Table of Contents (page numbers do not apply to web version)

One: Some Theorists: Antiquity and the Middle Ages…………………… 1

Two: Some Modern Theorists………………………….…………………... 23

Three: Practitioners: From Ambrose to Dante……………………………... 40

Four: Logos and Eros in the Early Renaissance…………………………… 65

Five: Rabelais…………………………………………………………………83

Six: Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Milton………………………..100

Seven: Seventeenth-Century Poetry: The Lyric……………………….……. 111

Eight: Clare and Shelley: Two Kinds of Romantic Visionaries…………… 127

Nine: Emily Dickinson………………………………………………………. 135

Ten: Victor Hugo: The Revolutionary Logos……………………………... 151

Eleven: Baudelaire: The Limits of Perversity………………………………... 183

Twelve: Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies…………………….…. 191

Thirteen: Wallace Stevens: The Aesthetic of Incarnation……………………... 217

Fourteen: Early American Prose Fiction………………………………………... 229

Fifteen: Hawthorne…………………………………………………………….. 242

Sixteen: Melville………………………………………………………………… 257

Seventeen: Modern English Fiction………………………………………………. 281

Appendix: An Upanishad…………………………………………………………. 290

Footnotes……………………………………………………………………….. 293 – 317

Part I: Some Theorists

Worrying about words is like worrying about God, or, as Kenneth Burke writes: “statements that great theologians have made about the nature of ‘God’ might be adapted mutatis mutandis for use as purely secular observations on the nature of words.”[i][i] Purely secular observations, however, tend to retain traces of sacred impurities, and those traces often seem able to reproduce some of the structures from which they have been drawn, occasionally becoming positively virulent. When Greeks philosophers tried to energize their vocabulary with terms and images borrowed from the mystery cults, “the adoption of a ritual terminology to assist and incite the exercise of intelligence proved exceedingly useful as a fiction, but ended, as such fictions are likely to do, by betraying the late Platonists into a revival of magic.”[ii][ii]

Figures of speech, then, are dangerous necessities; the danger lies in the audience’s (or reader’s) fallible powers of distinguishing the letter from the spirit, a tendency that may spring from weakness of intellect, but may also spring from a universally persistent desire to obliterate the distinction, in the hope of achieving a condition variously described as logos, presence, or Dasein. In addition to the uncomfortable polarity letter/spirit, polarities like word/thing, prose/poetry, and absence/presence provide central anxieties for many writers. Perhaps the most prolific antithesis with which grammarians, rhetoricians (including poets, novelists, playwrights, and literary critics) concern themselves is that of language and speech. This particular antithesis seems to have taken on the function of a magical incantation in modern literature, although its roots may be found in Plato, as well as in the Upanishads.

When writers focus upon the hypothetical polarity of speech and writing, a particular set of natural symbols recur persistently, even inevitably. In “La Pharmacie de Platon,” Jacques Derrida isolates and analyzes this set, providing the basis for a study of what I shall call the Incarnational Matrix. Derrida uses, as a point of embarkation, a passage from the Phaedrus, in which Socrates constructs an antithetical scheme out of mythic elements, to articulate a paradox central to grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, myth, and theology. In response to Phaedrus’ naïve enthusiasm for a text he has brought with him, Socrates tells him a story:

I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the God himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wise and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by the affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.[iii][iii]

Socrates goes on to insist upon the superiority of the spoken to the written word, finally leading Phaedrus to place his faith in, “the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called the image.”[iv][iv]

On the basis of this passage and a number of other passages from other works by Plato, Derrida produces a ninety-five page meditation on the nature of language as pharmakon, “à la fois remède et poision.”[v][v] His insistence that, “Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premier vu, la loi de sa composition et la règle de son jeu,” seems roughly in accord with the principle of decomposition or deconstruction advocated by Curtius, as well as with the pre-Socratic fragment in which Heraclitus insists that, “an unapparent connection is stronger than an apparent one.”[vi][vi]

The pair of opposites that dictates the rules of the game for the texts of Plato with which Derrida concerns himself is logos/écriture. Logos is a richly ambigious term, comprehensive, provocative, and elusive. It may designate speech, reality, immediate experience, unbearable truth, a hidden order beneath the surface of things, presence as opposed to absence, the thing in itself, divinity, or all of the above.[vii][vii] In Derrida’s analysis of Plato, logos, symbolized by the sun, represents the presence of unbearable, blinding, ungraspable truth. Live speech is the medium, or pharmakon, by means of which truth may be reduced to bearable intensity. In a sense, then, language provides a shelter from the sun; logos, however, is in danger of losing its wealth, vitality, intensity, and breath (pneuma or spiritus) when it is no longer “where speech most breathes, even in the mouths of men,” but instead is frozen in letters, grammata, écriture. Writing is potentially murderous, specifically parricidal according to Derrida’s reading of the text; Theuth, the god of writing, is also, as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses, the god of death. Theuth is also associated with the moon; as the moon is either the opposite or the supplement of the sun, so l’écriture can be either the opposite or the supplement of parole.

A major term in Derrida’s lexicon is la differance, a word by means of which he turns grammar into metaphysics: “la differance, disparition de le présence originaire, est à la fois la condition de la possibilité et la condition de la impossibilité de la verité.”[viii][viii] For Derrida, following Plato, the grammarian performs the first incision into the life of language, perceiving and imposing la differance on the infinite flow of speech (logos), dividing sounds into words, words into syllables, syllables into vowels and consonants. Every articulation, then, is a separation, an alienation, and, by ultimate imaginative extension, a murder (“we murder to dissect”).[ix][ix]

If administered in bearable form and quantity, as a result of this series of anatomies, logos is necessarily reduced, and may ultimately, if handled by an incompetent “pharmacist,” be destroyed. Such a symbolic murder, Derrida suggests, is a parricidal act, since logos, the sun, and the father are roughly equivalent terms in the myths that inform Plato’s texts. Socrates himself, the source of light and intellectual father of Athens, is murdered by his society as a scapegoat (pharmakos). However, the case for écriture is not entirely hopeless; the Phaedrus concludes with a distinction between two kinds of writing, one of which, the tilled field, is preferable to the other, elaborate, artificially forced Garden of Adonis.[x][x]

Derrida reads Plato in the presence of Saussure, Heidegger, Valery, Mallarmè, and a constellation of post-war structuralists, among whom the necessity for some kind of dialectical scheme (and in some cases for a theatrical expression of the scheme) seems axiomatic. To appreciate the peculiar nature of twentieth-century deployments of these antitheses, a brief sketch of some of the ways in which Graeco-Roman discussions of rhetorical decorum were adapted by Christian writers to help them represent Christ, whom they perceived as the Logos, is imperative.

According to Morris Croll, “The history of Greek and Roman style is chiefly the story of the relations of the genus grande and the genus humile. Theoretically the two kinds are not hostile or exclusive of each other… But in fact they almost always proved to be rivals.”[xi][xi] The antithesis used to distinguish between theses styles might also be Asiatic/Attic, and were sometimes like those made between poetry and prose.[xii][xii] Much of the discussion of style in antiquity centers upon diction, focusing upon levels of diction that seem to reflect levels of social stature, as Erich Auerbach describes it:

…in the most wide-spread view the low style implied sharp realism and homespun vigor. The style levels are particularly evident in the ancient theatre; in comedy persons and events of daily life are treated in the low, and occasionally in the intermediate, style; in tragedy, legendary figures, princes and heroes in extraordinary situations are made to speak with lofty dignity… Most educated pagans regarded the early Christian writings as ludicrous, confused and abhorrent… The content struck them as childish and absurd superstition, and the form as an affront to good taste.[xiii][xiii]

According to Auerbach, Augustine eventually comes to understand that style of the Bible does not proceed from an ignorance of rhetorical decorum, but rather from the necessity to find a medium in which to offer an otherwise unrepresentable paradox: logos, by definition timeless and boundless, at one point in time and space put in a flesh-and-blood appearance:

“…humilis became the most important adjective characterizing the Incarnation…. The humility of the Incarnation derives its full force from the contrast with Christ’s divine nature: man and God, lowly and subline, humilis et sublimes…. The lowly, or humble style is the only medium in which such sublime mysteries can be brought within the reach of men. It constitutes a parallel to the Incarnation, which was also a humilitas in the same sense, for men could not have endured the splendor of Christ’s divinity.[xiv][xiv]

Like the sun, then, the presence of Christ is blindingly unbearable, and language must be both a shelter from the sun, and an appropriate, decorous substitute for it. As Logos, and as pharmakos, Christ is appropriately represented in sermo humilis; significantly, Socrates too, the Athenian pharmakos and medium for the logos, speaks in ordinary language much of the time. As Alcibiades describes the technique in the Symposium, to understand Socrates’ meaning, we must open, if not deconstruct the humble, vulgarly absurd surface of the text:

…his talk most of all resembles the Silenuses that are made to open. If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when they are opened, and you obtain a fresh view of them by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are only speeches which have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – nay, so completely, intent on all things proper for the study of such as would attain both grace and worth.[xv][xv]

Socrates, then, is the model for delivering divine speech in sermo humilis; Christ, however, is divine speech.

The pattern of images deconstructed by Derrida in Plato’s texts combined with the Christian reversal of Graeco-Roman notions of rhetorical decorum, provides most of the elements and strategies of the Incarnational Matrix. Philo the Jew provides the remaining elements, in his attempt to Platonize the Old Testament. Preparing the ground for Augustine, Philo adds Sophia (Wisdom) as an equivalent of logos, thus making a female figure possible as a symbol of ultimate truth (logos is masculine in grammatical gender, sophia feminine); he associates logos/sophia with a fountain (pêgê), and he identifies angels as logoi.[xvi][xvi]

The interchangeability of logos and sophia will generate fruitful confusions in later literature, since Philo is not fastidiously categorical in his speculations. E.R. Goodenough points out some of these dialectical violations:

…the logos can be represented as derived from Sophia, or Sophia derivative from the logos, or the two can be made completely identical…. Philo says that the logos is the source of Sophia (De fuga et Inventione 97), and again that the logos flows from Sophia, its source, like a river (De Somniis ii., 242).[xvii][xvii]

In his relentlessly allegorical reading of Genesis, Philo provides even more elaborately paradoxical erotic resonances for logos-sophia:

…in the amazing allegory of Isaac the Self-Taught, who achieves the mystic marriage with Sophia the ever Virgin, daughter of God, daughter of the logos, wife of God, mother of the logos, scatterer of the seeds that ennoble man, man’s mother and man’s own wife in mystic rapture. A greater jumble of sexes and incests could not be imagined, for at the end it is evident that Isaac has married his own mother.[xviii][xviii]

Associating logos, at least in its meaning as speech or eloquence, with eros is not an original contribution by Philo; as Pedro Lain-Entralgo has shown, peitho and eros are linked by Aeschylus and earlier writers.[xix][xix] Philo, however, makes a strikingly dramatic use of the connection.

Philo also reinforces connections already made in Plato’s texts; for example, he asserts explicitly that the sun is a figure for logos:

Why, then, do we wonder any longer at His assuming the likeness of angels, seeing that for the succour of those that are in need He assumes that of men? Accordinly, when He says “I am the God who was seen of thee in the place of God” (Gen. xxxi. 13), understand that He occupied the place of an angel only so far as appeared, without changing, with a view to the profit of him who was not yet capable of seeing the true God. For just as those whoa re unable to see the sun itself see the gleam of the parhelion and take it for the sun, and take the halo round the moon for that luminary itself, so some regard the image of God, his angel the Word, as His very self.[xx][xx]

However, the sun is not limited to one symbolic function; it may also symbolize the human mind, Philo tells us, in a passage that also suggest that, under certain conditions, the absence of the sun’s light can provoke a transcendent vision not possible in its presence:

“Sun” is his name under a figure for our mind. For what the reasoning faculty is in us, the sun is in the world, since both of them are light-bringers, one sending forth the whole world the light which our sense perceive, the other shedding mental rays upon ourselves the medium of apprehension. So while the radiance of the mind is still all around us, when it pours as it were a noonday beam into the whole soul, we are self-contained, not possessed. But when it comes to its setting, naturally ecstasy and divine possession and madness fall upon us. For when the light of God shines, the human light sets; when the divine light sets, the human dawns and rises. This is what regularly befalls the fellowship of the prophets. The mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine Spirit, but when that departs the mind returns to its tenancy. Mortal and immortal may not share the same home. And therefore the setting of reason and the darkness which surrounds it produce ecstasy and inspired frenzy.[xxi][xxi]

Sun, then, can be a figure for noûs in its reasoning capacity; pneûma evicts noûs temporarily, in the mantic fit, when the divine presence takes up temporary residence.

During his exposition of Jacob’s dream, Philo modulates into a discussion of the figural uses to which Moses puts the sun, including the use of sun as logos:

The third meaning in which he employs the title sun is that of the divine Word, the pattern, as has already been mentioned, of the sun which makes its circuit in the sky. It is of the divine Word that it is said, “The sun went forth upon the earth, and Lot entered into Zoar, and the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire” (Gen. xix. 23ff.). For the Word of God, when it arrives at our earthly composition, in the case of those who are akin to virtue and turn away to her, gives help and succour, thus affording them a refuge and safety, but sends upon her adversaries irreparable ruin.[xxii][xxii]

The sun, then, can symbolize the divine Word, which, like a pharmakon (though Philo does not use the language of medicine in this passage), can have positive and negative effects on men.

Language as a shelter from the sun is a possible implication of the passage in which Philo explicates Genesis xiii., 1–3, connecting house with logos, suggesting moreover that speech is a paternal house:

And speech is our “father’s house,” “father’s” because Mind is our father, sowing in each of the parts of the body of the faculties that issue from itself, and assigning to them their workings, being in control and charge of them all; house – because mind has speech for its house or living-room, secluded from the rest of the homestead…. And marvel not at Moses having given to speech the title of Mind’s house in man; for indeed he says that God, the mind of the universe, has for his house His own Word.[xxiii][xxiii]

Logos, then, functions as father, house, and sower.

According to Philo, it may also be a cutting instrument, although Philo, unlike Derrida, does not see a melancholy polarity of absence and presence as the result of the work of [word in Greek] commenting on Genesis xv, he remarks:

Then he continues, “he divided them in the middle,” but he does not add who this “he” is. He wishes you to think of God who cannot be shown, as severing through the Severer of all things, that is his Word, the whole succession of things material and immaterial whose natures appear to us to be knitted together and united. That severing Word whetted to an edge of utmost sharpness never ceases to divide. For when it has dealt with all sensible objects down to the atoms and what we call “indivisibles,” it passes on from them to the realm of reason’s observation and proceeds to divide it into a vast and infinite number of parts. It divides the “plates of gold,” as Moses tells us, “into hairs” (Ex. xxxvii. 10), that is into length without breadth, like immaterial lines. So it divided each of the three in the middle, the soul into rational and irrational, speech into true and false, sense into presentations where the object is real and apprehended, and presentations where it is not. These sections He at once placed “opposite to each other,” rational to irrational, true to false, apprehending to non-apprehending. The birds he left undivided, for incorporeal and divine forms of knowledge cannot be divided into conflicting opposites.[xxiv][xxiv]

Splitting hairs, the logos seems to behave like a conventional Greek philosopher, who finds antitheses useful rather than threatening. As Philo says elsewhere, “That is the nature of opposites, it is through the existence of one that we chiefly recognize the existence of the other.”[xxv][xxv]

One antithesis, however, is the basis of a mixing process that seems to anticipate the central figure of the Eucharist, in a passage that describes the pharmaceutical effet of a combination of liquid logos and pneûma:

He took, we read, the half of the bloods and poured it into mixing bowls and the half he poured upon the altar (Ex. xxiv. 6), to show us that sacred wisdom is of a twofold kind, divine and human. The divine kind is without a mixture or infusion and therefore is poured as an offereing to God, who knows no mixture or infusion and is in his isolation a unity. But the human is mixed with infusion and thus is scattered abroad upon us, who are a mixed compounded product of infusion, to create in us oneness of mind and fellowship, and in fact a “mixing” of our various parts and ways of conduct. But the part of the soul which is free from mixture and infusion is the mind in its perfect purit. This mind filled with the breath of inspiration from heaven above is guarded from malady and injury, and then reduced to a single element is fitly rendered in its entirety as a holy libation to His who inspired it and guarded it from all evil that could harm it. The mixed kind is the senses, and for this nature has created the proper mixing-bowls. The eyes are the “bowls” of sight, the ears of hearing, the nostrils of the sense of smell, and each of the others has its fitting vessel. On these bowls the holy Word pours of the blood, desiring that our irrational part should be quickened and become in some sense rational, following the divine courses of the mind, and purified from the objects of sense, which lure it with all their deceitful and seductive force.[xxvi][xxvi]

Philo also reads the story of Cain and Abel as a lesson in the uses of rhetoric, incidentally fashioning a connection between logos and a spring; he begins by explaining the significance of eulogia:

A third gift is “blessing” or excellence of reason and speech, and apart from this it is not possible to make the former gracious gifts secure. He says “And I will bless thee,” i.e. “I will endow thee with excellent reason and speech.” “Blessing” or “eulogy” is a word compounded of “well” and “logos.” Of these, “well” connotes nothing but excellence: “logos” has two aspects, one resembling a spring, and is called “reason,” while utterance by mouth and tongue is like its outflow, and is called “speech.”[xxvii][xxvii]

Next he, like Plato, associates logos and wealth (ploutos):

That each species of logos should be improved is vast wealth, the understanding having good reasoning at its command for all things great and small, and utterance being under the guidance of right training.[xxviii][xxviii]

Some men, however, are not trained correctly, Philo continues, illustrating his proposition with the example of Cain and Abel:

For perfection depends, as we know, on both divisions of logos, the reason which suggests the ideas with clearness, and the speech which gives unfailing expression to them. Do you not notice Abel, whose name stands for one to whom things mortal are a grief and things immortal are full of happiness, how, though he has the advantage of a faultless understanding, yet through lack of training in speaking he is worsted by Cain, a clever wrestler able to prevail by skill rather than strength? Wherefore, admiring as I do his character for its rich natural endowment, I find fault with him in so far as, when challenged to a contest of words, he came forward to engage in it, whereas he to have maintained his wonted quietude, totally disregarding his quarrelsome brother; and if he was quite bent on fighting it out, not to have entered the lists until he had some practice in scientific grips and tricks; for village sages usually get the worst of it when they encounter those who have acquired the cleverness of the town.[xxix][xxix]

After giving this practical advice to Abel, Philo proceeds to ponder Aaron’s rod, equating it with God’s finger, which in turn is analogous with “divine rescript,” since God’s finger wrote the tables of the law.

Philo offers many more illustrations of some of the ways in which the thought, language, and imagery that penetrate Platonic, Neo-Platonic, and Stoic texts can influence a reading of the Old Testament; certainly Augustine nodded when he claimed that to read narrowly, according to the letter only, was to read more judaico.[xxx][xxx] However, Philo’s writings should not be seen as an exclusive source, but rather as a significant, vivid manifestation of a matrix of images that had become the common property of an entire literary culture. One might as easily use any number of passages from the Corpus Hermeticum, for example, to illustrate these patterns; when Poimandres asks for an explication of the radiant visionary experience he has just undergone, his guide replies:

This light is me, nôus, your God, he who exists before damp nature arose out of darkness. As for the luminous Logos born of nôus, it is God’s son.[xxxi][xxxi]

Christian theologians, then, clearly had a rich thesaurus of images and strategies upon which to draw when they began their attempts to describe the ineffable, to represent a presence that is only bearable when absent, to square the circle.

The first priority of the church fathers was to prevent literalists from mangling the text of the Bible. Tertullian warns us that, “prior est animus quam litera…. prior est sermo quam liber, prior sensus quam stylus, et prior homo ipse quam philosophus et poeta.” (The spirit comes before the letter, speech before the book, meaning before style, the man before the philosopher and poet).[xxxii][xxxii] Socrates’ distinction between the spoken and the written word, then, becomes a central element in Christian thought. Taking issue with Ernst Curtius’ categorization of Christianity as “the religion of the book,” Henri de Lubac insists that it is the religion of the spoken word:

Aussi la loi évangélique n’est-elle point une lex scripta. Le Christianisme n’est point à proprement parler une ‘religion du livre:’ il est religion de la Parole, - mai non pas uniquement ni principalement de la Parole sans sa forme écrite. Il est la religion du Verbe, - non d’un verbe écrit et muet, mais d’un Verbe incarné et vivant.”[xxxiii][xxxiii]

In making the distinction between the spirit and the letter, some theologians use a contrast between the Old and New Testaments; as the incarnation of the Logos, the New Testament is the sun, the Old Testament is the moon:

Vetus Testamentum littera est; novum, spiritus… Vetus si litteram sequimur, nunc occidit; novum vivificat… Sunt enim mysteria Christi, veritas et lux; mysteria Moysi, vestigia et umbrae. Veritas semper manet; vestigium tollitur. Ideo de eminentia novi Testamenti supra vetus instruit Corinthios Paulus… Litterae, nisi spiritibus, id est vocalibus informentur, vacuae sunt et inutiles, ex nihil ex se possunt… Ita vetus Testamentum, nisi Spiritu Christi animetur, nisi Evangelio informetur, vacuum est et inutile… Non alia luce quam novae lex vetus micat, ut luna, non alia quam solis.[xxxiv][xxxiv]

(The Old Testament is the letter, the new the script… If we follow the old letter, it kills; if we follow the new, it revives… The mysteries of Christ are truth and light; the mysteries of Moses are traces and shadows. Truth is eternal; traces are swept away. So Paul instructs the Corinthians on the superiority of the New to the Old Testament… Unless they are filled with breath, that is with spoken sounds, letters are empty and useless, and nothing can come of them… So the Old Testament, unless filled with the breath of Christ, is empty and useless… The old law shines with no other light than that of the new, as the moon shines with no other light than that of the sun).

Luther also argues for the historical priority of verbum dei non scriptum, emphasizing the importance of viva vox:

In the New Testament, the sermons are to be spoken aloud in public and to bring forth in terms of speech and hearing what was formerly hidden in the letter and in secret vision. Forasmuch as the New Testament is nothing else but the unlocking and revealing of the Old Testament… That, too, is why Christ himself did not write his teaching, as Moses did his, but delivered it orally, also commanded to deliver it orally and gave no command to write it… For that reason it is not at all the manner of the New Testament to write works of Christian doctrine, but there should be everywhere, without books, good, learned, spiritually minded, diligent preachers to draw the living word from the ancient Scriptures and constantly bring it to life before the people, as the apostles did. For before ever they wrote, they had preached to and converted the people by word of mouth, which also was their real apostolic and New Testament work… That books had to be written, however, is at once a great failure and weakness of spirit that was enforced by necessity and not by the manner of the New Testament.[xxxv][xxxv]

For Luther, then, as well as for Socrates, écriture is a secondary, untrustworthy, unfortunate activity.

Two other Platonic patterns are of significant use to medieval theologians: the sun may symbolize Logos, and Logos may function as pharmakon.

St. Bonaventura provides the most extensive list of figurative uses of the sun; among the sixteen senses, he includes:

Anagogie: aeterna Dei Trinitas, exemplaria sapientia, Angelica sublimitas, Ecclesia triumphans. Allegoria: Humanitas assumpta… Mater Dei Maria, Ecclesia militans, Sacra Scriptura. Tropologie: spiritualis gratia…, spiritualis vita,… spiritualis cathedra, spiritualis pugna.”[xxxvi][xxxvi]

Derivable from the sun, then, are écriture (sacra scriptura), pneuma-spiritus (spiritualis…), and two kinds of shelters from the sun (ecclesia, cathedra).

The sun, however, can also be an ambiguous symbol, at times signifying Logos, but at other times signifying persecutio, and at other times signifying present time (an interesting variation on the notion of presence).[xxxvii][xxxvii]

Another ambiguous term, pharmakon functions both positively and negatively for Augustine. The wrong use of language is like a bad drink, he tells us, condemning the pleasure to be found in perusing pagan mythology:

Non accuso verba quasi vasa lecta atque pretiosa, sed vinum erroris, quod in eis nobis propinabatur ab ebriis doctoribus, et nisi biberemus, caedebamur nec appellare ad aliquem iudicem sobrium licebat.

(I do not accuse the words themselves, chosen, precious vessels, but the wine of error poured into them by drunken men of learning; unless we drank, we were beaten, nor were we allowed to appeal to a sober judge).[xxxviii][xxxviii]

Drunkenness, however, can also represent a positive state, induced by an appropriate use of language, as Augustine indicates in his celebration of the death of Nebridius, who may now be said to be intoxicated by God’s Logos:

Ibi vivit, unde me multa interrogabat homuncionem inexpertum. Iam non ponit aurem ad os meum, sed spiritale os ad fontem tuum et bibit, quantum potest, sapientiam pro aviditate sua sine fine felix. Nec eum sic arbitror inebriari ex ea, ut obliviscatur mei, cum tu, domine, quem potat ille, nostri sis memor.

(He lives in the place about which he used to ask so many questions of me, ignorant, mere mortal. Now he does not place his ear at my mouth, but he places a spiritual ear to your fountain, and drinks, as much as he is able, of your wisdom, avidly, and endlessly happy. Nor do I think him so inebriated that he has forgotten me, since you, O Lord, when he drinks of you, remind him of me).[xxxix][xxxix]

Augustine thus continues the association of Logos, drink, and pêgê.

Less dramatically, but more pharmaceutically, Evagrius and Bernard proclaim the curative efficacy of Christ-Logos: “Verbum breviatum faciet Deus in omni terra. Hoc est Verbum, quod verbera nostra sanavit…. Verbum abbreviatum est abbrevians, salubre compendium!”[xl][xl]

Eventually, Christian writers incorporated figurae from pagan mythology to help represent some of the qualities of the logos. Alexander Neckam, for example, interprets Mercury’s rod as a symbol of the negative and positive pharmaceutical qualities of speech:

Verba namque penetrant usque ad penitiores partes animi, adeo ut nunc aculeo doloris animus pungatur, nunc imagines laetitiae letus sibi depingat. Numquid enim frustra in virga ercurii quaedam pars esse vivificans, quaedam esse mortifera, fingitur? Nonne in minibus linguae mors et vita?

(Words enter deep within the soul, so that at times the soul is pierced by the sting of pain, at times joyfully depicts for itself images of delight. Is the painting of the rod of Mercury pointless, that represents on part as life-giving, and another part as deadly? Are not life and death in the power of the tongue?)[xli][xli]

In a commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, possibly also by Alexander Neckham, Mercury and Christ are interchangeable:

Et quod ubicumque dignitas Mercurii Philologie dignitati proponitur in hoc loco. Mercurius Verbum, id est filius Dei intelligitur. Aliter enim non procederet cum rationem mentis sermone oris liqueat esse digniorem. Ei autem, id est filio Dei Philologia coniungitur, id est homo qui duce ratione tendit ad suum principium. Quid ergo per Mercurium et Philologiam nisi sponsum et sponsam, id est, Christum et Ecclesiam intelligimus?

(The fact that the dignity of Mercury is everywhere preferred to that of Philologia is evident here. Mercury is understood as the Word, that is, the son of God. Otherwise it would make no sense, since the disclosure of the mind is nobler than the speech of the mouth. To this, that is, to the son of God, is Philologia wedded, that is, the man, who with reason as his guide, tends to his origin. What then should be understood through Mercury and Philologia if not husband and wife, that is Christ and the Church).[xlii][xlii]

Greek myth, then, as well as philosophy, provides grist for the Christian exegetical mill.

Christian writers, however, were not the sole medieval exploiters of the incarnational matrix, as Gershon Scholem has demonstrated extensively in his writings on the Kabbala. The Jews, however, do not show great anxiety about écriture; in fact, they place their highest hopes in it, associating light and breath with grammata. Scholem contrasts the attitude of the philologist with that of the Kabbalist: “Writing for the philologist is no more than a secondary and extremely unmanageable image of real and effective speech; but for the Kabbalist it is the real centre of the mysteries of speech.”[xliii][xliii] Letters themselves take on the highest symbolic significance, replete with pneuma and lux, if not with the sun itself:

The letters, which are configurations of the divine creative force… represent the highest forms; and inasmuch as, in the earthly realm, they take on visible forms, they have bodies and souls, according to Isaac the Blind. Consequently the soul of each letter is clearly that which lives in it as a result of the divine Pneuma (Ruakh).[xliv][xliv]

Jacob ben Jacob Kohen of Soria goes even further:

Do not think that all the divine names, like the name of 12 or 42 or 72 letters and all the other countless mystical names, are merely unsubstantial words, for they all consist of letters which soar in an upward direction. The masters of the Kabbala have said of the letters relative to the name of 42 letters that they soar up until they reach the Merkaba itself, where they become pillars of light, which unite with one another in one great beam; and even the glory of God unites with them and ascends and conceals itself in the infinitely sublime and secret realm.[xlv][xlv]

Of the Kabbalist, Scholem discusses, Abulafia offers the most extensive meditation on the nature of the relationship between the spirit and the letter, offering a mystical grammar, and replacing syllogistic with mystic “logic.” Paradise, in fact, is the world of letters:

The actual “future world,” the place of bliss, as is illustrated by a bold play of words, is the “world of letters,” which is disclosed to the mystic in the hohkmatseruf. The infinite wealth of this world of letters is evident: in fact we can even say that “each individual letter in the Kabbala is a world unto itself.” In a world such as this the letters, which in other respects are conceived of as forms and mysterious signs, form for their part of the substance, which itself always remains the same throughout the movements which inter-connect with one another. Here the forms are now the meanings – the former sense – which the observer can attribute to these combinations in accordance with the degree of his intellectual faculty of knowledge. The letters are thus the substance and form of the intellectual world, each one in accordance with the different perspectives in which it is regarded.[xlvi][xlvi]

Greek philosophers, Christian theologians, and Jewish Kabbalists then, exploited, perpetuated, and augmented the incarnational matrix, bequeathing its ambiguous, contradictory powers to legatees with both sacred and secular uses for it.

Part One (B)

MODERN THEORISTS

Among the many texts that illustrate the infectiousness and durability of the incarnational matrix among modern theoreticians, Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry – the product of a Neo-Platonic training – offers two particularly apposite passages. In the first, Sidney acknowledges the potentially ambivalent qualities of logos as expressed in poetry, implying, by his use of the word “infect,” that language is a pharmakon:

For I will not deny but that man’s wit may make Poesy, which should be eikastike, which some learned have defined, figuring forth good things; to be phantastike, which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects…. But what, shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious? Nay truly, though I yield that Poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words, yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should give reproach to the abused, that contrariwise it is a good reason that what so ever, being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used (and upon the right use each thing conceiveth his title), and doth most good.[xlvii][xlvii]

Sidney then goes on to offer an explicit analogy between medicine and rhetoric, followed by a reference to patricide:

Do we not see the skill of Physic (the best rampire to our often-assaulted bodies), being abused, teach poison, the most violent destroyer?…. With a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince.[xlviii][xlviii]

As Shepherd indicates, the example of the two uses of a sword comes from Quintillian, who, however, mentions a thief, not a father, as his first term. Sidney’s substitution seems to proceed from the pattern of solar, paternal logos.

Sidney also acknowledges the power of sermo humilis, admiring the rude, rough verses of his ancestors, although not without some wish to temper with them:

Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which, being so evil appareled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar.[xlix][xlix]

The old songs have rough power and vivid presence, but, of course, are in verse. In the next century, many writers focus their longing for immediate, direct presence on prose, provoked perhaps subliminally by the fact that one of the denotations of logos is “prose,” but more strongly motivated by scientific aspirations and language. As a result of their efforts, writers seem to have believed that they might make words incarnate things, an aspiration they would have been surprised to find that they shared with the Kabbalists.

A frequently cited passage from Bishop Sprat’s History of the Royal Society provides a good example of the desire to abolish la différance, or as the classical rhetorician might have said, to disguise art:

They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear sense; a native easiness; bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.[l][l]

According to Sprat, the members resolved, “to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words.”[li][li] Such faith in the efficacy of stripping suggests the sensibility of an ascetic mystic, and was not confined to aspiring scientists in the seventeenth century.

Bishop Fènèlon, for example, complaining to the French Academy of a loss of vitality in the French language, recommends, “un terme simple et propre pour exprimer chaque objet, chaque sentiment, chaque action.”[lii][lii] Sprat and Fénelon seem to be performing unintentional variations on a remark of Philo: “With Moses the names assigned are manifest images of the things, so that name and thing are inevitably the same from the first and the name and that to which the name is given differ not a whit.”[liii][liii]

Swift probably had Sprat and his colleagues, not Fénelon and Philo, in mind when he deconstructed and demythologized their urge to incarnate things in words, dreaming up Laputian linguistics in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels:

An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on… many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things on his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who when they meet in the streets would lay down their loads, open their sacks and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.[liv][liv]

Swift’s parody seems to have repressed this form of the incarnational urge until the twentieth century, although one or two outbursts do occur in the intervening centuries.

Fénelon, incidentally, provides a striking use of the incarnational matrix in his first Dialogue on Eloquence. Like Socrates in the Phaedrus, he begins by attacking a false, or wrong use of rhetoric. After demolishing an inept sermon, delivered on Ash Wednesday, naively admired by another speaker in the dialogue, Fènèlon provides an example of an appropriate sermon, dependent on pêgê, pharmakon, and antithetical qualities of Christ-Logos, including humilis/sublimis:

Cette cendre, dit-il, quoiqu’elle soit un signe de pénitence, est un principe de félicité; quoiqu’elle semble nous humilier, elle est une source de gloire; quoiqu’elle représente la mort, elle est un remède qui donne l’immortalité.

(Although these ashes, he said, may be a symbol of punishment, they are a source of congratulation. Although they may seem to abase, they are a fountainhead of fame. Although they may represent death, they are a medicine that brings immortal life).[lv][lv]

Examples like this are rare, however, in the eighteenth century, since most of the major writers, until close to the end of the century, eschewed transcendent visions.

They did continue to fret about style, of course, and to recognize the peculiar attractiveness and difficulty of sermo humilis; a passage from one of William Cowper’s letters illustrates some of the typical attitudes of the time, anticipating as well, and perhaps preparing the ground for, Wordsworth’s more transcendent vision of the possibilities for every-day language.

The familiar style is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic – to marshall the words of it as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extempore speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.[lvi][lvi]

Wordsworth’s discussion of the possibilities of plain-speaking in poetry is far more complex, and also permits many of the elements of the incarnational matrix to re-enter the domain of literary theory. At one point in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he seems close to the aesthetic principles of the Royal Society, explaining that he has chosen, “the plainer and more emphatic language…[of] humble and rustic life,” because, “in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated.”[lvii][lvii] Wordsworth, however, is not interested in accepting an unmediated flow of rustic speech, but instead exercises a selectivity based on principles of social acceptability and of rhetorical intensity:

The language too of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appears to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike and disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because of their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity they express their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.[lviii][lviii]

Rustic speech, then, edited by the urbane poet, may function as a purgative, or pharmakon, battling infectious artifice, and acting as the least mediated medium through which one may perceive immediate experience, or immediate feeling, if not the logos.

Artificial figures of speech, however, may enter the text under conditions familiar to the classical rhetorician; ordinary language serves for ordinary experiences, and extraordinary language for extraordinary experience (although Wordsworth and Aristotle might disagree as to which was which). In discussing personification, Wordsworth admits:

They are indeed a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but I have endeavored utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription.[lix][lix]

“Prescription” shows at least a subliminal awareness of the negative, simply cosmetic aspect of language as pharmakon, which he would like to avoid, he says, because his particular poetic task involves establishing a sense of presence: “I have tried to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him; I am, however, well aware that others who pursue a different track may interest him likewise.”[lx][lx] Incarnate flesh and blood leads to a discussion of the compatibility of poetry and prose, a subject on which Wordsworth seems to anticipate Ezra Pound by more than a hundred years:

…not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, expect with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise… some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.[lxi][lxi]

Wordsworth, then, proposes to use rustic speech and the techniques of prose to keep his readers, “in the company of flesh and blood,” although he also seems to believe that mankind cannot bear too much reality. To protect the fragile reader, meter is to provide a shelter (though not specifically from the sun), or a valium-like pharmakon:

The co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feelings, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of meter to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be but little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose.[lxii][lxii]

Prose directness, then, may lead to unbearable intensity; metered verse may shelter the reader, reducing the intensity to bearable proportions.

Clearly, Wordsworth’s theorizing contains overtones of the sacred. He told DeQuincy, for example, that the language of poetry should not be cosmetic “dress of thoughts,” but the “incarnation of thoughts… the thought itself made concrete.”[lxiii][lxiii] Coleridge, too, meditated on the aesthetic problem with intimations of the divine, as well as of the Royal Scientific: “I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things: elevating, as it were, Words into Things and living things too.”[lxiv][lxiv]

Later in the nineteenth century, American writers produced extensive variations on the incarnational matrix, in their theorizing on the nature of linguistic decorum. Lowell seems close to Socrates when he writes:

There is death in the dictionary… No language after it has faded into dictum, none that can suck up the feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common fold can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from page to page, but from man to man.[lxv][lxv]

Emerson offers some interesting modifications of the patterns generated by the incarnational matrix. Instead of words/things, he offers words/deeds: “Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and, actions are a kind of words.”[lxvi][lxvi] He also thinks that écriture suffers by comparison with parole, particularly the parole of the nineteenth century’s version of a truck driver:

I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run… Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.[lxvii][lxvii]

The teamsters’ words, then, are flesh; language ossifies in books, lives only into the mouths of men, and then only in the mouths of humble men, as a sermo humilis with the power of sublimity.

A passage in Emerson’s Natural History of the Intellect seems to anticipate Derrida’s use of la diffférance, as well as Rilke’s use of Zwiespalt; Emerson’s word for these terms is “interval:”

The true scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his thoughts or to hold off his thoughts at arm’s length and give them perspective. It is not to be concealed that the gods have guarded this privilege with costly penalty. This alight discontinuity which perception effects between the mind and the object paralyzes the will. If you cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely together, you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never again so very near that they shall attract each other so that you can take up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good as a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity… The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject and object. For weal or woe we clear ourselves from the thing we contemplate.[lxviii][lxviii]

The “indescribably small interval,” roughly la différance, is a split that Emerson confines to the scholarly mind, although such a split frequently becomes a major preoccupation of modern poetry.

