Part II - Text as Testament

Summary

Introduction: Testament, Testify, Testation

transmission (sometimes strictly legal, sometimes more broadly) and bearing witness (testifying, being a testament to). These semantic fields are connected by more than a related etymology from the Latin verb testari and the noun form testamentum. They both involve modes or channels of connection, a speaker or testator and a listener or heir. Legal testament connects the testator and the heir via the passing along of property or objects, and the acceptance of these objects may entail certain conditions or obligations. Testament as bearing witness implies a strong claim to authenticity or truth, and it creates an emotional or empathetic connection between speaker and hearer (which may be violated if the sincerity of the speaker is contrived, if the account itself is shallow, or if the hearer is unresponsive). Thus the figure of testation at the broadest level binds together transmission and witnessing, inheritance and responsiveness— at least when it is successful, which, as some of the novels I treat in the following show, is not always the case. Testators-testifiers must both transmit and witness; receivers of testaments must both inherit and respond to what is transmitted. None of these interrelated processes— transmission and testimony, inheritance and response—is simple and unproblematic. Both how to transmit and testify and how to inherit and respond are caught up in economics, history, kinship, affection, values, and memory. These matters, in turn, are shaped by how testaments are generated and received. A focus on the figure of testation does not simply point to narrow intersections between literature and the law; it also brings into view broader issues about the complex, ongoing reshaping of relations and subjectivities in historical time and social space. Both the entity of the family and the genre of the novel are readily available sites for the working through of what is said as testament and testimony (as well as how it is said), and what is received as inheritance and story (as well as how it is received). The novel is both a metacommentary on practices of testation, insofar as testaments and testimonies are frequent elements of its plots, and itself a practice of testation in a literary tradition. The issue of how traditions are formed and inherited thus becomes a literary problem.