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

Abstract

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.