‘The Ethics of Metawitnessing in Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski’
Helena Duffy
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021042825039
Tiivistelmä
The present article considers Yannick Haenel’s novel Jan Karski(2010) as an act of metawitnessing, a term coined by Derrida in relation to Celan’s poetry and applicable to the philosopher’s won readings of the Judeo–Romanian poet’s work. By metawitnessing—as opposed to secondary witnessing—I understand the act of testifying on behalf of a witness, which, analogically to metafiction, is underpinned by a self-reflective meditation upon the mutually contradictory necessity and impossibility of bearing witness. Additionally, the article frames Haenel’s novelwith the development of Holocaust memory with the advent of the second and third generation of survivors, and of “nonwitnesses,” who, though lacking personal links to the Shoah, feel compelled to memorialize it. Using Hirsch’s taxonomy of postmemory, I define the position of Jan Karskiin relation to existing Holocaust testimony. I will then discuss Haenel’s both intense awareness of his project’s morally risky nature and ambition to offer a broader reflection upon the figure of the witness and the act of (secondary) witnessing. Guided by Jan Karski’s epigraph—“Qui témoigne pour le témoin?” (“Who bears witness for the witness?”)—which paraphrases the closing stanza of Celan’s poem “Aschenglorie,” my analysis will then turn to Haenel’s handling of the aporia voiced by the poem and materialized as the psychological urge to testify to what is often felt to be unrepresentable for the absence of the absolute, and thus necessarily silent, witnesses. Finally, illuminating my discussion with Dan Stone’s considerations upon the tension between Holocaust testimony and historiography, I will read Jan Karskinot only as a speculation about future commemorations of the Nazi genocide in the post-witness era, but also as an apology of testimony, even if testimony should be, oxymoronically, a work of imagination. This is because, unlike history proper, eyewitness accounts are capable of voicing feelings and especially trauma, and can therefore testify to a differend, as Jean-François Lyotard has termed a situation in which victims have no way of expressing the injustice they have suffered. According to Lyotard, it is precisely the duty of postmodern writers to seek new artistic means to articulate the wrongs experienced by victims, without, however, trying to resolve the differend or substitute for those they are representing.[1]I will conclude therefore with an attempt to assess whether, as many believe, Haenel’s portrayal of Karski has done further violence to the memory of the Polish hero and the cause he supported, or, conversely, thanks to its unconventional presentation, is an ethically sound testimony to the wrongs inflicted upon the Jews and their advocate.
[1]Writing from a historian’s standpoint, Raul Hilberg states that the unprecedentedness and unexpectedness of the Holocaust “necessitates the use of words or materials that were never designed for depiction of what happened here.” Raul Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in Berel Lang, (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), p. 21. This position is close to that of Lang himself, who notes that writers fail to represent the Holocaust precisely because of their use of the very literary conventions and techniques from before the war. Following Roland Barthes, he calls for “intransitive,” that is “nonreferential, nonrepresentational” writing. Berel Lang, “Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabès and the Measure of History,” in Lang, (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust, pp. 248–249.
Kokoelmat
- Rinnakkaistallenteet [19207]