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from The Motives of Eloquence (1976) Chapter 1: IThe discussion of verbal style in the West has proceeded on the basis of a few simple premises which it may help to hold before us. I shall call them serious premises. They run something like this. Every man possesses a central self, an irreducible identity. These selves combine into a single, homogeneously real society which constitutes a referent reality for the men living in it. This referent society is in turn contained in a physical nature itself referential, standing “out there,” independent of man. Man has invented language to communicate with his fellow man. He communicates facts and concepts about both nature and society. He can also communicate a third category of response, emotions. When he is communicating facts or concepts, the success with which they are communicated is measured by something we call clarity. When he is communicating feelings, success is measured by something we call sincerity, faithfulness to the self who is doing the feeling. Against this ordinary use of language stands another kind of use—literature. Literature creates a representation of society and nature, imitates them. Success here is measured by the faithfulness of the imitation, although a very great deal of leeway must be allowed in assessing such faithfulness. The nature presented may be less seen than envisioned. The good style, for either ordinary or literary utterance, will be the transparent style, the style which is looked through rather than noticed, the style which communicates most efficiently either facts, concepts, or imitations of reality. The bad style will be the excessive style, the style which shows. Against this set of serious premises for the study of style, juxtapose the actual Western practice. Style has been studied intensively since the Greeks, and always, until very recent times at least, as part of a training in rhetoric. In its main outlines, scholars agree, the rhetorical paideia has not changed since the Greeks. What was it like to pass through it? Let me synthesize a generic portrait. Start your student young. Teach him a minute concentration on the word, how to write it, speak it, remember it. Stress memory in a massive, almost brutalizing way, develop it far in advance of conceptual understanding. Let words come first as objects and sounds long before they can, for a child, take on full meaning. They are looked at before they can be looked through. From the beginning, stress behavior as performance, reading aloud, speaking with gesture, a full range of histrionic adornment. Require no original thought. Demand instead an agile marshaling of the proverbial wisdom on any issue. Categorize this wisdom into predigested units, commonplaces, topoi. Dwell on their decorous fit into situation. Develop elaborate memory schemes to keep them readily at hand. Teach, as theory of personality, a corresponding set of accepted personality types, a taxonomy of impersonation. Drill the student incessantly on correspondences between verbal style and personality type, life style. Nourish an acute sense of social situation. Let him, to weariness, translate, not only from one language to another, but from one style to another.
We think, Aristotle says, about those things which offer alternative possibilities. ( Use the “case” method. Let the student reenact fictional or historical situations: Nicias at Syracuse, Hannibal at Cannae, Socrates, hemlock-in-hand. Practice this re-creation always in an agonistic context. The aim is scoring. Urge the student to go into the world and observe its doings from this perspective. And urge him to continue this rehearsal method all his life, forever rehearsing a spontaneous real life. Fill public life, agora, forum, court, with men similarly trained. Make this intense training in the word, in dramatic incarnation, the aristocratic paideia, the only path to wealth and honor, union-card to public life. Downgrade training in a subject, shoe making, business, generalship, medicine—although as subjects for debate, all these may of course become respectable. Training in the word thus becomes a badge, as well as a diversion, of the leisure class. As such, attach to it a whole range of snob values, of invidious comparisons, with which it has no natural affinity. What kind of world would such a training create? What kind of man would homo rhetoricus be? What would “the rhetorical ideal of life”1 be like? Our composite picture suggests, as a first reflection, that rhetorical man must have felt an overpowering self-consciousness about language. So far have we moved in the opposite direction that the point bears emphasis. For rhetorical man, what we think of as a natural verbal spontaneity was never allowed to develop. Language, spoken or written, was naturally premeditated. Attention would fall, first and last if not always, on the verbal surface, on words not ideas. No matter about detail, about whether you had been taught to order your oration in seven parts, or five, four, three, or two; no matter whether you felt reasoning by epicheireme a shaky endeavor or not; no matter whether there were four levels of style, three, or two. Much more important, you had been taught to look at language in a certain way. You would be a nominalist to the end of your days. Whatever sins you might enregister, stylistic naivete would not be one. Nor would the self be naive and bubbly. Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. He is thus centered in time and concrete local event. The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation. And his motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic. He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. He hits the street already street-wise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in a single value-structure but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand. He makes an unlikely zealot. Nor is conceptual creativity, invention of a fresh paradigm, demanded of him. He accepts the present paradigm and explores its resources. Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful. So Protagoras’s wonderful answer when asked if the gods exist: “I do not know whether they exist or not. It is a difficult question and life is too short.” Nothing is aught till it is valued. Rhetorical man does not ask, “What is real?” He asks, “What is accepted as reality here and now?” He is thus typically present-centered. Past and future remain as possibility only, a paradigm he may some day have to learn. Until then, he does not sentimentalize them. No golden-ager, he, and no Utopian either. Nor is he a Puritan, especially about language. He cannot be surprised ceaselessly pushing through language to a preexistent, divinely certified reality beyond. No such reality exists for him. He can play freely with language. For him it owes no transcendental loyalties. Rhetorical man will always be an unregenerate punster. He will be not so much dazzled by the delights of language, poisoned by roses, as a sophisticated connoisseur of them. Such a connoisseurship would form a predictable analogue to the emphasis on scoring.
The rhetorical view of life, then, begins with the centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player. It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving theory of motive. We play for advantage, but we play for pleasure, too. Such a scheme is galvanized by the Gorgian prime mover, The premises used in discussing style, I hope it is now apparent, have not been those actually operating when style was taught. Indeed, the two sets of premises, serious and rhetorical as I shall call them, stand diametrically opposed. The opposition, it seems to me, goes far to explain the two persistently puzzling facts about the history of rhetoric: why it has been so deplored and why it has so endured. It has been deplored because it has been discussed in serious terms, in terms, that is, not germane to its essence. If we consider rhetoric within serious premises, it will truly be the “grotesque bogey” which a distinguished historian of medieval Latinity, E. R. Curtius, thought it. It will be indeed the bogey that Plato conjured up under the banner of “sophist” and that has been plaguing us ever since. The only thing to be done with it will be to do away with it. So George Kennedy prefaces his definitive history of Greek rhetoric with an epigraph from the great Platonist Paul Shorey: “We are freed from rhetoric only by study of its history.” But this long tradition of criticism, so apposite within its own serious terms, within rhetorical premises seems beside the point. Such criticism points to differences so fundamental they indicate a wholly different way of looking at the world. The rhetorical view of life threatens the serious view at every point. Thus rhetoric’s most perceptive serious students damn it utterly, find it in principle irredeemable. To find it a mixed blessing, like Aristotle and unlike Plato, is, at least at first, to underestimate its power, direction, and inner coherence. But would it not make far more sense to recognize the rhetorical ideal as a world view, a way of life as well as a view of life, a coherent counterstatement to “serious” reality? The recurring attempts to make rhetorical training respectable in serious terms all go astray. The contribution rhetorical reality makes to Western reality as a whole is greatest when it is most uncompromisingly itself, insists most strenuously on its own coordinates. The Western self has from the beginning been composed of a shifting and perpetually uneasy combination of homo rhetoricus and homo seriosus, of a social self and a central self. It is their business to contend for supremacy. To settle the struggle would be to end the Greek experiment in a complex self. Those who seek for sensible compromise, like Aristotle, though they contribute more to a living balance, throw less light on the theoretical antithesis than those, like Plato, who wish the Western self to become entirely serious. The rhetorical half of the pairing has been described by Platonic philosophers, or by rhetoricians who did not—and most did not—see clearly the implications of their own proceedings.2 They could not see their own authentic contribution to the larger task at hand, constructing the complex, creative, unstable, painful Western self. We find here the explanation for rhetorical training’s paradoxical durability. To leave it out cuts man in half.
