Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory: Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631729397, 9783631729403, 9783631729410, 9783631729427, 3631729391

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Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Alina Silvana Felea

Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predominantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poetics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on the subject of reference.

Alina Silvana Felea is Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of the Transilvania University of Brasov. She is a member of the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies. Her fields of interest are literary theory, rhetoric and theories of fiction.

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Literar y and Cultural Theor y Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory

Alina Silvana Felea · Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory

Alina Silvana Fe

Aspects of Referenc in Literary Theor

Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary His

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 50

Alina Silvana Felea

Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-72939-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-72940-3 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-72941-0 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-72942-7 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b11505 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2017 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents 0. The Reference and the Study of Literature ........................................... 7 1. Poetics ................................................................................................................  15 1.1. The acceptations of the term and the object of the discipline .............  15 1.2. Poetics in antiquity ....................................................................................  18 1.2.1. Plato and the objection to poetry ....................................................  18 1.2.2. Aristotle, the father of poetics ..........................................................  21 1.2.3. The poetics of the Latin space. Epistle to the Pisos .........................  26 1.2.4. The poetics of the Latin world. The treatise On the Sublime ........  30 1.3. The survival of poetics during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ................................................................................................  34 1.4. Between mimesis and poiesis. The 18th century ......................................  37 1.5. Poetics in the age of Romanticism ..........................................................  42 1.5.1. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the precursors of the poetics of Modernity ...........................................................................................  44 1.6. Modern Poetics ..........................................................................................  47 1.6.1. Russian Formalism ............................................................................  49 1.6.2. New Criticism ......................................................................................  54 1.6.3. The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926–1948) .....................................  58 1.6.4. Roman Jakobson ................................................................................  62 1.6.5. Structuralism ......................................................................................  65 1.6.6. Semiotics .............................................................................................  69 1.6.7. The mathematical poetics ...................................................................  76 1.7. Conclusions  ................................................................................................  79

2. Rhetoric .............................................................................................................  83 2.1 The glory and oblivion of a millenary discipline ...................................  83 2.2 Rhetoric in Antiquity ................................................................................  86 2.2.1. Greek rhetoric ....................................................................................  87 2.2.2. Latin rhetoric ......................................................................................  91 2.2.3. Asianism ..............................................................................................  95 2.3. Another type of rhetoric: sacred rhetoric ...............................................  96 2.3.1. Sacred rhetoric in Romanian culture ..............................................  98 5

2.4. Rhetoric in the centuries which were not favorable to it .....................  98 2.5. The rhetorical system and some essential matters related to rhetoric ....................................................................................  102 2.6. The specificity of rhetoric and its reference .........................................  107 2.7. Modern rhetoric and its two directions ...............................................  108 2.7.1. The philosophic neorhetoric ..........................................................  109 2.7.2. Linguistic neorhetoric .....................................................................  112 2.8. Conclusions  ..............................................................................................  115

3. Literary History ...........................................................................................  119 3.1. The identity of the literary history and its relations to criticism and literary theory ...................................................................................  119 3.2. The beginnings of the discipline; the 19th century ..............................  122 3.3. The conception of literary history in the 20th century ........................  124 3.4. Extrinsic and intrinsic ............................................................................  126 3.5. Classification – the privileged method of classical literary history ..........................................................................  129 3.6. Literary history: a discipline of continuity? .........................................  130 3.7. Diachronic and synchronic ....................................................................  137 3.8. Reasoning – between relativism and absolutism ................................  141 3.9 The narrative literary history .................................................................  143 3.10. Revisions of the subject of literary history ...........................................  145 3.11. Conclusions ..............................................................................................  151

4. The Variable Reference .............................................................................  155 Bibliography .......................................................................................................  159

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0. The Reference and the Study of Literature In the sum of present-­day discourses, of both exact and humanistic sciences, authentication and confirmation by reference to a definite and essentially verifiable fact has not only become a necessity but an obligation. Nowadays, a book without exact bibliographical references is susceptible to being considered unscientific or even superficial. Quoting from memory and evoking ideas are undoubtedly very widely used but once the quotation marks occur in the text, the bibliographical reference (page, publishing house, place of publication) becomes obvious. What is currently a very reasonable practice (and I have chosen only one example among many others) is however symptomatic for revealing a general prerequisite which is characteristic for our age, namely that of stability and cognitive certainty, of accuracy regarding the source that has to be named, not disregarded. On the other hand, an equally powerful trend is the one represented by antirealist theories and the view according to which neither thought nor language contain “representations” of reality since the truth is construed by contemporary anti-­rationalism as a mythologizing and oppressive value. The ancestral (also pejoratively termed mythical) need to understand and describe the real and its fundamentals, to establish its distinctions, value systems, norms and regulations, is considered useless, similarly to what the Sceptics and the Stoics once believed when referring to the impossibility of having any certainty regarding the surrounding reality. Richard Rorty – to give but one example – is a renowned representative of analytic philosophy and contemporary American pragmatism who claimed that a genuinely interesting philosophy is the one that manages to replace one “vocabulary” with a more pertinent one in relation to the present moment. The same thing would nowadays happen to truth or objectivity, hollow notions, devoid of meaning, which by no means implies that there are no longer values worthy of being taken into consideration and important for human beings and society.1

To give up or not to give up the search for “evidence” Moreover, we could easily notice that paradoxically, the large amount of information available to us – we are far more cognitively rich than our ancestors – does not help us in becoming more anchored in the surrounding reality. Probably it is

1 These are the values that are constantly promoted by the pragmatist tradition: liberty, tolerance, solidarity, etc.

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this very informative variety as well as the consciousness of multiple determinations that we resort to and which bear the guilt for what Toma Pavel termed “the severance of the ego from its own biography.”2 It is a sort of inability to comfortably inhabit our ego, to acknowledge or define our own identity. That does not, however, prevent us from searching for it with the prospect of certitude. Disorientation is also visible at the macro-­level of society. With reference to the observation made by Bernard Williams regarding the existence of two seemingly antagonistic trends nowadays, Pascal Engel raises a pertinent question: “On one hand, there has never been so much distrust of the values of rationality, scientific progress, truth, and objectivity, either in advanced intellectual circles or in the media and society in general. On the other, never has the impression that we are being deceived by the authorities (political and scientific), that are supposed to guarantee precisely these values, and the need for trust been so great. Why, if we no longer believe in truth, is there such a longing for it?”3 Hence, the eager search for evidence, the natural and legitimate urge to understand what is around us and what defines us, continues to manifest itself strongly. It is, however, true that vocabulary modifies itself as it varies.

Reference and reality We thus have the very eloquent example of the notion of reference. The theories on how we “refer to” various aspects have been altering and have obviously developed from 1960 onwards. Reference seemed to be another term for reality; therefore not once have the two notions been confused. Nevertheless, however alluring their association may be, reference is not equivalent to reality! As an illustration, one may consider the reference of the terms “dragon” and “ubiquity.” The former would be endowed with a physical yet fictional existence, therefore non-­conformant to our experience of the physical world. The latter would entail a non-­physical and fictional existence. Hence it is not in accordance with our experience of the non-­ physical world. Consequently, once more, the terms “referent” and “real” are not transposable4 even though their affiliation or resemblance is more than obvious. Nevertheless, whether one places reality under scrutiny or the issue of reference is being debated, the process of defining them nowadays is not a smooth and

2 See the series of lectures given by Toma Pavel in 2006 at Collège de France. 3 Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty, A quoi bon la vérité? (Paris: Editions Grasset  & Fasquelle, 2005), pp. 13–14. 4 See Georges Lavis, “Le texte littéraire, le référent, le réel, le vrai,” Cahiers d’analyse textuelle, no. 13 (1971), p. 11.

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effortless endeavour. The difficulty resides in the fact that reality is not necessarily revealed to sensory perception which means that, more often than not, one may have to determine the existence of objects and their configuration. This is an aspect that establishes a fairly strong connection between reference and reality because the problem remains the same, namely that of determining the reference. The truth has become for most a question of consensus, a convention between the members of a group or a community. This relativization has favoured the overlap of reality or existence and reference. However, on the other hand, the subjection of reference to reality ceased to be so strict once reference gained autonomy to a certain extent. By accepting the idea that there was also a fictional reference, it no longer depended upon truth value as the truth was defined as conformity to the real. The antagonistic tendency remains just as powerful – namely the need for a thorough knowledge of reference, for its delimitation – as when we take reality as a vantage point with the intention of understanding its mechanisms.

The term reference, explanatory remarks In order to shed light on the theoretical grounding of the notion of reference which will actually accompany us and will function as a conceptual landmark throughout this book, it is necessary to make some remarks regarding the process of acknowledgement of the term, of its essence and of the issues that it raises. Due to the fact that the concept attempts to establish a connection to reality, the interest that the philosophers and logicians first took in it is easily understandable. The German mathematician Gottlob Frege bestowed great importance upon reference within logical semantics, a discipline which was flourishing at the end of the 19th century. In the position paper Meaning and Reference published in 1892, one of the essential dichotomies was the Sinn (Meaning) and Bedeutung (Reference) dichotomy. Reference is the truth value, specifically the scientific truth, the one that can be experimentally or conceptually validated, and it is identifiable with denotation. On account of the fact that truth value is not congruent with the sphere of poetry and of literary works, reference was considered inconsistent with the artistic field. In his work Ausführungen über Sinn und Bedeutung, Frege noted that “in poetry words have only one meaning; yet in sciences and whenever one is concerned with the question of uncovering the truth, meaning is no longer enough; therefore we also attach a reference to proper names and concepts.”5 It is also true that Frege did not indicate what the exact acceptation of the term 5 André Rousseau, “La quête de la référence. Réflexions à partir des théories de Frege,” in: Statut et processus, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), pp. 15–27.

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meaning was! Yet we could use Paul Ricoeur’s explanation with regard to Frege’s theory: “Meaning is what the sentence communicates; the reference or denotation is that something about which meaning is communicated.”6

Reference from a linguistic perspective Nevertheless, reference is far from being a straightforward concept as it is subject to limitations, restrictions and continuous reevaluation. Apart from the above-­ mentioned author Frege there is also Saussure who, through his theory of the arbitrariness of the sign, pointed out the impossibility of a perfect correspondence between language and reality. Hence we can further refer to the second most probable domain of manifestation for reference: linguistics. Explained and exemplified in discourse, particularly dependent on language and its features, the reference is often defined as “the relationship that connects language to reality”, “what unites a language and its articulation with the real world” or the “grounding system” of the linguistic sign, as Cesare Brandi pointed out. However, it is a naïve endeavour to merely establish a correspondence of language in general to reality. Not only Saussure’s theory but also Frege’s draw attention to the fact that the term or expression does not set up a direct connection to the world, to reality, and therefore it only makes reference or it denotes by means of a conceptual pattern which is interposed between the two. Later on, in his famous work Linguistics and Poetics, published in 1960, Roman Jakobson introduced, among six other fundamental functions of language, the denotative function also known as the cognitive or referential function, defined by its orientation towards context. In other words, one of the functions of linguistic expressions is that of making reference to the world. The article is very important, primarily due to the clarifications that it brings regarding the poetic function, but those interested in the concept of reference will not find out much about the status of context in Jakobson’s acceptation. This is quite explicable because in the 60s linguists were just starting to consider reference. There is but one mention to be made: the poetic function, which is preeminent in literary texts, makes reference or denotation ambiguous, which means that the literary work becomes a distorting setting for the context that is to be reflected in it. The ambiguity of the referent in artistic creation is one of the major aspects of the art-­reality connection or of the relationship between common and poetic language.

6 Paul Ricoeur, Metafora vie, trans. Irina Mavrodin (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1985), p. 76.

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The matter of fictional reference is only tangentially of interest to us considering that the fictional issue is not explored. But some remarks are necessary and they can be made on the basis of an example. The character Raskolnikov, for instance, does not denote anything when used in fiction, but denotes the character created by Dostoyevsky when it is referred to in other texts, including critical ones. Therefore, there is, on the one hand, the original fictional text, and on the other hand there is the metatextual discourse in which mention is made of an existing referent, verifiable, formed of all the texts which had been written by Dostoyevsky and which contributed to the construction of the character Raskolnikov. Hence the answer to the question whether the poetic or critical discourse is a referential text, specifically one that directly re-­transcribes an object of the world, is affirmative since the literary referent is real as opposed to the referent in fiction whose existence is seldom real. In fact, as Paul Ricoeur emphasizes in the above mentioned study, there is not a problem related to the reference within language because signs evoke other signs within the same system.

The research on literature and on discourse from the perspective of its reference Coming back to the common language, the ontological aspect implied by the reference is worth mentioning. The reference entails existence which is not only that of physical objects but also what is not visible, namely abstract referents, theoretical entities, various types of experiences, etc., that we can name, “nominate,” identify by means of speech. Some specialists even consider that the function of “nomination” is the primordial function of language. At the same time, the notion of reference subsumes the function of representation of the real and this is the reason why, in dictionaries, a connection is established between reference and mimesis, the classical Greek concept of imitation. For the field of criticism, the “real” alluded to is the work itself. The concept of reference may constitute a guiding and organizing principle within the utterly vast and extremely complex domain of poetics, literary history and rhetorical discourse. Although much has been written about literary works considered individually and about literature as a system, the views differ according to the examination approach. It is precisely “this approach” that can be revealed by the reference, specifically by the relationship established between a certain literary or rhetorical referent and the discourse in which it is included. The often disconcerting diversity and abundance that characterize the field of literary research should not be mistaken for a limitless liberalism in which all is permitted. We know that from linguistics as well. One cannot associate an object or aspect of reality with just any lexical item. The 11

lexical unit predetermines what it can designate and what it excludes. Moreover, considering that not even the author himself/herself is absolutely free when they write, as reality “prescribes” certain trajectories, similarly, or even more so, the literary work does not allow the critic to write absolutely anything they want or to invent approaches that can later on prove to be dead-­end paths. We shall try to take into consideration, as much as possible, some of the landmarks or productive starting points around which the critical discourse has been and is still being built.

Justifying the choice of the organizing principle The multitude of perspectives and types of approach can also be substantiated by the problematic status of the referent – in our case the object is the literary work, literature in general or discourse. This is because the referent is not always transparent in such a way as to facilitate an unproblematic approach. There are also inscrutable, opaque referents or “oblique” contexts, as Frege termed them, which hinder the interpretation of the text and which call into question the extent to which the referential sphere is a cognitive vector for the other universe, namely that of discourse. Gottlob Frege also pointed out that a denotation, i.e. a single object, can have several co-­referential expressions, such as the morning star and the evening star which equally refer to Venus, and that there are contexts in which they are not interchangeable. This is also a more generally valid linguistic argument that furnishes, among other things, an explanation for the multitude of doctrines and schools of literary criticism, each with its own personality although the “denotation”, namely the point of departure, is the same. Transcending the domain of linguistics is a necessary step. Referential semantics chiefly studies the word and the name but the idea of reference is equally pertinent in the case of other units such as the sentence, text and context. However, as Paul Ricoeur also indicated, beyond the sentence, within the register of the text, semantics is no longer the focus, but hermeneutics. Perhaps the most correct solution would be a pragmatic approach to the various theoretical and critical projects. The degree of objectivity of these discourses will not be of interest to us – that would be sheer recklessness – because we do not have a seemingly “objective” knowledge of the referent itself. And in order to make assertions we do not need to vouch for the “truth” of certain statements but rather to understand the epistemological options of some communities at specific historical moments, equally exerted by means of the discourse of criticism. What mattered most and still does is the effectiveness of the respective discourses, the extent to which they achieve their goal of emphasizing, explaining and discovering what is not generally visible at first glance.

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Reference to literature and discourse can display the most diverse aspects. The present study does not claim to be exhaustive; the choice of poetics, rhetoric and literary history is subjective and it is by no means justifiable by our belief that they are more valuable than others. It is true, however, that the prestige and durability with which some of them, such as poetics or rhetoric, are endowed have had some weight in the decision to present them in the manner that we deemed the most significant. The title of the volume ought to be “Introduction to…” because it needs radically to simplify the discouraging amount of information that we could have for each and every orientation. Certainly, we do not pretend to be able to clarify everything nor to state “only what is truly important” because many issues are genuinely important. If this brief presentation of some subjects of interest from the field of humanities may be viewed as a potential guide by students and by those who want to use it as an introduction to the field, the book will have served its purpose.

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1. Poetics 1.1. The acceptations of the term and the object of the discipline Literature – an instance of language, a constant of poetic reflection Nowadays there is not only one definition of poetics because its long history contributed to the enrichment of its manifold identity, although a more thorough analysis of its defining fundamental themes will reveal their relatively reduced number. It is however true that these themes have undergone numerous and important transformations throughout time, every epoch has witnessed a reevaluation of the concepts, of the suppositions and postulates of poetics and its methodological principles that have been developed and integrated into new syntheses to such an extent that they are no longer identical to their initial formulae. Nevertheless, the constant of poetic reflection is the reference to literary art in its verbal creation capacity. The major aim of this discipline has always been that of observing and studying literature in its specificity, this type of art being the most frequently defined as an artistic verbal activity which can thus be included in the category of instances of language. Hence it has always been connected to the sciences of language as it attempts to delimit and analyse the defining criteria of literary language in order to reveal the functioning of the art of words from that perspective. Associating the observation with the domain of the verbal and with the categories that correspond to it has always been one of the defining markers of the investigation that the 20th century modern poetics has carried out while trying to avoid any kind of extrinsic considerations in relation to the object – thus, without interferences of any kind, be they sociological, psychological or philosophical, which would divert attention from what could strictly and solely define the literary field which was considered perfectly capable of preserving its own autonomy by virtue of its intrinsic specificity. This is because all these perspectives, which are extraneous to the aesthetic field per se, actually subordinate or affiliate it to external laws. Tzvetan Todorov noted that, as opposed to other humanistic sciences, poetics resorts to the very laws that can be found within literature and this is precisely why this field of reference to literature is at the same time “abstract” and “internal.”1 1 Tzvetan Todorov, Qu’est-­ce que le structuralisme? 2. Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil), p. 21.

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The definitions and meanings of poetics When examining the etymology of the term poetics, Paul Valéry stated that it refers to “everything related to the creation or the production of works whose language is equally substance and means.”2 In a current sense, poetics represents the sum of all aesthetic principles or theories that define and individualize the work of a poet. When referring to Poe’s or Baudelaire’s poetics, we deal with the choices that these creators made out of a multitude of stylistic, thematic and versification possibilities. There is also a poetics of a movement (the poetics of romanticism, of symbolism or of naturalism) and in this case we move from a particular to a general level that presupposes the ensemble of rules that a writer adopts or abides by, their adhesion marking their inclusion in the respective movement or literary trend. The more technical meaning with which the term poetics is endowed makes it one of the subjects of literary research whose goal is to devise an “internal literary theory.” In 1976, Benjamin Hrushovski defined poetics (one of many definitions) as “the systematic study of literature as literature.”3 It concerns the principles, categories and functions of this art or, in a nutshell, the examination of general laws that explain the totality of particular literary works. According to this view, poetics has a predominantly theoretical character, even scientific, precisely because its object of study is not the particular fact but the general one, or the governing law, although it became obvious at some point that in poetics the general cannot exist without the particular.

Poetics and other related disciplines The clear orientation towards the abstract and the general has led to the association of poetics to the theory of literature, which managed to induce a certain degree of confusion. As Jean-­Marie Schaeffer also emphasized “there are as many theories of literature as forms of cognitive approach to literature, namely an indefinite number.”4 Although the boundary between the two is very difficult to mark,5 poetics also differs from rhetoric, which is a field of study that deals with the sum of all discourses, 2 Paul Valéry, “De l’enseignement de la poétique au Collège de France”, in: Variété V (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 291. 3 Quoted by Lubomir Doležel in his paper Poetica Occidentală, trans. Ariadna Ştefănescu (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1998), p. 10. 4 Oswald Ducrot and Jean-­Marie Schaeffer, Noul Dicționar Enciclopedic al Științelor Limbajului, (Bucharest: Babel Publishing House, 1996), p. 127. 5 Poetics intertwined with rhetoric as early as antiquity; hence, the confusion between the two is justifiable.

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less concerned with the specificity of the literary art and more drawn to the verbal effects that literary discourse, just like any other type of discourse, can create. Similarly, it is related to, and very often converges with, linguistics as they share a common root, namely philology. Apart from the rigor of thinking and argumentation, what it borrowed from linguistics were also the concepts and terminology but there was not really an overlap between the two domains. In spite of the common interest in language, poetics targets a specific area, namely the one associated with art.6 With regard to literary criticism, the differences occur in the manner in which the literary work is examined. For the critic, it is the object of weighing, of establishing value and, without having to dispense with concepts or general laws, the emphasis is placed on the identity, specificity and originality of the respective literary work. It is thus essential to describe the individual work, to interpret it and consequently to unveil its meanings and eventually to assess it from an aesthetical point of view or to establish its evaluative dimension. For the theorist of poetics, on the other hand, the literary work is an object of reflection in the sense precisely of uncovering general matters’ it is an object of knowledge which leads to the assimilation of data on the system of literature understood both in its characteristic unity and variety. Certainly, we can ask the legitimate question whether the general categories and the essential features of the field researched can be considered trans-­historical and trans-­generic. The set of concepts that poetics devised, such as, for instance, narratological categories, internal focalization, ellipsis, prolepsis, genre, register, type, etc., undoubtedly last than any critical interpretation of a distinctive work, irrespective of its complexity. However, not even generic structures have the much coveted general validity. It is true that they extend over a wide area of the literary field without succeeding in covering it entirely, either diachronically or synchronically. One should bear in mind that poetics can be chiefly defined as a cognitive activity, literature viewed as reference thus becoming an epistemological object of study. Hence poetics is far more than theoretical abstract thinking that exceeds the borders of literary works and although, as mentioned, examples cannot be omitted from the written works on poetics, they refer precisely to individual creations. Without a stable and strong connection to the reality of the works per se, this activity can become futile and is faced with the inability to justify its own existence. Between interpretation and poetic reflection there is a complementary relationship, as neither is less important than the other when it comes to their connection to literature. In fact, the aesthetic field will always come first.

6 In its turn poetics exerted its own influence upon linguistics triggering, among other things, the emergence of transphrastic linguistics.

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The cognitive ambition is associated with the systematic, scientific study. The aim of modern scholars in the field of poetics was to eliminate the subjective dimension of literary research and turning objectivity into a veritable axiom within the study of poetics. Hence, poetics has focused on observing and describing the origins, nature, status and mechanisms of literature and for that purpose, concepts and conceptual frameworks, principles and general categories that would be able to grasp the essence of literary art were introduced.

1.2. Poetics in antiquity The history and tradition of Western poetics started with Aristotle’s treatise Poetics, not only the veritable cornerstone of the substance of this domain but also of literary research and theory in general. It is the first treatise of this type that has been preserved; although there is enough evidence in support of the claim that the systematic theories of poetics had been preceded by numerous reflections on the nature and aim of poetry amongst other human activities, there has always been the dilemma of whether poetry is truth or deception, whether its purpose should be to please and/or to educate. There was also concern regarding the role and place that the poet holds in society.

1.2.1. Plato and the objection to poetry One cannot pertinently refer to Aristotle’s Poetics, especially to analyse such fundamental concepts as mimesis, without invoking Plato’s view on poetry. His utterly critical stance, occasionally even virulent, had been neither singular nor accidental as many philosophers in antiquity regarded epic poetry, especially Homer’s,7 with great scepticism. Plato, an individual of aristocratic descent, subjected the whole of Athenian society to stringent critical examination, especially because democracy, as a political model adopted during his time, seemed far from being the best solution. We should bear in mind that Socrates, Plato’s mentor and source of inspiration for many of his ideas, was a victim of this “regime” and was sentenced to death for his beliefs.

The place of art in Plato’s project Plato was mostly interested in social organization and the improvement of the system of government in the Ideal State that he devised, theoretically, as an accurate illustration of his ideas. Hence, for Plato, the social, political and ethical 7 Xenophanes and Heraclitus were absolutely revolted by the liberties that Homer had taken, especially regarding the assignation of human features to the gods.

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issues mattered the most, as opposed to the philosopher’s lack of interest in matters of art even though he has been considered an authority on aesthetics and theory to this day. The philosopher sporadically examined art although his interests were of a different nature. In Ion as well as in The Apology of Socrates and Menon the focus of investigation is poetic inspiration. Beauty is the topic of Greater Hippias and The Symposium, while poetry is discussed chiefly in Book X of the Republic. Plato did not write a treatise entirely dedicated to art, but his theory is solid and coherent in its unequivocal condemnation of the artist’s enterprise on grounds of its being misleading and deceitful as it primarily addresses the senses and not the intellect. On account of its being fundamentally irrational, art is perceived as an instrument used in the corruption of the soul rather than its edification. To Plato, the possible psychological impact of creations that stir the conscience by focusing on passions, on unleashed feelings or vices, seems utterly perilous for the inhabitants of his Ideal State. Consequently, the philosopher simply invalidated the idea of emotion as a principle in the reception of art. For Plato, an essential guide in the process of moral redress was the philosopher or the scholar, never the poet who is not the master or even the author of his own productions, as these creations were induced by the muse or by the gods. Thus, poets experiencing a state of furor express themselves through the impulse given by an external and higher power, hence losing their mastery of reason, abandoning themselves to divine inspiration without being consciously involved in the creative process. Inspiration was actually associated with ecstasy and possession; therefore the poet was merely a passive instrument manipulated by a higher power, no longer the master of his own will, unable to explain the source of his poetry or its meaning and, when the inspiration ceased, he would awaken astonished by what he had been capable of accomplishing. We are thus witnessing a paradox: the creation that the god dictated through the agency of the poet was worthy of praise, but the poet himself was pitiful on account of the fact that he did not exercise control over his own reason. The individual poet became responsible when his creation was indeed his own and equally condemnable if he dared to approach dangerous topics. The prominence that poetry bestowed upon appearances, as the great philosopher considered empirical reality merely a pale copy of the absolute world of Ideas, led to its definitive condemnation. Consequently, Plato considered that it would have been more useful for the city to banish the poet from the community because his influence only perverted those frail minds that were in need of positive models in order to follow the path of morality, of righteousness and beauty. The only one deemed able to shape these minds was the scholar, 19

namely the one who valued reason and intellect, who contemplated the divine and the transcendence which was inaccessible to the senses… Without being a rhetorical effect, the project that involved the banishing of the poet from the city actually reflected the status granted to poetry. The latter’s influence was one that would generally be taken into account, and that was precisely what seriously worried the philosopher. Certainly Plato did not subject poetry as a whole to public opprobrium. By virtue of their aesthetic utility and of the contribution that they might bring to the moral formation of the younger generation, only hymns dedicated to the gods and to highly valued people were allowed. Hence, poetry had to exist in the Ideal State, but only the type of poetry that could instruct and cultivate. For Plato, the moral imperative was primordial, and this managed to radically shape his views on art because he advocated an aesthetic principle that presupposed the subordination of beauty to usefulness. In Plato’s approach to poetry, the reference is its content and the impact that markedly emotional themes had on an easily susceptible audience.

Mimesis and its Platonist condemnation The justification for Plato’s extremely critical attitude towards art and implicitly poetry resides in their reliance on mimesis. Probably at its onset the term had designated the imitation, within sacred rituals, of human beings or animals, and therefore the notion was initially associated only with painting, sculpture and theatrical performance. In fact, Plato’s mimesis does not make reference only to poetry; on the contrary, even in the case of the art of words the image remains essential because through it the poet would produce an imperfect “copy” of reality, which in its turn had been an equally imperfect copy of the flawless world of Ideas. The Platonist denigration of mimesis-­based poetic activity became, as Lubomir Doležel rightfully noted, a “cause célèbre” in the history of philosophy and aesthetics.8 According to Plato, the arts that primarily involved the senses, appearances and the surface of things did not have access to universal knowledge on account of the fact that the ontological status of what they imitate is inferior to that of the imitated object. Furthermore, imitations distort the Idea and deny the truth through its falsification. The poet was accused of the fact that, without really being knowledgeable, without being a specialist in one domain or another, he would hypocritically claim the possession of this knowledge. The public would be fooled, influenced and mesmerized by the hollow and vain pleasure that imitation provided. 8 Doležel, Poetica Occidentală, p. 39.

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Poetic “genres” In spite of this defamation, the philosopher had devised a classification of what was later on called poetic “genres.” Hence, in Book III of the Republic9 oted that poetry relies upon diègèsis (narration) which can be pure (haplè) when the poet speaks in his own name as in the case of the dithyramb (narrative choral chant), imitative, that is entirely mimetic (dia mimèséôs), when the characters are the ones who narrate as in the case of tragedy and comedy, whereas the third (mixed) category combines the previous two by alternating narration and dialogue, as in the epopee. The diegetic or narrative forms thus lay emphasis on the breach between the time of the narrative and that of the illustrated events. The classification then highlights another very important opposition, namely that between mimesis and diègèsis; the mimetic criterion in poetry presupposes attributing direct speech to characters, therefore without implying an apparent connection to the author. If according to Plato the more valuable genre was the one involving a lesser degree of imitation, as in the dithyramb, on the contrary, for Aristotle who was his former student, preeminence is granted precisely to the genre that imitates the most, specifically tragedy, as the span of mimesis extended, in his view, even over the epopee which is a genre that is not entirely dialogical, therefore encompassing the narrative field. Actually, Aristotle ended up restructuring the entire theory of mimesis furnishing, in his famous treatise, the first theory of poetry and implicitly of literature.

1.2.2. Aristotle, the father of poetics Born in Stagira, Aristotle was admitted to Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen and remained there for twenty years. Then he founded his own school, the Lyceum, and it is worth mentioning that he was Alexander the Great’s mentor. Aristotle’s extraordinary personality is still invoked today in numerous domains such as philosophy, logic, aesthetics, science, due to the essential contributions that he made though his treatises and papers. The study that is of interest to us at this point, the Poetics, was apparently written between 334 and 330 BC. It comprises about fifty pages of text and is more a collection of notes addressed to the philosopher’s disciples than a written work intended to be presented to a wider audience. This becomes obvious judging by the elliptic and raw character of the text and, as Rostagni10 pointed out, by the “schematic, meagre

9 Plato, “Republica” in: Opere V, (Bucharest: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1986). 10 Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov’s introduction to the book by Aristotle, La Poétique, (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 12.

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style which was not connected to a rigid external order, variegated by interruptions, repetitions, reflections on unpredictable topics, permeated with digressions and caesurae, brimming with insinuations, ellipses and brachylogies.” The formal aspects do not overshadow the importance of the treatise for the whole of Western literary theory because the conclusions regarding poetry that the philosopher issued, as well as the principles that he formulated, persisted for more than two millennia. The Poetics is a mandatory referential work even if the theories that its author formulated have been challenged or considered outdated. Aristotle relied upon a thorough knowledge of Greek poetic production. By subjecting it to a keen examination, especially examples which had been successful, the Stagirite offered a few recommendations to those interested in writing poetry, especially tragedies which were considered superior to all other types of poetry. In actual fact, his reference is not the whole of poetic creation, only the mimetic genres, namely the epic and the dramatic genres. He was totally uninterested in lyricism and equally unpreoccupied with the creative imagination of the poet or his “original” vision. Aristotle asserted that poets had an “obligation” to speak less in their own name throughout their poetic activity.

The Aristotelian mimesis The principle of mimesis that would later on determine and explain the connection established between art and reality (i.e. the imitation of reality within the work of art) is one of the major themes of poetics as a study discipline. Plato deemed many poets’ endeavour dishonest and deceitful because, in his view, they offer a distorted copy of reality (the latter being itself a copy of the world of ideas) whereas Aristotle pointed out the values of mimesis. By virtue of mimesis, poetry did not diverge from the essences; on the contrary, it came closer to them. Metaphysics and the positioning of the truth in the remote world of Ideas urged Plato to pass a harsh judgement on poetry which, according to the philosopher, was unable to attain to this realm of the absolute. Aristotle no longer situated the idea within transcendence but within immanence, in the emotional world, and that was precisely the reason why he considered that poetry could have enough cognitive weight to become the conveyor of general truths. The Aristotelian ideal form, the eidos, can resemble the real object. In fact, the role of the artist is precisely that of finding the Form in the object in which its manifestation is flawed. It is the cinder that has to be removed from around the essence. The major difference between the two theories on poetry therefore consists in Aristotle’s belief, as opposed to that of his former teacher, that there are valid and noteworthy poetic truths which profess the rise of individuality from the realm of the ephemeral, pretence and 22

incoherence, to that of durability and universality. Thus, in chapter IX of the Poetics, a distinction is made between the historian, namely the one who illustrates “the thing that happened”, and the poet, who depicts “things that might happen”. “Poetry”– Aristotle wrote in the same chapter – “is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal and history only the particular.”11

Mimesis in tragedy The author of the Poetics referred very specifically to poetry perceived as mimesis praxeos or imitation of actions although, unfortunately, he had never distinctly defined mimesis12 and thus the ensuing meanings attributed to this term by other scholars have often been divergent. It was irrelevant to Aristotle whether poetry was in verse or in prose, and if the displayed facts were real or imaginary (real events could have been a source of inspiration for the poet but the facts invented by him were equally accepted by the philosopher as legitimate in the field of poetry). What really mattered, however, were the logic of the action and the organic unity of the mimetic object which would entail the need for a muthos (action) constructed as a unified structure of events with a beginning, middle and end. Hence, the subject chosen by the poet – preferably a unique subject – had to be impeccable from the point of view of the cohesion and coherence of facts that unfold according to the rules of causality and logic, as Aristotle specified, within the boundaries of the plausible (eikos) and of the necessary (ananké). Character and “thought” are not as important in tragedy as the story, because it is not people but action that is the main reference of imitation. Certainly, one may object that there is no action without participants and that a plot cannot be conceived and understood in its complexity by ignoring or minimizing the characters. Aristotle’s option is, however, very straightforward in this respect, and elements that pertain to psychology, both of the author and of his characters, are considered negligible as compared to the issues that concern muthos, mimetic action, which leads to the idea of a temporal vision of literature and not a static, spatial or descriptive one.13 The main reference in Poetics is obviously to mimesis construed as imitation of actions through language. If modern poetics holds that the matter of the language

11 Aristotle, Poetica, trans. D.M. Pippidi (Bucharest: Academy Publishing House, 1965), p. 65. 12 The literary mimesis is only included in the larger category of imitative activities as specified in chapter IV of the Poetics. 13 The idea was very well highlighted by Paul Ricoeur in his book Temps et récit (Paris, Seuil, 1983–1985).

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of literature is the prevalent subject of study, Aristotle, on the other hand, placed it in the background as in the foreground he chose to place the idea of building a plot consisting of a series of events within the boundaries of the plausible and of the necessary. In his work there are also clarifications concerning lexis which is the fourth so-­called constituent of tragedy (after action, characters and thought) and is allotted three chapters (20 to 22). The linguistic and stylistic contentions, without being extremely elaborate, are systematically presented; among others, Aristotle’s definition of the metaphor is a mandatory reference in the specialized literature.

The emotional reaction of the audience or the catharsis The philosopher was interested in the emotional reaction of the audience that either attended theatrical performances or read poetry. The logical unfolding of events had to be plausible, and poetry had to be composed in full accordance with the precepts of beauty which, in Aristotle’s view, meant greatness and order directed towards generating emotion. Consequently, a valuable tragedy would provoke catharsis, the tragic emotion, by stirring feelings of mercy and fear. What catharsis precisely meant for Aristotle still remains a mystery. We only know that, in Book VII of Politics, he promised to provide a more detailed explanation of the concept in his future writings on poetics. Perhaps he even accomplished this task but the work in question was not preserved and, unfortunately, neither was his book on comedy which is said to have been much more than a mere project. It seems that in times past, the term catharsis was connected to the archaic Orphic and Pythagorean beliefs and designated the necessary cleansing of the souls of the dead in pursuance of their being admitted into the world of the shadows. But Aristotle only referred to the purifying power that tragedy and music had for the souls of the living. In Aristotelian theory this is an additional argument in favour of the utility of the poetic art which was no longer perceived in the same manner as by Plato, as a menace to emotional balance, but as a necessary cleansing, a purging of emotions and feelings. Furthermore, the poetic endeavour and the pleasure that art offered to the audience were justified, in the philosopher’s opinion, by the innate gift of imitation. Hence, it is a general feature of human nature, a natural and completely reasonable trait revealed both by the poet’s need for artistic creation and by the audience’s need to be part of the aesthetic experience. Confusion immediately arises when it comes to this notion as well, as it is not very clear whether the above-­mentioned cleansing is exclusively the “work” of the creator of art or the audience has its own active role in the process. Moreover, could the feelings of mercy and fear only be associated with tragedy? Could it be that comedy or narration in general might also have a cathartic power that 24

would, of course, involve other feelings than the above-­mentioned ones? Then, is it true that the, one might say, magical power of art entails a psychological or intellectual mechanism or an equally psychological and intellectual one, or even both of them in variable proportions? The ideal representation of how tragedy should be, a representation that Aristotle introduced in his treatise, was not independent of the poetic reality of its time. In his theoretical thinking, the philosopher had unquestionably been influenced by what he particularly liked in theatrical performance, especially because the effect that artistic creation had on the audience’s consciousness was extremely important to him.

Is Poetics a normative treatise? It is easily noticeable that his writings on poetic art primarily dealt with the general and not with specific matters, namely with particular poetic creations, even though the secret of artistic creation could often consist in precisely what distinguishes it from creations of the same kind: “Trying to pinpoint the essence of poetry” – Doležel wrote –“poetics lacks the fundamental aspect of poetry: the uniqueness and variability of its manifestations.”14 Poetics is not, however, reduced to a set of norms intended as a guide for those who wanted to become initiated into the poetic art or to fathom their theoretical knowledge with the aim of writing tragedy. The normative discourse blended with the descriptive one but also with critical judgements, which might appear as a lack of consistency regarding Aristotle’s firm conviction on how to relate to poetic activity as a theorist, historian, critic or a mere observer. The axioms that he had postulated and the precepts that he had developed were not tyrannically imposed within the Poetics, or at least a reading of the treatise does not imply it. As predominant as it might be, the normative accommodates both the descriptive and the axiological. The major reference is not, however, the contingency and variability of the poetic production, but the ideal form of poetry, which means that from a reference centred on the topicality of the theatrical production of his time, Aristotle also tended to target, like Plato, the essential and the transcendental. The radical difference between their conceptions resides in what they understood by the poetic ideal. Aristotle considered that it was perfectly feasible to materialize these exemplary forms within actual poetry even if they did not abide by unequivocal moral and ethical standards which, as we have seen, were absolutely vital to Plato. 14 Doležel, Poetica Occidentală, p. 32.

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The destiny of Aristotle’s treatise Paradoxically, Aristotle’s fundamental work was not widely disseminated in antiquity. It became known to the Orient due to a translation in Arabic, whereas in the Western world it was not truly rediscovered until 1498 when Giorgio Valla’s Latin translation of it became rapidly widespread throughout Europe. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s concepts have had an extremely lengthy existence in spite of the fact that they had not been very accurately defined by their author. This is why mimesis generated confusion and its ambiguity also favoured abuse of the term, because nowhere in Aristotle’s Poetics does one find an explicit formulation of the obligation to imitate reality as a whole. Its only prerequisite was that of imitating people in action. Nonetheless, the Renaissance, which carried forward the values of antiquity, also imposed a flawed interpretation of mimesis: poetry had to imitate reality, as its goal consisted precisely in copying nature. That was the moment when normative poetics, based on laws and canons to be respected, emerged and firmly dominated literature for centuries, its most radical expression being 17th century neoclassicism. Therefore Chapelain, a specialist in classical tragedy, perpetuating Aristotle’s ideas, laid the foundation of the famous rule of the three unities in the preface that he wrote in 1623 to Marino’s play L’Adone.

1.2.3. The poetics of the Latin space. Epistle to the Pisos Unfortunately, we know too little about a period extending over three centuries, the same period that separated Aristotle from Horace. Documents of a probably inestimable value – which would have facilitated our understanding of the evolution of ideas, of their diversity and of the respects in which they differed – have been lost. As for the history of the influence exercised by the Poetics, the Aristotelian doctrine had been popularized by Horace long before being rediscovered during the Renaissance. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, famous for his odes, satires and epistles, wrote An Epistle to the Pisos15 towards the end of his life (most likely in the year 15 BC) when he decided to dedicate himself almost entirely to “sapientia,” namely philosophical and ethical thinking. After a tumultuous existence, his principles became delineated by morality and the recommendations that he made in this small guide to artistic writing (476 lines) stemmed from his own life experience and, naturally, from the pertinent observations resulted primarily from the background built up

15 The addressees of this epistle, Lucius Piso and his sons, were well-­known supporters of art.

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while being a poet. The term ‘poetic art’ had been given to this work by Quintilian – Horatii de arte poetica liber – and thus it became essential to literary tradition, a very fruitful tradition indeed as Horace surpassed Plato’s influence and even Aristotle’s during certain periods.

Studium and ingenium As stated, Horace also promoted the principle of mimesis although it is unclear whether he had direct knowledge of the Stagirite’s Poetics. He also brought a personal development to this theory by advocating the imitation of literary models (in his opinion, the Greek rather than the Latin ones), a highly valued idea in that modernity which embraces the belief that one of the main sources of literature is literature itself: “uos exemplaria Graeca / nocturna uersate manu, uersate diurna” (lines 268–269 of the epistle). Among Horace’s milestones we, therefore, encounter the Greek artistic creation that should be studied day and night as Horace mostly held Homer in high regard. But caution was equally recommended because models were not to be followed too closely. According to Horace (lines 409–410), the harmonious intertwining of learning, i.e. stadium, and personal talent, i.e. ingenium, had to guide any poetic creation because one without the other would be worthless: “I don’t see any point either in learning without an abounding vein of inspiration or in unpolished talent.” This was the answer that the poet gave to a theoretical matter which was being fervently debated during his time and which remained a controversial topic in aesthetic theory: to what extent is the work of art the result of the artist’s natural endowment. Or is it rather an outcome of the effort invested in it? Consequently, is it skill, technique or talent and inspiration? Horace’s assumption is that the two do not exclude one another; on the contrary, they have to coexist.

The principles of Horace’s poetic art Horace adopted the theory of imitation from Aristotle and, from his perspective, posterity especially retained his famous comparison of poetry to painting from which it resulted that the common source of the two types of art would be the image, ut pictura poesis, a dictum that would preserve its authority from the Renaissance until Classicism. It is worth mentioning that, before him, Simonides – mentioned by Plutarch – had drawn this parallel: “Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.” From Horace’s short but dense poetic art a few core ideas emerged: the scholar devised a theory of the form and content of artistic creation which had to be governed by decorum. The latter had initially been an ethical category and after27

wards became a rhetorical principle as well, embodying the harmonious relation and the fair ratio between expression and content, the measure and avoidance of any excess in any kind of circumstance. On the other hand, the theorist also took into consideration the poet as an individual who had to be endowed with several mandatory characteristics for this occupation: a solid education, thorough knowledge of culture which was not only poetical (as in the study of the Greeks day and night…) but also philosophical. A serious self-­directed critical examination was highly recommended in order for creators of poetry to become aware of their abilities and skills with a view to choosing the appropriate subjects in accordance with their own capacity. This is a fundamental praeceptum: one has to know how to select the subject because an inspired choice always brings about an inspired style and layout of the entire poetic craft. Horace’s conception, according to which one of the exigencies that must be imposed upon the poet is virtue, is also of Platonic origin. How would he otherwise be able to advocate good deeds without supporting them in private life as well? Therefore one could easily understand that, to Horace, the moral content of poetry was extremely important because it was considered a veritable repository of wisdom and knowledge within society, a view that, this time, sets him apart from Plato who had the least confidence in the values that poetry may comprise. Actually, the moral and the educational functions were considered a priority for the poetic art as conceived by Horace. He therefore succeeded in accommodating in his theory both the ethical demands, of Platonic origin, and Aristotle’s confidence in the genuine value of poetry which could not necessarily be considered, in Aristotle’s view, of didactic value. It is equally true that the Latin author kept in mind the fact that arid content, however necessary for moral development, is not effective unless it is presented in an appealing fashion. Qui miscuit utile dulci is yet another principle handed down from Horace which, along with others, earned his fame. Hence poetry had to be equally usefulness and pleasure, intellectual effort and poetic indulgence, life lessons in a skilfully built form.

Horace’s vision of drama The main reference in Horace’s work is to drama which is given the importance of a privileged genre, a fairly interesting fact if we take into account the fact that in the reign of Augustus, in which Horace lived, the production of drama was virtually insignificant. Probably the very prestige of Greek models had inspired the invention of such a theory that ended up having a tremendous influence upon the creation of drama thereafter. The same happened to the recommendation to abide by the five-­act structure, an indication that afterwards became one of the 28

fundamentals of Renaissance and, later on, thanks to Horace, of classical tragedy as well. Mindful of all the difficulties that a playwright might come across, the theorist acknowledged the undoubtable difficulty of inventing new characters but, when lacking inspiration, the collection of legendary characters could offer valuable indications. However, “if you introduce a yet unknown type on the stage and you dare to invent an entirely new character, make sure it remains as you intended it from the very beginning until the end, consistent with the character that you had endowed it with.”16 For Horace, this consistency meant respecting a truth that life itself offered (ficta proxima ueris). Hence, being unaware of the manner in which an elderly man speaks and behaves as opposed to, for instance, a young man, a merchant or a farmer, could only be detrimental to the authenticity of the characters. The verisimilitude of any creation, to which Aristotle also referred previously, is conferred by the adaptation to the specificity of age, status, occupation or nationality by means of an appropriate discourse pattern for every situation and through suitable metrics (decentem). Anchoring artistic creation – which could also verge on fantasy, within limits – within plain reality was undoubtedly a point of interest to Horace for the moral and educational impact that poetry could have upon its audience. Inspired by real life, characters and situations might be appealing for precisely this reason, thus influencing those members of the audience who might have something to learn from what they saw. The poet had to be careful not only when it came to choosing or imagining characters but also in the coherent construction of the plot and of the denouement, in full accordance with the logic of the action. Ordo, that is the order of words as well as of the very components of creation in a single unit, emerged as one of the poetic principles to which the poet had to give his undivided attention. That is because the subject and characters had to be integrated into suitable settings in order for the entire poetic endeavour to lure and to delight and, at the same time, to exercise a concrete influence over the audience who could therefore be given valuable lessons in conduct.

The ensuing influence of Horace’s poetic art Horace’s poetic art, without being sophisticated, had a significant impact on the poetic reflection of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, because it was regarded as one of the aurei libelli, which meant that it was considered even 16 In D. M. Pippidi, Formarea ideilor literare în Antichitate. Schiță istorică, (Iași: Polirom Publishing House, 2003), pp. 144–145.

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more important than Aristotle’s Poetics. The thorough study of the Greek literary models, his main reference, inspired him to devise all the rules and precepts worth observing in the poetic activity. And if his poetic art became so successful during the following periods, it was probably due to the coincidence of interest in the same reference: the Greek culture of antiquity seen as the peak of the aesthetic thinking of mankind. Proposing governing principles of drama, a genre which was comparatively unappealing to his contemporaries, the author of the Epistle to the Pisos was establishing, without even being aware of it, the normative content, namely the set of regulations for the future, Horace thus becoming a reference himself. It was equally important that he had the same concern for the two essential aspects of every literary work: the subject, the content of ideas, and the manner in which they were expressed, which was not without effect upon the consciousness of the creators as well as of the theorists of poetics in the periods that followed. Castelvero, Du Bellay and Sidney were the most important theorists of the 16th century to whom Horace was a source of inspiration.17 Undoubtedly the most Horatian of the 17th century theorists was Boileau with his famous Art of Poetry (1674).

1.2.4. The poetics of the Latin world. The treatise On the Sublime The treatise On the Sublime had a privileged role among the works of criticism, poetics and rhetoric of antiquity although it was neither cited nor mentioned in them in order at least to certify its circulation at the time of its appearance or even later. For precisely that reason the identification of its author has been merely a matter of speculation. It cannot be claimed with absolute certainty that it is by Dionysius Longinus, Dionysus of Halicarnassus or Cassius Longinus. It is, however, a fact that the author is a rhetorician,18 conventionally referred to as pseudo-­Longinus. He probably wrote his treatise in the first half of the 1st century AD and examined one of the categories that ended up having the most significant impact upon, as we know, Kant’s philosophical work as well as upon the entire Romantic period, a category that would eventually lay the foundation of modern aesthetics alongside other categories.

17 On the other hand, there is another famous name, Scaliger who, in 1561, criticized Horace’s poetic art by claiming that it “educated” with so little … art, that the entire work seemed more of a satire (Poetics). 18 It is believed that Anonymous was a naturalized Greek Jew living in Rome, taking into account the fact that he considered himself Greek but he proved to have solid knowledge of the Judaic faith.

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Until then, however, the treatise On the Sublime functioned as a link between Classicism and the Enlightenment due to Boileau’s translation of the book into French that he published during the same year as his Art of Poetry, namely 1674. The rediscovery of this anonymous writing of antiquity, however, was the merit of Francesco Robortello who published it in 1554 but, at that time, it remained comparatively unnoticed.19 An entirely different impact was made by the translation into English by John Hall in 1652 and Boileau’s above-­mentioned translation into French. Boileau had been aware from the very beginning that he was dealing with an “excellent” study that very few had really understood. The French translator noted that the author of the treatise who was “the most famous and erudite critic of antiquity” and who analysed the sublime “was himself sublime.”

The complexity of the sublime The main reference of the treatise, hypsos, which meant peak, ridge, or summit, had been translated by ‘sublime’.20 This is, in the view of the anonymous writer, “the echo of a great soul”; it is the characteristic of monumental creations, the feature that can be equally encountered at the level of content and at the level of expression in the writings of geniuses such as Homer, Demosthenes and Plato who were admiringly considered almost demigods. It is a rare mixture of intuition, inspiration, enthusiasm and elation, but also of transcendence, “an intuition of the truth, of the latent being within all things,”21 as Marc Fumaroli described it. The dispute in which Horace had also been involved concerneing the importance of the contribution of natural endowment to artistic creations and the extent of the input of other elements such as toil and precision of refinement was resumed by the author of the treatise On the Sublime. Thus, he would rather find excuses for the small imperfections of genius than declare his enthusiasm for the strenuous, correct but mediocre work of someone who was striving to abide by the rules. The treatise seemed, as Alexandre Gefen22 rightly remarked, a sort of Aristotelian anti-­Poetics as it opposed any rationalization of the mimetic phenomenon. The shift of emphasis that Aristotle had originally placed on the typical and universal, on the atypical, on brilliance, on what is uncommon and

19 With the exception of Francesco Patrizzi who used to make reference to it and comment upon it. 20 The title Peri Hypsous could be translated as greatness or magnificence. 21 Marc Fumaroli, “Le grand style” in: Qu’est-­ce-­que le style? (Paris: PUF, 1994), p. 142. 22 This statement can be found in the collected works entitled La Mimèsis. Gefen, Alexandre, ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2002).

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above average, is the main source of compatibility between the perception of the anonymous author of the treatise and the precepts of Romanticism, except that, if later on, for the Romantics, poetry is considered the almost unique repository of imagination, the pseudo-­Longinus distinguished between imagination inclined towards exaggeration in poetry and the restrained imagination of prose and oratory which were more dependent on truth and reality. Fantasy plays a crucial role in artistic composition, according to the interpretation of the anonymous writer, and because this characteristic of art is positively valued not only by Romanticism but also by modernity, one realizes why the treatise On the Sublime is one of the most important references in aesthetics.

The sources of the sublime The order that the author decided upon when presenting the sources of the sublime wasdefinitely hierarchical. In the foreground there were the solid and noble ideas that stemmed from the reasoning of the genius as great writers reach the sublime through the greatness of their own thinking. Therefore, the first reference and the main source of the sublime is the very nature of the author. Adjacent to this source of the sublime is the inspiration of masterpieces, of history and poetry. The association with Horatian thought can still be made as once again we are not dealing with a subservient type of imitation but rather with an empathic communion between model and the one that creatively reflects it. The grandeur of the written work, its brilliance, is thus determined to an overwhelming extent by the author’s choice of content. The form that ideas take is just as important. It is true that the anonymous author, a rhetorician as stated above, paid the same attention to the qualities of discourse, the elocutio section within the rhetorical structure. The enumeration of the sources of the sublime brings about a rather interesting insertion between the two classical components of a literary work: the system of ideas and the one of expression. It is emotion, regarded as part and parcel of the arsenal of the sublime. Unfortunately, a gap in the text hindered a more detailed account of the author’s vision of this source of the sublime which came second in his hierarchy. Undoubtedly it involved the emotion of creation, but mostly the intensity of the emotion experienced by the audience and by the readers to whom one may convey a unique sensation that pseudo-­Longinus called ecstasy, ekstasis. Consequently, the greatness of the work is attested by the affective response that it receives.23 Aristotle did not minimize the affective value of poetry either, 23 Some scholars considered that the echoes of the conflict between the representatives of the Attic and Asiatic styles could be discerned.

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its cathartic purification through tragic emotion being one of the aims that any author of tragedy should have pursued. But the author considered the affective reaction triggered by the work of art its main form of axiological validation. Nor is this mere attraction. The degrees of intensity of the emotion as well as their depth are important, and it is only ecstasy that engulfs the soul, thus being above mere persuasion, pleasure or delight. The other sources of the sublime, all connected to the formal aspect of the creation, the figures (both of thought and of speech), and the inspired choice of words that form the sentences of a written work, are no less the endowment of exceptional artistic thought. Thus, knowing the purely technical aspects is not useless (in fact the author tackles them with pedagogical thoroughness), but nor is it enough. Genius is equally required in this respect. Finally, the mixture of admiration, awe and surprise that results from the greatness of the idea and the exquisiteness of discourse all contribute to the creation of this ecstatic affective disposition, which is both the best marker of the existence of the sublime and the best certification of the durability of the creation: “true beauty and the sublime have been cherished by everyone at all times,” the author claims. The enthusiastic trust in the endurance of art and in theeternal values can undoubtedly be explained by the following assertion: written works that had been created centuries ago managed to preserve their inventiveness and inspired the same aesthetic elation and emotion. The author would harshly judge the decline that he had noticed in his contemporaries’ artistic production and even found the main cause of this state of affairs, namely their almost exclusive interest in money. Yet art rises above contingency, goes beyond petty interests, and brings about the spiritual affirmation of the human being.

The sublime, a transgeneric aesthetic category The unifying principle chosen by the anonymous author, i.e. the sublime, succeeded in conferring a rarely-­encountered coherence on the critical vision due to its transgeneric character. The examples provided by the author brought together poets, rhetoricians and philosophers, equally connecting them to various types of art. Alongside poetry there were painting, sculpture and music. Nor were illustrative metaphors inspired by the most overwhelming natural phenomena overlooked: lightning, torrent, large rivers, Etna, etc. … At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian formalists insisted on the need to study literature from the perspective of techniques, an idea which was more recently embraced and developed theoretically by Gérard Genette. The aesthetic category of the sublime can therefore be considered a guiding principle. The dif33

ference from the theories of the 20th century consists in the emphasis laid on the affective involvement of the reader, the effect for which the artistic creation represents the starting point, and the reference as well as the outcome of the creative effort deployed by a brilliant writer. Quality, which is considered fundamental to a genuinely great work of art, is the reference in this case: the sublime is a feature that is not only dependent upon style, as it had been mistakenly believed. The amendment was made by pseudo-­ Longinus’ French translator, Boileau: “One has to be aware” – he noted – “that by Longinus’ Sublime we don’t imply what the rhetoricians call the sublime style, but the extraordinary and the miraculous that emerge from the discourse in such a way as for the respective creation to be able to elevate, to delight, to carry away. The sublime style always seeks great words, but the Sublime can only be found in a single thought, in a single figure, in a single turn of phrase. Something might be presented in sublime style and still not be sublime; in other words, it might have nothing extraordinary or surprising about it. For example, the supreme Judge of Nature made light with only one word. This is something that was uttered in a sublime manner but which is not however sublime, because there is nothing wonderful about it. Nonetheless, And God said: Let there be light! And there was light, is an extraordinary expression which is truly sublime and has something divine in it.”24 The sublime is nevertheless a difficult objective to achieve and that is precisely why the text has a predominantly prescriptive character. It is also important to notice the view on literature conveyed indirectly in the argumentation: this type of art can teach us greatness, splendour and magnificence, the most valuable qualities of human nature, as well as the most skilful ways of talking about all the above.

1.3. The survival of poetics during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance At the beginning of the Middle Ages there had been relatively little debate on poetics although it continued to be a subject of study. However, its autonomy and independent existence were constantly jeopardized by interference or rather by its attraction within the spheres of interest of other disciplines. It was either grammar or rhetoric, and in the 12th century it was logic, that assimilated the domain of poetics which seemed to have metrics and prosody as unique references and objects of study. That was totally against Aristotle’s firm recommendation, made from the very beginning of his treatise, that poetry should not be defined 24 Histoire des poétiques, ed. Jean Bessière, Eva Kushner, Roland Mortier and Jean Weisgerber, (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 197–198.

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and validated according to the criterion of versification. Nevertheless, it is true that the Middle Ages, not as indebted to classical tradition as the Renaissance, superficially came into contact with the Poetics only through a commentary made by Averroes and translated into Latin in the 13th century. By no means does this imply that the principle of mimesis, i.e. imitatio, was no longer applicable within art theory and criticism. Furthermore, the connotations of the term were numerous, just as they proved to be during the Renaissance: inventio, fictio, fabula, and the versatile semantic reality of this concept will hardly render the task of defining it theoretically any easier, a task that had to be and still must be carried out by the poetics scholar.

Poetry and the Scripture A new problem, namely the relationship between poetry and the Scriptures, was at the centre of the humanistic debate throughout the 15th century, representing a different theoretical manifestation of the question of the status and importance of art as well as of its “truthfulness”. To provide but one example, Boccaccio, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante or in Esposizoni sopra la “Commedia,” but also in De genealogia deorum gentilium, analysed the concept of theologia poetica. The credit that Aristotle had given to poetry was thus given a new avatar through Boccaccio’s sincere and manifest confidence, whose position was not unique in the almost sacred mission of poetry. The latter, similarly to theology and philosophy, is the repository of truth that can be expressed by ways that are specific to its field. Yet the truth in question is not, however, accessible to anyone, as not everyone is worthy or capable of discovering it. The esoteric endeavor that the uncovering of the poetic truth presupposed only sublimated poetry itself, which thus acquired a symbolic weight that went well beyond mere entertainment. Furthermore, this implies that a truly valuable poet had become an ethical subject, an individual whose probity could never be questioned. Dante, who had memorably advocated virtue and spoken against vice in his artistic creation, was a good example for Boccaccio and his contemporaries. The pedestal on which poetry had been placed was the one on which poets themselves were also placed, their prestige being greater when considered poetae vates, visionaries who were able to see the hidden meaning of the world that they inscribed in their texts as God had inscribed the supreme Truth within the text of the world. The poetic truth, also secret and waiting to be revealed, was dissimulated behind the poetic images meant to reconstitute the forms of nature as accurately as possible. The ethical concern was not, however, the only one of great importance. Throughout the 14th century as well as throughout the 15th, poets and theorists 35

of poetics strived to formulate a poetic ideal, a point of reference resulting from the most harmonious merging of the ethical, usefulness and the aesthetic. It was believed that this ideal was attainable in view of such masterpieces as Dante’s, despite the challenges that the achievement of this ideal always presupposed.

Normativity and the doctrine of similarity Normative poetry, which was shaped during the Renaissance and was at its peak during 17th century neoclassicism, was based on confidence in the power of the model. This led to the persistent practice of formulating laws, recipes extracted from the very structure of masterpieces, which were considered to be generally valid due to their timelessness. The absolute confidence in the perpetuity of the model, one of the major references of the theorists of poetics of the period in question, led to the radicalization of the doctrine of mimesis in an impressive production of critical texts. The 17th century abounded in general or specialized poetics in prose or poetry, in the form of pamphlets, prefaces, letters … This could be perceived as a constant preoccupation that denoted a vivid and extensive interest in the art of words. This doctrine of similarity with the world, an imperative that every poetic activity had to abide by, acquired especial prestige during the Renaissance. But it was not a matter of conceptual innovation, but only a new version of the Aristotelian mimesis, the second important reference on poetics in the period in question, alongside the replication of authorized literary models, namely the intertextual imitation of tradition. The rediscovery of Aristotle during the Renaissance was a truly important event, although his poetic theory was filtered through Horace and his vision of the subject.25 It is also worth noting that the letter and spirit of the Poetics were altered and so was the concept of mimesis. The norm resorted to, not only in the 17th century, but throughout the entire 18th century, was the norm of similarity which entailed that the works of art had to resemble nature. On closer inspection, though, the difficulties of abiding by such a principle emerge at once. First, the artist did not have much liberty, nor did his art have the slightest chance of competing with nature which was perfect in its divine organization. The attempt to imitate the world had become a sine qua non prerequisite of any creation, but the relationship was ultimately one of subordination, not equality, as nature was always finer. Then there is the dilemma of the extent to which the artist had to know this reality in order to be able to re25 We have seen, for instance, how important was the balance between the useful and the pleasant in artistic creation.

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produce it. Was it necessary to conduct a thorough study, similar to that performed by a scientist? And if it did not live up to the model, was the image of reality that the artist offered still acceptable? Last but not least, there was also the matter of the confusion regarding who had the right to decide the degree of resemblance between the representation and the reproduced object and whether this similitude could be considered a mark of value. Obviously, the norm of similarity was quite inaccurate, and it could not constitute a valid criterion in the evaluation of the relationship established between art and reality in general. Furthermore, complying with the canon must have been very problematic. In fact, the oversights were even present at the theoretical level. It is true that the main mission of the poet was the mimetic one, but poetic invention also had to be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, believed that invention could lead to the creation of even better things than those found in nature, which actually represented a defiance of the norm of similarity to nature. The exceptions did not only confirm the rule, but they also exposed its shortcomings. Moreover, one must not underestimate the long-­term consequences of such views. Thus, the European Baroque had been prepared for it ever since theorists were no longer afraid to replace the mimesis with the miraculous.26 It was only a synthetic overview that revealed the theoretical project, the historically- dated formulae which were specific to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The connection between art and reality, the relationship between the literary discourse and the truth as well as with prominent literary works and, finally, with the status of the inspired poet as “craftsman,” had been the focal points of theoretical reflection for several centuries, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.

1.4. Between mimesis and poiesis. The 18th century Normative poetics was ousted with great difficulty after it had been unequivocally dominant for centuries. As Genette pointed out, Batteux’s27 1747 treatise, in which the author advocated imitation as the foundation of literature, represented “the last effort of classic poetics to survive.”28 As a matter of fact, the main feature of

26 In 1586 Francesco Patrizzi, for example, would contradict Aristotle’s followers and rejected the idea of writing a poem based on credibility, verisimilitude and truth. According to him, only the miraculous and its sources were important within artistic creation. 27 The treatise is entitled Traité des Beaux-­Arts réduits à un seul principe. 28 Gérard Genette, Introducere în arhitext. Ficţiune şi dicţiune, trans. Ion Pop (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1994), p. 41.

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this century was a hesitation between banishment or refusal of the old norms and canons and the impossibility of relinquishing them altogether. Although during this period one cannot speak about the existence of a genuine poetics or aesthetics, the 18th century however announced, due to its strive towards innovation and its increasing interest in human individuality, the great mutations of modernity which were bound to happen in the 19th century and mostly in the 20th century. Significant changes were needed at all levels, especially at the level of mentality, in order for the aesthetics of norms, of generally valid “recipes”, to be dethroned. Antiquity ceased to represent an unattainable pinnacle, the imitation of nature replaced that of literary models, and artists would more ever more fiercely claim their independence and their right to creative liberty as they were tired of abiding by the rules. All the concepts that were in direct connection with literary mimesis were gradually redefined; for instance, the concept of verisimilitude was now conditioned by emotion and not by reason, whereas implacable destiny yielded to the representation of passion. The collapse of confidence in objective laws, the increasing regard for taste, imagination and originality – in a word, subjectivity – constituted the premises for the expansion of an intuitionist aesthetics. Nevertheless, poetics is essentially a theory of knowledge. When confronted with the ever-­progressing subjective factor, it could lose the specificity which also ensured its identity. Therefore the rationalist approach to literary arguments was not abandoned, but poetics strove for a better grasp of receptiveness and to formulate, to a reasonable extent, a rationale of receptivity.

The aesthetics of Bodmer and Breitinger A very important contribution was made by the Swiss founders of the news aesthetics of the 18th century; one of their most important sources of inspiration was Leibniz and his theory of possible worlds. Although literary works served as an example to the philosopher, the imaginary worlds mostly explained philosophical matters, especially the category of possibility, and were not used for theories regarding the artistic field. It was the merit of the Swiss aestheticians, Bodmer and Breitinger, who used this theory productively in the interests of literature: “Any well written poem” – Breitinger wrote – “has to be, therefore, regarded as a story that emerges from another possible world. This perspective entitles the poet to the name poietes, i.e. ‘creator’, as through his art he is not only capable of endowing invisible things with visible appearances, but also to create things which are not dependent upon sensory perception, specifically to turn their possible state into their actual state, and thus present them with an appearance and names 38

of realities.”29 This quotation also lays emphasis on the substantial difference in points of representation compared with normative poetics. Art – formerly subject to nature – winds up being its competitor, the artist equalling nature through the force of his imagination, although this is not exactly a creative endeavour but rather the discovery of a world. The doctrine of mimesis is not entirely abolished because, in Swiss aesthetics, it is still a matter of imitation, the only difference being that it is a “possible world” that is being imitated and not the real one, a world which still precedes the artistic act and is not shaped by and through it. Nature is therefore enriched in such a way that not only the real world is part of it but also the multitude of possible worlds; it has its own structure and it is not merely an idealized variant. And it is precisely these worlds that poetry “imitates”. Hence, another step was taken towards the dissociation from reality both of the artist and of his work.

Goethe, the mimetic theory and the organic model A prominent personality of the 18th century, Goethe founded his entire vision and artistic creation on the classic theory of mimesis but also realized that art is neither entirely mimetic nor totally poietic. A work of his, Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil, was published in 1789 and featured the three “stages” or levels of representation of nature. The artist aimed to create a faithful representation of reality by trying to construct an image of it which should have been as accurate as possible; hence the first stage is attained when the talented artist skilfully imitates nature which could give precision and strength to his creation. However, because the object cannot be reproduced or transposed into art with all its abundance of details, the artist’s mission calls for choice, for selection – actions that Goethe labelled “manner” – and which already denote subjectivity and imagination. In the 18th century this was not yet a creative component of the human psyche, able to dislodge the ego from the reality, as it became much later. According to the general view, the imagination, a feature that allows for impressions in the absence of objects, was subject to reason. Finally, “style” was the epitome of art. In order to reach it, the artist had to go through “imitation” and “manner,” but to leave them behind. He is thus capable, according to Goethe, of seeing beyond the ephemera of appearances and grasps the essence of things, to a degree whereknowing this essence in visible and palpable forms is permitted to us. The two concurrent truths thus become prominent: the truth of nature and the truth of art that do not visibly overlap. We therefore 29 Doležel, Poetica Occidentală, p. 47.

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infer that reference is not easily discernible every single time because the truth that the artist offers is not, in Goethe’s view, mere invention but a superior truth which renders nature in its refined form, in its essence. The mimetic theory thus kept its basic configuration but a breach was still created within it, just as in the theoretical system of the above-­mentioned aestheticians Bodmer and Breitinger. Although it does not relinquish the idea of its ability and mission to mirror, imitation can have as “object” an alleged reality that is no longer visible or perceivable. It was not just a matter of reproducing an existing model but mostly of imitating an ideal reality. The breach, through its gradual aggravation, would eventually lead to the erosion of the mimetic theory in its classical form. It was also Goethe who devised the organic model in the science of literature. As he was interested in poetry, aesthetics and natural sciences alike, Goethe keenly studied morphology30 as he was convinced of the fact that works of art have “an organic nature”, resembling living nature through their very own variety and structural unity. The morphological poetics laid great emphasis on the parallel between the world of plants and literature, on the resemblance of literature to an organism, and found the most diverse similarities: structure, emergence, evolution and extinction. The idea of this parallel was quite long-­lasting as the 20th century still considered it valid, even though, as Adrian Marino rightfully pointed out, the “lifetime” of art has nothing in common with the “lifetime” of life.31

Themes in the philosophy of art of the 18th century The classic view proved its resilience as many theorists had no doubt regarding the rightness of the theory of art as imitation and had no intention whatsoever of undermining it. In the particular case of Italy, there was even a tendency to return to the classical formulae, after a baroque period perceived as a time of imaginative exaggerations. Hence, in the 18th century Italian literary world, there was a very marked reaction against pretentiousness and against the baroque spirit which was considered excessively artificial. During this century, Western cultures witnessed a perpetuation of the debates on matters that had aroused the interest of the aestheticians and theorists of po30 Morphology is the theory of the formation of organic bodies out of individual parts. Hence, several parts form a superior order, i.e. complex structures. 31 Adrian Marino, Introducere în critica literară, (Craiova: Aius Print Publishing House, 2007), p. 39.

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etry of the past, such as the importance of the moral truth in art,32 the philosophical matter of beauty which is directly linked to that of the sublime,33 and also to that of taste. The understanding of the theoretical core of these concepts, which have always been veritable pillars of aesthetic reflection, went through a process of refinement and its dilemmas were mainly connected with the balance between subjectivity and objectivity, which decisively intervene in the creative faculties and in the perceptive ones. The aestheticians of this century have frequently wondered whether beauty is subjective, in other words, dependent upon human consciousness, or objectively exists in the surrounding world. On the other hand, taste has in its turn proved to be a sensitive topic as several aestheticians attempted to answer the question regarding the extent to which one can speak about a law of taste or the possibility to train it when it seems rather to be innate, a purely subjective fact, so arbitrary that it is beyond rational control.34 Matters related to art philosophy were, for many 18th century theorists, the reference to art, but the attitude towards the classical theory made the difference between them. For some of them, the idea of questioning it was therefore unacceptable. Yet others, theorists and creators who paved the way for the poetics of Romanticism, did not hide their interest in what is uncommon, original or even deviant in art and they did not hesitate overtly to criticize the persistence of some doctrines that they had once considered obsolete. Edward Young, for instance, labelled imitation as a “meddling ape,” an elementary exercise; Lessing, in his famous theory,35 laid emphasis not on the resemblance between poetry and painting rendered by the famous quotation ut pictura poesis, but rather on the differences between the two. Poetry as the art of time and action differs from painting which is the art of space and colour. As for Herder, he believed that imitation and its as32 The persistence of Plato’s theory of essences is still visible in the consideration of the mission of art which, according to some, ought to approach only moralizing topics with a view to unveiling the world’s ultimate truth, the moral truth. 33 In England, Burke wrote the most original treatise on beauty and the sublime before Kant’s, continuing the traditional view of these fundamental coordinates of art which trigger a specific, affective and emotional reaction. Burke did not only aim to find the sources of beauty and of the sublime but also the types of aesthetic pleasure that they engender. 34 It was still Burke who believed that taste could be perfected and that a pattern of taste could equally be traced. Furthermore, H. Home (Lord Kames) recommended that good taste and, eventually, one general norm regarding taste be established with reference to the exclusive environment of the ones who were born with this feature and who refined it through cultural and personal reflection. 35 Presented in the essay Laocoon.

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sociated concept, i.e. verisimilitude, were relative. He pointed out that the world was allegorical and that the symbolic content is also very significant. Then why should art not be allegorical, symbolical, less concerned with imitation and more oriented towards imagination? Moreover, Herder was in fact outraged that genius was barred by rules and that therefore it was constrained when the liberty of the creators should be nourished, encouraged and absolutely unrestricted. The reference to art, the fundamental concern of the 18th century theorists of poetry and aestheticians, was still the concept of mimesis which continued to alter and to change its valences, sometimes unperceptively and at other times more noticeably. At the same time, the collapse of this classic doctrine becomes apparent in an indirect manner. Not only the creators but also the theorists started to be interested in subjectivity and the artistic act as an ineffable, mysterious, fascinating and undefinable phenomenon. This reference, which was difficult to pinpoint from a conceptual point of view, would trigger significant changes in the structure of poetics as a discipline in the 19th century.

1.5. Poetics in the age of Romanticism Two great revolutions, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England (which happened between 1760 and 1860) generated important shifts in the European communities, but also overseas, in countries that thus passed from feudalism to the bourgeois political and social order. As usually happens in such circumstances, changes occurred at all levels of existence as the new mentality brought about the appropriation of an equally new set of values. Views changed and the reform of thought was compelled by the rise of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class that imposed economic and political liberalism, and focused on science, technology and, obviously, on their associated rationalism. Nevertheless, rationalism as the genuine propeller of the modern economies was less consonant with the aesthetics and with the sensibility of the period in question. Likewise, individualism and nationalism at a macrosocial level had had an increasingly significant contribution up to the point when they became fundamental concepts that managed to overshadow formerly dominant ideologies based on tradition, order and moderation, obsessively under the influence of statutory models. Aesthetics and general taste shifted from object to subject, thus giving prominence to the sensibility and to the uniqueness of the creator’s voice. The dreary temperance, self-­restraint and reason which had been recommended to artists for a considerable time were replaced by passion, spontaneity and by experiential authenticity. Genius and the freedom implied by its status were revered, even though only declaratively. The autonomy of art was eagerly acclaimed, and any 42

interventions which would give more prominence to other functions than the aesthetic one when it came to art were subjected to harsh criticism. The moral and the utilitarian, educational or social functions do not and should not prevail in the artistic world. Ingenuity, the freshness of nature and simple living were among the elements included in Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s project which was enthusiastically adopted and enriched both by the theorists of poetry and by the writers of the Romantic period. Life became more and more vibrant, and civilization was equated with artificiality and corruption. This was precisely the reason why a return to unspoilt nature, to the primordial and harmonious life, was advocated, which was a profoundly idealized and slightly escapist pursuit.

The Western Romantic theory Within the aesthetics of Romanticism there are some cultures which are very often invoked when reference is made to the ideology of the trend. For example, in the particular case of German Romanticism, almost all its representative writers were also theorists. Along the lines of Kantian idealism, Novalis, Schlegel and Hoffmann dealt with the idea of beauty whose relativity they also insisted upon. There was also a concern with the importance of the imagination in the artistic act, with the weight of the symbolical and of the allusive, with the enchantment of conundrums and mystery and with the extent to which excessive rationalism destroys the emotions that art was supposed to stir. Poetry was also seen as more than a mere enterprise, as an essential activity and a state of our being which is quite impossible to define. Having made these statements, Novalis had the approval of almost all the representatives of Romanticism who were themselves fascinated with the art of the ineffable, which offers safe access to the innermost self, one that is the least altered by the conventions upon which human existence is the most dependent. For theorists and creators, the reference focused on a wide array of favourite themes such as pristine nature, the national past, and popular art. Taste and sensibility were regenerated through these new sources of inspiration. With regard to French Romanticism, the most important role in the popularization and institutionalization of this trend’s ideology was played by Madame de Staël. Even though the most frequently cited is her 1814 work De l’Allemagne, Germaine de Staël noticed, as early as 1800 when her work De la littérature was published, the differences between French culture, which was tributary to the Greek-­Latin tradition, and primarily the German culture but also the British which conformed more closely to to the direction of Romanticism. Madame de Staël claimed that northern societies have a more acute sense of pain than of pleasure; hence their imagination is richer and more inclined towards melancholy. Like 43

Rousseau, she ardently pleaded for “the progress of literature, namely perfecting the art of thought and speech” which were necessary for safekeeping and securing freedom, and when she referred to the skills involved in artistic creation, the claim was that imagination was more valuable than reason. Victor Hugo, in his Preface to Cromwell, also marked an important moment in the configuration of the French ideology of Romanticism by vehemently speaking against models and traditions, be they ancient or foreign. That was because the modern genius was more complex, more varied, in clear contrast with “the uniform simplicity of the ancient genius.” It was high time that artistic value did not depend on the cultural level of writers and on their skill of reproducing models. Society thus assumed its new role. Being less “educated,” it could no longer find spiritual and intellectual inspiration in something foreign and incomprehensible.

1.5.1. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the precursors of the poetics of Modernity Modern poetics originated in the pre-­Romantic and Romantic periods. The famous authors Wordsworth and Coleridge were also considered theorists of Romanticism, although there was no doctrine or a coherent system of thought functioning as a critical system that the two had founded. There were only a few theoretical texts and, above all, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, a common36 volume considered as such because initially, Wordsworth and Coleridge used to have many shared views on art. Their dissent emerged when the second edition of the volume was published, two years after the first, namely in 1800. To the 1798 volume William Wordsworth decided to add a Preface in order to clarify some aspects related to his own creations, but these explanations ended up being deemed generally valid, comparable to a literary manifesto. Coleridge, in his turn, wanted to outline his own view which was in disagreement with Wordsworth’s with regard to some issues, although the theorists of poetics have often pointed out that the two points of view were complementary rather than antagonistic.

Wordsworth The coordinates of the standard Romantic view are readily discernible. Hence, the return to nature and to the inspiration that it provides, were certainly not new topics. Rousseau and William Duff had already discussed this issue. Nevertheless,

36 The anthology comprised twenty poems by Wordsworth and three poems written by Coleridge.

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Wordsworth insisted upon its importance as he considered it the most direct and unique way to rediscover a kind of receptivity that had been greatly endangered by industrialization and urbanization. This is precisely the reason why plain rural life was praised, especially for its spiritual benefits. Deeply involved in the quest for authentic living, Wordsworth denounced the ephemerality of the city, thus finding salvation in the eternity of nature. The profound, pure, essential emotions and experiences can be revealed, he claimed, only by being in harmony with nature. More than anyone else, the poet is endowed with a greater ability to grasp the profound nature of the world. In his view, imagination, which is the remarkable ability that allows for such accomplishments, is not at odds with reason but rather completes it by being, at the same time, directly connected to the senses that are otherwise controlled in order to prevent the “tyranny” of the senses. Therefore imagination is the privileged manner in which the poet, an individual who possesses an above-­average sensibility, succeeds in understanding the world as it is, beyond appearances. The comprehension of eternal truths and universal principles through poetry advocated by Wordsworth denotes the canonical nature of his perspective. Thus he was in agreement with Aristotle but equally pointed out that it is not the “individual and local” truth that poetry targets, but “the general and operational” one. In fact, the classical ideal intertwines with the romantic one. Poetry is considered a rational endeavour and not the result of random or chaotic inspiration because “it is the beginning and the end of any learning process.” This traditionalist view is interwoven with the Romantic one. Remnants of classical poetics continued to persist even during the Romantic period; thus classical and Romantic elements coexisted in the works of many representative writers. The poet had to be able to establish the connection between the inner world and the outer world of nature. The emphasis was thus laid on restoring the bond that art has or should have with life, with what matters to human beings and represents their constant focus, and which can easily become an inspiration for artistic creation. The poetics of transparency and simplicity that Wordsworth nourished did not exclude an issue that was considered a coordinate of theoretical thinking, namely that of the specific verbal channel used in artistic communication. Hence both Wordsworth and Coleridge vehemently criticized the language of neoclassical poetry for its pretentiousness and for the incongruity of this poetry with the sensibility of the epoch. Thus, both of them promoted the need to revive the field of poetics in both its aspects, namely the practical and the theoretical. A new theory of poetic language in full accordance with the sensibility that rediscovered naturalness and emotion and for which innovation and novelty were of utmost 45

importance was setting in. Wordsworth believed that poetic language had to be to a certain extent similar to everyday language but without becoming too commonplace. This was the classical Aristotelian prerequisite. The poet had to be careful with the choices that he would make because his own good taste was the one that ensured his correct options.

Coleridge With regard to Coleridge, he is generally considered the author of one of the most important Romantic theories of poetic language. The latter was compared to the language of science in order to distinguish its specificity and the conclusion, which is still accurate and valid, was that, in poetry, the aesthetic function is preeminent. Moreover, the aesthetic coordinate does not apply only to forms (e.g. phonic models or tropes) but mostly to the semantic level. In the 20th century these became some of the most debated issues not only in linguistics but also in many other disciplines and trends in literary research. Coleridge, who was equally interested in philosophy, founded his theory on philosophical bedrock. His tenet was that it was not only the critic who had to have a personal philosophy but also the poet who, according to Coleridge, could not have been a great poet without being a keen philosopher. Biographia Literaria, which was published in 1817 and which is in some ways an ideological revenge by the poet and critic the Preface written by Wordsworth in 1800, has a rather heteroclite character. The references to his own intellectual progress intermingle with the detailed analysis of Wordsworth’s claims, with considerations on literary theory or poetics, on aesthetics and philosophy. The imagination as a superior ability is also reiterated in Coleridge’s account and it is divided into two categories: primary, “the living force” and the main mediator between the human perception and the secondary one, an echo of the former. Imagination is above phantasy, which is considered merely a process of memory, as imagination is the greatest asset of the demiurgic poet and the one that conveys strength to the images in the poem to such an extent that the reader is under the illusion of entering a real world. It is Coleridge’s famous statement that poetry brings about a willing suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, poetic imagination, which differs from the perceptual or philosophical imagination, is creative and possesses the ability to reconcile opposites (the general and the particular, idea and image, judgement and enthusiasm, etc.) into a superior vision which is also unifying, a capacity that prose simply does not have. It is at this point that Coleridge’s view distinctly differs from Wordsworth’s for whom there is no essential dissimilarity between the language of prose and that of po46

etry. However, Coleridge rigorously separates the two languages by disagreeing with both the urge to idealize the rustic and with the glorification of mundane discourse which his peer advocated.

The poetics of Romanticism, the antipode of normative poetics The poetics of innovation thus contradicted what normative poetics had built and had authoritatively preserved for several centuries. Drastic rules, principles and norms had governed the artistic activity or, in actual fact, they had restrained it because, according to this theory, beauty resulted from abiding by the models. Given the fact that the respective models had proved their value and endurance, it was absurd to forget or ignore them. Yet this view of art, reflected by the theory of the norm, overlooked one of the most important features of the ever-­inquisitive human being, namely the need to discover, to explore new territories either pertaining to external reality or to their own inner reality. Romanticism and its aesthetics represented precisely the rebellion against restrictions and limitations imposed by the norm. The latter became worthless as the new artistic formula valued creative freedom, novelty and awe. Since then things have not changed significantly as regards conceptions. But if we make a further analysis of the history of poetics, the radical transformations that this discipline went through during the 20th century turned it into a veritable science of literary research, a very elaborate and sophisticated theory with a more precise conceptual apparatus and remarkable methods.

1.6. Modern Poetics There was an unprecedented development in science and technology during the 20th century which favoured another characteristic phenomenon for this period: a population increase which was especially prominent in urban areas. The process of delimiting nations was the centre of everyone’s attention, and other equally important notions for our society were delineated during the last century, namely class, gender, race, etc. Efforts were no longer targeted at revealing and imposing universal laws or what had been traditionally considered unique. The prestige of eternal truths faded until their validity and legitimacy were questioned and they were eventually replaced by other coordinates and values such as relativism, pluralism and diversity of opinion. Literary research was also marked by these significant changes of the value scale. At the end of the 19th century there was an impressionistic type of criticism, and the amount of biographical, psychological or historical elements was 47

overwhelming. That is precisely what triggered a violent reaction of rejection of those interpretations that had an insufficient focus on the literary work itself. The aesthetic rigorously delimited its object by refusing its previously assumed dependence upon other disciplines and their discourses: morals, religion, psychology, the social, etc. In order to be taken seriously and because a structural change was necessary, literary research progressively became a scientific activity in which objectivity was paramount. Another important aspect which led to a definite reconsideration of the theoretical tools of poetics was the recognition of the constitutive role of language in many modern theories. Language became the main concern in all issues connected with philosophy and was even considered essential to the structuring of the world. The innovations that literally baffled the domain of poetics were chiefly due to linguistics which was the discipline to which not only literary research but also philosophy and other fields of knowledge were very much indebted in the 20th century. Saussure’s course and Charles Bally’s linguistic stylistics helped poetics in performing pertinent analyses of the expressive potential of language and, generally speaking, they endorsed a totally different attitude towards the text.37 One of the main concerns of poetics started to be the internal logic of the literary work, its organization and the structural connections that define it. Matei Călinescu was wondering38 if one could speak of a wider critical Zeitgeist at the beginning of the 20th century, when he noticed similarities between the interests of Russian formalists, New Criticism and, in France, for instance, the theories put forward by Paul Valéry. When the latter noticed that poetics was somewhat obsolete as it had been using didactic acceptations based on abiding by rules and directions for such a long time, he suggested the adoption of a definition that would rely on a different meaning and, at the same time, on a different purpose of poetics. Considering the etymology of the term which implies the idea of “making,”39 Valéry suggested that the concern of poetics should actually have been the reality and specificity of literary works, their structure and not 37 Since language was viewed as a unity between form and meaning, a new science, i. e. semantics, which was also related to linguistics, was established. By means of the tools made available by modern science, one of its branches, literary semantics, studied the manner in which literary texts can convey meaning, the amount of conveyable meaning, or how alterations of meaning can occur at all text levels. 38 Matei Călinescu, A citi, a reciti. Către o poetică a (re)lecturii, (Iași: Polirom Publishing House, 2003), p. 128. 39 The meaning of poiein in Greek is “to make.”

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their prescribed appearance which ought to have followed some guidelines that were both difficult to follow and utterly incongruous with the general appreciation. Therefore it was high time for prescriptive philosophy to be replaced by prospective philosophy.

1.6.1. Russian Formalism The visible progress made by the literary studies during the last century was possible due to the relatively short but impactful activity of the Russian formalists. Nowadays any research on poetic language relies on or is connected to Russian formalism, which is said to mark the dawn of modern poetics. This critical and theoretical orientation emerged and existed in Russia between 1915 and 1930, as a result of the research conducted by the Moscow Linguistic Circle whose members were Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Boris Tomashevsky and Yury Tynyanov, and by the OPOYAZ (the Petrograd “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”) whose members, who were to become famous, included Victor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum. By rejecting literary positivism, sociologism and psychologism, namely abusive intrusion into the critical reading of elements which are extraneous to the artistic production, the Russian formalists were the ones who founded the tradition of scientific research in literature. Everything related to the external connections of the actual literary work such as the social and historical context, psychological factors or the personality of the author eventually became unimportant because the work ceased to be regarded as a social, historical or biographical document. Their focus was the intrinsic quality of the literary work and the internal organization of artistic creations, hence the idea of the autonomy of literary science which was to rely on the linguistic evidence and not on cultural productions.40 In the view of Russian formalists, individual literary creations are sui generis phenomena, autonomous and autotelic objects that abide by their own laws and are endowed with their own inner goals. However, autonomy does not entail the isolation of the individual creation which is perceived as a whole, as a system which is

40 The idea of aesthetic autonomy is famous due to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement. The philosopher pleaded for the elimination from the domain of art of other external interests: i.e. utilitarian, didactic or affective interests. Nevertheless, the formalists did not realize the fact that they were somehow developing Kant’s theory. Ewa Thompson referred to the Formalists’ lack of epistemological consciousness in her work Russian Formalism and Anglo-­American New Criticism. A Comparative Study (Mouton: La Haye, 1971).

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embedded into another system, namely literature. Hence the actual literary works and literature as a system were the main points of reference, the object of study of this particular school of thought.

Literary forms and the evolution of the literary system The name formalists was critically and ironically assigned to them by the ones who accused the members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and of the OPOYAZ of placing too much emphasis of the formal aspects and thus creating a veritable breach between literature and life.41 However, the name whereby they became well-­known and which, in time, lost its pejorative connotations, was not entirely adequate for the view that Russian formalists had of themselves. They were never interested exclusively in the study of form as they simply tried to dismantle the arbitrary dichotomy between content and form or rather to confer to the idea of form the prestige and importance that it had never really had. Form was understood as a dynamic whole with its own value, the latter being the very “content” and not merely a worthless coating. In order to highlight the fact that expression had been erroneously understood throughout the centuries as being subordinate to content, Shklovsky pointed out: “A new form does not appear in order to express a new content but in order to replace an old form which had lost its character of artistic form.”42 came the actual literary undertaking, the bearer of the specificity of the verbal art. Although one might infer from Shklovsky’s statements that there is a great diversity of literary forms, since they are constantly renewed, the reality is that the variety was considered by the formalists to pertain to the contents that reality furnishes and which become “inspiration” for literature, as forms consist of a limited number of invariant elements that can be systematically described; these are techniques that constitute the groundwork within the structure of the literary work. Similarly to Shklovsky, who did not perceive the transformations occurring within the field of literature as changes at content level but as formal innovations, Tynyanov also introduced a theory regarding the evolving literary system.43 The internal dynamics of the structures is the one that leads to alterations

41 Especially the Marxists were very virulent towards the formalist movement which was actually banned by the Bolsheviks. 42 Quoted by Pierre V. Zima in Critique littéraire et esthétique. Les fondements esthétiques des théories de la littérature (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), p. 46. 43 See Tynyanov’s study “Faptul literar”, published in the reader entitled Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1983).

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which result in the elements’ inability to preserve their dominant function for a longer period of time. When banality and routine set in, innovation materializes through the establishment of new forms that do not stem from the previous ones; on the contrary, they are quite their opposite, because the supersaturation of the system brings about the need for techniques, forms and manners of expression which differ from all previously known ones.44 This is an entirely different view of evolution as it is considered in nature. That is because “there is no perpetuation linkage between the preceding and the succeeding link”, as Bakhtin also commented. “The succeeding link does not stem from the preceding one at all.”45 The idea of dialectic literary evolution, “through struggle and replacement”, is opposed to the point of view of other formalists according to whom the literary work was envisaged as an organic whole whose parts coexist in harmony, the literary system functioning according to the same principle. For Tynyanov, however, the evolution consisted in the replacement of some systems with others and in changing the functions of formal elements, of their role and their weight. It can thus be inferred that the theories of the formalists were not unitary and did not keep a steady course.

Defamiliarization and the artistic work as a collection of methods Another example in this direction would be one of the key concepts in the currently discussed doctrine, namely ostranenie, i.e. defamiliarization. In spite of the fervent encouragement of artistic autonomy, the formalists who shared some of the opinions of the Futurists, their contemporaries, counted on the impact that artistic productions might have on one’s habits, on the values that one cherishes and the norms that one abides by. In 1917, Victor Shklovsky, a founding member of the OPOYAZ, wrote the essay entitled Art as technique which was considered a sort of manifesto of the formal method. In this essay, the author referred to the ability of art to renew the perceptions that had been “dulled” by the automatisms that always accompany us. New dimensions of reality, which would otherwise remain undetected, are revealed due to defamiliarization and also due to the distancing from the common reference framework that literature prompts. Through its set of techniques and methods, through

44 One of the examples given by Tynyanov is the following: if a period prefers an ample genre such as extended poems, it is very likely that the next period should prefer shorter poems like, for instance, the sonnet. 45 M.  M. Bakhtin, Metoda formală în știința literaturii. Introducere critică în poetica sociologică (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1992), p. 210.

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defamiliarization, art urges the individual to go from the simple recognition of the objects that we encounter in our daily existence to “seeing” them, to rediscovering them as well as the ingenuity of life that seems too common to notice any more. Nevertheless Bakhtin46 accused Shklovsky of not being aware of Tolstoy’s47 true intentions when using the technique of defamiliarization. The writer did not envisage a “renewal” of the perception of objects as it was not things but moral meanings that were de-­automatized by means of the use of the defamiliarization technique! What the formalists constantly wanted to prove was the particular character that literary art had as compared with other types of discourse, and the demonstration was made by means of the comparative method. Because poetry is the most distinctly different form of expression in comparison to all others since it thwarts the common verbal associations, the formalists attempted, at an initial stage of their research, to identify the principles that distinguish between poetic language and everyday speech. Later on, they would discover and institute the key concept of “literaturnost,” literarity, i.e “what makes a literary work literary”, which resulted from the research conducted by Jakobson, one of the most famous formalists due to his international career as a linguist and theorist of poetics that he managed to build after leaving Russia. Once this concept had been established, all the techniques that exhibit the literarity of a text or of the literary system became the object of study and the reference of poetics. When referring to the discursive particularities of literature, mention should be made of the fact that, according to the formalists, prose would mostly use the common variety of language rather than the artistic one and thus, from the point of view of proper language, it did not exhibit a typically artistic approach. Many studies (such as the ones written by Brick and Jakobson) later tried to devise a theory of traditional poetry, namely the one that involved a high level of coding: rhythm, rhyme, meter, etc. The sounds of the verse were also a favoured object of study because they contributed, through the disruption of the semantic aspect which circumvented its strictly communicative goals, to the construction of a discourse which was qualitatively different from the one of prose or from common speech.

46 Bakhtin, Metoda formală în știința literaturii. Introducere critică în poetica sociologică, p. 85. 47 Tolstoy’s work, which he often quoted, helped Shklovsky the most in the illustration of the technique of defamiliarization.

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The fable and the subject Yet prose could not be eliminated from the literary sphere and even though it did not arouse interest from the point of view of language, it was still attentively studied from the perspective of the structural elements of the story. Hence, the Russian formalists made an important distinction between the fable, namely all the events that represent the raw material for the narration, and the subject which is structured according to the building rules of the epic genre, rules that do not necessarily follow any particular logic of existence. Boris Tomashevsky, who was chiefly interested in the study of prose, claimed that fabula could be defined as “all the events in their reciprocal and intimate connection” as its evolution presupposed the passage from one situation to another. On the other hand, the subject entails “the distribution of events,” their arrangement into a specific order; out of the material furnished by the fabula, a “literary combination”48 is achieved via the subject. The fabula is a daily, ethical or political event that took place in real time: “it lasted for days or years and had a certain ideological or practical significance. All of them become the material used in shaping the subject. The latter is developed into a real timeframe of achievement and reception, of reading and of listening. The subject line is a winding road of digressions, halts, delays, detours, etc”.49 Analogies, repetitions, digressions, interruptions, condensations, the omission of certain occurrences that cannot be absent from the course of the real events, delays, going back in time, chronological discrepancies, etc., are the liberties that a creator can take when writing; they are a construct, the shaping and alteration of facts and natural order with the purpose of moulding them into an artistic form. By analysing various novels and short stories, the formalists reached the conclusion that there is a basic element in every narrative, namely the motif, and the web of motifs actually build the subject. Vladimir Propp’s fundamental study The Morphology of the Folktale (1929) also relies on this idea and, in the search for the form and governing principles of the folktale structure, it reduces one hundred Russian folktales to 7 action patterns and 31 invariant features.50 The latter are called functions which are converted into typical scenarios and occur in an always

48 B.  Tomashevsky, Teoria literaturii. Poetica (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1973), pp. 252, 254. 49 Bakhtin, Metoda formală în știința literaturii. Introducere critică în poetica sociologică, p. 144. 50 The idea of invariant elements that lay at the foundation of narratives was already famous in Russia, but Propp had the initiative of transposing it into a systematized theoretical and conceptual form.

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identical succession forming a closed set connected to the open set of motifs. The functions are assigned to characters according to spheres51 and thus the folktale becomes an easily formable structure, a pattern that can constitute the basis of different subjects. Propp’s model was one of the pillars of modern narratology, being “typical for the structural undertaking which does not involve identifying the specificity of a text but of its structure which is defined solely as the specific organization of the invariants existing in a superordinate code, a code of the literary genre, of discourse, of the epoch, etc.”52

The posterity of the Russian formalism Formalism became known and gained its fame in Europe and in the United States due to two important studies: Russian Formalism by Victor Erlich (1955) and Théorie de la littérature (1965) which comprises a collection of texts authored by the Russian formalists, which were translated and prefaced by Tzvetan Todorov. In Romania the work of the formalists was mostly known due to the above-­quoted anthology, namely Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă. Undoubtedly, many trends and directions in the literary research of the 20th century developed or passed on the theories of the Russian formal school whose aim was to comprehend the nature of literature, the laws that govern and sustain the literary system by preponderantly studying the specificity of the artistic language and its distinctive features in comparison with other types of discourse. Even though the interest was mainly channelled towards the materiality of the text (everything connected to the verbal dimension), rather than towards the “message” of the literary work, the formalists still rejected the dissociation between content and form by trying to discover the manner in which a particular artistic form, different from our communicative habits, is a carrier of meaning.

1.6.2.  New Criticism The Anglo-­Saxon New Criticism is less of a poetics-­oriented critical trend than the Russian formalism as its actions, which are centred on individual works, mainly have a hermeneutic and critical character. Hence, one of the leading concepts of the school of criticism is close reading, a very keen text reading and analysis that 51 For example, the sphere of the hero entails the decision to embark upon a quest, the reaction to the benefactor’s requirements, marriage. The sphere of the benefactor involves bequeathing the magical object, entrusting the magical object, etc. 52 Sorin Alexandrescu, “Prolegomenon II” in Poetică și stilistică (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1972), p. XCVI.

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considers phonetic, syntactic, and lexical aspects. Nevertheless, the effort to go beyond the borders of stylistics by identifying the general categories that define the text as well as numerous theoretical hypotheses formulated by the representatives of New Criticism, i.e. William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, etc., entitle the inclusion of this school into the comprehensive field of modern poetics.

Attitudes and viewpoints on the literary phenomenon Close reading emerged in the 1920s in England and became famous by the 1950s, whereas the American New Criticism peaked between the 1930s and the 1960s for the same reasons that had led to the establishment of the formalist doctrine: the study of literature relied solely on biographical and historical considerations, being almost exclusively concerned with the affective, moral, psychological and ideological rationales of literature. The New Critics, just like the formalists, changed the focal point of the reference of literary research: namely from what literature communicates to how it is produced, from studies dealing with extrinsic aspects to the immanent method of analysis. Apparently, the term New Criticism was first used in a 1910 essay title by Joel Spingarn in which he advocated for an imaginative Crocean criticism according to which preeminence should be given to the aesthetic aspects of literature. It was not the right time, however, for the configuration of a school. During the 20s and the 30s, the protest of the new critics, both in England and in the United States, was directed towards modern industrial civilization and the capitalist spirit. Some people were experiencing a euphoric sensation of confidence in the benefits of the new, but others, among whom there were many “Southern” critics living in the USA during the interwar period, were concerned about severing the umbilical cord that connected the individual to society, sensibility being also dissociated because science would subject it to this schizoid fragmentation. On account of the fact that New Criticism believed in the capacity of poetry to be the source of a spiritual renaissance, it also upheld the preservation of the socio-­cultural “Organicism” perspective on the work of art perceived as a whole resulting from the solidarity of its constituent parts. In its turn, the work of art was to be integrated into another system, namely into literature. Hence, the concept of “organic form” was perpetuated after it had been adopted from German Romanticism and from Coleridge. Thus, it could be stated that the theoretical premise of the New Critics was of aesthetic and not of linguistic origin, as it had been the case with the formalists. Therefore, whereas the formalists initiated the tradition of a scientific type of structuralism, the tradition of “aesthetic humanism” would continue. 55

The British inspirers of New Criticism I.A. Richards, a referential figure for the direction of New Criticism53 in general, is considered the first greatest theorist that followed Coleridge and one of the pioneers of the reception method which would later be known as close reading. In his famous work Principles of Literary Criticism, the author resorted to behaviourist psychology in order to discuss the impulses that various external stimuli trigger and to which the body responds. Literature, similarly to art in its entirety, also has the ability to balance the impulses, but it does not “express” emotions. It configures them, it constructs them discursively, yet we are not dealing with their mimetic reflection but with a restoration accomplished mainly by poetry54 which has a non-­referential nature. The affective tensions are discernible, Richards pointed out, both at the semantic level and at the formal one, but they are worked out by and within the global structure of the poem and that is precisely the great merit of poetry: i.e. its power to create harmony by engendering a beneficial state of contemplation in the mind of the reader. As a matter of fact, Richards shifted the emphasis from the author to the recipient, to their attitudes and reactions when exposed to art. The fact that the natural inclination of individuals is to establish order within a chaotic mass of external impulses justifies their attraction towards the work of art which satisfies certain inner needs of ordering, systematizing and hierarchizing existence. In Science and Poetry, taking his theory one step further, Richards demonstrated that poetry is able to transmit pseudo-­statements that are particularly convincing due to their internal organization. Science is that which conveys truth which does not entail its superiority in relation to poetry. In fact, the latter has nothing to do with the true-­ false categories. It matters and it is valued according to its capacity to convince. The main reason for the powerful impact of Richards’ theories was not the psychological implication, which was actually overlooked, but the critical applications promoted by the technical, internal and verbal analyses of the literary work.55 Moreover, Richards made a distinction between two paramount func53 Although there are voices claiming that the “new criticism” borrowed some of Richards’s ideas, the theorist was never part of the critical movement in question. 54 It is common knowledge that the privileged corpus of the members of New Criticism consisted of poetry, especially metaphysical and modern poems. 55 The teaching experiment that Richards conducted with his students is very famous and is presented in Practical Criticism (1929). His aim was to put the principles of close reading into practice and to avoid stock-­responses, i.e. those reactions which are the result of past experience and knowledge and which hinder the correct understanding of the poem. Professor Richards submitted for analysis various poems whose authors were

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tions of language, i.e. the symbolic function, which presupposes the transmission of the reference to the receptor, its symbolization, and the emotive function which involves the expression of emotions, attitudes, intentions, etc. Eventually the prominent representatives of New Criticism adopted this theory. For example, J. Crowe Ransom also made the theoretical distinction between structure – the content of the poem that could be rephrased – and texture which referred to the quality of the poetic expression. William Empson was considered an equally important personality within this the critical trend. Among his most famous books there is the one entitled Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the first study that the author published and in which a famous “reference,” i.e. ambiguity, was instituted as a defining feature of poetic language, as a feature which was generated by polysemy and by multiple meanings. Without firmly contesting the importance of the social and historical context for the artistic creation, the author mainly focuses on the suggestions offered by the constituent parts of a poem. This time it is not the overall view that takes precedence, but the segment analysis. His very thorough linguistic-­semantic studies examined both the ambiguity phenomenon which provides, according to the critic, the vitality of literature, and that of irony and polysemy. Following his former professor, I.A. Richards aimed to demonstrate by means of his work that a critic has to understand and decode the literary text which is a privileged manner of communication that has to reach the reader’s heart.

The New Criticism school of thought The American branch of the trend imposed its name due to John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), which was actually a group manifesto, and it became even more prominent than in England. The most brilliant representatives were John Crowe Ransom, Allan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke and R.P. Blackmur. The school of thought was not unitary as the points of view of its renowned representatives were diverse, although there was unanimity regarding the perception of poetry as an autonomous and non-­referential verbal act.56 The New Critics also

not specified. The interpretations and evaluations were very diverse and contradictory which led to the conclusion that the experiment had failed. 56 Among the most important and famous studies in the domain of literary research which examine these statements is The Intentional Fallacy (1946) which argues against the idea that a poem could be explained through the auctorial intention, and The Affective Fallacy (1949) which contradicts the contention regarding the expressive

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shared the endorsement of a thorough poetic textual analysis, able to highlight syntactic, prosodic, metric, etc. elements, close reading being actually the most important legacy left by New Criticism to literary criticism which is concerned with the thorough research of the structure and functioning of an artistic text. Therefore, New Criticism was never concerned, much the same as formalism, with the genesis of literary texts, with their reception and their ideas, or with the political and social aspects that constitute the context of any literary work, and that is because it was considered that the poetic discourse was incongruous with common logic and with other types of discourse. The type of interpretation that they relied on was the poetic and not the scientific, and therefore it was the domains of the symbolical and of the mythical that were subjected to scrutiny and not the domain of common reason. All that mattered for the New Critics was the meticulous study of word nuances, of types of verse and rhyme, of images, paradoxes, symbols, ambivalences, and particularly of the metaphor,57 the “queen of discourse” which has the capacity to reveal truths that do not pertain to the realm of the commonplace or to conventional logic. All these elements furnish the unified structure of the poem by their synergism, in spite of some divergences and contradictions emerging among component parts. The New Critics also advocated this type of homogeneity, which they gladly recognized in the poetic creation, with respect to culture and to regaining the harmony that, for instance, only myth and religion could restore.

1.6.3. The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926–1948) This was led by Vilém Mathesius, and its members were the Czechs Jan Mukařovský, R. Wellek, Havrének and F. Vodička, and the Russians Roman Jakobson – who had left Russia and resided in Prague for a certain period of time – and Trubetzkoy; it had the merit of continuing the research of Russian formalism and of corroborating in a new, modern, scientific perspective all the fundamental themes of poetics. Furthermore, it created and launched a new model that, in 1929, Roman Jakobson would call structuralism. The birth certificate of the first literary structuralism was represented by the Circle’s Theses presented at the 1928 Slavic Philology Conference in Prague, in which literature was still analysed from a linguistic perspective, similarly to the character of poetry; the latter is considered an autonomous discourse which is beyond the bounds of any current communicational goal. 57 Ransom, Brooks and Wimsatt placed great emphasis on the metaphor and described it in religious and sacred terms.

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other above-­mentioned directions of literary research at the start of the century. Nowadays, the ideas included in this document seem banal, as if taken from a common corpus of literary science. But at that moment they were new, especially with regard to their manner of systematization; thus, poetic language was understood as a whole whose component parts interact, (actually a multitude of levels among which reciprocal connections were established) because poetry was considered the only manner in which language as creative energy was highlighted, and which fully capitalized on its potentiality, etc.

Structure and sign As regards the concept of structure, it is to this day considered one of the key concepts of the movement and resulted from the adaptation of the Hegelian view on totality, which entailed, according to the philosopher, the consistency of the component parts. The Prague scholars believed, however, that the artistic structure was a hierarchical system with dominant and dominated elements, and hence a system governed by contradictions which are specifically the ones that bestow personality upon the work of art. The matter of the sign was no less remarkable. Mukařovský, the most important theorist of the Circle, placed aesthetics within the boundaries of the general science of signs, namely of semiotics, the science that perceives reality as an immense complex of signs. This type of semiotic aesthetics argued against any form of determinism (i.e. the mimetic, expressive and sociological perspectives). The contention was that art is not the reflection of a certain reality but an emerging autonomous sign; however, the secondary functions that it fulfils (i.e. biographical, historical, social, etc.) are neither ignored nor excluded. The immanent study of the literary work was paramount but, as opposed to the formalists or to the representatives of New Criticism, the Prague theorists of structuralism did not exclude the sociological features or the ones that concern the production and reception of a work of art from their research. Hence semiotic poetics deals with the factors that are always present in any literary activity, specifically the sender, the receiver and the social context. That is because literature belongs to human culture as a different form of communication from any other forms of communication, a status that the preeminence of the artistic function confers on it.

Mukařovský and the concepts of function, norm and aesthetic value The imposition of the concept of aesthetic function was due to Mukařovský, but the merit of highlighting the functions of language belongs to Karl Bühler. He was the one who defined the speech act as the relationship between three factors: 59

the sender, the receiver and the reference, each of them having a corresponding function, specifically the expressive function, the conative function and the referential function, respectively. It is a well-­known fact that Jakobson developed and substantiated the functional model of speech acts but Mukařovský noticed that, apart from the three functions put forward by Bühler, it was necessary to add a function, which did not resemble any of the three functions because it pointed towards the sign itself and not to extra-­linguistic realities, namely the aesthetic function. The hegemony of this function within the work of art, a function which is devoid of a practical purpose, has as a direct consequence the weakening of the referential dimension of the aesthetic object and the hypertrophy of the signified, especially when dealing with the rejection of the consensus between art and society or with defying traditions and crippling conventions. Literature actually exerts an active influence upon the material that it uses, specifically upon themes and language, in order to obtain an artistic structure. Mukařovský considered that this process involved two fundamental techniques: deformation and organization. First, “the material” is subjected to “disturbance”58 with the aim of changing its original form, and then there is the organization which leads to the configuration of a new model, namely the literary model. Mukařovský defined art as a dynamic and innovative element which may survive the normative systems, which aims at permanently questioning cultural norms and even succeeds in contributing to their change. The scholar pointed out the fact that aesthetic norms, which blend with social norms, with the influence of the setting and of the context, have a considerable bearing upon the final product, i.e. the work of art. In fact, the aesthetic value is the one that results from the combination of extra-­aesthetic values (e.g. social, political, religious, etc.), the difference between a literary work and other creations of the mind consisting in the dominant position of the aesthetic coordinate. The aesthetic value does not seem immutable or everlasting; on the contrary, it changes as it is conditioned by external factors as well as by the interaction between the artistic structure, the norm and the aesthetic function. Hence one might claim that the work of art does not change at all from the point of view of its material substructure, whereas the work of art as aesthetic object alters permanently due to the fact that it is not “a stone monument but a living semiotic object.”59 That is why a very complex work of art, with a great

58 These types of disturbances also occur in emotional or pathological discourse, but in those cases the aesthetic function is nonexistent. 59 Doležel, Poetica Occidentală, p. 166.

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power of adaptability and change, which is able to trigger an intricate hermeneutic process, has greater chances of surviving the changes of mentality, of taste and of views through the centuries than a work of art that only addresses its own context. Aesthetic value is thus determined by the ability of the work of art to outlast the heterogeneous cultural models that it comes across, an endurance which is determined by the capitalization on the formal and semantic potentialities of the creation in question, which appear as conjectures until they are brought to life and restored. This happens up to the point when the work of art has nothing more to communicate and even though it is included in the patrimony, it is not among the living, topical and current creations. Therefore the theoretical perception on the reference of literary value was fundamentally altered due to Prague Structuralism. Aesthetic Platonism, which involved the search for the unique and authentic significance of the work of art, was replaced by the idea of polysemy with everything that it entails, including contradictory interpretations. Hence there was no longer a single legitimate evaluation but several acceptable interpretations in accordance with the manifold aspects of the work of art.

Vodička’s outlook on aesthetic objects Having borrowed Mukařovský’s ideas on the topic, Vodička perpetuated and developed them, and thus he recommended literary historians to take into consideration the transformations that literary works go through in various social and historical contexts. A very relevant example in this sense is the Bible which has been, time after time, studied from a religious, aesthetic, historical, political or moral perspective. Felix Vodička pointed out that aesthetic objects and even the very concept of literature change when they are placed in other social-­political situations, and the aesthetic function can also work as a “disturbance” of communicational accuracy: “The work of art displays the features of a structure and it is an ensemble of signs, but the communicational clarity of these signs is to such an extent disturbed by the aesthetic function that they can evoke many different semantic associations. Therefore, one can generally concede that the reception of the work of art allows for several semantic and aesthetic interpretations.”60 Due to their extensive analyses of the effects that the literary work could bring about, as well as of the multiple interpretations, both Mukařovský and Vodička were rightfully considered precursors of the theories of reception.

60 This is a statement made by Vodička in 1941 and reproduced by Lubomir Doležel in his book Poetica Occidentală, p. 171.

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Apparently the Prague Linguistic Circle broadened its horizon starting from the mere observation of the aesthetic object, which was widely practised by the Russian formalists, to a more extended reference. The latter no longer downgraded extrinsic factors so vehemently since they also contribute to the shaping of the aesthetic object which, far from being as immovable as its material support, changes constantly.

1.6.4. Roman Jakobson A very important contribution to the configuration of poetics in the 20th century was made by Roman Jakobson, the linguist and theorist of poetics with an extremely prolific output, as mentioned. His career started at the Moscow Linguistic Circle from 1915 to 1920; it continued with the Prague Linguistic Circle from 1927 until 1938, and subsequently he refined his theoretical models in another cultural setting, namely in the United States, at Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc.

The linguistic functions In the 1960s, in his particularly famous study entitled Linguistics and Poetics and published in 1963, Roman Jakobson synthesized and systematized the most important perspectives of Russian formalism as well as the most comprehensive survey of the poetic research of the respective period. The main contention made in this study concerns the non-­referential character of the poetic message, a message that gives prominence to the word per se and to its autonomous value. Drawing on Karl Bühler’s linguistic model, Jakobson indicated the existence of six characteristic factors for verbal communication, either written or oral: the addresser, the addressee, the message, the code, the context and the contact. There are six corresponding functions for the previously mentioned six factors: the emotive function (oriented towards the addresser), the conative function (involving the addressee), the referential function (which is context-­oriented), the phatic function (in charge of opening, maintaining and closing the communication channel), the meta-­linguistic function (assures the common understanding of the code) and the poetic function, in this latter case the message focuses upon itself thus being enhanced, and that is precisely why it appears surprising and unexpected compared with other types of messages. The six functions can be present in any message, but the difference is made by the ranking of these functions in accordance with our communicative purpose. For instance, the poetic function can also occur in an advertisement but a poem can differ from this type of text through the fact that the poem’s poetic func62

tion is the dominant one. For Jakobson and the Czech structuralists, the notion of dominant sorted out the problem of the relationship between the aesthetic function and the other types of functions (social, political, moral, religious, etc.) which can undoubtedly be encountered in literary texts. The poetic function does not exclude other functions but it subordinates them because the dominant one is the “focal point” of a work of art due to the fact that it is the one that governs and shapes the other components, in this case the other functions. The examples provided by the theorist of poetics facilitate a more thorough comprehension of the matter. Thus, in epic poetry, in which the focus is on the third person and on the context, the referential and the poetic functions are included. On the other hand, lyric poetry is centred on the first person; therefore the emotive function is present alongside the poetic function.

The poetic function, between selection and combination Jakobson then tried to find an objective criterion that would permit the detection of the presence of the poetic function. This criterion was discovered departing from the difference that Saussure made between the possible relationships in the field of verbal signs: syntagmatic relationships (in praesentia) and paradigmatic relationships (in absentia). Jakobson labelled the two operations on which any linguistic construction relies, as follows: selection, which entails equivalence, similarity or synonymy relationships, and combination, in which the verbal sequence is founded on a contiguity relation. Conveying a message presupposes the combination on a syntagmatic axis of several units selected from many other more or less equivalent units reunited on a paradigmatic axis. In everyday communication we choose the word that we want to use from a set of equivalent words and then there is the stage of combining that particular word with another or with others which were selected in a similar manner, according to the principle of equivalence. Poetry maximizes these processes. The particularity of the poetic function consists in the projection of the principle of equivalence from the selection axis to the combination axis or, in other words, “similarity overlaps contiguity” and what is eliminated on account of contiguity becomes an equivalent. This is one of the essential laws of literary communication, a law which rightfully gained its notoriety. The correlatives of these two axes of language are two fundamental types of figures: the metaphor, which relies on similarity and selection, and metonymy, which involves contiguity and combination.61 In his 1956 essay Two Aspects of Language 61 In the case of metaphor, a sign substitutes another because it is somewhat similar: for example, passion becomes a “flame”. In metonymy an object is referred to by a term that

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and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, Jakobson put forward the theory of the bipolar structure of human language which oscillates between metaphor and metonymy. Any normal behaviour comprises the two processes and their interaction, but there are preferences for one or the other according to various circumstances and personal psychological characteristics. In this sense, literary trends also display inclinations; thus romanticism and symbolism preferred the metaphor, whereas prose, which is generally interested in reference and contiguity, favours metonymy.

Literarity Hence Roman Jakobson turned the poetic language into the real star of poetics which became the science that adopted linguistic theory during the 20th century. This language ended up being regarded as a special idiom which was able to transform the common verbal sign into a poetic component that did not adhere to reference. Jakobson termed this specificity of the literary text literarity (literaturnost), a very important concept for the Russian formalists and considered by most scholars to be the true object of poetics. What does it actually entail? It entails that literature does not simply appropriate elements from reality. It presents utterly diverse people, objects, experiences and phenomena which acquire, in the work of art, other meanings than the ones that they possess in reality. Through the contemplation of this unique form of organization or reorganization of reality that is literary creation, one is invited to reconsider prior knowledge or, at least for a while, to abandon one’s communicative and perceptive usages and everything that can be considered a stereotype or a cliché in our understanding of the world and of life. Later on, in 1991, in his work which was translated into Romanian in 1994 as Introducere în arhitext. Ficțiune și dicțiune, Gérard Genette confirmed the viability of the concept. But when also noticing the lack of theoretical guidelines regarding the span of literarity, he further noted that a distinction should at least be made between two types of literarity: constitutive literarity which includes fiction (defined logically and pragmatically) and diction (poetry defined formally), both having a distinguishable and declared purpose and, on the other hand, there is conditional literarity. In this case we are dealing with marginal literary genres such as the autobiography or the personal diary which do not have an artistic purpose but, at some point, they can be considered as literature and acquire an artistic dimension. What matters most is that the latter does not depend on the formal, syntactic aspect of texts, but on the manner in which they are perceived by designates a different object, but it is linked to the first through a logical connection of contiguity, such as, for instance, the work referred to by the name of the author.

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the receiver. In this case it was time for pragmatics to intervene as well as for the focus to shift away from the text, where it had been established by the formalists, and to move to the manner of reception.

1.6.5. Structuralism Structuralism started to achieve an appropriate recognition in the 60s, especially in France; its most famous representatives were Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Yet the real founder of the current was believed to be the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss, who studied the myths of South-­American Indians as systems of oppositions, transformations and negotiations, thus extracting rules for the configuration of signs and symbolic systems. Lévi-­Strauss pointed out that myth, also perceived as a form of language, has a dual structure with a historical dimension, which refers to events occurring in the remote past, and an unhistorical one concerned with timeless values. The anthropologist called attention to the great variety of myths, but the assembly of this variety relied on a limited number of themes and immutable universal structures. There are rules that govern the combination of elements with a view to creating a myth, and they can be considered a sort of a grammar of myth which is valid at any place and any time because it is grounded on universal mental operations. During these processes, the individual subject loses its relevance62 and collective thinking becomes essential. In the United States structuralism was anticipated by Northrop Frye, the most influential American theorist of myth criticism, who was at the peak of his fame between 1940 and 1960. He wanted to restore the spirituality represented by myths, rituals and stories in a world of alienation dominated by scientism, technology, positivism and not by intuition, imagination, dream and magic. In his famous study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) he offered a static model with recurring symbolic patterns. After going far beyond the borders of France, when reaching the United States, structuralism influenced the research in the field of narratives (Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, Neil Cohn) and stylistics (Michel Rifaterre). Other illustrious personalities in the domain were Seymour Chatman, Jonathan Culler, Claudio Guillen and Gerald Prince. The impact of this new school of thought was extremely powerful and the expectations were very high. It was believed that structuralism was able and bound to reform all humanist sciences, and it actually coincided with the development of some multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary trends. 62 Structuralism relied extensively on the idea of “decentring” the subject.

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The sources of structuralism The origins of the movement within literary research can be traced back to Russian formalism whose sole focus was also the text and its internal connections, to the structuralism of the Prague School, and to Hjelmslev’s linguistic studies, but mostly to the research of language conducted by Saussure. The latter pleaded for a synchronic study of language and noticed, among other things, that language is a system of interconnected signs, any sign becoming incomprehensible if it is isolated from the others. Saussure mostly laid emphasis on the social dimension of language rather than on the individual one, on langue rather than parole, on grammar rather than its application; he favoured models over their materializations, competence over performance. The theorists of structuralism wanted to shift from the subjective to the objective, from impressionism and dilettantism to a systematic and scientific type of study63; they wanted to be considered genuine scientists which even led to the emergence of a new discipline, namely narratology.64 Structuralism was perceived as being related to Marxism due to their common interest in invisible mechanisms, the structures that govern human activities. Yet Marxism was based on the theory of historical determinism and on the theory of materialism that held in high regard the idea of an economic basis, whereas structuralism was more partial to philosophical idealism as it was relying on the focus on the linguistic bases that were believed actually to contribute to the construction of reality.

System and structure In Structural Anthropology it was still Claude Lévi-­Strauss who provided a very important ground rule for the identification of structural sciences, and that was their common feature, namely their systemic character. Specifically, every

63 In time, the outline of a truly objective science of meaning conducted by Greimas, Genette or Todorov was abandoned. 64 Tzvetan Todorov, in the preface to his famous Grammar of the Decameron published in 1969, asserted his conviction that narratology, as a domain concerned with the study of the fundamental aspects of the narrative, ought to gain a good reputation within literary research, not as a science that investigated the surface structure of the text but, on the contrary, one that dealt with its deep structures. In its turn, Genette published Discours du récit in 1972, a book that became truly referential for literary studies and in which the author, departing from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, devised a generally valid theory of the narrative. Also, the seminal contributions made by Greimas, Claude Bremond and Roland Barthes should not be disregarded.

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structure whose elements could not be modified without bringing about alterations of the other elements that belonged to that particular structure could be considered a system. Thus any biological, logical, formal, historical, literary, anthropological or economic phenomenon was perceived as a network formed of its elements and their interconnections, elements that did not matter unless they entered into relationships in order to form a “system of interactions”. Hence the meaning and the reference that used to be of interest were no longer sought for at the level of terms but at the level of the network that subordinated and incorporated them; the relational perspective and “anti-­humanism”65 at that point replaced anthropocentrism which had been dominating the general outlook for centuries. “The new object for structuralism is the system that is endowed with all the attributes (autonomy, self-­regulation, unity, etc.) of the traditional individual.”66 The concept of structure, a concept of the interpersonal and of the superindividual, of transpersonal forces, without any connection to psychological or subjective-­emotional aspects, became the key term of the new direction. It designated, according to Lalande’s definition, “a whole composed of accordant elements within which every element is dependent upon all the others and it can only be what it is among and through them.”67 This notion was intended to replace others such as essence, form, eidos and totality, without actually eliminating them from the semantic composition but, on the contrary, by incorporating and overcoming them in order to mark a conceptual progress. Adrian Marino drew attention to the fact that, actually, the fundamental principles of structuralism were not exactly new. They presuppose, if the reference is art, “the internal cohesion” of the work of art, its “logic” and “organic structure.” In more general terms, one might claim that “there is a latent ‘structuralism’ in any type of organicist perspective and included in any integrative direction of the human mind”68 and this approach as well as the

65 Although “anti-­humanism” seems like a rather “strong” term, it perfectly illustrates the objective of structuralism to play down the human agent (be it the individual or society) by bringing language to the fore and turning it into a veritable institution with a determining role for the whole of human activity. Consequently, the transpersonal forces rank first due to the fact that they allegedly govern all the different levels of human life, and reality itself is no longer mirrored by language but “generated” by it. 66 Terry Eagleton, Teoria literară: o introducere, (Iași: Polirom Publishing House, 2008), p. 112. 67 Quoted by Savin Bratu in Analiză și interpretare. Orientări în critica literară contemporană (Bucharest: Editura Științifică, 1972), p. 83. 68 Marino, Introducere în critica literară, p. 71.

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principles that derived from it had been stated before and discussed at different moments in the history of universal culture.

Structuralist opinions and analyses Gérard Genette, a prominent voice during the affirmation of structuralism, advocated the study of the elements that transcended the individual literary work which was perceived as a product of poetic techniques. Therefore it was important to take into consideration history, forms, techniques and literary themes, not only the literary works per se. To the same end Tzvetan Todorov set the individual work, which should not have been the interest of the theorists of structuralism, in opposition to the abstract object of poetics. A.J. Greimas referred to the importance of writing a structural history with comparative semiological structures, a history that could replace the outdated, chronological one. Although there seems to be a consensus regarding the opinions of the most important representatives of structuralism, the differences are numerous and baffling and the structural analyses differ from one author to another. Perhaps the most famous structuralist analysis is the one jointly conducted in 1962 by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-­Strauss, whom Jakobson introduced to structural linguistics, on Baudelaire’s poem Les chats. The two theorists aimed to highlight the existing correspondences between the phonetic, metric, morphemic and syntactic elements and the semantic structure of this poem. It was an extremely thorough analysis which revealed not only the correspondences and connections between levels and between various structural elements but also the existing contrasts. As regards the narrative, the most famous studies were conducted by Barthes, Bremond and Todorov who examined the actantial narrative schema, whereas Genette and Franz K. Stanzel are the most prominent representatives of narratology who explored the formal structures of the story. In his study entitled Mirajul lingvistic69, Toma Pavel identified three directions of the structuralist movement, primarily according to the relationship with linguistics. Hence moderate structuralism, which was predominant in the 70s and 80s, was concerned with the study of linguistics whose methods and concepts it did not exactly borrow. In this category Toma Pavel includes the analyses of Jean Rousset, of Paul Zumthor and of J.P. Richard. On the other hand, scientistic structuralism extensively resorted to linguistics because the latter was considered “the most evolved of all social sciences.” Among the most illustrious representatives of this 69 Toma Pavel, Mirajul lingvistic (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1993), pp. 12–13.

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direction we can mention Lévi-­Strauss, Barthes (specifically his 1970s research) and A.J. Greimas. Finally, there was speculative structuralism with a philosophical orientation, represented by Foucault, Derrida, Barthes (i.e. his 1980s studies) and the school of psychoanalysis founded by Jacques Lacan. Due to the fact that structuralism had never had the features of individual literary works as a primary reference but rather their deep structure as well as the general features of literature, one might claim that it attempted to set up a general poetic theory. From antiquity until the 19th and especially the 20th century, poetics had never known a more visible development. Nevertheless, formalism and structuralism marked the rebirth of authentic poetics, the one that Aristotle established, namely the formal analysis of the literary phenomenon. And even if structuralism waned, we have to keep in mind that apart from the undoubtable influence exerted upon the “sciences of the sign” such as anthropology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, it also revolutionized literary studies, and therefore its study is essential for the correct understanding of the evolution of 20th century poetics.

1.6.6. Semiotics In the 1960s and 1970s, the tendency was for the term structuralism to be replaced by either that of semiotics or semiology.70 Saussure’s final important concept was that of semiotics, the origin of the term being the Greek word sêmeion. As a matter of fact, it may be claimed that semiotics existed since antiquity and was used in many fields of study: philosophy, grammar, rhetoric for the analysis of significance.71 Modern European semiotics is very much indebted to Saussure who defined language as a system of signs, the latter aspect making it comparable to the sign language alphabet or to symbolic rituals and politeness formulae. Hence the linguist suggested the 70 Hjelmslev defined the difference between semiotics and semiology as the opposition between the general and the particular, semiology being the general science of the system of signs whereas semiotics described particular systems. Greimas used the term semiology for content-­related sciences and the term semiotics for the form-­related ones. In Romania, Maria Carpov used the noun semiology and the adjective semiotic. In general, the continuators of Saussure’s theories prefer the term semiology whereas American and British scholars use its variant, namely semiotics. However, the two terms are considered to be synonyms. 71 Divination, for instance, was the art of sign interpretation with the aim of predicting the future, and medicine can also be considered, starting from antiquity, as a domain in which the reading and interpretation of signs/symptoms is very important in the treatment of illnesses.

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setting up of a “science whose object of study should be the life of signs within the social life,” a science that should be part and parcel of social psychology. Semiotics deals with the factual existence of signs, with their production, transmission and organization into systems and their interpretation. The signs can be oral, written or non-­verbal. The application area of semiotics is very vast as it can cover various disciplines such as mythology, anthropology, film studies, visual arts and, certainly, literary works for which the term semiology is preferred. This was precisely what triggered the emergence of several specific semiotics such as discursive semiotics (legal, political, etc.), visual semiotics or the semiotics of sounds.

Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles Morris Logic and semantics made their own contribution to the delimitation of the domain of semiotics, especially the research conducted by Charles Sanders Peirce which took place in the same period as Saussure’s. The latter was interested in the internal analysis of semiotic systems and, furthermore, he believed that the sign was based on the relationship between a signifier and a signified, a perspective which excluded the referent altogether. On the other hand, Peirce concentrated on the production and use of signs, on their reference to objects and to the manners in which objects were represented by signs, on sign systems and mainly on the language of sciences. According to him, significance is the relationship between a sign-­vehicle, an object and an interpretant. Moreover, Peirce made the distinction between “icon” signs (photography, for instance) which are based on a relationship of similarity, “index” signs, based on contiguity or causality, and “symbol” signs in which the sign is arbitrarily or conventionally associated with its meaning. Charles Morris developed Peirce’s theory in the US because he too considered semiotics to be a science but also an instrument of scientific investigation. That is why he claimed that linguists, philosophers, logicians, psychologists, etc., had to make their own contribution to the field of semiotics. It is Morris’s contention that any language is comprised of three axes: the semantic (sign/referent), the syntactic (sign/sign) and the pragmatic axis (sign/receiver). Semiotics imposed a series of conceptual distinctions: between denotation and connotation72, between codes, namely the rules that govern the structures and the messages transmitted by these structures, between language and metalanguage – in other words, a system of signs that refers to another system of signs. 72 Hjelmslev introduced the distinction between the explicit meaning of the linguistic sign, i.e. denotation, and its additional meaning, connotation. Obviously, connotative language cannot exist without denotation.

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The semiotics of A.J. Greimas One of the most famous directions in semiotics is the one led by Greimas, which was in some respects adopted by Barthes and by Julia Kristeva73. First, A.J. Greimas expressed his belief that any text, not only a literary one, can be defined by means of a theoretical discourse, and therefore it is accessible from a conceptual point of view. Therefore he believed in one single, authentic meaning that only a scientific undertaking could reveal. He also introduced the concept of semantic universe for various sections of reality, but these universes cannot be studied entirely, and therefore the semiotic analysis is actually an analysis of micro-­universes. The literary discourse represents such a universe and Greimas dealt with the analysis of the story, an analysis that he intended to be as objective, as formalizing and as abstract as possible, a truly scientific study. The point of departure was represented by the smallest semantic units and then the analysis became increasingly comprehensive: from signs to individually considered words, to verses, sentences, stanzas and finally to the whole poem. Greimas wanted to accomplish a global interpretation by means of the constant integration of meaning into a superior level. Certainly this method is virtually impossible to apply to the novel. But perhaps his most significant contribution is the semiotic square through which the narrative text (and sometimes the entire literary work) is reduced to four terms:74 term 1, term 2, term not-1 and term not-2. Terms 1 and 2 are opposites, for instance life and death. Between term 1 and term not-1 or between term 2 and term not-2 there is a relationship of contradiction, i.e. life and non-­life. Finally, between term 1 and term not-2 or between term 2 and term not-1 there is a relationship of implication. These terms and their relationships are connected to the deep structure and Greimas’ model was extensively used in the analysis of narrative texts. Still, although the deep structures should have been more or less universal, they differed from one theorist of structuralism to another. Barthes, Todorov or Bremond had totally different manners of envisaging this kind of deep structure. Equally well-­known is the actantial text model which consists of three levels: the level of the deep structure, the level of the surface structure of agents and actions, and the level of discursive structures with elements such as space, time, characters and images. In fact, Greimas adopted Propp’s roles and turned them into actants that acquire a syntactic function rather than a role. Greimas further 73 Roland Barthes in The Fashion System, a study published in 1967, and Julia Kristeva in Semiotike. Recherches pour une sémanalyse, published in 1969. 74 Greimas attempted to simplify Propp’s functions.

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introduced the concept of isotopy, which was given numerous definitions and which presupposed, on broad lines, the recurrence of certain semantic elements that assured the coherence and homogeneity of the collocations and of the text. Apparently, however, these recurrences do not appear only at content level but also at the level of expression75 and the mandatory prerequisite for the existence of isotopy is the presence of at least two units. Literary texts generally contain more isotopies on account of the fact that polysemy can be defined as the coexistence of two or more heterogeneous isotopies in a text. Greimas terms this coexistence poly-­isotopy.

Cultural phenomena from a semiotic perspective Umberto Eco focused on the analysis of the literary work viewed as a communication act as he was convinced that, in fact, all the cultural phenomena ought to be studied as communication processes. Hence, the primary codes of natural language, which fulfill communicative functions (economic, political, scientific) are transformed by and within literature into secondary codes, “private” codes or idiolects constructed by authors. And the decryption of truly valuable literary works never leads to an equivocal meaning. In The Open Work (1962), Eco defined the work of literary but also musical or plastic art as a system of signs. The openness that he refers to, starting from the title, entails the possibilityof the work (especially the modern or contemporary one) being interpreted in various manners without its signifying potential to be completely exhausted. The openness of the work equally refers to the invitation extended to the reader, by the work itself and its author, to contribute to its achievement, the work that is “to be completed” thus being a challenge for the interpreter. The emphasis is placed on the openness of literature and art in general. However, as opposed to Roland Barthes who carried this idea to the extreme by pointing to the unlimited polysemy of the signifier, Eco adopted a more moderate hermeneutical perspective and highlighted the opposition between liberty of interpretation and respect or loyalty towards the text, the latter having the ability to confirm or legitimize some interpretations and to reject others. This is the intentio operis, but according to the trichotomy that Eco devised there is also an intentio auctoris as well as an intentio lectoris. The process of the reception of the work of art represented a distinct chapter in the research of the theorist of semiotics who, in Lector in fabula, spoke about an “encyclopedic competence” of the reader which was related to the knowledge of 75 Alliterations and assonances can be considered phonetic isotopies.

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the world, cultural knowledge, literary and non-­literary knowledge, the linguistic competence possessed by the reader when getting acquainted with the subject, and the narrative structures of the text. As opposed to other theorists of semiotics (such as Greimas, for example) who had little or no interest in the reactions of readers, Eco granted them due attention in order to create a balance between the three “intentions.”

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes, a figure with a remarkable role in the establishment of the semiology of signification, is probably the most eloquent example of the heterogeneity of structuralism as well as of semiotics. Mostly in agreement with Saussure, the French theorist integrated semiology into linguistics and not the other way around (i.e. linguistics subordinated to semiology) as the Swiss linguist had done. As opposed to Greimas, the orthodox representative of structuralism, Barthes spoke against the authoritative domination of the signifier, of the concept, as well as against another authority which had been wrongly considered the sole guarantor and provider of the unique and homogenous meaning of the literary work, namely the author. Nevertheless, he advocated for the autonomy of the signifier, for the affirmation of expression, for the text which is generated by the body and not by rational or conceptual thought. The theorist praised the rediscovery, due to linguistics, of psychoanalysis and structuralism, and of the symbolic nature of language. Moreover, as a defender of the diversity of meaning allowed by the fluctuating signifier, Barthes considered the fear of relativism utterly ill-­founded. Polysemy was a resource that called for appreciation, not a reason for concern. As for his evolution as a scholar, Barthes himself mentioned three stages: the first one was centered on the criticism of ideologies (Le degré zéro de l’écriture – 1953 and Mythologies – 1957), the second was marked by the ideal of scientism (Le Système de la mode -1967) and, finally, the third stage was characterized by the ludic adhesion to the polysemy of the signifier, especially in its capacity of graphic sign.

Other French semiologists: Julia Kristeva Not only Barthes but an entire generation wanted the replacement of the concepts that were considered obsolete, outdated, and incapable of rendering the dynamic essence of the reality that they embodied. There were concepts such as: subject, truth, meaning, representation. For example, the Tel Quel literary magazine founded in 1960 and enlivened by Philippe Sollers, assiduously promoted the concept of text. The reason was that the text could no longer be regarded as immutable, closed, finite, as the literary work had been considered, but rather 73

resembled a scene of labour, a “scriptural practice” in which not only the “scripter” (a concept launched by Sollers) was involved but also, to a great extent, the lector. Julia Kristeva was another reputed semiologist of the French school who advocated the transformation of semiology into a type of philosophy of sciences and who extensively debated the endeavour of text production. Production no longer had anything in common with “creation” or with “representation” because it ignored the genuinely important matter of generating meaning. It is for this reason that Julia Kristeva’s semanalyses, devised according to Chomsky’s transformational model, were preponderantly applicable to non-­representational texts such as the ones authored by Mallarmé or Lautréamont. Kristeva employed two concepts, among others, to the description of which the theorist made a significant contribution, namely genotext (which was responsible for the production of the text, for its “generation”) and phenotext (or the accomplished text). Her contribution to the launch of intertextuality, a very valuable concept for the theoretical field, is even more famous. Kristeva basically developed this notion which had been outlined by Bakhtin by turning it into a key concept. Intertextuality, or the “textual interaction which takes place within a single text unit,” is the manner in which a text “reads history and gets inserted into this history” which entails an entirely new philosophy regarding the textual space. According to this philosophy, the text is composed of elements, collocations, sequences and codes that actually reflect the transformation of older elements, collocations, codes, etc. The new context into which these elements, which had been used earlier, are inserted essentially changes their aspect and significance.

The Tartu Semiotic School The Tartu semiotic school, founded in 1964 in Estonia, was equally renowned. Essentially, its fame was, to a great extent, due to its most famous representative, Iuri Lotman. The theorist defined the literary work as the actualization of a constellation of linguistic forms, a form of communication through which information was transmitted. According to the theory in question, language is the primary modelling system on the basis of which secondary systems such as literature, religion, folklore, etc., were founded. The specificity of the literary text consists of the fact that it possesses its own methods of transmitting ideas other than the ones applicable to the non-­artistic text. It is a sign whose content is conveyed by the entire structure of the literary work, which enhances its informational value. With regard to the poetic text, it was perceived as the most complex form of discourse which was semantically “saturated” because very much information is transmitted through it without finally ending up in an informational blockage, 74

as it would happen if the same amount of information were communicated via ordinary discourse. This happens due to the manner in which the poetic text is organized. Far from being redundant, it represents an assemblage of “systems” (phonologic, metric, lexical, etc.) which bring each other out in such a way that perception habits are annulled or enriched or transformed due to “the particular artistic information.” The literary work constantly thwarts our expectations by “defamiliarizing” them, as stated by the formalists. However, Lotman is not far from the theories of reception either judging from the fact that the way in which the meaning of a text is decrypted also depends on the readers and on their competence. In any case, the text is an invitation to rereading because some of its aspects and structures can only be perceived by rereading. And the promise of intellectual joy and sensorial fulfilment is a serious argument in favour of reading and rereading which is bound to discover the logical as well as the ludic systems of the literary text. The specificity of the literary text is rendered by “the simultaneous presence of several significances for every element of the subject,” but also by the possibility of the coexistence of contradictions which, in other non-­artistic texts, would not be permitted. Yet the internal richness of the text76 is not the only factor generating polysemy as meaning can also result from the relationship of the text to other texts or to literary, cultural or social codes. Meaning can only be deciphered within and through the context of the literary work per se, by means of similarities and parallelisms or differences and oppositions, the text being the outcome of various determinants that work together. The connection to reality is even more profound than between any other two terms of comparison because the literary text models the “unlimited object” that is the world.

Semiotics and structuralism from a poetic perspective Theoretically, literary semiotics deals with the study of the literary system whereas poetics would be concerned with the study of literary creation. In actual fact, however, semiotics cannot possibly be separated from poetics. Moreover, structuralism and semiotics are not only theories but also rigorous methods that ensure the careful, thorough examination of literary texts, although of particular interest

76 Anything could be meaningful, even the absence of some figures, or “negative figures” in Lotman’s terms, that we would expect to find in the text because that is what its logic seemed to indicate. For example, we may think of a certain rhyme that the text had cultivated and which failed to appear. That would be a significant moment as the text communicated something by means of its absence.

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for these directions were precisely the aspects that did not correlate with the particularity of a text. And because both disregard the value of the analysed objects as well as what those objects communicate, it might be claimed that their working methods are analytical rather than evaluative. But any serious text analysis would take into account the elements that the two research methods furnished. Yet the literary text is more than that and interpretation, an act that inevitably involves subjectivity, has no option but to bypass these rigid observations because the strictly linguistic criteria do not focus on fundamental aspects such as the intentional dimension of the text or its reception. Also, how are the so-­called “significant units of the text” established if not with recurrence to the human factor, to their decisions and choices? Nevertheless, structuralism, which seemed to have focused chiefly on the study of language, pushed literature off the pedestal on which it had been put as part of a certain process of mythification. From that point, the literary work was only considered as a construction among other language constructions, and its once privileged ontological status was fiercely contested. The perspective on meaning also changed and the constant search for the fixed, unique or “natural” meaning lost its purpose when the structuralist belief, which postulated that reality was actually a creation of language and of the way it was perceived, became increasingly widespread. Structuralism thus triggered a radical reorientation in the apperception of the world.

1.6.7.  The mathematical poetics The Romanian mathematician and theorist of poetics Solomon Marcus introduced one of the most unusual and original contributions to the cognitive research of poetry in his book Poetica matematică. It is true that, in the modern period, this discipline of literary study visibly moved towards science and even strove, as mentioned, to become a science itself. Consequently the association of the two domains of mathematics and poetry is not in the least surprising. However, even if the interdisciplinary dialogue is presently common, poetry still seems very far from mathematical formulas… Solomon Marcus himself admitted that “the interference of mathematics into the domain of art was rejected on account of the predominantly logical character of mathematics as opposed to the predominantly intuitive character of art.”77

77 Solomon Marcus, Poetica matematică (Bucharest: Academy Publishing House, 1970), p. 29.

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Poetic language vs. scientific language The author also insisted upon the differences that underlie and confer identity on the poetic language, on the one hand, and on the mathematical one, on the other hand. That is because, in the case of the respective book, the actual reference is language – not so much the habitual, everyday language which is seen as an “alloy” of elements from the musical, poetic and scientific types of language, as the language of art as well as the notional, transitive language of mathematics. Hence, poetic language “dominates the ineffable” and “singularity is its most salient feature,” it has “an infinite ambiguity,” it is reflexive,78 and it comprises “a musical structure in its weave.”79 Seemingly at the opposite pole, the language of science is much more concentrated and precise, with a standardized character and stereotypical expressions, dominated by the explainable and having a “notional”80 function, thus being characterized by lucidity and routine. The open and entropic character of poetic language is revealed by the poetic significance which Solomon Marcus describes as “continuous,” variable in time from one individual to another, incommensurable and unquantifiable, displaying a total lack of synonymy. By comparison, scientific language does not display homonymy at all, as it is biunivocal, whereas synonymy is infinitely displayed here because expression is unimportant. Therefore binary relations of synonymy and homonymy are singled out, homonymy being defined as the association of several meanings to a single text whereas synonymy is the exactly opposite relationship. In the same vein, it may be stated that “poetry is the supreme modality to concentrate and to reduce to essentials the figurative language.”81 And the value of suggestion charges the word, according to Lovinescu, similarly to electricity, with variable action strength, but without conveying any information because, due to its characteristic homonymy, this language is not communicative. It is its own goal, a fact which is expressed in terms of literary theory by the idea of the autotelic character of the poetic message.

The “spell” of poetic language In the very clear-­cut, straightforward, pertinent description of the features of the poetic expression that the author provides, there are, however, some terms that are undoubtedly connected to the idea of indeterminacy, be it to the inef78 The distinction between reflexive and transitive was made by Tudor Vianu, quoted here by Solomon Marcus. 79 Marcus, Poetica matematică, p. 18. 80 This reference is from Eugen Lovinescu. 81 Marcus, Poetica matematică, p. 17.

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fable, to suggestion, to intuition or to something which is even more unusual for this type of approach, namely the spell which apparently governs the art of words. Although this “poetic” manner of referring to poetry appears to be a disregard for the principle or rigorousness which preponderantly dominates Solomon Marcus’s book, in this case it is only a matter of the legitimate indication of the author who embarks upon his research from the assumption that it is unequivocally impossible to give an exhaustive account of poetic language, especially when one has to give a scientific explanation of what the enchantment of poetry might consist of or what is the secret behind this enchantment. Under these circumstances, one might legitimately wonder if the aim of the comparison between the two languages, namely poetic and scientific, is only that of highlighting differences. Nevertheless, in the author’s view, a mathematical approach to poetry does not entail resorting to the formulas on which science relies. The suggestion that Solomon Marcus makes is that the instruments that ought to be borrowed from mathematics are the method of thought, the logical modelling that this discipline applies and which would not only be completely harmless to poetry but it could even be its “hygiene.” Actually the two domains are not radically different because “mathematics has enough logic to detect the internal logic of poetry, and enough ‘madness’ not to be left very much behind the poetic ineffable.”82 Hence this pure science, maybe the purest of all, also has an unpredictable side and the “reckless” audacity or “madness” is not uncommon in this field that we automatically and undoubtedly include in the sphere of lucidity. Then why should poetics not have something to gain from all the very valuable accomplishments of the mathematical sciences, and progress through them without insisting on finding the answers to all its questions in them? A plausible approach to research into poetry should focus on the means by which art attains beauty. Thenceforward, when it comes to the ineffable quality of poetry and to the effects that poetry might have on consciousness and sensibility, poetics should admit its limitations. Nevertheless, Jean-­Marie Klinkenberg pointed out that “the most powerful model that has so far been devised in order to explain the particularities of poetic language, undoubtedly pertains to the Romanian mathematician Solomon Marcus whose essential contribution appears to have overcome the empirical, experimental and analytical stages of poetics so as to

82 Marcus, Poetica matematică, p. 29.

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facilitate its entering into the axiomatic stage, due to a mathematical formulation of the opposition between poetic language and scientific language.”83

1.7. Conclusions Poetics has had a fairly long existence, but despite its long history, apparently only in the 20th century did it start to be considered as a specific, systematic discipline.84 Faithful to its initial aspirations, both theoretical and epistemological, poetics preserved its status of a discipline which is oriented towards the study of literature, pursuing several essential matters. Firstly, there is the manner in which literature positions itself in relation to reality. Given the fact that the departure point and the point of arrival for art is reality, it was believed that, in actual fact, art copies reality, or at least it attempts to do so. The confusion deepened when the norm that postulated the obligation of literature to copy nature (normative poetics) was explicitly and distinctly formulated. Moreover, the application of identical evaluation criteria to works from different periods and geographical areas was implemented. It was much later that this error, which considerably restricted the artistic act (at least theoretically, because there were numerous deviations), was corrected and the artist as well as the work of art gained their freedom (especially during Romanticism). Previously subdued to reality, art became independent and starting from modernity, mention was made of the autotelic character of the artistic universe, although art cannot possibly be entirely isolated from reality. Somehow it ended up evoking reality, but this was no longer a prerequisite or a goal as it had been during past centuries. The concern of poetics in the 20th century chiefly centered on the artistic language, on the organization and functioning of the literary work at the verbal level. This did not imply that the materiality of the artistic creation would not overshadow the values of content and of significance. Quite the contrary. Modern poetics aimed to be a complex science, in the area of literary research, which would successfully avoid unilateral and thus erroneous approaches (in point of form or just from the perspective of content). It was demonstrated that decontextualization was a dead-­end street inasmuch as great literary works cannot be truly understood without also being analyzed from the perspective of other literary

83 Jean-­Marie Klinkenberg, Le sens rhétorique (Toronto: Editions du GREF, 1990), p. 83. 84 It is precisely for this reason that Tzvetan Todorov made the surprising remark that poetics was still in its beginnings and that it displayed all the shortcomings that this incipient stage involved.

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works. Therefore the adequacy of a history of literature is obvious when the aim is that of uncovering its meanings.

The deadlock of poetics But poetics distanced itself from the traditional object of literary research precisely when structuralism wanted to go beyond the actual literary work in order to focus on the literary “model” and on the creation process of the literary work, and therefore on the abstract rather than on the factual. Thus individual creations were not of interest as such, but only if they related to a reality that existed beyond them or to a possible reality. That is why poetics was even considered a science of literary possibilities, so that its object could no longer be literature but literarity, a concept which was still rather vague. The programmatic placement of the discipline in the sphere of the abstract led to visible exaggerations within the overly formalized discourse of poetics which was condemned, after the grace period of the 60s, for over-­theorization and for its perspective – which eventually proved to be utopic – on scientific study and on the study of art. The scientific paradigm, with everything that it involved, namely theories, methods of observation and analysis, and concepts, however ambitious it might be, reached its limits when it came to literature, because however detailed the observations are, no matter how applied, thorough or objective a study is, it does not provide all the answers, and our knowledge remains partial, incomplete. With reference to analysis, the effort to attain a high degree of rigorousness and objectivity which only science could achieve reveals why poetics avoided the aesthetic judgement and the question of the value of particular works of art. Matters such as taste or the affective response triggered by reading, the subjective evaluation of readers, are not consonant with the perspective of poetics. Still, there is an alternative to the acceptance of an abyss between an overly theoretical discipline, as some described it, and its reference. In Romania, as early as the 1970s, Al. Călinescu was the advocate of a form of poetics which was “applied, live, constructive, not a machine for the production of abstractions.”85 He was truly a theorist of poetics who never failed to be “down-­to-­earth” and in permanent connection with the reality of artistic creation. Certainly nowadays we can speak of a decline of poetics as compared to its glory years, starting from the 1960s through the 1980s, but having survived the considerably virulent attacks of the last decades, poetics remains a landmark in literary studies, “the innermost circle of literary science,” as described by 85 Al. Călinescu, Perspective critice (Iași: Junimea Publishing House, 1978), p. 118.

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Wolfgang Kayser, especially because it devised instruments that cannot possibly be ignored by literary analyses or by analyses of the literary phenomenon in general. Ion Vlad advocated the application of poetics research to literary forms, especially to the narrative ones, due to the fact that “a primary epic nucleus”86 existed in literature. Such categories of poetics as genre, modality, type, register, etc., and especially of narrative poetics (narrator, narratee, plot, time and space, voice, point of view, and so on) consistently recur within the theoretical discourse, even though they do not provide any kind of orientation regarding the reading choices that we make or, what is more, when we decide whether what we read is good quality literature or whether it has any literary value whatsoever.

86 Ion Vlad, Aventura formelor (Bucharest: Editura Didactică și Pedagogică), 1996.

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2. Rhetoric 2.1 The glory and oblivion of a millenary discipline Definitely one of the most prestigious and valued disciplines of knowledge in antiquity, rhetoric almost disappeared afterwards or was assumed into related domains (poetics, stylistics). The causes of this state of affairs lie, on the one hand, in the circumstances of its development and, on the other hand, in the meaning and incorrect definitions conferred on it later on, which were the reasons for its becoming discredited. Luckily, today rhetoric is not a discipline which belongs exclusively to the past, but it no longer resembles what it was in antiquity.

Rhetoric’s beginnings, its success It appeared out of necessity, its birth being consistently bound up with important historical events. The change of cities followed by the fall of the hereditary aristocracy in the 5th century BC, the fall and expulsion of the tyrants from Sicily and Greece gave the opportunity to recover some land that had been expropriated in favor of the mercenaries. Making property claims posed difficulties due to the absence of lawyers, and of people specialized in defending their causes in the court. Therefore, the citizens were forced to make compose their own pleas1 and, as they had no experience, finding the best means to build up a discourse that should convince became a necessity for very many. Theoretically, every citizen could become a rhêtôr; practically, there were very few who knew to write and read and who were able to deliver a speech in front of an audience. For this reason, orators were mainly from rich, socially influential families. The status of orator as well as rhetor,2 acquired by personal abilities and by education and talent would confer to the one who had it, whether from an influential family or not, prestige, glory, power and a high social status. So rhetoric, having eloquence as its object, was primarily judicial and not literary, as might be erroneously believed, and it was favored by the fall of the aristocracy that, by its nature, was against this discipline.

1 Solon’s law stipulated the obligation of each litigant to defend his own cause. 2 Sometimes the same person had the role of orator, i.e. public speaker, and of rhetor,or one responsible for the composition of speeches, as well as for the theorization and teaching of the rhetorical principles. At other times, it was about occupations that different persons were in charge with.

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The epideictic or demonstrative genre and the deliberative or politic genre were actually born from the judiciary one. Aristotle attributed the beginnings of rhetoric to Empedocles, but specialists are more inclined to agree to award the title of its originators to Corax from Sicily and to his pupil Tisias. Consequently, Sicily was the cradle of rhetoric, but its true blooming took place in Greece, where the fall of the aristocratic regimes made it extremely necessary and where it would be vigorously promoted by the Sophists.3 For five or six hundred years it would predominate in Greece, and afterwards it would reach Rome. Its consecration is marked by the transformation of the educational system; it even becomes one of the most important disciplines of antiquity, a kind of disciplina disciplinarum, as the medievals would have said, namely, a science of sciences or a global science. But the vigour of rhetoric was due mainly to the orators who had acquired such skill that they would present veritable displays of rhetoric through the speeches that they delivered either in court or in the Senate.

The decline With the ending of its heyday, the art of delivering a speech did not arouse the same interest because it no longer had a social application. Nevertheless rhetoric survived for a while as a subject of study, and later on it was assimilated into grammar or equated to the art of style, of figures of speech. It no longer had a purpose after the cause that had triggered its appearance disappeared. The fall of democracies in Greece, the instauration of authoritarian government in Rome after the fall of the Republic,4 the change in the balance of power in these societies, and the gradual forbidding of the right to free expression rendered rhetoric almost pointless in the practical sense which it had had in its beginnings and which had evidently helped it to a great extent.

Definitions of rhetoric The oblivion it subsequently fell into was also due to an erroneous comprehension of the basis of the discipline, and of what it really represents. As it was conceived by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and all the great orators of antiquity, rhetoric is the art 3 Some claimed that rhetoric appeared at the same time as language, others that its genesis was due to Homer, and Cicero believed that the settlers of the citadel had founded the discipline as well. 4 Tacitus, in Dialogul despre oratori (Dialogue on oratory), talked about the loss of political freedom and the erosion of t oratory because of the fall of the Roman Republic.

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of persuasion by discourse,5 of the discursive alternatives, the discourse being every verbal, written or oral production made up of a sentence or more and having a sense unity.6 It can be practiced in every domain, but especially in politics and in the judicial domain. The artfulness in arguing in order to persuade rightfully assigned it the name of “art.” The role that peithô had, a term approximately translated by “persuasion,” was more important than we could imagine today. Thanks to it we can identify a common reference between rhetoric and poetry, but also between philosophy and politics. It was not only the orators but also the bards who aimed to achieve this peithô, which was equal to delighting and unconditionally pleasing the audience. In one of the mythic stories of Apollonius, we see Orpheus resolving by his song, accompanied on the lyre, a violent conflict on the verge of breaking out between two of his travel companions. The song is irresistible and this is because it has this divine quality, peithô. The sense of persuasion in antiquity was maybe richer and more complex than in the present, because it implies not only a harmonious but also a voluntary agreement. The audience subjected to the magic peithô happily consents to follow the one who knows how to achieve it. Consequently, the artistic aspect interweaves harmoniously with the scientific one, because the rhetoric enjoys the benefits of a very elaborate system, based on rules for the construction and delivery of a speech, knowledge of which justifies the transformation of the discipline into a school subject. Therefore, another famous definition of rhetoric, taken from the Stoic Cleanthes, is ars or scientia bene dicendi, namely the art or the science of elegant speech, not only that of persuasion. Rhetoric was equally considered a science because a systematization of the discourse was necessary, and the arguments and proofs (if required) needed to be rational and logical, although sometimes illogic proved equally persuasive. Nevertheless, the major changes that the definition of rhetoric would undergo can further be deduced from the post-­Ciceronian phase of rhetoric, when the process of turning it into literature had become obvious, because the accent switches from what was initially essential, more precisely persuasion and argumentation, to a proven skill in the use of language and to the way the speech was constructed. Rhetoric ended by being, in the Middle Ages and later, an ars ornandi, the basis thus 5 Olivier Reboul in his book Introduction à la rhétorique brings into discussion a nuance, essential in his opinion, when it concerns persuasion. When you are determined to act, but you do not believe in the justice of this action, it is not a matter of rhetorical persuasion, but only when we act in the confidence that it is worth doing so. 6 Not all discourses are rhetorical. A poem, for example, or a technical text without the intention to persuade, is not rhetorical.

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beingthe idea of embellishing the discourse. It is then explicable why it came to be taken for grammar or, we might say today, practical stylistics, and why it was assimilated to the study of figures of style, and later was even equated with the preciosity and artificiality of various verbal ornaments. “The fall into disuse of the profession of orator, doubled by the instauration of some authoritarian governing forms that were not favorable to opinion diversity and their free expression as far as public matters are concerned, then the chaos which, towards the end of antiquity, culminated with the invasion of the barbarian peoples, leading to the fall of the Roman Empire, to the withdrawal of the spiritual life behind the monastery walls during the early Middle Ages, to the absolutist monarchies and the centralist tendencies of the feudal occidental states; all these have in time decided the fate of rhetoric beyond the inner evolution of the domain, situated half-­way between science and art, and beyond the evolution of the related domains – dialectics, grammar and logic.”7 After having gained huge and well-­deserved prestige in antiquity, during the Roman era and modern times rhetoric was strongly opposed because it represented everything that was fake, declamatory and bombastic. Rhetoric became the antonym of spontaneity, of true freshness of expression and, last but not least, of creative freedom. All this was because the real significance of rhetoric was ignored, the initial significance which presupposed knowledge, art and style, but equally reasoning, argumentation, discourse organization, opinion and the power to influence knowledge.

2.2 Rhetoric in Antiquity The celebrity of rhetoric in antiquity was due mainly to certain rhetors8 and teachers of oratory who established the framework of the discipline so that it could be claimed that what was fundamental in rhetoric had been said about two thousand years before. Nor can its complexity cannot be denied in the present day; on the contrary, it is about the multidisciplinary character of rhetoric, which assures its prestige especially today, when the communicative dimension of the human action and the means used by humans to communicate have long been studied. The art of persuasion by discourse is not of current interest only to the literate; it is indispensable in pleas of whatever nature and in philosophical and theological arguments and in education, as well as in advertising. Similarly, the presence and absence of 7 Gabriela Duda, Introducere în teoria literaturii (Timişoara: All Educational Publishing House, 1998), p. 34. 8 The rhêtôr is the public speaker; many rhetors in antiquity transformed their performances into a true art.

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a knowledge of oratory in the political discourse may carry more weight than one might believe, by influencing audiences who can appreciate a performance without realizing what it owes to a mastery of elementary concepts for building a discourse.

2.2.1. Greek rhetoric Yet, in the beginning, rhetoric, a discipline that appeared by reason of and thanks to public eloquence, came to be known in its principles by an audience that knew the ingredients which were absolutely necessary for a discourse to have the anticipated success. Countless treatises were composed in this epoch; for example, Corax and Tisias, the initiators of rhetoric, made a compendium of practical precepts accompanied by examples, systemizing the knowledge that had accumulated. It is true that, just as Cicero noticed, before them no rules were observed. Corax has the merit of speaking for the first time about this techné as a creator of persuasion, the first definition of rhetoric.9

Gorgias Himself Sicilian, like Corax and Tisias (who were his teachers), he went to Athens during the Peloponnesian War and pleased the Athenians by his art, as he was the originator of the epideictic discourse, namely of public praise,10 delivered on different occasions, especially public ceremonies. Becoming a teacher, Gorgias taught philosophy and eloquence, being very well paid and travelling from town to town. Nevertheless, he was reproached for a certain emphasis in the art he was practicing, given the fact that he was more concerned with skill in using language and the plasticity of expression than the subjects themselves. Yet it is important to remember that he was among the first to be interested in the association of beauty with rhetoric, as beauty needs, from an aesthetic point of view, to resemblepoetry,11 which was recommended as a source of inspiration for the

9 Corax invented an argument that has his name: that argument consists in saying that a thing is not likely just because it is too likely. 10 Illustrative of this genre were, for example, the funerary orations uttered upon the death of a famous person, and discourses of praiseas well of reproach. A very famous one is Helen’s Eulogy, whose author is Gorgias and which enumerates all the possible reasons for Helen’s abduction; in no circumstances will the orator take into consideration the possibility that Helen left willingly … 11 Rhetoric has as expression the prose, opposing to poetry in the moment when it appeared, which had verse as its basic element verse. But step by step rhetoric itself became itself an art form, just like poetry.

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discovery of figures of style. At the same time, he was attracted by what glittered in the vocabulary and by the archaic terms, which burdened his style, greatly appreciated while the orator lived, but then inclreasingly avoided. Gorgias predominantly focused on elocutio because he did not believe in the power of knowledge to lead to anything but relative results, namely to opinions that in his view were external to the categories of true and false. The world itself cannot be known, he said, so everything may be false. Persuasion thus became more important than the truth, an idea which shocked Socrates Gorgias intended above all to persuade his opponents in the sense that he intended …

The Sophists Rhetoric became the object of systematic education, well organized and prestigious, thanks to the sophists to whom we equally owe the first attempts at grammar and the preoccupation with the organization of discourse, but no philosophical system. In the beginning, the wise and the philosophers were called sophists, and in the 5th century BC this term referred to teachers of oratory who were paid to teach the young. The Sophists’ ideas which largely influenced rhetoric were severely criticized, one of the most harsh critics, in the name of philosophy and metaphysical values, being Plato himself, who differentiated, just as in the case of poetry, between two types of rhetoric. The rhetoric which Plato appreciated is actually identical with the dialectics and had a philosophical character, given its interest in the discovery of the truth.12 The other rhetoric, that of the Sophists, lacking any moral character, could plea in favor of every cause, even an unjust one, with Plato bitterly condemning their preponderant interest in gain and not in honesty. It was a matter of concern for the philosopher that a rhêtor, without any interest in the truth, or in authentic knowledge, had the power to convince, to seduce the ignorant crowd, and “to decide” what was just or unjust as he wished. Truth and objective reality were, to Sophists, relative13 (one can talk about knowledge relativism) – that is, they appeared as the result of an agreement be12 It is actually the rhetoric that Plato himself used in his Dialogues, having Socrates and his disciples in the foreground. 13 Protagoras, philosophy teacher in Athens towards the middle of the 5th century BC, claimed that there are always two sides, two opposing arguments for each thing (pros and cons), for which he was accused that he would influence people in believing that what is good can also be bad and vice versa. We owe to Protagoras the famous saying “Man is the measure of all things,” which indicates that the main measuring unit in the judgment of the world is the human person himself.

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tween interlocutors, exactly the opposite of Plato’s conception. But, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur very well underlines in modern times, it is always possible that “the art of speaking well” gets rid of the obligation of “telling the truth.”14 Consequently, the power of the word was speculative or, differently said, every discourse was acceptable if it succeeded in persuading, in offering powerful arguments, even when the source was not justice, but only opinion. But the language, as Plato bluntly asserted, does not have to have pre-­eminence over thinking, on the contrary it is necessary that it subordinates to reason. Rhetoric was also criticized because it found probability enough; it did not aim to serve the truth or to find out the truth, but it used discourse in order to dominate or to cheat, becoming an expression of the power exerted by words, irrespective of how just or unjust the cause might be. In Ode to Helen, for example, Gorgias wrote these memorable lines when he admitted: “When people do not have the memory of the past, nor the vision of the present, nor the foresight of the future, the lying discourse has all the advantages.”15 Plato denied to rhetoric both the status of science (epistemê), because it did not have a research domain of its own – although it is obvious that the domain of rhetoric is argumentative communication – and that of art. It was seen as a skill of a practical nature, an empeiria, which was based on the public’s ignorance and was far from reasoning but close to pleasure. Actually, even today rhetoric (as well as politics and ethics) is rather considered a practical discipline. Plato considered as totally exaggerated the claim of rhetors to be competent in all areas of social life.

Isocrates and Demosthenes The most famous of the orators contemporaneous with Plato, although he called himself a “philosopher,” Isocrates excelled in epideictic discourse, and was the one who put language at the basis of all human activities, seeing in logos a capacity that manifests itself both in reasoning and in speaking. He opened a school of oratory in Athens, attended by important people of the time who were interested in the moral and political preparation that the teacher could offer. Isocrates was convinced that the basis of education should be rhetoric, and the rhetor should train both his mind and also his body. He believed that in order to become an orator, three conditions needed to be fulfilled: firstly, one needed natural skills, without which every personal effort is pointless, then intense, constant practice, because natural skills are not enough and, finally, a systematic education. His 14 Ricoeur, Metafora vie, p. 21. 15 Quoted by Olivier Reboul in Introduction à la rhétorique, p. 19.

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disciples participated in the composition of Isocrates’ discourses; they discussed them and worked on them together, and the teacher recommended that the prose that they created themselves should be clear and precise, avoiding rare terms, neologisms, and too obvious rhythms. The prose did not have to be poetic, but its harmony was important, and also it had to be euphonic, but without awkward repetitions and too obvious figures of style. Isocrates, who declared himself anti-­sophist, differed indeed from the sophists through the conception according to which the truth and morality are not contradictory to rhetoric, this being defined only by the noble and honest causes to which they must dedicate themselves. Many specialists consider Demosthenes one of the most brilliant orators of Hellenic antiquity; he distinguished himself especially in the domain of political eloquence. This happened because he played an active role in the political life of Athens, to which he devoted himself unconditionally. His discourses, which impressed the audience every time, have a high moral message, being the result of elaborate and very detailed work. But even if Demosthenes composed his discourses before delivering them, he learnt them by heart, and did not read them; this detail is mentioned by Plutarch, who wrote appreciatively about Demosthenes. He skillfully used quotations, which illustrates the solid culture he had acquired, and he used a simple, accessible language by which he always succeeded in capturing the interest and attention of those he talked to. His political speeches called the Philippics are especially famous.

Aristotle One of the most famous philosophers of antiquity, interested in ethics, politics, logic, metaphysics, natural sciences, and making at the same time an important contribution to the foundation of rhetoric as as a system-­based discipline, was Aristotle. At the beginning he adopted Plato’s position – we should not forget that that he was his student for twenty years – but he soon deviated from this, giving rhetoric the attention that Plato had not considered necessary. In Techné rhetoriké, the first founding treatise of the discipline, he appreciated it thanks to the usefulness it had demonstrated, and to the role it fulfilled socially, as it contributed on more than one occasion to the decision-­making process in the citadel. Just as Gorgias or other rhetors were interested in the matter of honesty, Aristotle admitted that rhetoric can be used for unjust causes which it can serve equally as in the case of just ones. Nevertheless, in this case, it is not rhetoric that should be held guilty, but the one who, unscrupulously, resorts to it as a means of manipulation. That is why he took care to distinguish the real consensus from the apparent one with which the Sophists, always ready to cheat, were content. 90

Aristotle underlined a particular fact which will differentiate his view from that of Plato, namely that the purpose of rhetoric is not to obtain the truth, since it is not, in his opinion, a technique of logical argumentation; the discovery of the truth is the preoccupation of dialectics, situated on a superior level, because its purpose is knowledge. In the Nicomachean Ethics he outlined that, just as it was absurd to ask a mathematician for persuasive discourses, it is equally absurd to ask an orator for invincible demonstrations! Thus rhetoric is based on plausibility, eikos, and not on truth. The parties in a conflict re-­enact the intended situations, it is in fact a mental re-­enactment, and the judge needs to decide on the basis of often contradictory testimonies. Thus he will not rely on the truth, but on plausibility. But even if rhetoric is an argumentation technique which is based on plausibility and has the purpose of creating convictions, this fact does not make it culpable, although it is on an inferior level by comparison with dialectics. Eventually, the presence of rhetoric is justified by the lack of differentiation between the just and unjust causes. If the truth were always clear, if it were revealed and self-­evident, it would be easy to know who was right, and trials would be useless. Yet things are totally different in a world where uncertainty dominates, which makes debate absolutely indispensable. And it can only be an art of finding the most appropriate means of persuasion which need to be different from case to case as every discourse has, beyond its general structure, its specific elements and those of its subject. In this way, Aristotle situated rhetoric in the place it had gained, a place that had been threatened by slipping into matters of form and not of content, and on the other hand, by the indirect discrediting that it had suffered through its association with sophistry.

2.2.2. Latin rhetoric The art of discourse in antiquity is represented by two very important epochs: the Greek period and the Roman period, considering that between Aristotle and Cicero, that is, between the 4th and the 1st centuries BC, nothing really important happened. Rome adopted rhetoric in the 2nd century BC, thanks to its expansion into the Hellenistic world and to the presence of Greek rhetors and of some schools of rhetoric in the Latin-­speaking world space, but not before rhetoric had been violently rejected. Afterwards, this discipline becomes so highly appreciated that the emperor Vespasian, in the 1st century AD, ordered the foundation of a public school of rhetoric, and Republican eloquence would culminate in the oratory of Cicero. An important text, dedicated entirely to instruction in the methods of discourse, and whose author is anonymous, is Rhetorica ad Herennium. This book, which addressed those who wanted to become lawyers, politicians, or ora91

tors, presents in detail the five parts of the rhetoric system, the main styles, (high, medium and inferior), and the figures of style. At the end, there is a substantial list, a real glossary of the speech and modes of thought , with over one hundred types of tropes and figures of style.

Cicero Cicero and Quintilian are the greatest representatives of the rhetoric of the Latin world. An important personality of antiquity, “the last of the ancients and the first of the moderns,” as Tzvetan Todorov wrote, Cicero (106–43 BC)16 became a lawyer before turning 25, an important politician and the greatest orator, as his contemporaries considered him. For him, the late Republic was not an era of great rhetoric and because he regretted the loss of the initial status of the discipline, he brought back into discussion the divisions proposed by Aristotle: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio. He reminded the objectives of oratory: delectare (to delight), movere (to touch) and docere (to teach). In the beginning, it was closely related to philosophy, which presupposed “the knowledge of the most important ideas,” rhetoric being “its application to life.” In three famous rhetoric writings of his maturity, De Oratore, Brutus and Orator, Cicero tries to demonstrate that the two disciplines, far from being opoosed, are actually complementary, and rhetoric has not only an epistemological value but a practical utility. But unlike Aristotle and Plato, he believes in the superiority of rhetoric to dialectics, given the fact that he did not see any incompatibility between opinion and truth. On the contrary, truth and opinion can combine, but the absolute truth cannot be known, but only what is plausible and even then we do not have total access to the secrets of things, or of the world, which is why opinion is necessary. He also debated the issue of sincerity or insincerity that rhetoric involved, but Cicero believed it to be a false problem. Thus an absence of rhetoric will not add extra sincerity to the speech, but it will reveal deficiencies in expression and inability to convince.

“The complete orator” Cicero considered the art that he used to practice an essential discipline for the formation of the individual, and for his education and general culture, absolutely obligatory to everybody. Wisdom without eloquence, he said, proves of little use16 When Cicero, a defender of the Republic, defeated his main opponent, Catiline, in 64 BC he was considered the saviour of the country, and Plutarch presented him as the most important person in Rome at that time. Quintilian also said of Cicero that his name was synonymous with eloquence itself, so glorious had he become.

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fulness in a community, and eloquence without wisdom is simply dangerous. Thus, no sapientia without eloquentia, but no eloquentia without sapientia! Cicero was one of the most educated personalities of his time, so that his recommendations would come from his personal experience. There was no domain of humanistic culture in which he had no interest. He was well acquainted not only with Latin culture, but also with that of Greece – philosophy (he had listened to the most important philosophers in their homes), literature – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and of course Homer –, and oratory – Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates. The eloquent human being,17 a sort of humanist ideal, is required to know philosophy, law and human psychology and, of course, he must talk in such a way as to prove, to please and to convince. “An orator is required to have the shrewdness of a logician, the thinking of a philosopher, the expression of a poet, the memory of a solicitor, the voice of the tragedian and, I would say, the gestures of a famous actor. That is why there is nothing rarer in the world than a complete orator.”18 Crassus, the character behind whom seems to be Cicero, claims that the rhetor is superior to the philosopher because he has the power of the poet who touches his audience with the help of his expressions.

Elocutio in Cicero Style was not perceived by the great orator as an artificial addition to a content, but actually comprised two elements, verba (the form) and res (the content) which cannot be separated arbitrarily. Despite this, from Cicero’s writings it is obvious that the accent switched from inventio to elocutio, since, whatever the chosen subject, an elegant and carefully ornamented style was compulsory. To demonstrate is the privilege of necessity, to please of entertainment and to defeat of victory, and the style needs to be adapted and precise when it comes to proofs, moderate when the orator needs to please, and vehement when he seeks victory. For Cicero, beauty, the compulsory privilege of every discourse, means force, kindness, pathos, Attic transparency and Asiatic deployment. One of the exceptional qualities of his rhetoric was represented by the way in which he knew how to unify different principles belonging to different schools. He mastered the art of creating in his discourses the most diverse emotions and of easily switching from one to another, from crying to laughter, to compassion or indignation. His phrases are either ample or short, symmetrical, well constructed for every circumstance. 17 For Cicero, real eloquence is oratio grandis. 18 Cicero, “De Oratore” in Opere alese, vol. II. Trans. G. Guţu (Bucharest: Univers Printing House, 1973), p. 51.

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In one of the writings of his maturity, De Oratore, composed as a dialogue between various speakers including Antonius and Crassus considered by Cicero the most important men of the previous generation, all the important Ciceronian themes are present. Rhetoric is described as the central art which is connected to all aspects of civic and public life, which not only differentiates people from beasts, but can contribute fundamentally to the civilization of humanity. In fact it had flourished exactly where peace and tranquility dominated. His discourses have as their subjects history and its lessons, and to an equal degree political life, moral principles, and civic duties.

Quintilian Cicero’s ideas did not remain unanswered, being taken further by famous names such as Quintilian, the most important teacher of rhetoric that the Romans ever had.19 De institutione oratoria (The oratorical art), his treatise in twelve books, published in 96 AD, is one of the fundamental writings of classical, not only Latin, oratory, in which a whole tradition is systematized. His literary work has a special importance20 taking into account the precarious situation of rhetoric. Public liberties had suffered after the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire, and in the educational system, even though rhetoric was still a subject, it did not have the same importance. Tacitus21 regretfully noted in Dialogus de Oratoribus that rhetoric had been transformed into an ever more ornamental and empty exercise, since its main preoccupation had become the study of figures of style and tropes, which were nevertheless part of grammar. In Quintilian’s view, eloquence had declined especially because the Schools of oratory had become accustomed, by using the wrong methods, to cultivating a corrupted, ornate artificial style, dealing with implausible themes far removed reality, when it would have been more necessary, for example, to offer students an adequate oratorical and moral education. De institutione oratoria pays attention in the first pages to pedagogical problems, and to oratorical education as early as childhood. This is equivalent to a solid education when, after the child has learnt to write and read, he will know that it is not enough to speak correctly; he will also interpret literature. Quintilian recommended Homer, Virgil, and Horace, authorities in the field and models 19 He was the first teacher to be officially paid by the state. 20 His influence in the Renaissance was second only to that of Cicero. 21 With Pliny the Younger, Juvenal, Suetonius and others, Tacitus was a pupil of Quintilian at the school of rhetoric that he had opened.

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for rhetorical composition to which the personal creativity of the pupil could add. Declamation in schools was necessary, but Quintilian was convinced that it needed to be practiced in forums and courts. Exercises in rhetoric should not, he believed, have fictitious or mythological themes, but current affairs; they should be based on real cases. Next, the definition of rhetoric the author of the book accepts is provided, namely, ars bene dicendi, but an art more practical than theoretical or productive. The young orator who will acquire a solid culture backed up by a (necessarily) prodigious memory, and by an imagination trained by solid literary reading, will have the necessary instruments to learn how a discourse is composed, how the most appropriate arguments are chosen and how a speech achieves brilliance through diction. It will have a three-­fold purpose: to inform, to impress, to delight, ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet.22 This monumental paper, actually the richest and the most various treatise about the art of oratory in antiquity, refers to the parts of the discourse, the distinction between the technical and the non-­technical tests, comedy, the presentation of proofs, and style, but also to imitation, memory and action. The diversity of the references can be noticed in this enumeration of the main chapters of the treatise. The paper is more eclectic than homogenous and original; Quintilian presents the multitude of information he has access to, sometimes adding a personal touch to the themes he takes over. Being a great admirer of Cicero, he did not stray away from his ideas; that is why to him rhetoric was synonymous with culture and, indeed, it did not have to be, and could not be, separated from philosophy. Additionally, the orator tried to combine this discipline, as we have seen, with ethics and virtue, expressing his conviction that “where the cause is unjust, there is no rhetoric.” There is thus a dependence of true oratory on the moral qualities of the orator. His insistence on the moral qualities can be explained by the decadence of rhetoric at the time. Yet his educational project and his ethical recommendations did not, unfortunately, produce significant results in the following eras.

2.2.3. Asianism Beyond the Latin-­speaking world, where Greek rhetoric offered a starting-­point, it also provided an inspiration for rhetoric in Asia Minor rhetoric (the provinces of Caria, Phrygia, Mysia). The oriental style developed here; unlike the sober, reserved, Attic one, it seemed strange and excessively opulent, and was called Asiatic. This style was characterized by theatrical, dramatic effects and the numerous 22 See the introductory study by Maria Hetco in the volume M. F. Quintilianus, Arta oratorică, trans. Maria Hetco (Bucharest: Minerva Publishing House, 1974).

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exaggerations, which triggered blame on the part of those who appreciated the polished and balanced elegance of the Attics. Quintilian, for example, considered them rude, emphatic, and unbalanced. That does not mean that this style did not enjoy any success. Cicero himself, at the beginning of his career, cultivated this style, appropriate for an enthusiastic youth, but not for maturity, when he adopted the Asiatic style himself. The confrontation between the two styles is not strictly one of documentary interest. Ernst Robert Curtius, who studied the European culture of the Middle Ages in depth, pointed to the phenomenon which is of special importance for the comprehension of literature, “because it represents the first manifestation of what we will call from now on literary mannerism. The Asiatic is the first form of European mannerism, and the Atticism of European classicism. Atticism developed a classicist literary esthetics which imposes itself victoriously after the middle of the 1st century BC.”23 This is a further proof that rhetoric was familiar with the literary forms and genres which it inspired more than once, and, in the post-­Ciceronian period, rhetoric itself becomes literature, its references and its objectivest actually coinciding with literature.

2.3. Another type of rhetoric: sacred rhetoric No longer having a social and political vocation, oratory, i.e. the speech delivered in front of an audience and rhetoric, the art of delivering a speech, lost their public role. When it was no longer delivered in forums, political as well as judiciary eloquence declined with democracy. Historically, this occurs about the first century AD, and famous writings such as Petronius’ Satyricon, the last chapter of On the Sublime, Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria or Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus mention the decline of rhetoric. The explanation for this situation is, in the authors’ view, the moral corruption that affected education as well. The technical component of rhetoric was in decline, the deliberative and the judiciary genres became insignificant, and their place was taken by the epideictic genre. It was little concerned with persuasion, and it focused almost exclusively on the art of the orator, on his capacity of embellishing his discourse, so that a new trend appeared, that of fictitious causes which emphasized only the mastery of the orator in using the language, so that virtuosity counted more than the content of ideas. Thus, “rhetoric will be transformed into familiarity with the language

23 Ernst Robert Curtius, Literatura europeană şi Evul Mediu latin, trans. Adolf Armbruster (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1970), p. 84.

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which shows off,” it will become a “celebration of language.”24 Once excluded from politics and courts, the orator could only prove his talent by gratuitous and sterile exercises that sounded agreeable and enraptured those interested in this form of cultural life. Rhetoric became synonymous with the study of the rules of literary composition and, because the style acquired such great importance, grammar books multiplied simply because they were much in demand. Later, Christianity, at least in its early stages, did not want to have anything to do with the rich and influential Greek and Latin tradition. For the first Christians, rhetoric and dialectics were seen as creations of the devil, expressions of the pagan idolatrous culture like that of the Sophists. To them, the so-­called skill in speaking and the use of the word were culpable as a means of cheating and manipulation. Because of that, the first Christians would impose the idea that the truth of the Bible is self-­sufficient, without needing “an artificial and fabricated” rhetoric; their discourse needed to be sincere, inspired by faith. They would insist on the importance of authentic morality, not on a simulated one, as was believed to have happened in antiquity. Saint Augustine25 recommended, for example, a simple, direct and pleasant speech that should influence the audience towards observance of and respect for the precepts preached. The Christian orator almost disappeared in the relationship between logos and pathos, just because he was submitted to the temptation of falling into the sin of amor verborum (attachment to one’s verbal performances), and rhetoric itself was degraded from the central position it had had in antiquity. Saint Augustine pronounced on the thorny matters that had given rise to countless debates and established that rhetoric was legitimate when it referred to the Christian truth and illegitimate when it ignored this desideratum. The rejection by the first Christians of rhetoric, a highly sophisticated system, can be explained by the popular character of Christianity, and by the absence of experience in the art of discourse that could compare with the performances in antiquity. But as the church took its missionary responsibility more seriously, it was only natural that it should develop its own oratory and learn from the technique of building a discourse from the great rhetors of antiquity, although not all of them aroused their interest. Their ideas were similar to those of the Stoics, who despised eloquence and advocated sobriety of speech. Naturally, truth and morality were the undeniable purposes of every Christian orator, but they were not interested, as 24 Tzvetan Todorov, Teorii ale simbolului, trans. Mihai Murgu (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1983), p. 93. 25 Before converting to Christianity, Saint Augustine was an eminent rhetoric teacher, and an advocate of Cicero’s ideas.

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the classic orator was, in persuasion because the audience was already convinced in terms of the acceptance of the divine truth. The purpose of the preacher was to urge his hearers to observe the religious norms and precepts. It is sure that as soon as this type of oratory had gained prestige, going beyond the rudimentary stage of the first discourses, this rhetoric would be regarded as the expression of God’s power and not Satan’s, as it had been considered by the first Christians.

2.3.1. Sacred rhetoric in Romanian culture The first Romanian manifestation of eloquence was occasioned by sacred rhetoric. It relates to the 17th century and the preaching of Varlaam, followed by that of Antim Ivireanul. The Romanian educational book of Varlaam’s Cazania in 1643 does not stand out by its originality, but because it circulated intensively in the intra- and extra-­Carpathian region, it had an overwhelmingly important role by reason of the “diction of the moral idea,” as Elvira Sorohan26 emphasized. As for Antim Ivireanul, even if he seems to deny rhetoric, just because he was informed about the theological disputes on this subject, he nevertheless practiced it skillfully. His personality breathes from his vibrant sermons, because Antim saw himself in the role of the “soul fisherman” who confidently appealed to “the charm of education” and “the fishing rod of the word”, and thus to the persuasive effect of words. This case is also a case of religious and moral eloquence fervently sustained in his didache by special figures of style used in rhetoric: prosopopoeia, allegories, interrogations, exclamations, etc. Dimitrie Cantemir was the first author in Romanian culture to use the terms of classical rhetoric, drawing attention to the cunning oratorical devices and to the merits of great personalities such as Aristotle, Demosthenes or Cicero.

2.4. Rhetoric in the centuries which were not favorable to it Ars ornandi In late antiquity27 rhetoric was marked by the Christian anathema, and in the Middle Ages it was given a secondary importance, being taught in the Triuvium of the liberal arts, namely with grammar and dialectics. It will be reduced to the study of elocutio and of the ornaments of the discourse, as the deliberative genre 26 Elvira Sorohan, Introducere în istoria literaturii române (Iaşi: “Al. I. Cuza” University Publishing House, 1997), p. 120. 27 The main representatives of this period were Tertullian, Saint Augustine and Isidore of Seville.

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had disappeared, because the political confrontations did not have any role in the public life. The Renaissance brings with it the rediscovery of the values of antiquity, and implicitly of rhetoric, which once again becomes a fundamental study discipline, completing, more precisely, the philological culture. This fact indicates the continuation of the process of transformation into literature of the discipline which, although especially esteemed, will not recover its initial complexity, rhetoric being in its beginnings, as previosuly noted, multidisciplinary. But, due to its preoccupation with style, it is no wonder that it was taken for poetry given the fact that the border between the two disciplines was not clearly delineated. The study of Latin once again brings Cicero and his writings into the limelight to become a real model for education and the notions of clarity and naturalness regain their reputation. In Renaissance rhetoric must reflect things, res, yet paying attention to the words it uses, verba, it needs to encourage the genius, ingenium, but it should also intensify it by the imitation of the antics. The end of the Renaissance does not mean the return of of rhetoric to obscurity; it continued to be a school subject. Unfortunately, it was reduced to elocutio and actio by the reform of Ramus who, in his Dialectica in 1555, added to logics the most important components of rhetoric device, inventio and dispositio. Thus rhetoric was no longer an art of discourse but an art of style, confined to the study of figures of style. Tzvetan Todorov makes a subtly perceptive remark when he discusses the crises which affected rhetoric in its primary form: “Even the principle that causes the disappearance of the old rhetoric – the efficient eloquence – keeps alive rhetoric seen as a body of rules. The compulsory system of values for the entire society suppresses the freedom of speech, but maintains the rules. What dooms eloquence (and rhetoric simultaneously) contributes at the same time to its survival.”28 It seems paradoxical, indeed, that exactly what contradicted the spirit of rhetoric, the quality that had led it to success in antiquity, would control and determine its survival later on, irrespective how tormented it was. The truly cultivated persons did not ignore it, because it was the main modality of instruction to face discussions and the much appreciated disputes at Court. In the 17th century, preciosity imposed itself on rhetoric, because elegant manners and cultivated and refined expression represented a necessary modality for stepping up the social ladder.

28 Todorov, Teorii ale simbolului, pp. 103–104.

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The evidence against the plausible Later, after the strict separation between art and science, rhetoric remained the exclusive preserve of literature and, moreover, it was overtaken by grammar, which had become the only discipline that was governed the cultivation of expression. The development of science and the bourgeois revolutions fundamentally change the social priorities, and realist disciplines and the capacity to produce material goods gain preeminence, while elegant speech was seen as a trivial matter. Correct expression, supervised by grammar, was enough. The priorities of life changed, and the utilitarian philosophy was largely accepted. In this sense, Descartes’ theory of knowledge expresses the general conception very well. It concerns the importance given to the criterion of evidence and to that of the exclusive acceptance of facts that can be demonstrated, and the demonstration represents a number of means by which a statement or a phrase is transformed into an “established fact” which cannot be denied. Thus rhetoric was seriously affected, being a domain of the opinion and, precisely as Aristotle said, of the plausible. But Descartes asserts plainly: “everything that is plausible must be considered almost false.” Thus, the probable and matters for deliberation are discredited in the name of clear, checkable, obvious ideas. And yet, while Descartes does not blame the ornaments that the orator resorts to, he confesses that he thought at times of giving a more accessible form to his doctrine, by resorting to … rhetorical means. His attitude is consequently ambivalent when the truths he had found can be expressed by the help of rhetoric. In spite of this, it is very clear that scientific demonstration, the only kind taken into consideration, had taken over all the merits, while argumentation did not have any; it was despised or ignored. A new value was imposed and did not leave any space for rhetoric because, as Barthes wrote: “evidence is self-­sufficient and it steps away from language, or it believes it steps away or at least it pretends it needs it only as an instrument, a mediation, an expression.”29 Nor was Descartes the only philosopher who emphasized the so-­called uselessness of rhetoric. Of the same opinion were Spinoza,30 John Locke and, later, Kant, who did not give it any credit because for the art of persuasion he uses the synonym ‘the art of cheating’- an art that takes advantage of human weaknesses, an art that “borrows” from poetry what it needs in order to attract the spirits to its side for which reason it does not deserve any respect. In The Critique of 29 Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique”, Communications, No. 16 (1970), p. 192. 30 He is more than skeptical when it comes to paying too much attention to the language, which he considers a communicative instrument full of imperfections, sprung from imagination and not from reason.

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Judgement, the philosopher confessed to what degree reading the discourses of an orator created an unpleasant feeling within him, given the way in which these discourses led people to a mechanical acceptance of valueless judgments. Kant referred precisely to rhetoric’s capacity for manipulation, hence his contempt.

Rhetoric in the 18th and 19th centuries In Romanian culture, rhetoric appears, until the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, as a necessity for the educational system, an instrument for the cultivation of the literary language. Şcoala Ardeleană tried to use what classic rhetoric had to offer, not to say that the pupils from Blaj learnt the principles of oratory and made exercises on texts in Latin, especially from Cicero. In 1798 the first Rhetoric, attributed to Ioan-­Molnar Piuariu, was published. The influence of Aristotle, who is mentioned from the very beginning, is obvious in the paper, which has the merit of having tried to popularize this discipline. As for Ritorica română pentru tinerime (Romanian rhetoric for the young) published in Iaşi in 1852 by D. Gusti, it represents an evident progress in comparison to Piuariu’s. The definitions have clarity, the welcome commentaries are accompanied by various quotations, and the literary language the writer uses is very careful. Nevertheless, in other European cultures, rhetoric suffered attacks. The positivism contested it in the name of scientific truth, and Romanticism in the name of sincerity and of freedom in art, mainly because rhetoric had become a collection of normative rules. “Guerre à la rhétorique et paix à la grammaire!” was the vibrant urging of Victor Hugo and because in the 19th century rhetoric was considered a useless discipline, it was eliminated from the educational curriculum. But before classic rhetoric ceased to exist, two papers, one published in 1730 and the other 100 years later in 1830, reenergized the discipline, at a time when there were no hopes that this was still possible. The first was the work of Du Marsais, more exactly, the treatise On tropes and the other, The figures of language, was by Fontanier; both organize and structure the domain of tropes and figures of style in a way that will rekindle interest in rhetoric, but only temporarily. Because it was perceived in the Romantic period as well as in the modern period by Symbolism and Surrealism as a system of stiff, old-­fashioned rules that did not represent the aspirations of the time – the need for spontaneity and unbound, uncensored expression – the technique of expression, the rules and regulations became pointless obstacles in the path of of self-­exhibition. The reverberations of this idea can be identified even today, when one mentions the false and artificial rhetoric of some discourses. In fact, the whole history of the discipline mirrors the fundamental contradiction between those who wanted or want to impose a 101

simple, natural, honest rhetoric and the adepts of a rhetoric of the ornament, of embellishments, of skill in using the words.

A chance for rhetoric in the 20th century Nevertheless rhetoric was not condemned to disappear, even if the numerous attacks seemed to have removed it from general attention. Yet, whenever the study of the language imposed itself more prominently, rhetoric was not forgotten and “in every of the renaissances that Europe witnessed, rhetoric played an essential role and this role is far from referring only to pedagogy.”31 Thus, at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th there was an unprecedented flowering of the philosophy of language, thanks to the research of figures such as Humboldt, Russell, Carnap or Wittgenstein. Therefore, one of the current perspectives of rhetoric is the philosophical one, its other component being linguistics. In this latter case, the domain that is analyzed is that of figures of style, but only those figures of style that have a persuasive role, because the rhetoric of argumentation does not have to be separated from that of style. The differences that current rhetoric presupposes, comparable to the old rhetoric, are immediately graspable. In spite of all attempts to unify style and content, the tendency is still to highlight the aspects related to form and the language procedures used especially in literature. Although when we talk we use figures of style, it is important to know how to use them and to be aware of the power they have. Rhetoric is thus present in daily life as in the final analysis it is the science of human discourses in society. On the other hand, today the purpose of rhetoric is no longer to control the production of discourses but to interpret them, and the originality of this discipline nowadays is the extension of its area of interest by going beyond the field of discourse. Thus there is a rhetoric of the poster, of music, of the unconscious …

2.5. The rhetorical system and some essential matters related to rhetoric The apex of rhetoric was marked by Aristotle, the man who organized, in his famous paper Rhetorica,32 the rules of the discipline in a stable, homogenous and unitary system; this was because the plausible, the probable, the opinions needed

31 Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne1450-1950, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), p. 6. 32 The first part of Rhetorica is dominated by the issue of reasoning, the second by passions, and the third by style.

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a tekhné (art) of their own. The general directions (completed and unchanged by followers) of the rhetorical device converge into four main parts (an equal number to the main chapters of the rhetoric treatises): inventio (heuresis) or heuristics, the choice of the type of discourse, of the subject and of the persuasive means; dispositio (taxis), namely, the ordering, the plan of discourse, the organization of the material; elocutio (lexis) referring to the writing or the style, everything that is related to expression problems, and actio (hypocrisis), diction, properly referring to the delivery of the discourse. In the Roman period, memoria (mneme) was added to actio.

The first component of the rhetorical system, inventio Inventio is not the equivalent of today’s word invention, and it does not imply the idea of creation based on imagination. Rather, it concerns the choice of the type of discourse and the identification of what one needs to say in certain situations. The choice of the type of discourse can be made from among three types: judiciary, used in court in order to accuse (indictment) or to defend (plea), deliberative or political, (this is usually heard in the Senate, having as its object legislation, decisions referring to the defense of the city, the budget, the taxes, etc.), and finally, the demonstrative discourse or the epideictic one where a god, a human or legendary creatures are most often praised, although they may also be blamed, which implies ostentation and pomposity. Later, a particular species will derive from this genre, relating to the praise of the sovereign or panegyric literature. Aristotle demonstrates the way the three types of discourse differentiate by the time that is uniquely theirs. Thus, the judiciary focuses on what has happened, because it is about past events that need to be judged; the deliberative is concerned with the future, because it weighs and imposes decisions that will be taken and, finally, the epideictic focuses on the present because it aims to obtain the admiration of the audience by discursive performance. Not even the argumentation of every type is identical. The judiciary that addresses a specialized public, when referring to laws, uses especially the syllogistic reasoning, entimema,33 the deliberative genre,

33 Entimema, unlike the example, does not begin from secure prerequisites, but only probabilities and from an implicit general prerequisite, so it is deductive. In the case of the example, a particular fact is inserted in a more general context; one starts from past facts to arrive at future ones, so it is inductive. Although in Aristotle’s writings there is no clear discussion about the entimema, it can be said that this is an elliptical form of argumentation; it is a dialectic syllogism that leads to nothing but a probability.

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that addresses a less cultivated public, prefers to argue by using the example, and the epideictic resorts to amplification because the facts, being already known to the public, must be better valued so as to impress.

The second component of the rhetoric system, dispositio Once inventio is established, this first stage involving the search for the most appropriate arguments for the type of discourse chosen, the most important part in the conception of the discourse, follows, its plan, the organization of arguments, depending on the specificity of the cause or dispositio. The arguments are the “common elements,” topoi, “reserves of arguments” which rely on tacit agreements between the emitter and the receiver and which can be strategically placed at certain moments of the discourse, especially at the beginning, but also at the end or throughout the discourse. Quite often they were learnt by heart, especially when it was a matter of common elements that could be adapted to every subject.34 Many topoi in rhetoric would change their function in time and enter literature in the form of clichés. Paul Ricoeur sees “one of the causes of rhetoric’s death” in an excess of formalism, much later, in the 19th century.35 The classic plan consists of four parts. The exordium, representing the opening of the discourse, the introduction or the preamble, is meant to attract the attention (captatio benevolentiae), to prepare the audience and to make them favourably disposed towards the speaker. That is why it has an emotional value, being pathetic or vehement, indignant or vibrant. Aristotle said that the deliberative does not need an exordium because the audience already knows what it is about. On the contrary, in the epideictic style, the exordium consists in the involvement of the audience in the topic,36 which is meant to lead to an affective participation from the very beginning by those who are present. For example, one of the most frequently-­used topoi in the exordium is the excuse for a lack of experience, for incomplete preparation, and the praise of the adversary’s talent which should draw the benevolence of the audience to the modesty and common sense of the one who delivers the speech. Cicero, in his Orator, dedicated to Brutus, begins by saying that the topic is beyond his power and that he is afraid that he will be criticized by learned people, including Brutus. This kind of modesty will be ex-

34 Besides these loci communes there were also the specific loci, idioi topoi, appropriate only to certain subjects. 35 Ricoeur, Metafora vie, p. 57. 36 One of the topoi of epideictic eloquence was the eulogy of ancestors and of their great deeds.

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tremely frequent in late pagan and Christian antiquity, and it is accompanied by the excuse that the decision to write is influenced by the demand of a friend or of a superior. In the exordial, the topos of dedication or that of knowledge that needs to be shared with others may be encountered. Sometimes, it may happen that the exordium is suppressed and the cause may be referred to directly, which is also meant to attract attention. It is the case of Cicero’s famous ex abrupto, often quoted: “How long, oh Catiline, will you abuse of our patience?!…” The case, presented by narratio, the story, is the core of the utterance, and as the manner of presentation itself can be an important argument, a short, concise, simple, clear and credible narration of facts is recommended (or they should seem credible, if objectively this is not so), preferably chronologically. The orator must be aware of the fact that not every aspect and not every circumstance related to the case can help him, and then he needs to know what to present from whatever is to hand. Confirmatio, indisputably the longest part of the discourse, contains the assembly of proofs that will result in the destruction of the adversary’s arguments. The digressions and the moments of relaxation, which serve as indirect proofs, can be placed anywhere, but usually between confirmatio and the peroratio which closes the discourse and which involves moments of affection meant to attract for good the support of the audience.

Elocutio or style The third component of the rhetorical system, after inventio and dispositio, which had not existed since the beginning of rhetoric, but which was imposed later, becoming its essential component, is elocutio. Everything that referred to language, style or adornment, the very writing of the discourse, related to elocutio. This was the part that emphasized most strongly the personality of the author of the discourse and his contribution and, simultaneously, this was the point where rhetoric met art, becoming, thanks to it, an art. But before proving its artistry, the one who composed a discourse should use the language correctly, to observe the rules of correct expression, which was a compulsory requirement. Besides expression in conformity with the grammatical rules, there were other criteria in the appreciation of a discourse: clarity, the most important characteristic of the style, according to Aristotle, the judicious use of tropes and of figures of style, as well as their adjustment to the topic. The necessity of ornamentation was imposed because it was noticed that without figures of style the discourse was too dry and boring, but when verbal adornments appeared, they were not simply attached as a quantitative element that one could dispense with immediately. 105

Very important for the correct comprehension of what elocutio represented is the fact that the aesthetics of rhetoric is functional or, differently put, the beautiful was not only meant to create pleasure in the audience without having any further utility or role. The smallest stylistic effect or the most apparently insignificant figure of speech needed to be justified by the obligation of persuasion. Therefore the best style was the one that matched the chosen subject particularly well. Consequently, it was not a matter of art for art’s sake, and, erroneously, rhetoric later came to be taken for the domain of figures of style. These were only to complete the content harmoniously,and there was a rule according to which they should not be too evident. Every excess was blamed because an impression of artificiality, preciosity and even vulgarity was created. Art should not be apparent; at times slippages were mimed, the natural being much appreciated because the main purpose was persuasion and not the display of artistic procedures. Vasile Floreascu in his book Rhetoric and neorhetoric37 pertinently explains what the main cause was for the change of accent in rhetoric. If at the beginning inventio and dispositio were essential, elocutio came to change the focus of rhetoric, diminishing the importance of persuasion and of the support of some causes by the strongest arguments possible. This happened when a distinction between the content of ideas and their expression was made; it involves the classic difference between content and form. Normally, an unbreakable unity exists between them there is, but, unfortunately, the two components were artificially separated, and the error has not been corrected today either, except theoretically, when critics avoid talking about ideas and themes on the one hand and about style on the other hand in separate chapters. Yet, as early as antiquity, the matter of expression, of art’s adornments became primordial, because the practical interest in obtaining the audience’s support in favor of a cause disappeared when the democratic processes were no longer possible. And then, the aspect which attracted attention was the art of uttering a discourse, the hard work of finding and using figures of style. For their sake they would even imagine causes, which meant that preoccupations with problems of content were given secondary importance.

Actio and memoria Returning to the system of rhetoric, the fourth component, actio (also called pronuntiatio), deals with vocal effects, breathing and diction, mimicry and gestures. It is not by chance that this part of rhetoric was an inspiration for treatises 37 Vasile Florescu, Retorica şi neoretorica. Geneză, evoluţie, perspective (Bucharest: Academy Publishing House, 1973).

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on the actor’s art, because persuasion could be achieved not only by what was communicated, but also by the way it was communicated, by the very presence of the orator, by the tone that he used, by the way in which he talked and gestured, attracting attention and creating an impression. Demosthenes38 claimed that this part was the most important for eloquence because he had an intuition that the “non-­verbal signs” convince faster than words. And as it most often happened that the speech was learnt by heart, memoria was added to the other components of the rhetorical system. Rhetorica ad Herennium detailed for the first time the topic of memory, discussing the technique based on the principle of memorizing a series of places and images. It was closely associated with the content, because a coherent, logical discourse with a well- thought-­out structure was naturally easier to remember. Moreover, speakers would memorize quotations from famous authors, anecdotes and other elements which were meant to enrich the discourse. Cicero considered memory a natural characteristic and not a technique. On the other hand, Quintilian considered it a technique which needs practice, for which reason he indicated mnemonic procedures such as the breaking-­down of the discourse into parts that will be easily learnt, the establishment of mental signs for the important moments, etc. Yet, in time, they abandoned the two components actio and memoria, considered minor and even useless, when the discourse was no longer exclusively oral. The true loss that rhetoric suffered was when the essential part of the Aristotelian rhetorical device was taken out, the one that controlled the content, the subjects and the arguments meant to persuade.

2.6. The specificity of rhetoric and its reference In rhetoric, just as Aristotle emphasized, language, which helps us communicate, creates a bond between the orator and his audience. It is Aristotle’s merit to have systematized and outlined in Rhetorica the three essential elements of the rhetorical relationship. Thus the orator needs to demonstrate that he is competent and simultaneously to show honesty and morality which constitute the elements on which the persuasion of the audience essentially depends on. This is so because, without the trust of the audience, irrespective how powerful the arguments are, they do not have any value, and this confidence is not easily gained as there is the basic condition of sincerity: the orator needs to be credible and he should not hide 38 Considered the greatest Greek orator, he would put into practice what Aristotle theorized in his treaty Rhetorica. Demosthenes, the Cicero of the Greeks, primarily gained his glory by his political discourses. Thus the famous Philippics were dedicated to the fight for the freedom of Athens.

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anything of what he thinks, and, although this can be hard to prove, he can at least create the impression that he is sincere. Thus he has one extra privilege if he is likable, and his advice should be not only sensible, but also pertinent. It is a matter of ethos which is, as we have seen, closely bound up with the affect, to the mood. The part that focuses on the audience that experiences all kinds of passions and emotions while listening to the discourse of the orator is the pathos. Aristotle believed that the sincere emotion that the orator expressed could attract the audience, even when the orator talked nonsense. The pathos involves a lot of psychology, for which reason a great part of the second book in Rhetorica is dedicated to the psychology of different experiences and feelings (anger, fear, pity, etc.), and to the different characters of the audience, depending on their age and social position. The orator must adapt to all these variables. But even if things seem clear as far as the ethos and pathos are concerned, Quintilian will later blur these two concepts. He talks about the affections that dominate the calm and the balance and which are subject to the moral control, the ethos, and about an unexpected affection, violent at times, uncontrollable, the pathos. There is no specification that the ethos belongs to the orator while the pathos belongs to the audience. From this we might deduce that both the one who delivers the discourse and the one who listens to it can manifest either one type of affection or the other. In the end, the part which deals with the discourse, by which we understand the plan of the discourse, the style, the proper words, the figures of style, the arguments and the proper dialectic aspect of rhetoric, was called logos. Ethos was more prominent in the judiciary genre, logos in the epideictic one, and pathos especially characterized political debate, the deliberative genre. Different philosophers, teachers of oratory and orators focused their attention on one of the three dimensions. Plato, for example, did not believe in the power of the oratorical logos to get to the truth, and he was skeptical that the ethos could involve any value at all. Concerned almost exclusively with the impact that the discourses have on the audience that has to be submitted to some positive, not manipulative, influences which might create confusion and falsity, Plato has as his main reference the pathos. Cicero, on the other hand, is convinced that the ethos matters more than anything else; the virtue of the orator is reflected not only in the way he speaks but also in his capacity to say the correct thing.

2.7. Modern rhetoric and its two directions In 1958 two very important books, Traité de l’argumentation, la nouvelle rhétorique by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-­Tyteca and The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin, marked the comeback of rhetoric in the 20th century. The 108

Cartesian rationalism that undermined rhetoric in the 18th and 19th centuries and in whose name the discipline was despised, criticized and eliminated from education, enjoys the same success in the 20th century as well. What really allowed the comeback of rhetoric and the lifting of the embargo was a greatly enhanced interest in communication and debate, in discourse and information.39 It is true that the analytical reasoning that Aristotle talked about is related to truth and logic, yet there is also a dialectic reasoning concerned with opinions that do not belong to the domain of truth, but to that of the plausible, where persuasion and demonstration do not matter. “Aristotle, ” says Paul Ricoeur, “had the great merit of elaborating this bond between the rhetoric concept of persuasion and the logical concept of the plausible, and of building on this rapport the whole edifice of a philosophical rhetoric.”40

2.7.1. The philosophic neorhetoric Chaïm Perelman, professor, philosopher and Belgian jurist, made the distinction, in an essay entitled Prime philosophies and regressive philosophies, between the prime philosophies which are based on clear foundations from which regressive philosophies derive, with a starting-­point in the debate and arguments from which they regress in search of a basis.41 The regressive movement which defines these latter philosophies is not the sign of a subsequent irrationality which should isolate them. Thus Perelman aimed to highlight the importance of opinions, for which reason he was against a restrictive rationalism, while Toulmin is against the Carnap type of logics, wishing for a reform of logics which had been totally unfit for everyday situations. Stephen Toulmin, a philosopher of knowledge, tries to demonstrate that argumentation and logics are not incompatible nor in opposition. Nevertheless, the formal mathematical logics should be complemented by practical natural logics. Thus, for this discipline to relate to argumentation, it had to move from an “idealized logic” to a “working logic,” a logic applicable to daily circumstances when we debate, we have opinions and when we look for arguments for our positions – and an argumentation related to logics implies consensus, not certitude. Thus the path was open to the non-­formal argumenta-

39 In America, rhetoric was re-­launched thanks to the theories of communication; in Europe, linguistics was the main tool for the rediscovery of the discipline. 40 Ricoeur, Metafora vie, p. 24. 41 This distinction recalls the one that Pascal would make between l’esprit de géométrie (spirit of geometry) to which the method of demonstration corresponds, and l’esprit de finesse (spirit of finesse) to which the method of argumentation corresponds.

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tive logics to which Toulmin drew attention, because he himself did not carry out some clarifying systematic research. Perelman was aware of the fact that rhetoric lost the central place among the other thinking systems precisely because of Cartesianism, and for this reason he wanted to demonstrate that the plausible, values and the opinions are not situated in the area of the irrational, that they are not dominated by uncontrollable and at times incomprehensible passions, and thus, without any exaggeration, we can speak about a logic of the plausible and of opinions, about an order in the field of the probable. The domain studied by Perelman, the philosopher who continued Aristotle and Quintilian’s rhetorical tradition, the field of arguments and opinions is situated, he says, between that of evidence and demonstration on the one hand and the field of human affect on the other.

Doxa The sophists were the ones who drew attention to the fact that rhetoric has opinion as its main reference, and its method is argumentation, actually antonymous to demonstration. Associated with appearances, with the feelings and sensation, i.e. with precisely the changing sensitive nature that Heraclitus talked about, opinion was considered the inferior stage to knowing the world. Fragile, approximate, ambiguous, inconsistent, even false at times, we see it located by Plato between science (which leads to truth) and ignorance, because it varies not only from individual to individual, but sometimes varies in the thinking of the same person. Opinion was long despised because it is incapable of revealing the truth, this vision being based on the deeply-­rooted conception that there is reason in science alone. This way of interpreting things needed revisiting when it became very clear how important the techniques of influence and persuasion by language are for society. Thus it was concluded that between reason and truth there is not always an irreproachable equivalence,42 and that the rapport between justice and law accepts inadvertencies. Then, critically analyzing the demonstration, we notice that what really matters here is the correctness of the thinking with a view to uttering the truth. Its comprehension and acceptance by the audience, whether it is observed or not by those whom it addresses, are secondary aspects, insignificant for the one who resorts to this method of expression. On the contrary, if persuasion is necessary, it needs the support of the real audience, as in the case of scientific demonstration. This audience does not always accept the evidence; it is capricious, and decides emotionally; it has preconceptions, which means that it is more difficult to convince. But these difficulties must 42 In extremis, the skeptics doubt the very possibility of the knowledge of reason.

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be defeated as long as it is doxa which greatly regulates and stipulates social activity, although rhetoric interferes at every step of the way. Modern culture is a culture of opinion rather than of science, positivism and evidence.

Theories of argumentation Argumentation attracts the attention of specialists; Perelman wanted to prove the appropriateness of its use as a rational instrument for such fields as law, moral, philosophy, and religion. This is because to reason does not only mean to deduce or observe scientifically but also to deliberate, to back up ideas intelligently. The use of argumentation applies not only when it concerns well-­circumscribed fields such as the ones mentioned above. The bottom line is that to know how to argue is a necessity, not a luxury, and not to know to argue is, as Philippe Breton43 indicated, a source of cultural inequality which is similar to traditional inequalities, the social and the economic ones. Every pluralist and egalitarian society which appreciates democratic debate appeals to it when decisions are collective, for which reason it has never existed in totalitarian societies or in those where authoritarianism dominates. It is definitely used in situations where contradictions appear, a plurality of opinions, situations which require the imposition of debate, but it is meant to avoid violence and to find solutions for all kinds of conflicts. In a theory of argumentation the obstacles appear from the initial stage of the definition. Thus, there is no universal definition of the argument, and argumentation has a multiform character, which transforms it into a capricious object of study. Perelman’s new rhetoric was based on the study of “argumentative techniques,” which allowed “the challenge or the increase of adherence” to the hypotheses presented, and on the study of the arguments’ typology. And even if neorhetoric may seem complicated to a neophyte, Perelman stated that it addressed all kinds of audiences. Nevertheless, the more specialized methodologies addressed a specialized audience. In any case, the philosopher focused his attention on two of the components of the classic rhetorical system, inventio and dispositio, ignoring elocutio, actio and memoria. Naturally, argumentation may come from a literary perspective, but in this case, the seduction of beauty is more important than reasoning in itself, and Perelman considered that the figures of the discourse need not be given attention, as long as they back up the arguments, they emphasize them, or amplify them. But the persuasive force of the figures of style is what really matters. Without the argumentative energy which makes them significant, they are simply figures of style, worthy of appreciation from an aesthetic point of view. 43 Philippe Breton, L’argumentation dans la communication (Paris: La Découverte 2006).

