So who exactly gives the right to speak (or write, as the
case may be)?
In the medieval ages, through the Renaissance, up through
the Enlightenment, the right to speak seems to be God-given. Or maybe
God-selected. As I continue to argue in nearly all of my blog posts, the power
structure is the mediator of “God’s word.” This comes mostly in the form of the
Church—an organization that gave Augustine his right to speak and limited de la
Cruz’s right to speak. So maybe the right is God-given, but organizationally
selected.
The invention of the printing press was a major blow to the
power structure of the Church (hence a large part of Eisenstein’s argument).
Much of the power of the Church derived from controlling holy text (from which
laws and customs were drafted) and controlling the modes of production (since
the most literate bunch around happened to be clergy). Just as the Church’s
followership split with the advent of print in Lutheran Reformation, so did the
ideology concerning the God-given right to speak. Those who still believed in a
sacred text that could not be tainted by print continued to see the right to
speak as something endowed solely by God—a principle reflected in the American
notion of God-given rights. In this group I might include Maria Stewart’s
verse-heavy Biblical rhetoric as well as the Grimke sisters’ more analytical
readings of the Bible. The women here, like Pizan, rely on the power structure
already in place: an organization of men using a male-dominated text. (And, in
no way do a say this disparagingly; turning people’s own words on them is quite
a talent.)
(I realize here that I am setting up a dichotomy. This is somewhat intentional, as I want
to show the two major ways I see people claiming their right to speak. For the
record, the distance between the two views is less that I am making it out to
be. As Stewart remarks, “All that man can say or do can never elevate us, it is
a work that must be effected between God and ourselves” [1043]. Rather I am
concerned with where people saw the right to speak originating.)
On the other side of my false dichotomy are the
self-determined speakers like Wells and Douglass who seem to take up the idea
of humanism. A most notable lingustic feature amongst this group is their
acknowledgement of the “I.” Whereas the speakers who view their agency as being
born of God rarely acknowledge themselves, Douglass makes his entire case on
the use of I. The autobiography / slave narrative is a first-person-driven form
of discourse meant to empower the speaker. [Aside: This is a common pedagogical
issue faced by teachers when FYC students have an identity crisis of sorts,
asking if they have the authority to refer to themselves as I in an essay. It
sounds ridiculous until I look back at my Catholic High School upbringing and
realize I was never allowed to use I.] Royster certainly puts Wells into the
group of self-defined speakers when she says, “Wells looked closely at her
life, named herself, claimed her own vision of reality, claimed her own authority
to speak the truth she saw...” (173). Testimony from the Bible is, in this
group’s case, more impactful than the Bible. (Again, this is reductive in the
Hugh Blair way. We, of course, would also need to take into account audience,
kairos, and delivery when differentiating these groups.)
Like I said, I don’t want to be too binary. The move of borrowing
God’s ethos is a good one learned from centuries of people (like popes) doing
so. Moreover, in prohibiting a person’s right to speak, the word of God is
often used as justification (and still is, in the case of many social issues).
But I also see this rhetorical move as the “common ground” move we first
witnessed in de Pizan’s work and will see again in Rogerian argumentation. By
meeting on the Bible—or God’s word (depending on whether you value text or oral
tradition)—the speakers are finding a common source of agreement and building
from there.
I was also struck by the usage of biblical authority in these three rhetors. It's interesting the different ways they engage the Bible. Grimke is very textual, using close reading of passages (secular and biblical) and providing citation. But when we read Stewart's farewell address, it appears the citations have been added in after the fact; in oration, I think we can assume that she is "voicing" the Bible, cleanly meshing it with her own oratory. They weave seamlessly; I even found a couple that weren't cited but know to be direct biblical quotations. Douglass does this at times too, though often working more by allusion (my favorite is when he says, ". . . some of our number were disposed to turn our backs upon the town and to shake its dust from our feet, but of these, I am glad to say, I was not one. I had somewhere read of a command to go into the hedges and highways and compel men to come in.") Like you say, it's making use of common cultural understandings. It's also interesting to think of how we might read this against an Augustinian "art of interpretation" as, here, the scripture is for *enacting* rhetoric, not rhetoric for understanding scripture.
ReplyDeleteA very thoughtful and interesting post, Ryan, that cuts across a number of different readings and periods. Like John says, the Scripture is there, echoed in Douglass, though it isn't as explicit as in Stewart.
ReplyDeleteA very thoughtful and interesting post, Ryan, that cuts across a number of different readings and periods. Like John says, the Scripture is there, echoed in Douglass, though it isn't as explicit as in Stewart.
ReplyDelete