Commentary on Excerpt A

Excerpt A is dominated by Frank's account--as yet unchallenged. The question I want to address here is how it ought to have been "read." Does it "hang together" as narrative? Is it truthful or sincere? What does it tell us about Frank's judgment in this case? How might a reconstructive rhetoric (of the kind I proposed) address these issues?

By one reading--let us call it a hermeneutics of collaboration--Frank's account is truthful, narratively coherent, and arguably reasonable. Credulity is warranted in part because it concedes wrongdoing ("...while this was true, and I guess it really was true"), but also because the dramatistic elements of scene, act, agent, agency and purpose hang together (Burke, 1969). Haltingly, as though attempting to recover all of the complex thought processes leading up to the decision to capture Laura on tape, Frank presents a history that is not terribly flattering but is at the least believable. Sick in bed, his thoughts "precipitating out," the tape recorder already in his hands, he inches toward what will become the impulsive fatal plunge of the "record" button. The object was to mirror on tape the landscape of his relationship with Laura; in that metaphoric sense, the long anecdote about Coleridge and his son is perfectly explicable. Moreover the taping is solely for their private consumption. Dave may disagree with Frank's attempted justifications--in fact he does--but now they can discuss their differences in a reasoned and reasonable manner.

By another reading--let us call it a hermeneutics of suspicion--not just Frank's account, but all ethical justifications, are not to be trusted. From Nietzsche through contemporary deconstructionism, the self as autonomous moral agent has come to be viewed with increasing skepticism. The dominant ethical doctrine of our age, says MacIntyre (1981), is the doctrine of emotivism. As articulated by C.L. Stevenson (1944), it is the doctrine that all moral arguments are necessarily without rational foundation, and hence that every prescriptive claim is merely am expression of feelings or of preference for one state of affairs over another. "Emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations," says MacIntyre. As reflected in the writings of Erving Goffman (1959; 1969), for example, humans are mere game players striving always for effective impression management in a world emptied of objective standards for assessing moral worth.

Viewed from a Goffmanian perspective, Frank's account is patently deceptive and self-serving, a veritable grab-bag of available excuses and justifications (Scott & Lyman, 1968; Potter & Wetherill, 1987). Presented throughout is a passive self: its mind saturated, its thoughts slow, meandering and precipitously out of control. In this way Frank the account-giver seeks to distance himself from Frank the accused miscreant--constructing, in effect, a second self, one that ought not to have been treated too severely because it was, after all, a sickly, childlike, unknowing and uncomprehending self, and one that was not, in any case, the good and able person providing the account. The lengths to which Frank was prepared to go to avoid responsibility for his act are revealed by such awkward phrases as "the conversation she had ensuing." Viewed in that context, Frank's self-described generosity--his having been moved "to make a message for Laura"--is clearly disingenuous, and the Coleridge anecdote is an interesting but essentially irrelevant diversion. Moreover, Frank's concession to Laura ("while this was true, and it really was true") is all but undone by his subsequent insistence that no harm was intended or done ("solely for our private conversation"; "nothing other than a record of what passed between us").

From my own reconstructive rhetorical perspective, the "truths" of the two opposed hermeneutics are not entirely incompatible. Rather, in Burkeian terms (1969), they are "subcertainties" that can be bridged dialectically. Viewed dialectically, the deconstructive critique of Frank's account ("passive self," "disingenuous," "irrelevant") is unwitting testimony to the ineliminability, even in a postmodern age, of such antonyms as autonomous self, honesty, and relevance. Derrida (19 ) himself concedes that "we cannot utter a single destructive (or contestatory) proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest."

The foregoing analysis suggests the need for a dialogic rhetoric in which the voices of the hypercharitable and hyperskeptical hermeneutists are placed, as it were, in conversation. While the hermeneutics of participation is too charitable, the hermeneutics of suspicion is too critical. Neither allows for the possibility, for example, that Frank's account might have been (alternatively or at different levels) sincere and strategically self-serving, abjectly regretful and defensive--an example, in LaCapra's (1984) terms, of an "epideictic of ambivalence."