Bearing witness in How It Is

A central preoccupation of How It Is is the act of bearing witness: "I say it as I hear it." Readings of the novel turn on whether the text ultimately bears witness to the presence of alterity or cancels it in a final claim of absolute aesthetic autonomy. Here I draw out the text's relationship to two contrasting paradigms of witnessing: the theological paradigm exemplified by Dante's Comedy and the secular paradigm formulated by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz. I argue that the text's paratactic structure, pronominal indeterminacy and ambiguous negations bear out Agamben's secular paradigm of bearing witness.