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6 # Appeals to the Body

In the last chapter, we saw how the “Cracker” ecologist Janisse Ray com- bines appeals to place with appeals to the human body, personifying the disappearing pine forest as an abused baby, a victim. This rhetoric follows a well-established tradition in nature writing.

In the 1962 environmentalist classic Silent Spring, for example, Rachel Carson argues that human health depends upon the “health of the land- scape”; pesticides and industrial pollution produce, in her words, “scars of dead vegetation,” leaving trees with a “weeping appearance” (69, 70, 71). And, just as the earth’s “body” experiences health and illness like our own, so our bodies share cycles and chemical interactions with the earth: “There is also an ecology of the world within our own bodies” (170).1

Similar personifications appear in “Thinking Like a Mountain,” a com- panion essay to Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” in A Sand County Al- manac. Leopold urges readers to resist the short-term thinking of ranch- ers who kill wolves to protect their herds and increase deer populations on their land. Ultimately such practices unbalance the ecology, leaving more deer than the land can support. The deer strip the mountainsides of vegetation, destroying their own food supplies and driving themselves into starvation. From the vantage point of the mountain—a personification of ecological awareness, the habit of “thinking like a mountain”—the big pic- ture unfolds that deer and men ordinarily cannot see in their headlong pursuit of short-term goals (Leopold 129–33). The adoption of the per- sonifying strategy in environmental rhetoric makes perfect sense accord- ing to the logic of Leopold’s “Land Ethic.” It extends to the land the rhetoric traditionally used to promote the rights of man and woman.

Throughout the history of rhetoric, appeals to the body have been as- sociated with the ideals—and the shortcomings—of democracy. Demo- cratic philosophers, poets, and politicians have appealed to the common experience of the body to argue for the fundamental kinship and equality of all people. This approach has often earned them the contempt of op- ponents. In ancient Greece, the politically conservative Plato portrayed the rhetoric of his democratic competitors in Athenian education as a low art, fit only for confusing the minds and firing the emotions of the rising masses. In modern times, the critic and historian Daniel Boorstin, in the same spirit, has belittled rhetoric by associating it with advertising and shallow image- oriented politics, which he calls the “rhetoric of democracy.” This dismiss-

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 5 . S o u t h e r n I l l i n o i s U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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Appeals to the Body $ 69

ive attitude recalls Marshall McLuhan’s bemused commentary on adver- tising as the science of man embracing woman—which brings us back to my starting place for thinking about modern rhetoric as an art of appeals: the old ads for a brand of toothpaste that supposedly increases the user’s “sex appeal.”

Without accepting the elitist position on the failings of rhetoric and democracy—or for that matter, of advertising—this chapter is an invita- tion to take a closer look at this mainstay of mass rhetoric: appeals to the body.2 It’s important to keep in mind two points about this category of appeals that we will develop as we go:

1. Appeals to the body are contextually determined and are rarely as simple as they seem but usually work in combination with other appeals to suggest complex understandings of values.

2. Any approach to value may well begin with a valuation of the body so that appeals to the body are not merely a useful approach but an essential element in any effective communication.

In connection with appeals to the body, we will also consider two grand themes of modern writing: the problem of human suffering and the near obsession in modern times with power.

The Body Politic

Try this experiment: spend thirty minutes watching television or listen- ing to commercial radio and make a list of the products advertised and the basic approach of each ad—noting especially those that mention food, sex, or health. You’ll probably find that a significant number of ads have to do with products dealing with eating, drinking, or digestion: restaurants, pizza, cereal, snacks, coffee, beer, soda, antacids, laxatives, and so on. Most other ads will appeal to your desire to be free from illness and well groomed or otherwise attractive. Often these types combine: Drink our low-calorie beer so you can feel good and look good while you quench your thirst and have sex with beautiful partners.

It’s all too easy to conclude from such an experiment that Americans are materialistic and obsessed with their bodies. They eat too much, drink unwisely, and then pay the price for indulgence in worrying about their digestive health and their appearance. Am I too fat? Do I have bad breath? Am I sick?

But think about the television audience—as objectively as you can, let- ting go of any tendency you may feel toward moral superiority or defensive- ness about TV culture—the one certain thing we could say about viewers

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70 # Appeals to the Body

on any given day is that they represent a very wide variety of people. Given this diversity, what are the advertisers’ options for appealing to them, espe- cially if they have only a minute or two to capture their quick-to-wander attention? One thing they can count on is that all these people have bod- ies to care for and worry about. They have to eat and perform vital func- tions, and they are likely beset by sex drives and the attendant anxieties.

