Final Project: Deceptive Affect
Affect is powerful in its potential to absorb and distract the audience into a whirlpool of hyper-realistic experience. Affect absorbs by fostering a sense of sympathy and proximity that slips one into the shoes of another’s memory. Affect also distracts by distancing one through photography, sound, or ambience, reminding him that the memory is not actually his. Such witnessing becomes a therapeutic experience that “can create the conditions in which past atrocities can become part of a usable past” (Landy). This unique twofold way of affective engagement has surged with the technological advancement and “obsessive memorialization” (Huyssen 18) through mediums of museums, marketing, and media. In fact, Landsberg specifically quotes Walter Benjamin, “Reception… which is a symptom of profound changes in apperception- finds in film its true training ground” (Landsberg 14). Then if such powerful affect “prod(s) us to think and make sense of that experience” (Landsberg 15), is there such a thing as “good” affect or “bad,” or “productive” or “unproductive” affect?
Before delving into the ethics of memorial productivity, I wish to lay the grounds upon which I attempt to answer this question. First and foremost, Caruth defines trauma as a delayed “response… to an overwhelming event, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, (or) thoughts” (Caruth 4). Its crushing magnitude possesses the individual and distorts the memories, paralyzing any “witnessing,” presence of the “other,” or the restoration of the “thou” (Laub 69). In fact, the victims “not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive” (Laub 63).
However, the structure of trauma is further complicated by the verity of memory. Such complication is best illustrated by the little boy separated from his parents with only a photo of his mother. As the vagabond boy ages, the photo is entrenched within as an icon, a safe haven, and a first witness that helps him to cope with his loss and his trauma during wartime (Laub 70). In other words, the truth of whether the real mother resembles the picture does not matter; What matters is that his memory, projected on the medium of a photo, resides and adjusts to fulfill his own needs and desires.
Thus, trauma is unspeakable of, yet necessitates the speaking and comprehension of, and is constructed of fragmented or customized memories. Upon such complex structure is our ironic desire for a full narrative when there exists none. Such compulsive craving for a perfect “Truth” augments with the current societal trends: Memorialization through media, fueled by the swift advancement of technology and the fear or danger of forgetting (Huyssen 18), recommends a distinct narrative of beginning, middle, and end, alike typical Hollywood blockbusters. Further, the bloom of dark tourism, including Oswiecim’s Auschwitz and New York’s National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, necessitates such narrative for touristic, economic, and educational purposes. Thus, in search for a complete storyline, one pieces the puzzles of own desires, preconceptions, educational knowledge, and cultural memories to complete a neatly concocted “Truth” map which one utilizes to base future judgements. This tool is strengthened or threatened by new external information but would always remain to seem “complete.”
Although incomplete and flawed in its construction, this desire for “Truth” unveils our responsibility for constant inquiry to tune and reconstruct our memories. In fact, Hirsch urges for post-generational inquiry for truth as trauma is “transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right… at the risk of having one’s own stories and experiences displaced” (Hirsch 107). Thus, post-generational engagement unravels the compressed or unfathomable memories to revitalize active participation. Such revitalization is epitomized within Maus, where Art Spiegelman, a post-generation of a holocaust-survivor father, survives a nervous breakdown and decides to unpack his emotional burden into a 296-page graphic novel. Through lighter strokes of mice and cats, Spiegelman rummages through his own trauma, distinctive from his fathers, highlighting his responsibility to resolving not only his but also his father’s trauma in order to survive. Even when one is not a direct post-generation, Rothberg further urges the implicated subjects, or the indirectly involved, for justice to “lead to new versions of collective politics that build on alliances” (Rothberg 21). Thus, our collective responsibility as post-generations and implicated subjects illuminate a clear objective as to why we must strive to constantly inquire, orchestrate, and adjust upon for an academically refined and comprehensive “truth.”
