The Witness in Art: Tim O’Brien and Eddie
Adams; Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag
Perry McPartland
Abstract
This essay looks at the relationship between art and witnessing, focusing on two works which take the Vietnam War as their subject: the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien (1990), and the photograph, Saigon
Execution, by Eddie Adams (1968). It is proposed that the works' nature as aesthetic objects compromises their
status as historical representation. In each instance, the stylistic devices that the medium make available are invariably serviced for purposes of effect rather than those of document. In this pursuit of effect, impact is realized according to an invocation of the binary oppositions that determine logocentric hierarchies. Contrived in such a manner, the works fail to testify to the historically unique event, instead they merely render confirmation of a conventional and privileged centrality. Their operations appear incapable of extending beyond the closed aesthetic circuit of their genre and medium. As such, it is suggested that the genre of testimony-as-art bears no uniquely proximal relationship to historical reality.
Key words: witness, art-as-document, binary opposition, assertion-retraction, melodrama, rhetoric
Résumé
Cet article traite de la relation entre l’art et le témoignage, à partir de deux oeuvres dont le sujet est la guerre du Vietnam War : le roman The Things They Carried de Tim O'Brien (1990), et la photographie Saigon Execution de Eddie Adams (1968). Il montre que la nature esthétique de ces travaux compromet ce qui en fait des représentations historiques. Dans ces œuvres, les moyens stylistiques de chaque medium sont utilisés pour créer des effets plutôt que pour documenter. Dans cette recherche d’effet, l’impact a lieu en fonction d’oppositions binaires qui déterminent les hiérarchies centrées sur le logos. Ainsi biaisées, ces œuvres échouent à témoigner d’un événement historique unique, et confirment au contraire une centralité conventionnelle et privilégiée. Les opérations sont en réalité incapables de sortir du circuit esthétique étroit de leurs genres et de leurs mediums. Ainsi, l’article suggère que le genre du “témoignage qui fait art” n’entretient pas de relation de proximité avec la réalité historique.
In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida describes how the testimony of witness necessarily asserts itself as singular and exemplary. Insofar as these adjectives reveal an embedding in an underlying logocentricism, the experience of the witness is already compromised by what Derrida would refer to as the transcendental explanatory system. Philosophers of deconstruction understand meaning in the West as being realized in terms of binary oppositions, a system of ‘violent hierarchy’ (Derrida 1981, 41) wherein two mutually exclusive terms are set against each other and one governs. Western thought claims, at its foundation, an original and central guarantee to all meaning, and demands that this meaning be understood in terms of integrity and full presence.
The artwork of testimony, in that it would marry this re-presentation to aesthetics and form, evinces a further entanglement still. In this article, two works dealing with the Vietnam war and claiming testimonial status will be examined in light of Derrida’s observations. The notion of the singularity of testimony will be looked at in The Things They Carried, a novel by Tim O'Brien which concerns itself with the war and post-war experience of a company of American soldiers, and at the same time addresses how this experience might be represented through narrative. O’Brien was himself a soldier in Vietnam, and the novel’s narrator is explicitly identified with the author, sharing his name and significant details of identity and personal history. The second work is Eddie Adams’ photograph, Saigon Execution (1968), which shows the execution of the Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, and was taken during the first stages of the Tet Offensive. Adams’ image will be interpreted via a reading of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and in this way, we will examine Derrida’s concept of the ‘exemplary’ testimony. This essay will attempt to demonstrate that in the conversion of intense experience into art, both works reconfigure truth as impact, and that the devices of style, genre and medium are utilized in service of this impact. It asserts that such an approach confirms the logocentric systems that underlie these devices and cannot therefore be seen as either singular or exemplary, but merely as conventional.1 Depending on the context in which he locates it, Derrida has a number of terms
for this construction: ‘logocentrism’, ‘metaphysics’, ‘presence’, ‘centrality’. For the purposes of this essay, however, ‘significance’ or ‘presence’ are understood as being most appropriate and are therefore preferred.
The Assertion-and-Retraction Device in The Things They Carried.
According to Derrida, the experience of witnessing renders the witness a ‘universalizable singularity’:
I am the only one to have seen this unique thing, the only one to have heard or to have been put in the presence of this or that, at a determinate, indivisible instant; and you must believe me because you must believe me – this is the difference, essential to testimony, between belief and proof – you must believe me because I am irreplaceable. (2000, 40)
______________________________________
1 In Mythologies Roland Barthes defines the mythological process as the naturalization of history. By this he refers to the process
whereby that which is ideologically constructed and determined inculcates itself invisibly, and in doing receives an unthinking acceptance and accord. When I use ‘history’ in this essay, it is to be understood in the manner of Barthes’ employment, applied here to the discourse of literature as testimony. Where Barthes might have chosen ‘naturalized’, however, I, for the most part, use ‘conventionalized’.
I would argue that Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried constructs a testimony that emphatically makes use of the effects the notion of a universal singularity affords, and that this is brought about almost exclusively through the biases that rhetoric enables. Such heavy usage of rhetoric would suggest that the effects of the narrative are generated through a juxtaposition of abstract value-frames rather than an evocation of experience. Furthermore, insofar as rhetorical devices are a discourse of argumentation and persuasion, they represent an embodied instance of logocentricism’s violent hierarchies. Two ways by which rhetoric makes use of its powers of discourse are of particular pertinence to the present discussion: firstly, through the Aristotelian notion that rhetoric is employed in the actuation of truth, and secondly, through its persuasive utilization (that is through pathos, an appeal to the emotions), whereby rhetoric is used for the realization of effect.The Things
They Carried is a text that would have it both ways at once: while rhetoric is employed, on the one hand, for
purposes of impact, it nonetheless refuses to relinquish its truth claims.
The text generates its impact, repeatedly, and almost exclusively, through the rhetorical fronting of a binary relationship, directly followed by the dramatic favouring of one term. This occurs according to the text’s structural refrain, a construction which I have termed the assertion-retraction device, and which may be schematized accordingly:
(assertion – retraction) → Presence
An assertion is made, then it is retracted; the exchange serves to demonstrate presence. Since this formula operates according to the binary patterning of ‘on/off’, assertion and retraction may swap places. Presence will, of course, remain constant.
The most readily apparent use of the assertion-retraction device is found in the text's strategies of metafiction and verisimilitude. And while my remarks on O’Brien’s work will focus on rhetorical instances, the form of the novel, requires that this aspect is addressed. The narrative is presented as testimonial – the narrator of the text being identified with the book's author, sharing, as has been stated, his name and significant details of personal history and identity. Yet, the novel frames itself ambiguously, with the in-text narrator alternatively claiming the work as documentary truth and as fiction. Such strategies have led some commentators to understanding the novel as operating radically, as embodying an epistemological crisis of representation (see Dunnaway, 44).
Such a reading would of course make the question of the text’s reference of historical event and, consequently, its nature as testimony problematic. In response to this it should be observed that very little textual instability betrays itself about the persona of the narrator himself, rather the text takes great pains to establish “Tim O’Brien” as a consistent and genuine human voice. The ricochet between the vying claims of verisimilitude and metafiction that the narrative fronts actually serve to render qualities of character; they express the doubts that “Tim O’Brien” has as to whether a text is capable of re-presenting his war experience. These contradictory assertions take place within the discourse frame of his stable narrating consciousness – which is to say they occur at a narrative rather than textual level. What then would have been understood as anti-representational elements of textual metafiction are in fact narrative markers that establish the integrity and authenticity of the narrating character. Similarly, the narrative’s points of self-referentiality do not function as closed circuits of internal aesthetic address, but instead enable a reference to the experience of the historical
event of the Vietnam War and this codes the complexity of its narrative conveyance. Rather than enacting a crisis of representation, then, these approaches are emphatically representational, framed as instancing a powerful verisimilitude. The self-dramatizing intensity with which the narrator renders his ambiguity serves to confirm the narrative as referencing an experience of war that is not only actual, but particular and meaningful. It is a representational economy which secures what Derrida described as the significance and singularity of testimonial discourse, and extends to embrace the experience of the ‘irreplaceable’ witness.