Thus, though the media stayed in serious hands, rhetorical training thrived long after the immediate needs it satisfied. It had, by that time, come to satisfy needs yet more fundamental and long-lasting. It provided a brilliant education in politics and the social surface. From the Sophists onward, it addressed itself to speaking and acting in the city’s business (
Perhaps the serious premises have thrived because they flatter us. The rhetorical view does not. The rhetorical view of life is satirical, radically reductive of human motive and human striving. Rhetoric’s real crime, one is often led to suspect, is its candid acknowledgment of the rhetorical aspects of “serious” life. The concept of a central self, true or not, flatters man immensely. It gives him an identity outside time and change that he sees nowhere else in the sublunary universe. So, too, the theory of knowledge upon which seriousness rests. Here there is little to choose between a positivist reality and a Platonic, between realism and idealism. As Eric Havelock points out, “For Plato, reality is rational, scientific and logical, or it is nothing.” How reassuring to arrive at essence, Eleatic Being. How flattering that we, at whatever brave cost to ourselves, penetrate to the way things are, look, at the end of our quest, upon the true face of beauty “itself, of and in itself, always one being” ( At the heart of rhetorical reality lies pleasure. We personify for pleasure, we act for pleasure. And we clothe this pleasure with high-minded protestations, again for pleasure, as well as for advantage. The rhetorical view makes us all incorrigible sentimentalists. Again, how humiliating. We would prefer to dwell on our tragic fate, painful but heroic. To set ourselves off against the whole universe makes us, in a manner of speaking, as big as it is. Homo rhetoricus is flung into a meaningless universe too, of course. But unlike his serious—or existential—doppelgänger, he doesn’t repine, bathe in self-pity because his world possesses no center. He can resist such centermentalism because he knows that his own capacity to make up comforting illusions is as infinite as the universe he is flung into. Naked into the world he may come, but not without resource.
Perhaps we can see now why the Western paideia has always been a mixed one. The Sophists cannot have founded it alone, nor the philosophers. The best education has always put the two views of life into profound and fruitful collision. Divorce and domination present equal dangers. The West has confused itself unnecessarily. Its education has until modern times been in the hands of rhetoricians, but the historians of education have been philosophers. So too in literary history. The poets have been rhetoricians, the critics serious philosophers. Best is collision: Shorey’s dictum, then, taken as a description of the whole truth, may seriously mislead. The study of rhetoric does not free us from rhetoric. It teaches, rather, that we cannot be freed from it, that it represents half of man. If truly free of rhetoric, we would be pure essence. We would retain no social dimension. We would divest ourselves of what alone makes social life tolerable, of the very mechanism of forgiveness. For what is forgiveness but the acknowledgment that the sinner sinning is not truly himself, plays but a misguided role? If always truly ourselves, which of us shall scape hanging? To liberate man from his rhetorical dimension is to freeze him in the nightmarish prison of unchanging essence Plato so prayerfully invoked in the Republic. The Republic succeeds in abolishing politics, abolishing dramatic reality. What remains, though, is not essential reality but ontological vacuum, not freedom but political tyranny. For the central self depends on the social self. Platonic thought from first to last aims to defend the central self, “real” reality. It ends up imperiling both. The human self exists inasmuch as it continues to debate with itself. The struggle between social and central self is a—literally—self-generating, self-protective device. To free ourselves from rhetoric would be to shut that device down. To recommend such “freedom” invites us to think ourselves divine. IIWhat else but just this struggle between two kinds of self, we might reflect, is incarnated in that narrative-speech-narrative-speech alternation so endemic to Western literary utterance? Here again a confrontation of style amounts to a confrontation of philosophies. Western literature has tried to build into itself just that fruitful clash between rhetorical and serious reality the complex Western self requires for sustenance. Such a stylistic pattern seems to antedate all other critical categories, generic or whatever. It occurs in plays and lyric poems as well as, most characteristically, in the major forms. Speeches are everywhere in classical narrative, not just in the historians. Almost half the Iliad and two-thirds of the Odyssey are taken up with formal speechifying. Lovers orate spontaneously in Hellenistic romance, and this practice continues unchanged up to Sidney’s Arcadia. Formal orations dominated Elizabethan drama, especially historical drama, as they did Athenian tragedy, and Senecan tragedy still more. They supplied the focus for theories of language, the example for definitions of eloquence, the public occasions for political discourse. Such orations are fond of reporting what ought to have been said, The first lesson here was taught by Thucydides, who uses speeches to illustrate the public world, the domain of professed purpose. We might look, for example, at chapter six of book one, wherein is described one of the rhetorical sparring matches which preceded the Peloponnesian War. The Corinthians try to convince the Spartan Assembly that the Spartans should, the Athenian envoys that they should not, go to war with Athens. Both speeches are good, the Corinthian—in its vivid delineation of the Athenian spirit—especially so. One really wonders what the Spartans will decide. But the wonder is irrelevant. And so, we soon learn, are the speeches. The Spartans decide for the Corinthians “not so much,” Thucydides tells us, “because they were influenced by the speeches as because they were afraid of the further growth of Athenian power.” The speeches, then, are purely for display, form only a counterpoint to the backstage reckonings of national interest. The speeches dramatize public conscience. Three city-states offer themselves and each other pious truisms about treaties, traditional obligations, gratitude for past service, all as a cloak for their inevitable pursuit of self-interest. Thucydides’ story tells not only what people do and why they really do it, but why they think, and why they say, they do it. Or rather, it suggests that realistic motive is a combination, an interaction, of professed and expedient purpose. The speeches must be flowery and devious if they are to imitate accurately this deeper mixed motive. Thucydides wants us to see that these three city-states were fooling not only each other but themselves. He wants to show us how readily we hide behind fine words. He wants to make a statement about language and its role in human motive, and hence in true history. Are we to say, because the tape recorder had not yet been invented, that he was falsifying the event? Wasn’t he really proceeding from a more sophisticated conception of event than “objective” history has yet come to? Surely this is what he has in mind when, in the midst of the Mytilene debate in book three, he has Cleon taunt the Athenians with their love of rhetoric:
Love of language, eloquence as motive, forms part of the story Thucydides has to tell. Rhetorical man claims his share of the tale. He does so yet more obviously in another well-roasted chestnut, the famous debate at the beginning of Metamorphoses 13 between Ajax and Ulysses over the armor of Achilles. We must first notice that the debate is already a topos, having been taken from its Homeric context and made into a school exercise. Thus Ovid’s reader sees it, first and foremost, as a famous rhetorical occasion. He is not likely, as is the modern reader, to wonder why the issue wasn’t settled a little more briskly. The speeches are the point, not the armor. They are not, though, unrelated to Ovid’s larger design. He is in the midst of the Troy story and—to summarize boldly and baldly—is concerned to show a change in the concept of hero as Troy moves west to found Rome. Ajax represents the old ideal, the rudis et sine pectore miles, Ulysses the new ideal, shrewd, political, above all verbal. Thus the topos takes on mythic overtones and these work very much to Ovid’s purpose at this point in the poem. It also brings forward all the arguments for and against the two conceptions of heroism. It constitutes a philosophical digression in dramatic form. The ultimate lesson the debate teaches is not that Ulysses deserves the armor more than Ajax—Ovid’s sympathies lean toward Ajax—but that the best talker wins. The verdict is given almost laconically:
Ovid doesn’t bother to tell us directly who won, because the real winner is not so much Ulysses as Eloquence. (The loser is not specified either—does fortisque viri refer to Achilles or Ajax?—and for the same reason. The loser is Military Valor.) The hero is now talker not doer. The rhetorical occasion turns in upon itself; the self-conscious style ends up not only using rhetoric but talking about its uses. Any speech set off like this, by narrative or stylistic discontinuity, tends to turn in on itself and meditate on the limits of language. Historical narrative of the rhetorical sort thus contains a built-in control over its own veracity, a perpetual reminder of the boundary conditions language sets to truth. The rhetorical interlude perpetually analyzes the kind of statement the narrative plot is allowed to make. It will not let us think we know more than we do. By the side of it, “objective” history seems often a trifle naive. Context, then, is crucial in rhetorical literary documents. What seems a sublime, if superficial, interruption may be a profound comic corrective. Only a sense of context can show how the best history builds into itself a dialogue between the two ways of knowing. It is a sense of context which tells us that, for example, Xerxes’ war conference, as Herodotus describes it in book seven, is a farce, that Sidney’s Old Arcadia is a comedy; it is this sense that relates the fourth book of The Courtier to the first three, that sees the rhetorical comedy in Chaucer’s Troilusm that reads rightly the back- and front-stage heroism of Shakespeare’s Henriad. We might carry this matter of historical accuracy one step further. Consider the most famous oration ever composed, Cicero’s First Oration against Catiline. Who can forget “O tempora! O mores!,” or all the guff that goes with it, the hot air about that famous Ciceronian consulship praised, as Seneca said, non sine causa sed sine fine. Yet, as an historical document, what is its domain? It is a document, an event. It was delivered. But delivered by one acutely aware of his place in history, aware that he was making history. His artifice is sincerity itself, the desire to act the role he has earned. His real motive? To play Cicero and thus to establish Cicero’s reality. Further, this role is to be played by a speech which defines the situation and places it in time—and thus is itself an act of historical analysis—and also one which imposes that definition on patres conscripti, so that Cicero can then be the Cicero Cicero wants to be remembered as having been. (The strategy worked, we owe it to him to remark. He has been remembered as he wished to be. Sallust left a different account of Cicero’s role than Cicero left himself, but who do we remember as the “real Cicero”?) All this is secundum litteram, what happened. No objective narrative can get even close to an accurate mimesis of it. The decorum of rhetoric, a well-known history of narrative tells us, is antihistorical and antimimetic. Here—almost everywhere—such a statement is but a half-truth. We can see here too the weaknesses of a simpleminded front-stage/back-stage debunking. “Reality” must come from both stages taken in all their complex relationships. Division into objective event and fictional coloration simply makes no sense. Cicero’s immense self-consciousness suggests a response to the charge that the speeches depict a shallow characterization, black-and-white motive. As we try to understand that huge and exuberant Ciceronian egotism, we come again and again to a motive essentially neither selfish nor patriotic but simply dramatic. Isn’t this the lesson rhetorical literature as a whole teaches? Kenneth Burke has supplied a phrase for such a motive—“pure persuasion,” the actor’s attitude toward his audience. In a dramatistic, rhetorical world view, the dramatic motive—pure pleasure in impersonation—forms the groundwork of all “respectable” motives. Acting establishes the self. Sterne certainly thought so, and his mentor Hamlet moves us profoundly just because he sees this, penetrates to the essentially dramatic nature of human motive. If this is not the heart of his mystery, that he knows he would rather unpack his heart with words than pack off Claudius with a bare bodkin, then Eliot is right that the play lacks an objective correlative. Contemporary fiction seems preoccupied with motiveless malignity for just this reason—it sees motive as amoral, as wholly aesthetic. Rhetorical narrative does better. It offers an imitation of dynamic motive, of the flight into and out of the histrionic center. Compared to this critique of motive, the profundities of the psychological or of the “new” French novel seem a little, well, shallow. Each sees only half of the self. For realistic fiction, the self is assumed to be central, whole, as real as everything else; for the nonrealist, dramatic only. Neither will see the other half. We touch here the center of a nominalist view of rhetoric, a new definition of persuasion. One thinks of it as changing the opponent’s mind. This is hard to do; this is the philosopher’s way. Far easier—here sophist and Madison Avenue are one—to change his self. To redefine him so that he will do what you like spontaneously, hypnotically, by desire. Psychoanalysis does much the same thing, R. D. Laing’s analysis of schizophrenia as bad domestic drama being perhaps the clearest case of this. Offer the patient another frame. Cast him in another play. Consider, as an example of this strategy, what is generally thought the most outrageous rhetorical chromo bequeathed to us by classical antiquity, Gorgias’s oration over the Athenian dead:
H. J. Rose (in A Handbook of Greek Literature) apologizes for the compulsive We are mightily offended. In the face of death we fancy a lugubrious sincerity. Who wants to be sung to his final rest by a flight of homoioteleuta? But Gorgias knew the guard of honor was for the living. And he could not pretend the dead were not dead. He did not have our sentimental options. How might he console us? He could not change the event. How might he change our way of looking at it? Well, we have to have the sentiments. But they change nothing. How might he truly persuade us to do the only thing one can do about the dead, to forget them? He sets out a game and invites us to play. Name the tropes as they go by. Catch an antithesis by the tail. The more contrived the language, the more allegorical the style becomes—the more it serves its purpose. The meaning is not weakened by the style but reinforced. For it is the style which metamorphoses the grief into pleasure, makes us forget grief in the tremendous pleasure of expressing it. Gorgias’s subject becomes finally man’s tremendous resources of verbal pleasure, his endless ability to metamorphose one emotion into another by means of the word. Thus what is imitated is the process by which man can interpose words between himself and death, make of death a pleasure and finally—his self transformed—enjoy it. Gorgias deliberately makes the ostensible contrast between style and subject as great as possible just to show us what he is doing. He wants to show us a new version of ourselves, man in the process of accommodating himself to death. Gorgias illustrates this technique of rhetorical narrative most brilliantly, but Cicero seems to have used it, too, in his now lost Consolatio for Tullia, and it is parodied in Tristram Shandy. There Sterne constructs in the scene of Bobby’s death a similar self-consoling rhetoric and forces us to acknowledge what he is doing by referring to the Consolatio. We might represent this mixed pattern thus:
that is, as an alternation of narrative and speech, dramatic action and speech, translucent and opaque style, teller naive and teller self-conscious; or, more largely, the serious world and the rhetorical in oscillation. This middle state is flanked by two unstable extremes. About serious, mimetic, organic form nothing further needs to be said here. But its theoretical opposite requires comment. For rhetorical man, like his serious counterpart, possesses a characteristic literary form. Open, obliging, for the occasion, it neither begins nor ends. It plays games with both beginning and ending, with narrative expectation. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy constitutes the type of rhetorical literary form, as Sterne’s ancestors, Burton, Rabelais, Lucian, Apuleius, Ovid, had defined it. Again, conventional generic distinctions tell us little. The rhetorical documents are the ones everyone has trouble classifying. They seem to war on the stable orientations literary genres enshrine. They think narrative coherence a sham, not because it is unreal but because we impose it on the world without acknowledgment. They seek to make us self-conscious about the imposition, about literary form at all points. Their narratives are always posing; their style aims always for effect. They keep faith with their own pleasure, not with a reality somewhere “out there.” They play games with literary form. Literary form, in fact, constitutes both their subject and object, theme and reality. Like realistic fiction, they constitute a theoretical extreme, not an historical beginning, and like such fiction, they tend to bounce back toward the center. Like realistic fiction, rhetorical “narrative” is straightforwardly and consistently mimetic—but of an obverse reality, rhetorical not serious. Much critical confusion could have been avoided had these two characteristic forms been allowed each its own manner of proceeding. Literary history in the last two hundred years has delighted in applying serious, realistic coordinates either to the center, where they half fit, or to rhetorical forms, where they don’t fit at all. The critical history of Tristram Shandy provides one instance of misapplied coordinates, Gargantua and Pantagruel another, Ovid’s Metamorphoses a third. A formal matrix might help.
On such a matrix we can plot the difference between the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses without agonizing over whether Ovid really wrote epic. The matrix supplies a neutral ground for, to borrow a phrase from Richards, “arranging our techniques for arranging.” On such a ground, we need no longer talk of rhetoric’s malign influence on Western literature, no longer reinterpret two millennia of literary eloquence in terms of a formal strategy which represents a theoretical extreme, a necessary extreme to be sure, but one which has never prevailed long. The central and preponderant strategy in Western literature has been stylistic contrast, the
After bouncing between extremes, there seems an inevitable, though as yet uncharted, return to the richer central There seem to be two characteristic modes of Western literature, then, narrative and speech or serious and rhetorical, and two ranges of motive, one serious and purposive and the other dramatic and playful. The more one ponders these parallel dichotomies, the more clear it becomes that we really need two poetics to make sense of them. Aristotle’s Poetics, we can perhaps now see, is essentially a serious poetic. Its view of the self, and of referent reality, is—not surprisingly—Platonic. A referent reality stands beyond words—at whatever remove—and a central self (what else does tragedy exist to affirm?) forms part of it. Thus Aristotle concentrates his mind on how literature is related to such a reality, on the nature of mimesis. It is no exaggeration to say that from Aristotle’s Poetics to Auerbach’s Mimesis, the focus has remained the same, on the nature of imitation. Our sketch of the rhetorical ideal suggests that this exclusive focus is incomplete. What of the reality imitated? Posit a rhetorical, rather than a serious, reality, and mimesis is reversed 180 degrees. If reality is rhetorical, dramatic, then “serious” literature is no longer serious, realistic literature no longer realistic. Lewis Carroll becomes a realist, George Eliot a surreal abstractionist. A comprehensive poetic must be as complex as the Western self, and in the same way. It must be equipped to deal with these two fundamentally different realities, and to deal with them as they really occur, in a bewildering pattern of alternation which invites inappropriate coordinates. Often the misapplication seems willful, even ludic. But once we get the coordinates straight, a great many critical confusions come clear. We stop trying to judge Sterne by Fielding, Rabelais by Froissart, Ovid by Virgil. We cease to apply serious generic terms like comedy and tragedy to works not themselves serious and hence not built on the referential central self both comedy and tragedy premise. Such a double poetic might perhaps solve some traditional conundrums of literary theory. It could acknowledge, for example, that literature both is and is not autonomous vis-à-vis “real” life. It all depends on which reality is consulted. If we posit a serious reality as referential, then literature is clearly autonomous. Its identities are all roles, its realities all dramas. Its relation to life is by way of pseudostatements. But if reality is rhetorical? Is not literature here truly isomorphic, real in exactly the same way as life? Same self and same society? Not mimesis but enactment? Any truly comprehensive critical theory will have to plot a continuum of reality from rhetorical to serious, parallel with its mimetic continuum from literal to formal imitation. The confusion that has ensued because it has failed to do so is nicely illustrated by the basic inconsistency of formalist criticism generally. The formalist argues that literature is autonomous, but he bases his argument on its formal properties, its literariness, on that part of literature which is not autonomous. He wants to use rhetorical coordinates without acknowledging them, without admitting a rhetorical reality as alternate to the serious one. And if critical theory in the West has, until now, been only half complete, the same thing can be said for the Western theory of history. The rhetorical view of life excludes neutral statement by nature. Perhaps this accounts for the bad press homo rhetoricus has gotten from scholars searching for historical reality wie es eigentlich gewesen . For rhetorical man, there is no such thing as a fact, or a text, as it actually happened. To perceive is to color with intention, conceive as self-satisfying pleasure. Rhetorical man thus implicitly attacks the existence of the world “scientific” historians want to study. The rhetorical ideal thus forces on us a double conception of historical event. Serious history, of whatever persuasion, is based on a recreation of motive. Collingwood seems in this respect wholly correct. Whether we consider political motive, economic, religious, hardly matters. To chronicle purposive behavior we recreate purpose. Motive, purposive behavior, is the causality of history. But what if human behavior is not purposive to begin with? How then? What if we posit as referential the rhetorical, playful range of motive? It is not simply the history of literature which must be rewritten but the literature of history. We need a new literary history, that is, in two senses—a new history of literature and a new conception of history as essentially literary, as animated by dramatic motive, play instead of purpose. And again, fully serious history will combine both conceptions of event: purposive and playful. IIIWe will also need a new theory of style. Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all. Style’s central term is hollow. It simply points to success. The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived. The definition of clarity participates fully in the circular argument for normative style. Since a style reveals the clarity against which it is measured, you can speak finally only of your own satisfaction, either as writer or audience. A serious premise turns out to be rhetorical. The problem of clarity becomes the problem of analyzing each individual victory for the ingredients which have satisfied those concerned. These ingredients are not hard to generalize. They are, however, neither particularly intellectual, philosophical, or moral, nor are they specially flattering to man as a tireless clear communicator. Custom plays the biggest role. Pull a sociologist from his desk and sit him down to Dryden, the usual Bureau of Prose Standards yardstick of limpid clarity, and he will stumble. Feed him sociologese and all is light. So with all of us. Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century’s brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself. Of course we like some alien styles more than others, and some styles transcend their time completely. Clarity does not lie entirely in the eye of the beholder. It lies in formal properties, too, and these suggest a second general and neglected criterion, pleasurability, a style’s success in tapping sources of formal pleasure irrelevant to content. Samuel Johnson has not been alone in rearranging the world into more agreeable antitheses. We constantly work things over into a more pleasurable form, one more ideally reflective of how we see the world—often, as in Johnson’s case, in strong blacks and whites—and then bestow on our comfort the flattering name of clarity. We might, in this regard, salvage the frequent insistence that writing be done in a fit of absence of mind, as naturally as breathing. Perhaps thus we tap most efficiently the subconscious resources of formal pleasure that galvanize clarity. If language does not photograph things but, as Delacroix insisted, constitutes them, then it fits with what we know of perception psychology to see formal pleasure as playing a central role. Not clarity, then, but formal hunger may determine the shape of symbolic expression. It is generally assumed that language originally tried to be clear and only later degenerated into self-pleasing rituals. Why not the other way round—pleasure first? Clarity comprehends a third element beyond familiarity and pleasure, ludic scoring. Clarity must not show off. But serious prejudice aside, clarity contains enormous show-off zest. Clarity signifies, after all, an immense act of exclusion, of restraint. It is an affair of timing, potentially—like brevity—of wit. Clarity, no one points out, always means daring simplification and much trickery. Dryden, the great model of clarity, is full of both. No designs on you, eye on the object, he ends up with your assent. Clarity gets back in combativeness the pleasure it sacrifices in renouncing ornament. Sanctimonious moralizing about style again gets things backwards. The honest style is self-conscious, proclaims its designs on you. Rhetorical style seems less miraculous because it does not hide the amplifying powers of language, it waves them in our faces. The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world is not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a conjuring trick. For this trick we return thanks. We are reassured. The world is made like our minds. We don’t want to reflect, consider that it may be an illusion. This weakens the gesture, the feeling of isomorphic comfort. So, if we have it not, we assume a naiveté that will not sustain close investigation. The very act of writing (or of prepared speaking), we might reflect, is dishonest. Why is reading fun? It condenses and transfers power. It takes much longer to write than to read. From this discrepancy grows the primary pleasure of written communication. The reader gets, in a rush, what has taken the author ten times as long to create. We feel a tremendous transfer of power, an infusion of virtù. This rush of power carries no necessary charge of honesty, virtue, or truth. It rather resembles, in fact, the sublime style’s putative modus operandi. The serious conception of verbal composition depends on a naive, one-time model which proves equally deceptive. Buffon, in his celebrated inaugural “Discourse,” expresses this simplification as well as anyone:
Who writes this way? What of every writer’s dependence on the suggestive powers of language? None of us knows what he thinks till he sees what he writes. We surrender ourselves to language, and not once but over and over, we oscillate between language and concept, from draft to draft. We shuttle continually between a nominalist universe and a realistic one. To think that, the world once clearly seen through some clairvoyance, we then try to fix it in language, burlesques the process of composition by restricting it to a single cycle. We make a reality, polish, remake, keeping faith to something alternately “out there” and in our minds. Clarity at its best embodies continual movement. Fanciers of clarity through the ages never remark its dependence on previous circumstance, on context. It shines by contrast, thrills by variety. I mean something more than primal context, the big, buzzing confusion. I mean shared thought and feeling. When Leonidas posted the Thermopylae order-of-the-day, “Breakfast here; supper in Hades,” his gemlike clarity depended on an overpowering unstated context. The aphorism cannot sum up this context for us unless we share and pass through it. It cannot define reality its way until it has been defined another way. And the alternation repeats. Clarity, like the creative oscillation which engenders it, forms part of a process. Alberic of Monte Cassino illustrates, albeit unwittingly, both stages of the alternation in offering some elegant variations on “Have you eaten?”:
And the whole cycle stands revealed in a bawdy routine which The Committee, a San Francisco comedy troupe, used to put on. It was called “The Date” and consisted of two parts. The first pantomimed the process of an old-fashioned formal date: knock on door, corsage, formula greetings and smile, holding door of car, cheerful conversation within, car door again, all up to formal shake-hands good-by. In the second part, the young man, having said farewell, comes back, knocks again, and when the surprised young lady answers, asks, “Ya wanna screw?” The first half works in an opaque, a rhetorical style, the second as briefly as clarity could demand. Reality needs them both, needs both languages. Neither can say what the other says. The wit of the second depends on the preparation of the first. All clarity works this way. When it ceases to work against something, it ceases to be fun. The life forsakes it; the long slide into jargon begins. (Thus we see, on a small scale, the same kind of alternation that forms, on a larger scale, the structural principle of Western narrative.) Clarity needs the opaque styles to be itself. Without them, we may mistake clarity for reality. When we do this, we cease to see, and so to understand, clarity at all. The great rhetorical stylists understood this home truth. Indeed, it was precisely their refusal to identify reality with clarity which has made posterity misunderstand them. Some, Rabelais and Sterne, mocked clarity outright. Others, Ovid, Chaucer, Castiglione, Shakespeare, took pot shots in passing. But all insisted on calling attention to their tricks. They had to be honest, warn us of the verbal deception at the heart of things, design narrative structures to illustrate the same truth, remind us that whatever order we see, we have at one stage or another imposed, that man is imposing as well as imposed upon. Familiarity, then, pleasure, stylistic contrast, and authority can measure clarity, lend the term substance. And a substantive clarity can no longer banish style, banish language, in its name. The more you try to pump clarity empty of attitude, the more attitude floods in. The more objective you try to be, the more intuitive you become. The styles of clarity are rich and full, not inane and jejune. They stand a rich, full opposite to the rhetorical styles. Clarity never ceases to imply what it has banished, what in culture at large Ortega called “la presencia de lo ausente.” The usual high-middle-low stylistic division cannot adequately describe either a rhetorical style or a style based on normative clarity. The three-fold division, whether figured as three discrete stages or as a continuum, leaves out the observer and leaves out time. It is predicated, that is, on a naive observer. To anatomize reflective intelligence requires that we build in continuous interaction between self and environment. Precisely this needs to be done for the traditional three-fold division of style. We might first expand it into a continuum, with the high and low styles stretched yet further into theoretical extremes. The spectrum runs from referential to emotional language, from mathematics to infantile babble.
