Rhetoric

Peter Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138229556
• eBook ISBN: 9781315388847
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1971, this book provides a historical account of the fortunes of Rhetoric. Beginning with a study of classical rhetorical theory and practice, it goes on to explore the impact of rhetoric on English literature and the renunciation of rhetoric from the late 17th century. The book concludes with a survey of the ways in which rhetoric was revived and re-modelled in the 20th century and its bearings on the practice and theory of literary criticism.

This book will be of interest to those studying English literature and literary theory.

I

Introduction: Some Modern Instances

In his essay ‘“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama’ T. S. Eliot outlined a difficult task. Rhetoric, he said, ‘is one of those words which it is the business of criticism to dissect and reassemble’ (Selected Essays, p. 38). The critic may perhaps be excused for feeling that he is in the position of a man trying to dissect and reassemble a jellyfish – for the word, as Eliot went on to acknowledge, is notoriously slippery and imprecise. It has served to designate a number of radically different stylistic qualities. It has been invoked in order to praise writers, and at other times in order to condemn. So invertebrate is the word that we can apparently turn it inside out. Etymologically the rhetor

is a public speaker, and his distinctive art is that of addressing courts of law and popular assemblies. Yet when the judges in a recent debating competition laid down guidelines for the competitors they ‘advised against rhetoric’ (The Observer, 26 January 1969). Cicero and Quintilian would have found such advice incomprehensible.

We may be able to reduce some of this confusion to a semblance of order by drawing out the implications of the word’s etymology. To speak in public presupposes an audience which is spoken to, an audience which the speaker wishes to influence, to persuade, perhaps to exhort and instruct. And public speech is necessarily different from private chat. The rhetor will use more artistic, more artificial and formal kinds of language than he would in everyday conversation. At the very least he will be more orderly than usual, choosing his words with greater precision; otherwise he may find himself not communicating to an audience but addressing the empty air. If, then, out of these implications we construct a working definition of rhetor – ‘a man skilled in speaking who addresses a public audience in order to make an impact upon it’ – we may begin to see how the diverse uses of the word rhetoric in modern criticism can be traced back through various historical diversions and intersections to the several components of this basic definition.

Everything depends on the element which is stressed or isolated. T. S. Eliot, for instance, focuses on the public aspect of the speaker’s art. ‘The really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare occurs in situations where a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light’ (p. 39). The character, that is, deliberately assumes a public stance, as in Othello’s final speech: ‘And say besides, that in Aleppo once….’ Keeping the same basic emphasis, but extending its application, the critic may describe as rhetorical any literary work which is evidently intended for the public ear, and which has the tone and manner of a man speaking to a wide audience on some theme or subject of general importance. Taken in this sense rhetoric stands in contrast to a more intimate or private communing with the reader. So W. W. Robson writes of Byron’s description of the dying gladiator in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘This of course is rhetorical writing, but it is a very distinguished rhetoric…. Byron speaks here in the accents of a great European tradition of the public style’ (Critical Essays, London, 1966, pp. 156–7).

If we next lay particular stress on that part of our definition which concerns the speaker’s impact on his listeners, then we can stretch rhetoric to include almost the entire area of human discourse, since most of our speech and writing (even much of our soliloquizing) is directed to an audience, however small. The concern of rhetoric becomes nothing less than the whole complex business of communication through language, the intricate network of relationships which connects a speaker (or writer) with those he addresses. Thus I. A. Richards re-defines rhetoric as the ‘study of verbal understanding and misunderstanding’ (Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 23). Here too belong the courses in Rhetoric and Composition given in American high schools and universities, which aim to teach proficiency in communication, more especially in the writing of clear expository prose. Such courses will often include exercises in ‘straight thinking’ and practice in the marshalling of arguments, so that rhetoric has recaptured some of the ground it earlier lost to logic. Finally, as a literary-critical term, rhetoric in this sense will cover all the techniques by which a writer establishes rapport with his readers, and by which he elicits and guides their responses to his work. It is thus that the word is used in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, a detailed study of ‘the author’s means of controlling his readers’ (Preface).

In the uses of the term that we have so far surveyed, something of the third component of our working definition is already present: the element of artifice and ingenuity, of language polished or heightened beyond what we loosely call our ‘normal’ habits of speech. By emphasizing this element we arrive at a new meaning of rhetoric: the art of speaking well, of using words to their best advantage. Since poetry has customarily been regarded as the field in which words are handled with their maximum force and expressiveness, we find that the links between rhetoric and poetry have been numerous and firm, at least until the conception of poetry as a verbal craft began to fall into discredit. Indeed the two arts of language have sometimes been treated as though they were one. Our awareness of this historical state of affairs has encouraged the continuing use of rhetoric as a synonym for poetry, as when a reviewer comments on a recent study of Pope: ‘Throwing more light on certain selected scientific interests of the period than on Pope’s poetry, its actual centre of concern is not rhetoric but the history of ideas’ (Rebecca Parkin, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, III (1969–70), p. 139). More commonly, rhetoric is taken to refer specifically to tropes and figures of speech, those graces of style and patterns of words which most obviously display an author’s verbal skill and resourcefulness. So, in ‘The Rhetoric of Brunanburh’ Ann S. Johnson examines the ‘embellished verbal figures’ (the ‘rhetoric’ of her title) in that Old English heroic poem, and concludes that the anonymous poet had absorbed at least some of the forms and devices of classical rhetoric (Philological Quarterly, XLVII (1968), pp. 487–93).

Teachers and exponents of rhetoric have repeatedly claimed that since speech is man’s great privilege, distinguishing him from the beasts, their art is of central relevance to human affairs. The price it pays for such relevance is to become enmeshed in moral issues, value-judgments, questions of good and evil. These problems our neutral description has so far ignored. We are now presented with a further set of possible meanings for rhetoric, depending on our assessment of the orator’s moral character and the ends to which his verbal dexterity is directed. If we make a positive moral commitment and assert that the orator is ‘a good man, skilled in speaking’, we are in fact echoing Cato’s definition: vir bonus dicendi peritus The classical champions of rhetoric were unshaken in their adherence to this definition, in their conviction that goodness is a prerequisite of the true orator. But their very firmness is an attempt to disguise an underlying anxiety; it obliquely testifies to the existence of a counter-definition – that the orator is quite as likely to be a wicked man, manipulating his hearers for evil purposes. Even more damagingly, the whole art of rhetoric may be censured as morally reprehensible, the view taken by Socrates, its first and most formidable opponent.

During the long history of rhetoric the rumblings of moral disapproval have often dwindled to the merest whisper. But as the result of profound intellectual, social, and political changes which began in Europe in the seventeenth century, the dissatisfaction has grown steadily in volume and has even threatened to drown the voice of true rhetoric altogether. By the early years of the present century, as Eliot noted, rhetoric had become ‘merely a vague term of abuse for any style that is bad, that is so evidently bad or second rate that we do not recognize the necessity for greater precision in the phrases we apply to it’ (Selected Essays, p. 37). Rhetoric is a convenient label for all the most trivial and unworthy ways of attempting to move or influence an audience. To be more exact, it may refer to a literary style that clamours for us to admire its virtuosity, a style of tinsel ornament, meretricious show without substance. Or it can be applied to the style that tries to impress by taking the easy way of over-emphasis, the way which leads to fustian, rant and bombast. So J. M. S. Tompkins comments on a minor eighteenth-century novel, Sophia King’s Waldorf: ‘The calamities of this story are heaped up by the unsparing hand of youth, and described in distressing rhetoric’, and quotes a nice example of the author’s absurd exaggeration: ‘The eyes of Waldorf seemed bursting with the majestic energy of intellect’ (The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, London, 1932, p. 326). Or an author may hope to move us by a series of crudely sensational or sentimental appeals – a complaint which F. R. Leavis levels at Le Pere Goriot: ‘Balzac’s art here seems to me an essentially rhetorical art in a pejorative sense of the adjective: romantic rhetoric is the life and spirit of the sublimities and degradations he exhibits. They depend for their effect, that is, not on any profound realization of human emotions, but on excited emphasis, top-level assertion and explicit insistence’ (The Great Tradition, London, 1948, p. 29). Finally, by pushing our disapproval even further, we may come to dismiss as ‘rhetorical’ all empty, insincere declarations and the kind of cheap scoring of points which the judges in the debating contest presumably wished to avoid.

The inadmissibility of rhetoric is one of the rules of the question game played by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

GUILDENSTERN: What in God’s name is going on?

ROSENCRANTZ: Foul! No rhetoric. Two-one.

(Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
London, 1967, p. 31)

But we cannot allow Rosencrantz to have the last word. The fortunes and the meaning of rhetoric are still fluctuating. In the chapters which follow I have attempted to record some of the major fluctuations of the past, and to indicate some of the ways in which rhetoric has impinged upon literature. I have also tried to suggest the scope of a subject that has made itself responsible not only for the examination of legal arguments and the minutiae of style, but also for the liberal education of kings and statesmen.

2

Classical Theory

The people of Athens made yearly sacrifices to the statue of the goddess Persuasion, whose worship was said to have been established in the city by Theseus. The sacrifices gave public and formal expression to the citizens’ delight in discourse, and in the forcefulness of ideas persuasively presented. The power of words to move men’s minds and influence their actions had for the Greeks something of magical and divine about it. This faith in the word has been sustained in Western civilization – it is not too much to say that it has been a sustaining force in Western civilization – in spite of receiving some very shrewd blows. Throughout Greek and Roman antiquity the practitioners and theorists of rhetoric, those at least who held a lofty conception of their role and their art, were concerned to affirm this faith directly, and to reaffirm it continually.

This sense of the efficacy of the spoken word is much older than the formal study and codification of the art of rhetoric. The heroes of Homer’s epics acknowledge and exploit the power of speech, treasuring eloquence as one of the greatest of human excellences. It was not, however, until the fifth century B.C., among the Greek inhabitants of Sicily, that rhetoric as a distinct art was born. At that time landowners and others who had suffered under the recently expelled tyrants began civil proceedings to recover their rights. The Sicilians, reputedly a sharpwitted people and not averse to controversy, enlisted the help of Corax and Tisias in presenting their case. These two men were the first to ‘put together some theoretical precepts’; before this time, ‘while many had taken pains to speak with care and with orderly arrangement, no one had followed a definite method or art’ (Cicero, Brutus, 46). The rhetorician is then, to begin with, the man who can advise on the most effective way of presenting a legal case. Corax is credited with the first Art of Rhetoric, and with the first extant definition of the word:

(artificer, or producer, of persuasion). Rhetoric was soon to be extended beyond legal and political occasions, to situations in which persuasion, narrowly considered, was not a prime motive of the speaker; yet the persuasive or influential aim, inevitable in the setting of the law court, has never been quite lost sight of. Indeed, at Rome the study of rhetoric was often restricted to legal contexts, and both Cicero and Quintilian were keenly aware of the judicial functions of oratory.

The Sicilian Tisias is said to have taught Gorgias, who was in turn responsible for introducing oratory into Greece when he visited Athens as an ambassador. Gorgias specialized in writing set speeches in praise or censure of specific subjects or persons, thus widening the scope of the art (Brutus, 47). He laid particular stress on the decorative functions of style, favouring unusual phraseology and neologisms, and developed the kind of highly patterned prose which is most clearly represented in English literature by the writings of John Lyly. Most important, Gorgias and other teachers of rhetoric asserted that a speaker need not concern himself with the truth of the matter in hand. The rightness or wisdom of the cause is an irrelevance. What is important is simply the orator’s verbal dexterity in putting across his conclusions in a convincing way. The teacher will therefore get his pupils to exercise their wits by preparing speeches on either side of a question without regard to the morality and wisdom of the point of view expressed. And it will not be long before such a teacher is advertising his ability to instruct pupils how to make the worse, or weaker, cause appear the better and stronger.

It was against such moral irresponsibility that Isocrates set himself, claiming for rhetoric a role higher and nobler than that of mere persuasion. Speech, Isocrates reminds us (and the idea has become a commonplace of Western thought), is the foundation of human society, the means through which man expresses his wisdom, and without which wisdom is inarticulate and inert. Presumably because of the bad name rhetoric was already getting, and as a result of his own impatience with the frivolous attitudes of his teachers (including, probably, Gorgias himself), Isocrates declared his concern to be the study and teaching, not of rhetoric, but of the ‘art of speech’

. This is an art requiring a vigorous and imaginative mind, for the logos embraces all aspects of communication. It comprehends reason, feeling and imagination, as well as the forms of expression; it is the power by which we direct public affairs, by which we influence others in the course of our daily lives, and by which we reach decisions about our own moral conduct. Isocrates writes to Alexander the Great, commending his devotion to this broadly conceived rhetorical training: ‘By means of this study you will come to know how at the present time to form reasonably sound opinions about the future, how not ineptly to instruct your subject peoples what each should do, how to form correct judgments about the right and the just and their opposites and, besides, to reward and chastise each class as it deserves.’ Isocrates argues that ‘the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul’ (Nicocles, 7: repeated in Antidosis, 255). Educationally, study of the logos will promote morality, since men can become more virtuous by conceiving ‘an ambition to speak well’ (Antidosis, 275). Speaking and writing on noble themes will enlarge the mind. Moreover, the orator must be a good man, and must be known to be so: ‘words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute.’ The product of Isocrates’ educational system will be a philosopher and statesman, one who can mould public opinion by his speeches or writings, one who will always act justly and wisely. He is the embodiment of what Isocrates understood by logos: eloquent wisdom. This Isocratean ideal, transmitted by Cicero, was inherited by the Renaissance. Isocrates himself was admired by the humanist Ascham, and at the end of the sixteenth century his works were a regular part of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• NOTE
• 1 INTRODUCTION: Some Modern Instances
• 2 CLASSICAL THEORY
• 3 THE RULES OF RHETORIC
• 4 RHETORIC AND LITERATURE
• 5 THE RENUNCIATION OF RHETORIC
• 6 RHETORIC RENEWED
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX