The only thing is that at this point (the only point that has become famous throughout the centuries, and we are only at the end of the first section) Longinus wonders whether the Sublime can be thought about, and notes immediately that many people in his unfortunate times believe that it is an innate skill, a natural talent. But Longinus believes that natural talent can be preserved and made to bear fruit only by method, in other words by artistry, and thus he proceeds with his enterprise, which, as many people have forgotten or never known, is to define semiotic strategies that produce in the reader or listener the effect of Sublimity.
And there is no Russian formalist, no Prague-school or French structuralist, no Belgian rhetorician or German “Stilkritiker” who has spent as much energy as Longinus (even though only over a dozen pages or so) in exploring the strategies of the Sublime, and showing how they work. I mean showing how they work as they come into being and are then arranged on the linear surface of the text, reflecting the deepest workings of style back toward the readers eyes.
And in fact Longinus, Pseudo or not, lists the five sources of the sublime: the capacity “to conceive noble thoughts,” the ability “to display and arouse noble passions,” the way “to create appropriate rhetorical figures,” ingenuity in nobility of expression through “the choice of lexis and the accurate use of figures,” and lastly the “general overall arrangement of the text.” These are the sources of a dignified and elevated style. Because above anything else Longinus knew, against those who in his time identified the semiotic passion of the Sublime with the physical experience of excitement, that “there are some passions which are very far from the Sublime, and rather squalid, such as lamentation, dejection and fear, and at the other extreme many examples of a Sublime devoid of emotion.”
And we can see Longinus embark on his search for the sublime photosynthesis that produces the feeling of Sublimity: he shows how in order to produce an effect of grandeur in describing the Divine, Homer gives us the sense of a cosmic distance by way of a brilliant hypotyposis, and conveys the sense of this cosmic expanse through a prolonged description of physical distances; elsewhere he sees how Sappho conveys interior pathos just by bringing to the foreground a battle that involves the eyes, tongue, skin, and ears; or he contrasts a shipwreck in Homer with one by Aratus of Soloi, where the latter in a sense anesthetizes the imminence of death with a simple choice of metaphor (“Only a thin bark keeps Hades at bay”), whereas in Homer Hades is not mentioned, and for that very reason looms even larger. We see him studying strategies for amplification and hypotyposis, exploring the whole panoply of figures, asyndeta, sorites, and hyperbata, and noting how conjunctions weaken the discourse, polyptoton reinvigorates it, and shifting tenses dramatize it.
But one should not think of this as nothing more than a series of stylistic analyses. Longinus deals with the opposition and interchange of characters, the shift from one verbal tense to another, the way the author addresses the reader, or identifies himself with the character, and examines the grammar of these narrative manipulations. He does not ignore periphrases and circumlocutions, idiomatic phrases, metaphors, similes, and hyperboles. It is all one huge stylistic-rhetorical machine—of narrative structures, of voices, looks, and tenses—which is seen at work, analyzing texts and comparing them, in order to reveal and make us admire the strategy of the Sublime.
It seems that only the simple-minded fall into excitement, while Longinus knows the chemistry of their passions, and for that reason enjoys even greater pleasure.
In section 39 Pseudo-Longinus sets out to deal with “the compositional harmony in the arrangement of words,” a harmony that is not only a natural positioning aimed at producing persuasion and pleasure but also an astonishing tool for achieving sublimity and pathos. Longinus knows (because of the ancient Pythagorean tradition) that the flute generates passions in listeners, reducing them to a state of frenzy like so many Corybants, even though they are not musical experts; he knows that the sounds of the lyre, which on their own are devoid of sense, produce an effect of enchantment. But he knows that the flute obtains its effects “by giving a certain movement to the rhythm,” and the lyre acts on the soul because of its “varying modulations” and the blending of its harmonies. What he wants to explain is not the effect, which is obvious to everyone, but the grammar of its production.
It is in this context that, when he moves on to verbal harmony, “which captures the soul along with the ear,” he finds himself analyzing a phrase of Demosthenes that seems to him not just miraculous but sublime: “This decree made the danger looming over the city move on, like a cloud.” And he adds:
Here the concept is as noble as the rhythm. The entire sentence is expressed in dactylic rhythm, the most noble rhythm and the one most suitable for producing grandeur, and it is for this reason that it is typical of the heroic meter, the finest we know. Try to move the words from their present position to anywhere you like: “This decree made, like a cloud, the danger looming over the city move on,” or try to get rid of just one syllable, saying “moved it on, like a cloud,” and you will understand how much the harmony is consonant with its sublimity.
In fact the expression “like a cloud” (hosper nephos) has a long first foot, with four beats; but if you eliminate one syllable and have “like cloud” (hos nephos), you instantly mutilate its grandeur by this reduction. On the other hand, if you add a syllable, saying “made the danger move on, as though it were (hosperei) a cloud,” you are saying the same thing but you do not have the same rhythmic cadence, because by lengthening the final syllables the spark of the sublime is weakened and diluted.
Even without checking this against the original Greek, the spirit of this analysis is clear. PseudoLonginus is performing textual semiotics. And he is performing an act of criticism—at least according to the canons of his time—and explaining to us why we find something sublime, and what would need to be changed in the body of the text to lose that effect. And so, right from the most distant origins (for if we go back even further, to Aristotle’s Poetics, we find the same thing), people knew how to read a text, and how one must not be afraid of close reading, nor of a metalanguage that sometimes seems terroristic (for Longinus’s time his was no less terroristic than the metalanguage that terrorizes many people today).
Consequently, we have to remain faithful to our origins, as regards both the concept of style and that of true criticism, as well as the concept of analyses of textual strategies. What the best semiotics of style has achieved and continues to achieve is the same as what our predecessors accomplished. Our only commitment is, by serious and continued work, without giving in to any blackmail, to humiliate those who are our inferiors.
Final address at the Convegno dell’Associazione Italian di Studi Semiotici on Lo stile—Gli stili, held in Feltre, in September 1995.
LES SEMAPHORES SOUS LA PLUIE
How is space represented in words? This problem has a history of its own, and the rhetorical tradition classifies the techniques of verbal representation of space (as of every other visual experience) under the heading of hypotyposis, or “evidentia,” which is sometimes considered the same as, and sometimes judged to have affinities with, “illustratio,” “demonstrado,” “ekphrasis” or “de-scriptio,” “enargeia,” etcetera.
Unfortunately, all definitions of hypotyposis are circular, which is to say that they define as hypotyposis that figure through which visual experiences are represented or evoked through verbal procedures. Look at the definitions that come from the major exponents of classical rhetoric, from Hermogenes to Longinus, from Cicero to Quintilian, which I quote from Lausberg without specifying who said what, since one seems to borrow from the other: (i) “credibilis rerum imago quae velut in rem praesentem perducere audientes videtur” (a believable image of something that seems to lead the public into its very presence); (ii) “proposita forma rerum ita expressa verbis ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri” (a form of things proposed by the speaker in words in such a way that they seem to be visible rather than audible); (iii) “quae tam dicere videtur quam ostendere, praesentans oculis quod demonstrat” (things that the speaker seems to display as much as to say, presenting before our eyes what he is trying to show); (iv) “quasi gestarum sub oculis inductio” (a kind of parading before the eyes of things that have been done), and so on.
I have before my eyes (but this time in the literal sense of the expression) the paper on hypotyposis given by Hermann Parret at the Decade de Cerisy, which took place in July 1996, and here too this expedition into the forest of the most modern theoreticians does not seem to yield appreciable results.* Dumarsais
