A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (26 page)

Having established that not all novels are entirely fictional, let us look at the category that is classed as “non-fiction.” This category includes manuals, guide books, encyclopedias, letters and other forms of correspondence, speeches, reports, academic writing, and briefings of all kinds. This is not so much a single category as a broad spectrum of different
genres, all currently defined and united by the fact that they are not fictional. Most of these genres have a function in the world and are valued for the fact that they are a
means to an end
rather than an end in itself: they are generally seen, to use a term from discourse theory in the 1970s, as “transactional” rather than “poetic.” But a closer look at these genres suggests that they, too, are the product of creative activity; they, too, can be subject to critical analysis (e.g., notions of unity, imagery, or style); they too are the product of imaginative thinking; and they also chart possible worlds. The term that might be preferred is
documentary
rather than
non-fiction
, which tends to diminish their cultural value.

Let us return to Pavel's (1986) notion of possible worlds in order to shed light on the problem of the fiction/non-fiction categorization: the possible worlds created by the novel, for instance, are sustained possible worlds in which all the elements are shaped within an overarching conception of a possible, parallel, imagined world. Actions, characters, and other elements of fictional novels are no less “real” than actions in the real world, other than that they exist in a potential state. They are subject to narrative, emotional logics, just as actions in the real world are subject to these. The possible worlds created by documentary texts, on the other hand, are linked to the actions of the real world in a different way: they chart not whole, sustained worlds as such, but operate as guides and pathways to the real world, such as a recipe, a travel guide, a manual on how to tune a radio, or an investment portfolio report. As suggested by the philosophy of modal logic, every act within the real world is a matter of choice, and possible worlds are available all the time to each and every one of us, even in the most straitened of circumstances. Rhetoric, it might be said, has weaknesses because it does not take responsibility for the actions of the world that it might lead to; but its boundaries—that of the arts of discourse and communication—preclude it from direct influence on the world other than through speech acts. On the other hand, its deployment can prevent the deterioration of human action into violence, war, and tyranny.

A mode of discourse that the novel draws on for its linear power is narrative: a mode that embraces storytelling, autobiography and biography, chronologies of various kinds, and personal accounts. It can be seen from this list of examples that narrative genres include the fiction and “nonfictional” or documentary. Classical to nineteenth-century conceptions of rhetoric afforded narrative—alongside argument and description—central status. These were ways of arranging discourse, but they also conveyed dispositions and functions of different kinds: narrative, as well as its obvious telling and relating functions, has the association of inclusion, of unarguable record, and of sequential pleasure. Argument tended to be associated with persuasion, with the establishment of different ideologies and positions, with operation in democratic and public spaces as well as
in personal life, but also with clarification, the management of abstraction (claims, propositions), and the “vertical” relationship between such propositions with evidence. Argument, then, was a mechanism for debate about how to change the world, whereas narrative was more of a record of how the world was or how it was perceived. Description, though with strong classical antecedents, now seems more of a school genre: an artificial genre for recorded observation or non-sequential, non-vertical discourse. It is thus seen as a lesser partner of narrative and argument, the two main modes of discourse. Much has been written about narrative, but in rhetorical terms, the best way to see its relationship to argument is to envisage narrative as operating on a horizontal, sequential axis, managing aspects of time and rhythm, with argument operating on a vertical, hierarchical axis in its exploration of propositions in relation to evidence. Both have vertical and horizontal properties, though we say on the vertical axis that argument tends to operate deductively, while narrative tends to work inductively. On the horizontal axis, narrative is clearly driven by a temporal principle that links character and action, whereas argument links propositions in a logical or quasi-logical sequence.

Finally, in this chapter on rhetoric and poetics, we turn our attention to a micro-level of classification that classical (and especially Renaissance) rhetoric excelled in and that twentieth-century literary stylistics explored in considerable detail: the science or art of “prosodic and poetic terms likely to be encountered in many areas of literary study” (Preminger, Warnke, and Hardison 1986). Indeed, Grierson's (1945)
Rhetoric and English Composition
turns out to be less of a guide or manual for composition in English than an invocation to turn to literary examples and models to encourage rhetorical dexterity in writing. It is more of a medieval
progymnasmata
(exercises in modeling and copying literary form) than a comprehensive guide to composition, again reinforcing the historical preeminence of the literary over the more broadly linguistic. The tendency to classify rhetorical tropes and forms in minute detail reflects a movement
to establish rhetoric as a science, driven by a classificatory and analytical energy; it also happens to create a labyrinth of terms that ultimately has the effect of losing the reader and his or her connection to the starting point of his/her journey: the engagement with and understanding of text and of spoken and multimodal discourse in the world.

Why is narrative so compelling as a form of discourse? Its inclusiveness; its closeness to everyday lived experience of time, sequence, and action; its “natural” similarities to the passage of lives as well as of days, weeks, and years; its ability to create “worlds” that are not easily questioned, other than through the creation of counter-narratives … all these properties favor narrative and its adoption as a
modus operandi
, or even a “human paradigm.” Argument looks more difficult: it requires logical sequencing, more careful arrangement, the engagement and persuasion of others, and connectivity to the real world in terms of valid and reliable evidence and the manufacture of consensus for action. Argument—and its more technical process, argumentation—was the focus of
chapter 6
of the present book. The reason that narrative has been a principal focus in the current chapter is that it is not addressed elsewhere in the book.

However, in examining the encyclopedic traces of one form of a discipline, what can be learnt? What relevance have such manuals for a theory of contemporary rhetoric?
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Preminger, Brogan, and Warnke 1993) and its more selective, more focused
The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms
(Preminger et al. 1986) are not only repositories of and toolkits for literary analysis; they are, it is claimed by some writers, essential for composition. First, it is instructive to see how the
Handbook
defines its own relationship with rhetoric in the entry on “rhetoric and poetics.” There is a long entry, starting with the Aristotelian definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion, and of poetics as “the art of making or judging poetry” (1986, 230). In “most general” terms, the
Handbook
defines rhetoric as not only the study of the means of persuasion, but as an “inventory or tropes and figures”; whereas poetics is seen “as precepts for the production of verse or as an account of the qualities of literary creation and the nature of literature” (230). The dialectic between rhetoric and poetics, set up from Aristotelian principles, tends to diminish the power and scope of rhetoric in four ways: by containing rhetoric to the “art of persuasion”; by seeing it as “show” and “artifice” as opposed to substance; by including the category of the literary within poetics, and by erecting the literary above the demotic and everyday (realized in the fiction/non-fiction relationships explored earlier in this chapter); and by seeing rhetoric as a principally historical phenomenon, looking back to its classical antecedents. Looking at rhetoric from a poetics standpoint, and in line with Grierson and his disciples of literary culture, the imperative appears to be that a study of literature and its tropes will equip the student with a refined literary sensibility that will be of use in operation in the world in terms of making fine distinctions and judgments. If “all of human nature” is captured by literature (especially by Shakespeare), then poetics, which dissects and classifies literary production, serves as a model and manual for the arts of discourse in the world.

One of the interesting logical moves in the account of rhetoric in the Princeton
Handbook
is that it sees medieval and renaissance rhetoric as resurrecting the principles of invention and arrangement
(inventio, dispositio)
, but then suggests that such re-instatement of these concepts and terms puts rhetoric in a difficult and unsustainable position, referring merely to style and presentation. There appears to be a lacuna in the argument here, as invention and arrangement, dealing as they do with the motivations for composition and the macro-level structural arrangements
of discourse, are different from style and delivery. From the point of view of the current reconception of rhetorical theory, it is poetics and literary study—rather than rhetoric—that has confined itself to style (not even to performativity and delivery) by separating itself off from invention and arrangement. While this may appear to be a battle of definition of terms and scope between rhetoric and poetics, it is the clear position of the present book that poetics is a subsection of rhetoric, rather than the other way round, and that the definitional “battle” for rhetoric (fought by Vickers 1989) is with Platonic-derived philosophy, not with poetry, literature, and poetics. Preminger et al. (1986) instead see rhetoric as declining through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the form of “monuments of a discipline reaching its end” (232), culminating in the “revolt … [against] codifications of the rhetorical tradition … accompanied [by] the rise of
aesthetics”
in the Romantic period and the nineteenth century. We have seen elsewhere in the book that the nineteenth century marked the rise of literary study and its oppositional counterpart, historical and diachronic linguistics, dividing up the territory of rhetoric into two separate (and only tenuously related) disciplines. Despite a number of attempts to provide overarching rhetorical theory to discourses of all kinds, especially in the American twentieth century tradition of rhetoric represented by Burke (1969), the
Handbook
sees rhetoric as confined to
analytical
imperatives rather than to generative and compositional meaning-making. This approach is reinforced by rhetoric and composition courses that look back to classical models for their inspiration.

Nevertheless, let us take some of the conventional poetic tropes and figures and look at them from a contemporary rhetorical perspective. The devices chosen for this purpose are rhyme, metrics, and alliteration. Interestingly, rhyme is defined as “a metrical rhetorical device based on the sound-identities of words” (Preminger et al. 1986, 233) but, like much of poetics, focuses conventionally on the internal systemic properties of rhyme, rather than on its functions and connections to other properties of language and its deployment in particular genres such as poems. Rhyme schemes; the sub-categories of full (phonetic) rhyming, half rhymes, unrhymed verse; and the sonority of rhyme are all seen to be matters for discussion. From a rhetorical perspective, however, rhyme has functions: it is there primarily to reinforce rhythmic shape. Rhythm, in turn has the function of marking the selection of words in time and arranging them in such a way as to engender an aesthetic and feeling response. Rhythm, indeed, might be said to be one of the defining characteristics of a poem. The framing of language in poetic form—whether seen and/or heard—is more to do with its rhythmic identity than with its selection of words (its “diction”) or its rhyme. It is identified by the reader or listener
as a poem
because of this rhythmic shape. Rhyme, then, is a secondary device used to point up rhythm. This is where is relates, also, to metrics, in that
the regular beat of a meter as opposed to the more jazz-like rhythms of free verse is reinforced by rhyme. Alliteration might therefore be seen as a tertiary analytical level of operation from a rhetoric perspective as it is a form or element of rhyming. In summary, a rhetorical perspective on poetics starts from the wider political shaping of words. They are framed in order to convey something to someone/an audience. The author chooses from a repertoire of language and rhetorical devices in order to make his/her “message” aesthetically pleasing, communicative, and rhythmically effective. The repertoire is as much a resource for the artist as it is for the analytical reader or listener.

It might be said that the thinking set out in this chapter applies more to public verse—for example, the work of neo-classicists like Dryden and Pope—than to the lyric outpourings of the Romantic tradition. And yet the challenge of Romanticism to rhetoric, captured, for example, in the “Preface” to
Lyrical Ballads
, is a challenge to outmoded rules of operation and rhetorical conventions, rather than to rhetoric itself. The argumentational move to establish a new kind of poetic is a rhetorical move and sets up a new kind of rhetoric: one in which (in the case of
Lyrical Ballads)
expressiveness, the individual voice, narrative, and the lyrical spirit infuse the conventional poetic modes. It is interesting that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and many of their contemporaries did not innovate much in the formal sense; they used the ancient forms. What they were arguing for was a different position for the poet in relation to his or her audience and in relation to subject-matter (“nature”). This re-alignment is itself a deeply rhetorical move. That is why the view that Romanticism signaled the “death of rhetoric” must be countered by a view that suggests it merely presaged a
different kind of rhetoric
. Take
The Prelude
for example: as England's first autobiographical/philosophical poem, it marks a new moment in how poetry could act as the vehicle for the delineation of a life-story as well as providing a mode for lyric and philosophical expression. As such, it might be seen as the precursor of the subject English in schools and universities. It is rhetorically significant in these respects, as one of the prime examples of the presentation of self in poetry, is also at the same time a radical repositioning of the self in society.