The Redemption of Witnessing in Memoir
The act of reading memoir is as much an act of witnessing as that of writing it.
That the act of writing is an act of witnessing is made clear in the memoirs of those who have experienced epiphanies of sublime wonder or horror. Still Alive, Ruth Kluger’s memoir of the Holocaust, doesn’t describe the indescribable so much as it witnesses what people are and are not in the extreme. In telling of the epiphanies of wonder and the epiphanies of horror that she experienced, Kluger communicates what she cannot describe in the manner of what Kenneth Burke calls “perspective through incongruity,” a way of “seeing the world from its opposite” by “holding the conventional up to its opposite.” By holding up the incongruities of her own Holocaust experience, Ruth Kluger establishes a dissonance that opens a potential for the transformation from horrific experience to “still living.” The transformation of dissonance created by incongruity occurs through identification—both with the self and with others. Identification creates consubstantiality, an acting together of sensations, concepts, images, ideas, and attitudes. As biological beings we are separate from one another, but as social beings we need to belong, to identify. The experience of being at once separate yet identifiedcan only be resolved through communication. By telling her story, Ruth Kluger names the event, so that it can no longer be ignored or denied, by herself or by others. It is in the acknowledgement of the experience that Kluger is acknowledged, that she lives and exists in the world and to the world. This is why we read other people’s stories, listen to other people’s tales: to recognize and be recognized by them. It is in the reading of the memoir, the hearing of the story, that we not only acknowledge the agentive subjectivity of the story-teller, we identify as part of the human family as well.
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