Paper short abstract:

Taking the Holocaust as a symptom-event of traumatic-testimony, this paper seeks to explore ways in which the witness-account can no longer be considered an act of mimetic historiography but of active poesis.

Paper long abstract:

The essence of the testimonial act lies in its imperative to "tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" of history; the desire to return to the historical 'time past' from the pledge of a 'real' present: "jo bhi kahunga sach kahunga, sach ke siwa kuch nahin kahunga." The 'truth' or the 'sach', as pronounced in the oath, is "one" and irreducible to another, just as the bearer of this truth - as Elie Wiesel would write - can only be the teller of it:

"Not to tell, or to tell another story, is… to commit perjury."

Testimonies, whether recorded or scripted, have come to serve as documentary proof in favour of the 'real' event in time. The witness-agent has assumed the role of mimetically enabling an access to the 'lost' moment in history.

That the testimonial performance can yet, in two different ways, turn the victim-witness into not a historian but an 'author' is what I set out to prove. Consequently, I would show how, with repeated tellings, the memory of the 'actual' event gives way to 'authored' accounts of the same - till what they testify to is an absence of the event. I take as my analytical touchstone the 1985 film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah. While, on the one hand, my thesis consists in making visible the arbitrariness of theoretical claims about the event of trauma testimony, it is also an attempt to re-evaluate the testimonial speech-act as being more disruptively 'literary' than the commonsensical discipline of literature-as-fiction.