Deception, flattery, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Friedrich Nietzsche
 
 

Whenever people give accounts of their experiences, their stories can be contested. Especially when addressing sexualized violence against women, concerns for the truth inevitably arise. For example, in courts of law the truthfulness of a survivor's story is interrogated repeatedly and must prevail against alternative accounts that are vying for the claim of accuracy. Much is at stake, for both the victim and perpetrator, in assessing truth claims. For the survivor of sexualized violence, the ability to speak the truth about what happened is also important for healing from trauma. At various points, many survivors reveal a desire to tell the story of their abuse, to make sense of it, to be assured of its accuracy, not to falsely accuse, and to provide an account that is strong enough in its claims to truth to counter another's attempts to discredit it. Trust in one's story is connected to trust in one's very self and sanity.

Yet the notion of truth as representational accuracy is seriously limited and may hinder the healing process of survivors. As important as it may be for a survivor to tell the truth about what happened to her, the demand for the truth can also be experienced oppressively, revealing its impossibility. We expect the truth to "out" as though it will emerge or be uncovered, finally, in its unassailable obviousness. For serious doubt not to be cast upon a survivor's story, we demand unambiguous, paradigmatic accounts, as though survivors are not tangled in negotiating a variety of conflicting cultural discourses, standard metaphors, and dominant images of what gets to count as the 'true' experience. We demand unwavering, cohesive accounts in which survivors express, finally, no doubt, no confusion, and no contradictory aspects, not only in courts of law but also to satisfy a survivor's own sense of confidence in her view of reality.

This essay will focus on a particular aspect of the healing process that trauma theory literature identifies as a necessary element of healing: that of telling the truth about what happened. I will refer most often to issues concerning domestic violence, yet I think the concerns raised here apply to healing from other forms of sexualized violence and trauma in general. Providing narratives about experiences of trauma amounts to autobiographical speaking. As such, I will focus on contemporary autobiographical theory, especially concerning so-called confessional practices, to guide my examination of what it means to give an account of one's experiences in such a way as to be able to heal from their effects. In examining the complexity of the task of truth telling, I hope to show why it may be important to think of truth less as an issue of accuracy and more as an ongoing event of expression that opens up a space for intimacy.

Much of the literature of autobiographical theory addresses what "stands in the way" of being able to tell the truth -- that is, what forecloses its possibility. I will begin my analysis with a critique of Rita Felski's work on confessional practices which incorporate some of the dominant objections to thinking of autobiographical accounts as faithful representations of what has happened in a narrator's life. Then I will turn to one of the most influential texts on healing from trauma in order to reconceptualize what is involved in constructing a narrative in a therapeutic setting of what happened. What will emerge is a different understanding of what is happening when one attempts to articulate "the truth." To stand in the Way of truth is to open up a space of intimacy whereby the goal of assessing accuracy in one's account is overshadowed by the importance of engaging in an open, exploratory process of making meaning of what are experienced as traumatic events.

Contemporary autobiographical theory has exposed many of the preconceptions about what it means to present a narrative of one's experience.1 What seems to be a straightforward task, its processes and its goals, cannot be taken at face value. According to Rita Felski, "The goal of confession is to strip away the superficial layers of convention and to expose an authentic core of self, of meaning as fully present to itself. Yet the more frantically this true subjectivity is pursued, the more elusive it appears...."2 Felski identifies two goals of feminist confessional narrative: that of exposing and expressing the truth of oneself and what one experienced and that of sharing it with others to form a bond of intimacy. Here, what counts as the truth of the self amounts to presenting a transparent self-disclosure which underlies cultural ways of thinking about and encoding experience. It seems that what fuels attempts to tell the truth is the demand for authentic representations that can be shared with others. According to this notion of truth telling, narrators hope to demystify popular yet problematic discourses and practices by which women come to have and understand their experiences in order to share these discoveries of authenticity with other women who might learn from them and use them to understand their own lives. Through identification, they hope to be understood and validated by those who regard their stories, establishing a sense of intimacy.

