The Death of Rhetoric
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The Death of Rhetoric Terry Eagleton
Published online: 24 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Poetry is about the experience of meaning as well as the meaning of experience. To read a poem is to feel one’s way into the inner workings of its language, rather than to peer through that speech to an extractable truth. It is to treat words as constitutive of meaning, not simply as reflective of it. This, to be sure, is true of all verbal acts, even the most banal, but poetry is the place where the performative, rhetorical dimensions of speech rise to supreme self-consciousness. No poem reports on an experience without casting a continual sideways glance at itself. It is this, among other things, that marks the difference between Wallace Stevens and a report on the sanitation system of southeast Montana. The early poetry of T.S. Eliot, for example, tempts us to read through its verbal density to a determinate meaning, while mischievously withholding any such semantic consolation. To write “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” as Eliot does at the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is to cajole the unwary reader into wondering how on earth the evening can resemble an anesthetized patient, whereas the true effect of the lines is surely to draw ironic attention to the kind of dislocated modern sensibility that could come up with such an incongruous simile in the first place. The image concerns form, not content. What matters is its rhetorical effect, not its abstractable sense. Terry Eagleton is former Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universities of Lancaster, UK, and Notre Dame; [email protected]. His latest book is The Event of Literature (Yale University Press, 2012). How to Study Literature is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2013.
The Death of Rhetoric
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Meaning in poetry, Eliot once remarked, was simply the piece of meat the burglar throws to the guard dog in order to distract it while he goes about his stealthy business of raiding your home. The burglar here is the poem, and the reader the guard dog. Conscious meaning keeps the mind harmlessly preoccupied while the poem goes about its proper task of raiding the reader’s unconscious and stimulating his nerve endings, infiltrating the visceral regions and modifying the rhythms of our blood and breathing. It is no wonder that Eliot was quite startlingly cavalier about critical interpretations of his own work. He was not greatly interested in semantic content, any more than one inquires into the semantic content of an acquaintance’s cheery “Good morning!” It is the performative act that counts. Poetry, in short, is a thoroughly corporeal affair. It restores to our language something of the material thickness and intricacy of which everyday speech denudes it. This is not to suggest that it is language cocooned within itself. On the contrary, the denser the si
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