The presented tension between the modalities of metafiction and narrative is then only a semblance. The shift between the trajectories of assertion and retraction simply a rehearsal through which presence can be re-inscribed. Far from functioning as crisis, it makes for an essentially standard representational arrangement. Metafiction makes no impact on the narrative proper, which is actually marked by a gamut of centralizing and stereotypical conventions (the novel’s fictional personae, for example, make for an array of stock characters: among others, a seraphic 9-year old with an incurable tumor, and the ‘good Indian’, Kiowa – who is, quite naturally, exoticized and martyred).
As we move on to discuss how the novel employs the assertion-retraction device at a stylistic level, we will observe that the same relationship between representation, meaning and impact emerges. And it must immediately be stated that when it comes to style, the use of the device is pervasive in the extreme. It is the text’s central rhetorical formula and manifests itself in readily identifiable trope-effects that repeat themselves consistently and systematically. Providing an exhaustive compilation of each instance of each particular form of the device would not only demand more space than currently available but would quickly descend into superfluity. However, to illustrate the point that this usage is pervasive and consistent, I will provide a decontextualized cataloguing of quotations of one realization of the assertion-retraction device simply to evidence the fact that the text’s narrator repeats the same trope throughout for unchanged outcome.
In the text’s rendering of the instant of death, the assertion-retraction device realizes itself through a particular stylistic fillip which might be schematized in the following way:
(death – remove to nature) → The Poetic
Firstly, the fact of death is asserted; a remove to nature thereafter acts as a retraction, and through this juxtaposition of incident and nature (reminiscent of imagist poems or haiku) the mystery of presence is invoked.
This can be exampled in the following:
Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. (7)
...and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms. (69)
...and the young man seemed to jerk upward as if pulled by invisible wires. He fell on his back. His rubber sandals had been blown off. There was no wind. (130)
He released Kiowa’s boot and watched it slide away. Slowly, working his way up, he hoisted himself out of the deep mud, and then he lay still and tasted shit in his mouth and closed his eyes and listened to the rain... (148)
The above examples are all voiced by the text’s narrator, “Tim O’Brien”. Yet even when occurring in the retrospective conscious of a character (Norman Bowker) in one of “Tim O’Brien’s” stories, the device remains
in place: ‘He could not talk about [Kiowa’s death] and never would. The evening was smooth and warm’. (151)
Nature is invoked as a constant signifying presence; constant, to the point that even absence underwrites its significant presence (‘There was no wind’). Markedly haiku-like in technique, these passages borrow too the flat descriptive lexis associated with the form, a stylistic feint designed to vouch for the authenticity of the content. And, as we observe, these effects are often accented by their coming directly on the heels of a separate idiomatic register: ‘the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom’, ‘tasted shit in his mouth’. Informal fucks and shits, of course, make their own claim for an expression that is unvarnished and authentic, but the passages’ objective – the poetic presence – is only brought about by the juxtaposition of these distinct registers, . Following the description on page 150 (‘He fell on his back. His rubber sandals had been blown off’) with ‘There was no fucking wind’ would not, for example, serve.
It was not my intention to belabour the reader in exemplifying five times over O’Brien’s utilization of the same technique, I do so, as remarked, to demonstrate its pervasiveness. As I go on to trace other instantiations of the assertion-retraction device, so as to avoid redundancy, I will not resort to such an extended cataloguing. Most usually, one or two examples suffice to show that the assertion-retraction device functions in a manner that can be characterized as repeated, formulaic, systematic and conventional.
One of the text’s most prevalent realisations of the assertion-retraction device may be formulated as:
(homophilic assertion – heterophilic retraction) → Presence through Exclusivity.
While this particular construction is used extensively throughout this text, it enjoys particular use in the passages which reflect on the text’s own presentation of the war experience as narrative. ‘Homophily’, should the reader need reminding, is the tendency for individuals to associate and identify with those viewed as sharing similarities.
Insofar as the text relies on the impact generated through the exploitation of metaphysical systems inherent within certain rhetorical devices, that these contraptions might be rightly sprung, homophily (here, the framed mutualizing of the speaker-audience space) needs to be contrived. Throughout the text, the homophilic relationship is realized through a conversation model of address and identification. The narrative unfolds in a colloquial language which is frequently interrupted by the claims of direct and phatic appeals. The regular employment of sentential adverbs and an arrangement that is given to appear as casual and unformed underline the informal tone, and the sense of direct address.
A recipe of this type is employed in Spin, a chapter which concerns itself with the nature of narrative. Here, the assertion-retraction device serves to configure the story’s overall structure. Spin asserts the necessity of writing war stories, only to intersperse itself thereafter with disingenuous retractions. In both trajectories, the construction of the homophilic relationship is readily apparent:
I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I’m still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it’s an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony. In a way, I guess she’s right: I should forget it. (33)
The manner is colloquial and couched as it is in the language of confession and sentiment, invites the reader’s empathy. A direct address serves to introduce a brief anecdote:
Here’s a quick peace story:
A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse. It’s a great time. The war’s over, he thinks…Then one day he rejoins his unit…Can’t wait to get back into action…the guy says, ‘All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.’ (34)
The prefacing of the story formulates it as a gifting, while the adjective ‘peace’ opens up a shared space with the reader. However, the exclusive nature of the war experience (the inability of the soldier to bear the ‘peace’ experience) causes the retraction of the mutual frame. The devaluation of the peace experience, serves to mark presence, indicating the soldier’s (and obliquely thereby, the narrator’s) exclusive experience of significance. The surreal reification of peace as a concrete entity, both personalized and vulnerable, together with the paradoxical desire to somehow hurt it is there to indicate an experience beyond the rational. That is to say, in the heart of transcendentalist presence.
A related instance of the assertion-retraction device formulates itself in a similar way:
(compact offered – compact withdrawn) → Myth of the Unsayable
In this case the homophilic assertion takes the form of an offered compact with the audience through an implicated truth. The heterophilic retraction occurs as the offer of a divulged truth is withdrawn, and the realization of presence is invoked through the myth of the unsayable. The concept of the unsayable nature of the significant is of course a founding block of logocentricism, as old, at least, as Yahweh. In psycho-mythological terms, the fact that presence is occluded, secret and exclusive confirms (and ceaselessly re-mythologizes) its status of privilege. This formulation represents the overarching trope use in the chapter, The
Man I Killed, but its usage is there to be noted throughout the novel, for example:
We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it. (76)
…we understood with a clarity beyond language that we were sharing something huge and permanent. (224)
We will note that in the above quotations, the text asserts the identification of a revelatory truth, and then, in a gesture of retraction, indicates that the implied audience’s lack of mutual experience precludes them from access to this significance. The fact that the experience is first rendered exclusive, and then unsayable, allows it to enjoy and exert a classical centrality of presence.
Through the bald statement of its title, the chapter The Man I Killed asserts immediately that the reader is in the hallowed presence of irredeemable and awful knowledge, and further indicates the promise of a spare revelation. Despite repeated imprecations, however, the narrator’s exclusive truth is not to be shared. He sits mutely, the presence of truth ghosted (and confirmed) by its textual absence:
‘Think it over,’ Kiowa said.
Then later he said, ‘Tim, it’s a war. The guy wasn’t Heidi – he had a weapon, right? It’s a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.’
Then after a long empty time he said, ‘Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you.’ (123)
And the request for a response that is never forthcoming makes up the story’s final line: ‘“Talk to me,” Kiowa said’ (125). In these instances, “Tim O’Brien”, the writer, neither voices the profundity of his experience nor points up his silence (his secret knowledge) overtly in the narrative. This apparent rhetorical chastity though is of course counterfeit; the narrator’s retracted silence, the tease of his secret knowledge, is realized in inverted fashion by the repeated imprecations of Kiowa. Through Kiowa (demoted now to a rhetorical foil, a stand in here for the implied audience in that he voices the reader’s chorused imprecations), the audience has their responses directed: they are to view the narrator with sensitized admiration, excluded from the untranslatable significance of his experience, yet awed. And thanks to the Native-American-as-spiritual- marker trope the transcendental dimension of his silence is all the better amplified.
The issue of bravery is also central to the chapter entitled On Rainy River, which concerns the narrator’s dilemma over whether or not to dodge the draft. Once more the narrative enacts the assertion-retraction device, this time functioning
(avowal – disavowal) → Significance Reconfirmed
The story concludes as the cliché that the man who goes to war is brave is asserted and, in turn, retracted; ‘I was a coward’ writes O’Brien, and then in the next, and concluding sentence, ‘I went to war’ (33). And although guised as an abjuration, the sentence actually signals the narrator’s impending experience of war, which the text has throughout underlined as of significance. Schooled by this point in the narrative’s use of the coy and inverted pointers which make up the assertion-retraction device, the reader further understands the disavowal as a presence signifier, as pointing up the genuine bravery that must go unstated.2
The chapter opens with a homophilic gambit: ‘This is the one story I’ve never told before. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife…it’s a hard story to tell’ (39). The implied audience is again addressed with phatic intimacy, and the mutual yet unique nature of their promised experience is asserted. Even more, this time, the implied audience is privileged with the power of absolution:
Most of this I have told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. I don’t know what it was. I’ll never know. But it was real, I know that much […] (44).
The first sentence claims the experience of significance which is to be shared as both true and complete. The usurpation of the narrator-audience agreement, however, comes quickly on its heels. The implied audience is precluded access to this experience due to its incommunicable nature (‘I don’t know what it was. I’ll never know’), and finally, despite this experience being exclusive and indescribable it is, nonetheless, laurelled with the presence-signifier ‘real’: ‘it was real, I know that much’.
2 The imagined narratives of the book’s author and its characters reveal a remarkable coincidence. In the chapter, Speaking of
Courage, Norman Bowker fantasizes a conversation with his father which unfolds according to the avowal-disavowal dance: ‘… I wasn’t very brave.’
‘You have seven medals.’ ‘Sure.’
‘Seven. Count ‘em. You weren’t a coward either.’ ‘Well, maybe not.’ (143)
At the story’s climax the narrator is sat in a boat, within swimming distance of the Canadian border. He is paralyzed with self-doubt and fear; the promise made by his self-image is reneged: ‘That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was a threadbare pipe dream’ (52). The abnegation, however, is only to be followed by one of presence’s great marker: a vision. Again, this is introduced according to the assertion-retraction trope, beginning with a disavowal, before the assertion of “real” presence is marked: ‘A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel’ (53).
The conflation of “real” with presence is evidenced as the vision unfolds: the “real” is a miracle revelation, and as such conjoins exclusivity, truth and prophecy:
I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies…I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. My wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me […] (53).
This most overt example of metaphysics is not to be understood as exceptional, but simply as indicative of a text that establishes its effects through a melodramatic contrivance realized according to and within logocentric conventions. Operating on an axis that veers between confessional and revelation, we have moved, it seems, a great way from a testimony of document. In its stead, we are asked to be satisfied with merely being in the sanctified presence of the irreplaceable witness.
Saigon Execution and melodramatic form
The second quality that Derrida ascribes to testimony is that it must be of an ‘exemplary’ nature; the witness avers that: ‘this is true to the extent that anyone in my place, at that instant would have seen or heard or touched the same thing and could repeat exemplarily, universally, the truth of my testimony’ (2000, 41). This would seem to invite the conclusion that the camera, with its single and singular perspective, may function as the witness’s perfect aide, and that the medium of the photograph, in that it is the light-traced emanation of the real, might realize the exemplary testimony. In contrast to the experiencing subject, the camera’s promised neutrality would seem to guarantee it an objectifying distance in situations of extremity, intensity and drama. In the following discussion of Eddie Adams' Saigon Execution we shall however see that just as was the case with The Things They Carried, the inherent stylistic conventions of form and genre problematize the work’s status as testimony, and this in turn has marked consequences for the moral function of witnessing that the notion of the exemplary would implicate.