Yet, to what extent is it possible to tell the truth or establish such intimacy in confessional practices? Is intimacy dependent upon truth, and should either be conceptualized in the way Felski and others describe? Felski argues that neither attempts yield what is hoped for, yet I wonder if the failure she identifies is deemed failure because of the conceptions of truth and intimacy that are assumed.

A. Telling the Truth

According to Rita Felski, telling the truth, which amounts to exposing a transparent, unmediated, honest account of one's experiences, is precluded by the functioning of language and the alienating move of reflection which reveals a lack of identity between what is written or spoken and the life itself, between experience and its representation. This discrepancy moves one to generate ever more writing in the effort to bridge this gap, leading to a confessional text which is revealed as "infinitely extendible, an endless chain of signifiers that can never encapsulate the fullness of meaning which the author seeks and which would put an end to writing itself."3

She is not alone in this type of analysis. As early as 1956, Georges Gusdorf argued that "autobiographical selves are constructed through the process of writing and therefore cannot reproduce exactly the selves lived."4 Terry Eagleton agrees: "Writing perpetually stands in for a reality it can never encompass."5 Complicating this sense of putting one's experiences into words is the realization that "the very process of recording intrudes upon that which is being recorded and changes it,"6 organizing, structuring, and shaping what experience is and how it is lived. The very self that one articulates is itself affected, even created, by the process of articulation.

In offering narratives of one's experiences the slippage between word and experience emerges. Indeed, the process of introspection, as well as the continual interrogation of one's own motives for providing an account of experience, reveals, for Felski, "the impossible ideal of absolute honesty."7 The desire to bridge the gap between word and thing, the desire for unmediated access to experience, to expose and lay bare its truth, is to be understood as an unrealizable desire.

Yet the experience itself cannot be taken at face value; it is not simply there to be put into words. Joan Scott, in her essay "Experience," demonstrates the problems of referring to the seeming authority of direct experience as literal transparency, an incontestable foundation for truth claims. While one may be tempted to lay claim to the truth of one's experience -- "what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through?"8 -- such claims overshadow how something came to be the experience it is taken to be. "Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured -- about language (or discourse) and history -- are left aside."9 Indeed, references to experience often reproduce, rather than contest, operative cultural discourses, even as they attempt to expose their ideological impositions. Joan Scott observes,

It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces. 10

It seems that what must accompany proffered accounts of experience is the space to interrogate and explore how they emerge such that they become the accounts that they are, and in this sense, construct their historicity. Such accounts can then be understood as the effects of a multitude of culturally operative discourses and practices out of which meaning is made. Appeals to direct experience cannot be taken at face value. The story one tells is the one that emerges from negotiating a variety of constructions, which are open to further contestation, critical analysis, and transformation; hence, each story must include the space to explore its history.

Liz Stanley argues that referential claims do not represent experience accurately for another reason. She indicates that "narrative is highly complex and its referential claims frequently exist to repair what is actually an awareness of ontological complexity and fragmentation...."11 To "repair" seems to imply constructing a coherent, unified account out of complex fragmentary experiences. Yet, she acknowledges, we can never successfully "repair." Every narrative attempt carries with it its own undoing; fragility and transience is revealed through both the foreclosure of referential assurance and acknowledgment of its constructed production. "The ordinary self, the conscious and experiencing subject, is much more complexly constructed and more aware of its internal fractures, is more knowingly a social self composed through many overlapping patterns of interrelationships, than feminist postmodernist commentary on autobiography allows."12

I would argue that failure to posit a firm, consistent, accurate, unquestioned narrative is less a matter of failure than an acceptance of the complexities inherent in creating narratives about experience. So-called failure marks the extent to which the world and our experiences are insubstantial and open to a variety of instantiations. If the possibility of transparent self-disclosure in confessional narrative cannot be achieved, then perhaps we can turn attention to explorations which might otherwise have been closed off, explorations that defy the sense that "everything is secure, complete,... regular and without any gaps"13 and which serve to make strange -- and in need of interrogation -- that which has been taken at face value.

