The Uncertain Witness

In his poem “I Am Not a Camera,” W. H. Auden says, “The Camera records/visual facts: i.e.,/all may be fictions.” Auden was suspicious of the visual “recording” of events; he believed that relying on film to describe them was dangerous. His skepticism resulted in a longstanding disagreement with Christopher Isherwood. Auden and Isherwood were old friends who had traveled to Weimar Germany in the 1920s, resulting in Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (one of which was later the source of the play Cabaret). Isherwood’s credo as a writer was to take on the identity of “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Auden soundly rejected this idea. He believed that cameras were as likely as single observers to misrepresent events, particularly those that involve high emotion.

Problematic witnesses and trials go as far back as our literature. At the turning point in the Iliad, when Achilles is finally readying himself to fight, his mother, Thetis, talks the god Hephaestus into making a new shield to replace the one that Hector has taken as spoils after killing Patroclus. This new shield of Achilles is described so vividly that it is one of the best early examples of “ecphrasis,” an extended literary description of a work of art.

The shield is wrought with encircling layers that include renderings of vineyards, fields being plowed, a king’s estate and a scene of dancers. Two villages are also portrayed on it, one at peace and the other at war, surrounded by an army. One village scene depicts a man on trial by elders for killing someone. The sequence of the trial is the most detailed representation on the shield, showing arguments being delivered, the verdict and the blood money that the accused must pay. Wolfgang Schadewalt describes this moment as the calm before the storm of Achilles’ wrath as well as a rendering of the paradox of civilized life—peace and war.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange that Achilles’ shield shows a trial. The earliest civilizations developed witnesses and courts for obvious reasons. In commerce, law and religion, they help make sure that agreements are kept and wrongs righted. But witnesses are hardly infallible. They can convey the wrong impression, be mistaken or simply lie. For this reason, Mosaic Law was rigorous about testimony. According to the Talmud, more than one witness was required in all serious cases, and someone who lied in such cases could be punished as harshly as the presumed criminal. To bear false witness is to violate one of the Ten Commandments.

The legal systems of Britain and America highly favor the “eyewitness,” although both experts and simple statistics prove that such witnesses can often be unreliable. Picking the criminal from lineups is a notoriously fallible procedure. In court, witnesses either may have obvious motives for testifying against an accused or they may have psychological reasons that even they don’t comprehend.

In his essay “Philomena’s Tongue,” Horace Engdahl holds that testimonies of historical horror are the archetypal literature of the past century. Many of the memorable books of this period have concerned bloody turmoil —the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, the two world wars, the conflicts of empire, of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Elie Wiesel wrote that his generation “invented a new literature, the literature of testimony,” but he also believed that firsthand witnesses of events such as the Holocaust were too often plagued by the erasure of memory. Many who have been subjected to such events are “bruised into silence.”

French critic Renaud Dulong contends that there is a problem even with historical accounts of horrific events. Since historical accounts must arrange, explain and give chronology and logic even to subjects like the Holocaust, they may become an unintentional anodyne to the horror, effectively neutralizing and absolving. In cases of mass-scale chaos, the very logic of a rational accounting belies what it describes.

For these reasons, literature can sometimes describe highly charged events more compellingly and with a truer sense of emotion than history or even eyewitness narratives. By admitting to its own fiction and slanted...