and international; exclusion from government posts; the opening of secret files; commemorations in art and ceremony; forgiveness and reconciliation; confrontations; and storytelling contained in truth commission reports.23
Chapter 4 lays out seven potential benefits of storytelling in the context of transitional democracies: (1) translating chaotic events into a story not only provides therapy for victims (a claim that is well-documented), but the creation of story from experience also is an essentially human activity that enables all of us to make sense of our lives; (2) the restoration of the ability to use language for oneself in one’s own way balances the loss of language effected by oppression and violence, and thus is a form of retribution in a basic semantic sense (a sense of the word that was lost as the philosophy of punishment shifted the focus from the victim to the perpetrator) of giving back that which was taken away; (3) the free and open telling of stories can reveal more truth than other responses, including trials; (4) stories can bring about communication between people who normally cannot understand each other; (5) the storytelling setting in some circumstances provides healing ritual, akin to carnival, in which the hierarchy is inverted and the people are empowered; (6) the stories are a visible manifestation of the invisible in a sacramental sense; and (7) the truth commission reports give the stories a plot (in the technical sense used in narrative theory) and result in the creation of a constitutive history for the emerging state. Chapter 4 discusses the first six of these potential benefits and argues that they offer an expanded vision of the worth of stories for a transitional democracy and that they provide new and hopeful ways of thinking about and using such stories.
In Chapters 5 and 6, I first relate the ubiquity of truth commissions to the turn to narrative in diverse disciplines and demonstrate that truth commission reports can be a promising kind of constitutive history for a transitional democracy. The book then revisits my initial question: whether language can in any way adequately balance the harms of pain and oppression—can stories do any good?—in specific contexts. I analyze situations in which just such an attempt is being made: truth commissions and their reports. Looking in detail at commissions and reports from four countries—Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and South Africa—I discuss the various layers of “stories” that are told by the commission reports, and, using narrative theory, I evaluate their relationship to justice. I ask, using a question generated in the work of James Boyd White: what kind of community does the report imagine and create?
Truth commission reports have come into existence in the final decades of the twentieth century, and they are seen as filling a gap when countries do not have the will or the resources to pursue more traditional forms of justice: investigations, trials, and punishment. As time passes though, truth commissions are being criticized as doing as much harm as good by some observers who assert that truth commissions are a poor substitute for traditional justice. These critics maintain that truth commissions offer an inadequate second-best and that truth commissions and their reports encourage premature closure. The first of these common criticisms I refute and instead argue that truth commission reports may constitute a radically new kind of justice, and that they are, in any event, a necessary component of any adequate understanding of justice. This book will argue that justice is not a single event that occurs for once and for all—“we were harmed and now we have ‘justice’”—but is instead an ongoing, dynamic process, of which storytelling is a vital part. The second criticism—that the reports are a rush to closure—I engage in the final chapter and offer a cautionary word about narratives in general and the reports in particular: they can tempt us to a comfortable sense of closure more appropriate to fictions than actual political and human situations. I also engage two other potential problems: hearing or reading too many stories of violence may result in “psychic numbing,” in which we shut off our empathetic response rather than feeling anything; and the appropriation of people’s stories of pain, for whatever well-intentioned reasons, is a morally and ethically problematic act. As Hayden White and other narrative theorists warn, stories can be used to put across a moral vison of the world in the interests of power and manipulation. Is it possible to fashion truth commission reports in such ways to minimize their misuse in the interests of the new power structure? If the strengths of stories that I discuss in Chapter 4 are to be realized, we must be wary of the dark potentiality of storytelling as well.
Lingering doubts persist about the efficacy or propriety of language when confronting mass atrocity, that “radical evil seems to surpass the boundaries of moral discourse.”24 When I set out to look at truth commission reports through the lens of narrative theory (in a broad sense),25 I expected that such a view would provide a richer vision of the potentialities of the reports, and indeed this has proven the case. Truth commission reports are capturing the imagination because stories can achieve powerful ends, many of which have not been articulated or even brought into consciousness. This book begins the process of uncovering what stories can achieve in the context of transitional democracy, whether they represent the “simple drama of storytelling”26 or something far more profound and significant.
There is certainly no dearth of published opinion about the various responses that countries have undertaken to reckon with the past.27 The reports themselves, including the four on which I focus, continue to be discussed and evaluated.28 One of the widely recognized problems in truth reports is the political agenda of their writers; one of the less-recognized problems in the critiques of truth reports is the political agenda of the critics. Looking at the reports through narrative theory allows us to see their strengths and weaknesses in an apolitical way—as, after all, stories. This book draws from but does not retrace the steps taken in previous works; instead it focuses on a particular somewhat neglected issue: What constitutes revenge and retribution and what role, if any, does language play in those processes? It seeks to develop a theory about the role of language in revenge and retribution and in so doing makes several claims. First, given the historical and psychological evidence about revenge, putting the past behind by attempting to draw a bright line between the past crimes and the new government, in other words, “getting on with it” with no action, is unworkable and unwise. The metaphor of balancing is at the heart of discussions about revenge and retribution, a metaphor that we should consider and take seriously. When grievous harms occur, a rebalancing will occur whether it is orderly and lawful or disorderly and unlawful. Second, adequate government action need not be state-sponsored violence in the form of prosecutions; as Paulina discovered, lex talionis may not be the rule. At the same time, a state should provide or assist victims in finding “effective alternative means of psychic support that provide the benefits sought in revenge: preserving self-esteem and honor, providing physical security, and satisfying the desire for justice” (italics original).29 Third, in any case, state-enacted redress must not be decided upon from the top down; the desires and emotions of the victims must be taken into account and outlets provided for them. Fourth, language, if not necessarily the end-all of the retribution process, is requisite to any adequate balancing. This fourth claim has several implications that have to do with the work of truth commissions, and indeed all other responses to an oppressive past including trials. A solution is viable only if it provides an atmosphere in which storytelling and subsequent dialogue can flourish.
The book’s final claim, and perhaps its most critical contribution, is that in the developing culture of ubiquitous truth reports, we need to become attentive to the form that these reports take. The form of the report and its use of victims’ stories necessarily convey a political message to the citizens of the emerging democracy. The book’s theoretical framework and its analysis of prominent truth reports reveals that some reports are better than others. Why? To what forms should the writers of truth reports aspire?
Gerardo’s question—What would happen if everyone acted as you did?—is a compelling one to which we know the answer if we are attentive to
