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The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1917

Most commentaries on film and rhetoric are indebted to the neo-Aristotelian school of literary criticism once practiced at the University of Chicago, and particularly to Wayne Booth’s highly influential The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which is less preoccupied with overt argument or eloquence than with problems of ethical clarity and “the art of communicating” (i). Again and again, Booth emphasizes the artist’s effort, through techniques of narration and characterization, to help readers grasp the full implications of the work and to impose a fictional or illusory world upon an audience. In a similar though more overtly ideological fashion, writing on the rhetoric of film has tended to deal with issues of point of view, focalization, and enunciation, and especially with debates over what Avrom Fleishman describes as the “narrator-effect” of fiction cinema. (Besides Fleishman’s Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History, see Nick Browne, The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration; Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film; Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film; and George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies of Cinematic Point of View.)

Granting the importance of such matters, I plan to say relatively little about them. I want to define rhetoric more broadly and theatrically, as an art of suasion and seduction that secures our belief in claims of truth and our pleasure in representation. The rhetorical event in this sense is only secondarily concerned with the clarity or veracity of its evidence (as in the “realism” of documentary photographs); before anything, it’s intended to move us by means of verbal skill, bodily eloquence, spectacle, color, performance, and all the well-known elements of cosmetics, stagecraft, and mise-en-scène. Explicitly aimed at arousing the passions, it proves its worth or lack of worth through the emotional effects it creates on auditors or spectators at specific occasions.

As Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown in her important book The Eloquence of Color (1993), this broad conception of rhetoric, which is quite old, has long been connected to acting, painting, and the visual arts in general. In ancient Greece, it was a techne that controlled the entire empire of communication, and at a later, more specialized, moment in its history, it became one of the three crucial disciplines of the Roman trivium, which eventually shaped the curriculum in European schools. Even so, as John Bender and David Wellbery have pointed out in their anthology The Ends of Rhetoric (1990), rhetorical art was never without critics, who usually accused it of fostering luxurious excess, irrational power, and demagogic manipulation. Plato, in his quarrel with the sophists, distinguished between the language of rhetoric, which deals in mere adornment and emotional affect, and the language of philosophy, which deals in truth. Francis Bacon and every major scientist from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment denigrated rhetoric in contrast to the neutral, transparent discourse of scientific discovery. Immanuel Kant described the major part of rhetoric as “the art of deceiving by a beautiful show” and attacked its use in both the law court and the pulpit on the grounds that it was designed “to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom” (Critique of Judgment, 171). Not long afterward, the romantic poets forsook what M. H. Abrams calls the “mirror” of neoclassical art with the “lamp” of individual expression, thus asserting the primacy of the literary artist’s imagination over the need to communicate with an audience.

From the time of Plato and Aristotle until the nineteenth century, rhetoric was usually subordinated to philosophy and devoted to the study of inventio, dispositio, and elecutio in verbal language. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had narrowed to a typology of figures of speech, all of them labeled with Latin names, and to a genteel, highly controlled application of these figures and their appropriate gestures to the arts of acting and public address. The printed word had long since gained ascendency over oral communication, and verbal and visual rhetoric of the more flamboyant kind began to take on negative connotations associated with bourgeois pretentiousness, populist politics, and the newly emerging mass-communication and advertising industries. At this point, artistic modernism attempted to administer a deathblow to rhetoric. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, and particularly in the years immediately after World War I, there was a wholesale artistic revolt against the very term, which was seen as a discredited technique of an imperial establishment whose representatives usually spoke in the elevated tones of moral preachment.

