“What the Book Told”: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artists’ Books
26 Turning to my own particular encounter with Hall’s books, I would like to finish with a few brief reflections on the responsibility that is opened by that which fails to get across or cannot be grasped in the present. “What am I experiencing when I turn these pages? This is what the critic of an artist’s book must ask,” and, as Dick Higgins adds, “for most critics it is an uncomfortable question” (12). As he clarifies: “The language of normative criticism is not geared towards the discussion of an experience, which is the main focus of most artists’ books” (12). I would like to further complicate this statement. If, as suggested, artists’ books invite touching and handling, that is, they compel not only involvement with the ideas expressed in the text and the images, but also physical engagement, how is it possible for me to respond to Hall’s books “in a way which is generous, in a way which gives” (Ahmed 149), when proximity is mediated and thus one cannot get close enough to the other?
27 In a chapter on ethical encounters, which draws on Levinas’ work and Derrida’s ethics of hospitality, Ahmed stresses the need for a more proper and rigorous thinking of what it means to encounter an other by shifting our attention to the question of particular modes of encounter through which others are faced. Reading Ahmed’s lyrical and moving description of her encounter with Indian writer Mahasweta Devi and her fictional character Douloti, I am tempted to draw parallels and comparisons. Although my encounter with Hall’s books does not raise the kind of questions Ahmed considers in the context of post-coloniality, it is, like Ahmed’s mediated. I come to Hall’s books through a kind of translation not very dissimilar to the one that allows Ahmed to encounter Devi’s text in English (Spivak’s translation). This is not a translation into another language, but one, nevertheless, which makes Hall’s work accessible to a wider audience, including myself working in Britain: I am referring to the award-winning exhibition catalogue Holding In, Holding On, and to the film I Make Books, from which the second epigraph of this section is taken. The former reproduces excerpts taken from Hall’s books (though unmarked, as the same font is used throughout), together with photographs; the latter allows a more faithful, three-dimensional view of the books, but can only simulate the process of turning their pages:
And so I face this text in writing about it here. I must respond to it. But in responding to this text, already mediated by the failed proximity of translation, I cannot fully face this text, I cannot transform the text into a face. I miss it. But my missing of it, my failure to face up to it, is also an encounter with it, and engagement with it, and a responsibility for it. (Ahmed 148)
As Ahmed is right to suggest, “[o]ne’s infinite responsibility begins with the particular demands that an other might make,” but cannot stop there (147). If the particularity of my response to Hall, mediated by the catalogue and the film, cannot fulfill my responsibility, rather than seeing this as a form of failed witnessing, I prefer to approach it as “a call, a demand, for a future response to an other whom I may yet approach” (Ahmed 146, emphasis in the original). I hope this essay performs a particular and finite engagement with Hall’s artists’ books while also gesturing towards an approach that is “yet to be taken.”