threat to the social status quo and plunge himself into a dangerous situation in which he could be silenced or forced to modify his story under the overwhelming pressure from the powerful social forces that conspire. This is especially true with the survivor who is a member on the underprivileged or marginalized groups. What the survivor tells in this case is "a highly political speech". This line of thought leads naturally to the conclusion that memory of the survivor is not reliable due to its failure to restore the objective historical facts. For one thing, a one-dimensional, total historical narrative has lost its credibility and legitimacy. On the other, media brought about by technological development fall short of its desired objective in its pursuit of truth. As an alternative, imagination turns to take the task of representation of the past. According to Hartman, art remains in close contact with the tradition, which means that, by resorting to history, art is more effective in representing specific historical facts than historical writing, thus is more capable of passing on history. At the same time, art goes hand in hand inseparably with imagination. Modem media has overdone to display realism so that the public is separated from the real and tend to distrust what they see. As .a result, people are weakened in their perceptibility of the extreme events and are lost in their imagination that enlivens memories.
Accordingly, the inevitable conclusion of Hartman is that art is the perfect combination of history and imagination , which means that artistic truth contains both historical reality and imaginary reality, with the latter being at a higher level of truth. With artistic truth, enlightened modem people stay far away from the thought that due to ideological manipulation, history functions as a political discourse for the official to maintain its dominance over the civilian. Likewise, they would not take a skeptical stance upon the reality in front of media. Thereby it helps overcome "the real unreal" [!OJ created by history and media, namely, a false memory. By token of this, art, especially literature, excels others in overcoming mental inertia contributed to the modem media culture, and is unparalleled in evoking their sensitivity to the world outside, knowr1 as art's performative function which Hartman has been endeavoring to promote in establishing the Holocaust archives.
In addition to its aesthetic function, art plays another role in shaping the cultural discourse and cultural awareness through encouraging people to overcome alienation with others and with themselves. It is at this point that art comes to full play as far as its value is concerned. Any artistic representation of the Holocaust in the darkest period of human history, holds as an obligation not only informing people of the historical facts, but more importantly, stirring their reaction to both inhumanity and humanity as forces to endow the collective memory with imagination in order to produce a model of representing the collective memory in modern conditions. In all the artistic models, Hartman choose to video testimony as a narrative mode that combines the oral tradition and modern technology. This combination conveys much more immediacy and authenticity than novels, biographies, autobiographies, and makes what is absent present by stimulating the reader's and auditor's

N. Video Testimony as Literary Narrative
As testimonial literature, video testimony allows interpretations of diversity to "transmit knowledge in a form that is not scientific and does not coincide with either a totaiJy realistic (as if that were possible) or analytic form of representation". [JJJ It bears the following features as a literary narrative.
Firstly, these videos not only serve to make statistics of the deaths from the racial persecution and genocide, but to explore the story of human life itself. Therefore, with a powerful sense of historical mission, this mode shortens the distance between narrative and imagination.
Secondly, the video testimony is to reconstruct the past in a literary language. In the videotapes, survivors and witnesses speak on their own to the present or real-life auditors or listeners instead of speaking as an impersonal narrator through a very neutral persona to a non-existent shadow. This may be more effectively curing.
Having different individuals retelling the same event from different perspectives would be more effective in achieving the purpose of reconstructing that history.
Besides, the present narrator is also a character in the narrative, as the intransitive writing proposed by Bart, which means that the writer himself is in the text, not beyond, and he expresses himself directly without any distance between him and the text. Berel Lang suggests that this intransitive writing stands for an impersonal  the narrator itself. On the one hand, highly personal testimony reflects common aspirations of humanity, but this commonality does not mean oneness. The survivors and witnesses are representatives of lower classes who have been deprived of the right to education because of wars and harsh economic conditions have fallen into obscurity in the official history. On the other, their sense of seriously ruptured identity as a victim necessitates their self-acceptance. Therefore, each narrative by the narrator is targeted at another implied and inherent other, as Paul Celan alleged the ghostly "you". This less seeming but necessary "you" or "other" is, by nature, a listener and spiritual partner of the narrator whom he has not be conscious of in a long time even after being released physically. Many survivors are still kept in captivity of the shadows cast by the darkness spiritually.
Then each of the survivors and witnesses play three roles: the narrator, the character and the listener.
Although different memories surround the same event, the response triggered is far more diversified and complex than novel writing by virtue of the large number of victims. Hartman recognizes the value of video testimony with regard to this as he understands from the beginning "educational value of recording survivors, as well as bystanders to the event, and other relevant people, on video" and has been thinking a lot about " the medium of video, and the Holocaust, so these two matters came together." fi3J

V. Conclusion
For Hartman, the forms of non-realistic fiction and empirical history on the Holocaust may make readers feel like a close observer of the event or even sympathize with it, but both of them cannot effectively cover the complexity of the massacre. With view to this, he chooses to videotape the testimony of survivors and witnesses. As a more individualized approach, the video not only involves a wide range and a large number of citizens, but most importantly, it is characterized by visual, auditory, emotional, imaginary authenticity and enriched reactivity. Hartman believes that traumatic memory in the form of oral testimony is a literary representation that perfectly fulfills the tasks of cultural heritage, intellectual commitment and moral obligation unrealized satisfactorily in the past few decades of Holocaust studies. This, according to Hartman, revealingly exposes the extreme cruelty lurking in the dark depths of human nature and avoids the danger of it being appropriated culturally. What Hartman expects his studies on the Holocaust to do is to repolish humanity for both moral and political lessons that has been heavily dimmed by the massacre over the years.