Yet nothing on this modernized three-level spectrum can reflect a rhetorical attitude. It can chart only serious attitudes toward the world. It could never reveal that Hemingway is as self-conscious and as allegorical a stylist as James; that we are to notice each style as a style. The spectrum makes no provision for a self-regarding style. Here rhetorical theory has never isolated the natural premises of its own world view. It has never included the observer in a dynamic way. The reason is clear. From the beginning, from Aristotle (Rhetoric 1404B), style was not supposed to show. This was the great desideratum at any level. “Excess” meant any style which showed. The nonsense perpetuated by this leftover serious prejudice would be hard to assess. We can begin to dispel it by admitting stylistic self-consciousness into the community of human thinking and feeling. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about it. To build it into the accepted stylistic scheme, we must have a matrix like this:
The horizontal axis seeks to plot not configurations of language but our attitude toward them, our stylistic self-consciousness, how much we notice style as style. Tacitus’s imploding syntax, though very different from the low styles parodied in the Cena Trimalchionis, much resembles them in the degree to which it asks to be noticed as a style. The horizontal axis provides a place to plot this likeness. This axis does not vary independently of the vertical axis. It changes it at every point. So in the “Will” sonnets of Shakespeare: the five-way puns, schemes, surface decorations from a naive, show-off sonneteer become tropes, true wit, from Shakespeare the self-conscious manipulator of language. “Excess” regarded as self-conscious play is no longer excess. The ways of triggering such self-consciousness will preoccupy us throughout this book. Historical context becomes significant. How sophisticated was the audience? Within the rhetorical documents various release mechanisms recur—devices of repetition, of structure, direct self-reflexive comment (E. K.’s remarking “a prety Epanorthosis…and withall a Paronomasia” in The Shepheard’s Calender), dramatic juxtaposition, confessed parody (as in 2.4 of I Henry IV), plays within plays, dramatic and linguistic. Indeed, controlling stylistic self-consciousness becomes the main formal problem the rhetorical stylist faces. The additional axis solves many problems. We can describe a style in unmoralistic terms. “Excess,” “decadence,” all the leftover moralizings can be discarded. No style can be “excessive” in this matrix. If a writer wishes to draw attention to words as words, for whatever reason, he is free to. Such a matrix does not prohibit value judgments, but it slows them down and clears them up. It precludes judging by an irrelevant norm. We are free to remember times and places, notice different attributes. We no longer need judge Lyly by Dryden. The whole range of verbal style need no longer be judged by standards of denotative clarity which describe only a small part of it. The expanded matrix eliminates normative criticism as an initial stylistic judgment. Vices of language, then, need no longer concern a student of style. To the degree that a style ceases to illuminate its subject, the style will become its own subject. You can talk intelligently or stupidly about language, of course, coherently or not. It is a rhetorical commonplace that every virtue can turn into a vice: ne quid nimis. But it works the other way, too. Every vice can become a virtue. We might argue that imposture becomes sincerity. The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to. In the Arnoldian, highly serious sense of self, he boasts no self at all. At his center lurks a truly Ciceronian vacuity. He feels at home in his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself. The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is. Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor’s mode of being. The wider his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect, and the effort. Thus when Ovid adopts, in the Amores, first one role then, in the poem following, a diametrically opposed one, or when Shakespeare changes pose from one sonnet to the next, they move toward faithful representation, not away from it. They just keep faith with a different reality. Arnoldian “sincerity” offers not a stylistic judgment, a judgment of taste, but a philosophic judgment. A different kind of self is demanded. Terminology runs to moralizing because the matter matters. Reality stands at stake. Might we not think such self-consciousness more “sincere” than the evaporated, disembodied authorial presence? Can’t it tip us off that the writer is going deep, deep enough to doubt the substance of his own identity as well as ours? Such posing challenges those who think identity, authorial or otherwise, far more substantial than it is. We can learn noble sentiments, Quintilian reminds us (1.2.30), by speaking nobly. Can’t self-consciousness be seen as an attempt, potentially at least, to create a self? Expression sustains the self. Self-conscious posturing attempts to keep faith with dramatic reality. So does language which reminds us it is language, reminds us that we see only by means of language. Such language does not fool us, invite us to fool ourselves, into accepting a wordless, symbol-less world. Again the two views of life: from serious premises, all rhetorical language is suspect; from a rhetorical point of view, transparent language seems dishonest, false to the world. No topic has more exercised rhetorical theorists than decorum. A comprehensive matrix renders this debate otiose. Appropriateness in prose style is inevitable, inescapable. Our job is to imagine the reality for which such a style would be appropriate. When we call a style inappropriate, we mean that we don’t like the reality it creates, that we find that reality incoherent or jejune. Fair enough. But we should recognize the disagreement as with reality, not style. If a discussion of rhetoric has meant mostly a discussion of style, discussion of style has meant mostly a discussion of ornament and its rules. This discussion seldom fails to evoke in the beginning student a nomenclatural wonder, bewilderment at rhetoric’s fondness for overschematized cataloging. The cataloging seems often to run on for its own sake, levitate into bureaucracy, become a self-pleasing machine. But the same phenomenon haunts serious inquiry. Do away with the jargons and what is left of metaphysics? What Rube Goldberg machines have not worked under the banner of binary oppositions? Philosophy is complicated because, as with rhetoric, it is more enjoyable that way. Behind the controversial controversiae skulks a humble truth: people often debate largely for the pleasure it gives them. Artificial debates are more sincere than “real” ones. An opaque Kantian philosophical vocabulary stands truer to the nature of man than plain speech. Profundity is as enjoyable as conflict; if people cannot get enough in real life, they will seek it somewhere else. If to profundity they can add the pleasures of dramatic impersonation, as mock-debates do in one way and philosophical jargons in another—how tell the philosopher if not by his big words?—so much the better. So with rhetoric’s complex rules. It does not matter what they are, so long as they are detailed, self-contradictory, unclear in application—and so infinitely discussable. If we define academic to mean discussable rather than significant—and the history of scholarship leaves us little choice—we can pin down rhetorical ornament’s unpopularity more precisely. It is academic and honestly so. It thus constantly threatens academic inquiry with comic exposure. Curiously enough, rhetoric’s ornament-deliberations have always proceeded on serious premises, assuming a naive speaker and listener engaged in one-time encounter. If we dispense with the serious premise, some interesting things happen. Rhetoric has usually been depicted as a woman, especially an overdressed one—the harlot rhetoric. We might begin liverishly by developing the comparison. Students of rhetoric cannot have had much direct experience with harlots. Harlots do not paint to improve nature. They paint to invite a certain attitude. The cosmetics, since they are not referential, cannot be excessive. Their excess is their meaning—until, at least, all womankind follows suit. Likewise their dress. It is not calculated to improve their figures—it usually distorts them—but to invite a particular sort of attention. Cosmetics and dress, then, in this puritanical comparison of the philosophers, are allegorical, not referential. So is verbal style. As Morse Peckham has pointed out,7 printing poetry in verse works the same way. The typographical convention invites certain attitudes toward what is said and discourages others. It invites us to look at words, not through them, to allow ourselves an extraordinary verbal pleasure. Gorgias aimed to trigger the same release mechanisms by his resolute balance and antithesis, the oral-culture analogue of printed verse. The convention of printing poetry line-by-line is thus an “ornament” just like isocolon. It evokes a certain kind of attention. Since all grades of attention can be requested, it follows that no essential dividing line separates prose and poetry. The cosmetic analogy of the philosophers proves more illuminating than insulting. Personify the high style and the low, woman dolled up and woman made plain. Both are inviting us to assume certain attitudes. Eye makeup says, look at my eyes: I consider them sexually provocative and invite you to attach the same value to them. So with any detail of dress; it calls attention to, envaluates, an element of structure. It does not try to look natural, look unseen. If it really escaped notice (summa ars celavit artem), why bother? It wouldn’t work. Like a verbal style, it must be seen as such in order to function as an analogue. Nor can plain Jane escape. In a fallen, cosmetic world, she is asking not to be considered, wants to be overlooked—or perhaps to claim attention by contrast. She is as rhetorical as her made-up sister, proclaims as loudly an attitude. Thus the whole range of ornament, from zero to 100, is equally rhetorical, equally deep or equally superficial. The kinds of attitudes invited vary widely; the nature of the invitation, symbolic rather than substantial, very little. Ornament, in a way, then, seems more honest than plainness. It does not affect a naturalness in the nature of things unattainable. Ornaments are free forms, not immediately bound up with the subject, and thus more likely to tell you what is on the artist’s psyche, if not on his mind, than the bound forms, the forms that are immediately expressive of subject. Think of Sterne’s games with the physical appearance of a book, his blank and black pages, changes in type face, and so on. The Victorian saw only the shameless gesture, but the rhetorical point of view shows a mocking attempt to be honest, to declare the impostures implicit in a codex format. Was he not warning against just that codex, that “realistic” acceptance of book as coterminous with reality, upon which the Victorian novel was to be founded? Here again we come upon rhetorical sincerity, the insistence that we become maximally self-conscious about the artifice which rules us. The way to naturalness lies through artifice, not around it. “How little,” Wolfflin reminds us, “style is determined by observations of nature alone,…it is always decorative principles…to which the last decision is assigned.”8 It may perhaps be fruitful to view style as a self-corrective circuit. A movement toward either extreme on the spectrum generates a counterpressure back toward the middle. A totally serious, referential use of language never lasts long. It becomes stylized, turns playful. Bureaucratic jargons start out as purely denotative, strictly business, but end up as games of euphemism, of obfuscation, of plain verbal nonsense—“buzz words” which can be glued together in any combination. And the same process is happening to advertising. Language cannot last long without returning to its rich resources of play. The clarity in whose name it becomes purely purposive itself depends, as we have seen, on language’s fund of pleasure. The very process of composition generates an oscillation between play and purpose. But at the same time a movement toward the opposite extreme, toward pure verbal play, activates our resources for making meaning, our impulses for purpose. We try to “make sense of” nonsense. The more absent the sense, the more we supply it. As Freud said, no one can talk nonsense for long. He will start talking about himself, pouring himself into the Rorschach inkblot. A strong force seems to operate, keeping us in the rich, mixed middle ground of the stylistic spectrum. And a similar force seems to operate with human motive. When we become purely purposive, we become pathological, “take ourselves too seriously,” as folk wisdom properly puts it. We ascribe to ourselves too durable and preexistent a self and think our “reality” the only one there is. In such moods, we need a comic counterpressure, and thus change roles, go away on a trip, move in a different society. We relieve ourselves of the burden of that superserious self. And, conversely, when we have too long been all things to all men, played at life, we feel the need for commitment. Some people remain at either end of the spectrum, of course—zealots and triflers. But Western society has generally thought both extremes sociopathic. It seems otiose to ask whether the stylistic circuit came first or the self circuit. Surely they grew up together, synergistically. Together, they embody the self-corrective force of self-consciousness. Without role playing, we would never grow up; we never finally grow up unless, when we need to, we can stop role playing. The self needs periodic reminders that it is part of a society, takes its existence from it, and that it has its own identity as well, can stand apart. Verbal style both engenders this self-corrective oscillation and expresses it. Rhetorical literary works, as we shall see, often seem finally therapeutic, aiming to heal. Their therapy lives just here, in this necessary process of self-correction. It may even be possible, if we carry the argument a stage further, to see the function of literature as part of such a cybernetic scheme, an attempt to keep man in the rich central confusion of the mixed self. The value terms of the New Criticism—tension, paradox, irony—all seem apropos here. They refer to just the mixed middle, a self by turns central and social, a language first transparent and then opaque. Paradox and tension are terms that point to pain, the pain of a self guiding and sustaining itself. They applaud literature when it is doing its job best, keeping the two kinds of self in fruitful collision. When it veers toward pure concept on the one hand, or pure play on the other, it impoverishes man rather than enriches him, and is subject to self-corrective guidance. We start to play with the concepts or conceptualize the play. The narrative-speech-narrative pattern I have just commented on embodies the same attempt at fruitful collision, self-corrective oscillation. IVYou cannot read Renaissance literature for long without noticing everywhere a delight in words, an infatuation with rhetoric, a stylistic explosion. When you come to the learned commentary on this literature, however, you soon surprise a serious anomaly. On every hand you will be admonished to deplore just this delight, regret just this adolescent infatuation. The age, you are told, took a long time to outgrow its stylistic adolescence; so long, in most cases, that by maturity the Renaissance was over. You are, in a manner of speaking, invited to deny the age itself. If you push your investigations back further, you find that the Middle Ages were, in a different way, as infatuated with rhetoric as the Renaissance. Yet there too rhetoric must be deplored. If, sufficiently bemused, you revert to classical antiquity, again the same anomaly, writ yet larger. C. S. Lewis has confronted the issue with more self-awareness than most:
