History and Fiction

Hi Everyone,

Late to the party, but excited to be here!

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the question of the relationship between rhetorical history and fiction.  More specifically, with how to extend my rhetorical analysis of a public controversy to a fictional representation of the event.  My dissertation research focuses on the transfer of water rights from Eastern California (a region called the Owens Valley) to the city of Los Angeles at the turn of the 20^th century.  From its earliest conception the Los Angeles Aqueduct project generated a fire-storm of persuasive discourse and action:  arguments about urban planning, water rights, irrigation and agriculture, the ethics of profit-taking, overt deception in the press, fictional and visual representations, and finally even guerilla action on the part of Owens Valley citizens.  Mary Austin, a local novelist, fictionalized the early struggle over the water transfer in her 1917 novel, The Ford.

As a historian of rhetoric, issues of methodology and recovery come into play for me here.  Nonfiction genres differ not only as acts of rhetorical production within a public controversy but also in the manners and methodologies we use to interpret them.  I turn to Austin’s own rhetorical understanding of fiction for my quotation for this blog entry, as I her theories on novel writing hold value for contemporary historians of rhetoric.  Reading her own interpretation of the rhetorical force of fiction alongside the novel itself can contribute to our understanding of what the novel says about rhetoric as well as what the novel accomplishes rhetorically.

In a 1922 article written for The New Republic, Austin describes a rhetorical understanding of fiction, citing a transactional relationship between a novelist and her reader:

Preeminently the novelist’s gift is that of access to the collective mind. But there is a curious secret relation between the novelist’s point of access and his grasp on form--and by form I mean all that is usually included in style, plus whatever has to do with the sense of something transacting between the book and its reader. Whoever lays hold on the collective mind at the node from which issues the green bough of constructive change, finds himself impelled toward what is later discovered to be the prophetic form ("The American Form of the Novel" 3).

Here, Austin argues that the novel offers a relationship with and access to an audience that is not made possible by other genres.  The novelist’s ability to affect an audience is shaped by the rhetorical (stylistic, formal) choices she makes.  Austin’s use of an organic figure (the green bough) to describe collectivity is itself significant and speaks to both the interdependent relationship between reader and writer, and what Austin sees as the absence of a clear telos for the American novel.  The American form deprives the novelist “of fixed goals of social or financial or political achievement as terminal points, since none of these things have any permanence in the American scheme of things.  The utmost that the American novelist can hope for…is that it may eventually be found to lie along the direction of the growing tip of collective consciousness” (4).  Austin joins two metaphors, transaction and a living organism, to describe the rhetoric of the novel.  The rhetorical potential of the novel lies in its ability to position itself ideologically and to explore competing systems of values from within the text. The resulting transaction with a reader produces a response: the future growth of the collective unconsciousness. Something like Austin’s rhetorical approach to the novel is well-accepted at present in more recent rhetorical understandings of the genre, such as that of James Phelan who “assumes that the rhetorical act of telling a story entails a multileveled communication from author to audience, one involving the audience’s intellect, emotions, and values (both moral and aesthetic), and that these levels interact with each other” (6).

Austin goes on to characterize the author’s purpose as one of “revelation,” suggesting not only representation, but a making visible. While judgment exists both within Austin’s novel and for her readers, it is not judgment imposed by an external set of values, but judgment revealed from within.  James Phelan describes a similar understanding of judgment when he says, “within rhetorical ethics, narrative judgments proceed from the inside out, rather than the outside in.  It is for this reason that they are closely tied to aesthetic judgment” (10). Still, a social and political agenda guides Austin’s work.  Returning to her rhetorical theories of fiction has enriched my historical methodology as I begin with her premise of the transactional novel (cf Louise Rosenblatt) and her formulation of the novel as a kind of rhetorical realism, resolved only in its emphasis on contingency.