Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There

Abstract

The narrative turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in the humanities that occurred in the 1990s converged in the study of human rights and social justice. Human rights, it was argued, were about and dependent upon modes of storytelling; torture was often cited as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which narrative and human rights were co-implicated. The centralization of torture in the prosecution of the “War on Terror” and the recent declassification of documents authorizing the use of torture by US personnel offers an important occasion to reconsider some of the tenets of the arguments about human rights and narrative. This essay considers the problem of declassification as a process of un-narration and examines some of the ways that art and literature have attempted to deal with the stories of torture that are actively untold.

Joseph R. Slaughter is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He studies and teaches African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, critical theory, and human rights. His first book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literary and cultural theory), examines the social, political, and formal intersections of literary and legal fictions of human development. He is currently working on a book called “New Word Orders” that looks at the roles and problems of intellectual property in the development and diffusion of the novel as a world literary form.

Notes

1. I've reproduced here the PDF page images made available under FOIA rather than images of Holzer's paintings, which (according to the Whitney Web site) are copyrighted and would, ironically, require seeking the artist's permission to reproduce. This is a particularly curious effect of artistic activity in this case: the re-privatization of knowledge that many people (including Holzer) have worked hard to publicize. Formica Report Annex 28 available at: http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/formica_annexes_1.pdf. Images of Holzer's versions are available at: http://whitney.org/www/holzer/images.jsp.

2. The National Security Archive is a nongovernmental organization that pursues and collects documents released under FOIA. It is housed at The George Washington University.

3. See FBI Records (2003a).

4. See Department of Justice (2009).

5. See FBI Records (2002, 2003b).

6. It would be possible, I think, to construct a semiotics of state secrets using the FOIA exemptions (on the model of Roland Barthes's five codes for reading narrative) that would consist of the (legal) codes of silence, of what is unsaid.

7. “Museé des Beaux Arts,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used with permission of Random House, Inc.

8. Like many of his fellow British and American intellectual sympathizers, Auden had gone to Barcelona to become an ambulance driver for the Republican government; instead, he found himself shut up in a radio transmission tower, making antifascist propaganda broadcasts in English that, as he himself recognized, “cannot have been of the slightest practical use” (Osborne 1979: 135). Disappointed and disillusioned, Auden left Spain. The esteem that the poem expresses for the Old Masters's narrative mode of painting might reflect Auden's preference for figurative over abstract art and his assertion that “the only good artist is one who is also something of a journalist” (Auden quoted in Osborne 1979: 119).

9. Copyright Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Reprinted with permission.

10. If the horse is associated with “the human position” of detachment, as I suggested earlier, then perhaps its service as the narrative conjunction between suffering and satisfaction suggests that it is the reader-viewer's own sense of innocent disconnection from (lack of implication in) the suffering-satisfaction system that is precisely the link between the two extremes. I have elsewhere written about the figure of the horse as the figure of humanitarian indifference in the book that spawned the first Geneva Convention and the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (Slaughter 2009).

11. The repetition of forms and subjects within a painting is, according to Wendy Steiner, the primary indication of a narrative in an image (Steiner 2004).

12. Ariadne's thread, which in the Minos myth is the trick for tracing one's way out of Daedalus’ labyrinth, has often been taken to be a figure for narrative itself (Miller 1976).

13. Botero paintings reprinted with permission of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive. Photographed for the UC Berkeley Museum by Benjamin Blackwell.

14. That torture has become, especially in TV shows like 24 and Lost, just one more plot device to move narrative things along is an observation that has emerged from many conversations with Jennifer Wenzel.