In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Charles Reznikoff's 1934 Testimony and the Idiom of American Violence
  • Justin Parks (bio)

Pain—Has an element of Blank

—Emily Dickinson (1863)

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

Testimony, Charles Reznikoff's perplexing, seldom-read 1934 collage of excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts, consists almost exclusively of materials its author discovered in his Depression-era day job as a fact-checker for the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris.1 The work that resulted from Reznikoff's encounter with historical legal documents indulges in, yet also ironizes, the Depression period's search for a "usable past" as it draws on materials spanning the period from the Civil War to the Panic of 1873, a period when the United States emerged as a recognizably modern nation.2 Rather than embracing narratives of American progress, though, Testimony presents shocking, lurid scenes from the past to suggest the perpetuation of this earlier period's violence and social fragmentation into its own Depression-era present. Testimony thus tacitly rejects the naïve historical optimism according to which the past greatness of the nation, established through heroic individual deeds, would underwrite its greatness in the present. By contrast with this teleological understanding of national history as a narrative of gradual progress and deliverance from suffering, in which individual experiences of pain and degradation assume their places within a larger narrative and therefore attain a redemptive meaning, Testimony thus suggests instead an elegiac notion of history in which the wounds of the past are far from being healed. [End Page 49]

Reznikoff's documentary collage–poem forecloses readerly identification with the anonymous victims of the violence it depicts, as well as the possibility of ascribing their suffering a sacrificial meaning within the narrative of nation, by refusing to provide any information that would enable its readers to contextualize its scenes of suffering. In this essay, I argue that Testimony means to imply a link between past violence and present social fragmentation, and that it does so by casting the body—torn, injured, and maimed through racial and sexual violence, dehumanizing labor, and despairing self-inflicted mutilation—in a central role, ultimately dismissing the notion that physical pain can serve a galvanizing, restorative function. Bearing this attitude toward the past in mind, I conclude by suggesting that the final section of Testimony, titled "Depression," does not draw its subject matter from Reznikoff's 1930s' present, as the text's comparatively few critics have suggested. Instead, it documents the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, proposing this earlier period as a parallel to the Depression of the 1930s—and suggesting the inescapability of the past.

An ongoing preoccupation of its author, Testimony initially appeared in installments under the sardonic title "My Country 'Tis of Thee" in the little magazine Contact, edited by William Carlos Williams and Nathaniel West, in 1932, and in An "Objectivists" Anthology, edited by Louis Zukofsky, during the same year. The project was eventually published in its own volume, dedicated to Zukofsky and with an introduction by Kenneth Burke, in 1934 by the Objectivist Press, a venture in which Reznikoff held an important stake. Since the original text has been unavailable until very recently, and since Reznikoff continued to publish subsequent work under the same title throughout his life, the original 1934 text of Testimony has tended to be overlooked by both scholars of Reznikoff's work and commentators on the period.3 Yet, Testimony remains an important exhibit in the history of 1930s' documentary, particularly as it was transposed and adapted by poets. As its original title, "My Country 'Tis of Thee," suggests, Testimony raises issues of national identity both explicitly and implicitly, as it questions whether anonymous scenes extrapolated from the public record can be shaped and ordered so as to lend them weight or significance within a broader narrative of nation. Reznikoff's own account of the beginnings of the project emphasizes this aspect of his material: "Once in a while," Burke's introduction quotes him as saying,

I could see in the facts of a case details of the time and place...

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