Facing It

Front matter

‘We THE. ‘AUTH ee

Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Autho! E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michiga' ea. Press, 1998, https://doi. org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arl bor

Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface

Writing criticism in the midst of an epidemic can feel uncomfortably like getting on with one’s needlework while the house burns down. One ought to be dialing 911, rousing sleeping children and ushering them to safety, rescuing the cat or the strongbox that holds the insurance policy and the title deed. One ought to be working with ACT- UP, hassling congress people, contributing to AIDS research. What, Eric Michaels wondered in 1988 (156-58, 106-7),! after reading the special AIDS issue of October, can criticism do? Can it fight disease, save lives?

The question was sardonic but possibly also a bit tongue-incheek, given that fighting the disease of AIDS and saving lives has proved difficult even for medical science. Contrary to Michaels’s understandable skepticism, this essay is dedicated to the proposition that, in an epidemic, rhetoric also plays a not insignificant part and that the rhetorical stakes of writing an AIDS diary, as Michaels courageously did, and also of responding to it critically, are real. Why would a person at the symptomatic stage of AIDS wish to write a diary? What are the responsibilities of those who survive the diary’s author as its readers? What kind of “facing up” is entailed in these practices of writing and of reading? These are what I regard as the key critical questions, and my attempt to respond to them is grounded in the observation that, when it is not possible to fight disease, save lives, or escape pain, it is still important to bear witness to that impossibility. For as Sterne, in his wry way, noticed in Tristram Shandy, with reference to my Uncle Toby’s war wound, “the history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it” (I, xxv, 79).

1. For readers’ convenience I reference the pagination of both the Australian and the U.S. edition of Unbecoming, in that order.

Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface

The reason witnessing mitigates the pain it cannot cure seems to lie in the fact that an act of witnessing, contrary to the circumstances of trauma themselves, implies a certain belief in there being a future. In a situation of extremity the desire to survive in order to tell the tale is the essential sign, whether or not that desire is requited, of a certain refusal to become a merely passive victim. In cases like that of AIDS, however, in which a certain period of survival is vouchsafed the writer of a witnessing text but in which the story to be told is nevertheless that of the author’s dying—the story, then, of a strictly curtailed period of personal survival—a second kind of survival becomes no less essential than the first. This is the survival of the story itself, by means of which a textual subject (or “subject of writing”) can pursue the task of witnessing, as a social participant, when the “writing subject” has exited the scene. But this mode of survival may well seem dubious, in exact proportion to the degree to which the curtailment of personal survival appears certain.

My essay, then, concerns the anxieties that accrue, for the writer of AIDS witness in diary form, but also for the reader of such writing, around the death of the author and the survival of the text. And since criticism has a part to play in the textual afterlife of witnessing narrative—that is, its future—part of my project consists of examining the conditions of critical responsiveness under which an essay such as my own might be considered part of a shared project of (always inadequate) witnessing. For as Sem Dresden has put it, concerning the experience of reading the writing of Holocaust witnesses, “taking part, in all senses of the word, becomes a possibility and a duty” (21). What I have most wanted to say, then, is finally this. First, for reading subjects as well as for writing subjects, “taking part” hinges on a willingness to “face it,” without which neither mode of survival—the survival of the witness who lives to tell the story of dying, the textual afterlife (dependent on reading) of the story once told—can become a reality. But, second, facing it entails a recourse to techniques of representation, with all the conditions and consequences that representation entails, of which the first is that the act of witness can never be immediate or direct but must always be oblique and deferred with respect to its object. What we face, to put it metaphorically, we can face only in a mirror, like the ancient hero confronting the Gorgon— which means that we cannot know the “it” that we face but only write or read (it).

V111 Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface

That, however, is not just the condition of AIDS witness, or of witnessing in general. It is one of the possible definitions of what is called “the human condition” itself. In light of the heavy questions and issues that lie at its horizon, my project should be understood, therefore, as a very modest one indeed. I’ve not attempted to cover the now vast field of AIDS witnessing in general but have simply read three diaries “written,” for publication, by authors at the symptomatic stage of the disease called HIV/AIDS. I chose the diaries that made me, as their reader, feel most anxious about the fact of my readership, hoping that by looking carefully at their structures of address I might gain some insight into that anxiety and what it might mean. As it happened, two of the texts I chose were video diaries, which raised some questions about viewing as reading, but all three led me to think in the end about the sense in which reading can, and should, be understood as a practice of mourning.

I at first planned an article. It grew, as I worked on it, into the short essay that follows, in which I’ve retained the structure and movement of the original article, if only as a reminder of the shortfall between the issues I raise and my sketchy treatment of them. But in the context of AIDS grand statements seem particularly out of place in any case. We’ve watched enough public squabbles among scientific authorities and seen altogether too many press conferences called prematurely to announce supposed medical breakthroughs, and the suspicion of careerism hangs over all of us who, such as myself, have something to gain from this horrible epidemic. For reasons that I hope will become gradually clearer I believe it is important to write and to speak in response to texts of AIDS witness, and even to do so as a critic, but some of the reasons why such a response should be a chastened one have also been my concern.

The projected article from which this essay grew was in memory of my dear friend Marie Maclean, who in her life, as in her dying (not from HIV disease), set an example of how not to be a victim. An early version of chapter 5 (“Anxious Reading: Eric Michaels’s Unbecoming and the Death of the Author”) will now appear in the memorial volume Telling Performance being edited in her honor at the University of Delaware Press by Anne Freadman and Brian Nelson. Conversely, a short essay in Narrative (“Reading, Mourning, and the Death of the Author,” Narrative 5, no. 1 |Jan. 1997]: 67-76) is based on chapter 6, as is “The Responsibility of Responsiveness: Criticism in an Age of

1x Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface

Witness,” Paroles gelées 14, no. 2 (1996, special issue}: 9-27. For permission to republish I thank the editors concerned. Jean-Pierre Boulé kindly allowed me to read relevant sections of his forthcoming book Hervé Guibert: Voices of the Self (University of Liverpool Press). I must thank audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst College, Monash University, and the University of Western Ontario who engaged with talks closely or loosely derived from my work on Unbecoming. I owe an important debt to readers for the University of Michigan Press and to LeAnn Fields for their advice, and especially warm thanks are due to Anna Johnston in Australia and to my Michigan friend and colleague David Caron for their thoughtful and helpful reading of this essay. David, in particular, rescued me from more than one error. The essay is dedicated, in humility, to all who have been touched by the pain of AIDS.

x Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14463. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor