Blurbs from Ginny Woolf

This probably doesn’t have much to do with Woolf’s rhetoric, but I found it important to comment on:

“My dear you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.”
--The Angel in the House

Wow, this angel is still hanging out in my house. Well, I’ve got her caged, but she still squawks at me all the time. I’m a person who’s inclined to be blunt, but that sort of honesty isn’t expected of women, so it’s necessary for us to sugarcoat things. I’m under the impression that if I didn’t, I’d be called a “bitch,” whereas if a man acted the same way he’d be regarded as “hard to please,” and yes please read all the sexual innuendo into that phrase that you wish. At this point, I’m at the angry feminist stage of grappling with my demonic angel. I haven’t killed her yet, I suspect because I want to torture her first. Anyway, back to rhetoric.

On language and writing:

“[Sentence], a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.”

These remarks remind me of Cheris Kramerae’s view on the inadequacy of language for women. Woolf expounds upon this later when she discusses Mary Carmichael’s novel in which the author introduces a lesbian romance (at least as I understand it). Woolf claims that Carmichael’s language is not the best, but it is as good as it can be now. So, Woolf sees language appropriation as a process, one that must be carried out by future generations of women writers. But it’s not just language Woolf is talking about here, like Nietzsche, she’s using language as a metaphor for self expression. Just as women must kill the Angel in the House to be fully productive, fully self-aware, women must break apart the language system and rebuild it anew.

But that’s still using the master’s tools, so I’m not sure it will work, I’m not sure that it has worked.

I Failed Horticulturalsim

I faintly remember being assigned Nietzsche some years ago, for another course. I'm not sure which course it was, most likely one of a political science nature, but I know that I didn't do the reading. Such was the nature of my undergraduate years, especially before I started taking literature courses again.

What I remember about Nietzsche, I'm afraid, didn't work in his favor, because all that I could recall before today was that he said something about God being dead. Well, my indoctrinated, unquestioning self of a few years back, was clearly abhorred and never sought Nietzsche as an acquaintance since then.

Alas, things are quite different now. I'm reading through these selections, from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and I find myself wanting to underline and comment on nearly everything! Basically, Freddie's like, Truth and labels are arbitrary, nothing is absolute, everything has been socially and culturally constructed. In a modern sense, these claims may not be particularly relevatory to you. But take it from me, someone who's been wading through the icky, uppity, structured, and absolutist 19th century rhetors, that Nietzsche is on to some cool shit. Here's one of my favorites. I just want to eat these words all day:

Truths are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

While these words are certainly scathing, especially to the ears of the moral poiltical right (and dare I say Christian activists?), I think we should take a step back and contextualize. Nietzsche develops his argument, basically, by using language as a metaphor for how culture relies on signs, on agreed upon symbols, on arbitrary meaning. The only problem is, we've begun to treat morality and truth as absoloutes; we no longer question them, interrogate their meanings, their histories, their own contexts.

Paradoxically, I am a firm believer in not being too dedicated to a cause because complete immersion oftentimes leads to blindness and neglect. So, I'm rolling right along with Nietzsche when he questions these "truths." Meaning has to come from somewhere, right? Some find it in the stars, some in religion. What I think Nietzsche was trying to get it, is that we all need to think for ourselves, we need to stop relying prepackaged labels to explain the world around us. Take, for instance, this one example, he points out:

We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments!

He goes on to explain how these "arbitrary assignments" are also dependent on power, (though in this particular sample, he does not discuss power in the same realm as maybe Foucalt and Bakhtin do), in that differences are often labeled or designated as weaknesses, as in an inability to conform, to perform. Yep, that certainly sounds familiar. I feel like Judith Butler is sitting beside me and tapping her insistent finger along the margins of Nietzsche's rhetoric. I'm looking, Judy! I get it!

Richard Whately and Moral Absolutism

The first thing you'll probably notice about Richard Whately is that he has an incurable man-crush on Aristotle. While Whately attributes most of his fascination for the early philosopher to Aristotle's nearly infallible grasp of reasoning, you will also quickly notice that Whately sees a lot of himself in the ancient theorist. While my knowledge of the history of rhetoric is cursory at best, the particular anthology I'm reading (The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., Eds. Bizzel and Herzberg) offers a concise and well-written introduction that has helped me start connecting the dots, so to speak. As with the development of most theories, philosophies, etc., rhetoric follows a reactionary ebb and flow wherein one generation's proclivities are succeeded by the next generation's rejection of those same proclivities, creating schisms, splits, re-developments, and re-definitions along the way.

Though Whately was active in the early 19th century, he is very much a classicist. He adores and utilizes the texts of ancient Roman and Greek orators and philosophers. This, combined with Whately's own protestantism (he was a clergyman, in fact), makes much of his views on rhetoric and argumentation problematic. Most noticeable is Whately's dependence on moral absolutes (something the editors' introduction makes note of), and his further claims that a skilled rhetorician, as long as he speaks the truth, will win out in the end. This claim is even further complicated by Whately's repetitive emphasis on sound reasoning. Indeed, Whately asserts that where most rhetoricians fail is in their faulty grasp of logic. Yet, Whately's own source of logic is bound to the notion of absolute truth (I should point out that the footnotes indicate Whately pulled some of this view from Aristotle, whose own definition of "truth" is as platitudinous as the devotee's).

"Truth" for Whately depends largely on Christian morality, which perhaps in the context of this writing is not entirely problematic, but history easily shows that "Christian morality" has been used to propagate social immoralities as unethical as slavery (see: Edmund Ruffin's The Political Economy of Slavery) and sexism (see: Anything written by the apostle Paul). Furthermore, Whately's position assumes a universality that to a modern reader seems wholly faulty and, frankly, deviously presumptuous. Of course, I do not expect entirely ethical or inclusive writings from an 18th century pastor, but I do expect more sound reasoning from a rhetor who claims that reasoning is the basis for all successful rhetorical endeavors.

If there is one lesson I embrace from Whately's writing, it is his insistence that in order to be a successful orator/writer, one needs to be a language expert. Whately makes various comparisons to tools and labeling, but largely he reasons that language is how humans communicate and a sophisticated understanding of language will enable one to create a more effective message. Of course, Whately's definition of language depends on the aritsocracy's language and students' ability to emulate the forms of those who hold economic and social power. I'm guessing someone like Anzuldua would have a lot to say about Whately's assumptions, and none of them very nice, but I find myself oddly at ease with these claims, for it anticipates the modern composition rule "know your audience," and knowing one's audience is greatly concerned with understanding and utilizing that audience's language (be it MLA-laced academic prose or jargon-infused technical writing). So, if I were to translate Whately's insistence on linguistic expertise, I would say that a "good" writer would be able to wield multiple tools at once and know which tools were appropriate for particular circumstances.