Flaubert & Shakespeare

The Flaubertian idea of prose style: an avoidance of sonority, redundancy, and of the rhetorical repetition of lexical items. No unintentional rhymes or "jingles." A clear, limpid surface. An attention to rhythm, but more to the end of avoiding too obvious rhythmical effects. I knew a fine academic writer of my father's generation who would not repeat the same word in one paragraph.

An older, rhetorical model of an opulent, prose, written with a taste for baroque antithesis, gradatio, hendiadys, alliteration...

Victorian prose in English is still opulent in contrast to the clipped, modern style of the 20th century, but it is not as opulent as baroque prose. The 18th century brings a certain prosification of prose that reaches its logical extreme in Flaubert, and then in Hemingway.

A modern writer will tend to reduce word play, avoiding the use of two words with the same lexical root: "And that unfair which fairly doth excel," or the use of two adjectives with similar and overlapping meanings: 'Led by a delicate and tender prince." We recognize this Shakespearian rhetoric as effective, but not in a way very useful for our prose.

There are modern prose styles, though, that allow more rhetorical flair without sacrificing the modern gains of simplicity and clarity. I find William Gass's alliterations cloying, but I'd like to allow for some linguistic flourish that isn't in the ascetic, Flaubertian line.

Prose had to be invented, freed from its rhetorical (oratorical) and poetic origins. Imagine inventing a form of writing more effective when read silently than aloud. That is a real cultural achievement.

Qualification

A qualified phrase bears markers that make it less absolute. Qualification makes the statement weaker, less provocative, but it can also bring gains in precision. Also, you get points for the reader for the modesty of your claims. If someone disagrees, you might point out that they are only disagreeing with an unqualified version of the idea, not your carefully crafted qualification of it.

On my other blog, Bemsha Swing, I'll get hammered sometimes by commenters on some statement that I haven't properly qualified. It seems absurd, ridiculous, what I'm saying.

A corollary is that you can make the most uncontroversial claim using extreme rhetoric, and people will respond to your tone, without realizing that what you're saying is completely anodyne--or use a very bland tone to smuggle across a controversial point.

Overstatement

Geoffrey Pullum of language log is a master of a rhetorical strategy I will call "overstatement." See for example his post Worthless Grammar Advice from Harvard:

Oh, dear. Again and again and again, American professors with absolutely no background in English grammar insist that their 21st-century college students should study this unpleasantly dogmatic little work, written by men born in the 19th century. But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who read the book again and again and again, and took its edicts literally, would do disastrous damage to their writing.

Most of those who dip into it come out with some signs of a nervous cluelessness about grammar: they get edgy around adverbs and prepositions and instances of the verb be, without exactly knowing why they feel like that, or what they should do about it.

Nothing here is overstated or hyperbolic in the factual sense: Pullum believes all this quite literally. What is overstated is in the provacativeness of the tone: unpleasantly dogmatic, insane, disastrous damage, nervous cluelessness. The justification here is that Strunk & White's book is so revered yet so nefarious that only that kind of tone will suffice. I find this technique just as effective as the case of understatement I analyzed in May. You can have a nice effect on your readers either way, by objecting to something outrageous in very measured tones, or by objecting to something seemingly unobjectionable with outrage. Both techniques make the reader aware of the writer's perspective and attitude.

Pullum, by the way, is a wonderfully comic writer, deploying hyperbole, sarcasm, feigned (or real) outrage, and other similar effects with unforgettable aplomb.

Understatement

In classical Spanish poetry, Góngora’s Soledades provide an excellent example both of a masterful use of complex tonal configurations and of how a conventional, strictly rhythmic metrics is bound to miss this quality, however easily perceptible to a reader: the often admirable Navarro is forced to conclude, given his assumptions, that Góngora’s metrical skill does not go beyond “a level many others did not exceed either”. A view of metrics that does not lead to this kind of a conclusion would seem to me to be preferable, everything else being equal.

--Carlos Piera, "REPHRASING LINE-END RESTRICTIONS," emphasis added.

Understatement differs from litotes* in that it is not (necesarily) the negation of a negative, but simply a tonal shading. Look at this example from the brilliant poet and linguist Carlos Piera. He cites a quite outrageous opinion by the great Spanish prosodist Tomás Navarro Tomás. Instead of taking outraged issue with it, he states his discrepancy in measured, scholarly tones. This is effective because it works at a literal level (yes, it is preferable, mutatis mutandis) or as a deliberate rhetorical flourish. You feel the writer holding back, and you can supply the outrage (f any) yourself.

This kind of understatement, then, is useful for very strong disagreement.
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*Litotes could be defined as a specialized case of understatement, but not all understatements are cases of litotes.

Litotes

Litotes is a nice trope to have in your tool bag. I always thought the Orwell was reacting against a certain type of British rhetoric when he spoke against it in his essay "Politics and the English Language." I can easily see how its overuse could become tiresome, but I don't like the idea of ruling it out completely.

Litotes is expressing a concept in the opposite way, but negated. "A considerable sum of money" becomes "A not inconsiderable sum of money." The advantage of litotes is that it allows you to express a different shade or twist of emphasis. I disagree with Orwell when he says it is obfuscatory. It doesn't conceal your meaning, but expresses your particular attitude toward the meaning. In most cases, an attitude of ironic understatement. Just as hyperbole has its uses, so does understatement. You wouldn't want to rule out any shading of attitude.

I can't say I use litotes often myself, but I consider it a not ineffective trope in the hands of a good writer.

Citations

Citing other critics involves a certain rhetorical acumen. For example, if the ideas of the critics you cite are more interesting than your own, then you are in trouble, because the reader will tend to focus on ideas of other critics and view you as an amanuensis. On the other hand, you can't pick banal quotes either, unless you are taking issue with their banality. If you agree with other critics, then you can bring them in for back-up. If you are proposing something controversial, then it is good to have some other authority on your side. "See, it's not just me who's saying this..." On the other hand, it is also useful to have a critic who is sort of half-way right, whom you can agree with and then correct. Maybe someone has a very harsh opinion of something. You can cite that opinion, and seem less harsh yourself, distancing yourself from that position while at the same time putting it out there.

In short, citation brings into play a complicated dynamic of authority, competition, novelty. The point here is to be self-conscious about how you deploy other critics' writing. What are you doing by quoting someone else?

Establishing what the critical consensus is.

Finding support for something that your audience might not agree with.

Defining the position with which you disagree, either partially or wholly.

Establishing contextual information.

If you know why you are citing then you can figure out how to cite.

Show of Strength

At some points you will want to provide a show of strength in an article you are writing. By this I mean an overwhelmingly convincing demonstration of your knowledge of the subject matter, a particularly strong argument, something that establishes your authority. I'd say one of every three or four articles needs such a display.

Captatio Benevolentiae

One way of beginning an article or talk is by making a profession of humility. We'll call this a CB for short. Adeptly handled, this technique presents the speaking self of the article or book chapter as attractively modest, but without undercutting his or her authority. In other words, the audience understands that it is being seduced by the profession of modesty, but also understands that the modesty is a rhetorical device. There is an article by Derrida in The Translation Studies Reader (ed Venuti) that was originally a talk given to a professional association of translators. Derrida goes on and on at the beginning about how unqualified he is; he knows less about the subject (translation) than his own audience. Yet this CB does nothing, ultimately, to undercut his actual talk. Once he get into his main points he leaves behind this posture of modesty completely. Derrida is not a modest writer in the least.

I've seen people completely undercut their own authority by apologizing in a way that makes the audience think, "hey, he doesn't really know what he's talking about."

The paradox, then, is that the CB must be performed arrogantly enough so that it is transparently false. It must not be taken literally, but as a rhetorical ploy.

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The Socratic dialogue is based on a profession of ignorance, but Socrates uses that ignorance (known as Socratic irony) as a form of rhetorical jujitsu, lulling his interlocutors into thinking he is going to be easy to debate. The CB is also rhetorical jujitsu. It's got to be performed from a stance of strength, not weakness.