Trauma, vittnesmål och etik. Representationens möjligheter och omöjligheter i Hayden Whites "The Modernist Event" samt i Shoshana Felman och Dori Laubs "Testimony"

Abstract

This essay is a meta-theoretical study that aims to show normative and ethical implications that might follow from theories concerning representation of traumatic events in four essays from Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History and in Hayden White’s essay ”The Modernist Event”. Through a comparative analysis the essay mainly discusses how these writers deal with the problem of narrative. With a thematic reading the writers’ view on narrative are emphasized in relation to questions regarding events, history, trauma, truth, testimony, the unifying function of language, and production of meaning. While Felman/Laub value narrative positively, partly because through its performativety it is regarded as action, White on the other hand tends to connect it with fictionalizing. If for Felman, the writing of history is the explaining of an event through its own narrativity, White supposes that events have been unjustly squeezed into the pattern of narrativity. Although narration is closely connected with the access to the truth of a witnessed event, Felman/Laub don´t manage to avoid becoming normative. When the failure to witness is regarded as the condition of witnessing and when the union of language, as I interpret Felman/Laub, is said to be constituted by sane people the question that arises is which form representation should take and who then would be a suitable or even possible witness. Meanwhile Whites’ preference for modernistic, literary strategies for representing that which he calls modernist events result in a high appraisal of the fragmentizing and decentralizing of meaning who’s supposed non-totalizing qualities can be questioned. Despite the different perspectives which Felman/Laub and White have regarding narrative they both paradoxically manage to reinforce its position as an epistemological and ethical failure as it is often regarded in modernism, by the very way they, on the contrary, tries to save it.