Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

3. A Genre Without a Chance?

66 3. A Genre Without a Chance? Predicting the Social Effectiveness of Testimonial Narratives The question of testimonio’s potential efficacy is central to any engaged analysis. Can testimonial texts really be expected to contribute to the achievement of social goals? If it is possible to do such a thing with words, is it possible for testimonio’s speakers to influence the First World readers that constitute the genre’s largest audience? If so, what strategies are likely to be most effective in inducing readers to act? Social psychologist Melvin Lerner’s work on the belief in a just world offers crucial theoretical and experimental underpinning for an analysis of the role of text in testimonio’s social projects. Lerner, whose own work on social psychology and ethics has been widely cited, has also conducted a meta-analysis of the findings of hundreds of researchers working independently on the effects of specific details of presentation of injustice on subjects’ attitudes and actions. Lerner’s work strongly supports a basic tenet of politically engaged writing: that certain texts about injustice do make readers more likely to take action than do others. While this observation might seem obvious, it bears articulation in light of the current pessimistic mood in testimonial criticism. If, in the celebratory phase of the sixties, seventies and early eighties writers, critics and readers were too ready to deny the difference between text and lifeworld, the moment of mourning has been marked by precisely the opposite set of responses. Not only is it now noted that reading and writing are not revolution —a useful corrective to early triumphalism—the pendulum A Genre Without a Chance? 6 has swung to the opposite extreme, as some critics now profess grave doubt as to whether literature might ever influence life. “In dealing with testimonio,” states John Beverley, “I have also begun to discover in myself a kind of posthumanist agnosticism about literature” (Against Literature, 99). Georg Gugelberger observes that the reception of testimonio “clearly showed once again that whatever literature is or might be, it hardly will be able to instigate action and effect deeply needed change” (10). Gugelberger went on to assert that “we may not like this outcome but we can hardly avoid its implications. In the end there is only ‘mourning,’ ‘travail du deuil’ as Jacques Derrida has called it, or the famous ‘Trauerarbeit’ of which Walter Benjamin already had spoken” (18).1 The findings that Lerner sets forth in The Belief in a Just World demonstrate that at least some forms of literature can promote social change. Belief in justice is widespread and powerfully motivating, readers are willing to act upon it, and they can be motivated by textual depictions of injustice (15). Speaking of experimental samples representative of the majority of the population of the United States, and fairly representative of the mostly middle-class and educated First World readers of testimonio , Lerner observes that “it is clear that people value justice more than profit, and at times more than their own lives” (175). In contrast with prevailing “rational self-interest” models of altruism, Lerner found that people will do far more than they can ever predict could be repaid, and will even help when there is neither prospect of any repayment nor any witnesses whose presence might hold out a promise of enhanced prestige (172–76). Nevertheless, it is too early for renewed celebration. Lerner ’s work establishes only a hypothetical possibility that testimonio might induce currently uncommitted First World readers to cooperate in the genre’s project of social action. This does not mean that the specific forms that testimonio has hereto- 6 Can Literature Promote Justice? fore taken are necessarily effective; Lerner’s work also points to some formidable rhetorical requirements. To understand the specifics, it is necessary briefly to trace the operation of the “just world” belief system that Lerner posits as an explanation for his experimental findings. Believing in a just world, it appears, is an important goal of people’s everyday actions: people do justice because they desire to believe in it. At first glance, this statement might appear either simplistic or tautological. Why should the desire for justice be so widespread, let alone so powerful a motivator? Why should people take such risks and make such sacrifices to protect it? The answer, according to Lerner’s luminous synthesis, is that a basic belief in justice is adaptive in...