Chapter3

Rhetoric

Every work of culture, be it a novel, a song, or a movie, is a representation of an imaginary world of characters, actions, ideas, and feelings.

Tears, laughter, and suspenseful, anxiety are some of the most obvious reactions that literary works provoke.

Other reactions include the negative judgment an especially vile character or action inspires, or the feeling of identification and idealization that heroic actions and virtuous characters elicit.

The term for this kind of action on the audience is rhetoric.

Cultural works are rhetorical simply by being plausible or credible representation (of imaginary characters and events)

As James Joyce does in Ulysses, to place a humanist and compassionate Jew at the center of his novel, is making such a choice and engaging in such a valuation. Joyce’s choice of that representational element was deliberately provocative in the cultural context in which he wrote, one in which anti-semitism was quite common

By doing so, Joyce criticizes aspects of Irish culture that he found unacceptable. Compare his choice and his valuation to that of Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth. Wharton’s heroine, Lily Bart, is an embodiment of Anglo-Saxon self-idealization.

Wharton could get away with this derogatory representation largely because anti-semitism was pervasive in American culture at the time. For inverse reasons, Joyce could not get away with his effort to break cultural stereotypes, and his book was banned in the United States.

The makers of cultural works do not simply seek to inspire belief in an imaginary world in their audiences. They seek to create a particular kind of belief, one characterized by positive and negative judgments and feelings.

The field of rhetoric includes not only the choices and valuations that go into the selection of elements that shade audience perceptions and judgments in different ways, but also the way selected elements are arranged logically in a narrative sequence.

Rhetoric is often associated with the creation of emotional effects, but initially, in classical Greece and Rome, it had more to do with logic, with the arrangement of elements of language and thought so that were convincing.

We all belong to interpretive communities, group whose members share assumptions and who as a result see the world in the same way.

Consequently, not all audience can be counted on to react in the same way to the rhetorical offer a literary work makes.

Rhetoric is also an internal feature of works of literature and culture. Characters address each other in active ways that change behavior, mold perception and belief, or challenge assumptions.

English philosopher J.L. Austin pointed out that there is a class of statements in language that make things happen in the world. Such speech acts include the marriage vow, contracts, and the naming of a child.

When we read a book or watch a movie, we bring to the experience our own innate cognitive capacities.

In each case, a statement modifies the world.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(1)

King Lear might be said to be a play about speech acts, that kind of language that makes things happen in the world.

The first act of the play contains numerous examples of rhetoric, from hyperbole to chiasmus to apostrophe.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(2) Richard Lanham in Tacit Persuasion Patters

contends that certain forms language, such as chiasmus, imitate logic and so are tacitly persuasive even if they are not entirely logical.

Paradox is like chiasmus in that it equates or associates things that logically are far apart such as the last and the first.

How would you characterize the Fool’s rhetorical function or role in this opening act? What is the nature of his lessons to Lear? Notice the different kinds of puns that he uses.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(4) The only surviving account of the court seems

to corroborate that hypothesis. Does the play make jokes or references that

have been intended for a gay audience? A gay subculture in the early seventeenth

century would conceivably have one in which heterosexuality – and especially that dimension of heterosexuality that entailed physical contact with women’s bodies-might have been a subject of derision.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(5) One of the more interesting rhetorical moments

in the play occurs in Act 2, scene 2. The play privileges plain speech and associates ornate, contrived, hyperbolic speech with a lack of virtue.

When Lear’s world starts to fall apart later in the play, the change is rendered in part through changes in his ability to perform speech acts that he was used to performing before the collapse of his world.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(6) In locating moments of instability in the

performance of speech acts, you might begin with Act 2, scene 4, where Lear arrives at the home of Cornwall and Regan.

It is the breach of agreements that leads to Lear’s madness, of course. Notice how his sense of his identity changes in Act 3, scene 4.

He is no longer a king but a despised old man.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(7)

How is the final resolution of the play enacted as a restoration of the power to perform speech acts? Look at Act 4. scene 6. How do the soldiers behave when they find Lear?

Edgar plays a crucial in the restoration of order the play obviously considers to be right.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(3) Corbett lists several varieties, from syllepsis to

zeugma. The use of rhetoric in a literary or dramatic

work often depends on its audience. King Lear was first presented to King James’

court on St. Stephen’s night 1606. King James’ was homosexual, and his court was known as a safe meeting-place for catamites or gay people.

Exercise 3.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(8) Audience is a significant factor in

understanding the play’s argument. James favored an absolutist interpretation of

monarchial power, and he clashed with the parliamentarians, who favored a more tempered kind of power for the king. He should not rise above the law.

Many works of literature are argumentative in that they try to position the audience in a perspective that entails a belief in the values or ideals the work promotes,

Exercise 3.2Elizabeth Bishop, Anaphora(1) Another dimension of rhetoric is the shaping

procedures and forms that we use when we speak and write.

A poem named after a rhetorical trope would seem to be an attempt to draw some consequential meaning or effect from the use of language the trope names.

Read Bishop’s poem Anaphora and note its use of repetition.

Exercise 3.2Elizabeth Bishop, Anaphora(2) Why does Bishop name her poem Anaphora or

repetition She begins by describing a sunrise, and that of

course might be counted one of the more repetitive events in human life on earth.

She refers to it as a ceremony, and she seems to contradict the sense of dullness that repetition can be associated with by using deliberately idealizing images: brilliant walls.

Exercise 3.2Elizabeth Bishop, Anaphora(3) In the second stanza, the sun is described as

falling and moving toward sunset. The final image of the beggar in the park is

almost oxymoronic or self-contradictory. He lacks the wherewithal to read books, yet he is preparing stupendous studies.

Fiery event is reminiscent of the way early Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus described life.

Exercise 3.2Elizabeth Bishop, Anaphora(4) Finally, why conclude by evoking the

possibility of endless/ endless assent? The word assent means something like agree to in ordinary usage, but it also has a different meaning in nineteenth-century Protestant theology.

But here she seems to use a theological idea more affirmatively. Indeed, the theological meaning of assent is to express belief in or even to have faith.

Exercise 3.3Alice Munro, Goodness and Mercy(1)

Language acts in ways that can heal or hurt. We act on others by blaming or praising, cajoling or cursing, deflecting or demeaning, and so on.

Language is in some respects a licensing procedure that makes questionable actions acceptable or that so transforms our perceptions of other that we permit ourselves to act on them in unacceptable ways.

Exercise 3.3Alice Munro, Goodness and Mercy(2)

Naming or characterizing others through language is an important element in the women’s lives.

Tone in language can be quite significant as address others.

Language can either push people away or bring them closer. That is one meaning of charm. Language is magical in that regard.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(1) Apocalypse Now argues for a forceful resolution

to Vietnam War. Written and directed by America’s leading rightwing film-makers, Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, the film links the military argument to the conservative economic individualism that came to prominence in the US in the late 1970s and 1980s, immediately after the unsuccessful conclusion of the war.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(2) Conservatives during the post-World War II era

molded a convincing cultural and political ideology that successfully substituted freedom for inequality. The struggle against egalitarian national liberation movements or against egalitarian economies in general was presented to the public as a defense of freedom rather than as a defense of an inegalitarian economic system in which the wealth of a few depended on the comparative structural impoverishment of the many.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(3)

In many conservative films of the era, therefore, the idealization of the use of military force against national liberation movements is frequently accompanied by the glorification of individual freedom.

Coppola and Milius frame their individualist and militarist argument in religious and racialist terms.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(4) Asia is portrayed as a haven of primitive

barbarism, its Buddhist religion linked to blood sacrifice and mindless violence, while the mission of the heroic American soldier, Willard, is framed as a quest narrative with resonances in the medieval fisher king story and the Christ story.

Note that when Willard is given his assignment, Kurtz is linked to Christ.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(5)

America needs to adopt a similar attitude in order to be saved, according to the film-makers, mistaking a difference between colonial invaders with no motive for winning and liberation forces with a strong motive for fighting hard to free their homeland from foreign intervention for a difference between races.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(6)

What is needed, the film-makers argue in a traditional conservative way, is strong visionary leadership that transcends bureaucratic procedures, legal rules, civilian democratic protest, and the restraints of moral conscience.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(7) Democracy is wrong because it places too much

importance on the will of the people. Liberal bureaucracy and rules are worse because they curtail the individual leader’s will.

Think about the books the camera pans over in Kurtz’s room. One of them, From Ritual to Romance, recounts the medieval fisher king legend whereby the king dies so that a new king can be born.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(8) The argumentative strategy is twofold. First,

assign to national liberation fighters the ideal of military brutality that animates the colonialists, while suggesting that the liberals who oppose that conservative military ideal are the ones responsible for the war’s being lost. Second, suggest that, in order to win the war properly against such adversaries, the US needs to adopt the ways of the enemy, which in fact are projections of the conservative ideal.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(9) Go back to the beginning of the film and note

how images of his later strength are superimposed on images of his initial weakness.

The film is political to the extent that its meaning and its argument are situated within a context of discussion regarding the Vietnam War that pitted conservatives against liberals. It should be paired with the documentary Hearts And Minds(1975) that tells the story of the war from the point of view of the Vietnamese.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(10)

The link back to French colonialism is presented not as the continuation of a heroic struggle against restless natives but as the brutal, exploitative suppression of an indigenous population for the sake access to raw materials for the western economy.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(11)

The racist equation established in Apocalypse Now between eastern Buddhist religion and military ruthlessness is contradicted by the voices of Buddhist monks in documentary, who speak intelligently and reasonably about their opposition to colonialism and to the imposition of a military government on the South Vietnamese by the US.

Exercise 3.4Apocalypse Now(12)

While the opponents of the US are presented in Apocalypse Now as the practitioners of ruthless violence, in the documentary what emerges, especially from the testimony of victims of torture, is a sense that the US and its South Vietnamese allies were in fact the greater wrongdoers in this regard.