Due to technical difficulties, this post is being posted by me, Jackie, but the authors of the questions are Geoffrey and Meg. Cheers!
I’m left thinking about Obama. And Glen Beck. And Reagan. And Clinton. And Hitler. Would you prefer Jefferson? I’m thinking of him too… Walker (paraphrasing Hesiod) suggests the world of “rhetoric” breaks into two clear worlds: in short, the rhetoric of art and the rhetoric of business/politics. That rhetoric (or whatever word will eventually become “rhetoric”) is a “pyschagoogic art” of enthralling the given audience and turning aside listeners’ minds. Literally, taking control of their thoughts and bending them to the task at hand, be it poetry or policy. That the Arts would originally be considered the “secondary” half of the two is not surprising. However, the deduction that the most-successful rhetoric of politics and business actually springs from this “secondary art” is quite interesting to me as a writer and as a teacher and as a citizen, and I think Walker and company are on to something quite empowering here.
Back to Obama. He is our President because he’s a good speaker. Period. That’s it. Politics aside, what separated him from that pack and captured the imagination and support of so many a year ago was his ability to speak well. To share his vision in a way that was comprehensible to the “lore and language” (epos) of his mass audiences and supported by the “rhythmic formulae” (epea) of a sweeter discourse clearly found within our churches, streets and cultures. Our ears, suggests Walker, are trained to appreciate these “rhythms” and devices through church, ceremony, art. An epideictic code of an almost Jungian nature that the audience (must never forget the audience) shares collectively. To this, does the master speaker address.
I should just get onto my question: What rhetorical practices that we’ve encountered so far this year in song appear in your favorite “practitioner of pragmatika?” I’ve had a ball the last few days watching Obama speak (on Iran) and Beck rant on Fox. I’ve thought about the best salespersons I’ve ever worked with in the business world. I’ve thought about the “best” teacher I ever had and why... How did he speak? Question #1: What in the language of these practical speakers is similar to the rhetorical devices found in song? From repetition and cadence to expletives and hyperbaton, and everything in between. These devices are learned by the audience from ART, from the poetry of five thousand years of song and story. If Wallace speaks true, we’ll find these same devices in the next speech by your favorite (and least favorite) politician. And if, indeed, the Muses have blessed us with the gift of rhetoric to foster peace and justice on Earth, our very best leaders will those who have assimilated the very best practices of art (rather than the detached “rhetoric”propsed by Aristotle and Socrates). Question #2: As writers and educators and citizens, what rhetorical devices might we learn for ourselves and pass on to the next generation that are lifted from directly from the “bards” of so long ago and today?
Meg/Woog
As I read through Walker's essay I couldn't help but focus in on the sophist as he defines (if they can at all be defined fully) one. A "...professional intellectual, a 'wiseman,' 'sage,' or the possesor , performer, and a professor of some special skill...The sophist might, perhaps, even be a 'wizard'..." (37). This is because they seemed to translate as poets, in that a poet must be some type of wizard to pull the audience into the text/performance with grace. I use the word pull because I am imagining now a ribbon in the wind that a speaker must extend to the audience in order to reach them. The audience might not always be able to catch the ribbon (meaning the imagery or every word spoken) but that the image/text/performance is ever present, dancing before them. The subject matter in poetry can be stronger or more engaging when it dangles in from an audience, leads them to or through a story.
This is most clear in poems such as Edmund Spenser's "Aegloga Quarta" and Shakespeare's "It Was a Lover and His Lass" where the story seems whimsical, fluid, song-like. And, of course these are song-like, as Spenser has a, sort-of duet with these two voices talking back and forth to one another. And as Shakespeare writes with refrain using "with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" Sophists are poets in the sense that they bridge the gap, or more importantly, overlap the epideictic and pragmatic speech.
So, to the question. If poets like Blake, Spenser, and Donne are capable of creating poems that are "timeless," in the sense in that they "embody an ancient, ancestral wisdom," (23) speaking as "sages," how then, can modern poets such as Langston Hughes or Geoffrey Hill immortalize their poems? Are they steeped in the language of the present and is that language song-like enough to keep us from forgetting it or its importance/success as a "timeless" art?
P.S. Does anyone still have the Lip Gloss song in their head? Man, I can't stop singing/humming it.
“Rhêtorikê is invoked as the name for a specialized art of pragmatic discourse that cannot exist in and of itself, an art that cannot be centered or narrowly contained with in the pragmatic realm, if it is to produce anything worth desiring” (40). Tracing the naissance of rhetoric from the epideictic, rather than the pragmatic, certainly seems a justification of our endeavors. Surely, the sophists could not have been wizards without subsuming the skills offered in the epideictic and those of the pragmatic.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don’t think that Walker is equating sophists with poets; he seems to be quite critical of the sophists (or what became of them, I guess) and align himself slightly more alongside Aristotle’s differentiation between philosophy and rhetoric—which interested me, as it seemed to be a distinction between what’s “true” (concern of philosophy) and what’s “wise” (rhetoric.)
I think I see the use of the ribbon in the wind analogy (rhetoric as bait for reader? It’s all about audience) but it was problematic for me, since a ribbon is a more permanent thing than a performance—which cannot be ever-before an audience, by virtue of its ephemeral nature. Not to say that poetry is divorced from the ephemeral—or that it is necessarily permanent—or even written-down. In fact, the problem with differentiating between the epideictic and pragmatic became the perceived permanence of anything written down—thus blurring the lines, forcing the epideictic “to distinguish itself from pragmatic discourse as a wisdom-bearing eloquence equivalent to the old-time poetry” and “even a nonmetered epideictic ‘prose’ would need to retain the memorability and the psychagogic power of verse” (22). Which brings me to my earlier point: as the lines blurred and the two “branches” of rhetoric became regular bedfellows, it seems that the differentiation then became what’s true and what’s wise. (I realize I’m taking for granted some things here, and ignoring the completely pragmatic, which I think is what interested Geoffrey. Apologies.)
Continuing on, I don’t see this to be the case, at least in contemporary poetics; poems are less like proverbs and more like case studies, if wisdom is their goal at all. For what it’s worth, though, as a green young poetry student, I was taught that poetry should be “timely and timeless” as well as “memorable and memorize-able,” so I suppose the lyric plight of Pindar’s praise poems echo still.
I think this brings us to the issue of song v. poetry, or song to poetry, or song in poetry, the purpose of the switch or meld being then that poetry offered a more occasional media for individual expression, as well as the possibility to be spoken as well as sung (see pp. 20). This idea ties in to the questions posed by both Meg and Geoffrey: what is it about a poem that’s timeless?
And it’s here, I’d venture, that the poem connects to the basileus’ use of rhetoric: skill in “discerning precedents” and the ability to “articulate this… and presumably the interpretation of ‘precedents’… with ‘unfaltering address,’ with steady and self-assured declaration, and in well-shaped, ‘honeyed’ and fluent ‘words’ or phrases” (6).
ReplyDeleteAudience, precedence, and style are paramount here: what’s been done, what needs to be done, what’s owed and to whom, how’s it said and to whom. I think this is why “theme” can be eliminated from the equation; though important, I don’t think it’s necessarily important to identify “why the poem relates to the human condition”—or is it? Feel free to disagree. Clearly, many of these song-poems share themes—mostly either love or death—but the inclusion of a “universal” theme doesn’t make a poem or song timeless. It’s what’s done with the subject matter, what had been done, how it’s being twisted or stretched—and how it’s being said. In fact, many of the love (or loss-of-love) poems work precisely because they’re treading over-trodden ground but saying something new (so, I suppose, acknowledging some precedents but moving through or past them.) This is why Shakespeare’s “What is love?’tis not hereafter;/ Present mirth hath present laughter” works—still—along with, of course, use of language, line break, meter, rhyme. The songlike quality in the perfect rhyme resonates.
This isn’t the only working method: both Carew and Waller breathe life into the withering figure of the beloved, with lines like “Only she doth carry/June in her eyes, in her heart January” and “Tell her that wastes her time and me,” respectively, and John Wilmot blows the tops of everybody’s heads off with the sex bomb that is “The Mock Song.” I think the last time I heard something this dirty was stand-up from Bob Sagget.
