Representing History
Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony is an unusual literary work. Like the ‘conceptual’ or ‘uncreative’ writing lately practised by poets such as Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith, it consists entirely of language taken from other sources — the law reports that Reznikoff read while he was working for the legal encyclopaedia Corpus Juris. The first edition of Testimony appeared in 1934, but Reznikoff returned to the project in the 1960s and ‘70s and expanded it considerably: the second version of Testimony, eventually published in two volumes in 1978, contains more than four hundred cases and bears the subtitle United States (1885–1915): Recitative, thereby situating itself somewhere between chronicle and libretto. The 1934 version covers a slightly earlier period of history and is much shorter; it is also written in prose, whereas the later version makes use of line breaks, transforming the source material into blocks of austere free verse.
Reznikoff’s job at Corpus Juris was to look through old volumes of the West Publishing Company’s National Reporter System, a nearly exhaustive record of all the cases brought before federal and appellate state courts since 1789, and then to write short, compressed accounts of rulings with precedential value. The numbered sections of Testimony are the negative image of the entries in Corpus Juris: Reznikoff never includes the details of any judgement — the mechanisms of the court are almost completely absent from the pages of Testimony — and all the sordid, bloody details omitted from the legal encyclopaedia instead become the focus of his text. The following ‘case’, from the section titled ‘Southerners and Slaves’, is fairly typical of the work as a whole:
John Wilson and his younger brother, Cumberland, were cutting timber on a ridge in the woods when Ballentine came up. He had a rifle and a squirrel which he had shot, said that it was hot weather for cutting sticks, and left, going over the ridge. Later, he came out of the woods, and stood watching them.
John Wilson, sitting on the top log, turned his face to the team. The front pair of oxen had started, but the others were still standing. Cumberland Wilson was just rising to tell Ballentine good-by, when he saw him with his rifle up, the breach of it under his shoulder and the muzzle aimed at John. That instant Ballentine fired and Cumberland saw the smoke rising from Ballentine’s gun. John Wilson put his right hand to his breast and said, “Lord of Mercy!” The blood gushed from his mouth and nose. Ballentine began to run away; he ran ten steps or so, stopped, and looked John Wilson in the face. The dying man bowed his head and Ballentine ran on.
As in many of the other sections of Testimony, Reznikoff strips away just enough of the original case history to make the crime’s context and motivation only dimly perceptible. The events directly preceding and following the scene are omitted, and the lack of context produces a kind of estrangement effect (comparable to, but by no means the same as, the Verfremdungseffekt theorised by Brecht), drawing out certain unusual, evocative, or disturbing details that would have been lost in the translation of the case into a precedent in a textbook. For example: the way Ballentine begins to run but then stops to look directly at John Wilson; the fact that Cumberland sees ‘the smoke rising from Ballentine’s gun’ before he sees that John has been shot; the topography of the ‘ridge in the woods’ where the Wilsons make their living (the forests of the southern US are one of the country’s main sources of timber). The parts of Testimony that command the most interest are always these details, the ‘historic and contemporary particulars’ (to borrow Louis Zukofsky’s phrase), contingent facts which often represent larger social structures in microcosm.
Reading Reznikoff’s Intentions
Because of its subject matter and its mode of expression, critics have tended to include Testimony in a canon of experimental and political literature written in the US in the inter-war period. Writers working in this mode often sought to associate their work with documentary photography, either by publishing it alongside photographs, as in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or by aspiring to imitate those photographs’ vérité style. In an article on the political implications of Reznikoff’s documentary poetry Michael Davidson provides a long list of similar ‘hybrid works’ from the same period, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, and Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Book of the Dead’. Davidson claims that the Depression was the ‘enabling moment’ for this type of literature; he reads Testimony alongside Rukeyser’s ‘Book of the Dead’ and finds that both texts participate in a ‘common documentary project’ that aims to ‘provide a voice for individuals who live at the margins of a national scene’. Like many other close readings of Testimony, Davidson’s brings out the critical intent behind the text: Reznikoff’s purpose, Davidson suggests, is to unsettle a sanitised US national history by shedding light on its inhumane underside.
This view of Testimony as a critical and instructive text is predominant in several recent commentaries on Reznikoff’s work. It is stated particularly persuasively in Monique Vescia’s book Depression Glass, where she compares Reznikoff to progressive contemporaries such as Lewis Hine, one of the many photographers and sociologists of the 1930s who sought to represent ‘the larger social injustices perpetrated against the poor and working class’ by using forms that enable people and situations to ‘speak for themselves’. Vescia’s representation of Testimony is easily justified by reference to the text’s recurring themes and to the notes and drafts in which Reznikoff sometimes discusses his method and intent. Katheryn Shevelow cites some of these manuscript notes to support her claim that Reznikoff’s documentary poetry is meant to ‘provide a vivid lesson in humanity’. She places particular emphasis on Reznikoff’s interest in the concept of ‘catharsis’ and suggests that the text produces a morally restorative effect by confronting the reader with ‘the experience of pain and brutality’. A similar reading of Testimony’s purpose was also put forward in the very first critical reading of the work, ‘The Matter of the Document’, the introductory essay included in the 1934 edition. Written by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke at the invitation of William Carlos Williams, Burke’s short essay seeks to defend Reznikoff and his experimental text by emphasising the ‘vein of sympathy that underlies his work’; it concludes with the suggestion that the ‘truth’ of Testimony is its ‘usefulness to living’.
As persuasive as these assessments of Reznikoff’s intentions may be, they risk reducing Testimony to a merely didactic piece of writing. It is obvious that Reznikoff means to indict an unjust and exploitative social system (‘an economy based on various forms of slavery’, as Vescia puts it), but it is important to recognise that the text actually exceeds this intention and achieves the status of an interesting artefact in its own right. The poet and translator George Szirtes is one of the few commentators who have recognised the autonomous aesthetic qualities of Reznikoff’s factual poetry. In his introduction to Reznikoff’s other documentary poem, Holocaust, he attempts to describe the complex way in which documentary materials can be made to approach the condition of literature, emphasising the ‘musical’ formalism of Reznikoff’s syntax:
To read Holocaust is a terrible experience, but an oddly affirming one, if only because of the music. It is a kind of debt to lost music in that it hardly seems music at all. The violin does not sob, the harmonica does not sound in the hut, the voice of the cantor does not rise from the pit. Those things are gone but we are aware of their having gone. There is no soundtrack at all. It is only perfectly objective language falling as accurately as it can, working towards some ideal and convincing cadence that is hard to tell from ordinary syntax. It is the music of sheer labour.
Just as Szirtes suggests, Reznikoff’s method is highly contradictory. In Testimony he aestheticises the functioning of an inhumane and violent social system in order to represent the full scope of its completely unaesthetic, inhumane, and violent functioning. His representation of this system is strictly mimetic: his ‘perfectly objective language’ is an imitation of those nominally objective and disinterested legal structures that strip subjects of their autonomy. It is only by way of this rigorous form of mimesis — only by producing a text that views individuals from the supra-individual perspective of the court — that Reznikoff is able to make that objective system into an object of contemplation. Testimony does effect a certain kind of social criticism, then, but not in the simple manner of a journalistic exposé, as some critics have suggested. The form of the work allows it to criticise the formal characteristics of the law and economy of the US, and Reznikoff’s critique of these economic and legal forms in fact bears a close resemblance to Adorno’s critical theory.
Calculating the Law
At several points in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer apply their critique of post-Enlightenment rationality to the workings of ‘bourgeois justice’. In the opening chapter, for example, they suggest that the reductive tendencies inherent in formal logic, positivist science, and capitalist economy are also operative in the legal system, taking a line from Francis Bacon’s treatise The Advancement of Learning as a prototypical example of this pernicious formalism:
The same equations govern bourgeois justice and commodity exchange. “Is not the rule, ‘Si inaequalibus aequalia addas, omnia erunt inaequalia,’ [If you add like to unlike you will always end up with unlike] an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics? And is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion?” Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. (DE 4)
Adorno and Horkheimer go on to suggest that in the unfolding of Enlightenment’s immanent logic, ‘equivalence’ is made into a ‘fetish’; once again they connect this fetishisation of calculability with the ideology of justice:
Earlier, fetishes had been subject to the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish. The blindfold over the eyes of Justitia means not only that justice brooks no interference but that it does not originate in freedom. (DE 12)
And later in the text, in the commentary on the Odyssey, they continue to reinforce this comparison by likening the law to the ‘mythical inevitability’ that seems to dominate Homer’s narrative. ‘Scylla and Charybdis have a claim on whatever comes between their teeth, just as Circe has a right to metamorphose those who are not immune, or Polyphemus a right to the bodies of his guests’; the compulsive nature of these behaviours is evidence that ‘the natural relationship between strength and powerlessness has already taken on the character of a legal relationship’:
Mythical inevitability is defined by the equivalence between the curse, the abominable act which expiates it, and the guilt arising from that act, which reproduces the curse. All law in history up to now bears the trace of this pattern. In myth each moment of the cycle pays off the preceding moment and thereby helps to establish the continuity of guilt as law. (DE 45–46)
The argument that emerges in these passages concerns the transformation of the law into a system of blind equivalence, one that operates compulsively or automatically and in a manner similar to nature, fate, mathematics, or the economic system. Enlightenment’s process of demythologisation and rationalisation results in the disappearance of a qualitative idea of justice and its replacement by a strictly quantitative law of equivalence: ‘Justice gives way to law’ because ‘equivalence regulates punishment and reward within civilization’ (DE 12). As Etienne Balibar explains, this critique of the law is already implicit in Marx’s comments on ‘fetishism’ in Capital; Marx’s text contains the ‘bases for an analysis of the modes of subjection’ which Balibar outlines in the following way:
The structure common to economic and to juridical (and moral) fetishism is generalized equivalence, which abstractly and equally subjects individuals to the form of a circulation (circulation of values, circulation of obligations). It supposes a code or a measure – both materialized and idealized – before which ‘particularity’, individual need, must yield.
It is therefore significant that in the original German text of the passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment quoted above, the word translated as ‘continuity of guilt’ is a much more suggestive compound noun: Schuldzusammenhang. As Rolf Tiedemann notes, the word is used in many of Adorno’s other writings. It can be translated as ‘context of guilt’ or ‘web of guilt’, but can also mean ‘debt structure’ or ‘debt relationship’. (Throughout the English translation of Adorno’s critique of Husserl, for example, Schuldzusammenhang is rendered as ‘debit structure’; one of Adorno’s criticisms of Husserl is that his philosophy resembles a system of credit and debit.) Adorno and Horkheimer’s text plays on the different meanings of the words Schuld (fault, blame, guilt, or debt) and schulden (to owe); Walter Benjamin also commented on the ‘demonic ambiguity’ of the word Schuld in his fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’. Their critique is therefore founded on a comparison between debt and guilt: they argue that in civilisation — particularly in the period of modernity, but also in societies where myth and religion remain influential — the law is administered in such a way that it behaves more and more like an economic system in which exchange value governs everything and use value is of only secondary importance.
The germ of a similar insight is present in Reznikoff’s autobiographical poem ‘Early History of a Writer’. In the sixteenth section of this poem he describes the years he spent studying law at New York University, where he
learned to probe beneath the facts of each case
for the living principle of law
and to trace it, if I could,
to the solid trunk from which it sprang;
confused as it all was to me at first,
I soon saw the law in its elements as a beautiful order
in which benefit balanced obligation
and nothing was without its reason — or reasons.
But Reznikoff’s enthusiasm for this ‘beautiful order’ is gradually tempered by an awareness of the law’s formal limitations. Later in the poem he remembers sitting in a library, ‘memorizing sentences that seemed meaty’, but finding himself at a conceptual and physical remove from real life:
The noise of the street was far away—
ten storeys below;
far away, too, the worry and noise of my parents’ shop;
before me was all that was left of eager argument and eager parties,
now merely names that might just as well have been,
and in the talk of the law students often were,
single letters in the alphabet:
all the blood—the heartache and the heartening—gone out of the words
and only, as a pattern for thinking,
the cool bones of the judge’s reasoning.
And I felt no regret for the glittering words I had played with
and only pleasure to be working with ideas—
of rights and wrongs and their elements
and of justice between men in their intricate affairs. (NSP 131)
Reznikoff realises that the lived experiences of the ‘eager parties’ who appeal to the law are always partly lost or simplified in the process of their subjection to an increasingly objectified legal system. Indifferent to the particularity of individual legal subjects, positing them only as variables in a system of ‘benefit’ and ‘obligation’, the law threatens to transform itself into an automatic ‘pattern for thinking’. In the legal argumentation Reznikoff witnesses at NYU, the names of the people involved in each case are reduced to ‘single letters in the alphabet’ — like the parts of an algebraic equation — and the ‘blood’ of the original dispute gives way to the ‘cool bones of the judge’s reasoning’ — a metaphor that implies petrifaction and natural decay. As Dialectic of Enlightenment would have it, the ‘barren wisdom’ of this form of idealism
incessantly reinstates what always was. Whatever might be different is made the same. That is the verdict which critically sets the boundaries to possible experience. The identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself. (DE 8)
Any consideration of Testimony must therefore account for Reznikoff’s complex relationship to the language of the law: like Adorno and Horkheimer, he sees how the law’s language and structure tend to become impoverished, abstract, and mechanised, but he nevertheless uses that language as a model for his poetry. In the same section of ‘Early History of a Writer’ quoted above, Reznikoff remembers how he
found it delightful
to climb those green heights,
to bathe in the clear waters of reason,
to use words for their daylight meaning
and not as prisms
playing with the rainbows of connotation.
(NSP 130)
He thus presents the precise, nonliterary language of legal rulings as an instrument designed to focus rather than refract meaning, a metaphor that recalls Louis Zukofsky’s comparison between an Objectivist poem and a lens. But whereas Zukofsky often had recourse to these optical metaphors, Reznikoff almost always used the example of the constrained language of witness testimony whenever he was asked about his ‘Objectivist’ poetics. In an interview with L. S. Dembo in 1968 he defined an ‘Objectivist’ as a writer ‘restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law’, and then extended the comparison further:
Now suppose in a court of law, you are testifying in a negligence case. You cannot get up on the stand and say, “The man was negligent.” That’s a conclusion of fact. What you’d be compelled to say is how the man acted. Did he stop before he crossed the street? Did he look? The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and the judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet.
In Objectivist writing, then, judgement is suspended so that it can be induced more forcefully by the bare presentation of factual particulars. This much has already been said by those critics discussed earlier, like Davidson and Vescia, who claim that Reznikoff’s dispassionate style serves an instructive, moral purpose. However, what is most interesting about Reznikoff’s analogy is the way it moves back and forth between legal judgements and aesthetic judgements. The implications of the shift from one type of judgement to the other become fully apparent in Testimony. When Reznikoff transposes impoverished legal language out of the field of mechanised law and into the realm of poetry, this transposition allows for the reappearance of all the historical particulars that the legal apparatus treats as incidental and insignificant. Crucially, this revivification of incidental facts is an aesthetic activity, and not simply a morally instructive one. In fact it is identical with the process described in Dialectic of Enlightenment:
For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. (DE 4)
Unlawful Aesthetics
The fragmentary stories and sketches in Testimony vary in length from several pages to only a few lines. If one wished to argue that the text’s content is too gruesome and senseless for it to qualify as literature, one would only need to quote some of the shorter pieces describing gunshot wounds, dead bodies, or senseless acts of violence. But Testimony also contains scenes in which aesthetic or literary elements seem to emerge spontaneously, as epiphenomena of the law’s otherwise purely functional operation. The following quotation is taken from the end of one of the cases, and describes the aftermath of a murder:
Ranty went through the marsh barefoot so as not to show his tracks. He stepped from turf to turf. Jim walked behind him stepping in his prints until they came to the “piney” woods.
When Jim was put in jail he dreamed a dream, and then he knew he would be hanged. He dreamed that his two hands were tied together, and were on fire; there was a book hung before them — it had a leather cover just like the one they swore him on at the trial — the book caught fire and all the leaves were burning. (T 540–541)
By taking the original National Reporter case history, which would have consisted mostly of direct and reported speech, and editing out all its speech tags, explanatory interpolations, and references to the legal process, Reznikoff produces a spare, third-person account full of interesting details pertaining to the geography and economy of the US. The marshlands are evoked using only a few simple details: the ‘turf’ which Ranty imagines will conceal his footprints (but in fact do not, since Jim walks behind him ‘stepping in his prints’), and the ‘piney’ woods, this last adjective appearing in quotation marks to indicate that it is the witness’s own idiosyncratic term. The environment thus appears as something lived in and experienced by Jim and Ranty, a space through which they move and of which they speak. Jim’s dream also becomes interesting once it is freed from its evidential role: its simple symbolism manages to convey something of the fatalism and religiosity bound up with crime and punishment in the US. This is not simply a function of the imagery and language Jim uses in the original transcript, but an effect produced by Reznikoff’s editing: by omitting the judge’s verdict and ending the vignette with Jim’s premonition Reznikoff pushes the secular law into the background and brings the older religious one to the fore. The use of the Bible in court also reminds us that the religious concepts of fate and predestination are imbricated with the newer system of disenchanted rationality.
These aestheticised details therefore point beyond the borders of the text to the objective social totality from which they emerge; they are ‘metonymic’ in the sense defined by Charles Bernstein in his essay on Reznikoff’s poetry, where he asks
what is the status of the detail, the particular in this work? Why is it so important? For Reznikoff, as for Williams, the detail is not a “luminous particular” in Pound’s sense — not extraordinary but exactly ordinary, even if indeed luminous. So, then, why this particular detail, and then that one?
Metonymy: the fragment as substitute for, hinting at, something else, something that only it can stand for, is an instance of — a manifestation or emanation.
The ordinariness of these fragments, which Bernstein emphasises here, is essential to their aesthetic and significative aspects. In opposition to the process of enlightenment, which threatens to sweep everything into a system of equivalence, each detail in Reznikoff’s text is ‘allowed to be identical to itself’ (DE 8). The system of probabilistic rationalisation which would classify things as either typical or exceptional, ordinary or extraordinary, is suspended: by presenting these details in the form of a work of art they are able to stand both for themselves (as objects of aesthetic contemplation) and for the objective totality from which they emanate.
Throughout Testimony this metonymic relationship between part and whole always underpins the text’s most obviously literary passages. For example, there is a long section in the second part of Testimony titled ‘Rivers and Ships, Harbors and Ports’ which does not describe any major crime or accident but instead lists the names of ships, their captains and passengers, their cargo, and their destinations, and then includes some descriptions of these destinations and the changes in the weather. This evocative stream of nautical names and terms is one of the longest sections in the book, and most of it reads like poetry:
Rattlesnake Shoal, Pelican Shoals, Flapjack Reef; the ship aground all of the night, chafing and grating upon the sand, the weather dark, threatening to be worse, dark and stormy, spitting rain; the schooner under full sail with a fair wind running upon a bar of mud in Mobile Bay, thumping upon the bar heavily, the water calm but a very heavy surf […] (T 570)
It is difficult to assess whether Reznikoff has embellished any of this language: by including it in Testimony he presents it as a collage of words and names taken directly from other sources, but it ends up sounding lyrical, taking on the form of a ‘Whitmanian catalog’, as Davidson notes. Thus the conventionally literary aspects of Testimony become more overt the less the ordering principles of the law are preserved in the translation from document to poem.
The emergence of aesthetic contemplation from a system of domination is something Adorno discusses in his comments on beauty. In one of the short fragments in Minima Moralia he suggests that the ‘genesis of beauty’ is to be found in the ‘moment of enlightenment’:
Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place. The disinterested pleasure that according to Kant is aroused by works of art, can only be understood by virtue of historical antitheses still at work in each aesthetic object. The thing disinterestedly contemplated pleases because it once claimed the utmost interest and thus precluded contemplation. The latter is a triumph of enlightened self-discipline.
Adorno’s argument here is closely connected to his critique of the dominating ratio in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but it is the positive, hopeful, redemptive side of this critique, in which aesthetic contemplation first appears as something made possible by the process of disenchantment, and secondly as the mechanism by which that disenchanting rationality is able to overcome itself and posit another possible society. Central to his argument is the idea that the ‘disenchanted charm’ of beautiful things is a residue of the historical process by which they ceased to be objects of ritualistic control and domination. His theory of beauty therefore connects aesthetic pleasure to the disappearance of superstitious fantasies of power and control: in the process of disenchantment the ‘illusion of omnipotence’ is relinquished by the subject, and the ‘radiant’ objects which were previously believed to be sources of power — and so causes of anxiety and fear — come to be regarded as powerless, while remaining aesthetically fascinating. ‘Powerlessness’ and ‘purposelessness’ consequently become characteristics of the beautiful. Art is therefore the negation of the logic that governs an instrumental world in which everything is disfigured by power and ‘purposefulness’:
Total purposelessness gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation, which consummates the established order by drawing the conclusion from its own principle of reason, has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible.
Without wishing to imply that Adorno’s theory coincides exactly with Reznikoff’s poetic practice, Adorno’s remarks can help to explain why the language of Testimony often attains the status of something beautiful. By translating legal case histories into the free-standing vignettes of Testimony, Reznikoff enacts a process similar to the one Adorno describes here: Reznikoff’s experimental text liberates language and experience from a system in which domination, purposefulness, and self-preservation are the main poles of attraction. This is why many of the contingent facts in Testimony possess the ‘disenchanted charm’ which Adorno ascribes to beautiful objects.
At the same time, Testimony makes us aware of the ‘world of domination’ and its distorting logic by presenting this world as objectively as possible. It makes the ‘totality of purposefulness’ into an object of disinterested contemplation. This is the sense in which Reznikoff’s text can be said to ‘consummate the established order by drawing the conclusion from its own principle of reason’. Throughout Testimony Reznikoff’s disinterested style helps to reveal the ways in which an objective system of purposefulness and economic rationality dominates people’s lives. The actions of the individuals described in many of the cases often seem overdetermined by an external, objective force, a secular form of fate:
Pacheco at that time was living with a woman called Rosa Smith. He and Jose Maria had left her house before noon on the day Jose Maria killed Dutch John, telling her they were going to a dance. They came back the next morning. Pacheco told the woman they had bought some sheep. Another time he told her that Dutch John had given him the sheep to take care of.
They left the sheep up the mountains. Soon after, Jose Maria and Pacheco sheared them, and hauled the wool to Salinas, where they sold them for over two hundred dollars. They divided the money. Jose Maria at once lost forty dollars at cards.
Pacheco was down-hearted and said he was sick. He gave away some of the sheep. (T 577)
The two hundred dollars’ worth of wool for which ‘Dutch John’ is killed, which would have been centrally important in a murder trial, becomes in Reznikoff’s retelling the story’s meaningless centre of gravity. It appears and disappears rapidly: the extremely prosaic phrases ‘Soon after’ and ‘at once’ have the effect of speeding up the temporality of the story’s penultimate paragraph; the material motive is replaced almost immediately by the feelings of sickness and guilt which in turn compel Pacheco to give away some of the sheep he has stolen. Like Jim’s dream of the burning Bible, Pacheco’s ‘down-hearted’ sickness is transformed into a poignant, poetic detail; at the same time, the transformation of this detail into an object of aesthetic contemplation allows us to see that Pacheco exists within a structure of guilt and debt that constantly determines his behaviour. Testimony disenchants the objects of ‘utmost interest’ around which the events in each case are organised; it thereby disenchants the Schuldzusammenhang.
This interpretation certainly helps to explain the strangely sublime effect produced by those passages of Testimony which describe inhospitable environments and dire working conditions. Consider the following vignette:
The Arab was bound for Desolation Island to take sea-elephant or walrus oil. The sea-elephants were killed by spears here and there on the island. The blubber was taken from the animals wherever killed and carried by the men on their backs over blocks of ice to their hut on the shore to be tried into oil. The land was one of fog and clouds, snow and ice; they saw the sun seldom, and upon the sea on all sides the floating ice. (T 560)
As in ‘Rivers and Ships, Harbors and Ports’, Reznikoff’s editing gives as much weight to the details of the environment as to the people in it. All the activities are described in the passive voice; Reznikoff foregrounds the tools (‘spears’, the ‘hut’) and the landscape (the ‘shore’, the ‘blocks of ice’), component parts of a harsh objective reality which overdetermines the activities of the men surrounded ‘on all sides’ — surrounded, that is, not only by the water and ice but by a system of economic necessity and compulsion. The scene is definitely not a ‘Robinsonade’ (in Marx’s sense of the term): it refutes those economic tracts in which the bourgeois individual’s wealth appears as the result of an asocial industriousness and parsimony. Instead, the world of Testimony is one in which forms of labour are socially determined by a system replete with coercion, impoverishment, and ‘Desolation’.
The Limits of Objectivity
Reznikoff thus takes the nominally disinterested language of the law and makes it truly disinterested: in court the details of each case would have been integrated into a legal judgement; here they are made available to aesthetic judgement. Just as Adorno suggests, the emergence of these literary and metonymic aspects of the cases through their retelling in Testimony results from the text’s dialectical suspension of the struggle for domination and self-preservation. Adorno returns to this idea in his Aesthetic Theory, where he states that ‘[t]he opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination’. Noting that the strict formalism of true art necessarily ‘dominates’ its materials, Adorno claims that artworks ‘must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination’. Reznikoff’s close attention to the precise ‘music’ of his sentences is an example of this, but by taking the law reports as his source material he goes further, turning the world of domination into the model for his mimetic project.
However, it should be borne in mind that any interpretation of Testimony which overemphasises this aesthetic aspect while completely downplaying Reznikoff’s ethical or didactic intentions will fail to do justice to the work as a whole. In fact, to represent Testimony in this way would be to make it seem like an example of the type of art Walter Benjamin describes at the end of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Referring specifically to the Futurism of Marinetti, Benjamin writes:
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
If Testimony is prevented from turning into an instance of this extreme self-alienation, it is probably because of the ‘vein of sympathy’ which runs through it, as Burke suggests in his introduction. Still, it is interesting to note that the aesthetic pleasure afforded by Testimony never amounts to an endorsement of the destructive system from which the text derives; rather, those moments of aesthetic pleasure always coincide with the disenchantment of that objective system and its appearance as something oppressive and reductive. Even at its most objective and disinterested, then, the language of Reznikoff’s documentary poetry contains a critical impetus.
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‘The Coming Rapture’ by Charles Anderson. The painting is reproduced on the front of a postcard Gaddis sent to his friend John Aldridge in 1985.
