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The Phenomenology of the Disaster: Toward a Rhetoric of Tragedy

Although they are primarily exploited within literary works, the aesthetics of tragedy are also found within public speeches and public discourse, performing functions that might provoke a theorizing of tragedy's rhetorical, alongside its long-established literary and philosophical, character. Like dramatists, rhetors tell tragic stories and describe events as tragic; however, they do so in a manner distinct from the manner of the tragedian, for while the dramatist is primarily concerned with creating a work of art that will be experienced as a tragedy, the rhetor is primarily concerned with framing an experience so that it can be accepted as a tragedy and, in that sense, a work of art. Thus, where one literary critic, in keeping with Aristotle, has suggested that poetic mimesis "takes universals and dresses them up with particular names and episodes so as to enable them to play the part that particular people and events normally play in our emotional lives " (Woodruff 1992, 88), we might formalize the corollary to this claim and suggest that mimesis in rhetoric takes particular people and events in the play of our lives and dresses them up with the characteristics of universals. When a rhetor speaks tragedy, or exploits the term to characterize a situation, the event framed by the discourse is never the immediate creation of the rhetor, but instead involves an actual "burned-out family, a broken career, a smash on the road" (Williams 1967, 13-14). Thus, while we might think of the tragic poet as an inventor who imagines actions that "resemble particular patterns or possible relations among events in reality" (Freeland 1992,117), we should keep in mind that the rhetor's events are real; a fact that gives the performance of tragic rhetoric a unique character, one that requires a delicate balance between tragedy's imaginative aesthetics and the practical, eventful circumstances of public life under which it is appropriate to apply them. The art of rhetorical tragedy is no simple one, and it does not arise on every occasion that "bad things" happen. Small misfortunes framed as tragedies appear melodramatic, even comic; while the tragic framing of scandalous events often seems blasphemous. It is for such reasons that artful