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5 DAV I D S E DA R I S Expanding Epideictic—A rhetoric of Indirection My writing is just a desperate attempt to get laughs. If you get anything else out of it, it’s an accident. David Sedaris in Berquist, 2000 Given that we are vulnerable to the address of others in ways that we cannot fully control, no more than we can control the sphere of language, does this mean that we are without agency and without responsibility? Butler, 2005 David Sedaris would likely be bemused to know that anyone considers him a rhetorician, much less a purveyor of alternative rhetoric. As the opening epigraph indicates, Sedaris steadfastly refuses to claim his work has any purpose other than humor. Thus, from the outset I must acknowledge that Sedaris is not compelled to speak out against injustice in the same ways as Grimké, Douglass, or Anzaldúa. He is much less direct than the other three authors in using his experiences with marginalization to expose fault lines of difference and discrimination in American society. Yet even a casual reader of Sedaris’s work could hardly miss that Sedaris needs to write; he is unabashed about his desire for attention, but more to the point, his writing serves as a means for him to make sense of life and culture on a daily basis. He is an avid, perhaps even compulsive, diary writer, writing every day and filling four diaries a year, which he has professionally bound.1 However, Sedaris’s popularity as an essay writer for such periodicals as The New Yorker, GQ, and Esquire, and as a best-selling memoirist, depends on more than just his wit and his desire for attention. Without seeming to do so, Sedaris provides keen cultural insights that parse problematic cultural values without engaging in heavy-handed deconstruction. Further, as the Butler epigraph suggests, Sedaris cannot fully control the ways in which he is read, even 1. For more on this, see Bergquist (2000). David Sedaris 163 if he claims that getting anything other than laughs out of his writing is an accident. Indeed, in this chapter, I use my own and others’ readings of Sedaris’s writing to illustrate that the answers to the questions Butler poses here are yes and yes. That is, despite his inability to control how he is read, Sedaris does exercise agency (beyond his humorous intent), and his writing puts both himself as author and his readers into a relationship of responsibility that can be usefully examined in the service of deconstructing the usual conceptions of Truth and morality. Sedaris cannot be seen as explicitly seeking to expand the rhetorical canon for the academy or as directly attempting to unsettle problematic cultural values, although his memoir writing can be read as having these effects. In fact, as I argue later in this chapter, Sedaris engages in what I call a rhetoric of indirection, and, in this sense, he provides an interesting counterpoint to Grimké, Douglass, and Anzaldúa because he does not explicitly attempt to change cultural values. However, as I argue in the next section of this chapter, he can be read as expanding the canon of rhetorical practice if one reads him in the light of calls for an expanded understanding of epideictic rhetoric in the last twenty years, and his work can also be read as engaging in nearly as great a range of difference issues as Anzaldúa’s work does, but Sedaris’s approach is decidedly different. In one sense, he is more successful than any of the other three writers in creating the copresence of the other without falling into the potential subalternity trap of reifying the problematic binary values usually entailed in those differences, in part because he simply refuses to take his work seriously, even though I argue that his writing does serious work. Sedaris first garnered national attention in the early 1990s when Ira Glass asked him to read his “SantaLand Diaries” (1994) for Morning Edition on National Public Radio. Although Sedaris now refuses to read from “SantaLand Diaries” because he considers it poorly written (Bergquist 2000, 55), this exposure led to the publication in 1994 of Barrel Fever, a collection of short stories and memoir pieces and, eventually , to a four-book deal with Little, Brown and Company which, in turn, resulted in four best-selling books of memoir: Naked (1997b), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim (2004), and...

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