The great barrier amounts, for Lewis, to a matter of historical taste. But it was also a barrier between some of our ancestors and others: a typical, as well as an historical, discontinuity; less a difference of taste, we can now see, than of world view, a difference of cosmology, not cosmetics. When Lewis confesses that he—and we—have lost the taste for rhetoric, he really confesses that he has lost his taste for half of Western literature and half of Western man—a curious confession for a man who has argued so eloquently against, to borrow his own title, The Abolition of Man. In Lewis’s case, it is easy to see why. A religious dogmatist and a delayed Victorian, he recoiled instinctively against the whole idea of rhetorical man. The rhetorical man dealt with many orientations, not one; many selves, not the high-minded heroic soul, the Victorian manliness Lewis sought everywhere in literature’s best and greatest. He could not openly dismiss this rhetorical half of man. It would seem too dogmatic—he would be abolishing man—so he dismissed it under the rubric of changing taste. We have not that excuse. The whole story does indeed need to be rewritten. For Western literature, and especially the Renaissance, has been not simply misunderstood, but methodically misunderstood. This has usually been managed by applying serious coordinates to rhetorical texts, but it also works by reversing the misapplication. The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify. He need join neither the Chamber of Commerce nor an Eastern religion. His job is rather to describe the conflict accurately, to insist on criteria condign to each side. Such criteria, such coordinates, more readily come to hand for serious reality than for the rhetorical view, but neither side is, in principle, more difficult to understand. The history of Western literature must be rewritten as precisely the symbiotic relationship of the two theories of knowledge, theories of style, ways to construct reality—rewritten as the quarrel between the central self and the social self, between society as drama and society as highly serious, one-time sublimity. We must, that is, rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done. This debunking ends in that thinning of reality’s texture, that ontological discomfort, those tremors of nonexistence, so familiar to us now as science’s last best gift to a grateful mankind. But unhappy consequences threaten also in the opposite procedure, the language- and game-centered debunking of natural philosophy, the attack on any certain connection between man and the appearances he dwells among. We surprise again the centrality of literary study. Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style. But we must invert this, too. Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human. 1“There are two contrasting types of life, two bioi. One of them is built upon the flattering quasi-arts—really not arts at all but copies of arts. We may call it, after one of its main species of flattery, the rhetorical ideal of life. Its purpose is to create pleasure and win approval. The other, its opponent, is the philosophical life. It is based on knowledge of human nature and of what is best for it: so it is a real techné, and it really cares for man, for the body as well as the soul.” Werner Jaeger, Paideia, 2:144. (Emphasis mine.) 2Thus the Rhetorica ad Herennium, for example, begins with a glancing apology for not studying philosophy instead, and Quintilian confesses that rhetorical training, if it fails to form the moral judgment, must be considered a failure (Institutes 12.1.1-4.) 3History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1954). p. 182. 4The Greek text can be found in Hermann Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 8th ed.. ed. Walther Kranz (Berlin, 1956), 2. s.v. “Gorgias,” A1. The translation tries to reflect the word-formations of the original. 5Oeuvres Philosophiques de Buffon. p. 502. 6De Dictamine, in Briefsteller und Formelbücher des eilften bis vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Ludwig Rockinger (Munich, 1863; rpt. New York, 1961). 1:42. 7Man’s Rage for Chaos, p. 204. 8Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger, p. 51. 9English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 61. |
. Rhetoric 1357A.) Shape this habit into a doctrine of antilogy, the ability to argue with equal skill on either side of a question. Stress, too, the need for improvisation, ad-lib quickness, the coaxing of chance. Hold always before the student rhetoric’s practical purpose: to win, to persuade. But train for this purpose with continual verbal play, rehearsal for the sake of rehearsal.
, pleasure. Purposeful striving is invigorated by frequent dips back into the pleasurable resources of pure play. Rhetoric is always ritualizing, stylizing purpose in order to enjoy it more. The rhetorical view thus stands fundamentally opposed to the West’s bad conscience about language, revels in what Roland Barthes (in “Science vs. Literature”) has called “the Eros of Language.” Homo rhetoricus cannot, to sum up, be serious. He is not pledged to a single set of values and the cosmic orchestration they adumbrate. He is not, like the serious man, alienated from his own language. And if he relinquishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains the tolerance, and usually the sense of humor, that comes from knowing he—and others—not only may think differently, but may be differently. He pays a price for this, of course—religious sublimity, and its reassuring, if breathtaking, unities.
). It provided a training in the mechanisms of identity, offered a selection of roles the adolescent could try out. It offered a training in tolerance, if by that we mean getting inside another’s skull and looking out. It offered the friendliest of advices on how to tap into any and all sources of pleasure. It habituated its students to a world of contingent purpose, of perpetual cognitive dissonance, plural orchestration. It specialized less in knowledge than in the way knowledge is held, which is how Whitehead defines wisdom.
[Symposium 211B]). How humiliating to be all this time only looking in a mirror.
. Perhaps literature has always gravitated to the center of such a curriculum because it enshrines with greatest intensity and clarity the polemic Western self.
, a kind of high-class esprit d’escalier.
by saying that, though stale to us, these patterns were fresh to the Athenians. Well, not after the second line. And, of course, not at all. Gorgias they knew. Unless they were naive to silliness, what pleased them? How did Gorgias work upon them?
pattern in some form or another.
