The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Nearness and Neighborliness

Others 59 NearnessandNeighborliness In her testimonial writings, Charlotte Delbo, a French Resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor, repeatedly uses a specific rhetorical strategy that several critics, including myself, have commented on. Hoping to establish a relation of proximity with her readers in order to be able to transmit something of what she went through, Delbo must also try to frustrate our wish to know what we cannot possibly know, to deflect our desire for something like deep, subjective intimacy with someone whose experience will always remain partly beyond our grasp.The literary scholar PatriciaYeager,for one, has written beautifully about the need to resist the temptation of intimacy and proprietary knowledge when reading testimonies of trauma. Instead, Delbo’s goal is to establish enough common ground for us to stand near her while maintaining the distance necessary to ensure that we will not be able to be in her place or appropriate what is not ours. Close, in other words, but not so close as to render her transparent to us and her experience fully knowable by others. In the opening section of her trilogy, Auschwitz and After, Delbo describes what we immediately identify as a typical train station. Yes, we recognize this space, we’ve occupied it, or one just like it, we’ve used it, and, inevitably, we’ve shared it with throngs of other people, complete strangers for the most part. Soon, however, Delbo pulls the rug from under her readers ’ feet, and the description makes way for a very different train station—­ the arrival ramp of Auschwitz-­ Birkenau. The people exiting the trains here are not going home or to work or on vacation; they are Jews going to their deaths. In another passage, the narrator recalls the tales of colonial explorers nearly dying of thirst in the desert, stories whose orientalist local color once made them both exotic and familiar. And then, almost without warning, she depicts the far less heroic and far more disorienting experience of thirst that she went through in the swamps of Poland. Later in the book, a beloved childhood pet morphs into a bloodthirsty hound that tears a prisoner to pieces. There are other examples. These scenes dramatize just how far a reader may be able to go without, in essence, colonizing the witness by implanting into the testimony a kind of knowledge that is in fact the reader’s own. It isn’t that Delbo is trying to trick us, of course. Anyone who picks up her books opens them with a certain set of expectations. Some readers, such as academics, for example, are also aware that the testimonial writing 60 Others of trauma always raises questions of representation and that witnesses must rely on rhetorical tactics to ensure that something of the traumatic experience will be transmitted to others. Some authors use a degree of fictionalizing in telling their story, creating composite characters maybe, or imagining dialogues in order to verbalize for their readers’ benefits what may have been only felt or thought at the time; others tactically inhabit familiar genres or registers that provide us with something resembling a roadmap into mostly uncharted territory. But all know that familiarity has its limits. Sharing an experience of the extreme involves negotiating these limits and problematizing the modalities of contact, since it is through contact between what they articulate that limits in general are established and felt to exist even though they have no tangibility of their own. Our eyes lie. Only when I touch you and you touch me do we know for certain where we begin and where we end. If Delbo doesn’t exactly lure unsuspecting readers into uneasy contact, she does beckon us, in a way; or rather, she makes an appeal for us to read her.The French phrase that comes to my mind here is faire signe. It means to signal or to wave at somebody, but literally“to make a sign.”Indeed, if Delbo motions us to come near her, her mode of address foregrounds its status as sign.When we read the description of the train station in the opening pages, we know that it is meant to be typical, a series of signs that indicates not a train station but a“train station.” In a similar way, we are asked to recognize stories of thirsty explorers as told in children’s books whose purpose was to produce popular myths and a sense of national identity in colonial times. Readers are therefore...