Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness

8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness

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CAROLYN FORCHE

Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art

The letter arrived on a series of

plain postcards

in

Joseph Brodsky's

penciled

cursive,

mailed

separately

from his

newly imposed

exile

in Ann

Arbor,

Michigan, very

near the

township

of

my

childhood.

They

contained his advice to a

young poet

brash

enough

to

send her

youthful

efforts to him. You should consider

including

in

your poems

more

of

your

own,

well,

philosophy,

he wrote.

And

on

another card: It

is also a

pity

that

you

do not read

Russian,

but I think

you

should

try

to

read

Anna Akhmatova.

It

was,

I

believe,

two

years

earlier that

I had

read

excerpts

from the

transcript

of

Brodsky's

trial

in

the

former

Soviet

Union,

condemning

him to forced labor. When asked on what

authority

he

pronounced

himself a

poet,

he had answered that the vocation came from God.

Now he

was

advising

me to read

Akhmatova,

and so that winter

I went into the stacks of the

Library

of

Congress

and found a vol

ume of

her

poems,

translated

by Stanley

Kunitz and Max

Hayward.

Kneeling

on the floor between the

shelves,

I read a

passage

no doubt

well

known to readers of

Poetry:

In

the terrible

years

of the Yezhov terror I

spent

seventeen

months

waiting

in line outside the

prison

in

Leningrad.

One

day somebody

in the crowd identified me.

Standing

behind me

was a

woman,

with

lips

blue from the

cold,

who

had,

of

course,

never heard me called

by

name before. Now she started

out

of

the

torpor

common to

us all

and

asked

me

in a

whisper (every

one

whispered

there):

"Can

you

describe this?"

And I said, "I can."

Then

something

like a smile

passed fleetingly

over what had

once been her face.

Akhmatova referred

to

this

passage

as Vmesto

predisoviia

(Instead

of a

Preface),

adding

it as

prologue

to her

great poem, "Requiem,"

written

during

the

years

of

her

son

Lev Gumilev's

imprisonment.

The

poem

was her

podvig,

her

spiritual accomplishment

of "remem

bering

injustice

and

suffering"

as

experienced

within herself and as

CAROLYN FORCHE

159

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the

saying

of

poetry

which

calls the reader to her

irrevocable and

inexhaustible

responsibility

for the other

as

present

in the testamen

tary

utterance.

A

poem

is

lyric

art,

but

Levinas claims that

a

poetic

work is at the same time a

document,

and the art that

went

into its

making

is at once a use of discourse.

This discourse

deals with

objects

that are also

spoken

in

the

newspapers, post

ers,

memoirs and

letters of

every

passing age

—

though

in the

case of

poetry's strictly poetic expression

these

objects merely

furnish a

favorable occasion and serve as

pretexts.

It is of the es

sence of art to

signify only

between the lines

—

in the

intervals

of

time,

between times

—

like

a

footprint

that would

precede

the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.

This voice is the

saying

of the

witness,

which is not a translation of

experience

into

poetry

but

is itself

experience.

Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthe,

writing

on the work of

Celan,

proposes

to call what

[the

poem]

translates

"experience," provided

that

we both understand the word in its

strict sense

—

the Latin ex

periri,

a

crossing through danger

—

and

especially

that we avoid

associating

it with what is

"lived,"

the

stuff

of anecdotes.

But a

poem,

in its

witnessing,

"arises out of

experience

that is not

perceived

as

it

occurs,

is not

registered

in the

first-person 'precisely

since it ruined

this first

person,

reduced it to a

ghostlike

status,

to

being

a "me without me.'""

So the

poem's

witness is not a

recount

ing,

is not mimetic

narrative,

is not

political

confessionalism,

and "it

is not

simply

an act of

memory.

It

bears

witness,

as

Jacques

Derrida

suggests,

in

the manner of an ethical or

political

act."

