Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
values held by these groups. These traditional attachments have been very strong rhetorical tools. For most of the developed world these ties and their corresponding rhetoric are much diminished. Racial, religious, and linguistic conflict continue, and in some areas increase in intensity, but nation states of the West have minimized or simply reformulated the terms for racial, religious, and linguistic identification.
Extreme social mobility now allows and encourages people to situate themselves within and identify with a much wider diversity of relationships. It is no longer uncommon for children to leave their parents, marry outside of their religion or race, abandon old customs, and move to new regions. As the authority of primordial ties diminish, new forces work to situate and regulate the self. One of these forces is modern culture itself, which, characterized by diversity and plurality, reduces the emphasis given to the unquestioned authority of primordial identifications.
Aristotle was aware of conflicts among authorities, but demonstrated an attachment to a “primordial” authority; he idealized “truth” both as a voice of authority and as a single voice. By comparison, modern American culture does not idealize any single voice as the fountainhead of authority. Instead, many different and distinct voices are empowered, and all clamor to speak with authority. Modern culture, as a consumer culture, has in fact become a consumer of the “truth” voices of other cultures. Just as we buy the physical products of other cultures, we commodify, in a hybridized form, the thought of other cultures. The world becomes a vast supermarket of artifacts, discourses, and values, all available for consumption.
Ihab Hassan sees “postmodern pluralism” as powerfully disruptive, insisting that “pluralism . . . has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse.”23 He describes “postmodern” culture as a scene where authoritative guides for human action and value no longer preside. In place of authority, Hassan finds indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization of authority, irony, and hybridization. As modern or postmodern selves become caught in the conflictual linguistic codings of modern culture, they confront the psychological effects of a radical disorder.
Modern culture “informs” self-structure. The cultural and social life of the modern developed world is especially informed by plurality and diversity, and this experience characterizes the modern self. Such a self is torn and disordered by many different styles of authority and personality. It hears, remembers, and internalizes many different styles of voice. As the modern self develops, it seeks to establish identity in relation to the many voices competing for its attention. Rorty argues that the modern self “is” (at the level of self-representation, anyway) nothing more than a set of actions or choices; moderns, in other words, identify their selves not with some concrete entity, but with the act of choosing an identity. Postmoderns dispute the self’s “freedom” to choose its identity. Nonetheless there is agreement that the modern (and postmodern) self is fractured by conflictual self-images. Perhaps, for this reason, the modern self seems especially characterized by anxiety, internal diversity, and conflict.
Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst, finds evidence for the fragmented nature of the modern self in literature. Like Rorty, he believes literature reflects self-structure. He also believes that the literary products of modern culture differ markedly from older forms. He argues that whereas artists of the past wrote drama in which a “relatively strong self” is exposed to “loves and hates, . . . triumphs and defeats,” many modern artists “have begun to deal with a new set of issues”: “This set of issues, to speak of it in the most gross terms, is the falling apart of the self and of the world and the task of reconstituting the self and the world.”24 Kohut’s psychoanalytically informed observation echoes the claims literary critics have made for years. One watermark of “modern” literature seems to be the expression of a restless and divided self. Fragmentation and division dominate modern experience. Jurgen Habermas suggests that an older form of ideological control, “false consciousness,” required older ideological formations. In modern societies false consciousness has given way to a new structure called “fragmented consciousness.”25
If fragmentation and ethical pluralism characterize modern culture and the modern self, we should examine how these features play a role in modern ethos. Traditional readings of Aristotle and other classical thinkers describe ethos as a fairly simple interaction among selves. Ethos presents itself as a clear voice of authority and a vigorously dominant force presiding over a curious background of silence. Effective rhetoric establishes authority, clearly communicates its meaning, and effectively silences its opposition. Such thinking may effectively describe the kind of self and society that Aristotle knew. But such a self and society is not our own.
Consider another less tidy model to describe the modern rhetorical context. In this option, effective rhetoric is not a clearly authoritative and all-powerful energy in discourse; instead, it is a force always in conflict with an opposition. Effective rhetoric indeed dominates other voices. It subdues the noise of other voices and is heard above them. But in modern culture, effective rhetoric never completely silences other voices. Modern selves, it seems, suffer a certain failure of repression and can always, when they listen carefully, hear other competing noises, or voices of opposition, in the background. Modern texts, when paid some attention by modern selves, always deconstruct. A model for modern ethos should reflect this character of the modern condition described here. It should acknowledge the multiplicity of modern culture, the divided nature of the self, and the contingency of truth claims.
It is not easy, however, to redefine modern ethos in terms of textual multiplicity. If ethos is, as defined here, an argument in which rhetorical force derives not from “logical” support for what is said, but from the perceived personality of the agent behind what is said, then a modern ethos may appear theoretically inconceivable. An “author’s” voice heard in a text by a reader seems to generate many different messages, and thus never appears singular or securely “itself.” Increasingly, authors appear to be very unstable entities. Their characters become a function of readers’ projections and their meanings become the result of ideological effects. If texts really have multiple voices, then authors disappear.
It often seems we can’t have both at the same time: a theory that explains the rhetor’s presence in a text and a theory that fully describes the plural disseminations of textual codes. Contemporary critical theory seems to require us to choose between two theoretical alternatives. If we embrace the multiplicity of discourse, we must abandon any notion of authorial presence and intention. If, on the other hand, we believe in the efficacy of rhetorical presence and intention, we must abandon a belief in the plurality of textual meaning.
I think we can have—at the same time—a theory of textual multiplicity and a modified theory of authorial intention. Ethos, in fact, is best understood as an interplay of two features: first an author’s voice in a text and, second, that voice rhetorically manipulated by the plural nature of self, text, and context. I want to consider ethos as an externalization of various aspects of the rhetor’s self-structure (present as “voice”) affecting—that is, contributing to the internalization of—the reader’s self-structure. I also want to consider ethos as something energized precisely by the plural, self-oppositional, and divided nature of both the self and conflictual cultural ideologies. I discuss this last assertion in more detail later. Let us now concentrate on the earlier, more simple assertion.
In seeking to understand ethos, we should examine relationships among three things: the structure of the argument, the self-structure of the speaker, and the self-structure of the addressee. What we see and talk about in this triangular relationship will always be determined by culture, history, and personal projection. Nonetheless, we will always be able to see something in a text, and in most cases we will imagine the “real” voice of an author in relation to the rhetorical effects produced by a text. When we feel rhetorical effects, we will always tend to attribute them to the agency of another personality outside us, working the rhetorical effects of language on us.
There should be nothing objectionable in this. If we construct a more complicated notion of texts and