B. The Confessional Route to Intimacy

The second goal of confessional narrative that Felski analyzes concerns sharing one's narrative with others to form a bond of intimacy. Through this sharing, she writes, women seek to demystify cultural assumptions about women's experiences by offering what is seen as more authentic accounts, open the possibility for alternative understandings through using these new narratives to foster different meanings of their own lives, get validation and support for their experiences, and encourage personal identification with the author and gender identification among women in order to aid political movement.

Feminist confession, Felski asserts, seeks to create an ideal intimacy between author and reader, whereby the author can expose powerful feelings and self-understandings with the hope of reader validation, recognition, and identification. Yet Felski notes that this desire is thwarted in a number of ways. Paradoxically, "writing, seemingly the most isolated of activities, becomes the means to the creation of an ideal intimacy."14 Instead of intimacy, it seems that writing encourages psychological projection and a fantasy of identification. The validation and support that is sought is also undercut: "the yearning for total intimacy, immediacy, and fullness of meaning serves only to underscore the reality of uncertainty and lack, so that attempted self-affirmation (Bekenntnis) can easily revert into anxious self-castigation (Beichte)."15 Felski also argues that seeking to provide narratives that are representative of women's experiences in general can encourage a fictional element in writing as the narrator seeks to couch her story in ways that are more universally applicable and understandable. While this strategy may foster identification with other women, it seems to undercut the claims to authenticity and accuracy; hence the truth that intimacy is assumed to require might actually be sidestepped. Indeed, I would also add that there is a danger that the norms of expression that accompany our accounts of experience could solidify, subjecting women's stories to a normalization process which directs narratives to either conform or risk being judged as not real or illegitimate.

What underlies Felski's analysis of the failure of intimacy are the assumptions operating in confessional writing itself of an ideal whereby exposure must be full and transparent, involvement and identification is expected, and intimacy is a bond akin to a union in love between sympathetic confidants. "Feminist confession often reveals particularly clearly the contradictions between the desire for total intimacy and union, which seeks to erase all boundaries between desire and its object, and the act of writing as a continual deferral of any such identity...."16 Yet what is identified as failure may depend on misconceptions of how intimacy is conceived. What does it mean to be intimate? And what does it have to do with telling the truth?

To address these questions, it is important to understand what it means to provide a narrative of one's experiences of trauma. In so doing, the complexity of the process of telling the truth will be exposed and what it means to tell the truth will be reconceptualized. The role of intimacy in this process will also be examined, showing that it is not the outcome of telling and sharing the truth but an integral aspect that allows truths to emerge. It is not the articulation of an accurate story that heals; rather, it seems that healing is fostered by the relational intimacy that can be established in the process of articulating one's experiences. And instead of thinking of intimacy as identification through shared and commonly understood experiences, a common being, we can think of intimacy which is fostered through the process of allowing narratives to unfold. This shift may allow us to move from a political notion of solidarity in commonality to an intimacy that appreciates the diversity between us as we continually make sense of our experiences.

Providing a narrative of what happened involves far more than recounting facts, according to Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery. Indeed, because trauma often ruptures the meaningful assumptions and activities in one's life, because it shatters the complex system of self-protection upon which humans rely, a survivor may be at a loss when trying to bring it to words. To the extent that traumatic events also rupture the meaning-making schemas by which one both experiences and makes sense of the experiences, what even comes to count as a fact of abuse becomes an issue to be analyzed. To give an account of what happened, a survivor of trauma must negotiate how trauma has fragmented her life, rupturing immediate psychological responses, practical aspects of her life, and meaning-making schemas which enable her to articulate and come to terms with the events themselves.

According to Judith Herman and others, symptoms such as dissociation, denial, numbing, startle responses, and intrusive images, thoughts, and emotions commonly accompany or follow trauma, making it difficult to remember and reconstruct the experience. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman17 identifies these symptoms as adaptive coping processes rather than abnormal responses. According to her, dissociation splits off overwhelming experiences, allowing the survivor to still function at some level in the world, while intrusive re-experiencing keeps the traumatic experiences "alive" so that they can be continually addressed, worked on, and integrated, often through creation of new schemas of understanding. The survivor negotiates this fragmentation that arises from the traumatic experience as she begins to create a meaningful understanding of what happened, yet these responses affect her ability to recreate the story of what happened to her.

Many meaning-making schemas by which one makes sense of one's experiences can also be ruptured through traumatic experiences. These affect a survivor's experience of abuse, so she may experience confusion concerning how to make sense of abusive treatment from a loved one, surprise at her own coping strategies which may include acquiescence, retaliation, manipulation, or substance abuse, shame and guilt over perceptions of "participating" in the abusive relationship, lack of confidence in her perceptions of reality which are often called into question by the abuser and others, and a shattering of fundamental beliefs about herself, loved ones, security, meaningfulness of life, personal autonomy, physical integrity, predictability of the world, and the ability to have some control over herself. Further, the various ways her culture evaluates and makes sense of domestic violence, as well as the attitudes of significant people in her life, also affect how she experiences and understands the trauma. How the survivor navigates the multitude of meaning-making schemas, many of which are ruptured due to the trauma, affect her account of what happened to her.

The survivor must also navigate quite practical elements and concerns as she begins to weave her narrative. Domestic violence may disrupt where the survivor can live, how she and her children will shelter and sustain themselves, her marital status, the typical patterns of her day, her employment, and her relations with others. Concern about future revictimization by the abuser, fear of having one's children taken away, fear of not being believed, and fear of financial survival are just a few aspects that can affect how she articulates and makes sense of her experiences, for her account will have concrete effect in her world.

Telling the truth about what happened may be a matter of gaining confidence in the survivor's own perceptions, especially since her perceptions are often denigrated by the abuser, which can lead her to deny or minimize what has happened. Yet there are other reasons for telling the truth of what happened. Domestic violence isolates its victims, cutting them off from extended family members and people who have been important to them. It tends to silence women, often encouraging them to lie about a variety of circumstances in their lives which may lead them to think of themselves as dishonest and untrustworthy. Talking is a way of reconnecting, not only with others but with oneself, of facing one's experiences, of getting a certain amount of validation, of understanding one's responses to the victimization through the discourses of others so that they don't feel quite so "crazy." In the therapeutic setting, which extends to other communicational arenas, what is opened up is the space to examine and explore the meaning of what happened, and in this space intimacy emerges.

The clinical setting is not one in which a single person in isolation tries to give an accurate account of what happened, as though it is only the ability to tell and face the truth which is paramount in fostering healing. Rather, it is important to understand the task of telling about what happened as a collaborative event. Even as the childhood development of the self occurs collaboratively through significant relations with others, the meaning and significance of traumatic experiences, even the fact that they can be experiences at all, relies on collaboration of discourses and practices concerning such abuse which operate in one's culture and orient those who populate the survivor's world.

According to Judith Herman, a safe environment and an advocate who can bear witness to the significant events of the survivor's life fosters the capacity to articulate the traumatic experience. Without this, the survivor of domestic violence may not give voice to her story, leaving her experiences in the form of "traumatic memories [that] lack verbal narrative and context... encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images"18 as a crystallization of a set of fragmented images or affects that intrude in thoughts and dreams and which may be recreated in behavior. "The survivor's initial account of the event may be repetitious, stereotyped, and emotionless... a 'prenarrative.' It does not develop or progress in time, and it does not reveal the storyteller's feelings or interpretation of events."19 In this, according to Herman, the prenarrative is quite different from ordinary memories that are organized yet fluid, retold in a variety of ways, added to, embellished, and growing as living memories.20

Within the therapeutic relation the narrative about what happened is constructed through collaboration.

Out of the fragmented components of frozen imagery and sensation, patient and therapist slowly reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical context. The narrative includes not only the event itself but also the survivor's response to it and the responses of the important people in her life.21

The complex process of reconstructing the story of what happened does not occur in a single telling but is developed over time. In the collaborative role, "The therapist must help the patient move back and forth in time, from her protective anchorage in the present to immersion in the past, so that she can simultaneously re-experience the feelings in all their intensity while holding onto the sense of safe connection that was destroyed in the traumatic moment."22 The survivor learns to negotiate the fragments of her experiences while moving over expanses of time in a context of intimacy that fosters the unfolding of events and begins to make the accounts fluid.

Construction is rarely smooth. It often involves tremendous doubt, questioning, and uncertainty. The survivor is, after all, exposing both herself and the person upon whom she has depended and with whom she has shared intimate aspects of her life. Often she initially codes the abuse through the perspective of her abuser who tried to make her responsible for his actions. Most of her coping mechanisms required her to know how he thought and acted in the world, forcing her to accept his vision and reconstruct his reasoning. So, in her telling, whose words will she use? Whose perspective will she adopt? It should be no surprise that her story would shift over time as her understanding evolves.

There are actually many competing perspectives at her disposal out of which she may alternately piece together her story. The survivor is immersed in a variety of highly contested attitudes and assumptions concerning domestic violence which are themselves woven from disparate discourses on such issues as marriage, family, love, masculinity, femininity, the role of the wife, control, violence, safety, justice, sexuality, and responsibility that converge as she interacts with a variety of confidants to make sense of her experience. "The truth of what happened" and "her own perspective" emerge from negotiating these discourses; they are woven from a variety of strands.

This position challenges the epistemological privilege accorded to direct, immediate experience. Experience occurs within an arena of established, yet contested and transforming, meanings and practices; any account of the experience, even the experience itself, is a collaborative event, the effect of a variety of converging discourses and practices which are themselves contingent and variable. The "truth," then, is not static, but is a constructed achievement that is contextual, fluid, developed over time, open to transformations, and can only be understood with regard to its historical emergence. Indeed, it seems odd to use "truth" in this context. Perhaps we can understand what emerges in such events as narratives which arise in the midst of teller and told, within the arena of culture -- explorations in the meaning of being which continue to transform and which are themselves not necessarily consistent and coherent but encompassing a variety of conflicting articulations, none quite successfully canceling out the others completely.

Constructing "The truth of what happened" as though that truth were singular, static, and internally consistent, or as though it is just a matter of "look and see," may belie the complexity of the survivor's task and subject her to the oppression that can underlie the production of truth. Herman writes, "Because the truth is so difficult to face, survivors often vacillate in reconstructing their stories. Denial of reality makes them feel crazy, but acceptance of full reality seems beyond what any human being can bear."23 Yet I think we must acknowledge as well the existential vulnerability of attempting to construct a "truthful" narrative. Confusion, insecurity, conflicting interpretive frameworks, and collaboration make it impossible to simply refer to unmediated facts, the unvarnished truth; hence, the attempt to articulate the truth, in its traditional conception, can be experienced as anguish for the survivor, a task that undoes itself in its own failure. She may be all too cognizant of the vulnerability of her story as it is measured against the presumed obviousness of other types of experience that seem more direct, yet to try to impose a simple, coherent account of "nothing but the facts" may feel dishonest.

The cultural demand to speak the truth as though it is an accurate representation of fact serves to divert attention from the complex production of the truth. Foucault observes:

we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or to discover the truth. Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalises, professionalises and rewards its pursuit.24

To subject one to a narrative that demands "just the facts and nothing but the facts," as though this can be unproblematically offered, reveals the oppressiveness of our demand to produce the truth and the lack of understanding the complexity of constructing what is presented as truth. Yet if we focus on the production of narrative accounts -- their historicity -- it may be possible to avoid the hegemony of prevailing accounts of 'the truth of domestic violence' that could silence or shape the possibility of multiple, transformative articulations which could further foreclose the opportunity for future exploration and analysis. We can begin to see that articulating a narrative exposes a survivor's awareness of the multiple possibilities of understanding and the fluidity of the meaning of her experiences, for her story -- indeed, any story -- both is and is not "the truth."

Herman acknowledges that the process of constructing a narrative of what happened requires that both survivor and therapist develop a capacity for uncertainty, largely because retrieving gaps in memory takes time. She suggests that with the restoration of memory gaps comes peace of mind and coherence of story. Yet I am suggesting that the ambiguity that needs to be tolerated is endemic to the very process, unstable as it is, of creating a narrative of what happened, and that its resolution has less to do with finally achieving a coherent truth than in developing a tolerance for what it means to persist, as I will demonstrate, in the space of intimacy. What is needed is the ability to tolerate complexities in what counts as truth, accept the inadequacy of the notion that truth implies access to unmediated experience, understand the existential vulnerability that underlies any attempt to construct a single, truthful narrative, and accept the failure to formulate a consistent, coherent account as inevitable. Perhaps if the survivor were encouraged to realize that these elements must go with the territory, that they underlie any attempt to account for human experiences, that closure on the "truth" is impossible, her negotiations would not be so fraught with anxiety. And perhaps the ongoing transformations of her story would be expected, rather than experienced as her own incapacity and as immediate grounds for distrusting her story. Rather than trying to lock down the "correct interpretation," a hallmark of health might be the negotiation and acceptance of a variety of ways of understanding and making sense of one's experiences which, finally, may allow the trauma to "live" for the survivor in a multitude of ways, especially as the events become more distant in time as the survivor moves on with her life.

In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of the truth. There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' -- truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

That is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler -- for the liar -- than it really is, or ought to be.

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives.

"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

Adrienne Rich
 
 

If we can no longer think of truth simply as accurate representation, how might we address our need and desire for "the truth"? Adrienne Rich suggests that the goal of truth telling has less to do with demonstrating accuracy than with building intimacy between people. There is, one might say, a difference between the longing for certainty and the longing for honesty. Truthfulness and honesty is created between people: "Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people."25 Truth telling allows for intimacy; intimacy fosters truth telling. Being in the Way of truth amounts to the emergence of intimacy where the meanings of our experiences in their complexity arise. If we forget the role of intimacy, we may lose sight of the need for truth, the reason to engage in the struggle for truth, and the power of truth, as it is reconceptualized here.

Why might it be important to think about fostering this space of intimacy? Adrienne Rich indicates, "When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her."26 The attempt to speak truth involves opening up a space for other articulations. These narratives can validate yet challenge existing ones, opening up ever more ways of making meaning of one's experiences. In this space, narratives can emerge and circulate more fluidly.

It is not that truth is achieved, accomplished, finished once and for all. Rather, the struggle for truth is a matter of standing in the Way of truth. What the practice of truth-telling opens up is the depth of exploration, the occasion and invitation for other attempts. If truth can be seen as an event, a collaborative encounter emerging from what is between people, then we can move our focus to how this space opens up a variety of articulations. We can begin to ask about the 'coming to be' of particular accounts by historicizing experience, which allows us to keep exploring an understanding of ourselves and our world. Further, the cultivated space of intimacy that allows this may be politically important to insure against silencing women's voices, especially when attempts at exploring possible meanings might be closed off by dogmatic assertions of a new, totalizing truth which might exert normalizing tendencies.

The struggle for intimacy, in Rich's work, has less to do with knowledge -- "It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you."27 -- than with the attempt to extend the possibilities of truth between people. Instead of approaching our connections armed with truth and knowledge, we engage with each other, exposed, allowing the meanings of our experiences to emerge between us.

In this space, as we persist in this exposure, we face fear -- fear, finally, of what Rich identifies as "the void."

We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness.... The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy.... Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth. The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control."28

We might understand the void as a sort of bottomless, unknown abyss, out of which possible meanings might emerge. To attend to the abyss is to persevere in the face of the foreign, the unfamiliar. It is to acknowledge our vulnerability in the face of what may emerge. It is to realize our lack of control, over the other, over ourselves, in standing in the Way of truth.

Heidegger writes of the importance of anxiety and wonder that emerges when we are detached or alienated which actually aids attending and responding in ways ordinarily overshadowed by our usual ways of approaching the world. Typically, we engage with the world, otherness, through concepts, regarding things as objects and ourselves as subjects over against these objects. This approach overshadows the event of a thing's being (as well as our own), the historical emergence of its being as it is now thought of as being. In short, it overshadows how we come to regard things, how they present themselves as being.

Moments of anxiety or wonder, fundamental attunements whereby we are alienated and detached, can be utilized to reveal other senses of being. In this strangeness, we are guided by the openness of Being. Thinking becomes a response to the temporal (historical) opening up of Being, the event of a thing's emergence on its way of coming to be. Perhaps this provides a way of understanding the value of the void of which Rich writes.

Exposed to the unfamiliar, a new intimacy emerges that is open to otherness. Rather than thinking of intimacy in terms of identification and familiarity, we might think of it in the events of its emergence, as being awake to, attuned to, the possibilities of strangeness of the other or of their stories. Our move to intimacy is more often the move to overcome the strangeness of the other. Yet, what if we attend to it more deeply, persist in its difference, encourage the unfamiliarity? What might it mean to actively make strange our experiences, to question the seeming givenness of such experiences and the claims of immediacy and transparency? What might emerge in this opening? Can we be guided by it, respond to it, by persisting in the opening? Perhaps we can then attend to how a narrative of abuse comes to be, that which withdraws in the telling, in order to allow for the fluidity of possible articulations and understandings and gain a richer understanding of the world in which these are possible experiences. Perhaps there is a need for a multitude of tongues in approaching the meaning of experience whereby meaning can be put in play between us.

Standing in the Way of truth may be a matter of persisting in the openness of possibilities, of responding to the invitation of intimacy. Yet it is an intimacy that does not find its rest in familiarity, but in persisting in the strangeness of what may be opened up. Perhaps what emerges is also an understanding that what will never open up is complete transparency. It may be impossible to be transparent, to another or to oneself, and rather than think of transparency as a goal or a motive, we might think of the intimacy itself as the reason for struggling in the way of the truth. We may be utterly exposed in the risk of opening up the space for intimacy, yet not transparent.

We are in a better position, now, to reassess what Felski sees as the failures of confession. The "frantic search" for clarity of self and experience as well as the "frantic search" for an intimacy which achieves identification are both revealed as inadequate ways to make sense of the process of understanding what has happened in giving and sharing accounts of traumatic experiences. The pursuit of truth gives way to persisting in the space of the emergence of meanings by which we navigate our way in the world. We, ourselves, emerge, come to understand who we are and our possibilities, in this opening. We need not abandon the quest for truth, even for accuracy; rather, accounts of experience must be explored with reference to their historicity, as the effects of a multitude of culturally operative discourses and practices out of which meaning is made. Laying bare the process of giving accounts of what happened can give us greater understanding of what is involved in truth telling and enable us to respond to this task more empathically. It can give us a clearer understanding of what fosters healing, allow for differences and complexities of women's experiences and the experiences of domestic violence, respect the survivor's struggle of trying to say what happened, and help us understand more deeply our cultural involvement as we make sense of the possibilities of meaningful existence.

1The autobiographical narrative, whether presented in writing or speaking, offers a structuring of one's experience as one tries to give an account of the story of what happened. While there are salient differences between writing and speaking which are fruitful to analyze, and while it may be problematic to draw on theories that focus primarily on autobiographical writing, I am hoping that such discussions would not detract from the major thrust of this paper.

2Rita Felski, "On Confession," Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 89.

3 Ibid., 90.

4 Susan Stanford Friedman, "Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice," Women, Autobiography, Theory, 72.

5 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 44.

6Felski, 90.

7 Felski, 91.

8 Joan Scott, "Experience," Women, Autobiography, Theory, 59.

9Ibid.

10 Ibid., 60.

11 Liz Stanley, "The Knowing Because Experiencing Subject: Narratives, Lives and Autobiography," Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, eds. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (New York: Routledge, 1994) 133.

12 Ibid., 144-5.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870's, ed. and tr. Daniel Brezeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc.) 87.

14 Felski, 89.

15 Ibid., 91.

16 Ibid., 89.

17 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: The Free Press, 1992) 95.

18 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 38.

19 Ibid., 175.

20If ordinary memory is, as living memory, fluid, open to a variety of articulations, embellished and revised, one can also appreciate the complexity -- some would say inability -- to give a singular, accurate representation even of non-traumatic experiences. Indeed, it could be fruitful to analyze just when the standard of accuracy seems most pressing and when it does not in order to extend this analysis along cultural lines of critique.

21 Ibid., 177.

22 Ibid., 178.

23 Ibid., 181.

24 Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 93.

25 Adrienne Rich, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," 193.

26 Ibid., 191.

27 Ibid., 193.

28 Ibid., 191.