What was at stake during these years was not so much an abandonment of suasion, which would have been virtually impossible, as a new and heterodox contempt for certain audiences—an antirhetorical rhetoric that almost defined the modernist ethos. The keynote of modernist architecture was the rejection of classical ornament in favor of less decorative forms derived from industry or landscape; modernist painting divested itself of the sentimental, representational imagery of the nineteenth century, becoming increasingly abstract; art photography favored the austere, intellectual qualities of disegno over the emotional qualities of colore; and modern dance was predicated on a rejection of the rhetorical hierarchies in ballet in favor of what was sometimes called “task performance.” This suspicion of elevated tone and direct appeals to emotion was particularly apparent in modernist poetry, whose readers, according to T. S. Eliot, were never to be addressed “as if [they] were at a public meeting” (quoted in Stead, 169). Eliot himself went further, stripping poetry even of the social conventions of communication. The Waste Land (1922) was an ironic, deliberately antirhetorical poem addressed to a hypocrite lecteur and based on an art of verbal collage, or on what Hugh Kenner called “juxtaposition without copula” (quoted in Stead, 169). Despite the many academic commentators who tried to make it seem coherent, The Waste Land steered very close to surrealism, providing eloquence, rhetorical flourish, and a sense of luxury only through quotations.

Something roughly similar was happening in the novel, and this development, particularly in the hands of writers such as Joyce and Nabokov, later provoked Wayne Booth’s criticism in The Rhetoric of Fiction on the grounds that it left readers with no moral and ethical guideposts. Whether or not one agrees with Booth, it’s certainly true that the whole tendency of twentieth-century fiction was to become more ambiguous and in one sense “cinematic,” less explicitly “rhetorical.” In the English language, modernist fiction began in the first decade of the century with the attempts by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford to elevate showing over telling, and it culminated with James Joyce’s “invisible” narration and pastiche of literary convention in Ulysses (1922). Significantly, the seventh or “Aeolus” chapter of that book is devoted to the art of rhetoric, which it treats satirically. It shows us a group of Dublin windbags, most of them journalists and small-time politicians, lolling about a newspaper office, quoting speeches and news reports from the good old days. The conversation of this group contains almost a hundred examples of Latinate rhetorical forms (chiasmus, diasyrm, asyndeton, enthymeme, apostrophie, epigram, etc.), but the two most sympathetic characters in the chapter, the adman Leopold Bloom and the poet Stephen Dedalus, are markedly plain, sometimes even cryptic in their speech. In different ways, both are estranged from Dublin’s charmingly seductive but ultimately empty world of masculine palaver and antiquated eloquence.

An analogous development occurred in the theater. The word actor in English was originally meant to suggest the “action” of orators, and early textbooks on acting were designed to teach the artful employment of gestures and tones of voice to move, persuade, and embody traits of character. The connection between acting and speechmaking began to disappear around 1890, with the debates surrounding William Archer’s Masks or Faces? (1888), which prepared the way for what I’ve elsewhere described as a “shift from a semiotic to a psychological conception of performance” (Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 52). On the stage, actors sometimes stood in corners or turned their backs to the audience, and the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky led to a complete rejection of a centuries-old tradition of codified pantomime. The Stanislavskian revolution didn’t completely eliminate rhetoric, any more than novels or poems eliminated communication, but, like most forms of modern art, it was less openly solicitous or directly aimed toward the audience; it often relied on indirection, requiring viewers or readers to work at the discovery of meaning.

What, you may ask, has all this to do with movies? The answer is that Hollywood has a paradoxical or mixed relation to the modernist movements, at once participating in the general reaction against flamboyant rhetoric and fostering a full-scale return to bodily eloquence and visual suasion. D. W. Griffith is especially interesting in this regard because he’s both a modern aesthete and a Victorian ideologue. The Birth of a Nation (1915) helps to create a new form of intimate, vernacular acting and an “invisible” style of continuity editing, but at the same time it’s a definitive example of the cinema as argument—an emotionally charged, propagandistic melodrama, filled with spectacle and preachment, punctuated with title cards that aspire to old-fashioned oratory. When Griffith said that he was trying to make us “see,” he was declaring his affinity not with Joseph Conrad but with the ancient orators—who, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein demonstrates, were trained to paint pictures with words, and who sometimes unveiled paintings before their audiences as a way of achieving emotional assent to their arguments. Lichtenstein points out that ancient philosophy usually tried to control the powers of this visual rhetoric because of its dangerous emotional effects. Plato and Aristotle were alike, she notes, “in their determination to grant the spectacle only a secondary function. . . . They suggest that the greatest danger for the poet’s and the orator’s arts resides in the performances of acting and staging . . . and that a constant threat to the [priority of philosophy over] poetics and rhetoric lurks in the conditions of a spectacle whose presentation is, however, necessary” (71). If we follow this reasoning, Griffith can be seen as the philosopher’s worst nightmare, as a powerful rhetorician who never eliminates language or undervalues plot, but who foregrounds the emotional power of the actor’s body, the eloquence of camera placement, and the mute spectacle of staged conflict.

