The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony

Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies

Chantelle Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Print ISBN:
  9781138115927
  9780415501309
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136227516
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this book, Warner examines a number of German-language literary autobiographies that are connected to diverse social movements of the last forty years. These books have all received critical attention from the popular press, topped bestseller lists, and have been pivotal in discussions of authenticity, subjectivity, and referentiality. Because of the thematic diversity of these works, scholars within literary and cultural studies have tended to treat them separately under topical categories, such as women's literature, the post-war generation, migration and multiculturalism, etc. Underlying Warner's analysis is the belief that the social construction of autobiographical acts is as much a matter of textuality as it is of topicality i.e., how language means, rather than what it means, and that a pragmatic-stylistic approach is well-suited to describing how literary autobiographies come to function as testimonies to certain collective experiences.

By presenting a model for an integrative stylistics approach, The Prgamatics of Literary Testimony participates in current discussions within fields of literary linguistic scholarship, as well as autobiographical theory. In its analysis of key examples of German social testimonies from the late twentieth century, this book incorporates insights from discourse analysis, pragmatics, cogntive poetics, and sociolinguistics in order to demonstrate that this diverse body of works constitutes a particular form of textual practice defined by what the author calls authenticity effects—feelings of realism, immediacy, exemplarity, genuineness, and social relevance. Such a study of authenticity as a poetic effect, can help us to better understand the testimonial glamour owned by various types of autobiographical narration.

1 Autobiographical Style, Myth, and the Practice of Literary Testimony

STYLE AS MYTH

In 1995, the German publisher Suhrkamp released a Holocaust memoir titled Fragments: From a Childhood 1939–1948 (Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948). Fragments purported to be a collection of childhood memories, which the author, Bruno Grosjean (writing under the adopted name Binjamin Wilkomirski), pieced together in part as a result of work with his psychotherapist and friend, Elitsur Bernstein. The literal meaning of the title, “broken pieces,” both alludes to a Nazi term for the human victims of the extermination machine, and describes the narrative fragments that constitute the book. Together, these splinters of memory convey the experiences of a small child torn from the solace of family and home and thrust into the cold, grown-up world of the concentration camps. Within the first year after publication, the work was translated into twelve languages and its success spread from Wilkomirski's country of residence, Switzerland, to other parts of the world. Wilkomirski himself appeared in multiple documentary films and television programs about the Holocaust. The memoir received several prestigious awards, most of which were designated specifically for Holocaust testimonies, including the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, and Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city fundraising tour in the states. A number of Holocaust survivors publicly voiced solidarity with Wilkomirski, because of the ways in which his book added to and clarified their own memories. These sentiments are epitomized by the words of Miriam M., a survivor of Birkenau, who said, “It was the first time—and that was really the deciding point and what was healing about the situation—, that is the first time, that I met someone, who established a sort of continuum in my life, just through that fact that he was there.”¹ Not only did the experiences in Wilkomirski's work resonate with the accounts of many other Holocaust survivors, but literary reviewers and critics also lauded the style of the testimony, which encouraged readers to empathize with the child narrator and to confront their own feelings about the events of the Holocaust through his suffering. “[O]ut of the horror he has retrieved the poignant testimony of a child's voice that might otherwise have remained unheard,” wrote one reviewer from the Boston Globe (February 12, 1998).

Then, three years after it was published, this best-selling memoir was exposed as a fraud. Just as the publication of a popular autobiography can make a public career for the author, so too can its defrauding for those who uncover the fabrications and falsities in the work. The Wilkomirski scandal made at least two. An Israeli journalist residing in Switzerland, Daniel Ganzfried, first publicly voiced doubts about the legitimacy of Wilkomirski's autobiography in an article in the newspaper Weltwoche entitled “The Purloined Holocaust Biography” (“Die Geliehene Holocaust-Biographie,” August 27, 1998).² Swiss historian and Holocaust expert, Stefan Mächler, was later hired by Suhrkamp to corroborate the truth of Wilkomirski's claims. Unfortunately, a confirmation of Wilkomirksi's story was not the end result of Mächler's research. The author of Fragments was not, in fact, Binjamin Wilkomirski, born in Riga in 1939, but Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss orphan born in 1941 to an unwed mother, Yvonne Dösekker, who had—as Ganzfried had alleged—only ever visited the concentration camps as a tourist.³ Suhrkamp withdrew all copies of the work from bookstore shelves and both German and American presses ceased publication.

What was at stake in the Wilkomirski scandal was not simply the factual truth of the book, but the assumed value of the work before it was defrauded. The reasons cited by critics and reviewers for praising Wilkomirski's work— the exemplarity, sincerity, frankness, and truthfulness of the portrayal and the feelings it incited in its readers—were all seemingly based on their evaluation of Fragments as a literary representation—in other words, on stylistic properties of the text that in theory remained unchanged whether or not Wilkomirski was in actuality a Holocaust survivor; and yet, it wasn't that the work's factuality or the author's identity had been irrelevant to readers before the public accusations of fraud. Instead, readers had taken the validity of the work as an autobiographical account of actual experiences on faith based on the fact that the work presented itself as such and, moreover, did so convincingly. The trauma of the Holocaust, which Wilkomirski's work was able to effectively convey, was for many readers undeniably real, whether it stemmed from the concentration camps or the hardships of the orphanage. Several reviewers did, in fact, make this case in defense of Wilkomirski's work, claiming that although the details of the testimony were provably false, the expression of trauma that Wilkomirski suffered as a child was palpably real. But that was exactly what made the purloined Holocaust memoir so sinister. How could it feel so real and be nothing but a fabrication?

Concerns similar to those that surfaced in the Wilkomirski affair have also defined the aftermath of a number of other international memoir scandals relating to a diverse range of experiences. The Wilkomirski affair has often been compared with the equally public controversy surrounding the Nobel Prize-winning testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1982), in which Menchú recounts her experiences as a native Indian in Guatemala during the bigotry and brutality of the 1970s and 1980s. The work was taught in a number of U.S. university courses and was used as an argument for changes in U.S. foreign policy and an exemplum of the struggles of indigenous peoples worldwide. The controversy arose in the mid-1990s when anthropology professor David Stoll made it public that many parts of the work were false, insofar as they had not been experienced or witnessed firsthand by Rigoberta Menchú.⁴ This revelation incited debates about the rules of testimonial genres, and, in particular, their commitment to those (and only those) events that the author has experienced firsthand. Stoll and his supporters contended that Menchú’s misuse of the first-person cast doubt on the events that the work claimed to testify to, a concern shared by many critics in the Wilkomirski affair. Menchú’s defenders protested that the critics misunderstood the Latin American genre testimonio, which is a political act that seeks to elicit solidarity with the weak, by giving voice to the collective experience through personal narrative, and which is not to be equated or confused with autobiography. Menchú explained, “I have my truth of what I lived for twenty years. The history of the community is my own history” (110).⁵

Another similar controversy in the U.S. arose around the book A Million Little Pieces (2005). James Frey's memoir received rave reviews from critics when it was published in 2003 and was the second best-selling book in the U.S. in 2005.⁶ It was an action-packed tale of drug and alcohol induced self-destruction, which was hailed “brutal” and “beautifully written” (Dylan Foley in the Denver Post, May 4, 2003) and the “most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs’ Junky” (Boston Globe, July 6, 2003). This is how the majority of the more than 1.77 million readers, literary critics, and even talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey (whose Book Club seal of approval helped to jump-start the success of the book) read the book up until January 8, 2006, when the investigative website The Smoking Gun released a report claiming that Frey's memoir, which had been placed in the nonfiction sections of bookstores and best-seller lists, was filled with “fabrications, falsehoods and other fakery.”⁷ The exposé unleashed a fury of discussion across the pages of the American feuilletons concerning the status of truth in writing that presents itself as nonfiction. Both Oprah Winfrey and the publisher, Double Day, were driven to make official public statements on the importance of truth in memoirs.⁸ Double Day stated apologetically that it was their policy that a “nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them.” Frey's statement, which was released side by side with the publisher's, argued for a more open definition of the genre:

I believe, and I understand others strongly disagree, that memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from a strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection … Ultimately, it's a story, and one that I could not have written without having lived the life I've lived.”⁹

Like certain advocates of Wilkomirski and Menchú, Frey attributed his work to an almost Romantic claim of higher truth, which cannot be completely fettered to factuality. Public opinion seemed divided between those who agreed with Frey that what ultimately mattered was the moving story of addiction—a story that was, according to many readers who themselves had battled drug and alcohol additions, written authentically—and those who sided with critics, like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote “[s]haring feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth” (January 8, 2006). In other words, writing a moving testimony is not the same as legitimately testifying.¹⁰

Like the Wilkomirski affair, the cases of Frey and Menchú raise questions about what conditions must transpire for a public readership to perceive a personal account as a legitimate testimony. What is of interest here is not merely the rush to condemn the authors for their infringement of what Philippe Lejeune (1989) has called the autobiographical pact, the commitment “to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (22). What is striking in all three of the autobiographical scandals that I have described is the ensuing rush to preserve the veracity of the authenticity effects by attacking stylistic qualities of the now dubious accounts. The same book that had been described as “achingly beautiful” (Christopher Hope in the Guardian, October 15, 1999), and said to be written “with a poet's vision; a child's state of grace” (New York Times, January 12, 1997), was now “slim, vague and over-wrought” (Calev Ben-David, Jerusalem Post, July 27, 2001), an “unimpressive pastiche” (Mächler, 2001: 269). These criticisms imply that the work had been a poor representation all along and any “authenticity” which had been ascribed to Fragments was strictly naive. Similar comments were made in the cases of Frey and Menchú. Such protests can be seen as attempts to repair the underlying myth, one more precious than Wilkomirski's status as a Holocaust victim, but which had nonetheless also been tarnished in the scandal—the myth of testimonial style.

When readers believe in what they read, when they prove susceptible to the strategies of presentation, something happens that Barthes (1984[1957]) has called mythification—the naturalization of certain meanings and their corresponding forms of representation. Building on the Saussurean model of the sign as a dyad consisting of two components—the signifier (i.e., a sound or an image) and the signified (i.e., the object represented)—Barthes defines myth as a second order mode of signification. In mythic discourse, a sign from the first order of signification (e.g., the life portrayed through the text) becomes a signifier. The meaning becomes the form, producing a second-order sign—in this case, the testimonial affirmation of the experiences and events that are depicted, the testimonial effect of the work. Myth, as second-order discourse, always consists of materials that have already been worked on, language that has traversed the long and complicated path of practical modifications that allows it to signify “naturally” and “obviously.”¹¹ For this reason, perhaps, autobiographical studies have tended to draw from fields such as psychology and critical theory rather than engaging closely with stylistic analysis, and stylistics and rhetoric have focused on works that are more overtly fictional. The lack of attention to nonfiction in some ways underscores the apparent claim of these works. It is the felt authenticity of fiction that needs to be explained. That we should experience true stories such as testimonies and confessions in this way is taken for granted. However, the concept of myth does not imply historical relativity in any postmodern sense; rather, it assures that the “reality” of the experience is no longer the solitary or even dominant producer of its meaning. In mythic speech, the linguistic features of the texts that produce the effects we associate with testimonial authenticity (as opposed to facticity)— immediacy, honesty, realism, compellingness, etc.—are refracted so that all that the readers of, for example, Wilkomirski's memoir perceived was the cumulative testimonial effect, which led them to not only recognize the work as a manifestation of the genre of testimony, but to emotionally invest in the “truth” of the work.

That Wilkomirski's “false” testimony was received as incredibly “authentic” was connected in part to the alignment of the narration with the child's perspective taken in the work, which was described as retaining a “stark, unmediated directness” (Toronto Star, February 8, 1997) in which “memory and perception constantly braid together” (Boston Globe, November 6, 1996). For Barthes, the value of myth lies in its ability to move constantly between pure signification and pure imagination; the separation between the form of the testimony and the testimonial effect can be considered only when the motion is held static—either voluntarily in the position of analyst, or by intervention, of the sort provided by Daniel Ganzfried's and later Stefan Mächler's exposés. Not only the victim identity presented by Wilkomirski's memoir crumbles in the standstill, but also the status of the testimonial narrative as something to be taken for granted is called into question. Perhaps for this reason, some readers found it difficult to deny the affective force of the book, even after it had been exposed as a fraud. Inga Clendinnen, a reviewer for the Australian, expresses this point of view when she writes, “It is not authentic autobiography but it is an authentic psychological document for all that, sourced not in experience but in obsessively imagined situations of abandonment, neglect and cruelty” (October 13, 1999). Although Wilkomirski in the end did not meet the requirements necessary to occupy the position of Holocaust witness—thus delegitimizing his book—the original legitimacy of the work was closely tied to the authenticity effects created by the language. Style, no longer conceived as verbal embellishment or personal linguistic carriage, is revealed to carry interpretive, but also ethical and even political consequences.

If a work fulfills none of the linguistic and social conditions of a testimony, it is simply categorized as something else, although, as Ross Chambers notes, even minor generic lapses in testimony are often dismissed as cultural noise or attributed to the specificity of individual experience (2004: 27); however, when a legitimated testimony falls from grace, not only the work's power of attestation becomes suspect, but also the very value of testimony as a practice. Because it is often the textual effects that first initiated the work's acceptance as legitimate and it is typically the revelation of information about extratextual conditions that ultimately lead to its delegitimation (as was the case with the testimonies of Wilkomirski, Menchú and Frey), it is often these aspects of the particular testimonies that first come under public attack. The readers who “misrecognized” these texts as legitimate are judged “naïve.” The effects that they believed they sensed were never there to begin with. In attacking the style of the individual, delegitimated work, these reviewers and critics attempt to salvage the textual effects and with them, their main means of evaluating and authorizing testimonial acts. Although the structure of testimony and the value it holds are never completely static, many of the reviewers’ comments betray an urgent will to protect the ideal of testimony and its naturalized linguistic forms.

This process of what we might call demythication, whereby the authenticity or naturalness of style is called into question, is the basis of what Jean Baudrillard (1994) characterizes as the procession from simulation to the simulacrum. Simulation, for Baudrillard, begins with the radical negation of the sign as a value. According to Baudrillard, “Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelopes the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.” At this stage, the myth is no longer seen as the reflection of a profound reality, but as something that masks and distorts reality (e.g., Marxist and feminist literary theory), then as something that masks the absence of a profound reality (e.g., postmodernism), and finally manifests itself as something with no relation to any reality whatsoever (a simulacrum, a pure representation). The exposed simulacrum is dangerous, says Baudrillard, because it always leaves open to supposition that the beliefs and values behind a certain kind of representation may be nothing, but simulation. Using the metaphor of sickness, Baudrillard illustrates what is at stake here, “For if any symptom can be produced, any illness can be simulated” (3). By lambasting the style of contentious autobiographies as false representations, readers attempted to head off the progression of the simulacrum that Baudrillard describes here. A first-person account is admittedly a mediated representation, rather than a direct reflection of the lived life, but the sentiment conveyed by many readers is it may not be a mere construction, and it cannot (with the import of a plea, rather than an imperative) indicate the absence of true testimony altogether. Postmodern sensibilities may no longer allow the average reader to believe in an ultimate Truth, but that doesn't mean that most readers are (or perhaps even should be) ready to surrender all representation to the realm of the simulacrum and surrender their belief in the ability of testimony to attest to something.

The original emotional response to Wilkomirski's memoir as a testimony was connected to its mythic value as a portrayal of “an almost perfect pain to a world that is still ready to destroy the innocent” (Jonathan Kozol in the The Nation, October 28, 1996); however, the immediate concern in the international feuilletons following the exposé had to do with the underlying ramifications for the value of testimonial affirmation. The insistence on a documentary link has been definitive of not only explicitly autobiographical works from the Nazi era, but also of fictional accounts of the Holocaust. James Young (1988) writes of memoirists as well as “docu-novelists” and “docu-dramatists,” “[A]ll of these writers seem to fear that the rhetoricity of their literary medium inadvertently confers a fictiveness onto events themselves” (51). In other words, purposeful stylization is seen as an indication of inauthenticity, whereas certain styles are understood as natural, authentic. Similar concerns about the fictionalization and aestheticization of the Holocaust have been voiced around the Wilkomirski scandal, as well as around other literary and filmic representations of the Holocaust (including, most famously perhaps, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List [1993]). This documentary position braces itself against postmodern notions of discursive reality and arguments in historiography (made famous by Hayden White) that the historical narrative is merely a story, as much invented as found.¹² The fear is that, as Paul Lauritzen (2004) has argued, “If there is no mimesis, just poesis then Holocaust narratives have no more validity than Holocaust deniers” (24).¹³

Expanding the scope beyond Holocaust testimony, Paul John Eakin examines in his book, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (1992), what he calls the “felt difference” of autobiography; we gran...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Autobiographical Style, Myth, and the Practice of Literary Testimony
• 2 Exemplarity Effects: Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Leyla as a Typical Turkish Tale
• 3 Mimesis Effects: Styling Testimonial Voices
• 4 Immediacy Effects: Deictic Shifts and Point of View in Verena Stefan’s Shedding, Peter Handke’s Hopeless Unhappiness, and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive
• 5 Narrativity Effects: How Bernward Vesper’s The Trip Became an Exemplary Testimony to the German Autumn of 1977
• 6 Addressivity Effects: Facework and Deference in the Literary Testimonies of Chima Oji, Şinasi Dikmen, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
• Epilogue: A Hunger for Experience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index