The

"poetry

of

witness,"

as a term of

literary

art,

had not

yet

had

its

genesis,

but soon after

learning

of

Brodsky

and Akhmatova I

began

an

epistolary friendship

with the

late Terrence Des

Pres,

author

of

The Survivor: An

Anatomy of Life

in the

Death

Camps,

in which he

cites Akhmatova's

preface

to

"Requiem"

as

epigraph

to a

chapter

on

the survivor's will to bear

witness. Within months of

meeting

Des

Pres in the summer of

1977,

I traveled to

Spain

to

translate Claribel

162

poetry




6/17

Alegria,

herself a

poet

in

exile,

and in

January

of

1978

was welcomed

by

one of her relatives to

El

Salvador,

where I was to work as a docu

menter

of

human

rights

abuses

in

the

period immediately

preceding

a

twelve-year

civil war

(working closely

with associates of

Monsignor

Oscar

Romero,

then

archbishop

of San

Salvador,

and with

my

contact

in the International

Secretariat

of

Amnesty

International.)

If

asked when

I

returned from El Salvador for the last time in

those

years,

I have said March

16,

1980,

a week

before the assassi

nation of

Monsignor

Romero. After

thirty years,

I

now understand

that I did not return on that

date,

that the woman

who traveled to

El Salvador

—

the

young poet

I had been

—

did not

come back.

The

woman who did return

wrote,

in those

years,

seven

poems

marked

by the

El

Salvador experience, and also an essay, published in the

summer of

1981

in American

Poetry

Review,

in

which this return

ing

poet

states: "It is

my feeling

that the

twentieth-century

human

condition demands a

poetry

of

witness." Two

years

later,

Czeslaw

Milosz would

publish

his

monograph,

The Witness

of Poetry,

and

a

phrase, "poetry

of

witness,"

entered the lexicon of

literary

terms,

re

garded skeptically by

some

as

a

euphemism

for

"political poetry,"

or

as

political poetry by

other means. "Witness" would come to

refer,

much

of the

time,

to

the

person

of

the

poet,

much as it refers to a man

or woman

testifying

under

oath

in

a court of law. "Poets of witness"

were considered

by

some to be

engaged

in

writing documentary

litera

ture,

or

poetic reportage,

and in the mode of

political

confessionalism.

As

compelling

as

many

such "witness"

poems

are,

"poetry

of

witness"

originated

in a

very

different

constellation of

thought,

in which it was not

regarded

as

constituting

a

poet's identity,

nor

prescribing

a new litterature

engagee.

"Poetry

of

witness,"

a term

descending

from the literature of the Shoah and

complicated by

philosophical, religious, linguistic,

and

psychoanalytic

understand

ings

of

"witness,"

remains to be set

forth.

In

my

sense of this

term,

it

is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with

the literature of

that-which-happened,

and its mode is

evidentiary

rather

than

representational

—

as

evidentiary,

in

fact,

as

spilled

blood.

While the solitude and

tranquility

thought

to be the

condition of

lit

erary production

were absent for

many

twentieth-

and

twenty-first

century poets,

even in the aftermath of their

survival,

writers have

CAROLYN FORCHE




7/17

survived and written

despite

all that has

happened,

and

against

all

odds.

They

have created

exemplary literary

art with

language

that

has also

passed through catastrophe.

The

body

of

thought

that

informs

"the

poetry

of witness"

suggests,

moreover, that

language

can itself

be

damaged.

This idea of

"damaged language"

appears

in

George

Steiner's

Language

and

Silence,

when he considers the

German lan

guage "being

used

to

run

hell,

getting

the habits of

hell into its

syntax":

Languages

have

great

reserves of

life.

They

can absorb masses of

hysteria,

illiteracy,

and

cheapness

... But there comes a break

ing point.

Use a

language

to

conceive,

organize,

and

justify

Belsen;

use it

to make out

specifications

for

gas

ovens;

use it

to

dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality.

