The Rhetoric of Terror and the Terror of Rhetoric:
A Tale of Two Cities1,2
Joseph B. Juhász
University of Colorado[JBJ1]
Episodes of "night terrors," as common with adults as kids, often
involve the "presence" of a monster in the room-an imaginary creature
believed to be real-who (although a creature of the dreamer's imagination)
strikes supernatural fear, dread, and horror-a sense of doom, impending death,
of complete annihilation in the dreamer. With or without the specific monster,
there is in the dream a "presence," a hallucinatory companion, a
double or doppelgänger in the room: a copy of the dreaming self, a secret
sharer, a copy that is more real than the "original," the dreamer
himself or herself, the mysterious stranger who freezes the dreamer into a
state of immobility: of terror. It is a nightmare of the worst sort, where
image, imaginer, and imagination conspire into a monumental self deception,
a monumental believed-in imagining, one that plays out a drama of cataclysm:
an imagined End of the Self-or rather of a hell on earth-lakes afire, brimstone
hailstorms, exploding buildings, showers of newts, screaming horses, slavegirls
and infants-and the eternal companionship of the damned-a reverse conjuring
of the self to the dwellingplace of the shades, to that place where the shade
Alexander the Great or of Helen of Troy dwells.
It is the function of a rhetoric of terror to awaken in the attendee of a lecture,
the listener to a tale, the witness to a performance, the reader of a book,
in the viewer of a ritual enactment, like let's say a marriage, a wedding or
a burial, a mass, a Ph.D. oral, the administering of a WAIS II, or some other
play; a movie, a commercial, a news program, or of a web page...-or a conflation
of all of these: the contemporary media, a sense of the unspeakable elemental
night terror: fear, dread, horror, that nightmare sense of being at the threshold
of the heart of darkness itself a moment not of paradise-, but of Apocalypse-Now;
of the disoriented horror that comes with the feeling that somehow perhaps
hell is above and heaven is below: the vertigo, the motion sickness that comes
with that topsy-turvy in which the Father's fallen and now eternally damned
former Favorite: the Lucifer character, is metamorphosed into a grotesque caricature
of the abandoned and crucified second-"only"-son-favorite, that mocked
and despised, and crowned-with-thorns prodigal redeemer, this Christ figure.
Christopher Marlowe's, yes, Marlowe as in the Marlow of The Heart of Darkness-Christopher
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus has as one of its major themes the nagging question:
where is hell. This issue gets its clearest treatment in Act I Scene 3 lines
68-75:
Faustus: And what are you that live with Lucifer?
Mephistophilis: Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspired against our God with Lucifer,
And are forever damned with Lucifer.
Faustus: Where are you damned?
Mephistophilis: In hell.
Faustus: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Mephistophilis: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Mephistophilis': "Why this is hell," is perhaps the most powerful
line in dramaturgy, precisely because, among other things, it seems so precise
while being so absolutely vague: Is "this" "the scene,"
Faustus' study in Wittenberg? Is it Wittenberg? Germany? This planet? The material
creation? The here-and-now? Is it the theater in which the play is taking place?
Is it the stage? Is it London? Is it England? Is it wherever-the-play-is-performed?
Is it the play itself? Is it being an actor? Is it being a player? Is it having
to perform in this play (the actor's lament)? Is it simply the act of "let's-pretend,"
of "make believe," of "believe making" in which characters,
actors, and audience-reader, teller, watcher, author-all collude? Is it therefore
the capacity to dwell in fiction? Is it, is the "this" then, is hell
then the not here and the not now? Is hell that magical bridge, that magical
tornado, that magical Kansas farmhouse, that yellow brick spiral to an OZ forever
hovering over the seemingly endless horizon of the sunflowered fields of Kansas,
a Wild at Heart, a Nurse Betty, a Boys-don't-cry bridge to a "place,"
to this very place here, to this place right here right now, to this place-over
the rainbow.
I spent the six weeks from 11 June to 23 July in Budapest with my five daughters.
I am a native of Budapest-I fled that place on December 26th 1948-crossing
the border to Austria in the trunk of a '47 Plymouth with my mother and my
middle brother as trunk-companions. This past summer's trip was my very first
return to Budapest-after an absence of 54 years.
From July 15th to July 19th my two youngest girls and I took a trip to Venice.
After all, that is where my father's family used to summer before the war (the
first war, that is). The train journey there from Budapest went from 8 in the
morning to 10 at night on Saturday, the 15th of the July just past.
We chose the day train-which cuts between Italy and Hungary through Slovenia-pretty
much the entire length of that country. I found Slovenia, as seen from the
window of a train-car, to be idyllic almost beyond description: tidy farmhouses,
narrow roads, few cars, little new construction (or at any rate little construction
that looks new); almost no Stalin-era housing or factories: anyone's dream
of an Austria or of a Vermont from back in peacetime days, genuine peacetime
stuff all around; a landscaped garden of a country from the Sound of Music
let us say, with even perhaps a touch here and there of Heidi.
Here is an excerpt from my diary for Saturday the 15th of July:
Occasional glimpses of the Drava
Outside of Celje the first and so far only sign of deindustrialization.
Flowers, neatness, cleanliness, almost to an excess.
Plentiful train services.
Celje first urban landscape & nearby castle-roncs [ruin].
We pass a railroad box car with a bay window & another window with iron
bars with the word MARIABOR (sic) written on it & a road sign ?3 MARIABOR
(sic) also nearby.
According to our fellow passenger the death camp was at BOR which is also nearby
and where there are/were copper mines which made use of slave labor under fascism.
The complexities of the Freudian errors in this diary entry could fill an entire
sequel to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I did not, for my purposes
here, "correct" the story or the errors, however, at the time, and
for weeks afterwards I was personally convinced that in the midst of our Slovenian
idyll I had passed the shade of a German extermination camp, at Maribor (not
Bor); at the "Maribor" Camp in which, as I misremembered it, there
had been a partially successful uprising of detainees against their captors.
Further, just one more thing, I had seen MARIBOR and read is as MARI[A]BOR.
In my mind's eye, I had "seen," I had conjured up the image of a
perverted garden of Eden: a land scarred by thinly covered-over evidence of
atrocities, of innocent blood shed over fertile soil, of a garden, a lawn,
a castle ruin, barely covering the horror, the crawling Mistkäfers, the
creepy shit-bugs of hell and its monsters, just directly underneath the veneered
layer of cometicised cuteness.
Yet again, I had drawn the correct conclusion from the wrong data. When the
day before yesterday, the 10th of August, I finally discovered my error, namely
that "Maribor" appears in no official listing of German extermination
camps, I did a bit of research. I uncovered the fact that just a couple of
miles outside or Maribor, in a medieval castle, was one of the most infamous
concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia, where during the war the Croatian
fascists held at least 60,000 people-Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and assorted
left-wingers. Further, Maribor itself was the site of massacre of Croatian
and Slovenian suspected fascist fellow travelers by Titoist partisans after
the war. The bones of over a thousand seven hundred of these slaughtered fascist-suspects
had been inadvertently dug up recently when they were accidentally unearthed
during a street improvement project in Maribor.
So is the fiction or the fact of this story the clue to the placement of hell?
And what of the chain of events, the unearthed, the "true" story
of the middle link in my journey to Venice-and, indeed what was I taking to
and from there?
Here we speak of the encounter between the inner and the external rhetoric
of terror-and the coincidences between that stream and the stream of the various
terrors of rhetoric. My personal chain of remembrances and suspicions to words
and images that recall or conjure up fictional and real events of terror-the
rhetoric of terror-and their connection to external, "historical"
reality-to a social consensus of shared perceptions of terror. And-the terror
that is exercised upon me and upon a community by the use of a the very rhetoric
in and of itself, rhetoric that is in and of itself meant to arouse fear and
submission-the terror of rhetoric.
So-we speak of terror in the context of "night terror"-the nightmarish
sense of the "alien" and the way in which a rhetoric can and does
surround this experience-reminding us of terrifying experiences while terrifying
us with associations to imaginary cataclysms-the politics and the psychology,
if you will, of rule through the rhetoric of terror and of terror of rhetoric.
Many of you will recall another context for the word "terror" that
is appropriate to out topic: the "Reign of Terror" under the French
Revolution.
From our perspective, one of the really interesting features of the "reign
of terror" is that the Jacobin revolutionaries used the word "terroir"
to describe their own actions. So, unlike present and recent political or rhetorical
uses of the word (e.g. by Americans, Israelis, the English, the Italians-and
others) where one side that views itself as the victim, calls the other side
"terrorist"-a label that the other side would not and does not accept-in
the case of the Reign of Terror there was not only conscious use of terror
as in instrument of rulership, with the self-application of the word "terror"
to a self-description of mass beheadings and guillotinings-but a proud and
conscious theory behind the practice of ruling by terror and even of the public
use of that word to rule.
I have neither the time nor the space, nor is this either the time or the place
to go into the details of this history, but for our purposes here, I can say
that as Machiavelli can be identified with the idea of rule by manipulation
and deceit, so Robespierre can by identified with the concept of rule by means
of a rhetoric of terror and a terror of rhetoric. In a speech he delivered
on February 5th 1794 Robespierre draws the distinction between the people,
who are naturally virtuous (that is, rational) and are best ruled by argument,
and the hypocritical enemies of the people, the counterrevolutionaries, the
Machiavellian propagandists who would mislead the people by sophistry and rhetoric,
and who have to be governed by terror.
If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue, its basis at
a time of revolution is both virtue and terror-virtue, without which terror
is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power.
Terror is merely justice-prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an
emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most
pressing needs of the country.4
Robespierre, is, of course, resorting to rhetoric, sophistry and self-deception
himself. He wants to disassociate himself from the traditional reliance of
tyrants upon rule by terror and is loath to confess that in the face of the
agents of counterrevolution (well financed from London and elsewhere) he sees
no alternative but to adopt the traditional means of tyranny towards the elusive
ends of democracy.
Just as there were Machiavellian rulers before Machiavelli enunciated the principles
of rule by deceit, there were Robespierrian rulers before Robespierre put pen
to paper. Tyrants-whether honest, or self-deceiving-have long been aware of
the power of the terror of rhetoric and the rhetoric of terror: Robespierre
merely begins, with a revolutionary naiveté, a formalizing of the principles
of the theory of practice of governmental and quasi-governmental, Mafioso or
other "legitimate" "business" uses of terror, a credo so
well enunciated by Marlon Brando in his parts in The Godfather and in Apocalypse
Now.
Perhaps I should now elaborate on some further context for our understandings
of the word terror. The English word Terror traces through French, Latin, and
Greek to the sense of fear-and-trembling that is historically associated with
our experience of the terrifying aspects of the Divine. Nearly all of the early
uses of the word in English refer to what would commonly be called "holy
terror"-the Fear of the Lord.
Our common experience of what it is to have the Lord be with us includes not
only the reverence, love, and respect but also an aspect of the terror that
one feels toward a King, a Godfather, an Admiral, a Captain, or some other
ruler. It is the very alien nature of the Lord that makes Him at once loved
and feared to the extreme: the ambivalence to the rettenetes, the unheimlich,
to the uncanny, which is best employed and exploited in horror film.
When the Lord is with thee, then, your womb becomes fructified with an alien
being, the terrible and yet gracious and humble King of Kings: it is a burden
begat in mystery and delivered in glorious miserable poverty. The holy terror
of that sense of being touched by the most grotesque and most holy aspects
of the divine, of the sacred, can be exploited by the most depraved soldiers
of The Empire; indeed it is not by their words or their rhetoric but by their
deeds, by their fruits that you shall know them.
But, aren't words deeds? Can't we do things with words? "I hereby promise
to lend you fourteen dollars": haven't I just done something? For that
matter, isn't the use of words to do things the key for deriving an ought from
an is? Isn't it in words that the hidden imperative takes us from seeming description
(is) to a moral call to action (ought)?5 Jack borrowed 14 bucks from Jill.
Jack promised to pay Jill back. Jack ought to pay 14 bucks to Jill. From description
to call to action in three sentences.
While philosophers go on to elucidate Searle's6 theorem, we as psychologists
can ask ourselves these questions:
1. How much of what we purport to be descriptive psychological "fact finding"
is in actuality a thinly covered set of imperatives to action?
2. Do we collude with each other to look the other way when colleagues act
as if they were describing something whereas in fact they are promoting one
course of action over another?
3. As professional wordsmiths, is it our role to participate in the "rule
of the word" and with it the holy or unholy terror of The Authorities?
4. Is it in fact possible to purify language away from the rhetoric of terror
and the terror of rhetoric?
5. Finally, hoe does one act realistically in a world where language is always
complicit in tyranny without becoming cynical, Machiavellian, or Robespierrian?
As we ponder these questions, we come to grips with our ambivalence to the
Word itself, to the Word, which with a command brought forth the world, with
all of its implicit glories, powers, and its terrifying beauty. But, at that
point, are we not trying to situate ourselves within the city of God, the city
of Lucifer, and the city of man-but wait-wouldn't that be a tale of three cities?
Now, I remember. But what is the word for it? You, native speakers of English
can you help me out? It's just at the tip of my tongue...
Anyu?