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The Art of Forgetting: John W. Draper and the Rhetorical Dimensions of History

Philosopher Michel de Certeau posits that history is not a mimetic representation of the past, but is instead a selective process that actively creates the past. "The past" and "history," then, must be distinguished: the past occurred and was real, but that past is not contained by or equated with history; history, to the contrary, is a reconstruction of the pastÂ—a creation of the past that takes place in the present. A willed forgetting thus occursÂ—according to de Certeau it must occurÂ— in order to make the past lucid and uniform. What is forgotten, however, does not disappear. Rather, the forgotten elements constitute "resistances" or "survivals" that confound any effort to make history a linear and univocal phenomenon.1 Such "resistances" render history a contested field, comprised of competing interpretations. Every interpretation, moreover, is shaped by its own historicityÂ—that is, by the exigencies, conventions, and resistances of the time in which it is carried out. The contested and situated nature of historical interpretation reveals the rhetorical nature of history in general. To the extent that history concerns "understanding" and "forgetting," history is a way of knowingÂ—a way of knowing about the past that is not to be confused with the past event itself.2 To the extent that history is a public, dialogic construct that enables different audiences to know the world in contrasting ways, history is also a rhetorical form. The association of rhetoric and history is hardly new to rhetorical studies. At one time, the rhetorical dimensions of history within such scholarship were reducible to discrete elements such as style, argument, trope, or "other devices of language."3 Recent work in rhetorical studies, however, has begun to explore the notion that history is rhetorical not simply because it relies upon style and language, nor because it is somehow addressed to particular audiences, but because it creates a public way of knowing. In Kathleen Turner's words, this conception of the relationship between history and rhetoric views "the rhetorical process as the central epistemic function by which societies constitute themselves."4 In short, if history