William Rodney Herring

Steven Mailloux. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

I’ve taken to describing my project as asking the following question: when we look at realist and naturalist novels that are aware of the importance of grammar in class mobility, what rhetorical power do these novels have? It sounds catchy (I think), and it anchors my project in a rhetorico-literary tradition, but it certainly shouldn’t be modeled on Mailloux’s book, as the latter is not so much invested in describing or exhibiting rhetorical power as it is in providing rationale (among rhetoricians as well as literary scholars) for rhetorical contributions to discussions about novels and about the discipline of literary studies. And yet this last, insofar as it provides a rationalized methodology, is precisely what is useful about Mailloux’s work, as well as the explanatory potential of its terms like “rhetorical hermeneutics” and “reception history.”

Mailloux’s first section (comprising two chapters) articulates his rationale of a rhetorical theory (not to say Theory), by describing the first of these terms, and historicizes three twentieth century disciplinary formations (philology, formalist New Criticism, and reader-response criticism); this historicization occurs under a rhetorical aegis because “rhetorical hermeneutics” involves “theory and rhetorical histories” (18). With particular reference to a literary disciplinary genealogy, we must see that (and how) each new iteration of theoretical approach to reading was not only a response to what came before, but also to particular political contexts outside the discipline itself.

In the second section, Mailloux offers a terrific lengthy reading of Huck Finn. Chapter three is both a reception history of those twentieth century scholars who saw, for better or for worse, the significance of the novel in its treatment of race and a rhetorical response that considers the relative persuasive efficacy of the competing voices in the novel. The latter task allows Mailloux to demonstrate how the question of whether Huck Finn combats or continues racism rests largely on the judgments of readers, so that Mailloux can determine that “racism is both subverted and reinforced during the reading of Huckleberry Finn” (86).

But if twentieth century criticism of the novel has seen race as its most salient issue, Mailloux shows us why Twain’s contemporaries overlooked racial concerns. Preoccupied as they were by the “bad boy boom,” 1880s readers debated whether a book that seemed to celebrate (whether playfully or cavalierly) a disrespectful protagonist. Proceeding in roughly a new historicist manner, Mailloux supplies interesting examples of cultural conversation about the effect(iveness) of discursive artifacts on the malleable minds of young adults (and by extension on the presumably less malleable minds of all readers). To my mind, it is here in Mailloux’s analysis of the persuasion of the novel itself and the context of the novel’s reception that Rhetorical Power is most interested in the rhetorical power of literature.

Thus, when Rhetorical Power returns in its third section to theoretical matters, it does so to distinguish its theoretical underpinnings from the sides in the larger Theory debate (at least a decade or so old at this point) and by joining antifoundationalism in “supporting the claim that a general Theory of interpretation is impossible” (134-35). Rhetorical Power’s claim to engage this debate is based on the fact that part two is

a theoretical illustration of rhetorical hermeneutics, especially its claim that interpretive accounts should move from theory to history as quickly as possible. This neo-pragmatist argument proposes a change of subject for hermeneutics, a move from explaining interpretation in terms of isolated readers and isolated texts to discussing rhetorical exchanges among interpreters embedded in discursive and other social practices at specific historical moments. (134)

In the end, the value of rhetorical hermeneutics rests on its move away from trying to ascertain meaning in texts and toward determining what texts persuade (and how) their readers of (which means that studies of persuasion can’t ever be separated from studies of meaning). It seems unnecessary for Mailloux to march through quick readings of Ken Kessey, Edward Said, and Richard Rorty to reach this conclusion, especially as he still must bring Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp, as well as Stanley Fish (and George Orwell’s O’Brien) to the table. Ultimately, he best demonstrates this argument in his Conclusion, when he uses the “ABM Treaty Interpretation Debate” to show us that “theories are not foundational but rhetorical, establishing no permanent grounding or guiding principles guaranteeing correct interpretation but certainly providing much rhetorical substance for interpretive debate” (179). In each stage of the 1985 debate of the ABM Treaty’s meaning, subsequent theories (intentional ist, contextual ist, histories of interpretation, etc.) were trotted out in order to win the debate for each respective side, and each time the theories failed. So we would be better off to understand the application of the theories themselves as rhetorical strategies, to understand the “in order to,” not to invoke more and more theories to guarantee our own assertions about meaning.