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

Conclusion

15 Conclusion From Poetics to Prosaics In its progress from celebration to mourning, testimonio seems well embarked on the path that Kalí Tal found in the history of critical reception of other trauma narratives, from sacralization to assimilation to appropriation—ritual to history to self-help. At the same time, Melvin Lerner’s work suggests that the speakers who have “bet their blood” at other points in the testimonial project may not be wrong in their wager on the social potential of text. Lerner’s work holds out the tantalizing possibility that, with just the right arrangement of words, testimonio might evoke action. Deliberative speakers have sought to reach uncommitted audiences, and not on naïve terms. As evident from their countermeasures, some of those speakers are fully aware of reader resistance. Nevertheless, speakers have opted to use their limited time and energy to address readers because they do not think they can carry out their project in isolation, and because they have seen a use for the skills and resources that readers possess. Until collaborating writers and critics seek equally hard and knowledgeably to minimize and counter friendly resistance, it will remain impossible to know whether socially effective testimonio is possible. By taking into account what is known about readers’ resistances and how to overcome them, and by encouraging productive readings and exposing defensive ones, critics do have a potentially engaged role in the testimonial project, and whatever their limitations, some speakers seem willing to find a place for them. 15 Can Literature Promote Justice? This space of potential action stands in sharp contrast to both the ecstatic early poetics of solidarity and the mournful new poetics of isolation, epideictic responses that offer what Jean-François Lyotard called the “charm” of pathos without the responsibility to act (21). What is needed in testimonial criticism is a fundamental shift in expectations from both the instant gratification of the poetics of celebration and the selfabasing fantasy of the poetics of mourning— a shift from fantasy relationships with testimonio—to a harder, less glamorous, and less ideologically pure alternative. What deliberative speakers request of their allies, both in their lifeworld practice and in their appeal to readers—and what they offer in return—is not the high drama of a poetics, a shortcut to the sublime in which readers gaze in awe or despair on a landscape of wondrous heroes or desperate victims. As opposed to either sort of poetics , the solidarity asked for and offered in testimonio as a social project is most akin to what Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson have termed a prosaics, a solidarity founded not on ecstatic fusion but instead on considered, contingent, concrete, and undramatic actions in everyday life. (Creation, 15).1 A conception of the response to testimonio as a prosaic task could go a long way toward motivating writers, readers, and critics to consider their own answerability, as well as toward restoring the genre’s yet unrealized political potential. Attention to prosaics makes possible an engaged critique of deliberative testimonio on its own terms. It means being willing to critique seriously the practices of speakers as well as writers , critics, and readers, picking up the task begun early on by Ariel Dorfman. It will mean historicizing testimonio not only in terms of the speaker’s local and global social context (an exclusive focus that often promotes the defenses of forwarding, absenting or abjection), but also in terms of the local and global social context of readers, a task that Neil Larsen has begun. As a project, testimonio involves not only the community of speakers Conclusion 15 but the communities of writers, readers, and critics, who must also be willing to become objects of critical scrutiny. For many of us, analyzing the prosaics of the testimonio will also require a realistic acknowledgment of our own privilege.2 Such a focus on the prosaics of testimonio must not permit the critical pendulum to swing back to celebration. A politically engaged analysis has a stake in determining whether a given text is likely to be optimally persuasive. Lerner’s work has pointed to testimonio’s possibilities, but it has also pointed up the genre’s limitations. Even testimonios that are likely to be persuasive are no guarantee of social change. Narrative does not act directly on the world. It can only suggest to readers what they should do after they close the book...