The idea that the photographic might furnish evidence, that is to say that it is capable of making a record of existence, is discussed in Sontag’s On Photography. According to Sontag, the photographic claims an analogy between appearances and reality. The sheer objectivity and apparent facticity of the medium encourages this paradigm to develop itself and see in this recording of reality a depiction of truth (3-5). Man is ever metaphysical, and it is a short hop from here to the idea that the truth (it would of course be better to say, the apparently objective record) of appearances can reveal the meaning of appearances. This can take a particular idealist strain: discussing photographs, one of the nineteenth century’s most penetrating thinkers was indeed prompted to write: ‘That the outer is a picture of the inner...is a presumption likely enough in itself’ (Schopenhauer, 127). Even in the next century, the more pragmatically minded still seem to understand the medium as securing a correspondence between the external and internal:
The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film-the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. (Sontag, 6)
The fact that we are here dealing with a predicated truth dependent on the arrangement of surfaces does nothing to undermine the central and persistent faith in a correspondence between appearances and meaning. The movement from the ‘uncovered real’ to the contrived real represents, however, the medium’s movement from truth conceived as document, to truth conceived in terms of formal impact. As Sontag points out, it is a development that also points up the medium’s aesthetic schizophrenia: on the one hand photography would try to tear off the world’s mask, yet on the other, adorn it.
The link Sontag makes between the internal and external, of appearances and meaning, and – in particular the compact photography would make between beauty and truth – can be elucidated through our looking again at Adams’ image, and asking why, out of all the photographed dead, does this particular image enjoy such prestige? It would be ridiculous to assert that the success of Adams' image derives solely from, say, the beauty of its composition, or, for example, from its rendering of light – that is to say, from any internal formal sensibility. At the same time, the information it adverts is – unfortunately – insufficiently singular in itself to explain the esteem and attention given it. The photograph’s power must therefore derive from some type of collusion between the formal qualities it proposes as an image and that to which it attests as record. And yoked together in such a manner, truth and art serve only to curtail and compromise the other. Truth pins beauty to appearances, while beauty, for its part, impinges on truth. Beauty borrows attention from the matter at hand, and in its construction it removes the photograph from the sphere of the document; it transposes event into exhibition.
The willful naivety that Roland Barthes attempts to contrive for himself in Camera Lucida, of perceiving the photograph as a ‘weightless, transparent envelope’ (1993, 5) may be alluring, but it is intellectually unsustainable, neglecting as it does the inherent construction and artifice of the photographic. The making over of reality into document already comprehends its stylization and reinterpretation in the terms of the medium in which it is realized. Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us of the various formalizations that we accept unquestioningly: ‘We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman’ (198). The lucent chastity of Barthes’ envelope is a dodge; in reality the photograph’s four sides actuate and establish. Jean-Luc Godard’s commentary on another Vietnam War image in the 1972 film A letter to Jane is equally pertinent when applied to Saigon Execution: ‘This technical point of view cannot be considered an innocent one. The choice of frame is not neutral or innocent either’ (24 mins.).
Whether it wishes it so or not, the photograph is hostage to the art-historical formalization of the image, ‘still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience’ (Sontag 6). The medium brings with it an inherent aestheticization of its subject which subsumes its documentary powers of realism and revelation. As Walter Benjamin remarks, the camera ‘is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it’ (52). The horror of the photograph’s content is adulterated by the medium’s absorption within the aesthetic discourse. An execution can be made to function aesthetically. Sontag writes: ‘Contrary to what is
suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth.’ (112).
Photography’s addled mix of aesthetics and document means that beauty cannot realize its transcendence, it will merely service effect. The photograph’s aesthetic charge realizes itself not through its fidelity to the recorded instant, but in the transposition of instant to impact. Similarly, in depicting itself as testimonial, it claims for itself a pseudo-authority which serves neither to explain nor render reality, but only to heighten the pitch of its melodramatization.
