Antony Rowland

The future of testimony : interdisciplinary perspectives on witnessing

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the ground breaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

Reading Holocaust poetry: singularity and Geoffrey Hill's ‘September Song’

During classes on an interdisciplinary module I taught for ten years, literature students sometimes pointed out to those from other disciplines that the reader needs the objective tools of close reading in order to understand Holocaust poems properly. Such a subjective/objective dichotomy actually demonstrates that non-specialists in the field may have something important to tell us about reading, as a potentially missed encounter in the classroom, and in professional practice. The latter has resulted in three different ways of reading Holocaust poetry in recent years: Susan Gubar responds to such poems as ‘stymied testimony’, and I have argued elsewhere for the consideration of ‘awkward poetics’ – in which writers self-consciously discuss the problems of representation within the texts – as well as lyrics as a form of testimony in and of themselves. This article takes these critical positions forward by exploring the interaction between recent theories of engaging with poetry more widely and the specific case of Holocaust poetry. Can the concept of the singularity of literature fruitfully account for the ‘events’ of Holocaust poems, or does it obscure the importance of the metatext, and possibilities of ethical response? Also, in response to Derek Attridges work since The Singularity of Literature (2004), can the ‘objective’ close readings that critics engage in be too ‘powerful’ for Holocaust poetry? Can close reading be, essentially, an unethical enterprise?

A Dialectic of Forgetting: János Pilinszky and Ted Hughes

Critics such as Michael Parker and Neil Roberts have drawn attention to the influence of Eastern European poetry as a whole on Ted Hughes’s work, and in this article I focus on Hughes’s attraction to Janos Pilinszky’s verse in particular. Initially, this may seem odd, given Pilinszky’s pervasive Christian iconography, and the fact that—as I illustrate—the Hungarian poet vacillated between victimhood and complicity during the war. However, Pilinszky’s ruminations about trauma and memory strike a particular chord with the Yorkshire poet. Susan Bassnett, amongst others, has commented briefly on the affinity between the two writers, but in this article I explore the precise impact of Pilinszky on Hughes’s writing. Hughes was working on Pilinszky’s poetry with Janos Csokits in the early 1970s, until the publication of their translations in 1976: at the same time, he was writing two of his own collections that contain similar stylistics; Cave Birds, which he started in 1974, and Gaudete, which he worked on intensively in 1975. This synchronicity results in two collections that often read as if they were translations. Rather than fulfilling Harold Bloom’s magniloquent conception of the anxiety of influence as a violent “family romance”—in which the ephebe vanquishes the predecessor poet in order to survive—the relationship between Hughes and Pilinszky is that of fellow travellers who draw on aspects of each other’s work in order to refine previous convictions, rather than subvert the precursor’s aesthetics. I analyse Pilinszky poems such as ‘Unfinished Past’ and ‘You Have Had to Suffer Wind and Cold’, and extracts from Hughes’s Cave Birds and Gaudete sequences, in order to demonstrate the dialectic of influence between the two writers in the early 1970s, when, some critics argue, Hughes produced his best work.