-
6. Consider the Audience Witnessing to the Discursive Reader in Douglass’s Narrative
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6. Consider the Audience Witnessing to the Discursive Reader in Douglass’s Narrative It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and another to hear. —Henry David Thoreau This chapter brings together some of the concerns discussed in the preceding ones by recasting, in terms that are most familiar to my readers, the discursive terrain into which the slave narrator enters to give his or her testimony. That is, I consider who is the intended reader of the slave’s testimony. The search for this reader leads us not to a particular person or even to a particular community of persons. Rather, this discursive reader, which the slave implies in his or her testimony, is in fact a con- fluence of political, moral, and social discursive concerns that animate, necessitate, and indeed make possible slave testimony itself. In this way, our discursive reader is not altogether unrelated to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.”1 The discursive reader, for the slave witness, is the imagined horizon wherein the pro-slavery advocates (and their arguments for slavery ), the abolitionists (from the sentimental moralists to the staunchly political Garrisonians), and the ongoing debates between these two over slavery (which are characterized by such discursive sites as black humanity, natural rights, the Christian morality of slavery, the treatment of slaves under slavery, etc.) come together as an entity that will be the recipient of the slave’s testimony. Or, put another way, it is this discursive reader who serves as principal witness to the slave witness. 151 By foregrounding the implied profile of the discursive reader in our reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (1845), we call attention to the various rhetorical strategies employed by slave witnesses in telling their “truth” about slavery. I cite Mikhail Bakhtin here in order to sketch a more thorough understanding of how the profiling of the discursive reader might function as a reading practice for testimonial texts: Active understanding . . . , by bringing what is being understood within the new horizon of the understander, establishes a number of complex interrelations, consonances and dissonances with what is being understood, enriches it with new moments . It is precisely this kind of understanding that the speaker takes account of. Therefore his orientation towards the listener is an orientation towards the particular horizon, the particular world of the listener, it introduces completely new moments into his discourse: what takes place here is an interaction of different contexts, different points of view, different horizons, different expressively accented systems, different social “languages.” The speaker seeks to orient his discourse with its own determining horizon within the alien horizon of the understander and enters into dialogic relations with moments of that horizon. The speaker penetrates the alien horizon of the listener, constructs his utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background. (Quoted in Shepherd, 92) If we substitute Bakhtin’s “speaker” with our “witness,” and his “understander” with our “discursive reader,” his utility to our situation comes into focus. The slave witness witnesses not only to individuals but also to the “world of the listener,” his or her discursive milieu. While Bakhtin sees the listener’s world as an 152 Consider the Audience [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:21 GMT) “alien horizon,” I want to press this point and picture it rather as a mixed or hybrid horizon. This is based in the logic that whites’ understanding of slavery functions as public understanding of slavery. Slave experience of slavery, though of great interest to the public, is still “other” to that dominant horizon. That is to say only what racialist logic dictates: Blacks must, for the sake of survival in a racialized context in which they are the oppressed, know whites and their cultural and social logics, while whites are not obliged in the same way to know Blacks. The more aptly the witness accomplishes this speaking to the horizon of the white reader, the more politically effective his or her testimony will be to the cause of abolitionism in this case. I turn here to the most well known and most often discussed of slave narratives, for reasons having to do with its very celebrity . Douglass’s Narrative received a great deal of attention nationally and internationally in its day. Much of this had to do, as scholars have more than demonstrated, with its narrative force and rhetorical sophistication. It must also...