BEARING WITNESS TO TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Abstract

This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtual witness is actualized through time travel. Ken Liu’s writing contributes a documentary narrative of the witnessing of witnessing that extends the temporal dimension of witness and allows the flow between fictive and factual. This thought experiment posits a perspective into the interweaving acts and performances of witnessing to etch the ethics in witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, particularly in the global context. I argue that Liu’s novella uncovers the ethical relational witnessing in which “prosthetic memory” is produced and that affects postmemorial and the implicated subjects. The virtual reality witnessing bestows a strong agency upon witnesses while yet ethical concerns arise. Liu’s writing shows that witness and testimony both steer the path to shared memory in a possibly ethical way when channelled through moral emotions; virtual reality witnessing generates the private contact with historical experiences rather than one’s lived experiences. Thus, I identify the ethical stakes and possible settlements in witness and testimony when they are taken as continuing, relational acts, and as performances of emotional, sensuous experience, when witnessing and remembering become politicized and instrumentalized. Firstly, witnessing is problematized and debated particularly in terms of the perpetrator’s testimony. I argue that the perpetrator’s testimony can transfer trauma into collective remembering rather than individual redemption. On the debate over negative emotions in witnessing, I argue that through negative moral emotions ethical witnessing and its testimony are motivated, though they are often evaded or appropriated. Further, I demonstrate that empathetic witnessing is indicated in Liu’s writing, by negotiating the sensitivity in witness and testimony with an evaluative distance from the past. Liu’s empathetic narrative is founded on his investigation of historical trauma and his meditation on structural trauma.

Keywords:

• virtual reality witnessing
• moral emotions
• empathetic witnessing
• relational witnessing
• global traumatic memory
• structural trauma
• implicated subjects

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Marek Oziewicz defines speculative fiction as “a fuzzy set super category that houses all non-mimetic genres – genres that in one way or another depart from imitating consensus reality” in his article published in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature in which he delineates speculative fiction as a broad literary and cultural field (Oziewicz; see also Thomas; Gill 71–85).

2 Ken Liu conversed with The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz when launching his story collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (“Pen Out Loud Talks”).

3 Ken Liu talked about his writing of history in his interview with SF Signal Podcast (“The SF Signal Podcast”).

4 Unit 731 conducted human experiments which covered conceivable approaches to spreading disease, and to their prevention. Unit 731 researchers publicly shared some of their findings but disguised the human experimentation aspect with the claim of animal experiments. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, records in Pingfang were destroyed but later researchers disclosed the details of human experiments to American scientists and investigators. This history has been uncovered through divulging the witnesses’ testimonies and the remains of documents of Unit 731 (see Harris).

5 The concept of “prosthetic” in remembrance is also discussed in Celia Lury’s book. She shows the manipulation of digital images and other visual technologies which redefine the relation between consciousness, the body, and the memory as to create a “prosthetic culture” (see Lury).

6 Research on empathy is conducted in fields of philosophy, psychology, and sciences of the human mind which bend toward the study of emotional engagement (see Stueber; Davis, Empathy; Moral).

7 See LaCapra on his arguments about the reduction of structural and historical trauma (82).