If not morally commendable, the appeal to the body in advertising is at least understandable. Moreover, advertising is not the only branch of discourse to have solved the rhetorical problem of the mass audience by appealing to the body.

Consider, for example, the case of Walt Whitman, who has a stronger claim than perhaps any other nineteenth-century American poet on hav- ing anticipated the extreme modernism of the twentieth century. Whitman invented free verse, championed free speech, claimed to represent the com- mon working people of his day, and tried to cut all ties to European high culture and become the New World poet of democracy. Writing in a new age of near-universal literacy in which innovative printing and paper tech- nologies made possible the penny press and the dime novel, Whitman worked as a journalist and magazine story-writer before he settled into his vocation as a poet. He was intimately acquainted with the advertising, shameless self-promotion, sensationalism, and constant political scuffling that characterized the early efforts of the mass media to capture the at- tention of the great democratic masses—an audience wider and more var- ied than history had yet seen. No wonder that to the high-minded Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired Whitman’s power but worried about his taste, Whitman’s poetry seemed to mix the mysticism of the Bhagavad Gita with the rowdyism of the New York Tribune.

Whitman was committed to democratic ideals and to the free expres- sion of what he called “the poetry of the body.” In “Song of Myself,” a key poem in every edition of his famous compendium Leaves of Grass, the poet says he will “speak the pass-word primeval” and “give the sign of democ- racy” (48). And he makes the crucial connection between democracy and the body. He proclaims, “I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul” (45), refusing to accept the traditional poetic hierarchy that would set spiritual matters on a higher plane than merely physical life. In lines designed to shock his Victorian readers out of their middle-class compla- cency, he said such things as “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from / The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” (49). The poet of democracy can be no sentimentalist or prude, he insists:

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I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and

heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and

tag of me is a miracle. (48–49)

To see how Whitman enlists appeals to the body into the service of his political ideals, consider a passage from another poem composed before the Civil War and later titled “I Sing the Body Electric.” The scene is a south- ern slave market: “A man’s body at auction.” The poet imagines taking the place of the auctioneer, disgusted because “the sloven does not half know his business”:

Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough

for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without

one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain, In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not

flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood, The same old blood! the same red-running blood! There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires,

reachings, aspirations, (Do you think they are not there because they are not

express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

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72 # Appeals to the Body

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments

and enjoyments. (Leaves 85–86)

Whitman takes the reader of his day out of the “parlors and lecture-rooms,” the comfortable abodes of the literate class where the “slave question” gets discussed, and urges them to look at slavery in the very places where it thrives—the auction block of the slave market. The man on the block has a body just like you, he says. Brain, blood, nerve, and tendon, the body is a real thing, not an abstraction—and it is beautiful. It is the product of long eons of evolution and holds the promise of future generations: “this [is] the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns.” And regardless of what you may think about race, this is your human brother who shares the “same old blood” and feels the same “passions, desires, reachings, aspi- rations.” Past and future coalesce in this present moment: the sale of a human body. The slave trader does not “know his business” in more senses than one. His business attempts to put a money value on a human being who is priceless.

Whitman thus combines an appeal to time—“the quintillions of years” and “revolving cycles” contained in the present moment, the future of “populous states and rich republics”—with appeals to place (come out of the lecture room, he says, and see the moral horror and the wasted beauty of the slave market) and the body—the beautiful means of human achieve- ment, the focal point of human kinship. The slave is not an object or an animal, but a son and father.

Whitman was participating in what amounted to a new valuation of the body that followed the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and America.3 The breaking down of the old human hierarchies of race and class required people to take a new look at the so-called Great Chain of Being, the concept that placed human beings on a scale a little below God and the angels but above the animals that were, in their turn, above the plants and simpler living things. In this system of values, inherited from the ancients, human beings had a claim to a higher position than animals because of the human soul, said to be lacking in the lower beings. Plato, for example, had represented the hu- man condition in his dialogue Phaedrus as a chariot-driver struggling with two horses. The driver strives to let the soul take the lead, the noble horse that pulls him toward heaven, while restraining the troublesome horse that pulls him earthward—suggesting the body and the emotions. Within the

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broad category of human being, the tendency was to suggest that the class system replicated the Great Chain, with aristocrats, artists, and intellec- tuals lording over workers, peasants, and slaves, who were said to be “little better than the animals.” Those who were fit only to work with their bod- ies in the Platonic scheme lost touch with the human soul that distinguished them from the animals.

By proclaiming himself the poet of the body as well as the poet of the soul, Whitman was leveling the traditional hierarchy. For Whitman, equality in human relations meant forgoing appeals to the soul in favor of a body- awareness that stressed the kinship of all human beings. Working people did not have the luxury of concentrating on their souls and pursuing the spiritual gifts of art, literature, and anything more than the roughest reli- gious forms. But they shared with everyone else human feelings and the experience of joy and suffering that came from a conscious mind—the “all- baffling brain”—in a sensitive body.

Though no doubt Whitman would have kept intact the idea that hu- mans are superior to animals, he obviously thought about that difference too. In some ways, the animals are superior to us, he suggested. “I think I could turn and live with animals,” he says in Leaves of Grass, “they are so placid and self-contain’d”: “They do not sweat and whine about their con- dition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” The animals are perhaps the best democrats, after all: “Not one kneels to an- other, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago” (54).

In these whimsical thoughts, Whitman anticipated the animal rights movement of the late twentieth century. His words remind me of an ex- perience I had with my daughter once in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when she was a little girl about ten years old. We went to a fast-food restaurant for breakfast and ran into a protest for animal rights. Years later, after she had decided to become a vegetarian, we remembered one of the posters the protesters carried. In an appeal to the body for the kinship of all animal beings, the sign said, “Never eat anything with a face.”

The Body Impoverished

The appeals to the body and the democratic rhetoric we see in Whitman take on a special urgency in the literature of reform. The social realist writ- ers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath join investigative journalists in our own time in dramatizing the conditions of the poor for an audience of more affluent readers who are perhaps unaware of the nature and degree of suffering in the lives of the rural and inner-city poor. Appeals to the shared experience of the body

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74 # Appeals to the Body

often combine with appeals to place designed to raise the awareness of readers who enjoy good health and prosperity in the best neighborhoods of the city and suburbs.

A good example appears in the work of the contemporary journalist Jonathan Kozol, who has spent his entire career calling attention to the plight of poor children in the United States. Consider this passage describ- ing life in a South Bronx neighborhood, from his book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation:

Depression is common among children in Mott Haven. Many cry a great deal but cannot explain exactly why.

Fear and anxiety are common. Many cannot sleep. Asthma is the most common illness among children here. Many

have to struggle to take in a good deep breath. Some mothers keep oxygen tanks, which children describe as “breathing machines,” next to their children’s beds.

The houses in which these children live, two thirds of which are owned by the City of New York, are often as squalid as the houses of the poorest children I have visited in rural Mississippi, but there is none of the greenness and the healing sweetness of the Mississippi countryside outside their windows, which are often barred and bolted as protection against thieves.

Some of the houses are freezing in the winter. In dangerously cold weather, the city sometimes distributes electric blankets and space heaters to its tenants. In emergency conditions, if space heaters can’t be used, because substandard wiring is overloaded, the city’s practice is to pass out sleeping bags.

“You just cover up . . . and hope you wake up the next morning,” says a father of four children, one of them an infant one month old, as they prepare to climb into their sleeping bags in hats and coats on a December night. (4–5)

A sense of being trapped prevails in the passage and gives it rhetorical unity. It is too dangerous for the children to go outside and play the way their counterparts among the rural poor can do. Their windows are bolted and barred, imprisoning them in their own homes—which are not their own after all but merely a place the city provides (and to some extent, neglects). Even if they could go outside, there is only more squalor, none of “the greenness and healing sweetness” of a countryside home. The city is a trap, and so is the home. You can freeze to death in your own bed. Disease pur- sues you. Who can read the sentence about asthma without inhaling deeply and being thankful for the ability to take a “good deep breath”? The dis- ease increases the sense of entrapment, the claustrophobia. When every-

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thing closes in, you can’t get enough room to breathe. Shortness of breath can be a symptom of anxiety as well as asthma, and like anxiety, the dis- ease reported here is not only physical but affects the mind as well. Who said that depression is the disease of privilege or that sleeplessness affects only the aged? There was a grim joke in the Great Depression that people were too poor to be mentally ill—but Kozol’s investigations suggest oth- erwise. Moreover, the appeal to health strives to build identity. Even people who have not been poor have been sick and know what it means to suffer with illness.