It follows that we must then ask, what is the function of this effect, of a documented event re-rehearsed in the emptied gesture of melodrama? After all, in conceiving a testimony as exemplary, we implicitly ascribe it a moral function, understand it as serving good. Sontag asserts that in photography’s absolute foregrounding and immediacy, in its archetypal and abstract nature, it finds itself at a remove from moral feelings, which are, by contrast, ‘embedded in history’ (17). Yet, as radically qualified as her position is, Sontag still exhibits a faith in photography’s ability to stimulate a moral impulse: she feels that although ‘Photographs cannot create a moral position… they can reinforce one – and help build a nascent one’ (17). She examples this through reference to another image from the same conflict, Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of a South Vietnamese girl sprayed with Napalm running, naked and screaming, down a road (often referred to as ‘Napalm Girl’ – a nomination that perhaps unconsciously remarks the blunt force and deadening of context that such vivid images can take). Sontag states that the picture, together with others, served to ‘increase the public revulsion against the war’ (18). And certainly, we might understand the revulsion the image provoked in the American public as engendering a moral position. But then again, one would image that the same image could very well foment feelings of rage and revenge amongst the people of a country which remained daily subject to such attacks.
Later Sontag writes that ‘What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness’ (19), and we might be put in mind of Barthes and a similarly idealistic desire to elevate the photographic. When the sentence is analyzed however, we find ‘photographs’ as simply an emptied cypher embedded in a tautology: a relevant political consciousness will necessarily determine moral affects. And this points back to something about the nature of photograph itself. The photograph is a blank, it is indeterminate and open to any establishing context. Saigon Execution may itself be understood as a revelation of the abomination of war (the context given to it when originally published (see Morris, 241)), similarly it could be taken as a documenting the tragedy of the executed victim (the common response of people for whom the atrocity does not comprehend). Just as easily, the photograph (and this is most probably how Adams himself conceived of it (see Adams 1998)) could be seen as testament to the heroism of the executor, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The photograph, we see, betrays no determining context. Its historical dimension (and I use the word ‘historical’ in the manner of Sontag via Barthes) is as shallow as the paper on which it is printed.
Further, this simultaneous decontextualization and de-historicization mean that even the most liberal response to the photograph is nonetheless tainted with the voyeurism innate to the medium. Voyeurism grants proximity and access to the alien, something that Sontag writes about insightfully: ‘The hidden reality that the photograph documents is merely a reality hidden from the audience’ (40). At the same time, as it grants this vicarious thrill of otherness, it affords the audience the relish of being beyond the moment’s consequences and ramifications:
The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures… Partly it is because one is “here,” not “there,” … In the real world something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way. (168)
Finally, magically and marringly, the photograph allows the audience to luxuriate in extended access to the moment: ‘The force of the photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces’ (111). It grants an intimacy without any demand for a single trace of mutuality. As an audience we can stare into the dead face of Nguyễn Văn Lém with an emotionalized attention and over a length of time that would, in life, have been reserved for someone who held him in love: it would have been the last look of a departing lover, the held gaze of a dying friend or relative. Moreover, the photograph confirms the audience in its assumption that the awful private dignity of a human’s annihilation is something it might share and ogle (Nguyễn Văn Lém is viewed facing the camera, a formalization which ‘in the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait…signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject’s essence’ (Sontag, 37-38)). Surely, the moment of death represents the instant of man’s most complete and terrible individuation – and it is to this which the photograph invites us to participate, and which we in turn betray; unable to construe that in Nguyễn Văn Lém which made him an individual we take him as a cipher, as instancing brutality. Our intimate experience of this man’s death and the emotion we derive from it are both unearnt. It represents what Sontag would call consumption, and it is enjoyed at a remove, from a position of safety. In his death, Nguyễn Văn Lém is violated by the extent of our knowledge of him: ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have …’ (14). The pain of others, the annihilation of others, come to serve as further experiences of acquisition: ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power’ (2).