Then there are the incredible lines like “The double double double beat” and “The dead shall live, the living die/ And Music shall untune the sky” that fuel Dryden, echoed, I think, in the gorgeous simplicity of Williams and Hill. I can’t imagine a poem with bombshell lines like “As estimated, you died.” and “This is plenty. This is more than enough.” not being “timeless.”
...rollin their eyes, their lip gloss cheap
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to imagine sophists without also thinking about sophistry, the very thing that teachers like Isocrates warned about, and the type of sweet sounding, hypnotic language that led Aristotle and Plato to emphasize philosophy and the dialectic in relation to rhetoreia and rhetorike. When I read about Plato's use of Polus and Callicles to demonsrate "the potential viciousness that comes of a techne rhetorike cut loose from the kind of discourse art that Plato would call philosophia," I was reminded of Wayne Booth's more modern concept of rhetrickery, shoddy, dishonest communication that produces misunderstanding. These ideas all seem to point to the same phenomenon of skepticism over really pretty words. How many times have we all heard, "It's just empty rhetoric?"
With this in mind, I'm inclined to want to replace the period behind Geoffrey's statement about Obama being president because he is a good speaker, with a comma. My favorite political moments stretched over the entire campaign season last year, and throughout, I was constantly amazed with the way different people addressed Obama's speaking ability. I heard Obama supporters say over and over again: "My god, we have an articulate presidential candidate!" I would argue, though, that part of this fascination with Obama was his stark contrast to an extremely unpopular president, who didn't excel in the pretty words category. Throw kairos into the analysis, and the response to Obama's pretty words could have been a response to Bush, someone who was elected twice (debatable, I know) though he was not, technically, a good speaker. I would add that lots of factors came into play during the election that go beyond Obama's speaking ability, but definitely, he is a good speaker, and his speaking ability got lots of press.
I am fascinated, though, with the way so many people seemed to distrust Obama simply because he excelled at putting sentences together. There was the charge that he could speak well because he had a teleprompter ("Oh he has pretty words, but take that away, and where's the substance?") To add to Geoffrey's point about "Obama's sweeter discourse clearly found within our churches, streets, and cultures," there seems to be a racial aspect that comes into play with the larger fascination over Obama's language too. I'm reminded of a white student, during an in-class rhetorical analysis of Letter from Birmingham Jail, who pointed out that King had ethos because he was "one of those black guys with natural music in the way he talked." According to my student, his words had rhythm like black people, and he repeated stuff a lot like black people. Then he proceeded to imitate the musical quality of a black man's voice—It was fantastic (sarcasm). True, I read quite a few articles likening Obama's oratory skills to that of MLK Jr., though rhetoricians have found more similarities between Obama and JFK. (Or at least they did then-oh the articles that shall ensure...) Is this an instance where a black man's voice in particular spoke to a population of supporters who have learned to fetishize that voice and its words? Are these supporters just modern-day Alan Lomaxes? To flip that around, do Obama's dark tones racialize him and turn off a certain demographic that distrusts that particular African-American voice and its pretty words?
Geoffrey’s comment on rhetoric in politics made me think; while I agree that good speaking abilities are generally what get people elected, comparing the last few presidential elections really makes it interesting. If we say that Obama’s speaking abilities helped him get elected as a breath of fresh air from the previous administration, we should also say that Bush’s lack of speaking abilities helped him get elected in 2000. He was the straight shooter from Texas (Connecticut) who told it like it was. He didn’t spend a lot of time with empty rhetoric like the real politicians. Wasn’t that Reagan’s appeal? Obviously, he was a very skilled rhetor, but part of his skill was that he was eloquent without sounding like he was trying to be eloquent.
