Back to the Future: Rhetorical Studies for an Old/New Age

In the words of Faulkner, "the past is never dead, it is not even past." This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where "he" stands; and "his" standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which "his" constant fighting, "his" making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence. ¹

Hannah Arendt

When I read Marty Medhurst's essay, I was, strangely, reminded of Hannah Arendt's observation about the relationship between past, present, and future. In the essay, Professor Medhurst attempts to stand in the present, looking back to interpret the past and looking forward to project the future. Poised in this critical and unstable juncture between the known past and the unknowable future, Medhurst grapples with making meaning of the history of our discipline while he looks forward to suggest directions for us to follow. The history he provides, of course, becomes the lens through which he sees the future.

While I do not disagree with any of the "facts" Medhurst presents, I do have concerns with his projections for the future. To my mind, his creation of a history for the discipline both imposes order where there is none and, at the same time, offers a pattern for the future that may jeopardize our status as a discipline. Let me make my argument by considering the history Marty depicts and then explaining my reservations about the future he envisions.

The Past as Prologue

As we all know, historians construct the story of the past, using facts and details to flesh out a perspective. Hayden White develops a useful distinction between kinds of historical narratives:

And their [Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Braudel] example permits us to distinguish between a historical discourse that narrates and a discourse that narrativizes, between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak for itself and speak itself as a story. ²

In an earlier work, White makes clear that no history lacks a perspective, even an ideology. He contends that all historical narratives, consciously or unconsciously, have a mode of emplotment, which he describes using Northrop Frye's four categories from Anatomy of Criticism. ³ Without going through all four plot types (many readers may know those already), let me focus on the romance, which I believe to be the tenor of Medhurst's history.

According to White, the romance involves "the hero's transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it. . . . It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness." ⁴ Romance embodies, then, an optimistic perspective. It features triumph over adversity, new order from disorder. This description fits perfectly the history of our discipline presented here and elsewhere.

Although my graduate students who read Wichelns's essay never saw it as a movement in a drama, Medhurst sees it, fittingly I think, as a declaration of independence that issued a clarion call for rhetorical scholarship. In an earlier essay, ⁵ Medhurst traced the confusions, false starts, and strivings that ensued as scholars sought to find a way to do rhetorical scholarship in the period between Wichelns's essay and Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. ⁶ That essay reflects, then, the struggles and perils of our hero, Rhetorical Studies, as it seeks to define itself and find the...