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PARTISAN REVIEW
article in a student newspaper of 1958, for example, with such an article
today is to discover a vanished world in which a student could unselfcon–
sciously use language such as "contagious liveliness" and "feted and
canonized." I may note that I draw these terms from papers that carried
student letters calling for a new library and proposing that the university
"abandon intercollegiate athletics." I picked up a recent student newspa–
per to look for a contrasting passage but did not get beyond, "I was plopped
in front of the television watching Real Sex 5000 on HBO."
Once-familiar grammatical and rhetorical forms have also all but dis–
appeared. The apostrophe, our language's lovely, economical way of
signaling contraction and possession, has become as mysterious as a quark
to most writers. Accurate use of the subjunctive voice and confident con–
trol of embedded clauses have been, as it were, abducted from our language
in the middle of the night. Asked to provide an example of metonymy,
elegy, or antithesis, the student will be flummoxed: a definition, just pos–
sibly; an example? Is there a website?
We have developed in the United States an elevated fear of rhetoric as
something unnatural, unmanly, and manipulative. This suspicion
has
deep roots
in our culture, from Plato's scorn for the Sophists, those founding fathers of
the professoriate who had the un-aristocratic bad taste actually to accept pay–
ment for their teaching, to the justifiable weariness felt by many Americans for
the shopworn tropes of late nineteenth-century political oratory-the sort of
exercise for which H.
L.
Mencken coined the wonderful noun, "bloviation."
There is, no doubt, a valid apprehension of smoothtalking seducers:
salesmen, lawyers, and fakers of all sorts who use rhetoric to overcome
good sense. But unilateral disarmament is no defense against such people.
The mind, deprived of rhetorical skills, does not thereby move more freely
among the essentials of the human condition. Far from attaining authen–
ticity, the rhetorically uneducated mind is confined to banality and cliche.
The loss extends to the blighting of memory. Training the memory, as
Father Ong has reminded us,
was
for centuries a recognized, honored, and
highly elaborate sub-discipline of the
art
of rhetoric. But we no longer teach
children to memorize, a powerful intellectual tool now wrongly and endless–
ly denigrated throughout our schools as "rote learning." As a result, students
reach college with minds furnished with TV jingles but no Shakespeare. They
are deaf to allusions to biblical language and thus ill-equipped to read Dante,
Melville, or Eliot. If they are among the few to have studied history, how like–
ly are they to be among the fewer still to have developed their memories well
enough to read complex historical narratives? To read well, we observe too
late, also requires mastery of some of the rhetorical
arts.
The decline of rhetoric is evident as well on almost every occasion on
which people now speak, from wedding toasts to stump speeches. Our
