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Week #6b: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, February 23rd.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks | 3rd week | 4th week | 5th week
<<--Previous Notes for Wk. 6
narative-speech-narrative-speech:
Now Lanham takes up a graphical representation of what is happening in this somewhat dialectical exchange between philosophy (serious) and rhetoric (playful) that he sees as necessary collision for maintaining a delicate balance or ecology in Western thinking. He simply represents the patern of exchange as
narrative-[speech]-narrative
Lanham points to the style of Goragias's oration over the Athenian dead. It is seemingly low on substance and high on song and playfulness. Lanham says:
How might [Gorgias] console us? He could not change the event. How might he change our way of looking at it?... 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.... 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 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. (15-16)
The style is one of alternating between narrative and speech (as illustrated above), between
 "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 [speech, playfulness] is flanked by two unstable extremes [narrative, seriousness].... [N]arrative coherence [is] a sham, not because it is unreal but because we impose it on the world without acknowledgment" (15-17; reformatting mine).
Now let's turn to Lanham's more complete graphical representation (matrix) and, in doing so, let's see how it stands in meta-relation (notice the reference to I. A. Richards) to the earlier graphic mappings of inter-relationships (during Wks. 1-2) in terms of history and communications.
Lanham writes:
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 peponderant strategy in Western literature has been stylistic contrast, the --[]-- pattern in some form or another.
After bouncing between extremes, there seems an inevitable, though as yet uncharted, return to the richer central --[]-- pattern.
Is there a male-female(centralMatrix)-male shift/dialectic here? Perhaps this would be another way of thinking about it, but not one that we should valorize over yet other Others.
No ground is netural. Rhetoric has been maligned and will continue to be. It is the case here, however, that Lanham demonstrates theoretically (by reTheoeyezing) that the source of revitalization is rhetoric. I remember that when I took this particular article-chapter into H5301 (the previous avatar of this course under Humanities) and had the students talk about it,
| A Caveat: What we understand today as "Literature" is traceable back to the 19th century (in English and French) when the word takes on the meaning of the Belletristic Traditional, wherein literary works were studied as the source of aesthetic pleasure (see the OED, "Literature," entry 3), and even then Literature is tied to Philosophical texts in many ways, though not for the most part thought of in "traditional philosophical terms." There is, BTW, the argument in 50s and 60s criticism that Plato did not really understand that the Artist in the Republic was virtually painting the Ideal forms of 'bedness,' etc., and therefore should not have been excluded from the utopia. |
I had a colleague in rhetoric (with a Speech-Communication degree&background) who did not like Lanham's discussion because it was, in my colleague's words, a "literary rhetoric," or a joining of poetics (aesthetics) and rhetoric. He was right in that it is a so-called "literary rhetoric," for the subtitle of the Lanham's book is "Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance." The source for not liking the hybrid can be found in the historial split--the very angry one--at the beginning of the previous century between Speech and English. (Speech was originally located in English Departments. It was so ideologically and materialistic downgraded by Literature faculty in English Departments that Speech had no other recourse than to leave [See Paul E. Ried, "The Boylston Professor in the Twentieth Century." QJS 73 (1987): 474-81; Berlin, "Rhetoric and Poetics in the English Department.") We need to remember that in the Greek world of the 5 and 4th centuries B.C., these departments were not yet fully institutionalized, yet there was a split evolving between philosophy and rhetoric (sophistic rhetorics). I think that the splits among philosophy, rhetoric, and literature (poetics actually) in these B.C. times were well on their way to 'happening.' And yes, it's splits-ville among philosophy, rhetoric, and literature even up to this very moment of a day across the country (see Connors, "Rhetoric in the Modern University").
In Sum, then, Lanham writes:
There seem to be two characteristic modes of Western literature ... narrative and speech or serious and rhetorical, and 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 poetics [see Eco's The Name of the Rose]. Its view of the self, and of referent reaity, 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 elated 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. (18-19)
Clarity:
Parallel to a discussion of the --[]-- pattern is one of the notion of Clarity. Nothing, for me, is more mysterious and metaphysical than the Platonic, ideal, or Scottish Realist, Common-Sense, notion of CLARITY!
Lanham as several concerns about Clarity and its "ingredients":
"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.... 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";
"Clarity deos not lie entirely in the eye of the beholder. It lies in formal properties, too, and these suggest a second general and neglected criterion, pleasureability, a style's success in tapping sources of formal pleasure irrelevant to content";
"... ludic scoring. Clarity must not show off. But serious prejudice aside, clarity contians enormous show-off zest. Clarity signifies, after all, an immense act of exclusion, of restraint.... Sanctimonious moralizing about style proclaims its designs on you. Rhetorical style seems less miraculous because it does not hide the amplifying pwoers 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 illustion. To rhetorical man at least, the worls is not clear, it is made clear. [...] We shuttle continually between a nominalist universe and a realistic one." (20-23)
Yes, "from the beginning ... style was not supposed to show." No one was to be Xcessive (26). Being Xcessive was badddddddddddddd. In an attempt to put "style"/s (the full array of them) back into the third book of Aristotle's rhetoric, Lanham gives us the following matrix:
He comments: "The horizontal axis seeks to plot not configurations of langauge but our attitude toward them, our stylistic self-consciousness, how much we notice style as 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 eery point. [...] The additional axis solves many problems. We can describe a styule in unmoralistic terms. 'Excess,' 'decadence,' all the leftover moralizings can be discarded. No style can be 'excessive' in this matrix" (26-27).
Take special note of Lanham's discussion of the representation of Rhetoric as a Harlot. ("Harlots do not paint to improve nature. They paint to invite a certain attitude.") And the representation of the Plain Style (the clear, honest style!!!) as Plain Jane. ("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" [29-30].)
NOtes7 >>>>
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