A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (25 page)

Third, poetic spaces invite the delineation of feeling/affect. As worlds, fictional and possible, they are defined by, and define the
structures of feeling
(cf. Williams 1977). These affective structures are the key elements of what holds fictional/poetic worlds together. They may ostensibly take the form of plot, narrative time, character, rhythmic shape, linguistic intensity, and so on, but these elements are merely the constituents of a map that charts an emotional landscape. If we, as readers, wish to explore the consequences of feeling, we turn to fictional works like plays, stories, novels, and poems, which have charted those territories for us. They answer the question:
what if
?

Fourth, all the assumptions in the previous discussion have been that there is a commonly experienced “real world” and alternative “fictional” or “possible” worlds. It is a matter of philosophical debate as to what extent what any one person considers as the “real world” is indeed the same as another's perception of that “commonality.” Such commonality is hard to prove. Rhetoric as a discipline is more pragmatic than philosophy in this respect: it assumes a degree of commonality—enough to define a communally agreed space that we can call the “real world” and that can serve as a reference point for social and political engagement. This does not mean to say that rhetoric takes
perception
for granted. On the contrary: it accepts that perceptions may be different, but it explores these differences through the lenses of framing, through the channels of communicative modes and media, and through the relationship of the rhetor to his/her audience. The assumption of a degree of commonality moves rhetoric as a discipline closer to social theories of being, like Marxism, in which the actions of any one person in a social network or system affects others. Rhetoric both traces these communicative actions and in fact
generates
them. This closeness to the real world of communicative exchange may explain why Eagleton (1976, 1983) described rhetoric as “political literary criticism”—literary criticism that was aware of its place in the world, not in terms of a simplistic distinction between “reality” and “fiction,” but in the filigrees of connection between words on a page and the realities that those words represent and convey.

There is one further aspect of the relationship between the poetic and the rhetorical that must be noted: the dialogic nature of literary production and the further dialogic nature of the rhetor/audience relationship. Bakhtin (1982) is the source of much of the debate on these issues, particularly on the first of the two. If, as Bakhtin suggests, no work of literature is created without being in response to existing works, and that new works position themselves in response to the “voices” that have come before them, then the production of new poetic works is essentially dialogic. New works “answer” existing works. To take a further step—steps taken by reader response theorists in particular—the reader or the audience plays as much a part in the creation of meaning as the author/rhetor. In other
words, the relationship between writer and reader (to use these terms for simplicity's sake in the argument) is a mutual, reciprocal, and dialogic one. The “work” created by a novelist, poet, or dramatist, like the score of a musical composition, has no realization until it is “re-created” in the mind of the reader. Such a poetic is deeply rhetorical, in that it accepts that communicative exchange is a social act and that both the writer and the reader bring a hinterland of references and assumptions, manifested in framings, to the act of communication.

Let us now turn from the high level relationships between the poetic and the rhetorical to questions of
form
. Putting aside differences in genre for the moment—the novel, the short story, the poem, the play—the focus in the first instance will be on the supposedly most intense literary form: the poem. The
intensity
comes from the close attention to form and what that represents. The fact that some refer to poetry as the
highest
literary form is merely a wish to erect a hierarchy of forms and aesthetic experiences that creates an élite—and all the cult of celebrity and
faux
excitement that such élites engender. For the purposes of the current argument about the place of poetics within rhetorical theory,
intensity
is a better indicator. To put it another way, the intensity comes from a
highly framed linguistic construct
that constitutes, in the discourses we are exploring, “literature”—reading matter.

Take the following poems, all on the topic of reading and all commissioned as part of an “auction of promises” to raise funds for scholarships for postgraduate study for developing countries across the world.

The first point to note is that they are set on the page differently from the rest of the text of this book (in its prose-based, discursive, argumentational mode). They are instantly recognizable as poems in that they are consciously surrounded by white space, the words do not go up to the right hand edge of the page, and they are the product by a rhythmic sensibility that finds the form and the nature of the lines within that form a medium for the characterization and “setting” of internal and relative rhythmic relations. Such differences from everyday speech, or the discursive writing that surrounds them, can prompt those who read the works aloud to take on a different “voice”: more distant, more Oracle-like, more toneless, and consciously rhythmical than everyday speech. On the other hand, an actor reading them might take on a more unevenly paced, colorful, and varied delivery in his/her attempt to “convey the meaning.” Whichever way we look at these works—even if they try to emulate the colloquial, as these poems do—they are different and distinct from the everyday.

All are sonnets, in that they all consist of fourteen lines. If we take the sonnet form as one of a number of poetic forms designed to capture a sociological niche (in this case, the “little song”) as well as representing a tradition running from Petrarch through Shakespeare to, say, Robert Lowell, we can state that the form is often used to make an argument, either of a general nature or of a directly persuasive kind (e.g., from one lover to another). The arguments are condensed, eloquent, and carefully constructed. The form is instantly recognized, even on a page from a distance, in that the 14 lines (with longer lines than those in the previous examples) often look like
a square of printed text
on a page. This visual recognition of a sonnet is instant: the assumption of the sonnet form is sometimes played with by poets who provide 12 or 15 lines of blocked poetic text, but generally many such recognitions are correct: the author wishes you to know that he/she is using the sonnet form, with all its associations. Differently, if we experience a sonnet aurally rather than visually, for example in a reading on the radio, we are caught up in the formal sense that not only might the voice sound different from everyday speech, but the intensity of the delivery takes 30 seconds to a minute; we are asked to, in Coleridge's terms, suspend disbelief for that short period and frame that brief period for contemplation, enjoyment, and reflection.

However, although all the previous poems are sonnets, they experiment with different types of the form. The first is Lowellian, in that it operates in free verse, unrhymed except for the resonance of “game” and “same” in the twelfth and last lines—a way of bringing about closure. The punctuation—as is the case with the other sonnets—invites the reader to move from line to line in a more colloquial way than a more tightly conceived metrical form, even though the unit of rhythm, as in most free verse, is the
line
. Without the accentuating support of rhyme in individual line
endings (suggesting “this is the end of a line”), and the structural support of a rhyme scheme in the work as a whole, which sets up a musical pattern that underpins the words, the rhythm has to be carried by the “
sense
of a line ending,” which is built up by the overall sonnet form, once perceived. All the lines are roughly the same length, and the line length provides an underlying measure (Hughes suggested poetry was a “dance in words”) or rhythmic template within which the words move, even as they define the template. Within such a “free” form of the sonnet, syntax gets more profile, and we attend to the rhythms of the demotic, everyday voice more closely than if it had been highly framed for us in musical terms. The impression is of a casual voice, speaking directly to us in informal terms; the actuality is that the voice is part of a constructed artifice that is giving the appearance of informality.

The second sonnet takes the Shakespearian form that we are familiar with from
The Sonnets
, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. The alternating rhymes in the main body of the poem are wrapped up in the rhyming couplet at the end. What is distinctive, too, about this form is the series of three quatrains followed by a couplet. Shakespeare uses this form to argue a case: three propositions, some of them including “evidence,” followed by a concluding statement. The third one is slightly different, in that rather than alternating rhymes in the body of the poem, each quatrain operates in a more enclosed way with a rhyme scheme of ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GG. Here form dictates a slower, more deliberate build up to the conclusion with less argumentative momentum.

Finally, the fourth sonnet uses yet another pattern: ABBA, CDDC, EFG, EFG. The effect of this pattern is to distinguish the octet from the sestet—the first eight lines from the next six. The “feel” of such a form, or the “structure of feeling” implied by the form, is of one statement followed by another—a two-part argument.

Considerations of form and of formal variation, as in the previous four sonnets, are typical of poetry and of poetics more widely. They are about something tangible, which in most cases is about rhythmic patterning—not only in explicit and ostensible forms like the sonnet, but also on larger canvases like the novel or the play, divided as they usually are into chapters and acts/scenes. The rhythmic patterning is subtle, and in many cases we do not notice it; it simply works at an affective level, providing a substratum of shaping within time that determines for us the structure of feeling. That structure of feeling is different from the perception of time that is either lived through everyday experience, in relation to diurnal rhythms and/or the clock; rather, it is a rhythm that builds on and varies repetition, thus saying to us: this experience moves you out of linear time into a moment of layered time, or timelessness, that asks you to consider the
quotidien
. It is a mechanism that, as in music, lifts the reader or listener on to a different plane of experience, but one
connected to the everyday world through the conceptual content of the words. Furthermore, it engages the physical: rhythm is felt physically, in dance, movement, and within the body throughout heartbeat and pulse.

Thus poetics always sits in relation to the wider rhetorical imperative of communication through the arts of discourse. Its functions are to provide a different perspective on experience; to use its devices of rhythm, framing, intensity, and compression to distinguish itself from everyday communication practices but, at the same time, to keep connections strong between the everyday “real world” and the possible worlds it creates as lenses to view the real world.

One of the awkward dualities that a rhetorical perspective can illuminate is that between “fiction” and “non-fiction.” We will navigate between this apparent Scylla and Charybdis, and then consider the place of narrative within a theory of rhetoric.

The contemporary novel has challenged the notion of itself as a purely fictional genre by the inclusion of documentary material. While such inclusion may be seen as a sleight of hand on the part of the novelist, incorporating
realia
in order to persuade the reader of the veracity of the fiction, another—more generous—view of such inclusion is that the
possible world
created by the novelist is a hybrid, a crossover space in which “reality” and “fiction” meet. The novel is such a capacious genre that hybridity can be accommodated: think of
Tristram Shandy
, or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Such hybridity can include letters (“the epistolary novel”), fragments of found material, other documents, references to real world events and/or actual people from history who become “characters,” or political references (e.g., references to Thatcherism in
The Line of Beauty)
. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction becomes more bizarre when we consider that a vast swathe of text and discourse is classified by a “non-” category. This distinction appears to favor fiction as a gold standard, hegemonic, and even élitist meta-genre, and the rest of discourse as somehow defined by the fact that it is
not
of that nature. Perhaps the establishment of fiction as a cultural measure reflects the desire on the part of a middle class or middle/upper élite to be party to a world of possibility, of ideas, and of abstracted fictional life that marks them out from the tedious routines of the real world? The plethora of book reviewers, the adulation of the “creative writer” and the courses in such writing, book groups, and the cult of the author all suggest an industry and a class group geared around fiction, with the novel as the primary genre via which that group and industry define themselves.