One interesting rhetorical strategy in the passage is Kozol’s restrained style. He invites us to feel the condition of the poor with our bodies—take that deep breath and imagine what it would be like to do without it; remem- ber the prospect of freezing to death when you pull up the bed covers on a cold December night. But he does not overwhelm us with a sensational- istic account and a flurry of adjectives and adverbs, the conventional mark- ers of judgment in English prose. For a descriptive passage, there are few adjectives and adverbs here—“squalid” and “dangerously”—but imagine the things he could have said: unconscionable, pathetic, egregiously neglect- ful, grim, sad, sorry, mind-boggling, intensely fearful, god-forsaken, inhu- man. Instead, he tells us the story in language almost as plain as the chil- dren themselves might need to understand, he makes his observations, and for the most part, he leaves the judgments and the inferences to the reader.4

Kozol also avoids pious abstractions such as justice, honor, and dignity. The picture he gives is hard and concrete. To some extent it “speaks for it- self.” We can see the injustice, dishonor, and lack of dignity. He doesn’t have to preach us a sermon. In this sense the appeal to the body urges us to come down from the heights of abstract thinking and feel the world we are try- ing to think about.

The existentialist philosophers and realist writers of modern times teach us to mistrust the easy abstraction or the quick judgment. We know the world best by experience, and the best writing urges us to experience the trouble of the people described vicariously, imagining their worries and their hurts with a visceral intensity, feeling it in our own bodies.

The Body Embattled

The novelist Ernest Hemingway, who developed his famous “telegraphic” version of the plain style as a war correspondent in Europe, pioneered this rhetorical approach in his writing about human suffering. Of the old ab- stract language used to describe feats of warriors, he writes

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacri- fice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes stand-

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76 # Appeals to the Body

ing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if noth- ing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hal- low were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The abstractions mean nothing to the men who stand to be treated like a herd of cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse—or worse: they will only be buried and not used for meat. They seem to be dying without purpose, and the purposelessness extends to the old language of war, once used to fire the emotions of warriors and still shouted at them as they stand in the rain. After the experience of war, the words seem hollow and meaningless— much more so than place names and the numbers of military units and dates, which at least are useful to the soldiers in finding their way in battle and orienting themselves in a chaotic world.

Hemingway’s writing is typical of strong appeals to the body in its at- tempt to activate all the senses of the reader. His imagery, the word pic- tures he creates, involve not just memorable visual images, which engage the sense of sight—the soldiers milling around in the rain and listening glumly to speeches shouted at them—but also the senses of hearing (words shouted in the rain, the rain itself, the noise of posters “slapped up” over other posters), touch (the wetness of the rain, the slapping of the post- ers), and even, with some imagination on the part of the reader, smell: the stockyards at Chicago.

After the great slaughters of World War I, made only worse by the tech- nology that was supposed to have saved mankind, the literature of war tended to emphasize the brutality of human conflict. All of humankind, not just the lower classes, came to be depicted as little better than the ani- mals—or worse because human beings violated the high-minded promises of rationality and religion in order to engage in brutal acts or, as Heming- way suggests, used the very words of reason and religion to justify their acts.

The appeals to the body that animated this rhetoric were pioneered in the nineteenth century in accounts of the Civil War, often considered one of the first modern wars because of the use of more powerful rifles and automatic weapons and the tactics of total war, with attacks on civilian tar-

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gets and campaigns of attrition. The poet of the body Walt Whitman, vol- unteering in the army hospitals in Washington, D.C., saw many of the ef- fects of the war and wrote about them. He worried that “the real war will never get in the books” (Specimen Days 778). “It was not a quadrille in a ball-room,” he said (779); it was “about nine hundred and ninety nine parts diarrhea to one part glory” (qtd. in Loving 274).

Whitman’s war rhetoric combined strong appeals to the body with mythic references that would stir the fear and sympathy of his readers. He draws upon the imagery of eternal punishment in a passage titled “A Glimpse of War’s Hell-Scenes” in his memoir Specimen Days, building upon the fa- mous comment of General William Tecumseh Sherman, “War is hell”:

In one of the late movements of our troops in the valley, (near Upper- ville, I think,) a strong force of Moseby’s mounted guerillas attack’d a train of wounded, and the guard of cavalry convoying them. The am- bulances contain’d about 60 wounded, quite a number of them of- ficers of rank. The rebels were in strength, and the capture of the train and its partial guard after a short snap was effectually accomplish’d. No sooner had our men surrender’d, the rebels instantly commenced robbing the train and murdering their prisoners, even the wounded. . . . Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieu- tenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg’d out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them and thrust into the ground. These two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had receiv’d about twenty such thrusts, some of them through the mouth, face, &c. The wounded had all been dragg’d (to give a better chance also for plunder,) out of their wagons; some had been effectually dispatch’d, and their bodies were lying there life- less and bloody. Others, not yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning or groaning. Of our men who surrender’d, most had been thus maim’d or slaughter’d. (748)

“Demonization”—representing enemies as inhuman and in fact superhu- man in the evil of their actions and intentions (see chapter 8)—is a com- mon rhetorical strategy in wartime propaganda. Make the people afraid, one of Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandists is reputed to have said, and they will accept anything. In this passage, Whitman, a New Yorker and supporter of Lincoln and the Union, seems to be engaging in this kind of rhetoric. The rebel rangers appear as a “demoniac crowd.” But he doesn’t stop there.

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78 # Appeals to the Body

He goes on to show how Union soldiers took their revenge with equal sav- agery. Demonization is not a rhetorical tactic for him so much as an ef- fect of war on the human psyche. It turns people into demons and preda- tory animals:

Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—verify it in all the forms that different circumstances, individuals, places, could afford—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate, boiling volcanoes of human revenge for com- rades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart ev- erywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war. (Specimen Days 749)

The implication is that you don’t have to die to go to hell. War is a living hell, and there’s a deeper hell in every human heart.

The Body Disabled—and Embraced

One particularly poignant rhetoric of the body comes from the field known as disability studies. A key figure in that movement is the essayist Nancy Mairs, a sufferer of multiple sclerosis. I almost wrote “a victim,” but Mairs would never want to be called a victim—this woman who proudly accepts the label “cripple” as a way of raising awareness of the modern human being’s unacknowledged dependency on the body. She uses her own crip- pling disability as a means of turning readers toward their own bodies as the source of identity itself.

In the essay “Carnal Acts,” she writes,

Research suggests that I was infected by this virus, which no one has ever seen and which therefore, technically, doesn’t even “exist,” be- tween the ages of four and fifteen. In effect, living with this myste- rious mechanism feels like having your present self, and the past selves it embodies, haunted by a capricious and meanspirited ghost, unseen except for its footprints, which trips you even when you’re watching where you’re going, knocks glassware out of your hand, squeezes the urine out of your bladder before you reach the bath- room, and weights your whole body with a weariness no amount of rest can relieve. An alien invader must be at work. But of course it’s not. It’s your own body. That is, it’s you. (393)

She tugs the reader toward her condition with the switch to the second- person “you” early in this passage, and rightly so, for her condition, though it is an extreme example perhaps, is not different in kind from the human

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condition. We all have bodies that seem sometimes alien; they don’t fit with the mental image we have of ourselves; they seem to let us down at cru- cial times. The alienation from the body is built into Western culture, Mairs argues: “The Western tradition of distinguishing the body from the mind and/or the soul is so ancient as to become part of our collective uncon- scious. . . . I have a body, you are likely to say if you talk about embodi- ment at all; you don’t say, I am a body” (393).

One of Mairs’s goals as a writer is to “write the body,” to call attention forthrightly to the things that in her upbringing as a graceful young lady she was taught never to mention (such as “urine” in the passage just quoted). It was not so much her body, she suggests, as the education in grace and charm that let her down. It did not prepare her for life as a cripple; it only brought her shame. Her education taught her to write bodiless prose in “a voice that had shucked off its own body” (398), but when she became ill, she resolved to speak the “unspeakable,” to bring the body into the fore- ground with her vivid imagery and blunt diction:

No one is going to leave me speechless. To be silent is to comply with the standard of feminine grace. But my crippled body already vio- lates all notions of feminine grace. What more have I got to lose. I’ve gone beyond shame. I’m shameless, you might say. You know, as in “shameless hussy”? A woman with her bare brace and her tongue hanging out. (399)

Until I read Mairs, I was always suspicious of the way we use the term “voice” when we talk about writing. We praise good writing by saying the author has a strong or distinctive “voice.” We encourage novice writers by saying “Now you’re finding your voice.” I always thought of this usage as a weak metaphor that participates in a devaluation of writing in favor of speech. Voice has the advantage of suggesting something as uniquely indi- vidual as fingerprints, but style also suggests the particular ways of writing associated with an individual author. We often refer to the style of Hem- ingway or Dickinson, the special patterns of written English that charac- terize their works. So shouldn’t we reserve “voice” for spoken language and say “style” when we talk about writing—a word derived from the instru- ment of writing, the stylus, or pen?

Mairs would say—or shout—no:

I’ve found my voice . . . just where it ought to have been, in the body- warmed breath escaping my lungs and throat. Forced by the exi- gencies of physical disease to embrace my self in the flesh, I couldn’t write bodiless prose. The voice is the creature of the body that pro- duces it. (399)

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80 # Appeals to the Body

The idea of voice in writing, as Mairs so dramatically hints, is a special ap- peal to the body. If you trace writing back to its source, there will always be a body present, a hand pushing the pen or tapping the keyboard, a throat vibrating with the “silent” words on the page or screen.5

The Body Empowered

The appeals to the body we have covered so far—presenting a relatively comfortable audience with images of life as the poor live it, the claustro- phobic trapped feeling of being unable to breathe or so cold that you worry about freezing to death in your sleep; or the hellish scenes of war where all human reason and its abstract categories of honor, justice, and love get stripped away to reveal the brutish underside of life; or the struggles of the disabled person just to get up in the morning—may evoke emotions such as fear and disgust. The risk is that the audience will turn away from the message, repulsed by a kind of natural defensiveness. But the authors are counting on a different response, a sort of natural fascination, the kind of curiosity that causes people to look closely when they pass the scene of an automobile accident, often in spite of their conscious wishes.

Modern rhetoric fully acknowledges and occasionally invokes uncon- scious motives such as the human fascination with death and evil. Begin- ning in the nineteenth century, scientists like Darwin brought people face to face with their animal origins, and political thinkers like Marx and Engels took an interest in how people often acted contrary to their own best in- terests, driven by ideologies, or “false consciousness”—ideals that had little to do with their material existence but kept them enslaved to particular ways of working and living. The philosopher Nietzsche argued that all the seeming goodness of humanity was really directed toward the often un- conscious drive to power; most people behaved like a herd of mindless cattle while a privileged few strove to grasp the means to take charge of the herd.

The interest in unconscious motives reached a new height with the invention of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twenti- eth century. We need not go into Freud’s famous theories of personality and development here, many of which have been discredited and have lost their claim to scientific validity. Even so, Freud remains one of the great mythologists of modern culture and a powerful resource for modern rheto- ric. Above all, Freud taught that we are not always fully aware of why we do things and that our every success seems fraught with a sense of dissat- isfaction, with guilt or incompleteness. The dissatisfaction may arise from some old experiences that still rumble around deep in our minds but never

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quite rise to consciousness—some real or imagined deprivation or failing from childhood, for example.

In his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud—who was him- self suffering from the ravages of mouth cancer at the time and was forced to use an ill-fitting prosthetic jaw—directly addresses people’s worries and fears about the inadequacies of the human body. In earlier times, accord- ing to Freud’s account, people saw themselves as “feeble animal organ- ism[s]” and “formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience” that, being denied to humanity, could be embodied in the gods. “Today,” however, “[man] has come very close to the attainment of this ideal”—“he has almost become a god himself” by the power of his technology. He builds “auxiliary organs” to extend his powers—microscopes and telescopes to extend his vision, communication devices to send his voice around the globe, airplanes that allow him to fly, fortresses that add layers of protec- tion to his tender skin:

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that his development will not come to an end precisely with the year 1930 A.D. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimagin- ably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But [for now] we will not forget that present- day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character. (44–45)

Freud reminds us that what makes modern people proud is their sense of power, the notion that they are living out their ancestors’ dreams and fan- tasies about power. Notice the appeal to time that draws upon the mod- ern concept of a break with the past.

But, as Freud makes clear, along with this new feeling of Godlike om- nipotence comes a suspicion that things aren’t what they seem to be. Un- derneath all our glory, we still have our weaknesses—perhaps we are even worse off than our ancestors because now we have come to depend upon our “prosthetic organs.” It is our machines and inventions that have the power, not we ourselves, our own bodies. These devices have not grown to us, so they can be taken away, leaving us exposed and powerless.

