The ethos of drama: rhetorical theory and dramatic worth

4. Memory and Ethos

131 C h a p t e r 4 Memory and Ethos In his valuable, comprehensive survey of memory in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, William N. West notes “the vagueness of its role in rhetoric,” yet other summary comments of his broaden an understanding of memory beyond its use as a mnemonic to a rhetorical place with clear theoretical applications to narrators in plays by Tennessee Williams, Brian Friel, to the autobiographical Hally in Fugard’s “Master Harold” ... and the boys, and to the collective, reconstructed memories of the three historical characters in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Beginning in classical times, West writes, “memory serves as the locus of personal history and individual identity”; in its “nature,” it has “unmatched rhetorical force as authentic knowledge [and] continue[s] to be in the forefront of contemporary cultural concerns .” In our time, “authentic knowledge” still provides the ethical ground for persuasive “individual identity” which in turn makes a “personal history” credible. West’s summary of the Rhetorica ad Herennium on a speaker’s use of memory applies in almost all its particulars to autobiographical plays in performance and could stand as epigraph to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: V 132   Memory and Ethos Creating one’s own memory images further anchored personal identity in the faculty of memory; it required that one combine private fantasies, perceptual stimuli, and intense feeling in a mental experience that was simultaneously physical, sensual and emotional.1 The title refers to the figurines collected by Laura, the sister of Tom Wingfield. With a slight, but decided limp, she is withdrawn , an object of concern to her mother, Amanda, a faded belle who hopes that the play’s fourth character, The Gentleman Caller, will prove a suitable beau for Laura. Amanda’s affectations , Tom’s dead end job, and Laura’s insecurity—all of them aspects of Williams’s own life—frustrate the apprentice writer who finally chooses career aspirations over family. As the playwright’s narrator and surrogate, Tom instructs the audience in his opening monologue that “The play is memory ,” and he asserts that its pathos (“intense feeling”) follows as a direct effect from that cause: “Being a memory play ... it is sentimental.”2 To identify with Tom emotionally the audience must trust him, and Williams carefully works to establish his character’s ethos and the play’s from the outset. In the first moments of the play, Tom “addresses the audience” with a flat statement designed to establish his good character from the noblest of motives; unlike the “stage magician,” he says, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (1.144). In the same speech, he tries to add a deeper dimension of credibility to his character; as a poet, he presumably will offer subtle insights from a penetrating, complex point of view. Because his disclosure is mildly self-deprecating (“I have a poet’s weakness for symbols”), the audience is expected to identify with his modest “weakness,” a coyly disingenuous claim, and to trust him as 1. William West, “Memory,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed.Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 483, 484, 486. 2. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams , vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1990), sc. 1.145. Textual references are to scene and page numbers of this edition. Memory and Ethos   133 a guide to the meaning of illusion and symbol. But Williams’s stage illusions broadcast single meanings; stock symbols declare their significance, and the poetic elements in Tom’s style are as heavy-handed and patronizing as his declaration that he gives us the truth. In explaining the Gentleman Caller’s role, Tom’s voice merges with the playwright’s: “I am using this character as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for” (1.145). These lines belong more properly in a dramaturge’s notebook; they interpret the significance of the character before he appears, and the contrast between The Glass Menagerie and plays that progress toward a similar , unstated meaning—notably Waiting for Godot and The Three Sisters—could hardly be sharper. If, in Pound’s formulation for an image, a symbol is an emotional-intellectual complex, then forecasting the intellectual component, the meaning, breaks down its integrity and undermines its potential for emotional impact. Further, in identifying the character as a symbol, Williams—contrary...