Coming up...

-A post on Marshall McLuhan vs. Raymond Williams.

-A post on why literary theory doesn't deal with aesthetics (often perplexing to those outside literature).

-A post on the dividual in Deleuze and notions of community, via a nice passage from Red Mars.

-A post on Jameson's deep notion that postmodern theory ends up thinking (only) the body.

-Another post on Addison, with special guest Addison.

And, of course, lots over a the Latour blog. We're reading a bunch of essays now, and revisiting the amazing Aramis.

I'm a bit all over the place lately, no? Oh well--it's post-examination time, and all I'm doing is trying to expand ideas before locking down that dissertation proposal.

On detraction

Addison's greatest work, I think, was Spectator 253, which was printed on December 20th, 1711. This consideration of Pope's Essay on Criticism becomes a reflection on criticism itself and especially its negative qualities. Addison is quick to reproach Pope for being vicious before being just in his remarks on Dennis, Blackmore, and Milbourne, but this reproach takes place only within a subtle redirection of our attention onto the more valuable parts of Pope's endeavor. Pope was wrong to get bitter and characterize this (in the Epistle to Arbuthnot) as damning by faint praise. This presupposes that what Addison does, which I wouldn't hesitate to call critical and negative, is actually something positive. What we have is a deflection of certain effects of criticism that align the critical act to dispraise and envy, and which can be mistaken for the motivation of criticism itself. What Addison does is assert these effects only really appear in a criticism that is not stridently neutral (to use his word for it), or continually open to the negative (to use Adorno's word). In this essay, he does this by taking on praise itself, as it were, and showing that praise has its origin, not in some flat opposition to criticism and envy, but also in neutrality and negativity. This involves a subtle performance which demands to be considered beyond its face value but neither as pure rhetoric: while in the Epistle Pope considers it to be the latter, indeed at first (in a letter written to Addison just after the piece was published) also misreads it as the former (he thanks Addison for his "candour and frankness in acquainting me with the error I have been guilty of in speaking too freely of my brother moderns"). Can this shuffling between one and another positivity be said to be typical of someone who would hypostatize the critical act, and see it as the mere viewpoint upon various proper or improper objects of criticism? That is, not as a redirection of our relation to those object by mobilizing the viewpoint itself, and showing it cannot remain so fixed? I'll leave that open. Here is the whole essay:

Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
Compositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper.
-Horace

There is nothing which more denotes a great Mind, than the Abhorrence of Envy and Detraction. This Passion reigns more among bad Poets, than among any other Set of Men.

As there are none more ambitious of Fame, than those who are conversant in Poetry, it is very natural for such as have not succeeded in it to depreciate the Works of those who have. For since they cannot raise themselves to the Reputation of their Fellow-Writers, they must endeavour to sink it to their own Pitch, if they would still keep themselves upon a Level with them.

The greatest Wits that ever were produced in one Age, lived together in so good an Understanding, and celebrated one another with so much Generosity, that each of them receives an additional Lustre from his Contemporaries, and is more famous for having lived with Men of so extraordinary a Genius, than if he had himself been the sole Wonder of the Age. I need not tell my Reader, that I here point at the Reign of Augustus, and I believe he will be of my Opinion, that neither Virgil nor Horace would have gained so great a Reputation in the World, had they not been the Friends and Admirers of each other. Indeed all the great Writers of that Age, for whom singly we have so great an Esteem, stand up together as Vouchers for one another's Reputation. But at the same time that Virgil was celebrated by Gallus, Propertius, Horace, Varius, Tucca and Ovid, we know that Bavius and Maevius were his declared Foes and Calumniators.

In our own Country a Man seldom sets up for a Poet, without attacking the Reputation of all his Brothers in the Art. The Ignorance of the Moderns, the Scribblers of the Age, the Decay of Poetry, are the Topicks of Detraction, with which he makes his Entrance into the World: But how much more noble is the Fame that is built on Candour and Ingenuity, according to those beautiful Lines of Sir John Denham, in his Poem on Fletcher's Works!

But whither am I strayed? I need not raise
Trophies to thee from other Mens Dispraise:
Nor is thy Fame on lesser Ruins built,
Nor needs thy juster Title the foul Guilt
Of Eastern Kings, who, to secure their Reign,
Must have their Brothers, Sons, and Kindred slain.

