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ABSTRACT
Recent investigations of the communicative challenges posed by mental illness offer opportunities for exploring how tacit philosophies of communication and ontologies inform how sufferers of depression frame their experience as a lack in the ability to communicate meaningfully with others. I read William Styron’s memoir about depression as a response to what rhetorical scholars call rhetorical disability to help facilitate insights into tacit philosophies of communication in the text that become explicit as Styron narrates breakdowns in the signifying power of language. A tone of rhetorical dissociation characterizes his memoir as he employs both biomedical diagnostic discourses to make sense of his immediate existential situation as well as figurative and metaphorical passages to convey these extraverbal experiences to nondisordered audiences. This rhetorical style reveals a parallel tension between representational and constitutive views of language within communicative praxis. Exploring how Styron narrates his inability to communicate his experience to others as a moment of rupture in communicative praxis helps illuminate interconnections between moods, ontology, and communicative praxis more generally.
Notes
1 Gary Brent Madison, “Being and Speaking.” In Beyond the Symbol Model: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language, ed. John Stewart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 77.
2 See for instance, the critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
3 Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003).
4 William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990).
5 C. S. King, “Blue Notes,” New Statesman & Society 4, no. 141 (1991): 37.
6 Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father: A Memoir (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2012), 9–10.
7 James Atlas, “The Age of the Literary Memoir Is Now,” New York Times, May 12, 1996.
8 Katie Rose Guest Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 5 (2010): 479–501.
9 Ibid., 480.
10 Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993).
11 Kim Hensley Owens, “Confronting Rhetorical Disability: A Critical Analysis of Women’s Birth Plans,” Written Communication 26, no. 3 (2008): 247–72.
12 Any discussion of pain and communication must mention Elaine Scarry, who argues that pain actively destroys language, thus isolating the person in pain from others. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1987).
13 Cathrine Prendergast, “On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability.” In Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse, ed. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 202.
14 Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, “Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities,” Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 156–67.
15 Jenell Johnson, “The Skeleton on the Couch: The Eagleton Affair, Rhetorical Disability, and the Stigma of Mental Illness,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 5 (2010): 461.
16 Pryal, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability,” 480.
17 Johnson, “The Skeleton on the Couch,” 462.
18 Cathryn Molloy, “Recuperative Ethos and Agile Epistemologies: Toward a Vernacular Engagement with Mental Illness Ontologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015): 138–63.
19 Pryal, “The Genre of Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability,” 479–501.
20 John Stewart, ed., Beyond the Symbol Model: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 15.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 33.
23 Ibid., 11.
24 Ibid., 41.
25 Corey Anton, “Beyond the Constitutive-Representational Dichotomy: The Phenomenological Notion of Intentionality,” Communication Theory 9, no. 1 (1999): 26–57; “Discourse as Care: A Phenomenological Consideration of Spatiality and Temporality,” Human Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 185–205; “Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy: On the Origins of Representational Theorizing.” In Communication Uncovered: General Semantics and Media Ecology (Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2011), 93–112.
26 Anton, “Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy,” 93.
27 Anton, “Beyond the Constitutive-Representational Dichotomy,” 36.
28 Anton, “Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy,” 110.
29 Calvin O. Schrag, Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
30 Ibid., 18.
31 In Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), the authors assert that all rhetorical dissociation is rooted in the conceptual dissociation between “appearance and reality” where appearance is cast as subordinate to “reality” (415–17).
32 Ibid., 117.
33 Ibid., 415.
34 Carol Iannone, “Darkness Visible, by William Styron,” Commentary, November 1, 1990, 54.
35 Michiko Kakutani, “Primo Levi and the Ghosts of Auschwitz,” New York Times, December 12, 1989.
36 Stewart Kellerman, “Shadow of Auschwitz on Primo Levi’s Life,” New York Times, November 26, 1988.
37 Cited in Alexander Stille, “Primo Levi: Reconciling the Man and the Writer,” New York Times, July 5, 1987.
38 James L. W. West, William Styron: A Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 451.
39 William Styron, “Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died,” New York Times, December 19, 1988.
40 Ibid.
41 Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1998); Robert Whitaker, “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 7, no. 1 (2005): 23–35.
42 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1968), 40.
43 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1981), 220–21.
44 Mitchell Wilson, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150, no. 3 (1993): 405.
45 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), 70.
46 Schrag, Existence and Freedom, 18.
47 Michael J. Hyde, “The Experience of Anxiety: A Phenomenological Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 2 (1980): 142.
48 T.M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry (London: Picador, 2001), 275.
49 Styron, Darkness Visible, 1.
50 Ibid., 40.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 41.
53 Ibid., 61–62.
54 Ibid, 62.
55 Ibid., 43.
56 Ibid., 42.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 43.
59 Ibid., 50.
60 Einat Avrahami, The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 9.
61 For the communicative aspects of breakdown consider ibid., 7.
62 Arthur W. Frank, “Metaphors of Pain,” Literature and Medicine 29, no. 1 (2011): 193.
63 Styron, Darkness Visible, 36.
64 Ibid., 37.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 38.
68 Ibid., 19, 17, 64, 46, 60, and 17, respectively.
69 Ibid., 37.
70 Ibid., 25.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 38.
73 Ibid., 9.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 44–47.
76 Ibid., 44.
77 Ibid., 15.
78 Frank, cited in James A. Marcum, An Introductory Philosophy of Medicine: Humanizing Modern Medicine (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2008), 52.
79 Alistair MacIntyre, “Medicine Aimed at the Care of Persons Rather than What?” in Changing Values in Medicine: Papers Delivered at the Conference on Changing Values in Medicine, Cornell Univ. Medical College, New York City, Nov. 11–13, 1979, ed. Eric J. Cassell and Mark Siegler (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985), 90.
80 Styron, Darkness Visible, 16–17.
81 For more on literature as equipment for living, see Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Vintage, 1957).
82 For an articulation of the transmission model and a case for its pervasiveness as a dominant paradigm, see James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2009); Lee Thayer, On Communication: Essays in Understanding (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1987).
83 For more on the philosophical uses of bodily breakdown see, Havi Carel, “The Philosophical Role of Illness,” Metaphilosophy 45, no. 1 (2014): 20–40.
84 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Penguin, 1967), 188.