Think about the controversies today over devices like the calculator and the computer. The calculator allows math students to work faster and more accurately than ever before, but the persistent worry is that students’ ability to do simple math without the aid of the machines is getting lost. This line of argument is very old. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates expresses

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82 # Appeals to the Body

the same worry about writing. If we write everything down, will we ulti- mately lose our powers of memory?

Even a technology as seemingly simple as writing thus threatens the in- tegrity of the mind as the philosopher understands it. With the change of technological scale in modern times, the worries intensify. We’re reminded of our vulnerability when a large-scale electrical failure brings the com- puterized and air-conditioned society to its knees. Just as our “prosthetic organs” give us trouble, so our restructured environments fail us at times.

With this view in mind, go back to your experiment with TV and ra- dio ads. Chances are, any of the ads that do not appeal directly to your de- sire to eat or have sex have to do with your desire for power or security. Think about car and truck ads in particular. The images suggest freedom and release—a sleek automobile speeding down the highway with no bar- riers in sight—or superhuman strength and power: a four-wheel-drive truck pulling a huge load up a gigantic incline. Even if you can’t run a hundred yards or push the lawn mower up the hill in your own backyard, you can get the speed and power you need by buying a new car or truck. Power is what the advertisements promise, and this kind of promise rests upon an appeal to the body that sets the limitations of the actual body against the potential of the ideal body, the body extended by technology.

To take a more disturbing example, think about the rhetoric of terror- ism, a uniquely modern form of symbolic action. Terrorism results from a conflict between the drive for power and the sense of powerlessness that both pervade the modern world. It turns large-scale technological systems against the people who usually most enjoy the benefits of these technolo- gies. People usually ignored or despised by the powerful can use thus dis- rupt systems of transportation, communication, and commerce. In this way, they gain the attention of the world. With attention comes some measure of power.

In the September 11 attacks, for example, a small group of militants un- associated with the usual aggregations of world power (nation states and multinational corporations) hijacked commercial airliners—technologies that embody godlike speed, mobility, and energy in a modern society— and used these planes to attack symbolic places: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nerve centers of commercial and military power on the global scene. Having used violence on the grand scale to attract the atten- tion of another global force—the news media—the militants locked into the power of mass communication. The once powerless militants had suc- cessfully, and tragically, co-opted the power of high technology and the great nations.

One lesson that arises from a rhetorical analysis of terrorism is ironi- cally similar to the message of early democratic rhetoric. When life is con-

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fronted in its barest essentials, we all must live and die in our own bodies. All power is limited. To think otherwise—to believe the fantasies of power that get acted out in advertising and in acquisition—may allow us to for- get those limitations, but terrorism confronts us with the truth in the old maxim of “live by the sword and die by the sword.” The power we desire and court with such fervor can always be used against us.

We have seen how appeals to local places tend to question globalist val- ues. In a similar way, appeals to the individual human body—the home place of the self—may be used to question the values implicit in high tech- nology and the promise of godlike powers.

In Sum: From Identification to Difference

In appeals to the body, authors use language and imagery to stimulate the senses in the hope that audiences will feel a visceral tug toward various positions of value.

• Advertisers extol the value of products with the promise of speed- ing buyers along the path to personal power.

• Advocates of democratic politics communicate their traditional val- ues of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or “liberty, equal- ity, and fraternity.”

• Reformers and activists appeal to the audience’s sense of kinship with the sick, oppressed, and suffering to foster the values of social ser- vice and responsibility.

• Essayists and novelists communicate the horrors of war, the thrill of street life, or the alternating feelings of liberation and panic as- sociated with the experience of power.

Appeals to the body, like all appeals, vary minutely in their purposes, but the general aims can be summarized according to changes that authors seek to produce in an audience’s awareness, attitudes, and action:

• Appeals can aim to open up readers’ awareness (calling attention to the condition of poor children, for example).

• Appeals can aim to change readers’ attitudes (debunking the idea that war is about honor and glory, for example, or that technology is the key to human power).

• Appeals can aim to move the reader into action (to buy a new prod- uct, vote a certain way, or go to work for a political cause).

Appeals to the body can help us work through our differences with other people by focusing on common ground. But even as they promote identi-

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fication among diverse groups, appeals to the body can also contribute to a stronger sense of difference, sometimes even an aggravated and persis- tent sense of difference, as we have seen in the rhetorics of disability and terrorism. The differences between males and females, to which we turn in chapter 7, and the differences between the races, the topic of chapter 8, provide further cases in point.

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