“Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem.”
— Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz
In this essay, I analyse Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage as a text that recuperates realism as a literary form for bearing witness. In a review of the novel, Sri Lankan poet and academic Cherian describes The Story of a Brief Marriage as “a novel which for the first time has ethically represented a Sri Lankan Tamil subject in English” (Kailasam n.p., emphases added). Determining what makes this text the first ethical representation of its kind would require situating this text within the canon of Sri Lankan literature in English, which is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I will show how the text explores the question and possibility of ethics and witness for the representation of the refugee in the camp, focusing the discussion through Cathy Caruth and Giorgio Agamben’s models of witnessing.
I argue that the text foregrounds witnessing as both a possibility and ethical imperative open to literature, and that the text’s account of witnessing is produced through twin struggles enacted at the level of form and within witnessing itself. Fredric Jameson conceptualises realism as the “consequence” of the tension between the formal antinomies of a text (26). I argue that in The Story of a Brief Marriage, the shifting and chromaticising of the realist narrative between its antinomies allows the narrative to represent the homo sacer in récit, while simultaneously resisting a reduction of the subject to bare life through scene and affect. Beyond bare life, the subject emerges— through affect—as witness, caught between the desire to “turn away” (Caruth 97) from the deaths of others and the call and imperative to awaken. Through these two tensions in form and within witnessing, the narrative thus produces an account of witnessing, representing the subject as witness, and itself constituting a witness of the subject. By representing the subject as both homo sacer and witness, I argue that the text thereby acknowledges and responds to the ethical imperatives placed upon both literature and the human subject: in this case, to witness the refugee as homo sacer.
Narrative, Homo Sacer, and Subject
In his introduction to the Antinomies of Realism, Jameson describes how realism “come[s] into being” from the symbiosis and struggle between its antinomies: scene and affect “abhor” that which “constitute[s] the force of the tale or récit” and seek to liberate themselves from that which “hold[s] the affective impulses in check” (11). The antinomies of “récit” and “affect”, as Jameson uses them, must thus be understood together, as part of a mutual “opposition” that he argues produces “realism” (16).
The récit, as Jameson interprets it, may be understood as “an account or even a chronicle of events”; as an impulse, it may be understood as a kind of narrative impulse which serves the “storytelling function” (16). Its defining characteristics are that which he considers inimical to affect: these “enemies” include “characters” and characterisation; “the structures of melodrama”; the “dominance of point of view” and “the organizing attribution of a central consciousness” (11); and above all, “meaning” and signification (33). I will elaborate more on the use of the term ‘affect’ later.
At one level, The Story of a Brief Marriage may be understood purely in terms of tale and récit: as a narrative which tells the story of Dinesh, a Tamil refugee in a camp in the Vanni region of Sri Lanka during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Beginning in medias res, the third-person narrative focalised through Dinesh’s perspective alternates between the present moment and paraleptic deviations, including stream of consciousness representations of Dinesh’s thoughts, as well as moments of analepsis. Through this, the narrative presents the récit to the reader: the tale comprises the events of a single day in Dinesh’s life, beginning with the amputation of a child’s arm, the marriage, the couple’s first meal and night together, and finally Ganga’s death before dawn. The récit also includes glimpses, through analepsis, into Dinesh’s childhood, the events that led up to his arrival in the camp, the death of his mother, his life in the camp, and the marriage proposal in the morning. Seen in this light, narrative paralepsis can thus be subsumed under the impulse of the récit: as a “telling” of context, history and characterisation, and as a means of “showing” and signifying the effects of trauma on the psyche through a mimetic representation of Dinesh’s interiority, thought processes, and moments of dissociation.
As Jameson notes, however, realism can respond—and has responded—to “the truly historical changes in what is asked of language by each novelist, and what is represented in the way of representation of subjectivity, and of its perceptions” (32). I argue that the novel goes beyond mere psychologisation and characterisation, responding to the representational and ethical demand placed on realism and narrative to witness. As a realist text constituted by the impulses of both récit and scene, the ethical demand to witness can be answered by the representation of Dinesh as both homo sacer— through récit—and as subject and witness—through scene and affect.