Something

will

happen

to it—

Something

of the lies and sadism

will settle in the marrow of the

language.

Imperceptibly

at

first,

like the

poisons

of radiation

sifting

silently

into the

bone.

But

the

cancer will

begin,

and the

deep-set

destruction. The

language

will no

longer grow

and freshen. It will no

longer perform, quite

as well as it used

to,

its two

principal

functions: the

conveyance

of humane

order which we call

law,

and the

communication of

the

quick

of the

human

spirit

which we call

grace.

The

damage

need

not be

regarded,

however,

as

always irreparable.

In the words of Paul

Celan in his

speech

at

Bremen:

One

thing

remained

attainable,

close and unlost

amidst all

the losses:

language. Language

was not

lost,

in

spite

of all

that

happened.

But it had to

go through

its own

responselessness, go

through

horrible

silences,

go through

the thousand

darknesses

of

death-bringing speech.

It was this language, this poetry that had passed through death

bringing speech,

that I set out to find

and

gather

in

my anthology,

Against Forgetting.

I

hoped

to

discover the trace of

extremity

that

might

remain

legible

in these

poems.

Common

among

them is an

explicit

will to bear witness. Here

is Wislawa

Szymborska:

Write it. Write. In

ordinary

ink

on

ordinary paper: they

were

given

no

food,

they

all died of

hunger.

"All.

How

many?

164

POETRY




8/17

It's a

big

meadow. How much

grass

for each one?" Write: I don't know.

History

counts its skeletons in round numbers.

— From Hunger Camp atJaslo

There are inventories of

losses,

as in Akhmatova's

"Requiem":

Nothing

I

counted

mine,

out of

my

life,

is mine to take:

not

my

son's terrible

eyes,

not the elaborate stone flower

of

grief,

not the

day

of the

storm,

nor the trial of the

visiting

hour,

not the dear coolness of his

hands,

not the lime trees'

agitated

shade,

not the

thin

cricket-sound

of

consolation's

parting

word.

The difficulties of

forgetting

and

remembering

are marked. Vahan

Tekeyan:

Forgetting.

Yes. I will

forget

it all.

One after the other. The roads I crossed.

The roads I did not.

Everything

that

happened.

And

everything

that did not.

—

From

Forgetting

Guillaume

Apollinaire:

Memories composing now a single memory

As a hundred furs make

only

one coat

As these these thousands of wounds make

only

one

newspaper

article.

—

From Shadow

Of the self's

fragmentation,

we read in

Angel

Cuadra:

CAROLYN

FORCHE




9/17

The common man I

might

have been

reproaches

me

now,

blaming

me for his ostracism

his solitary shadow,

his silent exile.

—

From In

Brief

Early

in the twentieth

century,

there is evidence of faith and

prayer

in

poetry,

and of belief in the sacred. Toward the middle of the

century,

there is a discernible shift toward alienation from the

deity.

Celan:

They dug

and

they dug,

so their

day

went

by

for

them,

their

night.

And

they

did not

praise God,

who,

so

they

heard,

wanted all

this,

who,

so

they

heard,

knew all this.

—

From There Was

Earth

Inside

Them

The

temporal

sense seems

changed.

In Velimir Khlebnikov's

"Suppose

I make a

timepiece

of

humanity,"

we read this:

I

tell

you,

the universe is the scratch

of a match on

the

face of

the

calculus.

And

my thoughts

are a

picklock

at work

on a

door,

and behind it someone is

dying.

There are

many

other shared

qualities,

such as the

experience

of

consciousness itself as

fragmented

and

altered,

and for the first

time,

soldier

poets

write of the

extremity

of

the

battlefield

explicitly

in

terms of its horrors. Poetic

language attempts

a

coming

to terms with

evil and its

embodiments,

and there are

appeals

for a shared sense of

humanity

and collective resistance. There are

many poems

of address:

to war as figural, to death and evil, memory and hunger as figural, and

of course

to the world to come:

We

speak loudly

but no one understands us.

