‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ Philip Hofer says, ‘by making a telling visual report’ of the insurrection that led
tothe Peninsular War.^1 More poetic than journalistic, these profoundly intimate
images present unnamed persons, living and dead, in attitudes of extremity. War
in Goya’s eyes is people suffering. But in addition, the images are captioned with
fragmentary, enigmatic, even oracular declarations. The first of Goya’s etchings
reads, ‘Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer’ (‘Sad presentiments of
what must come to pass’), and presents a lone figure in rags kneeling with arms
outspread and hollow eyes upcast amidst a nondescript blackness that appears to be
garroting his throat and drawing his hands back into itself. This supplicant before
an implacable universe is the obverse of the penitent; the last vestige of shredded
hope opens the figure to the cold and indifferent heavens, and he becomes not a
pray-er but a seer witnessing through the past that has brought him to this desperate
pitch ‘sad presentiments of what must come to pass’. Past and future are suspended
in this instant in the way the man’s outreaching arms are held above a dark abyss.
The bleakness of Goya’s vision is allayed only by the supplicant’s gaze that remains
at once apart from and a part of both death and life.
‘It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness,’ as Seamus
Heaney says in his Nobel Lecture, when describing the horror of a lone Catholic
man called out from his Protestant peers by unknown gunmen who then massacred
his colleagues, who, in a final squeeze of the hand, had tacitly offered themselves as
protection from being singled out presumably for death.^2 While such gunshots are
inextricably ‘a part of the music of what happens’, Heaney points to the squeeze of
the survivor’s hand by those about to die as the germ ‘of the future we desire’.^3 Of
course, no one, including the poet, can apprehend the experience of the survivor
who will bear this ‘instant’ of his death as the beginning of the rest of his life.^4 Yet for
Heaney, this man’s uncanny survival suggests the position of poetry as it addresses
war. One terrible predicament of those who survive trauma is that they bear, like
Goya’s figure, the strange fate of possessing a knowledge of suffering and death that
is inadequate to alleviate the dread not only of what happened but of what will
happen again elsewhere if not here.^5 Something of deathandlife, for instance, is,
transmitted in that squeeze of the hand, but such knowledge is lost to the abyss
(^1) Philip Hofer, ‘Introduction to the Dover Edition’, in Francisco Goya,The Disasters of War,ed.
Philip Hofer (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968), 1.
(^2) Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber, 1998),
456.
(^3) Ibid. 457.
(^4) Maurice Blanchot explores this predicament of survival inThe Instant of My Death,analysedat
length by Jacques Derrida. Derrida speaks of this ‘unbelievable tense’, the unimaginable position and
temporality of the survivor as witness who gives testimony to death as dying (Maurice Blanchot/Jacques
Derrida,The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 49). 5
The awful paradox of this condition is that this knowledge or experience is capable of re-
traumatizing the survivor, creating the vicious cycle of traumatic repetition noted by Freud inBeyond
thePleasurePrinciple.