“Memory,” writes Enid Sefcovic, “is discursive, interpreted from the artifacts of society. Our shared symbolic past, preserved as social artifacts, links individual and communal memory; these artifacts influences what and how we think.” Recent interest in public memory and the health of the public sphere invite a brief revisiting of the enthymeme. Hariman and Lucaites argue that memory constitutes the tacit experiences used to form the public sphere. Both public memory and the enthymeme rely on the stuff of the public sphere, a set of shared experiences that constitute a common, if often contested, culture. As Stephen Browne tells us, the study of public memory is concerned with texts as the “site of symbolic action, a place of cultural performance, the meaning of which is defined by its public and persuasive functions.” Traditionally, the enthymeme has been considered a rhetorical syllogism in either verbal or written form. But given our culture’s shift from an oratorical culture to a mass mediated culture, we ought to look at the way that enthymemes work in visual and popular texts as well as public speeches or political writing. After looking at some of the traditional definitions of the enthymeme, this paper will consider the ways in which the enthymeme is retooled for use in popular cultural texts, by looking at the public amnesia over miscegenation in the recent Disney film, The Haunted Mansion.

Bitzer’s now classic article “Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited” attempts to distinguish the features of an enthymeme. Bitzer, like other theorists who write about the enthymeme, all point to the enthymeme as a logical form or a syllogism with a suppressed premise. This is common knowledge to even the novice student of rhetoric. So common, in fact, that it often obscures the significance of the enthymeme as more than a truncated logical form. What’s important about Bitzer’s article, however, is its emphasis on the enthymeme’s relationality between text and audience. The enthymeme is a product of an interaction between a rhetor and her audience and for this reason Aristotle sees it as one of the strongest forms of persuasion, because it articulates the auditor with the rhetor and the message. Additionally, rhetorical enthymemes typically demonstrate the two other characteristics: (1) they deal with the realm of the contingent or probability over the realm of the certain, putting them squarely in the domain of rhetoric as opposed to dialectic; and (2) they deal with the realm of judgement about practical matters. In short, Bitzer defines the enthymeme as (in Fisher) “A syllogism whose propositions are probabilities, signs, and examples, whose premises are given by the audience, and whose function is to persuade men on matters related to practical conduct.” He adds, “The source of enthymematic premises is the stock of opinion and knowledge held by the audience – or by people of a particular type. Aristotle frequently says that enthymemes are constructed out of received opinions – out of propositions generally admitted or believed. [Aristotle] says ‘The Materials of rhetorical syllogisms are the ordinary opinions of men.’”
 

Tom Farrell, in his book the Norms of Rhetorical Culture attempts to advance a theory of rhetoric that would revitalize public debate in times of a fragmented or eroding public sphere. Farrell too talks about the relationality of rhetoric in his attempt to re-invigorate phronesis. Farrell writes, It is worth remembering that the enthymeme was designed not to be a distorted or flawed syllogism but rather a mode of participatory reflection on cultural norms. It is a form of logos designed to allow the audience to persuade itself.” Enthymemes, to Farrell, are a central site of phronesis because of their relationality. He adds, “Rhetorical utterances are comprehensible at all when they extend elliptically to become part of unfinished episodes, thereby allowing the inferences of others to become constitutive meanings. (258)”
 

So the question of what an audience brings with them to the text of a film and what is left tacit or suppressed in a film becomes an important one. Popular films become texts that represent public norms that serve as the substance of an enthymeme’s missing premises and popular filmic texts rely on public norms to make enthymematic arguments or to advance a plot. This is evident in the film, The Haunted Mansion, in which race is never explicitly discussed but serves as the major premise of the plot. The Haunted Mansion was released in 2004 to dismal critical reviews and a weak box office. The film treats the story of the Evers family, headed by Jim Evers, played by Eddie Murphy, who are trapped in a gothic mansion somewhere in Louisiana. The location of this story is established only by license plates on the car but never directly referred to in the film. The ghostly backstory for the plot is simply that the mansion’s owner, Master Gracey, committed suicide after his suit was rejected by the woman he loved, Elizabeth. This rejection turns out to be a mix up orchestrated by the butler, now also a ghost, who felt that a marriage between the lovers would be inappropriate. After the lovers both commit suicide, the mansion remains haunted by not only their ghosts but a legion of other ghosts as well. The Evers family is tricked into coming to the mansion by the owner’s ghost who believes that Eddie Murphy’s wife is the reincarnation of his beloved Elizabeth.
 