Gilberto Perez has described motion picture direction as an art of “dramatized showing,” a phrase that nicely captures the fundamentally rhetorical nature of decoupage and mise-en-scène and that enables us to see point-of-view shots and other camera positions as rhetorical and theatrical, not merely narrational (62). But in the history of American cinema, directors have approached this art differently, and they can be categorized in terms of the degree to which they employ grandiloquent images in the service of an overt rhetoric. John Ford, for example, was a disciple of Griffith who claimed to have played a Klansman in The Birth of a Nation and whose films overflow with populist sentiment, patriotic symbols, and painterly images of military horsemen seen against spectacular landscapes. Ford’s particular sort of masculine nationalism was memorably embodied by Will Rogers and Henry Fonda, plainspoken, folksy heroes who were quite unlike the grandiose orators of the nineteenth-century Eastern establishment, but were visualized in monumental style and posed in a way that invited us to see them as emblems of American history. Ford was also the director who propounded the notion that when the facts become legend, we should print the legend—the idea that rhetoric can be more important than truth. Thus in pictures such as My Darling Clementine (1946), the emotions seem authentic and the vistas breathtaking, even when the history is a lie.

At an apparently opposite extreme is a director such as Vincente Minnelli, whose musicals and melodramas create a luxurious excess of movement, light, fabric, and decor. Seen in relation to the ancient debates about rhetoric, Minnelli was a Sophist rather than a Platonist, because his pictures are so unabashedly about the flattery of the senses, the pleasures of dance, costume design, cosmetics, and above all color. Even in a small-town domestic melodrama such as Some Came Running (1959), he indulges in sentimental emotion, swirling action, and gaudy hues. To quote Lichtenstein again, “Flattery, cosmetics, artifice, appearance . . . all the terms of this metaphorical chain . . . qualify the effects of color as effects of seduction; they are the effects of illusion and pleasure. Essentially sophistic, color is also rhetorical, from the point of view of its effects: it is the figure of ornamentation and the ornament of figures” (53). Thus Ford and Minnelli, for all their differences, are opposite sides of the same coin: if the potential critique of Ford rests on a relatively recent notion of rhetoric as an instrument of phallic, masculine hierarchy, then the potential critique of Minnelli rests on an even older notion of rhetoric as a “feminine” and perverse practice of deception, an art of surfaces rather than essences.

In a different category altogether are the modernist directors, who employ an ironic rhetoric that questions its own validity. Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer, for example, exhibit varying degrees of detachment from their audiences—as in Buñuel’s Land without Bread (1932), which uses Mozart’s music and a travelogue-style narration to create a bottomless, Swiftian irony. Orson Welles is another obvious example, particularly in Citizen Kane (1941), a film that sets out to expose the manipulative bombast of a media tycoon and that treats every instance of public address, such as News on the March or Kane’s stem-winding campaign speech, as a hollow deception. The film’s claims to truth reside in the whispered “Rosebud” and the spectacular but ambiguous conclusion, which places the audience in the position of trespassers and tells them that a word can’t sum up a man’s life. Consider also The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which superbly adapts the rhetorical conventions of Booth Tarkington’s old-fashioned, omniscient novel while at the same time evoking pathos in relatively unorthodox ways. What seems unusual here, as in Kane and several of Welles’s other films, is the way in which the audience is invited to sympathize with characters that are also treated critically. “I believe it is necessary to give all the characters their best arguments,” Welles once told a group of Spanish interviewers, “including those I disagree with. . . . I do not want to resemble the majority of Americans, who are demagogues and rhetoricians” (Cobos and Pruneda, 16).