It has been over four decades since I read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 story ‘The Dwarf’, but it has stayed with me. Aimee chats to her colleague Ralph about the Dwarf who comes every night to see himself taller in the mirrors at the end of the pier. Aimee feels sorry for him, but Ralph wants to play a trick, so he changes the mirror to make him look smaller. The story ends with Ralph seeing himself in a mirror looking ugly (1.). For Ray Brand, witnessing is a paradigmatic mode of relating to trauma, to stand in proximity to an event that escapes representation but calls for communication (2.). Witnessing is situated in the gap between event and representation, the mode by which trauma is communicated outside the logic of representation (ibid.). To witness is to stand for the absence of experience, but in doing so witnessing recalls the absence it attempts to resolve (ibid.). Aimee is the witness in story. The image is profound because it frees itself from its object to become a process, that is, an event as possible (3.). This no longer needs to be realised in a body or an object; the image is not a representation of an object, but a movement in the world of the mind (ibid.). Memory formation and recall are productions; we perceive through a lens of previous memory (pre-perception) which informs perception, then post-perception informs selection and construction – mirrors at the end of the pier.

1.

See Ray Bradbury, The Dwarf (nyu.edu)

2.

Ray Brand, ‘Witnessing Trauma on Film’, in P. Frosh et al eds., Media Writing (Palgrave, 2009), pp. 198-199.

3.

D.N. Rodowick, ‘The Memory of Resistance’, in Ian Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian Century? (Duke University, 1999), pp. 37-47.