Strangeness as Profundity
A Theme in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book III
Christian Kock
Unobtrusive Strangeness
In the third book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric an arresting idea shows up several times that has not received much attention. It is the idea that a rhetor ought to speak in a style which is on the one hand strange, unfamiliar or deviant—but which on the other hand is not noticed as such.
Aristotle’s emphasis in Book III on clarity as an absolute requirement in rhetorical prose is well known, and also his insistence on a definite distinction between poetry and prose and the importance in rhetoric of never sliding into poetry. Nevertheless he repeatedly makes the point that rhetoricalprose should have some of the typical features and hallmarks of poetry, only not too much, i.e., not so much that their presence are detected by the audience.
Among of the passages in question isthe following:
The use of nouns and verbs in their prevailing [kyrios] meaning makes for clarity; other kinds of words, as discussed in the Poetic, make the style ornamented rather than flat. To deviate [from prevailing usage] makes language seem more elevated [to gar exallaxaipoieiphainesthaisemnoteran]; for people feel the same in regard to word usage [lexis] as they do in regard to strangers [xenous] compared with citizens. (1404b5)[1]
Here we have the notion of deviating (exallaxai), which may lend the speech an air of the elevated. We are clearly to take it that this elevated feel in the speech is a good thing for the rhetor to aim at. Further on, we read:
As a result, one should make the language unfamiliar [diodeipoieinxenēntēndialekton]; for people are admirers of what is far off, and what is marvelous is sweet. Many [kinds of words] accomplish this in verse and are appropriate there; for what is said [in poetry] about subject and characters is more out of the ordinary, but in prose much less so(1404b11).
Here, the difference of genre between poetry and prose is invoked to remind us that in rhetoric the tendency to deviate and the strange air must remain within certain bounds; but the fact remains that Aristotle counsels rhetors to “make the language unfamiliar”.However, the advice is always two-sided: the deviation, strangeness or unfamiliarity should not reach the level where it is consciously noticed.
Next, we read: “As a result, authors should compose without being noticed [diodeilanthaneinpoiuntas] and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally.”(1404b18-19)
Here, the injunction is to hide [lanthanein] one’s pursuit of the effects just mentioned or pursue them as it were surreptitiously, so that one does not seem to speak “artificially” or, as one might say, by design [the adverb used is peplasmenōs, from the verb plassō, to shape or form]. However, it is clear that what the rhetor does in heeding these piecesof advice is precisely to speak by design, but in such a way that he does not seem to speakby design—a way that is not obvious and thus likely to go undetected.
Somewhatlater we read this: “Thus, it is clear that if one composes well, there will be an unfamiliar quality [xenikon] and it escapes notice [lanthaneinendechesthai] and will be clear.”(1404b31)
Here again we have the two intimatelyconnected and mutually dependent features in one sentence: the “unfamiliar” or “strange” quality, and the importance of keeping it unnoticed. Stating this dual requirement is tantamount to saying that Aristotle envisages a subliminal, or at most a “liminal”, effect on the hearers’ minds. They must not become conscious of what the rhetor does in this respect, but the rhetor is advised to do it nevertheless; if this apparent contradiction is to be meaningful it follows that this particular aspect of the rhetor’s work is meant to be unconscious on the hearer’s part or, at least, (sub)liminal or not fully conscious.
Later in Book III, where the topic is metaphor, we get this:“In speech it is necessary to take special pains to the extent that speech has fewer resources than verse. Metaphor especially has clarity and sweetness and strangeness [to xenikon]”(1405a7).
Clarity and sweetness—two properties unreservedly recommended by Aristotle—here go hand in hand with strangeness, and a similar view is reflected in his words on the use of epithets: “if used immoderately they convict [the writer of artificiality] and make it clear that this is poetry. Though there is some need to use them (for they change what is ordinary and make the lexis unfamiliar [xenikonpoieitēnlexin]), nevertheless one should aim at the mean” (1406a11). As we see, the fact that epithets may contribute xenikon is taken, without further argument, as a reason why it is advisable to use them.
With the phenomenon that I wish to unpack thus identified, it may be helpful if I sketch how this paper will unfold. First I will address the issue of rhythm in oratory, of which Aristotle says things that are similar to his pronouncements on strangeness and unfamiliarity. I will then consider what some of the commentators on Book III have had to say about the issue, and try to make clear why I think there is more to say. Next, I will explain more fully what that is. By way of illustration, I will then introduce two examples of authentic readers meeting “strange” features in oratorical texts and responding in ways representative of the mechanism I have described. A final section presents, in an attempt at further illumination of the phenomenon, a reading by an outstanding literary scholar of a famous piece of oratory in which he finds features that I see as resembling the “strange” but unobtrusive rhetorical features that are my subject.
On Rhythms
The idea that arhetor should do something that is on the one hand effective but which on the other hand should not rise above the hearer’s threshold of consciousness (because only then will it be effective in the intended way) is evident in Aristotle’s advice of the use of rhythm. We need not here go into what exactly he means by the two related terms rhythm and meter; even for our modern languages whose pronunciation is fully known to us (unlike that of Ancient Greek), that is a thorny issue. The point is that rhetorical prose should have one (rhythm) but not the other (meter), and that if one exaggerates rhythm it approaches meter. This will not do because by approaching meter the rhythm becomes noticeable; it should be there, but unnoticed, not breaking through the threshold of consciousness. Aristotle says:
The form of the language should be neither metrical nor unrhythmical. The former is unpersuasive (for it seems to have been consciously shaped) and at the same time also diverts attention; for it causes [the listener] to pay attention to when the same foot will come again (1408b21).
A similar piece of advice follows, where Aristotle discusses which kind of rhythm to recommend. The heroic (dactylic and spondaic rhythms, as in Homer) “has dignity, but lacks the tones of the spoken language”; on the other hand, iambic rhythms (as in drama) resemble “the very language of ordinary people … but in a speech we need dignity and the power of taking the hearer out of his ordinary self” (1408b33-35). The recommended middle-of-the-road solution is the use of “paeanic” rhythms, where one of the syllables is long and the other three short. The paean rhythmis best “since from this alone of the rhythms mentioned no definitemetre arises, and therefore it is the least obtrusive of them” (1409a9-10)(it is more easily hidden:hōstemalistalanthanein). So again we have the curiously two-sided ideal: there should be a kind of structuring that is akin to poetry and thus strange to everyday prose (in this case highly formalized poetry like the odes of Pindar, which use paeanic rhythms), but on the other hand it should not be consciously perceptible.
Looking over the textualfeatures and devices of “strangeness” recommended by Aristotle for use in oratory we can see that they may be divided in to two main categories: deviations and regularities. In later rhetorical treatises we find a related categorization of rhetorical figures in schemes and tropes, where schemes are characterized by regularity and tropes by deviation from some assumed norm of plain speech. In our time, there is for example Geoffrey Leech’s work on the linguistic features of English poetry, which applies a distinction between deviations and regularities.[2] These two phenomena may be seen as nicely symmetrical in the sense that whereas regularities can be said to represent an over-application of a rule, deviations may be seen as the opposite: breaches or under-applications of rules.
In Leech and many other contemporary students of poetic language the term foregrounding has been used to describe how poetic language, in virtue of regularities and/or deviations, steps into the foreground of the reader’s attention. The term is derived from the Czech word actualisace, as employed by the Prague structuralists of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, with Jan Mukařovský as the main figure. In our time, the term has been used in many studies of poetic texts and also in empirical studies of literary reading. For example, studies by David Mialland others have clearly shown that readers slow down over passages high in foregrounding and also that they consistently rate such passages as affectively more intense.[3]But these findings were made in connection with poetry. We might perhaps say that Aristotle similarly recommends a certain amount of linguistic foregrounding in oratory—if it were not that if we are to follow his advice, strangeness in the form of either extra deviation or regularity should not be foregrounded, but remain in the background; it should be “backgrounded”,i.e., (sub)liminal. But it should be there nevertheless.
We are left here with the question we began with: Whyshould there be, onthe one hand, this twofold excess of formal or poetic properties: of deviation as well as of regularity; and on the other hand, why should their presence not be consciously noticed by the audience, the way it is noticed and enjoyed when we read poetry?
At this point, I shall anticipate what will be my answer to the question of the function of subliminal strangeness as understood in Rhetoric III.
In poetry there is no need for the presence of strangeness—regularities and deviations—to be subliminal; poetry readers expect these properties and read poetry in order to enjoy the aesthetic effects they generate. In oratory, by contrast, the features of strangeness should, according to Aristotle, be kept subliminal or at least unobtrusive because the audience should not feel that they are being influenced by “merely” formal, aesthetic effects. But if, on the other hand, the “strange” features are kept just barely noticeable, i.e., subliminal or unobtrusive, then the audience may feel that there is a yet untapped and uncomprehended residue of content, of a deeper and more momentous meaning lurking underneath them that cannot not fully grasp in a first encounter.
Further I wish, in anticipation, to emphasize that I believe the kind of effect at issue here—an effect known and recommended to orators by Aristotle—is generally a spurious one: the feeling or impression of hidden depths of meaning that one might experience, more or less subliminally, on hearing a piece of oratory with unobtrusively “strange” features in it does not imply that there actually are any such hidden depths underneath the words. There might be, but the strangeness is not a reliable sign that there is.
Aristotlehimself only gives us few pointers as to what the strangeness consists in, and in particularhe says little on why it is to be there, and what its workings are. He refers to the way oratory with “backgrounded” poetic features may appear more “elevated” and compares this with how we may “admire” what is “marvelous” and “out of the ordinary” and “unfamiliar” and find it “sweet”; and he talks about aiming for “dignity” and “the power of taking the hearer out of his ordinary self”. But whereas he completely accepts a full and even obtrusiveuse of these features in poetic texts, the constant injunction for its use in oratory is to keep it “unobtrusive” and have it “escape notice”. Why?
The aspects of Aristotle’s advice that are least challenging are perhaps those that have to do with excess regularity (such as rhythm). Cicero, for example, in the Orator, notes that the use of rhythm (numerus) is particularly appropriate toward the end of a speech when the listener is “in the grip” of the orator and does not suspect manipulation, but, in admiration of the speaker’s power, wishes him to carry on to the end (tumvaletcumisquiauditaboratoreiamobsessusestactenetur. Nonenimidagitutinsidieturetobservet, sediamfavetprocessumquevultdicendiquevimadmiransnonanquirit4quidreprehendat).[4]Powerful repetitive effects toward the end, rhythmical or otherwise, are standard in poetry and music.Cicero’s observation also suggests why the orator should hold such effects in check until the end: they are in place when the audience is already persuaded of the rightness of the orator’s case, and they may then serve to mobilize or energize the audience’ssupport of it in a quasi-physical way. But obtrusive rhythm is out of place when the actual persuasion is still in progress; in that phase an audience will want to think that it is being persuaded by appeals tologos, ethos and pathos, in other words, by attending to the content of what the speaker says, not being carried away by purely formal devices. Aristotle’s recommendationto orators that there should be rhythms all along, but unobtrusive ones, becomes understandable in this light: the orator wants the audience to draw listeners along while he unfolds his case, they should be kept attentive and expectant, and unobtrusive rhythmical features can help achieve that—but they should feel all along that they attend to content for the content’s sake; that is why Aristotle repeatedly cautions against sliding into poetry (a caution echoed by Cicero and others). What is at issue here is the difference between listening for content and listening to poetry; that difference may become clearer if we remember Roman Jakobson’s famous definition of the “poetic function” of language: language functions poetically when the listener/reader has “focus on the message for its own sake”.[5]If an orator intends to persuade an audience, then the audience shouldnot feel that the orator intends them to have “focus on the message for its own sake”; that is why, as Aristotle has it, openly metrical language is “unpersuasive” (1408b). However, as Cicero makes clear, it is different when the audience is fully persuaded—then obtrusive rhythms may be welcomed by listeners that enjoy the shared energy it injects in them.
But this does not reallygive us a satisfactory answer to those aspects of “strangeness” that have to do with deviations, with the “unfamiliar” (xenikon).
The Commentators
If we go to the commentators (commentators on Rhetoric III are not numerous), most of them are not very helpful in throwing light on this question.
E.M. Cope, in his monumentalintroduction to the Rhetoricand his three-volumecommentary(1877),is mostly satisfied with giving very elaborate paraphrases with numerous parallels in other classical authors.[6] However, it is suggestive that he points to a recurrent assumption in Aristotle: “the pleasure of ‘wonder’, and the gratification of curiosity in learning”, as mentioned in the Rhetoric I, 1370a.[7]This, I suggest, can be seen as a clue to understanding the functioning of strangeness in the form of unobtrusive deviations: they may give a listener a feeling that there is an alluring further store of wisdom to acquire. Such a feeling, which I believe the “strange” features recommended by Aristotle are apt to arouse in hearers, is a key point to which I shall return.
Modern commentators on Aristotle’s Rhetoric have had their difficulties and challenges with these recommendations of artful, “unfamiliar” features of discourse that are nevertheless to be kept below the listeners’ threshold of consciousness. The most frequently quoted contemporary authority on Aristotle’s Rhetoric is George Kennedy, whose translation with commentary (first published 1991) remains a standard text and reference.[8] Kennedy generally takes a rather dismissive attitude towards the whole of Book III and does not have much to say in answer to the query raised in this article. In relation to the motion of “unfamiliarity” he points out, rightly, that the Russian “Formalists” have extended the view of literary language as “defamiliarization”.[9] He also points out that Aristotle’s remarks on this score are perhaps the earliest statement in criticism that the greatest art is to disguise art,[10] but he does not recognize that this leaves unanswered the question of why the art that should be disguised should include strangeness. As for the recommendations on prose rhythm, Kennedy criticizes Aristotle’s remarks on the poetic rhythms as being “unsatisfactory in several ways”, in particular in regard to his claims about the occurrence of the various rhythms in various genres.[11] It is likely that Kennedy is quite right about this, but he has little to say on the general question why there has to be rhythm in oratory in the first place, and why it nevertheless has to be unobtrusive.
Only few commentators have tried to take up the challenge that others have passed over. The few attempts there have been to face the challenge have tended to re-interpret the concepts of strangeness etc. as epistemicallymotivatedproperties, i.e., as particular aspects of “clarity” and as means to a deeper and truer insight than may be achieved through “mere” ordinary clarity.