Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6781dc69-12bf-5fcc-b5ff-104a205d9a18">28. Arnold Rothstein, The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection (New York: International Universities Press, 1984).
29. Jeffrey Berman, Narcissism and the Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 1.
30. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144.
31. For a broad discussion of theoretical and clinical support for the origin of artistic production in narcissistic compensations, see Lynne Layton and Barbara Ann Schapiro, eds., “Introduction,” in Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of Self (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 1-35.
32. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Re constitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 15.
33. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), points out: ”Heart of Darkness was, among other things, an early expression of what was to become a worldwide revulsion from the horrors of Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo” (139). Captain Otto Lutken, a Danish sea captain who had commanded ships on the upper Congo for eight years, wrote a response to Conrad’s work: “It is in the picture Conrad draws of Kurtz, the tropenkollered [maddened by heat] white man, that his authorship rises supreme. The man is lifelike and convincing—heavens, how I know him! I have met one or two ‘Kurtzs’ in my time in Africa, and I can see him now,” (from London Mercury 22 (1930): 350). Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 259, points out that “much of the horror either depicted or suggested in Heart of Darkness represents not what Conrad saw but rather his reading of the literature that exposed Leopold’s bloody system between Conrad’s return to England and his composition of the novella.” Conrad wrote in the context of this British expose literature, and he wrote for the reading public that was responding to such literature. Chinua Ach-ebe’s, “Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782-94, is a useful corrective to many over idealizations of Conrad’s clearly compromised moral posture. But Achebe’s argument should not prompt us to overlook the propaganda effect present in the work’s historical context. The novel written with Ford Madox Hueffer, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925), is aggressively explicit in expressing emphatic repulsion with Leopold’s imperialism.
TWO Self-Structure as a Rhetorical Device: Modern Ethos and the Divisiveness of the Self
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.
Bob Marley, “Redemption Songs”
Contemporary scholarship in English has begun to show an increasingly sophisticated attentiveness to the forces of politics and persuasion. It is not simply that Marxists like Terry Eagleton pronounce literary theory dead and rhetoric alive; many traditional scholars, people deeply committed to politically disinterested New Critical views of art, have begun to recognize political forces and rhetorical patterns in texts long considered distant from such concerns. In keeping with this new interest in the operations of rhetoric, it is useful to examine the traditional concept of ethos. Ethos seems especially fitted to advance an understanding of textual rhetoric because it focuses attention on a simple question often neglected by traditional literary theory: How do people persuade other people to change their values?
Although our understanding of ethos has changed over the years, one feature remains constant: Often it is not a person’s ideas but a person’s character that changes people. Thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and Kenneth Burke agree on this point. Aristotle formulated three modes of argumentative support (logos, ethos, and pathos) and discussed ethos (persuasion stemming from the personal qualities of the rhetor) as a highly effective rhetorical tool. A speaker’s character, Aristotle points out, “may almost be called the most effective means for persuasion he [she] possesses.”1 Like Aristotle, Kenneth Burke insists on the importance of the speaker’s character: “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”2 For Burke, persuasion works via mechanisms of identification or “consubstantiality.” When people identify with speakers, they can be manipulated into accepting their ideas and values. For both Aristotle and Burke a key impetus for persuasion lies, not in a conscious response to logical and factual reasoning, but in the prior (more primitive, and often unconscious) gesture of identification.
In many ways identification is a fundamental narcissistic gesture. We identify with people we want to be like; we want to imagine ourselves as better or more powerful by assuming the properties of people we admire. Our identifications, because they demonstrate our need for a desirable self-image, are narcissistic modes of desire. Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of ethos and Burke’s insistence on the gesture of identification thus give powerful support to an argument linking narcissism to rhetoric.
Theoretical Considerations
If identification is the key to persuasion, then any response to human character is a formidable rhetorical power. This response, as many argumentation theorists see it, is not something behind the force of an argument; it is the force of an argument. This chapter attempts to clarify this claim and support it in detail.
If ethos refers to the manner in which the character of the speaker or writer is featured in persuasive activity, then we must examine how character can be fashioned by language to serve a rhetorical function in a text. Second, we must examine, at the most fundamental level possible, the relationships between language and human character. This examination of relationships between human character and language is crucial to the larger argument of this book. Rhetoric, as I argue, is fundamentally concerned with the way self-structures participate in, and become reformed by, verbal structures.
What is self-structure? How is it related to a “self”? Unfortunately, contemporary discussion of relationships between language and the self is often confined within the assumptions and parameters of two models: the traditional Aristotelian theory of ethos and the current poststructuralist account of intertextuality. Neither of these models of character understand self-structure. Both lack the theoretical flexibility needed for an adequate explanation of rhetoric.
Classical consideration of ethos frequently links three separate ideas closely together: the development of self, the development of ethos, and the development of ethical habits. The classical message seems to be that people are the roles they habitually play. Rhetoricians, for both moral and practical reasons, are instructed to learn “good,” or “ethical,” roles. Quintilian argues that the good orator should be “a good man [woman]; and consequently we demand of him [her] not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellence of character as well.”3 This quotation works in two ways. First, Quintilian is exhorting his reader: “Be a good man [woman].” Second, Quintilian is making what he takes to be a factual statement: “A good rhetorician is a good man [woman].” Taken together, these two messages implicitly define the self. A “person” is what he or she strives and learns to be. As a “person” learns and repeatedly plays a role (a “good” role, it is assumed), he or