The climax of the movie is about memory and forgetting. Briefly, Sara resists the ghostly wedding and Master Gracie accuses her of forgetting. “How could you forget?” But Sara goes through with the wedding scene because the butler threatens her children. During the wedding scene, after both parties have said, “I do” putatively making them married, Jim Evers enters the scene shouting that he objects. The two men argue over Sara until Jim reveals that the butler killed Elizabeth. The butler plays innocent and Evers accuses him of amnesia. The butler finally admits his guilt and simply claims the union was “unacceptable.”
What’s striking about this scene and indeed about the whole plot is a feature that is outside the context of the film: The master of the mansion is white and Elizabeth/Sara is black. At no point does the film directly reference their relationship as an interracial one, nor does it address any of the concerns an interracial relationship might raise during the late 1800s. In a deleted scene, we learn that the original lovers’ tale took place 122 years ago, placing the original romance somewhere during the 1880s-1890s. Most film reviews, incidentally, place the original love story in antebellum New Orleans due to the story line itself and the antebellum costumes worn by the ghosts. No where in the scene is there reference to race or an interracial relationship, no where does it state why the union was unacceptable. The audience is left to infer based on the tacit evidence of skin color why the marriage was impossible. What’s forgotten is the history of miscegenation in the south. Interracial marriage was prohibited and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Pace v. Alabama (1883). That decision was not overturned until well after the modern Civil Rights Movement had begun, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), when 16 states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Civil rights and voting rights were extended to African-Americans before the right was granted both to whites and blacks to marry (and have legitimate sexual relationships) across the color line. Why would the butler even NEED to kill Elizabeth when interracial marriage was prohibited, on the one hand, and sexual relations between white slave owners and black women, at least as slaves, were both commonplace and commonly ignored..
By avoiding the issue of race completely, the film leaves the audience to question and speculate about the nature of Gracey and Elizabeth’s relationship. Did Gracey fall in love with a black woman? Or are we supposed to assume that Elizabeth was white and returned as a black woman? Or are we supposed to ignore race completely. Though many film reviews point to the weak plot line for the movie, only a handful of reviewers comment on the interracial relationship, all of which point out simply that it leaves the subject untouched. What are we to make of this historical amnesia over miscegenation? What are we to make of a film that assumes audiences will overlook racialized differences and accept on the surface that black and white are equal?
 

Kamen (in Browne) articulates the relationship between memory and forgetting. He tells us that there is a powerful tendency in the United States to depoliticize traditions for the sake of reconciliation and that memory is more likely to be activated by contestation and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation. Barbie Zelizer writes: “Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall.” A key question in studies of cultural memory is whose version of history is remembered? Whose is forgotten.” Sefcovic. So, the role of memory in cultivating the cultural norms that serve as the premises for enthymemes. In this film, amnesia serves the function of reconciliation.
 

After the marriage is interrupted, Sara faints from the poison that the butler gave her and her body is inhabited by Elizabeth’s ghost. In a situation disturbingly reminiscent of the sexual politics of slavery days, Master Gracey romantically kisses and embraces Sara/Elizabeth in front of her husband and children. The kiss lasts an uncomfortable length of time until Jim Evers finally interrupts. During this scene Elizabeth/Sara’s body is bathed in white light so strong that her skin tone is washed out; the ghost bride is whitewashed in bright light. Elizabeth’s ghost then evacuates Sara’s body. Gracey actually apologizes to Jim Evers and Evers replies, “What’s to forgive, you loved her,” after which the two ghosts ascend to heaven while Jim Evers gets his wife back. In this scene of reunion, the white master’s transgressions are forgiven and the wife’s body is purged of its ghostly history.
 

The basic argument in the plot is that Gracey cannot marry Elizabeth. The only explanation for this is that they come from different worlds, i.e., black and white. The syllogism here is embodied in the signs of blackness borne by Elizabeth, who is a light-skinned black woman with white features. The audience is expected to bring to the text the fact that black and white should not mix during presumably antebellum Louisiana. In other words, the differences in this movie are rewritten in favor of universals and are expected to be overlooked. In the film, identity is constructed in a way that suppresses difference despite a surface appearance of capitulating to identity politics by portraying an upper middle class black family. In other words, The Haunted Mansion capitulates to difference, but the difference portrayed is an empty one that ultimately glosses over power relations of racial difference and the attendant difficulties for cultivating public judgment about interracial relationships and the racist history of miscegenation in the U.S.
 

Perhaps the screenplay was written with the unmarked white male as its lead character and then the part was offered to Eddie Murphy. But even this explanation underscores my point because it shows the way that a universal humanity must suppress difference in ways that defy logic or rationality. A black actor cannot easily assume a role written for the unmarked white male any more than a woman can easily assume a role written for a man.
Fisher suggests that, because of their relationality, enthymemes develop consubstantiality between an audience and a rhetor. The consubstantiality developed here is one in which we close our eyes to racial social relations in order to facilitate a racial reconciliation. No matter how fleeting the impact of this film, it refers to a fading public memory of the history of miscegenation, implicating the audience in the gloss of power relations associated with racial difference.