I will deposit my notes on On Great Writing, which is either a 3rd century text by Longinus, one of the great scholars and rhetoricians of his time, or was written earlier and is by someone else. Who knows. I will call the author Longinus, and call the work On the Sublime, the title that accompanied the work’s 18th century entry into the canon of literary criticism. It hits a number of 18th century preoccupations.
Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself. The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, if it is indeed true that to be convinced is usually within our control whereas amazement is the result of an irresistible force beyond the control of any audience . (1, p. 4), tr. G. M. A. Grube)
The move from the “charming and persuasive” to “the
startling and amazing” is the Enlightenment moving to Romanticism.
A writer’s “inventive skill” and “the structure and
arrangement of his subject matter… slowly emerge from the texture of the whole
work”:
But greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer’s full power in a flash. (1, 4)
This has something in common with Nabokov urging his
students to read not with the head or heart but the spine, and perhaps also
with Kafka saying that the only worthwhile art is that which feels like an axe
splitting the skull. Roughly speaking,
Aristotle was writing in Poetics about he big overall effect of a work,
while Longinus is interested in the best individual scenes or images or lines,
but they are both critics asking how it all works.
For much of On the Sublime, Longinus identifies
rhetorical devices that are part of passages he finds especially great. I can see how the author is a professional
rhetorician – maybe he can teach me how to make my writing great. But then I notice how much space he gives to bad
writing. My use of the very same devices
will likely produce bad writing. There
is still a lot of mystery here. The best
I can do is emulate Homer and Demosthenes, even asking what these writers would
think of my words. “For as we emulate
them, these eminent personages are present in our minds and raise us to a
higher level of imaginative power” (14, 23).
Longinus mostly looks back at earlier Greek literature,
mostly Homer, the three tragedians, and the 4th century BCE Athenian orator
Demosthenes – as usual, mostly Athenians.
It is as if a book about great writing written today took the bulk of
its examples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, which is not implausible. I am setting aside the surprising appearance
by Moses (9, 17) and the part where Longinus inadvertently saves the first
stanza of a great Sappho poem (10, 17).
… which should be preferred in poetry or in prose, great writing with occasional flaws or moderate talent which is entirely sound and faultless? (33, 44)
Really, would you rather be the flawed but great Sophocles or
the flawless but merely good Ion of Chios?
Longinus thinks that “no sane man would count all the plays of Ion to be
worth as much as the one play, Oedipus” (33, 45), so on Twitter it the
vote would be fifty-fifty. I am starting
to elan towards Ion of Chios myself, out of pity.
Longinus ends by wondering why the writing today, in his day, stinks so much. His answer is money. Such a book written today would likely have the same ending.
I plan to read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
(1872) soon, which will finish off this project. My memory is that Nietzsche’s book is about
two-thirds what it says in the title and one-third how Richard Wagner will save
us from the cultural decadence begun by the super-villain Socrates. I’ll write something up before Christmas.
I need to make time for this one. It's short and references works I've mostly read. Plus, it looks entertaining.
ReplyDeletePoor Ion. There's no real need to choose, but people do.
It is entertaining. It is not the anti-Aristotle, but it is an alternative, one for which I have a lot of sympathy, even if the cataloguing of rhetorical devices is not so exciting.
ReplyDeleteHave to say I rather like the cataloguing of rhetorical devices--at least in Puttenham. Definitely have some poems in which I was merrily fooling with things read in Puttenham. I'm going to put Longinus on The List and hope that 2023 will have more time for reading. I have not encountered him since grad school, and have forgotten much of what I met there--very helpful for a writer to forget schooling, I find.
ReplyDeleteLonginus is only 60 pages long, so with luck it will fit into the year. You likely have more patience for rhetoric than I do. It is so useful.
ReplyDelete