The Phenomenology of the Disaster: Toward a Rhetoric of Tragedy

Although they are primarily exploited within literary works, the aesthetics of tragedy are also found within public speeches and public discourse, performing functions that might provoke a theorizing of tragedy's rhetorical, alongside its long-established literary and philosophical, character. Like dramatists, rhetors tell tragic stories and describe events as tragic; however, they do so in a manner distinct from the manner of the tragedian, for while the dramatist is primarily concerned with creating a work of art that will be experienced as a tragedy, the rhetor is primarily concerned with framing an experience so that it can be accepted as a tragedy and, in that sense, a work of art. Thus, where one literary critic, in keeping with Aristotle, has suggested that poetic mimesis "takes universals and dresses them up with particular names and episodes so as to enable them to play the part that particular people and events normally play in our emotional lives " (Woodruff 1992, 88), we might formalize the corollary to this claim and suggest that mimesis in rhetoric takes particular people and events in the play of our lives and dresses them up with the characteristics of universals. When a rhetor speaks tragedy, or exploits the term to characterize a situation, the event framed by the discourse is never the immediate creation of the rhetor, but instead involves an actual "burned-out family, a broken career, a smash on the road" (Williams 1967, 13–14). Thus, while we might think of the tragic poet as an inventor who imagines actions that "resemble particular patterns or possible relations among events in reality" (Freeland 1992, 117), we should keep in mind that the rhetor's events are real; a fact that gives the performance of tragic rhetoric a unique character, one that requires a delicate balance between tragedy's imaginative aesthetics and the practical, eventful circumstances of public life under which it is appropriate to apply them. The art of rhetorical tragedy is no simple one, and it does not arise on every occasion that "bad things" happen. Small misfortunes framed as tragedies appear melodramatic, even comic; while the tragic framing of scandalous events often seems blasphemous. It is for such reasons that artful rhetors, who are sensitive to these and other subtleties, typically bring forth tragic characterizations only on appropriate occasions. Roosevelt, for example, initially calls Pearl Harbor infamy, treachery, and a dastardly attack (1941)—at no point does he call it a tragedy. His sensitivity to the relationship between the event and the language that might be used to describe it offers a direction to those who would investigate the rhetorical character of such words; a reminder that rhetorical analysis, unlike literary criticism, always bears responsibilities that exceed the formal features of the work itself— responsibilities that arise from the circumstances of the speech and the circumstances that a rhetor would bring forth for a people. These broader responsibilities, it should be understood, make a rhetor's assignment not only a criticism, but more genuinely a rhetorical anthropology¹ —an attempt to uncover the meaning of a text through examining its emergence from and investment back into the human experience from which it arises, but also an attempt to uncover the human experience by uncovering the existential meaning of texts. On this occasion, the author intends to reveal something fundamental about the character of tragic rhetoric through a disclosure of some part of its human situation, understood as the phenomenology of the disaster, believing that, to the extent that the phenomenological disaster is uncovered, the relation between tragedy and rhetoric will be illuminated.

The lack of literature concerned with rhetorical tragedy has much to do with conservative tendencies within the philosophy of literary form, for which Aristotle's Poetics has been the Archimidean point since it resurfaced from comparative obscurity in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the greater part of structural and functional analysis...