Narrating the Homo Sacer in Récit
The figure of the refugee, for Agamben, is the paradigmatic homo sacer. The refugee is one who was originally a citizen with rights, rendered vulnerable and exposed to death, without recourse to any form of protection or redress, and reduced to “bare life”. His very existence thus exposes an “originary fiction” at the basis of citizenship (Homo Sacer 77), a fiction which Agamben sought to highlight through the figure of homo sacer, and through his investigation of political and symbolic significance of the notion of “sovereignty”, and “the camp”.
Agamben provides numerous definitions for homo sacer as he traces the genealogy of the term, but the definition of “homo sacer” as ‘one to whom juridical rights and protections no longer apply’ is perhaps most relevant to his understanding of the condition of the refugee, and to the text. Homo sacer and refugee literally and figuratively live outside the boundaries of a polis or city; they are exempt from its laws, but are similarly excluded from the rights and protections offered by one’s inclusion, as citizen, within the jurisdiction of the governing body of the city. The refugee’s existence, any harm done to him, and his death thus lack any significance within the juridico-political symbolic order of the polis. By virtue of existing outside such an order, within which rights and protections might be enforced, the refugee is thus stripped of all the human rights which one considers inalienable to one’s existence and status as a human, and is therefore one who “break[s] the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality” (77). Born a citizen and subject with apparently inalienable rights, his status as refugee thus disrupts that “originary fiction” of citizenship: the presumed continuity between birth and citizenship, subjecthood and rights.
Dinesh’s reduction to homo sacer is narrated through the mode of the récit. Through a temporal structure of “past-present-future”, constructed around Dinesh as “the locus of personal identity”, récit narrates the events and conditions that produced his “destiny” as a refugee (Jameson 24–25). The phenomena of the “denaturalization and denationalization” of citizens that exposes the fiction of inalienable rights (Homo Sacer 77) is detailed in analepsis in Chapter 4 of The Story of a Brief Marriage, when Dinesh and his mother are evacuated from their home within the land controlled by the separatist movement. This temporary “displacement”, which they initially regard as “an unplanned but not necessarily unpleasant holiday” (Story 76), gradually becomes a permanent state:
[t]hey stayed in the new place another three weeks, moved from that one to another, and from that to yet others, the length of their stays shortening from three weeks to two to ten days to even fewer, till gradually they began to spend more time on the road than in any fixed place. (77)
The narrative describes how “with every displacement”, the “bombing behind them was getting louder” as the threat of war grew closer; similarly, “with every displacement”, the temporary state of evacuation becomes a permanent state of displacement (77). Displaced from home and suspended in a state of homelessness which knows no foreseeable end, the refugee is thus doubly displaced—geographically and temporally. The temporary “evacuees”, who can initially look forward to returning home and who can still maintain possession of their belongings, are forced to “relinquish” (78) these privileges in order to survive. Transformed into “refugees”, upon arrival at the camp, what remains of their belongings serve as “paperweights” that only reinforce how insubstantial the refugees’ claim to citizenship, identity, and subjecthood is, without which they would “float up and waft away” (79). Dinesh himself leaves his possessions behind in hopes that it would “protect” his dead mother’s body and “provide her with some identity”, an ineffectual attempt at restoring dignity and the status of a subject to her — the very symbolic value which is now denied to them as homo sacerand refugee, existing outside a juridico-political symbolic order (82–83).
Without any claim to land and property, these refugees exist within a “zone of indistinction” between the rule of two separate juridico-political powers locked in a civil war which itself threatens the possibility and integrity of the sovereign state (Homo Sacer 11). Given the dissolution of state power within the contested zone of the camp, neither side can nor will guarantee “the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man [that] show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state” (75). Within the literal and symbolic space of the camp, the refugee is “stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life”, “so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (97). The refugee thus becomes homo sacer, one who may be killed but not murdered, and one whose “so-called sacred and inalienable rights” to life, dignity, bodily integrity, and property may be violated with impunity.
