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The Power of Silence and Limits of Discourse at Oliver Wendell Holmes's Breakfast-Table

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Michael A. Weinstein
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Extract

Mark Gibian's major study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s political theory casts Holmes as a democratic pluralist in the line of Richard Rorty who instantiates his commitment in the literary form of untrammeled table talk. Gibian's thesis can be challenged through a close reading of Holmes's main political work, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, revealing that Holmes's defense of free expression as the core of American national identity is counterpointed by a more fundamental appeal to nondiscursive reconciliation. Treating The Professor as a “dramatized essay” or “proto-novel” opens the possibility that the work's meaning is most fully disclosed by placing conversation in tandem with the deeds and recorded gestures that develop its plot. Through a dramatic reading, Holmes emerges as a humanist balancing aristocratic and democratic principles, rather than as a liberal discourse analyst.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Winter 2005 , pp. 113 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, vol. 2 of The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892], p. 90.Google Scholar All subsequent citations fom Holmes's writings are from this edition of his works.

2. Gibian, Peter, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 1.Google Scholar All subsequent citations of Gibian's writings are from this book.

3. Among the most important scholarly articles that bear on the themes considered in the present study are Matson, J. Stanley, “Oliver Wendell Holmes and 'The Deacon's Masterpiece': A Logical Story?” The New England Quarterly (03, 1968):104–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thrailkill, Jane F., “Killing Them Softly: Childbed Fever and the Novel,” American Literature (12, 1999):679–707Google Scholar; and Wentersdorf, Karl, “The Underground Workshop of Oliver Wendell Holmes,” American Literature (03, 1963): 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Matson points out Holmes's general stance of opposition to dogmatic ideology, Thrailkill shows the progressive and pro-feminist tendency of Holmes's medical polemics, and Wentersdorf underlines the centrality of unconscious thought to Holmes's interpretation of life-experience. Tilton's, Eleanor M.Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes [New York: Henry Schuman, 1947]Google Scholar is unsurpassed as a source of information and insightful commentary on the development of Holmes's thought. Hoyt's, DavidThe Improper Bostonian: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes [New York: William Morrow, 1979]Google Scholar follows Tilton in fact and interpretation, and is a more popular work, but it has useful commentary on Holmes's politics. Small's, Miriam RossiterOliver Wendell Holmes [New York: Twayne, 1962]Google Scholar is a general survey of Holmes's literary output that also follows Tilton. Although all of the foregoing works are valuable for understanding Holmes as a theorist, none of them consider him directly as such.

4. S.I. Hayakawa and Howard Mumford Jones are representative of Holmes criticism, holding that he was “distinctly an amateur in letters. His literary writings, on the whole, are partly the leisure-born meditations of the physician, partly a means of spreading certain items of professional propaganda, partly a distillation of his social life” (“Introduction,” in Oliver Wendell Holmes: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes [New York: American Book Company, 1939], p. xli).Google Scholar They are also representative of opinion on Holmes's politics: “because he said little about economic exploitation, political graft, social problems, or the dog-eat-dog theory of business life, his social pronouncements may well seem either wanting or irrelevant” (p.xvii).

5. The characterization of Holmes as a “dilettante” is pervasive in the literature about him. Hoyt titles one of the chapters of his biography of Holmes “The Perfect Dilettante Writer” and elsewhere calls him “Holmes, the dilettante” (The Improper Bostonian, p.169).Google ScholarJerrold, Walter calls him “the dilettante speaker of the breakfast-table” (Oliver Wendell Holmes [London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893], p.66).Google Scholar Small remarks about the breakfast-table books that “The richness Holmes offered in his treatment was only rarely of philosophical depth or lyrical intensity” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, p.90).Google Scholar Tilton builds her entire interpretation of Holmes's life on his “habit of doing too many things too easily and quickly” (Amiable Autocrat, p.22).Google Scholar

6. Holmes's, table-talk works are: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), Works, vol. 1Google Scholar; The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1859)Google Scholar; The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872), Works, vol. 3Google Scholar; Over the Teacups (1890), Works, vol. 4.Google Scholar

7. McChord, Samuel Crothers calls Holmes's table-talk books “discursive essays” and suggests that the author “follows his mind about, taking notes of all its haps and mishaps” (Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Autocrat and his Fellow-Boarders [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909], p.10).Google Scholar William Dean Howells asserts that Holmes “invented” “the form of the dramatized essay” in The Autocrat (“Oliver Wendell Holmes,” http://www.blackmask.com/books26c/whowh.htm(downloaded 3/28/03)).

8. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Elsie Venner (1861), Works, vol. 5.Google Scholar

9. Lang, Andrew, “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” http://www.mastertexts.com/adventures_among_books/chapter00004.htm (downloaded 3/28/03).Google Scholar

10. Tilton devotes extensive attention to Holmes's political opinions and his multifaceted conflicts and controversies. She suggests that “In the first person singular, Holmes maintained some kind of poise in the face of the violent attacks of the evangelical press; in the disguise of Little Boston, he could, conveniently, lose his temper and at the same time laugh at himself for doing so” (Amiable Autocrat, p. 250).Google Scholar

11. Iris's use of speech here is performative.

12. That Holmes understood the workings of ordinary politics and despised their pettiness and narrow self-interest is evidenced abundantly in his memoir of his friend John Lothrop Motley (John Lothrop Motley, Works, vol. 11: 325–526).Google Scholar

13. Dewey, in fact, uses the same image as Holmes did in articulating his “common faith,” stating that the “fact” that we are “all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean” has potentially “infinite religious significance,” and that faith in humanity's improvement “has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind” (A Common Faith [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934], p.87).Google Scholar Dewey's move was to carry the notion of the Broad Church from Christianity to humanity as a whole, the last moment of a process of generalizing and secularizing New England Protestantism. See Santayana's, GeorgeCharacter and Opinion in the United States, vol. 8 of The Works of George Santayana [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936]Google Scholar for an extended statement and attempted demonstration of the thesis that turn-of-the-twentieth-century New England philosophers secularized their Protestant heritage and generalized its categories. Recent contributors to the pragmatic tradition, such as, have dispensed with a humanist faith in favor of interminable conversation, abandoning substance for process.