Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
Cultures, we may say, structure selves. But cultures do not speak by themselves. They speak through the selves they construct. In speaking through selves, they construct selves. Texts, thus, must contain devices that connect the self-structure of authors with the self-structure of readers.
We can imagine these issues in a more concrete way by considering relationships between the concept of ethos developed by rhetoricians and the concept of charisma developed by sociologists. Think of charisma as both an aspect of self-structure and as an agency for rhetorical force. Studies of charisma provide clear, almost empirical, descriptions of strong personalities making effective rhetorical use of self-structure.
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Max Weber sought to explain how new values and institutions are introduced and supported in society. In short, he sought to explain change. He began with an analysis of the sources of a culture’s authority, and maintained that leadership derives from three major sources of power: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Traditional and rational authority, he argued, have a certain permanence and are both “institutions of daily routine.” Charismatic authority is a different mode of authority. Its legitimacy comes neither from special knowledge nor from the leader’s special place in a social hierarchy of power. Charismatic authority is held by people who “have been neither office-holders nor incumbents of an occupation . . . that is men who have acquired expert knowledge and who serve for remuneration.”26 Such authority derives, Weber argued, purely from the personal qualities of the leader. By virtue of their personality, charismatic leaders are “set apart from ordinary men [women] and treated as endowed with either supernatural, or superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers.”27 Weber’s emphasis on the persuasive role of personality in charisma is analogous to ethos as I have defined the term: an argument in which rhetorical force derives not from the logic of what is said, but from the perceived personality of the agent behind what is said. Considered from this perspective, the power of charisma is precisely the power of ethos. In both charisma and ethical argument, power stems directly from the personality of the speaker.
Whereas sociologists have documented the widespread occurrence of charismatic leadership, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically trained sociologists and anthropologists have tried to explain its mode of operation. W. LaBarre argues that the charismatic leader’s message is “not new information of the structure of the world, but only of new inner emotional structuring in people’s culture-personality.”28 Theorists argue that the self-structure of the charismatic leader plays two roles in social interaction. First, and this is all too obvious, these leaders have a particular structure of personality that appeals to their followers. Second (and this is more interesting), charismatic leaders know how to “elaborate” their personality-structure symbolically for followers to emulate. In this “elaboration,” leaders activate many messages within the more literal message of their speech. Charismatic leaders often outline a “mission” for their followers to follow. This mission may require the performance of real actions, but also encourages followers to develop a structure of defenses, desires, and repressions—a self-structure—similar to that of the leader. It is as if charismatic leaders rely on and draw rhetorical power from a certain (usually unconscious) control of the plural voices of their own text. A key component of the charismatic leader’s power, then, lies not simply in the structure of personality, but in the ability to communicate, and especially to communicate oneself (and all the various linguistic layers of oneself), in all the various layers of one’s message. As Winer, Jobe, and Ferrono point out, the charismatic leader “must have extraordinary powers of communication, usually oratorical as well as written.”29
How do the mechanisms of charisma operate within the field of discourse? Two dimensions of psychoanalytic speculation seem to offer answers. First, numerous thinkers have linked charisma to speakers’ ability to “share” and “elaborate” an unconscious fantasy within the more obvious material of their message. Second, charisma has been linked to speakers’ power to depict, for others, their own mastery of a conflict analogous to the conflicts experienced by listeners. Charismatic leaders’ power to elaborate their fantasy might be understood in relation to Ernest Borman’s work on group decision making. Borman argues that the unconscious sharing of group fantasy often directs the path of group decisions. If group decisions are manipulated by the sharing of fantasy, then charismatic figures may be leaders who are especially adept at unconscious (and perhaps conscious) communication and elaboration of fantasy. In another context, Jean Wyatt claims that literary texts can contribute to the production of politically consequential fantasy as they invite readers to participate in their own politically relevant fantasies.30 Clearly, relationships between politics and fantasy are important and require more research. Here, however, I want to subordinate concerns for particular fantasies and focus sharply on the relation between charisma and the mastery of psychological conflict.
Recall the claim I made earlier: Ethos links the self-structure of the reader to the self-structure of the author. Winer, Jobe, and Ferrono suggest that people who respond to charismatic leaders (that is, to masters of ethos) respond especially to a fantasy about the mastery of conflict.31 However, what may be most important here is not the nature of a particular conflict, but the general structure of conflict itself. Consider this generalized human experience, the mastery of conflict, as something not present in a text in the form of a subject or content, but as a structuring device. This device indeed “structures” the language of the text, but it is able to work rhetorically because it “reflects” the linguistic structure of the author and “affects” the linguistic self-structure of the reader.
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