The photograph, then, without an aesthetically determined position, makes of the history and context of its subject a blank, and in doing so allows the image to be experienced solely for the drama of its surface impact. Through the spurious claim of its authority as document, the effects wrought by the camera’s testimony are heightened, and realize for their audience their most voluptuous and sentimentalized intensity, their most vertiginous and abyssal temptation: the experience of somebody else’s pain understood as the aesthetic frisson of the attested real. In this photographic-real all that is historically indexed, conditioned and predicated becomes sublimated; all that remains is the instantaneous. Of the dead man, the photograph can tell us nothing, nothing of his life, nothing of his family’s experience of loss, nothing even about his role in the Viet Cong, or the injustice or otherwise of his execution. Of history, the photograph tells us nothing; it merely privileges the act: it speaks only the violence of impact. This operation represents a condition of melodrama, wherein context is exchanged for intensity. That which is human is expunged, and the subject is instead transformed into a functionary of effect.
In two distinct artworks, realized in distinct mediums, both of which would formulate themselves as instances of testimonial, we encounter similar problems. It might be suggested that in the imposition of testimony upon art, the effects of each medium are conjured in their crudest utilization. The exigency of bearing witness, it seems, has encouraged The Things They Carried and Saigon Execution to reconvene the event's particular truth in abstracted impact. A flourish of rhetorical tics and stylistic histrionics contrive a melodrama – that is to say, a decontextualized effect of violent contrast. In its realization, binary oppositions are invoked and exploited; and that their impact might be best levied, these effects are hinged to a clear and explicit fulcrum of centrality.
(The term physicists give such an arrangement, ‘the ideal mechanical advantage’, is not out of place in our current discussion.) Fidelity to the singularity of the witnessed event would necessarily seem to warrant radicalism, yet in its stead these forms establish their effects through an address to a meaning which is sanctioned and fixed. Theirs is a finished language in which event has been transposed into spectacle, in which form has claimed sovereignty over circumstance and the testimonial betrayed into convention. Hierarchically prescribed, these witnesses tell nothing of history, they merely initial power. They betray nothing more than a banal assertion, the marking of the witness for privilege: the act of witnessing, says Sontag, means that ‘only he has mastered the situation’ (10).
The fact that two distinct and particular approaches to witnessing in two very different media reveal such remarkably similar problems can cause one to wonder if, rather than being a condition specific to these two works, these might instead represent the general difficulties involved in conceiving of art as testimonial. It may be the case that, despite its best efforts, the language of art, whether it is visual or textual, struggles to go beyond its particular form; that is to say, that the artwork’s unfolding offers no particular no coincidence with reality’s truth. Attempts to marry the two would then represent nothing more than a confusion of ideological and rhetorical dimensions. If, on the other hand, we were to understand the work as a circumscribed, formalized and non-event-referencing system, the question of whether its depiction is real or artificial, would vanish into irrelevancy. It would follow that the testimonial be considered a genre form, meaning a closed system of signification. As such it would enjoy no more a privileged proximity to reality than does any other aesthetic category; understood generically, art-as-testimonial would have no better, or worse, claim to historical representation than would, say, science fiction or the fairy tale. We would not then ask of such a form if it were realistic or unrealistic, but only if it were counter-mythical or mythical, radical or conventional. Approached in this manner, history would, of course still vanish – it seems art can salvage nothing there – but we would, at least, be spared the factitious drama and empty sanctity that can contrive itself about the witness.
Works cited
Adams, Eddie. “Eulogy: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.” Time. 27 July 1998. ---, Saigon Execution. 1968. Photograph.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage Classics, 1993. ---, Mythologies. New York: Vintage Classics. 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1927-1934. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 2005.
Morris, John G. Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ---, Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Dunnaway, Jen. “Approaching a Truer Form of Truth: The Appropriation of the Oral Narrative Form in Vietnam war Literature.” Soldier talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative, edited by Paul Budra and Michael Zeitlin. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Godard, Jean-Luc and Gorin, Jean-Pierre. A Letter to Jane. Postscript to Tout Va Bien. Gaumont Film Company, 1972.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. London: Flamingo, 1991.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Studies in Pessimism, On Human Nature, and Religion: a Dialogue, Etc. Kansas: Digireads. 2008.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1979. Ut, Nick. Napalm Girl. 1972. Photograph.
Perry McPartland teaches at the University of Agder (Norway). He mostly writes about Shakespeare, the
visual arts, and aesthetics.
