Terms of Response

Language and the Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory

Robert Montgomery

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780271007649
• eBook ISBN: 9780271075181
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

This book takes a new look at the place occupied by medieval Spanish epic within European folk and literary tradition. Thomas Montgomery traces the origins of key parts of most known medieval Spanish epics to an ancient myth. He shows how the myth of the initiation of the young warrior, shown by Georges Dumézil to be fundamental to the belief systems of widely distributed Indo-European peoples, was variously adapted to shape the action of texts including the Siete Infantes de Lara, the Mocedades de Rodrigo, and the Poema de Mio Cid, in which it accounts for the peculiar behavior of the Infantes de Carrión. Montgomery also connects the same mythic tradition to works as diverse as Tristan and the Chanson de Roland.

In a preliterate society, the oral presentation of this archetypal lore required a special language capable of re-creating the ritualized behavior of the epic characters and maintaining the ceremonial tone of the performance. Focusing on the Poema de Mio Cid, Montgomery examines the ways in which the poetic language worked to evoke a feeling of group unity that absorbed the audience and still works its spell upon today's readers.

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Baroque Surprise

The Pleasures of Metaphoric Form

But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth, nor again when it is found that it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later school of Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies, where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candlelights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

—Francis Bacon, “Of Truth”

In Italian literary theory the seventeenth-century successors to the abundance of theorists in the previous generation are three Italian rhetoricians, Emmanuele Tesauro, Matteo Peregrini, and Sforza Pallavicino. If we include the Spaniard Balthazar Gracian, together with him they produced the significant whole of baroque literary theory, though taken at face value their work seems limited in scope and narrow in objective. Their interests centered in the conceit and forms of verbal wit, features that Tesauro grandly claimed could produce a “whole theater of marvels.” These interests stretched well beyond the borders of poetry, fiction, or drama to include all the forms of artificial discourse. Yet with the possible exception of Tesauro’s attempt to propose Aristotle as the supreme authority on style, their work adds little to the history of rhetoric. What they bring to the history of literature, explaining and in part justifying the eccentricities of Marinism and Metaphysical style, is more important and more interesting,¹ but their significance in this study involves their place in the history of affective theory.

Although they extend the sixteenth-century interest in the affinities between rhetoric and poetic and keep alive the long-standing reference to Aristotelian faculty psychology to describe audience reaction, their work effects substantial changes in emphasis. Style is proposed as the object of audience attention. The audience in turn is more to be entertained than moved or instructed. For Tesauro, and only slightly less drastically for Peregrini and Pallavicino, form is equivalent to style, and style is resolved into witty and conceited language. Wit and conceitedness cross generic boundaries and inform all types of discourse, and Tesauro, in his own effusion of wit, finds these qualities in the natural and the supernatural.

At the same time the baroque theorists say nothing whatever about plot or character. Verisimilitude was one of the more urgently debated topics in Renaissance literary theory. It survived and flourished as a central value in neoclassical doctrine. But for the apologists of wit it is not simply a secondary concern, its worth is implicitly denied in the deliberate and conscious elevation of verbal artifice, and the traditional view that delight was an instrumental, not a terminal value, is called in question, though not entirely abandoned.² They exploit the tendency emerging in the later sixteenth century to divide poetry and truth, ornament and doctrine, image and reality, all at the expense of content or “matter” as a major value in artistic discourse, though modern students of baroque aesthetics have tended to state the development rather too categorically and simply. For the baroque thinkers what distinguishes poets is neither their wisdom nor capacity to render nature; they are no longer the dutiful servants of the verisimilar or the unities. Instead, their talent for surprise, for cleverness, and for verbal fireworks is the mark to know them by, and these are called into being by the audience’s desire for marvels.³ By mid-seventeenth century Pallavicino can state flatly that the intrinsic and proximate ends of poetry are not to be found in utility but in delighting the common intellect, though poetry should not make use of “whatever delights them, obviously, but that which they derive from conversations or writings composed where marvelous things are discovered by the author.”⁴ The authority for such a view derives, perhaps surprisingly, from Aristotle.⁵