But

we are

not

surprised

For we are

speaking

the

language

That will be

spoken

tomorrow.

—

Horst

Bienek,

from Resistance

l66 POETRY




10/17

In conditions of

extremity

(war,

suffering, struggle),

the

witness is

in

relation,

and cannot remove

him or herself. Relation is

proximity,

and this closeness

subjects

the witness to the

possibility

of

being

wounded. No

special protection

can be

sought

and no outcome in

tended.

The witness who writes

out of

extremity

writes his or

her

wound,

as

if such

writing

were

making

an incision. Consciousness

itself is cut

open.

At the site of the

wound,

language

breaks,

becomes

tentative,

interrogational, kaleidoscopic.

The

form of this

language

bears the trace

of

extremity,

and

may

be

comprised

of

fragments:

questions,

aphorisms,

broken

passages

of

lyric prose

or

poetry, quota

tions,

dialogue,

brief and lucid

passages

that

may

or

may

not resemble

what

previously

had been written.

The word "extremity" (extremus) is the superlative correlative of

the word "exterior"

(exterus).

Extremity suggests

"utmost,"

"exceed

ingly great,"

and also

"outermost," "farthest,"

implying

intense suffer

ing

and even

world-death;

a

suffering

without

knowledge

of

its own

end. Ethical

reading

of such works does not inhere

in

assessing

their

truth value or

efficacy

as

"representation,"

but rather

in

recogniz

ing

their

evidentiary

nature: here

language

is a

life-form,

marked

by

human

experience,

and is also itself material evidence of

that-which

occurred.

This evidence continues

to mark human consciousness.

The

aftermath

is a

region

of devastated

consciousness of barbarism and the

human

capacity

for

cruelty

and

complicity

with evil. In this

aftermath,

we are able

to read

—

in the scarred

landscape

of

battlefields,

in bomb

craters

and unreconstructed

ruins,

in oral and written

testimony

and

its

extension in

literary

art

—

the mark or trace of

extremity.

In the work of

witness,

of

writing

out of

extremity,

the

poem

does

not become a means

to an

extra-literary

end:

the

poet, according

to

Maurice

Blanchot,

is excluded from the

facile,

humanistic

hope

that

by writing,

or

"creating,"

he would transform his dark

experience

into

greater

consciousness. On

the

contrary:

dismissed,

excluded from

what

is written

—

unable even

to be

present

by

virtue of the

non

presence

of his

very

death

—

he has to renounce

all conceivable

relations of a self

(either

living

or

dying)

to the

poem

which

henceforth

belongs

to the other.

CAROLYN

FORCHE




11/17


12/17

Q&A

Your connection

of

the

poetry of

witness with the ideas

of

Emmanuel

Levinas

suggests

that,

for you, poetry

has a

distinctly

moral

purpose,

that

it

should

awaken us to the

plight of

other

people.

Is this true? Do

you

be

lieve that a

right reading of poetry

leads to this kind

of

moral awareness

and

openness?

Poetry begins

in a

not-knowing

rather

than a moral

impulse.

A

poet's

consciousness

is,

in this

sense,

improvisational

and

open

to transfor

mations,

felicitous

accidents,

and an

intuitive

response

to

language

generating meaning

and music

—

that is true whether

the

spark ignit

ing the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in

experience, present

or remembered.

This

spark

is what Mandelstam

calls

poryv,

or

impulse,

and what Emerson

thinks of as what is oldest

and best in

us,

the alien

visitor. This

not-knowing

is a

hovering

and

receptive

state of consciousness without intention

(in

the traditional

meaning

of that

word).

Levinas

proposes

an ethics based on our infinite and inexhaustible

responsibility

for the

"Other,"

whom we meet in the

face-to-face

encounter,

and for whom

we are also the "Other." The

thought

of

witness

proposes

that we consider what is made

present

to us in cer

tain

poetic

texts,

what is

opened

up

to

us,

transmitted

to us.

In

this

sense,

it

might

resemble the face-to-face

encounter and its attendant

obligations.

If we read a

poem

as

witness

(and

there are

many

other

ways

of

reading),

we

open

ourselves to another

way

of

knowing.

We

read in

response

to an ethical

imperative.

We are not bound to read

this

way,

of

course,

but if we

do,

we are

responding

to

the

poet's

call

to the

future,

to a

writing

from the

past

that addresses the reader to

come,

addresses the one who will lift the corked bottle from the sea

waves and read its

message.

I don't know if there is a

"right reading"

of

poetry,

but rather

many readings, many ways

of

reading,

and one of

them is a read

ing

of the

poem

as witness that is

perhaps

also

testamentary,

but is

certainly always

evidence of that from which it

arose. Whether this

way

of

reading

leads to moral awareness and

openness,

I don't know.

In

Levinas's

sense,

certainly

it would

provide

an

occasion for ethical

awareness. Mandelstam and also Bakhtin would

say

that the

poet

is

always writing

in

response

to a

listening

from an unknown future

reader. This means that we can't

know what the

poem

means because

CAROLYN FORCHE

169




13/17

we can't know what it will mean later. We are

writing

what

future will be the irrevocable

past.

Does an

"evidentiary

"

reading preclude

an aesthetic one? Can a

poem

be

successful

as evidence

and

yet

a

failure

as art?

No

reading precludes

another. When

poetry

is read as

witness,

the

poem

is

judged by

its truth as a

poem,

and what this truth does in

the reader. This is

Mandelstam's criterion. If the

poem

is true in

Mandelstam's

terms,

it doesn't fail as

art. If it does fail as

art,

it isn't

a

poem,

but remains

a

piece

of evidence. If one

reading

of Kant

sug

gests

that the

categorical

imperative

demands a freedom that can be

found through the aesthetic experience of the sublime, then aesthetic

experience

offers

the

freedom

that is the

ground

of

ethics,

so

perhaps

it

—

the

poem

—

can

offer a sense of

responsibility

or

blessing.

You

say

that "most

of

the

prominent twentieth-century

poets beyond

the

English-speaking

countries

(and

even some within

them)

had endured

such

experiences

during

their lives." Does that mean

that the

greatest

poetry

somehow

depends upon having suffered

some

extremity of expe

rience? And how would

you respond

to

John

Berryman's

idea

that the

"luckiest" artist is the one who

is

presented

with

the worst

possible

ordeal

that will not

actually

kill him?

Great

poetry might

in

part depend

on

engagement

with the

extremity

of

existence,

but this does

not

necessarily

entail the

greatest suffering;

these extremes

can be

experienced meditatively

and involve awareness

of the radical

contingency

of all human life. There are

poets

—

and

in

the

twentieth and

early twenty-first

centuries

they

have been

many

—

whose

engagement

includes man's

inhumanity

to

man,

and

this was the form of

extremity

I

collected

into the

anthology Against

Forgetting: warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, and other

forms of

extremity

endured

through

the

depredations

of the state.

Not all

extremity

is of this kind.

As for

John

Berryman's

statement,

I would

guess

that he was

referring

to those

artists,

such as confessional

poets,

who view their

experience

as

material,

and

perhaps

"suffering"

is then also material

and

provides

a more resonant

self-expression.

He

might

also be re

ferring

to

the

necessary

education of the

soul

in certain

poets,

who

seem almost

determined to

subject

themselves to all manner of

pain

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14/17

for reasons that

may partly

have to do with their

literary

art. But this

isn't about the

economy

of

converting personal experience

to

literary

art. No

one is a

great poet

because

she is a miserable drunk. No one

is a

great poet

because he has had a nervous breakdown.

Suffering,

however,

can be

experienced

as a curse or a

blessing;

the luckiest is

the one who can

experience

it as a

blessing.

You

say

that not

only

the

poets "pass through"

their

experiences

but also

their

very languages,

which continue to "bear

wounds,

legible

in the line

breaks,

in constellations

of imagery,

in

ruptures of

utterance,

in

silences

and

fissures of

written

speech."

Can translation

convey

this? What is the

effect of reading,

in

translation,

all

of

these

poems

that trauma has so sin

gularly shaped and stamped?

Poetry

is an art of words but also the

energy

that moves

through

them

—

what comes

from

spirit

or

noumena,

the

impulse,

the

spark,

and this is what makes the

poem

unparaphrasable.

A successful trans

lation allows the

spirit

or

impulse

of the

original

to enter and flow

through

the new

language.

The

poem

will not sound like the

original,

and the music of the

original

will be lost

(together

with connota

tive

resonances),

but in a

good

translation a

new music is

found,

and

the new

language

is suffused

with

the

original impulse.

If

you

have

faithful and literal translation

by

itself and without this

energy,

you

have

paraphrase.

Hans

Magnus

Enzensberger

said "Was nicht sel

ber Poesie

ist,

kann nicht

Ubersetzung

von Poesie sein"

—

what is

not

poetry,

cannot be a translation of

poetry. According

to Walter

Benjamin,

translation is the afterlife of the

original,

and is marked

by

its

ongoing

life

(and

in this

sense,

language

is a life

form).

In

witness,

this afterlife is the

poem's

survival in another

language, along

with

the mark of

extremity.

Can the "poetry of witness" transcend trauma? Can it include joy, or at

least an uninhibited shriek

of being

(the

late work

of

Mandelstam,

say)?

One cannot transcend trauma. Trauma is

trapped

and

clings

to that

which

happened.

We live not after trauma but in its aftermath. There

is a

process,

which some

imagine

as the work of

"healing,"

which is

not

perhaps

accurate. This

process

is one of trans-memberment: one

is

always attending

to the

metamorphoses:

the nausea and

psychic

ruin of trauma

moving

into wisdom and

strength, again

and

again;

CAROLYN FORCHE

I7I




15/17

every day

one does the work of

turning

trauma into what

might

be

called

grace

or fortitude or wisdom.

Can

poetry

of witness be

experienced

or read as

joyful?

I

don't

know

why

not. A better term

might

be as

blessing.

In

many poems

read as

witness,

there is an

affirmation,

a fullness of life. The

poet

writing

in the mode of witness is never within the trauma.

The

poem

is marked

by

it and

bears the remains of what has been endured.

In

this

sense,

it

might produce

"more

life,"

more of what life is. It isn't

subject

matter that makes a

poem

witness;

poems

are not what

they

are

"about."

If

they

were,

that would be

paraphrase

and not

poetry.

Can the

poetry

of

witness be a

purely spiritual phenomenon?

That

is,

can

the dynamic that you're describing in this essay, the permanent wound

ing of

consciousness

and

language,

occur

from metaphysical,

as

well as

physical,

trauma?

If we think of the

spiritual

as a

way

of

knowing,

one can be wounded

spiritually.

Jean-Francois

Lyotard

would

argue

that the

language

of

the Torah is

permanently

wounded

by

the

experience

of the divine.

Jacob

endures

wrestling

with the

stranger,

his

angel.

The

slightest

shock or event

can

send

you

from one

thinking

to

another;

trauma is

said to occur when this shock is

sufficiently

strong

as to overwhelm.

If the

experience

of God is

traumatic,

it is because we meet with the

incommensurate.

In

1981

you

wrote,

"It is

my feeling

that the

twentieth-century

human con

dition demands

a

poetry of

witness." Do

you

still

feel

this

way?

How well

does a

poet

like Elizabeth

Bishop,

who is

easily

the

most

highly-regarded

American

poet of

the second

half of

the twentieth

century,

meet

this demand?

Witness is not demanded

of

every poet.

Witness,

as a mode of

reading,

is a response to certain works — those that bear the mark of extremity,

and often those written in

light

of

catastrophic experience.

The work

of

Wallace

Stevens,

one of the

greatest poets

of our

language,

would

not often be read as

poetry

of

witness,

but rather of

contemplative

states,

formal turns of

mind,

and

poetic accomplishment.

However,

if we think of witness in

light

of

catastrophic

events,

we would

have to consider The Auroras

of

Autumn

and its

implicit

confronta

tion

with the violence of wwn. Charles Altieri reads

this work in

part

as Stevens's

need

172

POETRY




16/17

to

explore

in

what

ways imagination

may

be

complicit

in one

mode of evil and then to see

how he

[Stevens]

might

reconstitute

his

projections

so that he could

foster an

imagination

capable

of

taking responsibility

for this

complicity

and so

working

toward a

different mode of

self-consciousness.

This seems to me a

species

of the

reading

I have in

mind. Works of

witness have

something

to do with the

intimacy

of world

engage

ment. In

Bishop,

there is a confrontation

with radical otherness: the

moose

in

the

road,

the fish

pulled

into

the boat still

wearing

the

hooks

of his

past struggles.

She writes

out

of her

shock at

coming upon

these

creatures. The shock

that shifts

thinking

from one to

an other.

Your

essay

is

full

of major postmodern

thinkers but veers

far from post

modern

thought,

which

typically

asserts the

instability of

the

self, identity,

and

language.

The notion that a

particular poet

or

poem

could be

witness

to,

could in

some

way express,

general suffering

—

many

people

will

find

that a

hopelessly

Romantic notion. What would

you say

to that?

Rather than

postmodern

thinkers,

I would

say

that

those

I

have cited

are continental

philosophers

of the war

years

and

after:

Benjamin,

Levinas,

Lyotard.

These are thinkers who re-read

Heidegger.

Poetry

read as

witness does not become

"protest poetry"

or,

necessarily,

"poetry

of

resistance." This work

involves a

reading

that isn't

post

modern;

it

is,

perhaps, post-Shoah: writing

in the aftermath of

events,

or what Walter

Benjamin

would

call their "afterlife."

In

any

event,

suffering,

in

literary

art read as

witness,

is

not

gen

eral

but

specific,

what Blake would call

"particular."

In

English

it is

akin to a

Wordsworthian

perception

that still holds in

contemporary

American

poetry:

that the

past

has a

way

of

coming

back,

and

pro

ducing

what will

happen

in

the future. In

Wordsworthian

terms,

the poetry comes out of returning memories one doesn't plan to

have,

and if

you imagine

that what these

memories

bring

with

them

aren't

simply

instances of childhood

but historical

extremity,

then

yes,

this is

a

Wordsworthian

—

or

Romantic

—

idea.

(Here

is

how

Wordsworth's sense of

memory

enters continental

philosophy:

Wordsworth influences

Ruskin,

Ruskin

influences

Proust,

Proust

in

fluences Lanzmann and also Levinas.

Benjamin

was a translator of

Proust,

but also

Baudelaire.)

This

has

nothing

to do

with stabiliz

ing

or

destabilizing

selfhood. If

you

wish to think in

terms of

self,

it

CAROLYN FORCHE

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17/17

is the self

in Levinas who comes into

being through

the

address of

the other. The self who

grounds

her existence in otherness is not so

much unstable as

dialogic.

The

permeability

of self and other

in

such

work

might

be

profoundly

disturbing

if one wishes to control one's

own

thoughts,

but this is

instability

of a different kind: that which

comes when

your

existence is involved with another's. Witness can

welcome

an

intimacy

that

might

seem,

to

some,

offensively

invasive.

There is

nothing,

in

my

view,

that is not

personal.

Witness

might

be

read as a

public

voice,

but also a

deeply

intimate one. This

might

not

be

public

oratory

but

lyric whisper.

174

POETRY

Documents

Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness