The Unwitnessable: External and Embodied Foreclosures of Testimony in Anna Burns' Milkman and Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Abstract

This study examines Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), through a combined reading of the primary philosophical frameworks of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969,1985) ethics of the face, and Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 1999, 2005) concept of bare life, with Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) theory of trauma to distinction between the signs of foreclosed witnessing and their critical expression. It argues that both novels depict what can be theorized as the unwitnessable: a condition that emerges when political and gender-based violence becomes extreme enough to disrupt the possibility of ethical witnessing. Each novel presents the unwitnessable differently. In Burns’ it is created by social regulations and ideological adherence reinforced through community surveillance, and in McBride’s it results from psychological fragmentation. This comparison shows that the unwitnessable is not only a narrative strategy but also a condition where some individuals’ experiences cannot be expressed, understood, or witnessed. Through close analysis of the narrative strategies, this paper demonstrates that both authors not only present the impossibility of testimony but reproduce it, forcing the reader to be part of the ethical failure. Hence, this study proposes the unwitnessable as a critical category for the analysis of literary works involving political and gender-based violence in which testimony is rendered impossible, offered here as a working hypothesis to be tested against a wider corpus rather than as a fully generalized claim.