The Rhetoric of The Duel
This is a chapter on rhetoric as it relates to the Code Duello. It is the third chapter of my dissertation titled Pistols at High Noon: The Code Duello in Western Literature. The complete dissertation was published by a foreign press at a price that explains its sales, but it is available here on Amazon.
Chapter Three
“Them’s Fightin’ Words!”
Speech acts have always been intimately tied to the Duello; indeed, it is only through the verbal cues of challenge and acceptance and the speech acts of the seconds (as well as the speech codes, implicit and explicit) that ultimately identify a conflict as participating in the Duello and differentiating this violence from other, baser forms of killing. The Duello is governed by language use in a complicated and dynamic relationship that governs the actions of those who participate in the Duello. The rhetoric of the duel assumes two primary roles, the actual speech acts that govern its use, and an understanding of the rhetorical theory that underlies the cultural assumptions behind the social institution of the Duello. On one hand, language may be considered the introduction to force, the challenges that incite violence and authorize it, but it would be a mistake to see these speech acts as stoplights that merely grant or deny the passage of physical acts. The speech acts that occur in the Duello are forceful and palpable in and of themselves, and occasionally an entire conflict is negotiated within language, as with the tall tales in The Virginian, without any recourse to physical force.
In a series of lectures in the 1970s, J.L. Austin outlined exactly how language influences force. He defines “performative sentences” as those in which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something” (6-7). He delineates three discrete sets of performative utterances, locution, illocution, and perlocution; each represents a different level of persuasion upon the auditor. The first of Austin’s levels, locution, is in essence any kind of declaratory statement, for example, “He said to me, ‘shoot her!’” The locution is “roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in a traditional sense” (109). A more emphatic version would be illocution, in which persuasion is more traditionally employed: He urged me to shoot her. Illocutionary acts are “utterances which have a certain (conventional) force” (109). Taking Austin’s example, if a soldier is ordered to shoot a prisoner there is a certain conventional force in the superior’s authority, but the soldier may not comply, citing illegitimate orders or the like. Finally, a perlocutionary act would be exemplified by ‘He persuaded me to shoot her, or ‘He got me (made me, etc) shoot her.’ Here the difference is that the force is applied, or the persuasion is successful. In this example the difference between an illocutionary and a perlocutionary statement appears to be one of reception; if I make an argument it is illocutionary, and if my argument is convincing it becomes perlocutionary. Austin states that perlocutionary acts are those in which “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say surprising or misleading” (109).
A perlocutionary act is one that does what it says, such as marriage vows. When the groom states “with this ring, I thee wed,” his statement brings about the effect that it names. Austin notes that perlocutionary acts are highly dependent upon social context, however – in the case of marriage, the couple must be in the context of a socially recognized ceremony for their speech to be perlocutionary.
Austin’s analysis of performative sentences is particularly applicable to the Duello. He actually mentions dueling, noting that often perlocutionary statements must be worded very specifically, and it is often the case that simply naming what one is doing fails to effect the act – when we challenge another, we do not say “I challenge you,” but the challenge itself must be worded differently. Austin notes that an exception to this is the German University Duelling Corps, in which they will issue a challenge that translates directly into “I insult you,” which of course intrinsically carries no particular insult, but in the case of the University students it works because of the context. It works in this case because the point of the Duello is subtly different, and the actual challenge is a mere formality because they have to duel as a rite of passage, proving their mettle.1 In the future, these men will not issue challenges in the same rote manner as they did while at the university. Instead, they will use, or at least their American counterparts used, specific insults drawn from a common wellspring of epithets: liar, puppy, the ever-popular poltroon, and others; these insults carry a certain duel-specific weight, and are the insults of the honorable challenge.2 Traditionally there was a set of typical insults that would trigger challenges. A fine example is Stephen Crane’s “The Duel That Was Not Fought” (1894).
In this short story, Stephen Crane presents a clash between working class American men and a presumably higher-class foreigner – or at least a foreigner who perceives himself to be of higher class. Patsy Tulligan is at a public house with two of his friends from down on Cherry Street. Also in the pub is a “slim little” Cuban who is described as possessing almost feminine features. This Cuban is almost diametrically opposed to the models of masculinity presented in Shane and the Virginian.
The Cuban makes a small remark, almost under his breath, a remark that Crane does not share with his readers, and is presented as being not directed quite at Patsy, but clearly about him. Patsy responds with another remark that Crane does not share, a “careless and rather loud comment to his two friends. He used a word which is no more than passing the time of day down in Cherry Street, but to the Cuban it was a dagger point” (205).
The Cuban challenges Patsy by telling him “you have insult me. You are a dog, a hound, a cur. I spit upon you. I must have some of your blood … . I must have s-s-satisfac-shone” (206). These are all typical insults, about on par with “poltroon” and “puppy.” It recalls Austin’s caution that one cannot challenge a man by saying “I challenge you,” and so the Cuban is careful to issue his challenge in the appropriate terms, ending on a demand for satisfaction. It could not be clearer, except to Patsy, who is only vaguely aware that the little man wants to fight for some reason.
Patsy offers to “wipe d’joint wid yeh,” but of course the Cuban is not interested in a brawl; he wants a real duel. The Cuban has offered Patsy perlocutionary speech, only to be given locutionary in return; it fails to satisfy him. The Cuban, “in his clear tense tones, spoke one word. It was the bitter insult. It seemed to fairly spin from his lips and crackle in the air like breaking glass” (207). He chooses these words because they are recognized as the proper ones to use in such situations, and this fact illustrates Austin’s second most salient point, that all performative speech acts must be accepted by their listeners as valid in order to fulfill their intended role. Austin specifically uses the example of the duel in noting that if I challenge another and he simply shrugs it off, the performative weight of my insult, its perlocutionary force is lost or dissipated, and the glorious duel I sought with him comes to naught. This fact is the real source of dueling’s decline in America, and even abroad. People simply quit validating the speech codes that supported and controlled the activity, and this is in fact what happens in Crane’s tale. The Cuban adheres closely to the strictures of the Duello, but the men he challenges don’t seem to speak his language. Ultimately, rather than the men recognizing the power of his speech and participating in a duel, the Cuban is hauled off to jail by a policeman. Crane demonstrates the limitations of performative speech; context is everything.
The contextual importance of speech is highlighted early in The Virginian when the narrator from the East first arrives in Wyoming. The stereotype of the western hero is that of the strong, silent type, and Jane Tompkins notes that a character’s speech becomes even more important as he says less. Such is the case with the Virginian, who exemplifies the silent hero and yet is also an accomplished orator. Although Jane Tompkins suggests that speech is feminized in westerns as part of a continued backlash against women that began with Hawthorne’s infamous “scribbling women” remark, in The Virginian there is a different kind of speech being valued, and the tension that exists rests more squarely upon the East/West boundary as part of Wister’s program to define the quintessential American male.3
But if Western heroes are not the stoic, silent types that Tompkins suggests, neither do the cowboys of Wister’s imagination tolerate idle chatter. The Easterner is largely silent during his first meal, preferring to observe the interactions and listen to the “drummers.” But he “was doing better than I knew; my strict silence and attention to the corned beef made me in the eyes of the cowboys at the table compare well with the over-talkative commercial travelers” (11).
The novel virtually opens with speech acts; readers are introduced to the Virginian by his playful teasing of Uncle Hughey about his multiple attempts to secure a bride in his later years. The old man gets himself all worked up, but as the Eastern narrator notes, he “evidently got a sort of joy from this teasing,” because he was in a position to walk away if he so chose. So much for the silent Westerners.4 When Uncle Hughey departs, the southerner approaches our Eastern narrator, who presumes to be familiar with him, based largely upon his having witnessed the playful exchange between these friends. Thus, knowing the Virginian to be capable of jocularity and wit, the Easterner attempts to engage him in a similar vein, but he is put off by a veiled sarcasm. Asking his host if there are many such oddities around as Uncle Hughey, the Virginian replies that, “there is a right smart of oddities around. They come in on every train” (6). The Easterner is astute enough to recognize that he is being asked to maintain some social distance, and he admires the deft way that the Virginian is able to distance himself from his charge (for he is charged with picking up the Easterner for his boss, and so owes him civility, but not familiarity).
The Easterner gets another lesson in the social use of language shortly thereafter, as the pair encounters Steve, a friend of the Virginian’s. Steve greets his friend by taking a swat at his hat, which doesn’t irritate him at all. Steve remarks that he’ll have a difficult time finding a bed to himself in the small town, and the Virginian suggests that he’ll get his own bed, hinting at some trickery and implicitly recommending a bet of “drinks for the crowd” (9). Steve seems to think he’s at a disadvantage, but takes the bet, saying, “you’re such a son-of-a---- when you get down to work” (9). The Easterner “expected that [Steve] would be struck down” for such a serious insult, but the Virginian doesn’t seem bothered by it in the least; “used thus, this language was plainly complementary” (9).
But the term takes on a new color when the Virginian becomes involved in a card game; there are a couple of questions about him returning from Arizona, as an unnamed man asks why he didn’t stay. The Easterner is quick enough to feel the shift in the linguistic winds, and notes that the “sunshine of merriment” was suddenly gone (17). Through overheard conversation, readers learn that the man making most of the snide remarks is Trampas, who will prove to be the novel’s antagonist. Tonight he is having poor luck at cards and is looking for someone to take it out on. He lays down his money and says, “your bet, you son-of-a----,” using the same epithet that Steve had earlier (18). But the Virginians’ response is different this time, as he lays his pistol on the table and in an easy, gentle voice, cautions Trampas, “when you call me that, smile!” (18). The dealer tells a man near the Eastern to “sit quiet … can’t you see he don’t want to push no trouble? He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel” (19). Trampas doesn’t take up the challenge, although the narrator remarks that “a public back-down is an unfinished thing,” hinting at their future conflicts later in the book (19).
This scene, and in the penultimate ‘showdown’ scene later in the book, demonstrates the Duello in its later, frontier, form: most of the formalities have been dispensed with, but the salient elements remain. There is no second, no cards are exchanged, no apology is formally offered, and yet the dynamic of the interaction remains fundamentally the same. Many of the explicit speech markers of the old Duello are gone, but are now exchanged for implicit ones that serve the same function, and meaning lies primarily in the context and intention of what is said. Even the narrator understands this, and remarks about how different the Virginian’s response to Trampas was from his response to Steve: “the same words, identical to the letter. But this time they produced a pistol. … So I perceived a new example of the old truth, that the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life” (19).
Performative speech is powerful in its own right, not simply as a precursor to physical violence in the form of a challenge. Particularly in The Virginian, speech exists as its own site of rhetorical conflict. Linguistic power appears again later in the novel, during the “Game and the Nation” chapters. Here, the Virginian has been appointed foreman by his employer, the Judge, and is charged with bringing cattle to market and then returning the men via railroad. Getting the meat to market proves easily enough done, but on the return trip the men hear tales of a fresh gold strike in Rawhide, and many of the young men want to jump ship and go try their hand at gold-digging. This cadre is led by Trampas, of course, whom the Virginian hired on as a hand. In these chapters it is not fighting, but speaking abilities that win the day, as Trampas tries to slyly effect his mutiny while the Virginian struggles to retain control of the men.
The men are paused at a small whistle stop, where the trains must wait for repair to the Big Horn bridge before they can continue, and they begin comparing scars and sharing stories. The Easterner falls in listening to a cowboy’s tale of getting a small scar on his thumb; it involves a job for an scientist hunting for owl eggs in the ground and being bitten by a snake instead; the wife of the man (an Easterner in short pants) who has hired him produces an Indian Medicine stone that sucks all the poison from his finger and then drops off … and when the wife has a child later in the year, the boy comes out with 8 rattles, just like the snake had. Well, the Easterner sees that he’s been had, and in his narration he complements the cowboy for, “fact and falsehood blended with such perfect art” (112).
Trampas and the Virginian begin what appears an idle conversation about railway developments, engineering practices, and their worth and practicality. The conflict is sublimated, but each clearly wishes to appear the better of the other. They run about neck and neck for a time, until Trampas mentions an accident that the Virginian has not heard of; his reply is that the Southerner has “been running too much with aristocrats” (114). Here the conflict is most thinly veiled, and the Virginian responds by trying to force Trampas’ hand, saying, “I thought you’d be afeared to try it on me” (114). Trampas whirls around, his hand on his gun, but stops himself, and what another character recognizes as a brewing showdown is averted. But even the Virginian recognizes that he has all but lost the loyalty of the men to Trampas’ lead, and sighs that “maybe none of us are crossing that Big Horn bridge now, except me” (115).
There have been several trains stopped for these repairs, and so the town has flat run out of food to supply the hungry passengers. The Virginian, with the aid of his new cook, Scipio, rounds up a mess of frogs and is able to feed his men and a few hungry travelers, besides. He notes that the townspeople were about to starve, never realizing the wealth of good meat they had so near. This fact is due to their fixation on cattle; Montana being a cattle state, he explains, folks naturally think in those terms, never thinking about other sources of food, or income. He then launches into a grand story about his days on the Tulane frog ranch down in California. He weaves a glorious tale about the riches of frog ranching and the lucrative business it presented in the recent past, before the business dried up, finally ending on the solemn statement, “frawgs are dead, Trampas, and so are you” (125). To which his new cook Scipio yells, “rise up, liars, and salute your king!” (125). Shortly thereafter the bridge is repaired, and the Virginian offers his crew one last opportunity to defect to Rawhide, but they refuse, preferring instead to remain on board. Trampas has lost again, this time to a superior tall tale. Here there is no threat of violence; in some respects the stakes are higher here because the Virginian is officially in a position of power, being responsible for the men and answerable to the Judge, whereas previously their conflict involved only themselves. Yet there is no overt force here, only the linguistic wrangling of tall tales and the persuasive power that they project on behalf of their orators.
The Virginian’s speech is also showcased when an itinerant missionary visits the ranching area. Dr. MacBride offers the cowboys a hellfire and brimstone speech that focuses on their sin and impossibility of their redemption through choosing not to sin. The narrator notes how carefully the missionary, “built the black cellar of his theology, leaving out its beautiful park and the sunshine of its garden,” speaking only of God’s wrath and saying nothing of love or forgiveness (150). The cowboys are not impressed, and except for the Virginian, their attention wanders. For his part, the Virginian goes to the missionary in the night, “using some of the missionary’s own language” (152). The Virginian keeps the poor man up all night wrangling over points of theology and ardently requesting the missionary’s intervention. The Virginian tells him, “I’m afeared to be alone,” that he is “losin’ my desire afteh the sincere milk of the Word” and that “sin has quit being bitter in my belly” (153). Along toward dawn The Virginian feels less “afeared,” and notes that the missionary is expected to breakfast soon with the Judge and his wife. He tells him “I’ll worry through the day somehow without yu’. And to-night you can turn your wolf loose on me again” (154). At this point the motivation of the Virginian is clear, and as the narrator stifles his laughter into his pillow (“making the noise of a dozen hens” 154) the missionary cries that his treatment is “an infamous disgrace” (154). He leaves in a huff, to the relief of everyone on the ranch. In this exchange the Virginian is once more protecting the ranch’s interests by wielding his power as an orator in much the same way as his frog tale does with the men. He completely dupes the missionary, keeping him up all night and finally admitting his strategy to complete the job. So in the Virginian, Wister offers a complete hero whose rhetoric and oration serve equally well as his gunplay and physicality.5
Austin alludes to context and agreement, but context alone doesn’t explain why someone would agree to meet a fellow man in a field on the outskirts of town for the express purpose of shooting at one another, especially on the pretext that this action would somehow solve anything – how does a verbal disagreement turn to a physical solution?
In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle suggests that most actions are governed by what he terms “social reality.” Searle suggests that “social reality is, so to speak, weightless and invisible” insofar as people grow up within it and take it wholly for granted, indeed don’t feel its presence at all – except for those who challenge its borders. He notes “there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are thing that exist only because we believe them to exists” (1). This agreement constitutes what he calls an “institutional fact,” which he differentiates from “brute” facts (2). Examples of institutional facts, those which require widespread agreement for their existence, could include things as mundane as hammers, or as conceptual as fiat money or masculine honor, As an object, a hammer is a “brute” fact; it exists in the world independent of people, even though people made it. What makes it a hammer, however, is the social function assigned to it. If it is dropped in the desert and left, it continues to exist physically. When removed from human society, however, it does not continue to be a hammer, because its name and purpose are imposed upon it by collective agreement by society, and represents an institutional fact. For its institutional existence, the hammer relies in large part on the intentionality of the society that has constructed the need for a hammer and the use to which a hammer is put. Searle asserts that people live in a world constructed of function, and that view everything, even the physical world in terms of how it functions or what functions it represents.
The same may be said of fiat money, and Searle spends some time wrangling with the idea that the value of a twenty-dollar bill is wholly dependent upon the collective agreement that it has such value. Searle notes that “for social facts, the attitude we take toward the phenomenon is partly constitutive of the phenomenon … [and] this is a remarkable feature of social facts; it has no analogue among physical facts” (33-34). Observe that if public faith in the value of money suffers a precipitous decline it can quite literally create such a decline in its value. The value of the twenty-dollar bill is purely in “the metaphysics of ordinary social relations” that such a slip of paper is imbued with this value, and it is here that the rhetoric of the Duello acts, or acted, upon those who participated in it (4). Searle’s example of fiat money is salient for its similarity to masculine honor within the culture of the Duello; a man’s social face was based on the credit society extended him, and honor may be productively considered in economic terms.
Institutional facts as complex and dynamic as the Duello depend on what Searle calls “collective intentionality,” for not only do people “engage in cooperative behavior, but … they share intentional states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions” (23). In other words, it is not enough for someone to call a slip of paper a twenty-dollar bill; it must be a fact that is agreed upon by a large group of people. Searle uses the example of a prizefight to illustrate collective intentionality; a random assault in an alleyway might not require that both participants be in agreement about what is happening, but for something like a prizefight (or a duel) to go off, everyone involved has to be in agreement about what will occur and what it will mean. Searle’s definition of a collective intentionality simply demonstrates that the individual intentionalities that comprise the aggregate society are all functioning within the whole by identifying their actions and beliefs with the larger social structure. Thus, even though the aggregate is indeed composed of individuals, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts because of this overarching shared ethos. In the cultural milieu of the Old South, men understood their role in relation to the society as a whole, as protectors, and this understanding of themselves was directly responsible for their behavior and the often absurd lengths to which they would go to protect their social identity. Recall that the premium placed upon being “given the lie” was not whether or not one’s statement were true, but that it undermined one’s social face, calling into question one’s ability to protect and provide for one’s family. Such questions threatened to essentially separate the aggrieved from society by declaring him unfit for the role his gender and social class indicated, and without his position in society a gentleman was unhinged. The primacy of the relationship between the individual and society suggests one reason that the industrial North was never as fond of dueling as the agrarian South. Built as it was upon trade and craft, men in the North were more likely to view themselves as distinct from the society they inhabited than men in the South, where even economic activities were wholly dependent upon the cooperative actions of many individuals.6
There are two types of rules governing behavior, constitutive and regulative – the former are rules that govern an activity (as the rules of chess define the game) and the latter regulate a pre-existing activity (as the rules of the road regulate driving). In the Duello, there exists something of a blend because the rules of the duel are constitutive on one hand (what makes it a duel is that the rules are followed and it’s done properly), yet regulative on the other (these rules govern violence, which covers a much larger category of behavior and may indeed be intrinsic to human natures). So dueling codes are constitutive rules of honor that are regulative of violence in general.
Searle states all institutional facts have a corollary physical fact. In some ways this point highlights the relationship between constitutive and regulative rules because the duel is an institutional fact that regulates a pre-existing tendency toward violence among people. Searle suggests that collective intentionality “bridges” the gap between the physical and institutional facts when “the imposition of function [occurs] on entities that cannot perform that function without that imposition” (41). His example is that of a physical wall surrounding a tribe that defines their boundaries – if the wall breaks down in time, it may no longer serve to physically separate the tribe from the outside world, but may have come to symbolize the boundary, and so act as such even though one might step right over it. Such boundaries exist in society in the form of legal borders, whether national borders or a personal property line, or even in the rope barriers at a movie theater. So it is within the Duello that the periodic violence acts as a check upon further violence, and in many cases men do not have to defend their honor precisely because it is publicly known that they would. And so a man’s (or a woman’s) honor represents a metaphysical boundary that is respected because everyone acknowledges its existence, even though it is invisible.
Searle also speaks of performative utterances or declarations. He suggests, as does Austin, that these performative utterances do what they say, as in “I appoint you chairman” or the like. For Searle, this point is important because it is in these performative utterances that institutional facts are created. He states “performatives play a special role in the creation of institutional facts, because the status-function marked by the Y term in the formula ‘X counts as Y’ can often, though not always, be imposed simply by declaring it to be imposed. This is especially true when the X term is itself a speech act” (55). The importance of this symbolic formula is one of symbolism; when X counts as Y it stands in for something as a social symbol or status marker for a physical fact or position. As Searle notes, the X term does not need to be a speech act but instead may be a physical symbol, and he uses the example of a wedding ring to symbolize a host of emotional and legal conditions and commitments that are represented by a small piece of jewelry on a given finger. Here again, the brute fact of love or emotional commitment is represented by an institutional fact of marriage, which comes essentially from the speech acts of a public declaration that someone will forever maintain the current relationship with their partner. Because “language is constitutive of institutional reality” there is no marriage, or even the concept of such a social arrangement, until it is spoken into being (59). Searle suggests, “the capacity to attach a sense, a symbolic function, to an object that does not have that sense intrinsically, is the precondition not only of language but of all institutional reality” (75).
So ‘X counts as Y’ is the primary conduit that allows a gentleman to assume the host of rights and responsibilities that come with the concept of “being a gentleman.” If a man is educated, well mannered, landed, owns slaves, etc. he possesses the earmarks of a gentleman – if his person and bearing represent the X term, he can be counted as a Y term. And Searle, like Austin, notes the level of social agreement that is required, because “as long as people continue to recognize the X as having the Y status function, the institutional fact is created and maintained” (47). This point brings Searle to the next iteration of the formula: X counts as Y in C. This formula, Searle asserts:
gives us a powerful tool for understanding the form of the creation of the new institutional fact, because the form of the collective intentionality is to impose that status and its function, specified by the Y term, on some phenomenon named by the X term. The ‘counts as’ locution is crucial in this formula because since the function in question cannot be performed solely in virtue of the physical features of the X element, it requires our agreement or acceptance that it be performed. Thus, we agree to count the object named by the X term as having the status and function specified by the Y term (46).
The ‘C’ value here may be deemed context, or the social situation. If a man (X) is unknown to me, but I meet him in the company of fellow gentlemen, I may treat him as a gentleman (Y) by virtue of his acceptance in society (C).7 Searle notes, “a certain sort of promise as X can count as a contract Y, but to be a promise is already to have a Y status-function at a lower level. It is no exaggeration to say that these iterations provide the logical structure of complex societies” (80). So to participate in the Duello, or to issue (or accept) a challenge, one must be a gentleman, which is a Y term from a lower level – to be a gentleman one must be well bred, educated, a good card player, etc. So if one is educated (X), then one may be treated as a gentleman (Y) in the social context of a verbal disagreement (C).
Searle’s formula for institutional facts demonstrates how the Duello served as a social status marker in the turbulent post-Civil War years of westward expansion even though many of the “brute facts” that had erected the Duello’s codifications were no longer present. In the highly mobile and transitory societies of the west during its initial expansion, men often were unable to know one another as they might have in the antebellum South, where family pedigree could be easily documented. But in the early settlements, ranches and mining camps, one’s actions had to suffice, and men were judged in large measure on how they carried themselves until a record of behavior could be determined. In Shane, Joe Starrett tells his wife Marion, “anything [Shane] does will be done right” (33). Joe has determined this by watching Shane; even in the absence of fine clothes or money, Shane is received as a gentleman – or perhaps it would be better to say a man of quality, as for Schaefer it’s less an issue of class than character – and Joe says, “what a man has isn’t important. It’s what he is that counts” (33). In Joe’s world, a proper man takes care of his things and the people and animals that depend on him – this is an expression of X counts for Y, in which men who behave this way (X) may be considered ‘proper,’ ‘real,’ or ‘gentle’ men (Y). Note that this masculine position of protector or provider is quite similar to an antebellum notion of a ‘gentleman’ as it existed in the South, even though it is absent of the class markers of wealth and land ownership. When Shane appears, Schaefer notes that he lets his horse drink before he does, and that “everything about him showed the effects of long use and hard use, but showed too the strength of quality and competence” (4).
It is this algebraic formula of Searle’s that is in play when Starrett takes Shane’s word over the salesman Ledyard, who has come by with an overpriced cultivator. Shane has remarked that Ledyard is asking too much; Ledyard doesn’t appreciate his intervening and attempts to undermine his influence by questioning his face, remarking to Starrett that he is “surprised you’d let him hang around” (15). But Starrett tells Ledyard that, “I’m taking his word. He’s my guest. … I can figure men for myself. I’ll take his word on anything he wants to say any day of God’s year” (16). Shane (X) counts as a gentleman or man of quality (Y) when he looks competent and well cared for (if a little trail-worn), and when he clearly and overtly cares for his horse (C). Being granted this (Y) function at an earlier (or Searle would say lower) level, Shane has the social capital to influence Starrett’s decision with respect to Ledyard’s honesty and forthrightness. Starrett takes Shane’s price of sixty dollars and adds twenty for profit and delivery, and Ledyard reluctantly accepts it. Starrett has accepted Shane’s version of truth over Ledyard’s, and in so doing explicitly values Shane more than the trader, based on the men’s respective abilities to ‘sell’ themselves. Shane’s ‘face’ is more convincing, and Scheafer presents it as naturally so; while he doesn’t stoop to the sort of “natural man” moralizing that Wister was fond of, he is clearly writing from the same camp. The status of gentleman is now an intrinsic quality that cannot be so closely allied to class markers like one’s clothing, or even communal ties, such as if Shane had been the cousin of someone Starrett knew, and his status is assured instead through such a voucher system.
Competence and strength are prime qualities in western fiction and films, and these are valued because they represent social power. Searle notes, “in general, status-functions are matters of power … [and] the structure of institutional facts is a structure of power relations, including negative and positive, conditional and categorical, collective and individual powers” (94). He comments, “institutional power relations are ubiquitous and essential. Institutional power – massive, pervasive, and typically invisible – permeates every nook and cranny of our social lives, and as such it is not a threat to liberal values but rather the precondition of their existence” (94). The institutional power intrinsic in the Duello as a cultural practice served just this purpose; it established order so that civilization (as it was then defined) could proceed. The violence that was certainly part and parcel of the Duello’s requirements acted as a regulative rule to order the natural aggressive tendencies of men whose success lie in zealously defending their borders and resources from potential rivals.
In an essay entitled “Force,” Stanley Fish asserts that language is force and can be as powerful as “a gun at your head” (520). Fish takes as his starting point The Concept of Law by H.L.A. Hart, in which he disagrees with Austin in characterizing the law as a “’situation where one person give another an order backed by threats’ and thereby ‘obliges him to comply’” (503). Hart believes that the law is wholly unrelated to such brute force, and complains that it casts the law as nothing more than organized banditry. Fish agrees with Austin, however, and rather does think that the law is simply better organized than the common thug. Fish makes two points about the force of law that are salient here. Firstly, the law differs from more common force by two elements: distance and separation, and the illusion of objectivity. The law validates itself by virtue of being above mere interpretation, but in being sanctified and almost holy. The law cannot be questioned because it stands apart from other, messier business of judicial interpretations. In this sense the law is separated from the whims and fancies of those who might wish to change things, to give or take preferential treatment under the banner of legality. Secondly, the law is ensconced in such processes that it becomes process itself; this factor aids in its presence as a separate, unquestionable entity, and further allows it to appear objective. When one is forced from one’s home at gunpoint, there is a clear aggressor with obviously malicious intentions; when one is forced from one’s home by the law of eminent domain the actual officers are not malicious, the intentions are presented as offering a benefit to the community, and there is generally no apparent assault. But the cases operate, according to Fish, on the same fundamental basis of force, and the only real difference is that the state’s force is diffused across many levels of process and many individual actors so that there is no single gunman that one can point to and declare “he stole my house!”
If the basis of government is force, its legitimacy is based in language. The force of law is different than the force of individual wills only because people believe it to be so, and act on that belief. For Fish, everything rests in the linguistic hurly-burly of interpretation and argument, and he states that that’s okay, because people are always living within the created world of linguistic structures, and even “legal actors [or literary critics] … live within the temporary ascendancies they at once affirm and undo” (523).
What Fish is speaking of is simply the institutional facts of Searle, the shared agreements that people live by. Understanding the theoretical basis behind these theories sheds important light on why men would go to the field and risk their lives over piddling arguments. Here is the social force of a community that loses faith in one of its members; as the Virginian explains to Molly, if the townspeople come to think he is a coward, “[m]y friends would be sorry and ashamed. My enemies would walk around saying they had always said so. I could not hold up my head again among enemies or friends” (298).
When the Virginian and Molly come into town for their wedding, Scipio tells the Virginian not to change his clothes in a veiled warning; Trampas has been loitering in town, “fillin’ up” and saying some indelicate things about his nemesis (291). Because it’s supposed to be his wedding day, several of his friends offer to run Trampas out of town for him; the mayor offers to arrest him and hold him until the Virginian is “married and away” (291). The Virginian is left in a quandary of sorts because “the community knew that a man had implied he was a thief and a murderer; it also knew that he knew it” (291-292). The question is whether or not his impending nuptials could excuse him from having to call Trampas to account for his words, as most brides would discourage gunplay in their husbands-to-be on their wedding day. He weighs his options against the implicit Code Duello: “could he for her sake leave unanswered a talking enemy upon the field? His own ears had not heard the enemy” (292). This state soon changes, as Trampas comes drunkenly in, firing a shot at the ceiling as others attempt to restrain him. He unleashes a fury of epithets that no real man could honorably withstand, ending with an ultimatum, “I’ll give you till sundown to leave town” (292). Still not satisfied, he then throws a whisky bottle at his hated target.
The Virginian has had all he can stand, and of the last physical assault says, “that was surplus, Trampas … if you mean the other” (292). Trampas repeats his deadline and retreats. To the assemblage the Virginian says, “Gentlemen, I know you’ll oblige me” (293).
If the challenge was issued and retracted almost silently over the card table, it is not so here; Trampas is a loud and foul-mouthed challenger (no matter how murderous they may have been, a proper antebellum gentleman was at least polite), who has issued the Virginian a challenge that he cannot ignore, and can no longer postpone. All of the men who were offering to handle Trampas for him now offer to back away and leave him his business; each was done in the same spirit of friendship as the other.
The Virginian’s friends, McLean, Wiggins, and Scipio scour the town to make certain that none of Trampas’ friends make a foul play, and when the time comes for the Virginian to meet him in the street they follow behind to guard his back. In some respects this practice appears to invalidate the Duello code, as no gentleman would cross his opposing principal in such a blackguard manner. However, the nature of seconds were charged with guaranteeing that the duel went off properly, and McLean, Wiggins, and Scipio are acting in precisely the right way for their implicit roles in this affair. They are his seconds, and are protecting his honor. In this climactic final duel, it is the combined effects of the regulative rules of the Duello, which are enforced by a collective intentionality about what constitutes the rules of masculine honor.
Another rhetorician whose works centers on social construction is Kenneth Burke. One of Burke’s central tenets is that scholars must consider what a piece does as well as what it says. This remark doesn’t refer necessarily to its performative quality (though it might), but rather to its context – the same offhand remark by the same person might be taken in very different ways in two different situations, as the Eastern narrator of The Virginian notes. Burke suggests approaching a text as “literature for use,” stressing what the text is supposed to do rather than simply what it says. This recommendation, of course, fits well with current cultural critical models, but also offers a nice corollary to Austin and Searle’s discussion of performative declarations and the greater social requirements of their use. A text, or a statement, must always be considered within its context and for what purpose it was written or uttered, as when the easterner of The Virginian is reminded of “the old truth, that the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life” (19). This is a literary manifestation of the Burkean notion that, “the humorless statement may foretell homicide, and the humorous one may be the very thing that forestalls homicide. Thus surrounded, or modified by the total motivational context, the animus in one case may be as different from the other as yes from no” (5).
Burke introduces three specific concepts that are directly relevant to the Duello: transformation, identification, and consubstantiality. These three concepts work together in ways that help clarify why the culture of the Duello made men make the choices they did.
Transformation involves, as its name might suggest, transforming something – he notes again and again that features often can contain their opposite, so that an artistic image of murder may actually refer to suicide, or that images of killing may refer not to homicidal acts in actuality, but in ritually defeating some element of the artist’s psyche. Understood in this way, the duel may be seen as an exercise in transformation, in which “the so-called ‘desire to kill’ a certain person is much more properly analyzable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents” (13). Insofar as the principals involved in a duel represent a social threat to one another, they certainly do want to transform their opposing principle. Trampas has called the Virginian a thief and a murderer, and in so doing threatens his honor, the social face and economic credit that he possesses in the community. The Virginian must “transform” Trampas into a reassertion of his social worth and value by calling him to account for his lies, thus restoring his social capital.
As a duelist, particularly a first-time principal, engaging in the duel offers another transformation as a rite of passage – A young man enters the lists as a youth, and exits (assuming he is not killed) a man, having proven himself capable of defending himself, and by extension, my home and family. More importantly than his ability to defend, however, is his ability to stand his ground in the face of danger; his willingness to risk everything is indicative of his membership in the institutional fact of the Duello and all it stands for. The social status of having dueled, or being old enough, or “man enough” to face such danger is a recurring theme. In his autobiography, Twain wryly recalls that in Nevada at the time, no man could “thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled himself” (Autobiography 71). It also appears in Roughing It, in Twain’s anecdote of Little Brown, who very nearly gets himself into more duel than he can handle over a crushed hat. Finally, it appears in Cody’s autobiography when Chief Rain-in-the-Face intervenes on Cody’s behalf to spare his life from a raiding party by telling them that Cody is still a “papoose,” and too young to honorably kill. In Shane, Shane rejects Chris’ attempts to insult him over soda pop by telling him, “you’ve had your fun and it’s mighty young fun. Now run home and tell Fletcher to send a grown up man next time” (53). In so doing, Shane rejects Chris’ status and refuses to validate his insult. For Burke, themes frequently occur on lines of opposition, such as murder/suicide, and he suggests that in literature, one theme is often sublimated through the expression of another. This dynamic is certainly at work in the duel, because it is an exercise in transformation along an axis of death and rebirth – by facing one’s challenger, one symbolically dies and is reborn. The power of this transformation is clearly evident in the Duello, and in Twain’s autobiography he relates a duel that his friend Joseph Goodman fought with a rival editor in Virginia City.8 Goodman enlists the aid of a veteran duelist named Major Graves. Major Graves tells Goodman to hold the pistol low and bring it up rather than the reverse, for it is of the utmost importance that one not risk actually killing one’s opponent. Graves states that one should “take all the risks of getting murdered yourself, but don’t run any risk of murdering the other man. If you survive a duel you want to survive it in such a way that the memory of it will not linger along with you through the rest of your life and interfere with your sleep.” The honorable tactic, according to Graves, was to shoot at the man’s leg below the knee; it would cripple him, “but leave the rest of him to his mother” (73). Goodman is a good study and brings off his duel in exactly this way, giving his man a limp and losing only a lock of hair himself. This short anecdote of Twain’s illustrates the Burkean concept of this binary transformation and the social emphasis the Duello placed on facing danger rather than actually killing.
Identification follows closely on the heels of transformation because “transformation involves the ideas and imagery of identification,” and the imagery of killing offers an especially ripe case (20). Burke says, “the killing of something is the changing of it, and the statement of the thing’s nature before and after change is an identifying of it” (20). The transformation in the above scenario works precisely because the participants have identified with the values represented by the duel as a rite of passage, and Burke suggests that such identifications occur everywhere (although obviously they’re seldom as dangerous), and he states that it’s quite normal for a young adolescent to identify with images of brutality or violence precisely because they symbolize the transformation that is taking place within the adolescent himself. Now most adolescents do not have visibly violent transitions into adulthood, but for most of them, they feel very much so. Again, as Burke is careful to point out, violence as an identification serves as a trope of violent transformation, and need not have a concrete corollary (though in the case of antebellum youth, the distance between symbol and reality was quite short).
So identification works to bring together two essentially disparate elements under one rubric, or by combining them in symbolic meaning. He notes that “rhetoric is par excellence the region of the Scrabble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, malice and the lie, cloaked malice and the subsidized lie,” but he points out that it “also includes resources of appeal ranging from sacrificial, evangelical love, through the kinds of persuasion figuring in sexual love, to sheer ‘neutral’ communication” (19). Rhetoric, as a form of communication, may be viewed as agonistic, Irenic, or some combination that includes both elements. In this way, Burke is able to make the apparently ludicrous assertion that war is really “a special case of peace – not as a primary motive in itself, not as essentially real, but purely as a derivative condition, a perversion” (25). War is, in other words, not an element in its own right, but a piece of a much larger whole. He notes that in war there are a myriad of cooperations that go into the massed antagonisms of combat and battle, and even among combatants, within the larger context of hostile fighting there are incidents of mercy and sympathy between individuals. Indeed, he refers to war as “the ultimate disease of cooperation,” and notes that the battlefield is a mediatory ground, a larger context that is able to at once contain both antagonistic parties and also unify them in a cohesive whole (22). His point, of course, is not to argue that warfare is a nifty way to make friends and influence one’s political neighbors, but that in any situation, particularly in complex situations such as warfare, there are many sides and angles, and how the whole picture looks depends a great deal on how one identifies with what one finds. He notes that even though an act may be distilled down to its pure intrinsic principles, this fact doesn’t preclude another from finding a wholly different set of apparently intrinsic principles at work. This fact is due to the complicated nature of identification, whereas there is always another possibility lurking on the fringes of any principle, and thus, it is practically impossible to fully isolate and fix any single identity. As an example, he uses the shepherd guarding his flock – on the one hand, he is a marvel of peace and stewardship, protecting his flock from wolves, but on the other he is merely protecting his investment and guaranteeing high market value for animals that will ultimately be led (by his very hand) to slaughter. Both of these examples bear directly on the Duello. As in warfare, men faced each other in duels for reasons that were very much held in common and that transcended their respective grievances with one another. The field of honor unified the antagonists in their common defense of masculine honor, and it was really not so very much about the particular insult (which is not to say that any insult was forgotten!). So it is possible to consider the Duello as “a special case of peace” insofar as the violence within it is an aberration that itself evinces a great deal of cooperative behaviors. Furthermore, I believe it is appropriate to see the Duello as at least partially a socially constitutive institution that enabled men to negotiate conflicts with a minimum of violence. Taken this way, the cooperation of the Duello serves to reduce violence and bloodshed even as it sometimes authorizes it.
Burke’s warfare example also leads to his final concept, that of consubstantiation, which is the notion that an individual is related to, or connected to, others. Burke says, “in being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet … he remains uniquely an individual locus of motives” (21). So in explaining the consubstantiality of duelling, the principle is separate from his second, from the doctor, and everyone else present, yet all share in the same system of honor and code, and thus all are consubstantial with one another by virtue of holding different positions in the same unifying referent of the Duello. Another consubstantiating feature of the Duello is that the violence of the duel is substantially the same as the general peace that (at least superficially) prevailed over most of polite society. Because of the extensive amount of cooperation among different individuals required for a duel to off properly, the violence of a duel isn’t really a threat to the general peace. It is not an incidence of chaos or a lapse in social controls, but simply another manifestation of social control. As in The Virginian, everyone in town understands the conflict that is brewing, and in fact has seen it building for some time. Indeed, the Virginian’s friends offer to help in whatever role they can, signifying the extent to which this single combat was very much a communal affair.
Chapter Three
“Them’s Fightin’ Words!”
Speech acts have always been intimately tied to the Duello; indeed, it is only through the verbal cues of challenge and acceptance and the speech acts of the seconds (as well as the speech codes, implicit and explicit) that ultimately identify a conflict as participating in the Duello and differentiating this violence from other, baser forms of killing. The Duello is governed by language use in a complicated and dynamic relationship that governs the actions of those who participate in the Duello. The rhetoric of the duel assumes two primary roles, the actual speech acts that govern its use, and an understanding of the rhetorical theory that underlies the cultural assumptions behind the social institution of the Duello. On one hand, language may be considered the introduction to force, the challenges that incite violence and authorize it, but it would be a mistake to see these speech acts as stoplights that merely grant or deny the passage of physical acts. The speech acts that occur in the Duello are forceful and palpable in and of themselves, and occasionally an entire conflict is negotiated within language, as with the tall tales in The Virginian, without any recourse to physical force.
In a series of lectures in the 1970s, J.L. Austin outlined exactly how language influences force. He defines “performative sentences” as those in which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something” (6-7). He delineates three discrete sets of performative utterances, locution, illocution, and perlocution; each represents a different level of persuasion upon the auditor. The first of Austin’s levels, locution, is in essence any kind of declaratory statement, for example, “He said to me, ‘shoot her!’” The locution is “roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in a traditional sense” (109). A more emphatic version would be illocution, in which persuasion is more traditionally employed: He urged me to shoot her. Illocutionary acts are “utterances which have a certain (conventional) force” (109). Taking Austin’s example, if a soldier is ordered to shoot a prisoner there is a certain conventional force in the superior’s authority, but the soldier may not comply, citing illegitimate orders or the like. Finally, a perlocutionary act would be exemplified by ‘He persuaded me to shoot her, or ‘He got me (made me, etc) shoot her.’ Here the difference is that the force is applied, or the persuasion is successful. In this example the difference between an illocutionary and a perlocutionary statement appears to be one of reception; if I make an argument it is illocutionary, and if my argument is convincing it becomes perlocutionary. Austin states that perlocutionary acts are those in which “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say surprising or misleading” (109).
A perlocutionary act is one that does what it says, such as marriage vows. When the groom states “with this ring, I thee wed,” his statement brings about the effect that it names. Austin notes that perlocutionary acts are highly dependent upon social context, however – in the case of marriage, the couple must be in the context of a socially recognized ceremony for their speech to be perlocutionary.
Austin’s analysis of performative sentences is particularly applicable to the Duello. He actually mentions dueling, noting that often perlocutionary statements must be worded very specifically, and it is often the case that simply naming what one is doing fails to effect the act – when we challenge another, we do not say “I challenge you,” but the challenge itself must be worded differently. Austin notes that an exception to this is the German University Duelling Corps, in which they will issue a challenge that translates directly into “I insult you,” which of course intrinsically carries no particular insult, but in the case of the University students it works because of the context. It works in this case because the point of the Duello is subtly different, and the actual challenge is a mere formality because they have to duel as a rite of passage, proving their mettle.1 In the future, these men will not issue challenges in the same rote manner as they did while at the university. Instead, they will use, or at least their American counterparts used, specific insults drawn from a common wellspring of epithets: liar, puppy, the ever-popular poltroon, and others; these insults carry a certain duel-specific weight, and are the insults of the honorable challenge.2 Traditionally there was a set of typical insults that would trigger challenges. A fine example is Stephen Crane’s “The Duel That Was Not Fought” (1894).
In this short story, Stephen Crane presents a clash between working class American men and a presumably higher-class foreigner – or at least a foreigner who perceives himself to be of higher class. Patsy Tulligan is at a public house with two of his friends from down on Cherry Street. Also in the pub is a “slim little” Cuban who is described as possessing almost feminine features. This Cuban is almost diametrically opposed to the models of masculinity presented in Shane and the Virginian.
The Cuban makes a small remark, almost under his breath, a remark that Crane does not share with his readers, and is presented as being not directed quite at Patsy, but clearly about him. Patsy responds with another remark that Crane does not share, a “careless and rather loud comment to his two friends. He used a word which is no more than passing the time of day down in Cherry Street, but to the Cuban it was a dagger point” (205).
The Cuban challenges Patsy by telling him “you have insult me. You are a dog, a hound, a cur. I spit upon you. I must have some of your blood … . I must have s-s-satisfac-shone” (206). These are all typical insults, about on par with “poltroon” and “puppy.” It recalls Austin’s caution that one cannot challenge a man by saying “I challenge you,” and so the Cuban is careful to issue his challenge in the appropriate terms, ending on a demand for satisfaction. It could not be clearer, except to Patsy, who is only vaguely aware that the little man wants to fight for some reason.
Patsy offers to “wipe d’joint wid yeh,” but of course the Cuban is not interested in a brawl; he wants a real duel. The Cuban has offered Patsy perlocutionary speech, only to be given locutionary in return; it fails to satisfy him. The Cuban, “in his clear tense tones, spoke one word. It was the bitter insult. It seemed to fairly spin from his lips and crackle in the air like breaking glass” (207). He chooses these words because they are recognized as the proper ones to use in such situations, and this fact illustrates Austin’s second most salient point, that all performative speech acts must be accepted by their listeners as valid in order to fulfill their intended role. Austin specifically uses the example of the duel in noting that if I challenge another and he simply shrugs it off, the performative weight of my insult, its perlocutionary force is lost or dissipated, and the glorious duel I sought with him comes to naught. This fact is the real source of dueling’s decline in America, and even abroad. People simply quit validating the speech codes that supported and controlled the activity, and this is in fact what happens in Crane’s tale. The Cuban adheres closely to the strictures of the Duello, but the men he challenges don’t seem to speak his language. Ultimately, rather than the men recognizing the power of his speech and participating in a duel, the Cuban is hauled off to jail by a policeman. Crane demonstrates the limitations of performative speech; context is everything.
The contextual importance of speech is highlighted early in The Virginian when the narrator from the East first arrives in Wyoming. The stereotype of the western hero is that of the strong, silent type, and Jane Tompkins notes that a character’s speech becomes even more important as he says less. Such is the case with the Virginian, who exemplifies the silent hero and yet is also an accomplished orator. Although Jane Tompkins suggests that speech is feminized in westerns as part of a continued backlash against women that began with Hawthorne’s infamous “scribbling women” remark, in The Virginian there is a different kind of speech being valued, and the tension that exists rests more squarely upon the East/West boundary as part of Wister’s program to define the quintessential American male.3
But if Western heroes are not the stoic, silent types that Tompkins suggests, neither do the cowboys of Wister’s imagination tolerate idle chatter. The Easterner is largely silent during his first meal, preferring to observe the interactions and listen to the “drummers.” But he “was doing better than I knew; my strict silence and attention to the corned beef made me in the eyes of the cowboys at the table compare well with the over-talkative commercial travelers” (11).
The novel virtually opens with speech acts; readers are introduced to the Virginian by his playful teasing of Uncle Hughey about his multiple attempts to secure a bride in his later years. The old man gets himself all worked up, but as the Eastern narrator notes, he “evidently got a sort of joy from this teasing,” because he was in a position to walk away if he so chose. So much for the silent Westerners.4 When Uncle Hughey departs, the southerner approaches our Eastern narrator, who presumes to be familiar with him, based largely upon his having witnessed the playful exchange between these friends. Thus, knowing the Virginian to be capable of jocularity and wit, the Easterner attempts to engage him in a similar vein, but he is put off by a veiled sarcasm. Asking his host if there are many such oddities around as Uncle Hughey, the Virginian replies that, “there is a right smart of oddities around. They come in on every train” (6). The Easterner is astute enough to recognize that he is being asked to maintain some social distance, and he admires the deft way that the Virginian is able to distance himself from his charge (for he is charged with picking up the Easterner for his boss, and so owes him civility, but not familiarity).
The Easterner gets another lesson in the social use of language shortly thereafter, as the pair encounters Steve, a friend of the Virginian’s. Steve greets his friend by taking a swat at his hat, which doesn’t irritate him at all. Steve remarks that he’ll have a difficult time finding a bed to himself in the small town, and the Virginian suggests that he’ll get his own bed, hinting at some trickery and implicitly recommending a bet of “drinks for the crowd” (9). Steve seems to think he’s at a disadvantage, but takes the bet, saying, “you’re such a son-of-a---- when you get down to work” (9). The Easterner “expected that [Steve] would be struck down” for such a serious insult, but the Virginian doesn’t seem bothered by it in the least; “used thus, this language was plainly complementary” (9).
But the term takes on a new color when the Virginian becomes involved in a card game; there are a couple of questions about him returning from Arizona, as an unnamed man asks why he didn’t stay. The Easterner is quick enough to feel the shift in the linguistic winds, and notes that the “sunshine of merriment” was suddenly gone (17). Through overheard conversation, readers learn that the man making most of the snide remarks is Trampas, who will prove to be the novel’s antagonist. Tonight he is having poor luck at cards and is looking for someone to take it out on. He lays down his money and says, “your bet, you son-of-a----,” using the same epithet that Steve had earlier (18). But the Virginians’ response is different this time, as he lays his pistol on the table and in an easy, gentle voice, cautions Trampas, “when you call me that, smile!” (18). The dealer tells a man near the Eastern to “sit quiet … can’t you see he don’t want to push no trouble? He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel” (19). Trampas doesn’t take up the challenge, although the narrator remarks that “a public back-down is an unfinished thing,” hinting at their future conflicts later in the book (19).
This scene, and in the penultimate ‘showdown’ scene later in the book, demonstrates the Duello in its later, frontier, form: most of the formalities have been dispensed with, but the salient elements remain. There is no second, no cards are exchanged, no apology is formally offered, and yet the dynamic of the interaction remains fundamentally the same. Many of the explicit speech markers of the old Duello are gone, but are now exchanged for implicit ones that serve the same function, and meaning lies primarily in the context and intention of what is said. Even the narrator understands this, and remarks about how different the Virginian’s response to Trampas was from his response to Steve: “the same words, identical to the letter. But this time they produced a pistol. … So I perceived a new example of the old truth, that the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life” (19).
Performative speech is powerful in its own right, not simply as a precursor to physical violence in the form of a challenge. Particularly in The Virginian, speech exists as its own site of rhetorical conflict. Linguistic power appears again later in the novel, during the “Game and the Nation” chapters. Here, the Virginian has been appointed foreman by his employer, the Judge, and is charged with bringing cattle to market and then returning the men via railroad. Getting the meat to market proves easily enough done, but on the return trip the men hear tales of a fresh gold strike in Rawhide, and many of the young men want to jump ship and go try their hand at gold-digging. This cadre is led by Trampas, of course, whom the Virginian hired on as a hand. In these chapters it is not fighting, but speaking abilities that win the day, as Trampas tries to slyly effect his mutiny while the Virginian struggles to retain control of the men.
The men are paused at a small whistle stop, where the trains must wait for repair to the Big Horn bridge before they can continue, and they begin comparing scars and sharing stories. The Easterner falls in listening to a cowboy’s tale of getting a small scar on his thumb; it involves a job for an scientist hunting for owl eggs in the ground and being bitten by a snake instead; the wife of the man (an Easterner in short pants) who has hired him produces an Indian Medicine stone that sucks all the poison from his finger and then drops off … and when the wife has a child later in the year, the boy comes out with 8 rattles, just like the snake had. Well, the Easterner sees that he’s been had, and in his narration he complements the cowboy for, “fact and falsehood blended with such perfect art” (112).
Trampas and the Virginian begin what appears an idle conversation about railway developments, engineering practices, and their worth and practicality. The conflict is sublimated, but each clearly wishes to appear the better of the other. They run about neck and neck for a time, until Trampas mentions an accident that the Virginian has not heard of; his reply is that the Southerner has “been running too much with aristocrats” (114). Here the conflict is most thinly veiled, and the Virginian responds by trying to force Trampas’ hand, saying, “I thought you’d be afeared to try it on me” (114). Trampas whirls around, his hand on his gun, but stops himself, and what another character recognizes as a brewing showdown is averted. But even the Virginian recognizes that he has all but lost the loyalty of the men to Trampas’ lead, and sighs that “maybe none of us are crossing that Big Horn bridge now, except me” (115).
There have been several trains stopped for these repairs, and so the town has flat run out of food to supply the hungry passengers. The Virginian, with the aid of his new cook, Scipio, rounds up a mess of frogs and is able to feed his men and a few hungry travelers, besides. He notes that the townspeople were about to starve, never realizing the wealth of good meat they had so near. This fact is due to their fixation on cattle; Montana being a cattle state, he explains, folks naturally think in those terms, never thinking about other sources of food, or income. He then launches into a grand story about his days on the Tulane frog ranch down in California. He weaves a glorious tale about the riches of frog ranching and the lucrative business it presented in the recent past, before the business dried up, finally ending on the solemn statement, “frawgs are dead, Trampas, and so are you” (125). To which his new cook Scipio yells, “rise up, liars, and salute your king!” (125). Shortly thereafter the bridge is repaired, and the Virginian offers his crew one last opportunity to defect to Rawhide, but they refuse, preferring instead to remain on board. Trampas has lost again, this time to a superior tall tale. Here there is no threat of violence; in some respects the stakes are higher here because the Virginian is officially in a position of power, being responsible for the men and answerable to the Judge, whereas previously their conflict involved only themselves. Yet there is no overt force here, only the linguistic wrangling of tall tales and the persuasive power that they project on behalf of their orators.
The Virginian’s speech is also showcased when an itinerant missionary visits the ranching area. Dr. MacBride offers the cowboys a hellfire and brimstone speech that focuses on their sin and impossibility of their redemption through choosing not to sin. The narrator notes how carefully the missionary, “built the black cellar of his theology, leaving out its beautiful park and the sunshine of its garden,” speaking only of God’s wrath and saying nothing of love or forgiveness (150). The cowboys are not impressed, and except for the Virginian, their attention wanders. For his part, the Virginian goes to the missionary in the night, “using some of the missionary’s own language” (152). The Virginian keeps the poor man up all night wrangling over points of theology and ardently requesting the missionary’s intervention. The Virginian tells him, “I’m afeared to be alone,” that he is “losin’ my desire afteh the sincere milk of the Word” and that “sin has quit being bitter in my belly” (153). Along toward dawn The Virginian feels less “afeared,” and notes that the missionary is expected to breakfast soon with the Judge and his wife. He tells him “I’ll worry through the day somehow without yu’. And to-night you can turn your wolf loose on me again” (154). At this point the motivation of the Virginian is clear, and as the narrator stifles his laughter into his pillow (“making the noise of a dozen hens” 154) the missionary cries that his treatment is “an infamous disgrace” (154). He leaves in a huff, to the relief of everyone on the ranch. In this exchange the Virginian is once more protecting the ranch’s interests by wielding his power as an orator in much the same way as his frog tale does with the men. He completely dupes the missionary, keeping him up all night and finally admitting his strategy to complete the job. So in the Virginian, Wister offers a complete hero whose rhetoric and oration serve equally well as his gunplay and physicality.5
Austin alludes to context and agreement, but context alone doesn’t explain why someone would agree to meet a fellow man in a field on the outskirts of town for the express purpose of shooting at one another, especially on the pretext that this action would somehow solve anything – how does a verbal disagreement turn to a physical solution?
In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle suggests that most actions are governed by what he terms “social reality.” Searle suggests that “social reality is, so to speak, weightless and invisible” insofar as people grow up within it and take it wholly for granted, indeed don’t feel its presence at all – except for those who challenge its borders. He notes “there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are thing that exist only because we believe them to exists” (1). This agreement constitutes what he calls an “institutional fact,” which he differentiates from “brute” facts (2). Examples of institutional facts, those which require widespread agreement for their existence, could include things as mundane as hammers, or as conceptual as fiat money or masculine honor, As an object, a hammer is a “brute” fact; it exists in the world independent of people, even though people made it. What makes it a hammer, however, is the social function assigned to it. If it is dropped in the desert and left, it continues to exist physically. When removed from human society, however, it does not continue to be a hammer, because its name and purpose are imposed upon it by collective agreement by society, and represents an institutional fact. For its institutional existence, the hammer relies in large part on the intentionality of the society that has constructed the need for a hammer and the use to which a hammer is put. Searle asserts that people live in a world constructed of function, and that view everything, even the physical world in terms of how it functions or what functions it represents.
The same may be said of fiat money, and Searle spends some time wrangling with the idea that the value of a twenty-dollar bill is wholly dependent upon the collective agreement that it has such value. Searle notes that “for social facts, the attitude we take toward the phenomenon is partly constitutive of the phenomenon … [and] this is a remarkable feature of social facts; it has no analogue among physical facts” (33-34). Observe that if public faith in the value of money suffers a precipitous decline it can quite literally create such a decline in its value. The value of the twenty-dollar bill is purely in “the metaphysics of ordinary social relations” that such a slip of paper is imbued with this value, and it is here that the rhetoric of the Duello acts, or acted, upon those who participated in it (4). Searle’s example of fiat money is salient for its similarity to masculine honor within the culture of the Duello; a man’s social face was based on the credit society extended him, and honor may be productively considered in economic terms.
Institutional facts as complex and dynamic as the Duello depend on what Searle calls “collective intentionality,” for not only do people “engage in cooperative behavior, but … they share intentional states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions” (23). In other words, it is not enough for someone to call a slip of paper a twenty-dollar bill; it must be a fact that is agreed upon by a large group of people. Searle uses the example of a prizefight to illustrate collective intentionality; a random assault in an alleyway might not require that both participants be in agreement about what is happening, but for something like a prizefight (or a duel) to go off, everyone involved has to be in agreement about what will occur and what it will mean. Searle’s definition of a collective intentionality simply demonstrates that the individual intentionalities that comprise the aggregate society are all functioning within the whole by identifying their actions and beliefs with the larger social structure. Thus, even though the aggregate is indeed composed of individuals, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts because of this overarching shared ethos. In the cultural milieu of the Old South, men understood their role in relation to the society as a whole, as protectors, and this understanding of themselves was directly responsible for their behavior and the often absurd lengths to which they would go to protect their social identity. Recall that the premium placed upon being “given the lie” was not whether or not one’s statement were true, but that it undermined one’s social face, calling into question one’s ability to protect and provide for one’s family. Such questions threatened to essentially separate the aggrieved from society by declaring him unfit for the role his gender and social class indicated, and without his position in society a gentleman was unhinged. The primacy of the relationship between the individual and society suggests one reason that the industrial North was never as fond of dueling as the agrarian South. Built as it was upon trade and craft, men in the North were more likely to view themselves as distinct from the society they inhabited than men in the South, where even economic activities were wholly dependent upon the cooperative actions of many individuals.6
There are two types of rules governing behavior, constitutive and regulative – the former are rules that govern an activity (as the rules of chess define the game) and the latter regulate a pre-existing activity (as the rules of the road regulate driving). In the Duello, there exists something of a blend because the rules of the duel are constitutive on one hand (what makes it a duel is that the rules are followed and it’s done properly), yet regulative on the other (these rules govern violence, which covers a much larger category of behavior and may indeed be intrinsic to human natures). So dueling codes are constitutive rules of honor that are regulative of violence in general.
Searle states all institutional facts have a corollary physical fact. In some ways this point highlights the relationship between constitutive and regulative rules because the duel is an institutional fact that regulates a pre-existing tendency toward violence among people. Searle suggests that collective intentionality “bridges” the gap between the physical and institutional facts when “the imposition of function [occurs] on entities that cannot perform that function without that imposition” (41). His example is that of a physical wall surrounding a tribe that defines their boundaries – if the wall breaks down in time, it may no longer serve to physically separate the tribe from the outside world, but may have come to symbolize the boundary, and so act as such even though one might step right over it. Such boundaries exist in society in the form of legal borders, whether national borders or a personal property line, or even in the rope barriers at a movie theater. So it is within the Duello that the periodic violence acts as a check upon further violence, and in many cases men do not have to defend their honor precisely because it is publicly known that they would. And so a man’s (or a woman’s) honor represents a metaphysical boundary that is respected because everyone acknowledges its existence, even though it is invisible.
Searle also speaks of performative utterances or declarations. He suggests, as does Austin, that these performative utterances do what they say, as in “I appoint you chairman” or the like. For Searle, this point is important because it is in these performative utterances that institutional facts are created. He states “performatives play a special role in the creation of institutional facts, because the status-function marked by the Y term in the formula ‘X counts as Y’ can often, though not always, be imposed simply by declaring it to be imposed. This is especially true when the X term is itself a speech act” (55). The importance of this symbolic formula is one of symbolism; when X counts as Y it stands in for something as a social symbol or status marker for a physical fact or position. As Searle notes, the X term does not need to be a speech act but instead may be a physical symbol, and he uses the example of a wedding ring to symbolize a host of emotional and legal conditions and commitments that are represented by a small piece of jewelry on a given finger. Here again, the brute fact of love or emotional commitment is represented by an institutional fact of marriage, which comes essentially from the speech acts of a public declaration that someone will forever maintain the current relationship with their partner. Because “language is constitutive of institutional reality” there is no marriage, or even the concept of such a social arrangement, until it is spoken into being (59). Searle suggests, “the capacity to attach a sense, a symbolic function, to an object that does not have that sense intrinsically, is the precondition not only of language but of all institutional reality” (75).
So ‘X counts as Y’ is the primary conduit that allows a gentleman to assume the host of rights and responsibilities that come with the concept of “being a gentleman.” If a man is educated, well mannered, landed, owns slaves, etc. he possesses the earmarks of a gentleman – if his person and bearing represent the X term, he can be counted as a Y term. And Searle, like Austin, notes the level of social agreement that is required, because “as long as people continue to recognize the X as having the Y status function, the institutional fact is created and maintained” (47). This point brings Searle to the next iteration of the formula: X counts as Y in C. This formula, Searle asserts:
gives us a powerful tool for understanding the form of the creation of the new institutional fact, because the form of the collective intentionality is to impose that status and its function, specified by the Y term, on some phenomenon named by the X term. The ‘counts as’ locution is crucial in this formula because since the function in question cannot be performed solely in virtue of the physical features of the X element, it requires our agreement or acceptance that it be performed. Thus, we agree to count the object named by the X term as having the status and function specified by the Y term (46).
The ‘C’ value here may be deemed context, or the social situation. If a man (X) is unknown to me, but I meet him in the company of fellow gentlemen, I may treat him as a gentleman (Y) by virtue of his acceptance in society (C).7 Searle notes, “a certain sort of promise as X can count as a contract Y, but to be a promise is already to have a Y status-function at a lower level. It is no exaggeration to say that these iterations provide the logical structure of complex societies” (80). So to participate in the Duello, or to issue (or accept) a challenge, one must be a gentleman, which is a Y term from a lower level – to be a gentleman one must be well bred, educated, a good card player, etc. So if one is educated (X), then one may be treated as a gentleman (Y) in the social context of a verbal disagreement (C).
Searle’s formula for institutional facts demonstrates how the Duello served as a social status marker in the turbulent post-Civil War years of westward expansion even though many of the “brute facts” that had erected the Duello’s codifications were no longer present. In the highly mobile and transitory societies of the west during its initial expansion, men often were unable to know one another as they might have in the antebellum South, where family pedigree could be easily documented. But in the early settlements, ranches and mining camps, one’s actions had to suffice, and men were judged in large measure on how they carried themselves until a record of behavior could be determined. In Shane, Joe Starrett tells his wife Marion, “anything [Shane] does will be done right” (33). Joe has determined this by watching Shane; even in the absence of fine clothes or money, Shane is received as a gentleman – or perhaps it would be better to say a man of quality, as for Schaefer it’s less an issue of class than character – and Joe says, “what a man has isn’t important. It’s what he is that counts” (33). In Joe’s world, a proper man takes care of his things and the people and animals that depend on him – this is an expression of X counts for Y, in which men who behave this way (X) may be considered ‘proper,’ ‘real,’ or ‘gentle’ men (Y). Note that this masculine position of protector or provider is quite similar to an antebellum notion of a ‘gentleman’ as it existed in the South, even though it is absent of the class markers of wealth and land ownership. When Shane appears, Schaefer notes that he lets his horse drink before he does, and that “everything about him showed the effects of long use and hard use, but showed too the strength of quality and competence” (4).
It is this algebraic formula of Searle’s that is in play when Starrett takes Shane’s word over the salesman Ledyard, who has come by with an overpriced cultivator. Shane has remarked that Ledyard is asking too much; Ledyard doesn’t appreciate his intervening and attempts to undermine his influence by questioning his face, remarking to Starrett that he is “surprised you’d let him hang around” (15). But Starrett tells Ledyard that, “I’m taking his word. He’s my guest. … I can figure men for myself. I’ll take his word on anything he wants to say any day of God’s year” (16). Shane (X) counts as a gentleman or man of quality (Y) when he looks competent and well cared for (if a little trail-worn), and when he clearly and overtly cares for his horse (C). Being granted this (Y) function at an earlier (or Searle would say lower) level, Shane has the social capital to influence Starrett’s decision with respect to Ledyard’s honesty and forthrightness. Starrett takes Shane’s price of sixty dollars and adds twenty for profit and delivery, and Ledyard reluctantly accepts it. Starrett has accepted Shane’s version of truth over Ledyard’s, and in so doing explicitly values Shane more than the trader, based on the men’s respective abilities to ‘sell’ themselves. Shane’s ‘face’ is more convincing, and Scheafer presents it as naturally so; while he doesn’t stoop to the sort of “natural man” moralizing that Wister was fond of, he is clearly writing from the same camp. The status of gentleman is now an intrinsic quality that cannot be so closely allied to class markers like one’s clothing, or even communal ties, such as if Shane had been the cousin of someone Starrett knew, and his status is assured instead through such a voucher system.
Competence and strength are prime qualities in western fiction and films, and these are valued because they represent social power. Searle notes, “in general, status-functions are matters of power … [and] the structure of institutional facts is a structure of power relations, including negative and positive, conditional and categorical, collective and individual powers” (94). He comments, “institutional power relations are ubiquitous and essential. Institutional power – massive, pervasive, and typically invisible – permeates every nook and cranny of our social lives, and as such it is not a threat to liberal values but rather the precondition of their existence” (94). The institutional power intrinsic in the Duello as a cultural practice served just this purpose; it established order so that civilization (as it was then defined) could proceed. The violence that was certainly part and parcel of the Duello’s requirements acted as a regulative rule to order the natural aggressive tendencies of men whose success lie in zealously defending their borders and resources from potential rivals.
In an essay entitled “Force,” Stanley Fish asserts that language is force and can be as powerful as “a gun at your head” (520). Fish takes as his starting point The Concept of Law by H.L.A. Hart, in which he disagrees with Austin in characterizing the law as a “’situation where one person give another an order backed by threats’ and thereby ‘obliges him to comply’” (503). Hart believes that the law is wholly unrelated to such brute force, and complains that it casts the law as nothing more than organized banditry. Fish agrees with Austin, however, and rather does think that the law is simply better organized than the common thug. Fish makes two points about the force of law that are salient here. Firstly, the law differs from more common force by two elements: distance and separation, and the illusion of objectivity. The law validates itself by virtue of being above mere interpretation, but in being sanctified and almost holy. The law cannot be questioned because it stands apart from other, messier business of judicial interpretations. In this sense the law is separated from the whims and fancies of those who might wish to change things, to give or take preferential treatment under the banner of legality. Secondly, the law is ensconced in such processes that it becomes process itself; this factor aids in its presence as a separate, unquestionable entity, and further allows it to appear objective. When one is forced from one’s home at gunpoint, there is a clear aggressor with obviously malicious intentions; when one is forced from one’s home by the law of eminent domain the actual officers are not malicious, the intentions are presented as offering a benefit to the community, and there is generally no apparent assault. But the cases operate, according to Fish, on the same fundamental basis of force, and the only real difference is that the state’s force is diffused across many levels of process and many individual actors so that there is no single gunman that one can point to and declare “he stole my house!”
If the basis of government is force, its legitimacy is based in language. The force of law is different than the force of individual wills only because people believe it to be so, and act on that belief. For Fish, everything rests in the linguistic hurly-burly of interpretation and argument, and he states that that’s okay, because people are always living within the created world of linguistic structures, and even “legal actors [or literary critics] … live within the temporary ascendancies they at once affirm and undo” (523).
What Fish is speaking of is simply the institutional facts of Searle, the shared agreements that people live by. Understanding the theoretical basis behind these theories sheds important light on why men would go to the field and risk their lives over piddling arguments. Here is the social force of a community that loses faith in one of its members; as the Virginian explains to Molly, if the townspeople come to think he is a coward, “[m]y friends would be sorry and ashamed. My enemies would walk around saying they had always said so. I could not hold up my head again among enemies or friends” (298).
When the Virginian and Molly come into town for their wedding, Scipio tells the Virginian not to change his clothes in a veiled warning; Trampas has been loitering in town, “fillin’ up” and saying some indelicate things about his nemesis (291). Because it’s supposed to be his wedding day, several of his friends offer to run Trampas out of town for him; the mayor offers to arrest him and hold him until the Virginian is “married and away” (291). The Virginian is left in a quandary of sorts because “the community knew that a man had implied he was a thief and a murderer; it also knew that he knew it” (291-292). The question is whether or not his impending nuptials could excuse him from having to call Trampas to account for his words, as most brides would discourage gunplay in their husbands-to-be on their wedding day. He weighs his options against the implicit Code Duello: “could he for her sake leave unanswered a talking enemy upon the field? His own ears had not heard the enemy” (292). This state soon changes, as Trampas comes drunkenly in, firing a shot at the ceiling as others attempt to restrain him. He unleashes a fury of epithets that no real man could honorably withstand, ending with an ultimatum, “I’ll give you till sundown to leave town” (292). Still not satisfied, he then throws a whisky bottle at his hated target.
The Virginian has had all he can stand, and of the last physical assault says, “that was surplus, Trampas … if you mean the other” (292). Trampas repeats his deadline and retreats. To the assemblage the Virginian says, “Gentlemen, I know you’ll oblige me” (293).
If the challenge was issued and retracted almost silently over the card table, it is not so here; Trampas is a loud and foul-mouthed challenger (no matter how murderous they may have been, a proper antebellum gentleman was at least polite), who has issued the Virginian a challenge that he cannot ignore, and can no longer postpone. All of the men who were offering to handle Trampas for him now offer to back away and leave him his business; each was done in the same spirit of friendship as the other.
The Virginian’s friends, McLean, Wiggins, and Scipio scour the town to make certain that none of Trampas’ friends make a foul play, and when the time comes for the Virginian to meet him in the street they follow behind to guard his back. In some respects this practice appears to invalidate the Duello code, as no gentleman would cross his opposing principal in such a blackguard manner. However, the nature of seconds were charged with guaranteeing that the duel went off properly, and McLean, Wiggins, and Scipio are acting in precisely the right way for their implicit roles in this affair. They are his seconds, and are protecting his honor. In this climactic final duel, it is the combined effects of the regulative rules of the Duello, which are enforced by a collective intentionality about what constitutes the rules of masculine honor.
Another rhetorician whose works centers on social construction is Kenneth Burke. One of Burke’s central tenets is that scholars must consider what a piece does as well as what it says. This remark doesn’t refer necessarily to its performative quality (though it might), but rather to its context – the same offhand remark by the same person might be taken in very different ways in two different situations, as the Eastern narrator of The Virginian notes. Burke suggests approaching a text as “literature for use,” stressing what the text is supposed to do rather than simply what it says. This recommendation, of course, fits well with current cultural critical models, but also offers a nice corollary to Austin and Searle’s discussion of performative declarations and the greater social requirements of their use. A text, or a statement, must always be considered within its context and for what purpose it was written or uttered, as when the easterner of The Virginian is reminded of “the old truth, that the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life” (19). This is a literary manifestation of the Burkean notion that, “the humorless statement may foretell homicide, and the humorous one may be the very thing that forestalls homicide. Thus surrounded, or modified by the total motivational context, the animus in one case may be as different from the other as yes from no” (5).
Burke introduces three specific concepts that are directly relevant to the Duello: transformation, identification, and consubstantiality. These three concepts work together in ways that help clarify why the culture of the Duello made men make the choices they did.
Transformation involves, as its name might suggest, transforming something – he notes again and again that features often can contain their opposite, so that an artistic image of murder may actually refer to suicide, or that images of killing may refer not to homicidal acts in actuality, but in ritually defeating some element of the artist’s psyche. Understood in this way, the duel may be seen as an exercise in transformation, in which “the so-called ‘desire to kill’ a certain person is much more properly analyzable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents” (13). Insofar as the principals involved in a duel represent a social threat to one another, they certainly do want to transform their opposing principle. Trampas has called the Virginian a thief and a murderer, and in so doing threatens his honor, the social face and economic credit that he possesses in the community. The Virginian must “transform” Trampas into a reassertion of his social worth and value by calling him to account for his lies, thus restoring his social capital.
As a duelist, particularly a first-time principal, engaging in the duel offers another transformation as a rite of passage – A young man enters the lists as a youth, and exits (assuming he is not killed) a man, having proven himself capable of defending himself, and by extension, my home and family. More importantly than his ability to defend, however, is his ability to stand his ground in the face of danger; his willingness to risk everything is indicative of his membership in the institutional fact of the Duello and all it stands for. The social status of having dueled, or being old enough, or “man enough” to face such danger is a recurring theme. In his autobiography, Twain wryly recalls that in Nevada at the time, no man could “thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled himself” (Autobiography 71). It also appears in Roughing It, in Twain’s anecdote of Little Brown, who very nearly gets himself into more duel than he can handle over a crushed hat. Finally, it appears in Cody’s autobiography when Chief Rain-in-the-Face intervenes on Cody’s behalf to spare his life from a raiding party by telling them that Cody is still a “papoose,” and too young to honorably kill. In Shane, Shane rejects Chris’ attempts to insult him over soda pop by telling him, “you’ve had your fun and it’s mighty young fun. Now run home and tell Fletcher to send a grown up man next time” (53). In so doing, Shane rejects Chris’ status and refuses to validate his insult. For Burke, themes frequently occur on lines of opposition, such as murder/suicide, and he suggests that in literature, one theme is often sublimated through the expression of another. This dynamic is certainly at work in the duel, because it is an exercise in transformation along an axis of death and rebirth – by facing one’s challenger, one symbolically dies and is reborn. The power of this transformation is clearly evident in the Duello, and in Twain’s autobiography he relates a duel that his friend Joseph Goodman fought with a rival editor in Virginia City.8 Goodman enlists the aid of a veteran duelist named Major Graves. Major Graves tells Goodman to hold the pistol low and bring it up rather than the reverse, for it is of the utmost importance that one not risk actually killing one’s opponent. Graves states that one should “take all the risks of getting murdered yourself, but don’t run any risk of murdering the other man. If you survive a duel you want to survive it in such a way that the memory of it will not linger along with you through the rest of your life and interfere with your sleep.” The honorable tactic, according to Graves, was to shoot at the man’s leg below the knee; it would cripple him, “but leave the rest of him to his mother” (73). Goodman is a good study and brings off his duel in exactly this way, giving his man a limp and losing only a lock of hair himself. This short anecdote of Twain’s illustrates the Burkean concept of this binary transformation and the social emphasis the Duello placed on facing danger rather than actually killing.
Identification follows closely on the heels of transformation because “transformation involves the ideas and imagery of identification,” and the imagery of killing offers an especially ripe case (20). Burke says, “the killing of something is the changing of it, and the statement of the thing’s nature before and after change is an identifying of it” (20). The transformation in the above scenario works precisely because the participants have identified with the values represented by the duel as a rite of passage, and Burke suggests that such identifications occur everywhere (although obviously they’re seldom as dangerous), and he states that it’s quite normal for a young adolescent to identify with images of brutality or violence precisely because they symbolize the transformation that is taking place within the adolescent himself. Now most adolescents do not have visibly violent transitions into adulthood, but for most of them, they feel very much so. Again, as Burke is careful to point out, violence as an identification serves as a trope of violent transformation, and need not have a concrete corollary (though in the case of antebellum youth, the distance between symbol and reality was quite short).
So identification works to bring together two essentially disparate elements under one rubric, or by combining them in symbolic meaning. He notes that “rhetoric is par excellence the region of the Scrabble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, malice and the lie, cloaked malice and the subsidized lie,” but he points out that it “also includes resources of appeal ranging from sacrificial, evangelical love, through the kinds of persuasion figuring in sexual love, to sheer ‘neutral’ communication” (19). Rhetoric, as a form of communication, may be viewed as agonistic, Irenic, or some combination that includes both elements. In this way, Burke is able to make the apparently ludicrous assertion that war is really “a special case of peace – not as a primary motive in itself, not as essentially real, but purely as a derivative condition, a perversion” (25). War is, in other words, not an element in its own right, but a piece of a much larger whole. He notes that in war there are a myriad of cooperations that go into the massed antagonisms of combat and battle, and even among combatants, within the larger context of hostile fighting there are incidents of mercy and sympathy between individuals. Indeed, he refers to war as “the ultimate disease of cooperation,” and notes that the battlefield is a mediatory ground, a larger context that is able to at once contain both antagonistic parties and also unify them in a cohesive whole (22). His point, of course, is not to argue that warfare is a nifty way to make friends and influence one’s political neighbors, but that in any situation, particularly in complex situations such as warfare, there are many sides and angles, and how the whole picture looks depends a great deal on how one identifies with what one finds. He notes that even though an act may be distilled down to its pure intrinsic principles, this fact doesn’t preclude another from finding a wholly different set of apparently intrinsic principles at work. This fact is due to the complicated nature of identification, whereas there is always another possibility lurking on the fringes of any principle, and thus, it is practically impossible to fully isolate and fix any single identity. As an example, he uses the shepherd guarding his flock – on the one hand, he is a marvel of peace and stewardship, protecting his flock from wolves, but on the other he is merely protecting his investment and guaranteeing high market value for animals that will ultimately be led (by his very hand) to slaughter. Both of these examples bear directly on the Duello. As in warfare, men faced each other in duels for reasons that were very much held in common and that transcended their respective grievances with one another. The field of honor unified the antagonists in their common defense of masculine honor, and it was really not so very much about the particular insult (which is not to say that any insult was forgotten!). So it is possible to consider the Duello as “a special case of peace” insofar as the violence within it is an aberration that itself evinces a great deal of cooperative behaviors. Furthermore, I believe it is appropriate to see the Duello as at least partially a socially constitutive institution that enabled men to negotiate conflicts with a minimum of violence. Taken this way, the cooperation of the Duello serves to reduce violence and bloodshed even as it sometimes authorizes it.
Burke’s warfare example also leads to his final concept, that of consubstantiation, which is the notion that an individual is related to, or connected to, others. Burke says, “in being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet … he remains uniquely an individual locus of motives” (21). So in explaining the consubstantiality of duelling, the principle is separate from his second, from the doctor, and everyone else present, yet all share in the same system of honor and code, and thus all are consubstantial with one another by virtue of holding different positions in the same unifying referent of the Duello. Another consubstantiating feature of the Duello is that the violence of the duel is substantially the same as the general peace that (at least superficially) prevailed over most of polite society. Because of the extensive amount of cooperation among different individuals required for a duel to off properly, the violence of a duel isn’t really a threat to the general peace. It is not an incidence of chaos or a lapse in social controls, but simply another manifestation of social control. As in The Virginian, everyone in town understands the conflict that is brewing, and in fact has seen it building for some time. Indeed, the Virginian’s friends offer to help in whatever role they can, signifying the extent to which this single combat was very much a communal affair.