In the novel, Mr Somasundaram’s attempt to use marriage as a guarantee against conscription and rape merely emphasises the fragility and insubstantiality of rights within the space of the camp (Story 8). In this space where nothing can actually guarantee protection from conscription, rape, nor death “in the hands of the government” or the movement’s soldiers, the camp emblematises a space where “normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (Homo Sacer 99). As Dinesh notes, “it was only a matter of time … before he would either be killed in the shelling, or conscripted and then killed in the fighting” (Story 11). Subject to the inescapable threat of faceless violence and nameless death from either shelling or conscription, his status as refugee reveals “[t]he absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed” (Homo Sacer 74).
Within the camp, mere survival and bare life become the only imperatives. Just as “the rubble of all the buildings ruined by the fighting had always looked the same”, so too is the individual within the camp levelled and reduced to being one among a mass of refugees, “no matter how different their character or purpose had been” (Story 62). The absence of conversation and communication within the camp, where “most just sat and marked time in silence” (65) indicate this reduction of the individual and the paring down of life to survival, leading Dinesh to believe that “[w]hen the practical concerns of life had been dealt with, when all one’s plans had been settled, what was left, really, for anybody to say?” (66). When Dinesh asks Ganga: “Are you happy we’re married?”, she responds with silence at first. She then follows with her own question—“Are you hungry?”, indicating the total reduction of life to the imperative of survival in conditions in which one’s identity and past have become irrelevant, and where “there [is] no future for them to speak of” (63).
The mode of the récit thus constructs the conditions under which Dinesh becomes and exists as homo sacer. The conventions of melodrama—character, the marriage plot, dialogue—thus function as a way of representing Dinesh as homo sacer, with each progressive development in Dinesh’s life bearing “the mark of irrevocable time” (Jameson 19–21), each event reifying his present existence as homo sacer. However, where récit can represent the homo sacer as an object of representation, it is through affect that his subjectivity and the subjective state of what it means to be homo sacer is represented.
Narrating the Subject through Affect
Dinesh as subject emerges at the moments when the teleological temporality of the récit is suspended in favour of a “perpetual present” of scene, and a “reduction to the body” (Jameson 28). Jameson describes this phenomenon—when “the isolated body begins to know more global waves of generalized sensations” (28)—as “affect”, and emphasises that such “sensations” cannot be reduced to the “sense-perceptions” of the body (41), nor to the “named emotions” (29). Such sensations become “autonomous”, resisting nomination, localization through subjectivity and context, and above all, meaning (34–36). Jameson argues that “[a]t its outer limit … affect becomes the organ of perception of the world itself, the vehicle of my being-in-the-world” (43).
In The Story of a Brief Marriage, I argue that affect becomes Dinesh’s way of experiencing the world and his own existence as homo sacer, and consequently, that affect is the way in which his subjectivity and subjecthood is recuperated from the reduction of his existence to bare life. It becomes another “zone of indistinction” or “point of intersection”, enacted through form, “at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures” can “converge” and resist each other (Homo Sacer 11), at which point the individual subject might then appear. This appearance of the subject takes place through affect, through which the consciousness is represented. The nature of this consciousness is aptly captured in the narrative with this description of the sleeping refugees in the camp:
[i]t was as though these sleepers had disengaged themselves from the world entirely, from not only its objects but also from the forms through which in ordinary life these objects were perceived, as though they had left their bodies lying unguarded in the camp and gone off to some other place, trusting meanwhile that they would be safe though in fact of course shards of metal could come raining down from the sky at any time. (Story 110, emphases added)
I suggest that this description aptly mirrors the nature of the consciousness produced by affect, in its “perceiv[ing]” of its own existence and survival through a “disengage[ment]” from both reality and from “the forms through which in ordinary life … objects were perceived”, while simultaneously—through such consciousness—also reinforcing the embodied vulnerability of its own existence.
This consciousness, I argue, is one which also has its own “chromaticism”, intensifying and fading in its awareness of its own bodily existence and survival (Jameson 38–39). Answering a question regarding the handling of time in the novel, Arudpragasam stated during an interview:
[i]n most of our ordinary life we are often without consciousness. Not necessarily cut off from our thoughts and feelings, but blind to them because our activity is so governed by routine and habit. So it is only in certain periods where we come to understand our situation in the world, I feel. Such moments or periods are bounded on both sides by more conventional time, but within these moments or periods one forgets time, and ceases to exist within it, so that such moments and periods can be thought of as being within time only retrospectively. These moments or periods aren’t uniform, obviously, but I feel they are all characterized by a certain lucidity or clarity, a quietness, a sense that that the past and the future, all of life, are perfectly contained within them. (Consciousness n.p., emphasis added)
Here, Arudpragasam encapsulates how affect and time function within his novel: the narrative consists of the “conventional time” of the récit which then “chromatici[ses]” (Jameson 38)—like affect—into “the impersonal consciousness of an eternal or existential present” (25) that characterises pure scene. This, I argue, is not merely a form of paralepsis that can be subsumed under the force of récit, but instead functions through affect.
At numerous points of the novel, this chromaticism occurs, suspending temporality and revealing Dinesh’s heightened sense of consciousness through affect. These long deviations from the “tale” and mode of the récit suspend the movement of the plot in favour of an extended present, for instance, when Dinesh risks death—from discovery and conscription, from exposure to shelling—in his trip to the beach to defecate and to the well to bathe. The narrative channels affect and describes the sensations which create a sense of Dinesh’s subjectivity. He experiences “an urge, suddenly, to empty his bowels”, an urge which is “[n]ot so much a bodily urge … but more of a psychological urge … [that] he might nevertheless satisfy physically” (Story 19). As he satisfies this urge, he simultaneously experiences the sensations of “defenseless[ness]” and “vulnerab[ility]” (25) These sensations and urges, which elide a fixed source or receptor in the body, are thus necessarily experienced by Dinesh himself as affect. Another sense of chromaticism is evident here, as this affect is continually “waxing and waning not only in intensity but across the very scale and gamut of such nuances” (38–39): for instance, as he bathes and “realiz[es] for the first time that he was in possession of a body” (Story 120–21); and as he gains a sense of himself as “autonomous and self-sustaining, independent, somehow, of the world outside him”, a sense which grows “more and more with every step” taken (163–4).
These “generalized sensations” (Jameson 28) which cannot be located in “sense-data” (41) emphasise Dinesh’s growing awareness of his own existence as embodied, and vulnerable to injury and death. The narrative describes how in the aftermath of a shelling of the camp,
[a] strange feeling always came over Dinesh as he wandered around in the silence … above all it was the disintegration of his body that came to mind at such times … He sensed acutely the fact that soon his body would begin breaking down, sensed in fact that the process of becoming permanently separate from it had already begun. (Story 19)
Ironically, even though Arudpragasam describes the novel as taking place during “a small window of consciousness within a much larger period of alienation from oneself” (Consciousnessn.p.), this consciousness is also a “strange feeling” of simultaneous embodiment and dissociation, a feeling which resists nomination and a fixed signified, and cannot be attributed purely to a “heighten[ing]” of “the body’s senses” (Jameson 28) nor to “sense-perceptions” (41). As the “free-floating” (36) affect reveals a dissociation and “alienation” (Consciousnessn.p.) of the consciousness from its surroundings, it simultaneously returns as a bodily affect which “sense[s] acutely” (Story 19) the tenuous existence of the body it inhabits. The chromaticisation of récit into scene thus also puts off the “irrevocable time” of the récit (Jameson 21), while maintaining a constant sense of ominousness and threat of death through the embodied experience. In a parallel to the way affect suspends the temporal syntax of récit, Dinesh’s very status as refugee is characterised by a kind of temporal suspension, as described earlier in “Narrating the Homo Sacer in Récit”.
