The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Books- When Words Work A Special Magic
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Books: When Words Work A Special Magic
ON ELOQUENCE
By Denis Donoghue
(Yale, 199 pages, $28)
"PRENDS l'eloquence et tords-lui son cou!" So wrote the poet Paul Verlaine in his polemical verse manifesto "L'Art poetique" (1874): Take eloquence and wring its neck. It seems a harsh prescription. Yet it's one we don't find hard to understand. Eloquence is a quality as much mistrusted as admired.
There's a long history to this. Plato saw that the eloquent man could stir a crowd or sway a jury much as an enchanter charms a snake. It wasn't an achievement he approved. He suspected eloquence because it aims to persuade, not to inform, to produce conviction, not knowledge; it pays no heed to right and wrong. For every great political orator or noble advocate using rhetorical skills in the public good there are dozens of plausible hucksters or dangerous demagogues.
Aristotle, Tacitus and Quintilian made the case for the defense. Cicero, acknowledging the need to turn the persuasive arts to positive ends, nonetheless saw eloquence as something to be valued on its own account. He knew that the purpose and concerns of classical rhetoric were primarily civic and practical, but he realized, too, that the experience of eloquence could be a powerful source of pleasure -- for the emotions, the imagination and the intellect. He relished "the kind of eloquence which rushes along with the roar of a mighty stream . . . . This eloquence has power to sway men's minds and move them in every possible way. Now it storms the feelings, now it creeps in; it implants new ideas and uproots the old." For Cicero, the poet and orator were kinsmen. We might say (though he did not) that the eloquence he valued is, in itself, a kind of poetry or literature or art.
That, certainly, is how Denis Donoghue sees it. He goes further and asserts an absolute distinction between the merely practical, persuasive business of rhetoric and the high aesthetic appeal of eloquence. It is the latter -- shifted decisively now from the realm of public speech to that of literary writing -- that interests him in this thoughtful and provocative book.
In the opening section of "On Eloquence," Mr. Donoghue outlines the qualities he cares about as a reader and teacher of literature: "aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, 'how to do things with words.'" And he regrets that "it has become harder to persuade students that these are real places of interest and value in a poem, a play, a novel, or an essay in the New Yorker."
It's a persistent lament. The critical tradition in which Mr. Donoghue works held sway more or less unchallenged in Anglo-American literary studies for many years. Acknowledging such influences as Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater in the 19th century, and T.S. Eliot and the so-called New Critics in the middle years of the 20th, it has as its constants a belief in the merit of trying, in Arnold's words, "to see the object as in itself it really is" and an insistence that this seeing is best achieved, in the case of literature, by close and scrupulous attention to the words and workings of the text.
Such an approach, humane in purpose, broadly formalist in method, has at least since the 1960s seen its values and assumptions rudely challenged by schools of criticism -- Marxist, feminist, structuralist, deconstructionist -- that would subordinate the particularities of the individual work of art to a range of theoretical and ideological concerns. Mr. Donoghue, as teacher, essayist and author, has often been in the front line of the resulting "culture wars." "On Eloquence" is his latest broadside.
In it he concedes, as he always has, that there may be merit in considering, say, the extent of Joseph Conrad's complicity with imperialism or the significance of T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. But he thinks that such questions are better answered by others, and answered elsewhere. They don't really engage him as a critic. For Mr. Donoghue believes quite passionately that when literature is read as a reflection of the prejudices of its makers and the historical and political currents of the world in which it was produced, something vital, something truly life- enhancing risks being lost.
This is where eloquence comes in. Mr. Donoghue thinks that literature is eloquent when it is at its most irreducible, when it is most utterly itself. "Eloquence," he writes, "has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means. It is a gift to be enjoyed in appreciation and practice. The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic. Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it."
Mr. Donoghue finds eloquence where others might never think to look: in a sudden switch by Dante into Provencal; in the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth"; in the ambiguities of Donne's poem "The Extasie"; in a single word -- "indignant" -- of a line in "The Second Coming" by Yeats. The dazzling display of erudition is carried off with a surprising lightness of touch. Homer, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Whitman, Joyce, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Carol Shields: All are pressed into service, quotation trumping quotation as Mr. Donoghue rehearses arguments for and against the eloquence of each. Close readings alternate with fleeting allusions, grand assertions, personal reflections, polemical asides.
Not all of it comes off. "This chapter is likely to be irritating," Mr. Donoghue warns at one point. And it is. There are readings of readings of readings that all too often just don't read well. The case for eloquence relies on insistence and illustration more than argument. But that seems entirely apt. "On Eloquence" is itself a performance, a show of the quality it seeks to describe. "Eloquence," Mr. Donoghue observes, in one of his more extravagantly eloquent conceits, "resembles hang gliding in some respects." Don't look down.
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Mr. Brunskill is obituaries editor of The Times (London).