Aristotle and Metaphor

The text to which the baroque theorists—Tesauro being the most prominent in this respect—turned was the Rhetoric, and for them its crucial element was the analysis of metaphor in Book III. Aristotle thought of metaphor as fundamentally artificial, and his notion of artifice can be gathered from the earlier definition in the Poetics: “Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy.”⁶ The key term is “strange.” Golden’s translation reads “the transference of a name from the object to which it has a natural application” (emphasis added),⁷ but Aristotle’s discussion of nouns at the beginning of chapter 21 seems to indicate that he is thinking of usage as either familiar and ordinary or strange and unfamiliar: “Every noun is either ‘ordinary’ or ‘rare’ or ‘metaphorical’ or ‘ornamental’ or ‘invented’ or ‘lengthened’ or ‘curtailed’ or ‘altered.’ An ‘ordinary’ word is used by everybody, a ‘rare’ word one used by some; so that a word may obviously be both ‘ordinary’ and ‘rare,’ but not in relation to the same people” (Loeb trans.).⁸ Only if “natural” is understood to refer to familiar usage, that which seems natural because it is habitual to those who use and hear language, is Aristotle’s concept of metaphor as felt artifice fully clear. The terms, therefore, are not absolute but are instead relative to user and audience. To make a metaphor is a more conscious, deliberate manipulation of language than simply using a term already familiar to identify an object. Metaphor thus carries with it what Aristotle calls a “foreign air” (Rhetoric III.ii), a sense of strangeness, of something calculated and special, a work of art, perhaps, in miniature. There is also the hint that metaphor is a kind of deliberate misnaming, or catachresis, as Foucault believes.⁹ Ricouer also calls attention to catachresis, but explains it as a movement from “literal incongruence to metaphorical congruence between two semantic fields.”¹⁰ In treating metaphor as an art Aristotle dwells first on propriety (Rhetoric III.ii), giving examples of “inappropriate” metaphor and suggesting that the distance between the two “objects” involved in metaphoric compounding must not be too great: there must be some likeness, though not so much that it is too readily evident to anyone. The maker of metaphor is considered gifted—many of Aristotle’s examples are drawn from the poets—and what we notice first of all is skill or cleverness. “And generally speaking,” Aristotle says, “clever enigmas furnish good metaphors; for metaphor is a kind of enigma, so that it is clear that the transference is clever.”¹¹ He thus lifts metaphor beyond the utilitarian and involves our thinking about it in the character of the maker and the response of the audience.

What metaphor does for the audience is to put “‘the matter before the eyes,’ for we ought to see what is being done rather than what is going to be done” (III.x.6). Considered in this way, it approaches the neoclassical requirement of perspicuity, but in that case it has to be so discreetly managed that it would seem natural and spontaneous, rather than noticeably contrived. For Aristotle something more than visual presence is involved; there is also an aesthetic consideration: “Metaphors should therefore be derived from what is beautiful either in sound, or in signification. . . . For it does make a difference, for instance, whether one says ‘rosy-fingered morn,’ rather than ‘purple-fingered,’ or, what is still worse, ‘red-fingered’” (III.ii.13). The emphasis here is on the need to strike just the right balance in the form of the metaphor, for if the listeners or readers cannot accept its cleverness as well as its propriety, then they have no pleasure in it and any further purpose is lost. Aristotle thus views metaphor as a close and delicate transaction between author, form, and audience.

The pleasure we take in metaphor is also ascribed to what Aristotle terms “easy learning” (III.x.2), and ease has to do with how quickly we get the point. Once again, however, there is a correct or appropriate moment between the too easy and the too difficult. Since what everyone knows is boring, a metaphor whose terms are too obvious makes no impact; at the same time no one takes delight in an enigma so obscure it can’t be understood. We can now grasp why in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric Aristotle insists on what he calls the “strangeness” of metaphor, for what he is really talking about is a combination of strangeness and familiarity. The listeners or readers cannot be totally passive: they must work, however lightly and briefly, to grasp the point and must appreciate as well the way in which something is identified and qualified by the alien term, that is, by what that something is not. Thus, it is not what we learn but the manner in which we learn it that gives force to metaphor and, to a lesser extent, to simile. The speed with which we move from ignorance to knowledge is crucial. And, although Aristotle does not mention it, there is also implied in the concept of strangeness a form of mortality. Repeated too often, metaphor becomes familiar and stale. Like slang, its surprise and the impression of its novelty (qualities the baroque rhetoricians emphasized) have a brief power, and this mortality guarantees that metaphor is especially dependent upon an audience.

