Rhetorics Rising: The Recovery of Rhetorical Traditions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn by Bruce Dadey A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2006 © Bruce Dadey 2006 Author’s Declaration for Electronic Submission of a Thesis I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, Invisible Man and House Made of Dawn are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison’s young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday’s alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels’ own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors’ strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Kevin McGuirk, for his generous enthusiasm and guidance throughout all the iterations of this project, and the other members of my committee, Linda Warley, Victoria Lamont, and Andrew McMurry, for their advice and support. I would also like to thank Randy Harris, who initially sparked my interest in rhetoric, Glenn Stillar, who introduced me to the work of Kenneth Burke, Lynn Lawson, who provided a space for me to write, and the women of Edmonton Public Schools’ Sacred Circle Project, who shared their wisdom and life stories with me, beginning the journey that has resulted in this project. Finally, I would like to thank Kym-Su Matheson, who has shared on a daily basis all the challenges and joys that accompanied the completion of this thesis. iv This project is dedicated to Kym-Su, without whose patience and support it would not have been completed. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Washingtonian and Vernacular Rhetoric in the Deep South.............................. 25 Chapter 3: The Return of the Repressed Vernacular ............................................................. 67 Chapter 4: Trickster Oratory in House Made of Dawn ........................................................ 136 Chapter 5: A Rhetoric of Ritual and Blood............................................................................ 209 Chapter 6: Conclusion—Toward a Modernist Rhetoric ...................................................... 274 Notes ........................................................................................................................................... 304 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 335 vi Chapter 1: Introduction The 1950s and 1960s were a time of revolutionary change in American race relations, change that was, to a significant degree, reflected in the literature written during those years by ethnic-American authors. In this project, I argue that the increased political activism of marginalized cultural groups in the United States during the mid-twentieth century was associated with another process that is also reflected in the literature of the times: the recovery of culturally-distinct rhetorical practices and traditions that were formerly displaced by dominant Euro-American rhetorical traditions. In order to explore the nature of this rhetorical recovery and its relation to its social and political context, I will examine in depth the role of rhetoric in two works of ethnic-American literature, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, analyzing both the rhetorical action that takes place within the fictional worlds of the novels, which I will call diegetic rhetoric, and the potential rhetorical effects of the novels themselves on their readers, which I will call extradiegetic rhetoric. In his seminal essay “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd Bitzer writes that The rhetorical situation as real is to be distinguished…from a fictive rhetorical situation. The speech of a character in a novel or play may be clearly required by a fictive rhetorical situation, a situation established by the story itself; but the speech is not genuinely rhetorical, even though, considered in itself, it looks exactly like a courtroom address or a senate speech. It is realistic, made so by fictive context. But the situation is not real, not grounded in history; neither the fictive situation nor the discourse generated by it is rhetorical. We should note, however, that the fictive rhetorical discourse within a play or novel may become genuinely rhetorical outside the fictive context—if there is a real 1 situation for which the discourse is a rhetorical response. Also, of course, the play or novel itself may be understood as a rhetorical response having poetic form. (224) Bitzer defines rhetorical discourse as symbolic action on the part of a rhetor in response to a historical situation containing a genuine exigency, an actual audience, and concrete material, psychological, or social constraints, and, accordingly, he suggests that a fictive depiction of oratory cannot actually be considered as rhetorical, except insofar as we examine the extradiegetic rhetorical effects of the work on a genuine audience. In this project, however, I will argue that fictional depictions of rhetorical action in the works I have selected (and in others) may be fruitfully analyzed in rhetorical terms because they are indeed “grounded in history,” reflecting rhetorical practice as it takes place within a particular cultural framework; indeed, I assert that fictive depictions of rhetoric, within the overall context of the works, can function as a narrative form of what George A. Kennedy has termed a “metarhetoric” (History 3), a theory of what rhetoric is and how it works. William W. Cook, analyzing the relation of the African American rhetorical tradition to artistic productions, asserts that Ellison’s novel, “when fully understood,” should stand next to the works of sociolinguists such as Roger Abrahams or Geneva Smitherman “as a thoroughly worked-out study not only of African American rhetoric but of the liberating power of that rhetoric and the cultural forces that it embodies” (260). Both novels in this study explicitly concern themselves with the nature and ends of rhetorical practice: Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is an aspiring orator, and Momaday’s protagonist, Abel, is plagued by a lack of speech and is healed through the efforts of two orators: Tosamah, an irreverent Peyote priest, and Ben Benally, a displaced Navajo chanter. This blending of narrative and rhetorical theory is not without precedent, even within 2 the classical tradition—one need only recall Plato’s Gorgias or Phaedrus, or Cicero’s De Oratore, all of which set their analyses of rhetorical practice within a narrative context, albeit one less developed than that of Ellison or Momaday. Nor is the study of fictional rhetoric foreign to the classical tradition, as rhetorical critics have long commented on speeches from epics such as the Iliad or Odyssey or on orations which were likely invented by classical historians such as Thucydides or Herodotus, presuming that the speeches, even if fictitious, reveal something about the practice of and attitudes toward rhetoric at the time they were given, or at the time the writer included them in his own work (see, for instance, Kennedy, History 13-14, 21-23). Yet the use of narrative to embody a metarhetoric is especially appropriate in the works studied here, for three reasons: first, because in both African American and Native American oral traditions, story plays a central role in communicating cultural norms or practices; second, because story is an integral part of rhetorical practice as it is portrayed