Servants, Masters, and the Coercion of Labor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I grew up in an era when linguistic distinctions grounded commonly used and clear categories: subjective and objective, normative and descriptive, historical and fictional. The lines between them were seen as solid. In our time, commentaries on words and their meanings recognize that the lines between these linguistic categories have become porous. So I begin with acknowledging my debt to the teachers, colleagues, and mentors whose words and writings have helped me grasp the limits to these categories, and to any systems of categories.

I also wish to indicate some of the distinctions that are of particular interest to this study. Logic refers to proof; rhetoric to persuasion. Psychodynamic refers to theory; psychotherapy refers to method. Normative refers to how things should be. Descriptive refers to how things are. A subjective view is seen as including the viewer’s own points of view; an objective view is seen as excluding the viewer’s preferences in favor only of what is externally verifiable. Biography is from a writer’s self and about the self; fiction is not visibly from the self, and is about a created self. This study has drawn on the contexts of each of these pairings. It has seen them as the places where discourse occurs, and the places where the conclusions of our discourse—common ← vii | viii → agreements on which we build the contracts for social and intellectual life—grow their roots.

Common and accepted tools in discourse are conventions, and conventions can be challenged. In our world they have been challenged and continue to be challenged. In my world men of letter have played major roles as the challengers. So given their influence in this study I want to recognize them here. I mention two of them at the end of this study. Poets Czesław Miłosz and William Everson. Each presented his literary offerings in uncommon ways. Each adapted rhetoric to go beyond persuasion in attempts to prove, and did so in very different ways. Everson accepted a Jungian framework as though convinced of its objective truth. But he did so within a personal worldview that did not take any expression of certainty that seriously. Miłosz saw the writer’s self reflection as “the native realm of intellect.” But no realm, native or adopted, merited total assent.

I want to add a third writer here, David Vann, a novelist from a new generation and, again, a friend. His creativity has drawn on personal history, fiction, classical imagery, and intuition, and weaves them together with a persuasive of compelling rhetoric. The different occasions, over the years, when he has discussed how he writes, in addition to being personal treasures, have challenged me to stretch the use of language far beyond what I had thought useful or possible. I mention them all because I owe them so much. I accept, but cannot easily describe, how they have influenced these studies. I suspect that my need to understand what makes a friend drive on, when joined to a masterful use of spare and effective communication, has played a key role.

This is the fourth study I have published in this series. Given that there is continuity in writing, I want to include the friends and colleagues already thanked in the earlier works. I especially want to note, once again, the work on rhetoric of Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle. She has grounded what might ← viii | ix → seem an almost arcane study in the known human contexts, for example of Luther and Erasmus. It is that emphasis on context, the human context of language that I have wanted to describe.

Classicist Paul O’Rourke has helped considerably with an earlier example. His guidance on the reshaping of Homer and Ezra gave a much needed context for the process of rewriting history. Professor Irmengard Rauch, who edits this series, has been continually gracious to work with and supportive of my contribution to it. Czesław Jan Grycz has, again, undertaken the design of this text, a noble contribution to one whose computer literacy is so limited. I continue to be grateful for my on-going standing as a visiting scholar at the Dominican School in Berkeley, which continues to give me access to the libraries at the University of California and the Graduate Theological Union.

David K. O’Rourke

Point Richmond, California

June 9, 2015

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CHAPTER 1

WORDS, METHODS, and CONTEXTS

This is a book about words. It is especially about two words—master and servant. Perhaps most significantly it is about words in contexts. For words in context are alive. They live in the lives of the people whom they point to, pointing sometimes with respect and deference, more often in disdain. For the living contexts of masters and servants though usually connected are very different, very far apart.