Searching for a Rhetoric of Resiliency

What in these desponding days can be done by us?

—R.W. Emerson, "Divinity School Address," 1838

These are not easy days to be a rhetorical critic. Last June, government scientists revised upward their estimates of the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the exploded Deepwater well: nearly 2.5 million gallons per day. The impact on shorelines, wildlife, and the livelihoods of thousands of people will be catastrophic. Writing about President Obama's June 15, 2010, speech from the Oval Office, in which he addressed the crisis in the Gulf, Maureen Dowd asked with apparent seriousness, "[D]o words really matter when the picture of oil gushing out of the well continues to fill the screen?"¹ These are not easy days to be a rhetorical critic.

President Barack Obama's election was said to usher in, among other things, the elevation of our political discourse, the recovery of a public rhetoric that, as Emerson wrote, might match our rituals. The president cannot be faulted for lack of effort. But who could foresee that a well some 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface would explode, that the Great Recession would continue unabated, that two shooting wars would rage unchecked overseas? In the throes of this seeming despondency, do words really matter? I pose the second question to recall the inextricable relationship between loss and our shared democratic lives. Danielle Allen put that relationship this way: "A democracy needs forms for responding to loss that make it nonetheless worthwhile or reasonable for citizens who have lost in one particular moment to trust the polity—the government and their fellow citizens—for the future."² It is not oil or war or real estate but loss that unites us all. And loss is painful. And the forms—words—by which to rebuild the trust crumbling around us almost daily, leaves falling in autumn, have perhaps never been more urgent. Yet our responses have perhaps never been found more wanting.

The subjects of the books reviewed here all knew something about loss. Consider these vignettes: Strolling through downtown Atlanta toward a much-anticipated interview with a local newspaper editor, W. E. B Du Bois saw displayed in a grocer's window a man's knuckles, the remnants of a lynch mob's work. The professor turned on his heel and retreated home, unable to banish from his mind the horror he had witnessed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton furiously wrote essays and speeches on the rights of women. Taunted by housework and the amorous clamoring of seven children, burdened by a husband more hapless than helpful, she pleaded to her dearest friend, "Men and angels give me patience! I am at the boiling point! … If I do not find some day the use of my tongue on this question, I shall die of an intellectual repression, a woman's rights convulsion!" (as quoted in Ginzberg, 91). A prolific writer whose earliest works celebrated individuals' intuitive creativity, Ralph Waldo Emerson never stopped mourning the death of his son. In the essay "Experience," the optimistic father darkly lamented,

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more.… [I]t does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar.³

Loss unites us all. Perhaps the loss I feel is for the courage, verve, and grace that characterized the efforts of Du Bois, Stanton, and Emerson as each wrestled to articulate responses to complex questions of race, gender...