One aspect of this dependence is the author’s attempt to deceive the audience. In addition to having to learn something, listeners must be aware suddenly and almost in spite of themselves that they have learned something. Listeners thus not only undergo a change from ignorance to knowledge but also reach a conclusion that is contrary to their expectation. Versions of this process are central to baroque concepts of wittiness and the motives these concepts discover for its appeal.

Finally, Aristotle talks about concreteness. We have already noticed that he has said that metaphor “places things before the eyes.” In III.xi this is one of the powers attributed to “smart sayings.” “I mean,” he explains, “that things are set before the eyes by words that suggest actuality.” “Actuality” indicates that Aristotle relies on a concept of words representing things in such a way that more than reference is involved, that the word is capable of making us picture the thing imaginatively. Metaphors are thus predicates in which picturing is part of the relationship established by transference. What we learn, presumably, is something about an object we did not know or perceive before, and we do so by being able to see it as if it were some other object. Therefore, two events are taking place, learning and the manner in which learning is brought about. Aristotle does not lay the weight of his discussion on manner as much as his baroque followers do, and if they can be said to modify Aristotle in any profound way, it is in their shifting attention from the issue of learning to that of manner, in the sense that manner is celebrated as a play of mind and the creation of new and marvelous fictions.

Tesauro

The peculiarity of Emmanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (1654) is its effort to concentrate all that is interesting in artifice into what he calls argutezza, a term that translates with some awkwardness into English but means, roughly, keenness, sharpness of wit.¹² For Tesauro argutezza is the heart of wit, and the figure that surpasses all others in witty expression is metaphor. This sequence of priorities surrounds and controls Tesauro’s discussion of style, which opens with a flamboyant set of assertions making “argutezza” and hence metaphor virtually coextensive with poetry or discourse itself:

A divine part of the mind, better known through its appearance than through its birth, has been in every country and by virtually all men held in such great admiration that, when read or listened to by those who do not know it, like a beautiful miracle it is received with the highest rejoicing and applause. This is KEENNESS, the great mother of every ingenious conceit, the clearest light of oratory and poetic elocution, the vital spirit of dead pages, the most pleasant sauce [seasoning?] in civil conversation, ultimate power of the intellect, vestige of divinity in the human soul.¹³

In its turn metaphor is “the most witty and acute, the most strange and marvelous, the most pleasant and useful, the most eloquent and fecund part of the human intellect” (66). There is, he suggests, something divine in metaphor, life teased from the inert, the strange and exotic bursting through the familiar, the element without which all formal discourse is flat: “In sum, everything is dead that does not taste of the wine of sharpness” (2). Exaggerations aside, Tesauro thinks of metaphor as much more than a figure, more even than the most central of figures. In miniature it stands for verbal artistry at large, so that when one talks about the several issues involved in rhetoric and poetic in Tesaurian terms, one is talking about metaphor.¹⁴

What some of these issues are is already evident from our review of Aristotle. Tesauro points constantly to the cleverness of the maker of conceits and justifies cleverness as the source of our pleasure and hence our willingness to listen. He proceeds then to examine “argutezza” in all the arts, even in the lapidary, though it is predominantly a verbal quality. In an effort to define it, he says (7) that it is first of all characterized by vivacity and then by words being well put together, striking, and graceful (from Cicero’s “sententiis non tam gravibus et severis quam concinnis et venustis”¹⁵). Another feature is Aristotle’s asteia (urbanity), which is more than suavity of style: urbane discourse is the mark of civilization. The writer capable of managing these qualities is the object of admiration, though beyond repeating this kind of generality, Tesauro really says very little about the rhetor or poet. The ethos of the writer or speaker is thus effectively absorbed into the nature of the task; it is, in other words, almost identical with the formal properties of wit. A kind of magician, the verbal artist is a stager of theatrical events who can make us see in a single word “a full theater of marvels” (267). As a maker of metaphor the poet is endowed with “a most agile wit,” but it is only the activity of wit that we attend to. In all other respects the poet is anonymous and without depth or individuality.

Tesauro’s theatrical analogy underscores the power of metaphor to condense, to collapse almost spatially a variety of ideas into a single word or phrase. The example he uses is interesting: “If you say, ‘The fields are pleasant,’ you represent to me nothing more than the greenness of the fields. But if you say, ‘The fields are smiling,’ you make me see, so to speak, the earth as animated human being. The field is his face, the pleasantness is his glad laughter, so that in one small word appear all these notions of different genres, earth, field, amenity, human being, laughter, gladness” (267). The reader’s “performance” is thus the reverse of the author’s: he notices and no doubt marvels at the skill involved in the compression of the many into the one, but he also experiences the unraveling of the one back into the many from which it seems to have derived. However, such a line of thought is followed no further. Instead, Tesauro’s attention to the formal properties of metaphor centers in two qualities familiar to modern critics of baroque and Metaphysical poetry, the discovery of likeness in apparently different things and energeia or liveliness.

As to the first of these, he draws on Aristotle’s observation in the Poetics that metaphor involves a transference from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or genus to genus. It is the most ingenious figure of all, says Tesauro, “because if wit consists (as we have said) in binding together remote and separate notions of the proposed object, this is exactly the office of metaphor, and of no other figure, thus drawing the mind, no less than the word, from one genus to another, it expresses one concept by means of another quite diverse, finding similarity in dissimilar things” (266). It is evident from this statement and from his later discussion of types of metaphor, as well as of extended metaphorical argument, that he has in mind a whole central category of language and thought conceived on very broad terms and including particular figures that we ordinarily assign separate and different names. And what is central is the concept of similarity in difference, the feature Dr. Johnson described as “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together.” For Tesauro there is no violence, but there are surprise and novelty.

Novelty, pellegrina, is the term he uses to translate Aristotle’s “strange” or “alien” (though we should not assume too great a bending of Aristotle’s meaning: Tesauro uses a Latin version of Aristotle, and in the margin quotes from Rhetoric III.2, “peregrinum affert Translatio . . .”). “Novelty” is a generously inclusive term already familiar in literary theory to account for some of the appeal of poetry. Tesauro claims it derives from compression (“Delia Brevita nasce la NOVITA . . .”), and illustrates brevity by elaborating Aristotle’s example of the pleasure to be derived from easy learning (Rhetoric X.iii): “for when Homer calls old age stubble, he teaches and informs us through the genus.” Tesauro begins with a full statement of the logic of the example: just as stubble is the stalk of the grain which was once green and vigorous and now is dry and withered, so old age is a lack of vigor in a body that was once robust and healthy.” Metaphors squeeze everything into a single word, and “in an almost miraculous way they make you see the one in the other.” What one learns is not a new fact, at least insofar as this example is concerned, but a new perspective, a way of seeing. “Hence,” he continues, “the greater is your delight in the sense that it is more curious and pleasant to view many objects through the penetration of perspective, than if the same originals came to you by passing successively before your eyes” (301).

Novelty, then, is to be found in manner of expression. The combination of two words whose usage is familiar when apart results in fresh expression because it is unanticipated: “For although the word ‘stubble’ is ordinary and familiar among the people, even so, standing for old age it is a fresh word insofar as this meaning is concerned” (301). Novelty is also involved in the deception practiced on the audience, which Tesauro classifies as his eighth type of metaphor (294). But for his concept of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Baroque Surprise: The Pleasures of Metaphoric Form
• 2. “Contre le Baroque”: Bouhours and Boileau
• 3. Addison and the “Helps and Ornaments of Art”
• 4. “The Irregular Fancy of the World”
• 5. “An Unaccountable Pleasure”: The Attractions of Tragedy
• 6. Connections and Discontinuities: Du Bos, Condillac, and Diderot
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover