Rhetoric and figurative language
invention, disposition, elocution
RHETORIC AND POLITICS
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
“It has always been preferable for the governed to be ruled by the spoken word rather than by the whip, the chain or the gun.” (Jonathan Charteris-Black: Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor)
“war is peace” -- “meat is murder”
“In democratic frameworks it is primarily through language that leaders legitimise their leadership”. (Charteris-Black)
Political discourse: appeals to rational, cognitive faculties + appeals to unconscious, emotional contents
Metaphor: connecting different spheres
Rhetoric and the anti-rhetorical tradition
“up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane;
A fairer person lost not Heav’n, he seem’d
For dignity compos’d and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
…yet he pleas’d the ear
And with persuasive accent thus began.” (Milton: Paradise Lost, II, 108ff)
Francis Bacon: “men began to hunt more after words than matter”
The Sophists - Socrates (in Plato’s Gorgias): “There is no need for rhetoric to know the facts at all, for it has hit upon a means of persuasion that enables it to appear in the eyes of the ignorant to know more than those who really know.”
Plato (in Phaedo): “the man who plans to be an orator ‘need not’ learn what is really just or true, but only what seems so to the crowd”.
Aristotle: rhetoric is predicated on “the defects of the hearers” (Rhetoric)
Puritan ideal of the “plain style”
“painted sermons” are “like the Painted Glass in the windows that keep out the Light” (Richard Baxter)
“Eloquence, like the fair sex” (John Locke)
Bishop Thomas Sprat (1667): praised the members of the Royal Society for rejecting “all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking: positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.”
Ancient defence of rhetoric
Cato: rem tene, verba sequentur (‘seize the thing, the words will follow’)
Quintilian (and Cicero): “No man can speak well who is not good himself” (eloquence follows from good character and grasp of truth)
RELIGION AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
The language and interpretation of the Bible
literal → the Bible becomes a historical document
Difficulties with literal reading
figurative
Eg. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd (wise) as snakes and as innocent as doves.” (Mt 10.16)
St. Augustine: “the reference is to the behavior of snakes—that to protect its head [the serpent] will present its whole body to its assailants . . . that is to say, that for the sake of our head, which is Christ, we should willingly offer our body to the persecutors, lest the Christian faith should, as it were, be destroyed in us, if to save the body we deny our God!”
Jesus overturning the tables of money-lenders (Mt.21.12)
‘Political’ problem of limiting interpretation
Allegory. word of God, divine mysteries: must be screened (like seeing God face to face): necessity of allegory
Christ’s parables
Levels of meaning:
St Thomas Aquinas: “So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science [i.e., scriptural interpretation] has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it. Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division . . . so far as the things of the Old Law [Old Testament] signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense.”
TYPOLOGY in the Bible
Typos: strike, imprint, impression
Moses: figura Christi (type/figure of Christ)
Jonah in the belly of the whale
OT: type (prophecy, prefiguration) → NT: antitype (fulfillment)
Stake (political): the unity of the Bible
OT→NT→ end of time
‘historical’ events remain open, future-oriented (as well as allegorical)
The world as the Book of God
Hermetic tradition: everything signifies everything else (planets, precious stones, flowers, animals)
Final referent: God’s creation and glory
Literal and figurative language
Friedrich Nietzsche: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically enhanced, transposed, and embellished, and which after long use seem fixed, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power, coins which have lost their picture and now matter only as metal, no longer as coin.” (“On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense”)
Man: the „metaphorical animal”
Concepts: the residue of figures
catachresis
reliteralisation
“Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who is doing all the moving. I’m not the station, I’m not the stop: I’m the train. I’m the train.” (Martin Amis: Money)
Is all language figurative?
“Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall … an idea of immensity, of distance” (Paul Scott: The Jewel in the Crown)
I.A.Richards: constancy of meaning – constancy of context
Rhetoric as the study of tropes
Figure or scheme (e.g. ellipsis, parallelism, congeries) vs. trope
Theories of metaphor (meta-pherein, tra(n)slatio)
substitution - deviation - interaction
I. A. Richards: tenor, vehicle, ground
„the fringed curtains of thine eyes” (The Tempest, I, ii)
classical view (decoration) – Romantic view (vehicle of truth, essence of language)
Cognitive theory (love is…; death is…)
“What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?”
(Shelley, “To a Skylark”)
Aristotle: “strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something fresh” …“a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”
metaphor ~ model - Suzanne Langer: “every new idea assumes the form of a metaphor”
“Every man is an island”
„If music be the food of love, play on
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
(Twelfth Night, I.i)
„My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is going to burst.” (Martin Amis: Money)
Metaphor and other tropes
“Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature
For ruin’s wasteful entrance” (Macbeth II, iii)
“the poet is a penguin” (e. e. cummings)
simile (less effective?)
LLRH’s cape: “it was red, red as the Swiss flag, / yes it was red, red as chicken blood” (Anne Sexton)
“Richard turned forty. Turned is right. Like a half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old leaf, like milk, Richard turned.” (Martin Amis: The Information)
„the earth is blue like an orange” (Paul Éluard)
allegory, symbol, oxymoron, paradox
Allegory: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”
(Shakespeare, King John, 3.4)
candle in a churchyard: metonymy, metaphor, allegory?
metonymy
- ships sail the sea – keels plough the deep
- “an aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick”
(W. B. Yeats: „Byzantium”)
- “Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed” (Anne Sexton: „LRRH”)
- “we have been created of dust and into dust shall we return”
synecdoche
fantasy vs. trope
„This summer the roses are blue” (Breton)