I am sorry to find that an Author, who is very justly esteemed among the best Judges, has admitted some Stroaks of this Nature into a very fine Poem; I mean The Art of Criticism, which was publish'd some Months since, and is a Master-piece in its kind. The Observations follow one another like those in Horace's Art of Poetry, without that methodical Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author. They are some of them uncommon, but such as the Reader must assent to, when he sees them explained with that Elegance and Perspicuity in which they are delivered. As for those which are the most known, and the most received, they are placed in so beautiful a Light, and illustrated with such apt Allusions, that they have in them all the Graces of Novelty, and make the Reader, who was before acquainted with them, still more convinced of their Truth and Solidity. And here give me leave to mention what Monsieur Boileau has so very well enlarged upon in the Preface to his Works, that Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing Things that are new, as in giving Things that are known an agreeable Turn. It is impossible for us, who live in the latter Ages of the World, to make Observations in Criticism, Morality, or in any Art or Science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us, but to represent the common Sense of Mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon Lights. If a Reader examines Horace's Art of Poetry, he will find but very few Precepts in it, which he may not meet with in Aristotle, and which were not commonly known by all the Poets of the Augustan Age. His Way of expressing and applying them, not his Invention of them, is what we are chiefly to admire.

For this Reason I think there is nothing in the World so tiresome as the Works of those Criticks who write in a positive Dogmatick Way, without either Language, Genius, or Imagination. If the Reader would see how the best of the Latin Criticks writ, he may find their Manner very beautifully described in the Characters of Horace, Petronius, Quintilian, and Longinus, as they are drawn in the Essay of which I am now speaking.

Since I have mentioned Longinus, who in his Reflections has given us the same kind of Sublime, which he observes in the several passages that occasioned them; I cannot but take notice, that our English Author has after the same manner exemplified several of his Precepts in the very Precepts themselves. I shall produce two or three Instances of this Kind. Speaking of the insipid Smoothness which some Readers are so much in Love with, he has the following Verses.

These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line.

The gaping of the Vowels in the second Line, the Expletive do in the third, and the ten Monosyllables in the fourth, give such a Beauty to this Passage, as would have been very much admired in an Ancient Poet. The Reader may observe the following Lines in the same View. A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,

That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along.

And afterwards,

'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some Rock's vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.

The beautiful Distich upon Ajax in the foregoing Lines, puts me in mind of a Description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the Criticks have taken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his Stone up the Hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the Bottom. This double Motion of the Stone is admirably described in the Numbers of these Verses; As in the four first it is heaved up by several Spondees intermixed with proper Breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continual Line of Dactyls.

Kai mên Sisuphon eiseidon krater' alge' echonta
Laan bastazonta pelôrion amphoterêisin.
Ê toi ho men skêriptomenos chersin te posin te
Laan anô ôtheske poti lophon: all' hote melloi
Akron huperbaleein, tot' apostrepsaske krataiis:
Autis epeita pedonde kulindeto laas anaidês.

It would be endless to quote Verses out of Virgil which have this particular Kind of Beauty in the Numbers; but I may take an Occasion in a future Paper to shew several of them which have escaped the Observation of others.

I cannot conclude this Paper without taking notice that we have three Poems in our Tongue, which are of the same Nature, and each of them a Master-Piece in its Kind; the Essay on Translated Verse, the Essay on the Art of Poetry, and the Essay upon Criticism.

Ichneumon

I remember to have read in Diodorus Siculus an Account of a very active little Animal, which I think he calls the Ichneumon, that makes it the whole Business of his Life to break the Eggs of the Crocodile, which he is always in search after. This instinct is the more remarkable, because the Ichneumon never feeds upon the Eggs he has broken, nor in any other Way finds his Account in them. Were it not for the incessant Labours of this industrious Animal, Aegypt, says the Historian, would be over-run with Crocodiles: for the Aegyptians are so far from destroying those pernicious Creatures, that they worship them as Gods.

If we look into the Behaviour of ordinary Partizans, we shall find them far from resembling this disinterested Animal; and rather acting after the Example of the wild Tartars, who are ambitious of destroying a Man of the most extraordinary Parts and Accomplishments, as thinking that upon his Decease the same Talents, whatever Post they qualified him for, enter of course into his Destroyer...
-Addison, Spectator 126

The destruction of rhetoric in the 18th century

The following is a speculative narrative, at once too general and too specific, repeating points others have made and not backing up whatever original claims it makes:

Addison quotes a French author in his "Pleasures of the Imagination" series in The Spectator. Fréard is talking about architecture, and the necessity of introducing "grandeur of manner" into buildings.

Addison explains this particular "grandeur" as what makes the dome of the Pantheon more impressive than a Gothic cathedral, even though the latter is larger: the general plannedness, or designedness of the structure is carried out across the large structure, while the cathedral is just large (indeed much larger) and supplemented by ornamentation. Design trumps bulk, or rather bulk is created where there is no design.

But there still remains the question of why the ornamentation (little figures and such) doesn't make up for the lack of planning, or why it doesn't signify design as much as the coffering of the Pantheon. Fréard says the following, which Addison quotes:

...that will have but a poor and mean effect where there is a redundancy of those smaller ornaments, which divide and scatter the angles of the sight into such a multitude of rays, so pressed together that the whole will appear but a confusion.
-The Spectator, #415 (Thursday, June 26, 1712)

In short, ornament is seen not as an addition anymore to something that is lacking. It is seen as adding to what is already a plenitude. This makes it into something that scatters: if the eye is already being directed, adding something else will direct away from what was the unadorned direction. Or even more accurately, it will pull the eye away while also pulling the eye away while also soliciting it to follow the original direction: the view is scattered because it is split.

Who would have thought ornament could be seen as something so violent, when just a century before, it was considered to only enhance beauty if not carried too far? The general line of thought here is to convert this into a point about rhetoric as well: what is usually characterized as the 18th century destruction of classical rhetoric, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with the reformation of the educational system and the creation of public schools (which no longer stressed the classics, but stressed the need for general intelligibility), is not so much a destruction as a transformation of its role, which centers on the devaluing of its ornamental role (it should be noted that this general characterization has already fallen apart with due attention to the transformation of political rhetoric surrounding the Civil War, and can even be pushed farther back to the late 16th century, when the use of classical rhetoric was at its peak (see the work of Walter Ong on the rise of the idea of information).

But in order to convert this into a point about rhetoric, one also has to consider how, a century before, even ornament in rhetoric was less ornamental than it appeared. It was generally seen as the structure given to argument--that is, design. And if this is so, well, what we're talking about is not so much a destruction as a return of rhetoric. But how could it return in such a different guise?

One answer comes from yet another art, situated between literature or verbal argument and architecture: painting. The 18th century increasingly saw both architecture and (what is often harder to even think about today) literature as similar to painting (though Addison actually tries to retain the primacy of architecture over painting: I think we can still see he succumbs to this rubric however, which is why I started with his remarks on the Pantheon etc.). This is a bit unreal to us, who are more used to seeing literature in particular in terms of cinema--if anything. So what roughly happens is that the design given to argument had to become more visible. And this meant seeing what were essential aspects of classical rhetoric, like tropes, as things that popped out of the discourse. This was helped by the classicists' tendency to categorize rhetorical figures, which could easily allow them to be abstracted out of the linguistic medium. While this abstraction was once seen as more natural, or more accurately as something to be naturalized or internalized by education and made into a skill, the increasing tendency to see the verbal medium like paint strokes made naturalizing them unnecessary (I am arguing this instead of the general argument that proceeds by seeing this conversion of rhetoric into ornament rather than skill as a product of declining standards of education or emphasis on more public goals--an argument that is, I think, either unnecessarily pessimistic or unnecessarily nostalgic, and at its worst either undemocratic or Luddite, and tends to turn this transformation we are tracing here back again into destruction). So while skill is reinterpreted as involving, not the deployment of internalized knowledge, but something more explicit--namely, the arrangement of ornament--it also made ornament more obtrusive, less transparent, since it did not proceed from some background intention or knowledge.

(One could also say that the process of proceeding-from-background-knowledge has changed as well, since in Locke it becomes association, not expression. The notion of memory, considered not as preconscious but non-conscious knowledge, then also becomes more important: this is what produces the division in Addison between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination.)

The explicitness of design, then, naturally produces another movement to eliminate ornament as superfluous to that design. The neoclassicists held on to the notion somewhat, trying to play with ornament as arrangement. But the increasing explicitness seems to have also made the notion of design expand beyond what mere arrangement can produce. Or rather, arrangement itself transforms to become the arrangement elements that are both smaller and larger than anything resembling the size of the classical rhetorical unit (which was either small trope--a few words--or a large rhetorical plan--considered as the relation between a block of sentences and the preceding block). I would say that this is the point at which we get the vague early-mid 18th century notions of design like variety, novelty, and the picturesque, and then more concrete notions of design as animating authorial intention, like genius (in Young), the general (in Johnson), and imagination (in Coleridge's sense). But the whole point of my little history here is that it would be a mistake to see this as an all-out retreat from design, a complete forfeiture, as many people do who are either not schooled in the 18th century (particularly its middle), or give too much credence to the notion that rhetoric relies on skill, considered as implicit knowledge that is then deployed (that is, the educational argument). What has happened is that design now appears in units which simply have less relationship to traditional rhetorical units, and a different function--one that is much more in keeping with the idea that using language is painting. But this means that rhetoric, far from being destroyed, is actually still at work: it just appears as that part of the text which can be traced to an origin or function, or rather to what gets called a "whole." Rhetoric has not lost, but regained much of its functionality. The only thing different is that language, in which rhetoric takes place, has become a thicker medium, incorporating the visual in painting. Thus, if you don't exit language and consider the history of other art forms, this will of course appear as a destruction, a thinning out.