As described in the previous example (Story 19), an “impersonal” consciousness is thus also constructed, one where the “self” is “only an object for the impersonal consciousness of the present” (Jameson 24–25). Even as Dinesh experiences these “autonomous” and “unnameable sensations” that “simply exist” (34), these sensations embody an excess of signifiers without fixed signified, in contrast to the bare life which “simply exist[s]” without significance within the symbolic order of the juridico-political system. Where bare life levels and obliterates, affect—which resists “absorp[tion]” into the “subjectivity” and “named emotions” (34)—generates an excess that takes the form of consciousness, recuperating the subject and a subjectivity that resists reduction into homo sacer. Hence, even as scene eliminates its enemy—the protagonist, which belongs to the mode of the récit—and even as the “self” becomes a mere “object” of an “impersonal” consciousness, the subject nevertheless features as a consciousness which grows into an awareness of both its own consciousness as well as its exposure to death. Realism, understood as operating through both antinomies of récit and scene, thus makes possible a representation of homo sacer as subject, which in turn allows for the possibility of viewing the subject as witness, and for the text itself to serve as a kind of witness.
Narrating the Witness
The witness, as figured by Caruth, is one who has been awakened against his will to “respond, in awakening, to a call that can only be heard within sleep” (99). The call the witness responds to is “the necessity and impossibility of responding to another’s death” (100); this awakening constitutes a transformation of addressee (106) and a “transmission” (106) between the addressee and the speaker. Following this model of witnessing, I argue that in The Story of a Brief Marriage, Dinesh may be understood as both subject and witness, and that just as affect recuperates that which exceeds bare life, thereby representing a subject and subjectivity that can bear witness to others, affect also serves as a way of representing the processes that constitute such witnessing—awakening, transformation, and transmission.
As Caruth argues, through interpreting Freud and Lacan, witnessing is experienced by the consciousness as a tension between consciousness’ desire to “prolong sleep and delay waking” (Caruth 96–97), and the call which awakens it from within the dream. In suggesting that it is “something in reality itself that makes us sleep” (Caruth 97), Freud here appears to anticipate his later conceptualisation of the death-drive as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (Freud 611), seeking an “extinction of … excitation” (625) through sleep, understood as a kind of death (Lim 1–2). This desire to avoid “traumatic” excitations that might “breach” the “protective shield” of the consciousness (Freud 607) in death might thus be expressed in the desire to sleep, in that “[f]alling asleep was, in a way, the closest a person could come to renouncing the world outside them while still alive” (Story 171). Having “lost concern with the world immediately outside [it]”, the gaze “turned more or less inwards” (100–01), the sleeping consciousness thus “turns away” (Caruth 97) from reality and the deaths of others. The narrative explores this as the “crystalliz[ation]” of “the questions and complexities of life” into “a simple choice between waking up and staying asleep”, registered within “the dark seed of consciousness” (Story 174). This desire to sleep, and for death, is thus held in tension with the awakening that Dinesh experiences—“against … the very wishes of the consciousness” (Caruth 99)—that urges him away from his own death towards life, toward a confrontation with and witness of the deaths of others (Lim 2).
The novel opens with an awakening of sorts, as the injured boy that Dinesh was carrying “[comes] to life” from “a state of deep, silent sleep”, just as the doctor begins the amputation of his arm (Story 3). This awakening to consciousness is not the awakening of a witness, however, and is unlike the awakening that Dinesh experiences, given that Dinesh awakens not to his own trauma or to physical trauma, but to a recognition of his own “originating relation with others”, and to “the impossible demand at the heart of human consciousness” to witness “the deaths of others” (Caruth 104). I argue that Dinesh experiences this awakening twice: first, with the marriage proposal and the marriage, and later, with the death of Ganga. Furthermore, although the motifs of sleep and awakening are constantly revisited in both récit and affect, when represented through affect, awakening does not signify or symbolise “meaning” (Jameson 37). Instead, the awakening is performed as a process of witnessing, as the subject experiences an awareness of his own awakening. This awakening is to a consciousness of his own existence—an existence which can no longer be taken for granted, having been excluded from recognition with the juridico-political symbolic order—but also to an understanding of the need to awaken, in order to answer a call from reality to witness.
Dinesh’s first awakening takes place when Mr Somasundaram approaches him with the marriage proposal, an awakening which is conveyed through affect, registering Dinesh’s sudden heightened awareness of “the multitudes of people around him”, and “of himself” (Story 9). The proposal functions as an event which parallels that of “the accident” as Caruth rethinks it: it “takes place too soon, too suddenly, too unexpectedly, to be fully grasped by consciousness”; it “engages a larger question of responsibility”; and it becomes a “missed encounter” that—belatedly understood by the subject—then transforms the “mode of existence” of the subject, defining “[his] very survival” (100–101). As Dinesh realises in recollection how he has been “forced to wake up” from the “heavy fog” which clouded his existence (Story 9), the “strange transformation” which he “anticipat[ed]” begins (52), as he becomes increasingly defined by his capacity to witness.
Perhaps Dinesh, in his natural reluctance to sleep and in his later insomnia (102–03), might be understood as one who is already predisposed toward the necessary comportment of the addressee to the one who speaks. But now, Dinesh actively “want[s], for the time being at least, to stay awake” (103); the marriage makes possible a moving beyond “a state of stupefaction, devoid of memory, thought, and perception” and returns to him a sense of self and history that might allow him to relate to Ganga (112), while also awakening in him a heightened “aware[ness], for a brief moment, a world vaster than and more independent of him, a world that he had the chance, in some way, to encompass in its entirety” (126). Affect, as that “sense of possibility” and awareness (126), is thus what registers his transformation into a witness—witness as defined by his relations to the worlds “contained entirely inside” (86) others such as Ganga, which exist beyond him but which he might nevertheless impossibly “encompass”.
The possibility for such “encompass[ing]” lies in the nature of the “transmission” that happens between the witness and the one who is witnessed; Caruth emphasises that witnessing is “not an understanding but a transmission”, one which is predicated on the witness’ “very inability to see” and belatedness, but also on the “irreducible inaccessibility and otherness” of the speaker (Caruth 106). In this case, the speaker is Ganga, who cannot be said to “speak” in conventional terms. I argue that Dinesh, throughout his interactions with Ganga, acts as a kind of witness who receives such an unspoken transmission. In his attempts to communicate with her, to attempt to “build a narrow bridge between their worlds” (Story 52), Dinesh does not seek “knowledge or cognition” (Caruth 111) but rather the possibility of a “bridg[ing]”, through “words and gestures” that fail to signify in “a lifeless and empty land” (Story 52). In “respond[ing] to Ganga’s silence by accepting it somehow, by acknowledging what [the silence] contained”, silence then “connect[s] them rather than separate[s] them” (137) in an unspoken, uncomprehended, yet shared transmission of what it means to exist as homo sacer. In a way, through these “words and gestures” which “no longer signif[y]”, their interactions replicate “the language of testimony”, which through the “giv[ing] way” of language to “non-language”, “show[s] the impossibility of bearing witness” and the simultaneous necessity of doing so (Remnants 39).
When Dinesh awakens, for the second time, to the urgent knowledge “that something was happening that he needed to pay attention to” (Story 175), he awakens “anew” (Caruth 107), once again transformed, as the “survivor” (Remnants 39). Upon finding Ganga’s body, he witnesses her death by “clos[ing] his eyes” and “doing his best once more to listen” (Story 190) to the “senseless sound” of her body and “voice” (Remnants 39). In doing so, he bears witness to Ganga—who, as “the complete witness”, “cannot bear witness” to her own death—and thus embodies the “impossibility” of bearing witness which the survivor is nevertheless compelled to respond to (39).
Witnessing the Witness
Even as the realist novel makes possible the representation of Dinesh as subject and witness, the novel might itself also be understood as a form which allows for a transmission between the writer and the reader, through the text.
Lacan argues that the transmission that characterises witness is predicated on a “knowledge … [that] can perhaps appear only in the form of a fiction or a dream” (Caruth 95), and emphasises that within the fiction of the dream lies “another reality”, and a message which contains “more reality” than what lies beyond it (98). Literature, which produces the “gap” between fiction and reality might thus produce a “greater” significance than any direct confrontation with reality (101–06). This gap is one which Arudpragasam acknowledges within A Story of a Brief Marriage; towards the end of the novel, the narrative readjusts its original focalisation through Dinesh’s perspective:
[t]here were things, after all, that could happen to human beings, after which their thoughts and feelings become unknowable. There were events after which, no matter how long or intimately one has tried to be by their side, no matter how earnestly or with how much self-reproach one desires to understand their situation, how meticulously one tries to imagine and infer it from one’s own experiences, one has no choice but to watch blindly from outside. (Story 191–92)
Here, the narrative adopts a kind of self-reflexivity that allows it to speak for Dinesh as witness to Ganga, and to speak as the narrator as witness to Dinesh. Without claiming to “understand”, and “watch[ing] blindly from outside”, the narrative bears no claim to a “simple mastery of facts”, or “knowledge or cognition” of the experience (Caruth 111). Renouncing its claim over that which has been represented, “the words are no longer mastered or possessed by the one who says them” (107)—by the one whose experience is documented, nor by the narratorial voice that documents, if it can even be said to be “documenting” reality at all (Lim 3–4). Instead, Dinesh’s uncomprehending witness of Ganga is passed on, through the narrative, to the narrator and reader: “the words are passed on as an act that that does not precisely awaken the self but, rather, passes the awakening on to others” (Caruth 107).
Caruth emphasises that what passes between the witness and the one who is witnessed is “not an understanding but a transmission, the performance of an act of awakening that contains within it its own difference” (106–7). As I have argued earlier, it is affect that allows for the “performance of an act of awakening”. In its inherent “[un]assimilability” (Jameson 37) to nomination and meaning, affect can perform that which “contains within it its own difference”. The status of realism and affect for witnessing thus functions not on the basis of a homologous mimesis or factual record of the traumatic event or experience, but through its capacity for transmission while insisting on the alterity and incomprehensibility of the experience. As Agamben argues, the testimony of the witness has “nothing to do with the acquisition of facts” (Remnants 17). Just as Dinesh sought “not so much a place or thing as a mood” in his conversations with his friends (Story 141), affect functions through the representation of such moods which in turn make possible a transmission without fixed signification. Through affect, the novel makes possible the representation of the subject as witness, and a witness of that subject through textual transmission.
Such textual transmission, as witness and testimony, can serve to “create a connection that did not exist … between the inside and outside — to set them both in motion and dialogue with one another” (Remnants 35). By connecting the figure of the refugee—as the one who is “inside”—to the writer and reader “outside”, the narrative thus “sets … in motion and dialogue” a connection and transmission that is “not simply a reality that can be grasped in these words’ representation, but the ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet to occur” (Caruth 112). The “reality” and realism of the novel thus functions as a way of offering a truth claim to the existence of the subject and that aspect of being human—the capacity to witness—which exceeds the symbolic order of bare life, hence responding to and transmitting an ethical imperative which is open specifically to literature, and through literature. Where legal representation is no longer possible for the homo sacer—who cannot be recognised as subject within the juridico-political order, within the domain of literature, literary representation can respond to the ethical imperative to witness, in turn making possible the recovery of homo sacer as subject and a recognition of the ethical imperatives we have toward others.
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Lim, Rei. “‘Another Reality’: Caruth, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.” Class Assignment, National
University of Singapore, 2018.
Other Works Consulted
Navaratnam, Subashini. “War and the Novel of Integrity in ‘The Story of a Brief Marriage’.” PopMatters,
22 June 2017, popmatters.com/the-story-of-a-brief-marriage-anuk-arudpragasam-2495389428.html.
Accessed 5 April 2018.
Solanki, Tanuj. “The Persistence of the Body.” The Hindu Business Line, 9 December 2016,
thehindubusinessline.com/blink/read/the-persistence-of-the-body/article9418097.ece. Accessed 8
April 2016.
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