ReplyDeleteAnyways. I went and looked at the transcript of the “Yes We Can” speech to see whether it fell towards epea or logos and I’m going to have to go with the former. “A sensually pleasing stream (epea) of words that carry off the listener’s mind from one way of thinking to another,” (p16) would probably describe the speech. He uses “Yes we can” as a refrain. Some parts sound Whitman-esque, “I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children alike. I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life and men and women of every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag.” And some parts even sounded like a list poem, “There are young and old, rich and poor. They are black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American. They are Democrats from Des Moines and independents from Concord and, yes, some Republicans from rural Nevada.”
That said, I don’t know if any of these speeches will be memorable or historic. Although moving, they still do seem almost standard politic-speak. Like (I think) Jackie was saying; it’s not necessarily the subject matter, but what’s being done with it. For politics, of course candidates are going to talk about poor people from around the country. For poetry, of course 17th century writers are going to talk about love. How is it made new? Has Obama made the political speech fresh like Earl of Rochester made the love poem fresh? Will we remember “Yes We Can” like we remember “The Mock Song” or “Signor Dildo”? (Sorry I just had to put that one in there)
I keep going back to what Burke said in regards to literature being measured by its ability to meet the expectations it provokes, or sets up, in the reader. We teach something like this in 112—borders and gaps, or the struggle to get our students to keep reading something they feel they can’t connect with, based on the content (i.e. the character is Puerto Rican and I’m not, so this has nothing to say to me), unfamiliar vocabulary, etc. We teach them to recognize these and fill in the gaps or find a way around the borders. From the opposite angle, I might tend to be moved more by literature that is familiar to me, that doesn’t offer lots of gaps for me to try to fill or borders to work around.
ReplyDeleteIn the same way, I wonder how much our notions of ‘timelessness’ actually rely on relevance to a specific audience. Even the technical aspects of music speak to a certain context. For instance, a Western ear might first have to adapt to the Middle-Eastern style of music, from scale to vocal quality, in order to connect and be moved by it. The lyrics add another dynamic—I’m remembering the ballads—how old English ideas were often revamped into the American context. Then there is that idea of spade that came up during the week we listened to the religious songs; we discussed how they relied on a specific language community (space, shared vocabulary of certain stories, principles, and values.)
So, to answer the question about my ‘favorite’ practitioners of rhetoric—I believe they are the ones who I can identify with, who speak/perform according to the community I recognize as my own, who share my concerns as well as my vocabulary. They reach me in the same way that much of my favorite literature somehow embodies some shared experience. So when Walker says that “epideictic discourse carries great suasive power,” and that this power, “derives, in part, from its felt authority as ‘permanent’ or ‘timeless’ discourse embodying ancient, ancestral wisdom” (12), I suspect that this so called timelessness is directly related to how the song and its delivery worked in addressing the Greek audience, which was not timeless, but existed in a specific space/time/tradition.
(I wrote this before I read Mandy’s post so the following mostly emphasizes what she wrote…) Obama, who is definitely the rhetor-of-the-year to speak to me, moved me most when he spoke, during the campaign, about racial reconciliation, because this is probably the political subject that means most to me, and that is because of my experience growing up as a white girl in the black community. Perhaps, also, the context from which Obama arose to power persuaded me, almost more than the content of his speeches (and his skill in delivering them, and the devices by which he delivered them so masterfully). Obama persuaded me because he was so unlike Bush, which also has to do with context rather than content. That said, his speaking ability was perhaps the best demonstration of this contrast.
ReplyDeleteWhich leads me to respond to Meg’s question… I’m wondering how much of the timelessness of the Dryden, Donne, Shakespeare, and Spencer songs/poems has to do with their recognition as part of a poetic tradition? Are they timeless, merely because Norton anthologized them? If so, how much does recognition (which, in a sense, works as credibility, or ethos) play in their ability to move us? I’m a stickler for questioning the idea of ‘universal theme’—maybe because my experiences with other communities that hold different values, even in the context of something that seems universal and truthful, like ‘love.’ To a Buddhist, for instance, Shakespeare might not communicate his ideas of love as effectively. To a Thai person, his mastering of form would be harder to recognize. And even in my own experience of reading these ‘timeless’ poets, I know that Spencer’s queen adoration serves as a specific gap/border in my ability to connect with those poems because I can’t relate to it, just as I can’t really connect to the Monarchy-influenced rhetoric I came across in Thailand.
Although term-heavy, the Wallace piece really recast some of my initial conceptions about the overlap of poetry-rhetoric. Reading through the Hesiod at the outset, describing the power of the basileus effecting change through suasive means, I kept thinking about Plato's lambasting of the "honeyed muse" of poetry (arguably, certain types of poetry)in "The Republic" book X. I was also fascinated by Hesiods idea of the basileus, (and beyond this, Aristotle's reclaiming of the broader social dimensions of rhetoric) as a precursor of Quintillian's definition of rhetoric as a "good [person] speaking well". This reading was among other things, another reminder that the "killer dichotomies" set up by disciplines and still tolerated within academic discourse today involve far more interplay than we often allow them credit. There is plenty of meaning overlooked at the interstices of disparate terminology.
ReplyDeleteAs for the specific questions: I am interested in a sort of parrallel structure between musical/thematic crescendo--both in listening to song and also public speaking. This crescendo can take a purely musical form, or a more subtle thematic development (well-sequenced ideas, introduced with kairotic consideration--the basic tools of what might generally constitute "good" storytelling...often telegraphic, but still dramatically wrought).
The question of timelessness in poetic art (question #2) is an interesting one, as is the general premise of the assumption this is based on (the archival-knowledge argument). It makes me want to ask: who's knowledge? And in respect to the modern twist on this assumption, will these poems prove timeless for whom? It seems that subject-position theory enters in here, and it becomes difficult for me to answer that question. The other part of me wants to simply answer that 'time will tell' for whatever benchmarks we set up as measuring timelessness of poetry.
I agree with Mandy’s complication of the Obama victory—that kairos and a whole smattering of other variables worked in alongside his speaking capacity. But did he ever give some great speeches. I might argue, moreover, that Obama never would have accrued the necessary clout to make it as a presidential contender if not for his 2004 keynote speech at the DNC.
ReplyDeleteI want to examine a bit of this speech in detail (see the transcript at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html and the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWynt87PaJ0). Obama, late in the speech:
“It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; [pause] the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; [pause] the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; [pause] the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; [pause] the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.”
[Applause]
To offer some direct response to Geoffrey’s first question, passages like these are where Obama’s musicality really takes flight. His speech centers almost incantationally around the refrain of the word “hope,” and each of the pauses before the next “the hope” (which he almost pronounces as an exclamatory “thehope!”) acts as a musical cue into a new stanza of lyrics. This section of the speech builds tremendously, too, Obama’s voice rising in speed and amplitude with each “the hope,” until it triggers a crescendo of applause following the “skinny kid with a funny name” remark. Obama’s musicality seems based in escalating repetition.
Walker writes that the basileus’s “ability to speak wisely and persuasively to the people in assembly depends on his knowledge of both the lore and language of epos” (7). Bearing this in mind, we could do worse than to discuss Obama as a basileus figure, able to speak both music/poetically and to instill his words with the recurrent elements of American lore.
I think Mandy is right, too, though, to note the widespread cynicism Obama encountered as an orator. Walker notes this potential, too: “One is hypnotized by the beautiful words repeating themselves forever, and constrained to in thought by compositional principles that lend themselves more to the copious stacking-up of equivalent phrases than to reasoned inquiry” (12). This, or something like it, was a common Republican criticism of Obama, but I think it ultimately backfired because the right was unable to expose any tangibly insidious nugget hiding under Obama’s rhetoric. In the end, McCain and others were able only to criticize Obama’s rhetoric for itself, and unable to compete on the same musical-poetic-rhetorical-whatever plane, they ended up looking like someone knocking a great jazz singer with the argument that jazz is lame.
Perhaps it is a trite starting point, but what most caught my attention (I wonder what color ribbon it was, and exactly what bait appealed to me) out of the postings was Mandy’s anecdote about the student who said that “King had ethos because he was ‘one of those black guys with natural music in the way he talked.’” And my mind went flying. But it landed (somewhat precariously) on one of my favorite films: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. At one point in the film, Sidney Poitier, speaking to Spencer Tracy, says “You can do the Watusi, but we are the Watusi.” The soft, antithetical phrasing of this sentence is in part no doubt what helped secure it in my memory. It should be noted, however, that the musical quality of Poitier’s voice is no less or more effective on me than the strength of Tracy’s when he says “You’re two wonderful people who happened to fall in love and happened to have a pigmentation problem.” If we are going to draw race into the question again (which, if we are beginning our question with Obama’s election, is difficult to avoid), this might be an interesting place to start. I’m afraid I have no great modern Prince or “practitioner of pragmatika” with whom I am enthralled. The current trend toward “rhetrickery” has somewhat put me off my lunch.
ReplyDeleteBut, to the point, where my mind started to wander was in wondering how valid and effective rhetoric (which I distinguish from rhetrickery) and art have ever been separate. I have always had difficulty not conflating the two. The purpose of rhetoric is to persuade, to bring about some sort of change. Does art not do the same? Movies are considered an artwork (arguably, in some cases), but they often, if not always, address some social and/or political concerns. Music, even as a case study (as Jackie says), rather than a proverb (interesting, as the Biblical proverbs very likely may have been sung), is entirely capable of doing the same. If I were to name rhetoricians (who address political and social concerns) that “turn my thoughts aside” from “sorrow” I would list artists. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgASBVMyVFI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRryVe_-I3M.
And, yes, thank you, Meg, I most certainly do have “Lip Gloss” stuck in my head. Now.
In thinking timelessness in poetic art and I agree with Joe that it is a matter of subject position. And I agree with Jackie/Jonny that it also has to do with a dialogue (regarding a subject) that’s been established over time and how a particular writer can add something new to this dialogue. I’m also thinking about canonization. A piece of writing produced 500 years ago might certainly be able to affect a reader of today and thus merit being called timeless, but if that piece of writing isn’t available today then is it timeless in the fullest most literal sense of the word? So maybe we can broaden the question of timelessness to include the politics of publication. I’m also thinking a lot about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair because I am reading it now with my 112 students. It’s a fascinating novel because the critical essays (included in the back of the Norton edition) as well as the introduction, constantly are constantly apologizing for the book, saying it really isn’t art because the writing is too sloppy, unrefined, and at times lapses into pure Socialist propaganda – though I’m not sure why these aspects (sloppiness/political agenda) would necessarily disqualify a work from the realm of timeless art. The book was a huge hit in its day, again not for its artistic merit, but because it exposed the rotten meat that was being canned and fed to the American public. The book continues to be read/studied today (as it will for quite some time into the future, I bet) for this reason and for others, but nonetheless, there’s always that disclaimer that’s attached, saying “we’re not sure if this is truly a work of art, but its merit lies elsewhere”. In numerous personal essays, Sinclair himself states that his aim, in writing The Jungle, was to “shake America out of its slumber,” to expose the injustices of capitalism and the suffering of the working class. (In response to fact that the book’s success hinged on its exposing the rotten meat being fed to the public, he claims that he “aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit the stomach”.) He felt that he’d written a timeless novel in response to critics who called his book “a sensation of the moment” he claims, “I do not think that we have any book in American literature, with the possible exception of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ into the making of which more human anguish has entered. It’s publication marks the beginning of a proletarian literature in America; we have nothing before it excepting sugar-coated sentimentality like ‘Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.’” This is interesting to me because Sinclair felt his novel would achieve timelessness b/c of the human suffering it contains, but he also insists that his novel be viewed as proletarian, as socialist propaganda (he argues the incompatibility of art and propaganda/politics is a fallacy), and as something that will incite immediate action (i.e. socialist revolution and the end of wage-slavery). It’s interesting to think about the persistence of this book because in a way it unapologetically is trying to be both epideictic and pragmatic. Critics claim it is an artistic failure because its poetry is weighed down by its pragmaticism. According to Sinclair, it is an artistic success (because it encapsulates human suffering) and a pragmatic failure (because it did not stir the masses to revolt). And yet it continues to be read and discussed and published, albeit with these disclaimers: that it might not be art.
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