Thus, we have defined the qualities of affective engagement, trauma, and truth, and our desires and responsibility to satisfy such volatile “truth.” Upon such tenets, I argue that an audience’s resentment molded by deception or betrayal also becomes a powerful and ethical means to achieve affective engagement. In other words, when an audience sensuously encounters (Landsberg 15) mediums such as novels, films, or documentaries, later to learn that they are incorrect or distorted, is shocked into action. Thus, this deceptive affect becomes one of the many channels to act upon the perceived “truths” and ultimately to work through trauma. Such deceptive affect is not to encourage a competitive measurement as to which form is more ethical and less ethical means of engagement. Rather, it is to reevaluate the dismissed literatures, films, and events of Wilkomirski’s Fragments.
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| Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski |
Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood and our engagement with the work epitomizes the power of deceptive affect. Wilkomirski drafts an achingly beautiful “autobiography” that perfectly juggles absorption and distraction: It absorbs by prodding maternal or human instincts to protect the innocent eyes of a cluelessly traumatized child during war. It further distracts with the hazy and choppy recalls and distressing violence:
"In a shadowy corner, the outline of a man in hat and coat, his sweet face smiling at me. Maybe my father… The transport starts to move… heading for us … He looks down at me and smiles… From down below, against the bright sky, all I see is the line of his jaw and his hat falling backward off his head" (Wilkomirski 6).
Such heart-wrenching affect effortlessly slips the reader into the shoes of the child in Auschwitz: They, too, must brave numbing sleet and sleepless nights. They, too, must apply a different emotional mastery to the notion of futility. And they, too, survive it all.
However, Fragments was soon debunked as a literary fraud and was withdrawn from official publication and multiple book awards. Literary scholars jeered in betrayal, commenting, “Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch” (Maechler 281). Yet the publishers, audiences, and scholars fail to recognize that this very stupefaction arouses from the overwhelming affect that placed us within the whirlpool of the child’s experience, and the fact that we have become so infatuated with it as to adjoin the child’s memory to our existing “truths.” This means that the audience is absorbed and distracted in so as to, to a certain extent, understand the unspeakable and unfathomable trauma. Thus, the betrayal from such powerful immersion signals various actions, whether this be inquiry for more extensive research, direct challenging of the source, or a complete reconstruction of own “truths.” This precise ignition from betrayal, in some times, prevails over mere affective engagement: When the ultimate goal of memory studies is to understand the crushing trauma to relocate it back into the realms of the normal, and when deceptive affect precisely succeeds to do so, we must warrant a reevaluation.
Thus, through this essay, we have built upon the notions of affect, truth, and trauma, and our desire and responsibility for “truth,” and illuminated the core reason as to why deceptive affect becomes a “good” and “productive” affect. Deceptive affect thus allows a substantial understanding of trauma and ultimately gears the audience into productive action. Such recognition alarms the urgent need to reevaluate Fragments and many other mediums and events, including The Last Princess or Duk-hye Ong-ju, JFK, and brutality during the Korean War committed in Vietnam (Griffin). Thus, a tolerant warrant of deceptive affect brings us a step closer to a comprehensive understanding of memory and trauma.
Works Cited
Griffin, Jo. Women Raped by Korean Soldiers During Vietnam War Still Awaiting Apology. The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2019.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Columbia University Press, 2012. Print.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.
JFK, Dir. Oliver Stone. Le Studio Canal+ Regency Enterprises, Alcor Films, 1991. Film.
Landsberg, Allison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print.
Landy, Marcia. Marcia Landy Reviews Engaging the Past, 2016. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marcia_landy_reviews_engaging_the_past/
Laub, Dori. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Print.
Maechler, Stefan. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. Schocken, 2001. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, 2019. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. Pantheon Books, 1980. Print
Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Schocken, 1996. Print.
Closing words:
This is my last piece on memory studies, as it is my final year at Yonsei. It's been five long and arduous college years, and I'm glad and also somewhat melancholic it's over. Whoever is out there reading this, thank you for your interest.
Best regards, Chrissy