Emerson’s friend Thoreau, concerned with a different interval, came to an entirely different conclusion. Aware of “a memorable interval between the spoken word and the written language,” Thoreau prefers the “noble exercise of reading:

The noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds… What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. No wonder Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics… It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; – not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.[lxix][lxix]

Two other passages in Walden contain the Platonic connection between the proper use of écriture and the tilled field:

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans…. [the farmer] wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day with ennui and “the blues!” but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his.[lxx][lxx]

On the basis of the sharp contrast between Emerson’s preference for speech and Thoreau’s for writing, one might suspect more than a merely aesthetic prejudice at work. Social judgments may also be implied; Augustine, trained in classical rhetorical decorum, found the language of the Vulgate uncomfortably like ordinary speech, until he accepted the paradox of the Incarnation. Emerson certainly had more hope for democratic principles, or at least more interest in them, than did Thoreau. Victor Hugo will provide, in a later chapter, a vivid illustration of the social and political uses to which the incarnational matrix can be put. In the twentieth century, Spengler and Levi-Strauss provide a clear contrast.

Spengler writes as though Thamus had remained silent in Thoth’s presence:

Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relations of man’s waking consciousness, in that it liberates it from the tyranny of the present (Gegenwart)…. Writing is the grand symbol of the Far…. writing is above everything a matter of status and more particularly an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history and therefore without writing.[lxxi][lxxi]

Spengler thus provides an excellent illustration of the attitude and consequent actions that Levi-Strauss attacks in his assault on écriture:

The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it [writing] is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals, and the distribution of those individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes…. it seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind…. If my hypothesis is correct, the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings…. The European-wide movement towards compulsory education in the nineteenth century went hand-in-hand with the extension of military service and the systematization of the proletariat. The struggle against illiteracy is indistinguishable, at times, from the increased powers exerted over the individual citizen by the central authority. For it is only when everyone can read that Authority can decree that “ignorance of the law is no defense.[lxxii][lxxii]

We may expect to find, then, in the twentieth century, that political motives give additional impetus to the incarnational matrix.

Roland Barthes probably provides the most glittering example of such a phenomenon, in the series of Marxist variations which make up his Writing Degree Zero. In this early work, he denounces écriture as both weapon and symptom of a reactionary literary, political, and economic establishment. According to Barthes scenario, the literary establishment has produced a body of classical and romantic literature that represents an oppressive and repressive past. A writer today must discard the rhetorical paraphernalia, including many of the grammatical conventions, of the coagulated tradition, and draw upon the resources of language as actually (including its French sense, actuellement, “now”) spoken. To destroy the polarity of absence/presence, Barthes suggests a strikingly literal-minded solution: use the present tense:

When, within the narration, the praeterite is replaced by less ornamental forms, fresher, more full-blooded and nearer to speech (the present tense of the present perfect), Literature becomes the receptacle of existence in all its density and no longer of the meaning alone. The acts it recounts are still separated from History, but no longer from people.[lxxiii][lxxiii]

For Spengler, the present (Gegenwart) is a source of tyranny (Zwang); for Barthes it is the source of all vitality, while the past is potentially suffocating.

One period of French history (and therefore of literary history) is exempt; the writers of the French Revolution receive a license which a Marxist could presumably accord to no other group (since the Jacquerie produced no spokesman because, as Spengler insists, “the peasantry is without history”):

The Revolution was in the highest degree one of those great occasions when truth, through the bloodshed that it costs, becomes so weighty that its expression demands the very forms of theatrical amplification. Revolutionary writing was the one and only grand gesture commensurate with the daily presence of the guillotine. What today seems turgid was then no more than life-size.[lxxiv][lxxiv]

Like Christ’s blood, then, the revolutionaries’ blood authenticates the logos. However, the revolutionaries did not represent their experience in sermo humilis. Barthes’ justification of their style seems very much like a reversion to classical decorum, requiring a high style for lofty and intensely experienced subject matter. In this respect, he seems very close to Henri Peyre’s politically non-partisan description of Romantic rhetoric as an accurate reflection of an intense, private, essentially subjective feeling:

Even when they resorted to inflated language or to exclamatory rhetoric to convey an experience they deemed unique, they were trying to render passionately and exaltedly what they had experienced ardently…. Of one sin the romantics were guilty – a sin against sincerity and against art. What they felt intensely had, they thought, to be expressed powerfully; and power, for them, often lay in exclamations, interrogations, cataracts of images, litanies of invocations, debauchery of sonorousness… Such voracious explorers, who seek their own selves in the whole universe, may be guilty of haste, of turgidness, of confusion between authentic voices and mere echoes of their own sonorous class.[lxxv][lxxv]

Barthes’ description of Romantic rhetoric is less sophisticated than Peyre’s at least partly because he is describing it only to dismiss it as no longer relevant.

According to Barthes, whose title, Le Degré Zero de l’Écriture implies as much, exuberant rhetoric is inappropriate for modern revolutionary writing, which must be stripped, “zero to the bone.” In later essays, he emerges as the champion of New Wave novelists; that he fixes his attention upon writers of prose, in his attempt to preserve the intensity of the logos, seems significant, partly because “prose” is a lexical denotation of logos, and partly because of the mythic belief in the pharmaceutical qualities of prose. A passage in Writing Degree Zero anticipates Barthes’ advocacy of the New Wave novelists:

What makes writing the opposite of speech is that the former always appears symbolical, introverted, ostensibly turned towards an occult side of language, whereas the second is nothing but an empty flow of signs, the movement along of which is significant.[lxxvi][lxxvi]

By compelling the reader to determine the meaning from the movement of the language, the writer attempts to circumvent the possibility of a merely literal, deadly response to the text, which may consequently remain alive, out of the hands of Thoth. Such a text also will be a true text, because it fulfills Derrida’s Heraclitean requirement that the laws of its composition and the rules of its game be not immediately apparent.

Among the many modern writers who express partisan feeling when faced with a choice between writing and speech, none produces a more oddly paradoxical set of divagations on the topic than an American in Paris, Gertrude Stein. More than a decade before Barthes’ proclamations, she committed herself to Thoreau’s position on écriture, though certainly not in Thoreau’s language: