The Seduction of Samuel Butler: Rhetorical Agency and the Art of Response

Abstract

Using the Victorian writer Samuel Butler's response to Darwin's Origin of Species as an example, I argue for a method of reading characterized by the process of fascination and seduction. Such an antimethodical method not only requires a different kind of agency on the part of the reader, but it also resituates rhetoric as an art of response to the dynamic flux of the communicating world.

Notes

¹Thanks to RR reviewers Barbara Warnick and James Zappen for their helpful feedback and suggestions for improving this draft; thanks also to Jack Selzer, who provided valuable encouragement and help on very early versions of the article.

²In this review John Muckelbauer brings up the question of ethics raised by “rhetoric of X” projects, questions that are present but not explicit in Gaonkar's disciplinary mapping: “Through such analyses, any object of study whatsoever (regardless of whether it is an artifact, a practice, or a field of study) can be shown to be irreducibly immersed in, or even constituted by, rhetorical dynamics. Yet, rather than raise familiar questions about the appropriate size of rhetoric or about whether rhetoric is truly a productive or hermeneutic endeavor, this tendency might also raise questions about the ethics of rhetoric's disciplinary existence. In short, this tendency toward ‘the rhetoric of X’ might raise questions about the appropriating, even colonizing inclinations of this characteristic rhetorical move” (902).

³It is important to note here that Gaonkar, who calls Campbell “indisputably one of the best critics in the field,” also points out that Campbell's later essays on Darwin show a move away from this exclusive privileging of rhetorical consciousness and more toward an interest in the “intertextual dynamics out of which the Origin emerged” (52).

⁴Sue V. Rosser, for instance, characterizes Darwin's sexual selection as an “androcentric” phenomenon, arguing that “[t]he theory of sexual selection reflected and reinforced Victorian social norms regarding the sexes” (qtd. in Grosz 33).

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. 1872. New York: AMS, 1968. Reprint of Vol. 2 of The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler. Ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew. 20 vols. 1923–26.

Butler, Samuel. Life and Habit. 1877. York: AMS, 1968. Reprint of Vol. 4 of The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler. Ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew. 20 vols. 1923–26.