Susan Wells's "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasions: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report"

In "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasion: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report," Sue Wells traces the ways in which a commission report on racial violence (as per the title, the MOVE Report) makes use of narrative structures in ways that frame this violence in politically benign ways--mitigating the responsibility of those who participated in senseless violent acts. By utilizing form toward particular ends, the report (and writers/reviewers and readers) are able to (re)structure a narrative of racial violence by relying upon formal features such as the fragmentation of narrative, the naming of characters and a specific use of hierarchy and subordination. These structures, Wells argues, allow for incongruous and problematic politics of such an event to preside comfortably, pleasurably, within a text pointing to and underscoring the political imperatives of paying attention to the importance of form, not simply as means to push forward with social justice in rhetoric and composition studies, but also to provide insight into how structures, if we do not carefully and critically attend to them, can be used to rationalize violence and injustice.

Wells states the following regarding the MOVE Report and the main project of her article:

This essay reflects upon that failure of both ideological and narrative coherence, seeing it as an expression of the commission's political and discursive situation, a situation that was difficult and contradictory. I will examine how this situation marks the element of the text, moving from relatively formal questions-How are characters named? How are episodes connected?-to a discussion of what counts as a good reason within the bounds of the text. My interest is to show how provisional are the boundaries between formal questions and political questions in this text; here, nothing is more deeply political than the text's representation of subordination (Wells 209).

Here, Wells writes about the bind between the formal and the political and how those are bound up in constructing reason within a text. As Wells moves through her chapter, she argues that along with attending to issues of form and the ways in which form implicates us into political situatedness, our analyses could benefit from the theoretical tools of the Frankfurt school and of literary critical theory. Before introducing Horkheimer and Adorno's notion of 'instrumental reason,' Shes states:

The creation of such a subject, the repealed proffering of multiple solutions, and the definition of the discursive situation as a problem are not accidents of production. The system of reason articulated within the report is neither universal nor transcendent; this piece of administrative writing articulates the maxims and rules of evidence of instrumental reason (Wells 220).

Here, Wells is suggesting that the MOVE report is simply not an accident of generic form but rather instrumentally and strategically makes use of textual aspects of narrative such as hierarchy, chronology, naming and causal relationships to assert particular politically multiple and situated bullet-ed narratives that resist assigning cause or blame. Although Wells is not suggesting that the report is the result of the fully conscious actions of any one writer, she does stress that the report specifically rejects conventions of commission reports in order to maintain the necessary fragmentation. On page 223 she writes:

The conventional report format, then, is subverted to the demands of narrative. The formula of segmentation, which could have fragmented the audience, here allows the document to recreate a new audience at each finding. A hierarchical report organization allows the Commission to present narrative movement as logical support, to lend the force of events moving through time to the movement of its own argument (Wells).

This section, for me, post compellingly points to one of Wells' central claims: that the structure of the narrative itself creates logic, creates reason to a situation that otherwise struggled to gain a narrative due to the social, political and cultural complexities that surrounded it. Here, Wells is claiming that their is a direct link between invention and social structure and, although Wells' example tends to show how social structure can certainly be maintained through the invention of new forms, we can also imagine how we might make similar arguments that social structure and inequalities could be shifted through invention/play with like narrative features or textual forms.

Although Wells' work was most interesting to me because of the implications regarding invention, form and shifts (or lack thereof) in social structure, I was also interested in a more marginal point that Wells makes toward the end of her text regarding pleasure. She writes the following:

Second, contemporary narrative theory raises the issue of pleasure, which is perhaps the most valuable prize that the rhetoric of inquiry could take in a raid on the arsenal of theory. Taking pleasure in a text is not the same as liking it, or identifying with it, or thinking that it is correct. It is an act of the reader, and a rhetorician who raises the question of pleasure has left his privileged spot at the speaker's elbow and taken an anonymous place among the audience. There, relying only on the intensity of his impolite whisper, the rhetorician addresses to whomever stands nearby an urgent and inconvenient question."Why do you want this to go on? Why do you want it to end?" In the case of the MOVE report, the pleasures of continuing and ending are local pleasures of containment and explanation. They arc ways of placing a disturbing event securely in the past, and of guaranteeing that it will not be repeated (Wells 228).

This notion of pleasure seems particularly useful because it gives us a way to think about why experimentation, when it is working well, can provide a sense of pleasure in allowing us to achieve particular aims; yet, it also, I feel, provides a way of thinking about why new forms of invention are needed. If we are seduced or persuaded into texts that provide us with pleasure but feel the need to make other kinds of arguments that may not be as easy to make with available forms or arrangements, then we need to gain a better sense of form and audience to make new kinds of texts that also are pleasurable for readers as a means of providing alternate social possibilities.