The Ethics of Memoir: Ethos in Uptake

Abstract

In their production and uptake, memoirs grapple with the status of the self and subjectivity as evidentiary fodder for social, cultural, and political concerns. The concept of ethos illuminates memoir’s rhetorical potency and its dubious ethics. Personal experience that subtends memoir serves as a form of persuasion, but it can also be used to overly personalize issues in need of systemic critique. We argue that attending to a memoir’s uptake is one way to contend with the ethical challenges this genre poses. This approach places a memoirist’s ethos—her vision, language, modes of rationality, and ideology—as well as memoir’s varied functions, within larger social, cultural, and political debates. It thereby traces memoirs’ rhetorical power while also enabling critique of their ethical grounding in the “self.” Two case studies illustrate our findings: J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

Keywords:

• ethics
• ethos
• genre
• memoir
• uptake

Acknowledgments

We thank RSQ editor Susan Jarratt and our blind reviewers for their extensive, thoughtful, and generative feedback on this essay.

Notes

¹ For resources on memoir as individual and social, see Gornick; Karr; Schaffer and Smith; Smith and Watson. For work on memoir from rhetorical scholars, see Fleckenstein; Gray-Rosendale; Robillard.

² Post-truth, Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016, is “defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’” (Midgley).

³ Some critics, like Karr, assert memoirists’ responsibility to veracity, or, at least, to marking their perspective as theirs and thus only ever partial. Others, like Couser, find the tensions of “truth-telling” in memoir troubling, inherent to the genre, and possibly unavoidable, despite the memoirist’s best intentions. He writes: “The genre demands a fidelity to truth that may overtax its source and conflict with its aspirations as art” (80). We argue, however, that what memoirs do precisely and potentially productively is complicate the meaning of truth. We do not refer here to blatant distortions of facts and history but rather to memoir’s active (re)construction of meaning and reality on the basis of subjective experience. Memoirs forward the subjective experiences of an individual as a powerful form of “truth” and “reality.” As Fleckenstein observes, “[memoir] inhabits that anomalous realm between the facts of one’s life and truths of one’s life, between the reality of one’s life and memory of one’s life” (7). Astute readers will be attentive to the various constructions and reconstructions of the “truth” and “reality” that a particular memoir constructs rather than concerned with its actual “truth” value.

⁴ The contrasting uptake of these memoirs in university reading programs highlights this difference. In “Rebel Yale: Reading and Feeling ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’” Dore, Connor, and Sinykin note that “no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga).” The authors argue that this uptake indexes the memoirs’ rhetorical appeal along racial and ideological lines: “Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance’s book.” Put bluntly, educators in red states might want to adopt Hillbilly Elegy to persuade conservatives to look elsewhere for budget cuts.