Something interesting that was brought up in class today was the year in time that the protagonist of the Borges piece experienced in his own mind. Someone brought up the question that if there’s no tangible record of this happening, no witnesses of the work he completed in his mind, did it even happen at all? It hearkens back to the whole “if a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one hears it, did it fall down at all” question. Do we need a witness for something to be real?
I’m in another literature class right now called Literature of Witness, and as expected, we’re reading works written by primary witnesses — of the Holocaust, of slavery, and of life in prison. The fact that this extra year that the protagonist is granted, supposedly by God, is a “secret” miracle reminds us that the protagonist is our only witness. This brings me to think about the difference between collective testimony vs. personal testimony. In canons of witness, we see a lot of common themes depending on experiences that have been shared by many — individual accounts differ, but patterns often appear. If something happens to just one person, and one person alone, a secondary witness won’t do that experience justice, or even, perhaps, realize what has happened. This gets a little complicated when we bring up the subject of what is “real” and what is not, though. Because if reality is what we perceive, then wouldn’t the act of seeing or hearing the tree fall make the action real? At the same time though, just because I haven’t seen everything with my own eyes doesn’t make its existence unreal to me.
The comparison between the idea of a witness and a separate version of reality is a really interesting topic. Continuing with this, we expand this idea into what seems to be my favorite topic in this class, subjectivity. Because we are a witness to something, that makes it real in our minds, a reality. Using the idea of a witness literally, let’s say there is a murder in a store and the only person who saw the murder happen was the storekeeper. The events that the storekeeper saw make up his reality, he saw what happened and he knows that is what happened. Assuming that he doesn’t lie, the reality that he has experienced is the true reality of what happened in that store. However what if two witnesses contradict each other? Again let’s say there was a murder in the store but a shopper saw it happen in addition to the storekeeper. Just because there are two witnesses to an event doesn’t necessitate that they contradict each other, maybe they experienced the same reality. But what if the shopper though that the murderer was left handed and the storekeeper thought they were right handed. Each witness has their own reality, but the true objective reality has disappeared. While this is a small detail, a detective solving this case would be split between two separate realities, each that could lead the case in a different way.
What if when time stopped for the character in the Borges piece, time stopped for everyone else in the same way. Everyone is conscious of the year that passes while they stand there motionless, but no one knows if anyone else is sharing this experience. We only have one witness’ testimony in the Borges piece but he dies at the end and cannot confirm his experience with anyone else. However if that was the case, would that diminish his own experience and perhaps prove his version of reality as separate from the true, objective reality?