This arresting image of traumatic memory is voiced by ‘Jack Blow, Coachman’, the estranged son- and brother-in-disguise in The Antiphon (1958), Djuna Barnes's three-act verse tragedy about the sinister reunion of the Hobbs family. Jack acts part court-jester, part advocate, as he restages the childhood abuses suffered in an unorthodox, polygynous and probably incestuous family home not unlike the one depicted in Ryder and in the author's own biographies. Jack's lines are addressed to his mother, Augusta, and come shortly after his meta-fictional reenactment of his sister Miranda's abuse through the means of ‘Hobb's Ark, beast-box, doll's house’, ‘The House That Jack Built’ – a miniature house complete with doll-sized family members (Selected Works, 181). The image of the ‘eye-baby’ is suggestive of the idea that trauma is brought into the world through witnessing: its birth is, perversely, contingent on its being seen for the first time. Jack's notion of Augusta's perpetual pregnancy as she carries the image until death also conveys the ceaselessness of the traumatic memory as it is repeated. And significantly, these lines suggest the contagiousness of trauma: Augusta witnesses a testimony of her daughter's trauma, but such witnessing blurs the boundaries between subjects, and Augusta too takes on the characteristics of the trauma-survivor. Traumatic testimony is thus portrayed as a complicated and complicating activity, producing semblances between victims and witnesses while indeed requiring the combined presence of these distinct subjects.