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2.7.2. Linguistic neorhetoric Despite this stated opposition by one of the most important promoters of neorhetoric to the foregrounding of the aesthetic dimension when it concerns argumentative discourse, the ‘60s brought about the spectacular comeback of the classic rhetoric of the 17th century, of the style figures44 and the aesthetics of discourse, of elocutio. This branch of neorhetoric has as its main reference its very relationship to the science of literature. It is true that the enrichment of ancient rhetoric by the expressive component occurred with the special recommendation for its subordination to the persuasive dimension. Cicero himself formulated the principle dissimulare eloquentiam by which the art, although present, did not have to be too visible in discourse. Rhetoric was transformed gradually from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Renaissance into a glossary of figures of style, an assembly of rules, into a number of recommendations about how to write well by using this glossary. The Enlightenment and especially the Romantic revolt against this too rigid discipline was somehow justified. The beginning of the transfer process from classical rhetoric to neorhetoric was made by Du Marsais by his Traité des tropes published in 1730, although the perspective was that of a linguist rather than of a rhetor. Its style focuses especially on figures of style. Later (1821), Fontanier, in his Traité général des figures du discours, broadened the study field to the assembly of figures of style, tropes and non-­tropes. In the 1960s Barthes claimed that rhetoric needed to be redefined in terms of the structural linguistics, and Genette, who compiled his studies under the title Figures, defined rhetoric as a “system of figures.” A white writing which lacks the figures of style is identified as the zero degree of writing, and the most important figures of speech, representing the deviation from this basis of the system, which the Russian formalists had long talked about and especially Roman Jakobson, metaphor and the metonymy.

The Liège group In the 60s and 70s, the group µ45, representing the “French neo-­rhetoric”, contributed to the rebirth of rhetoric. In their famous paper General Rhetoric the systematic sound figures are systematically presented and analyzed (under the influence of Structuralism), namely exactly the elements which derived from an44 Some consider important for the renewal of elocutio Jakobson’s thesis referring to the opposition between metaphor and metonymy. 45 Among the members of the group were J. Dubois, J. M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Edeline and H. Trinon.

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tiquity from elocutio. The group thus identified a plastic field where the figures of speech are in the formal aspect of words, the domain of semantics, with figures of style visible at the level of sememes, the syntactic level where the figures of speech can be identified in the structure of the sentence and, in the end, the domain of the reference where the figures of speech take part in the presence of facts. Corresponding to each separate level we have the metaplasms, metasememes, metataxa and metalogisms. This rhetoric aimed to be general because it had the ambition to reveal, by the analysis of the tropes, the semantic processes and the fundamental symbolization, and the field of figures of speech contains all the forms of discourse. Even if the representatives of the Group of Liège pointed to the fact that the figures of speech need not be isolated from the context because they are part of the textual mechanism, nevertheless the ancient bond with the persuasive dimension is not preserved. In fact, this literary neorhetoric of the 60s which did not include only the theoreticians of the Group µ, but also Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes and Jean Cohen, simply refused to subordinate the figures of speech to persuasion. The reference was strictly a literary one, but an authentic rhetoric should not have been talked about in this way. The aesthetic of prose, which rhetoric cultivated programmatically, was an aesthetic marked by the idea of utility. No stylistic element needed to be used without the justification that persuasion represented; without it the discourse was vulgar and senseless. Thus the style needed to be carefully adapted to the subject and to the audience as well, the orator supervising attentively his delivery which made an impression on the audience if it was agreeable, alert, sometimes surprising or unpredictable, vivid, convincing. For all these qualities to apply, it was necessary for the orator to know in detail the means he could resort to; it is mainly a matter of figures of style. In his aesthetics, Hegel had made a necessary distinction between the poet who does not have and who should not have a purpose unknown to art and the orator who creates an eloquent discourse, having a well-­defined purpose. Conformity to this purpose is subsumed to the general persuasive purpose. It is true that for a long time rhetoric was equated with literary prose, and elocutio was that part of the rhetorical apparatus where literature stood out clearly. Then there were the non-­rhetorical figures of style that were studied by some disciplines such as the literary stylistic or aesthetic, but for a figure of style to be rhetorical, it needs to have a very clear function: to be persuasive. In this case a question arises related to the degree to which these figures of style are still literary. If literature is willing to take in elements that do not have an exclusively aesthetic function, then these figures of style with a persuasive role can find a place in the 113

literary domain as well. On the other hand, figures of style that do not have this functionality should not be considered rhetorical, because, just as Ana Ene indicates, this discourse is “rhetorically non-­marked,” unlike a “deliberately oratorical discourse,” where the oratorical intention is clear, even explicit, as happens, for example, in the case of advertisements or interviews.46 The group of Liège was not the only one that made glossaries of figures of style. Every modern study, keeping in mind the expressive aspect of rhetoric, thus brings further clarifications that respect the categories established in the classical period. According to these glossaries there are figures of style such as the pun or the rhyme referring to the sonorous consistency of discourse, the figures of style, such as the metaphor, referring to the significance of words or groups of words. Then there are the constructive figures of style, such as the ellipsis, the antithesis which relates to the structure of the sentence or even of the discourse and finally the thinking figures of style which refer to the relationship of the discourse either to the orator, to his attitude, or to the object.

Rhetoric and the literary phenomenon The literary works that are generally “rhetorically non-­marked,” but represent exceptions and nevertheless have an obvious persuasive dimension can be rhetorically read, which is one of the other methods of textual analysis. It is a type of interpretation which pays attention to the author and to his ideas, without ignoring, when they are accessible, information referring to his biography and data that may be relevant for the comprehension of the artistic thinking. Thus the intentions of the writer are given attention, as well as the persuasive and argumentative use of the language, the nature and the response of the audience or of the reader, the relationship of the text to other discourses and last but not least, the social and the political contexts of the author-­text-­reader interactions. Thus, in this type of approach, the text is not isolated; it is within the frame where it appeared, and the author and the receiver are given equal importance. Moreover, the advantage that modern rhetoric brings to the study of figures of style is the demonstration of the fact that, far from being simple ornaments, they reflect the process of thinking. Nevertheless, the rhetorical perspective is not a major one with the textual analysis method, as it is somewhat incidental, and this is so because the object of rhetoric is not literature, but discourses of all types, from every domain that uses them. There were voices that criticized modern literary rhetoric because it 46 Ana Ene, Elemente de retorică şi neoretorică. Tipologia discursului (Braşov, “Transilvania” University Publishing House, 2007), pp. 114–115.

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limited itself to classification and description, without having tried to understand the profound nature of literature or its mechanisms. The result was therefore an incomplete literary reference and a perspective that reflects the artistic phenomenon partially and superficially. Yet it seems that the ambitions of rhetoric have always been and still are closely related to communication, to the capacity to construct persuasive discourses. There were tangencies with the artistic field from the very beginning, but the reference of rhetoric was only partially literary. Moreover, the literature of today does not seek to be persuasive at all costs; it is hostile to ordinariness, in a word, reluctant to what is most representative for rhetoric. Thus the two domains do not communicate too much.

2.8. Conclusions Today, said Roland Barthes in 1970, “the world is incredibly full of the old rhetoric,” and this statement continues to be valid, although it seems that many are not aware of this fact, because I have heard this type of exclamation more than once: “Let’s leave aside rhetoric and deal with serious things or the truth!” But when you learn to make a plan for what you will say, to choose and to combine arguments coherently and efficiently, to supervise your language and to have a style that should draw attention in order to reach your persuasive purpose, is this not a question of rhetoric, in the finest sense of the word? And on the other hand, the incapacity to express oneself correctly, to be aware of what you want to transmit and thus the incapacity to organize the discourse which seems loose and hard to follow or banal and unattractive or full of clichés – can all these be excused or overlooked? Are they not proof of an unpardonable lack of culture? Rhetoric exists, Wayne C. Booth notes in his book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, whenever we want to obtain effects by words, facial expressions or gestures.

Communication, knowledge and honesty Rhetoric is the first field of knowledge that systematically studied language as a means of communication. This fact is demonstrated by the rigor of definitions, the accuracy of observations, and all the rules and techniques resulting from a very laborious process, meant to make the communicative action still more effective. We thus understand why rhetoric underwent a significant change in modern times, intensely based on communication. The prestige of rhetoric was due to the fact that it knew how to explore the resources of the language and to transform them into an efficient and persuasive means of communication, but also into a possibility for knowledge. Rhetoric 115

was, just as Cicero noticed, very close to philosophy. In spite of this and within a short time, the two disciplines were no longer complementary but conflicting, because rhetoric was fundamentally based on opinions which could be false or impossible to demonstrate and not on the truth as in the case of philosophy that, according to a prejudice, is serious and founded on serious theoretical grounds, beyond all suspicion. Both disciplines served man, but they used different means, which represented the main reasons for the disputes. Rhetoric, which was said to form dishonest people by flattering vanities and cultivating a pointless pleasure, was vehemently accused of a lack of morality, and of the encouragement of dishonesty, since it pleaded in utramque partem, i.e. it served good causes as well as bad ones. Despite this, language and the handling of all kinds of arguments were available to everybody and were used as such, this fact giving rise to heated debates, sometimes with much more important consequences than those of a simple verbal confrontation. Rhetoric was and is an important means of social propulsion. “Rhetoric guarantees not only freedom” – Vasile Florescu noticed – “victory, in the clash of interests with other people and material prosperity; it ensures social superiority in the modern sense, offering to the one who masters it the possibility of satisfying his thirst for glory. Interpreting language as a means of social distinction in the modern sense will never disappear from the European mentality, profoundly marked by the Greek and Latin tradition.”47

Rhetoric and the plausible As for the charge that rhetoric is the domain of the hypothetical, of the plausible, of the probable, of convictions that are not appropriate to knowledge, it is not acceptable as a reproach in an era when ambiguity and indetermination, the absence of certitudes and of irreproachable decisions are generally accepted. And rhetoric involves deliberation concerning the uncertain deeds that we may perform, so it is a very necessary instrument of social action. Thucydides, one of the greatest ancient historians, wrote: “we do not consider that discussions are a waste of facts, but the lack of clarification by discussion before completing what needs to be completed.”48 The Cartesian concept of evidence and of the provable fact is inappropriate when it is a matter of discussions in public life, given the fact that we do not live, fortunately, in a scientific “totalitarianism”, in a world of pure science, but rather in one of hazard, where proofs are more or less convincing. 47 Florescu, Retorica şi neoretorica. Geneză, evoluţie, perspective, p. 33. 48 Thucydides, Războiul peloponesiac, trans. Nicolae  I.Barbu (Bucharest: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1966), p. 258.

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For this precise reason, the mastery of rhetoric in discovering and finding solutions where they do not offer themselves is highly valued today. Our society is by excellence one of communication where individuals express themselves, debate, and must seduce and persuade. Opinion is part of daily life; it represents the foundation of our choices, because mostly we argue on the basis of our opinions and not on the basis of the truth or errors. Consequently, a resort to rhetoric is more necessary than ever before, because the future of a person or of a nation may depend on the ability to talk, to negotiate the differences between individuals and communities, or to find remedies for misunderstandings. It may avoid the outbreak of a war, or, on the other hand, the starting of one; it may lead to the winning of freedom, of prosperity, of some benefits or, unfortunately, when it fails, to the loss of some rights or goods. It teaches one to speak simply and convincingly to an ordinary audience, but also ornately and suggestively to a more sophisticated audience. “In rhetoric, when it is not a matter of defending a thesis, but a cause,” Olivier Reboul wrote, “where you do not play with ideas, because the stake of the discourse is the judiciary, political or ethical destiny of people, thus in rhetoric, you need to treat seriously that ‘appearance’ just as the plausible, which replaces an always unnoticed evidence.”49

The virtues of the orator Besides knowledge and communication, the artistic contribution of rhetoric is remarkable. General attention may be drawn by the subtle use of figures of style, meant to enrich the discourse, and to contribute along with arguments, to persuasion. The pleasure that the artistic procedures created in antiquity combined with the emotion produced by the performance of the orator who transformed into a real art the delivery of the speech: the gestures, the mimic, the tone, the modulations of the voice, everything contributed to a display that addressed the intellect, the artistic feeling and the affectivity of the audience equally. There was a special type of communication between the orator and the audience, given the “psychological” knowledge the orator had acquired. Thus he knew how to exploit in his favor the reactions of the audience, if not actually to foresee them, which could at times matter more than the cleverness of the discourse’s construction, since it is neither rigorous principles nor the truth that can decide the advantage, but rather an able exploitation of the states of mind of the audience. Just as Quintilian rightly noticed, it was not enough for an orator to build his discourse by the rules of the art, to memorize it and then to deliver it in front of the audience like 49 Reboul, Introduction à la rhétorique, p. 51.

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an actor playing his part. He needed to adjust to the caprices of an audience that did not accept the evidence, and could be turbulent, interrupting the speech. All kinds of situations could occur, distracting the orator, who needed to keep calm and focused, to have facilitas (Quintilian’s term), i.e. the agility and easiness to adapt to these unpredictable situations and to convince and to guide the audience where he wanted. Thus a good orator had to be a good hermeneutist, as he interprets attentively and correctly the discourse of the adversary in order to know what to answer afterwards, and what his weak and strong points are, but also the traps that he set and that needed a rebuff. Controversies and contradictions, attacks and defense – the orator needed to be familiar with everything.

The merits of rhetoric Obviously, rhetoric is equally theory and practice, the art of constructing speeches and science; it is not by chance that it became one of the most important educational subjects in antiquity, and not only then., and the controversies about the honesty or lack of honesty of some orators do not reduce its formative power, or the role it had played in the education of the youth. Because rhetoric helped them to develop and refine their intelligence, thanks to it they would learn not only to express themselves correctly, but also efficiently and elegantly; in a word, they would learn how to use to their own profit the communicative virtues of language, how to emphasize their qualities and to correct their errors. The main merits of rhetoric presented so far explain its rediscovery in our times; knowing its basis and its tormented history, it proved very profitable for areas such as the theory of culture, or the theory of knowledge, ethics, the theory of speech acts, general linguistics, and philosophy of law which are directly interested in the process of communication, not to mention publicity, which is part of the rhetorical system as it presupposes inventio, dispositio, elocutio and especially actio. Chaïm Perelman, as well as I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke and other specialists in neorhetoric, have tried to give it a philosophical dimension, in the hope that the theories of argumentation would transform domains of communication, such as politics or marketing, religion or publicity, into more rigorous disciplines.

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3. Literary History An autonomous domain endowed with qualities and specific functions, a favorite space (like the other arts) of creativity, literature is backed up by literary research. This one, in its quality of meta-­literary space, has won prestige and fame in its long history, accepting at the same time – with some exceptions, as we will see – its inevitable limitation: the impossibility of absolute autonomy. Bound to literature which, some say, is parasitic on it, while others say, completes it, literary research proved, in spite of contestations and suspicions, not only its utility but also its necessity. The studies in this domain seem modest and aimed at specialists or connoisseurs, but despite this appearance no-­one but for the literary critic is a better intermediary between the book and the audience. And when the utility of the critical act is denied, the gross error of denying reading, even “for pleasure” its indispensable acuity, occurs, because every reader, effortlessly, unintentionally, even at a rudimentary level, performs a critical act by appreciating, assessing, weighing, comparing, making different connections through reading. For this reason, literary criticism represents the professionalization, cultivation and exacerbation of an innate attitude, characteristic of human thinking. It is still true that the prestige of literary research is often diminished by the literature that it actually feeds on and develops from. There have been attempts in modern criticism to compete with literature and, in extremis, to gain its own autonomy, and even the unprecedented situation when criticism challenged literature. There were creators for whom the influence of Roland Barthes’ theories was overwhelming, to give only one example. In the relationship between literature and criticism an extreme point has been reached, and a situation discontinued, but it could not have been maintained, so that the relation between literature and criticism should be restructured fundamentally. Criticism will continue to back up literature, but this is a sign that criticism is not spiteful, it cannot be ignored and it is perfectly capable of laiunching its own offensives.

3.1. The identity of the literary history and its relations to criticism and literary theory Literary theory The triad history, criticism, literary theory is acknowledged today, each of these fields having its functions and aims. But because they all study literature, overlapping is not excluded, as the absence of tight relationships between the three do119

mains is unimaginable. Today, for example, without a conceptual structure which is derived from the literary theory, history and criticism can easily be accused of amateurism or lack of seriousness, professionalism, or scientific pertinence. This is not because abstracting and conceptualization are fashionable, but because the science of literature imposes systematic knowledge. But the theory of literature, the one that proposes concepts, categories, and principles to serve as instruments of literary research, cannot break the bonds that connect it to related disciplines because otherwise it risks isolation within abstract frameworks which, at some point, may have no relevance or utility.

Literary criticism Because it had the mission to appreciate, judge, decide if a work has or not any artistic value, criticism seems more anchored in the present. This operation of valorization ensures for criticism, as Mircea Martin notes, and the orientation function as well as “the lucidity regime.”1 The analysis, the commentary, work for the discovery of codes and of the structure of writing, of its significance are specific to literary criticism, as well as the more marked presence of the critic’s personality. As evaluation involves his taste and intuition, the subjective factor and the originality of interpretation are accepted quite frequently and naturally in criticism. That is why the question whether criticism is an art, “a literary genre,” intellectual practice or science has been asked. Although, irrespective of how off-­handed the literary critic may be in his appreciations, the most solid of them and the most convincing are those that prove thorough knowledge of the field of literature, including that of the past, and implicitly of the literary history. Relating to this matter, René Wellek commented: “Yet I do not think that the critic is an artist or that criticism is an art (in the strictly modern sense). Its purpose was intellectual knowledge. It does not create a world of imagination similar to the world of music or poetry. Criticism is conceptual knowledge or, in any case, it aims at such knowledge. It needs to aspire, lastly, to systematic knowledge of literature, to literary theory.”2

1 Mircea Martin, Singura critică (Bucharest: Cartea Românească Publishing House, 2006). 2 René Wellek, Conceptele criticii, trans. Rodica Tiniş (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House 1970), p. 4.

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Literary history Literary history3 aims at studying literary evolution theroughout certain periods or from its origins to a certain time, its vocation being to offer information on the literature of the past. It is thus interested in writings, authors, sources, but also trends and literary movements, topics and literary myths. In other words, it is interested in the individuality of the writings that make up a literature and also refers to the literary system, a concept included in the very idea of history. Gustave Lanson, a famous French literary historian, suggested the comparison of literary texts for the individual to be differentiated from the collective and originality from tradition. The literary historian imperatively needs a solid method in the syntheses he makes, and a sense of hierarchy to choose what really deserves attention, but he equally needs to know to highlight the revealing detail. The overall vision is implied in order to have a clear picture of continuity, of periodic coherences, because literary history arranges writers and their writings in a chronological order of periods and generations, but the same overall vision offers the image of discontinuities, of changes in the process of literary evolution. Theoretically speaking, literary history, which usually focused on masterpieces and, generally, on writings acknowledged as valuable, is perceived as having a more reduced degree of risk. It does not need to decide, as the initial criticism, if it is about value or non-­value; it is not a trailblazer, and the matters to be discussed are to some extent predictable. This is exactly the difficulty that is often disregarded when literary history is globally judged. New perspectives on acknowledged writings, more than once submitted to analysis and interpretation, are imposed in order to justify a re-­opening of the subject, so that the work of the literary historian can be far more difficult, and originality is still an issue. Redistribution and reorganization in the literary system, which is not “settled” once and for all, are natural. Despite these realities which literary history and literary historians need to take into account, for this reason we can understand the reproach that sometimes they are inspired in the selection of writers from writings by some questionable criterion. The most numerous critiques appeared when the external elements to the artistic phenomenon were predominant, such as social and political fame, posterity, culture or nation. 3 There are specialists who differentiate between the history of literature which might include the class of literary works and the literary history that would have the mission of situating them, of restoring the network of historical, social, political, ideological and cultural determinations. Because I do not consider that it is a well-­defined distinction, I will use both variants in a synonymy relationship.

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There are many other challenges that this discipline needs to answer: for example, should the object of literary history be only valuable literature or any type of literature, including that considered inferior including? It is high time that the literary historian should focus his attention only on the periods when literature changes or transforms significantly, or on those when there is no innovation at all. No less important is the question of whether literary history should transcend in its analysis the literary text in order to take into consideration other humanistic domains such as philosophy, history, science, etc.

3.2. The beginnings of the discipline; the 19th century The Greek term kritikós that designated a so-­called “judge of literature” or an evaluator is noted at the end of the 4th century BC. Philetas of Kos, teacher of the future king Ptolemy the 2nd, is called “poet and critic.” Another mention of the term is preserved from antiquity, from the 2nd century AD. It is about a school of criticism located in Pergamum and managed by Crates which claimed to signal the superiority of critics to the “grammarians” of Alexandria. After this date, the term kritikós is almost out of use (surprisingly, judging by the frequency of its use today and its prestige) or it becomes synonymous with grammarian or philologist. It is only the critical spirit of the 18th century, the Century of Enlightenment, which revolutionizes all domains of thinking and action, becoming the mainspring of Western culture, and the literary criticism reasserts itself, never to disappear again from the concerns of those interested in literature. It should be mentioned that the separation of the areas of literary research took place over time. The name historia litteraturae, literary history, is used in 1551 in K. Mylaeus’s treatise De scribenda universitatis rerum historia commentarius and then it spreads in the 17th century. But back then it designated catalogues and bibliographies. As for literature, it subsumed both literary writings and other types (history, philosophy, theology, journalism, etc.). Thus the concept of literature crystallized in the 19th century. Back then, in the second half of the 19th century, the domains of literary research begin to build and impose their own identity, and then the specific elements of literary history as a modern discipline became established. In its rudimentary form, this domain of research was a mere chronology of writers (especially in the 18th century) or a history of civilization, such as the Histoire littéraire de la France, a collective work published in 1773.

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Causal literary history: the positivist influence But in the 19th century an array of critics assert themselves by emerging from the obscurity that the previous impartiality of the critical act conferred and build a model of a linear and causal literary history. These include Sainte-­Beuve, Taine, Faguet, De Sanctis and Lanson, to mention only some of the most famous. Sainte-­ Beuve, for example, the creator of “the portrayal” in criticism, paid crucial importance to biographical study. Although this tends to as great loyalty as possible to reality, it is nevertheless the fruit of creation, which means an attempt to reconcile objectivity with subjectivity in the critical act. The name of Sainte-­Beuve is well known, even if Proust’s famous essay, Contre Sainte-­Beuve, discredits his methods, one of the most important reproaches being that, incorrectly, the biographic I is taken for the artistic one. Step by step critical impressionism lost ground to the open path to objectivity associated with positivist scientism. The positivist-­type criticism takes its inspiration from natural sciences, history, and philology, and focuses on the context of the literary work and on biography. Emile Faguet was convinced that “the literary historian must be as objective as possible; it absolutely must be like that. It is his duty only to inform, not to communicate the impression that a certain author made on him, but only the one it made on his contemporaries.”4 But this objectivity goes beyond the specificity of the artistic act and it switches accent, so that for H. Taine, for example, a literary work will be relevant only if it represents a document which contains important data on the psychology of people. The Italian critic De Sanctis considers that art is in a close relationship to society and even if he sees in criticism a “superior science”, he nevertheless convicts the excesses of historic and psychological criticism. In the same spirit of objectivity, the study of literature is not considered a mode of creation; it only confers coherence on the writing where coherence is not very visible as it can continue and explain the senses suggested by the artistic creation. The sonorous names of positivist criticism are Wilhelm Scherer, who wrote Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (History of German literature), published in 1883, and Gustave Lanson, the author of Histoire de la littérature française (History of French literature), published in 1894. Taking his inspiration from the natural sciences, Scherer pays great importance to causality. The writer’s biography and personality were foregrounded. Scherer considered them strongly influenced by heredity, environment and culture in a formula that became famous: Ererbtes, 4 Emile Faguet, Arta de a citi, trans. Lidia Cucu-­Sadoveanu (Bucharest, Albatros Publishing House, 1973), p. 123.

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Erlerntes, Erlebtes – what is inherited, what is learnt, what is experienced. It needs to be noticed that determinism can be considered an essential principle in nature, but hard to apply to artistic creation. Gustave Lanson firmly asserts the necessity for objectivity and the preeminence of scientific methods in the study of literature: “we need to strive to know by objective, critical methods everything that can be known by them. We need to remember everything that can be obtained by exact, impersonal, verifiable knowledge. We should ask intuition, emotion only what is inaccessible in any other way.”5 By avoiding subjectivity as far as possible, Lanson nevertheless favours the exterior, extrinsic aspects of artistic creation. The creation is like an object that reveals to knowledge by what can be verifiable, uncontestable, and indubitable, such as the sources and the historic context of the text. It is only the essence of creation that cannot be revealed by summing up this data. Positivism offered literary research moral or civil criteria; it saw in it an expression of the spirituality or psychology of a people, and it was, obviously, exterior to the interests specific to literature. The contestation of positivism will come from the “historical” movement in Germany, having as representatives the following: Dilthey, Windelband and Rickert, and from others such as Bergson or Croce, and later Husserl. Such topics as living or the comprehension of artistic creations were brought into discussion, one of the modalities of knowledge being intuition.

3.3. The conception of literary history in the 20th century The Russian Formalist school An important contribution to the redefinition of the concept of literary history was that of the Russian Formalist School, which was categorically against sociologism and psychologism that had dominated literary research. The formalist theories pleaded for abandoning the introduction of monographic studies in the history of literature, in favor of the study of processes that organize literary systems. Humorously, but also very suggestively, Roman Jakobson wrote, as one of the important representatives of the Russian Formalism: “until recently literary historians were like policemen who wanting to arrest a certain person, would, just in case, take everything they found in the house and arrested even those who by chance crossed the street. Similarly, literary historians gathered all kinds of social, psychological, political and philosophical facts and, instead of a sci5 Gustave Lanson, Încercări de metodă, critică şi istorie literară (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1974), p. 41.

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ence of literature they obtained a conglomerate of rough disciplines. Apparently, it was forgotten that these facts relate to other disciplines which can use literary facts only as secondary data. But if the science of literature wants to be a science indeed, it is important to acknowledge the procedure as its unique hero. Thus the primordial problem is the problem of procedures, of their thorough study.”6 But, due to the politically and historically unpropitious conditions, the theories of the Russian Formalist School did not spread – unfortunately as it would have deserved this at the time of its appearance – and they really came to fruition only in the 60s and 70s.

German philology An important contribution was that of some figures such as Ernst Robert Curtius, the author of the unrivalled The European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, published in 1948, or Erich Auerbach, with his similarly famous book, Mimesis (1946). Characteristic of these thinkers and researchers is the organicist conception that takes into consideration the writing, its form, and the representation of the world in the vision of the author, as well as his personality. Thus the artistic phenomenon seems to be unitary, having a particular coherence. A philosopher of culture, with an exceptional classical education, Curtius considered historicism a viable solution in the approach to and comprehension of European culture, and, implicitly, of literature. It will be seen as a totality composed of the European literatures that, in the integrative vision of the critic, become parts of a whole. Auerbach considered the most important representative of the comparative stylistics, borrows from Vico the idea of the fundamentally historical nature of humanity. This fact is reflected by the artistic creations which begin with fragments selected from exponential writings in order to demonstrate the existence of some common styles in European literature in different periods. He will try to discover what unifies the assemblies and the laws that govern the changes and the development of the general culture.

Genette and Barthes’ view of literary history Still later, the discipline of literary history is submitted to a process of reorganization, the proposals aiming at discussing its fundamentals and even at questioning it as a domain. Gérard Genette, furthering the ideas of the Russian formalists in

6 Jakobson is cited by Mihai Pop in the “Preface” to Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1963), p. IX.

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a structuralist conception of literary history, considers, in the study “Poetics and history” included in the book Figures, that the principles of the literary history need re-­discussing. If for the formalists the object of study in this field should be the procedure, for Genette the forms, namely the narrative techniques, the poetical structures, the rhetorical codes are those that change and at the same time last and can be seen in their historicity. But these elements transcend the writing, so that they need to be at the center of attention for the literary historian, more than the individual creations. The historian of poetry saw a serious impediment to the writing of such a history where the synchronic approach should be dominant. Literary theory does not yet offer an adequate conceptual framework; it is about the formal categories that should be identified in the literary tradition and defined in a trans-­historic order, not a timeless one, because the concepts of the literary theory are submitted to change and evolution, in accordance with the dynamics of the literary field. Genette expressed his regret that, in the 19th century, the history of writings and authors had erased the system of genres that rhetoric had established. Thus it was a question of the evolution by transformation of the theoretical domain, but of the canceling of one of its branches which might have represented a good foundation for such a literary history. A further radical opinion besides Genette’s is that of Roland Barthes, who, in 1960 (History or literature?),7 but also in the Tel Quel questionnaire, sees history and literature as two systems that do not communicate directly with one another. On the one hand there would thus be, the world (political, social, economic, ideological), and on the other hand, writing: “solitary”, apparently, and ambiguous because it could have several senses. The world and writing “resist”, each in its own system; each has its own rhythm of changes, and writing cannot be seen as an ordinary historical product. For this reason, Barthes considers literary histories as pseudo-­histories that are nothing but simple chronicles. In his opinion, all that can be written are histories of the literature’s functions (production, communication, spreading, and consumption) in the society, but no literary histories in the previous acceptations. A categorical denial, as it could be seen, of the very status of the literary history!

3.4. Extrinsic and intrinsic The issue of representativeness that documentation needs to cover was one of the most serious challenges that literary history confronted with. The positivism of the 19th century visibly influenced the humanist discipline of the literary history, 7 This is one of the parts of Roland Barthes’ study, Despre Racine, rans. Virgil Tănase (Bucharest: EPLU, 1969).

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especially referring to the emphasis placed on objectivity and on the explanation that invariably aimed at the cause-­effect relationship. The literary historian started to share the conviction that he could look at the literary phenomenon, unlike his colleague, the critic, not only from the subjective angle of individual perception, but similar to the way the scientist analyses his object of study. The determinist approach came to the foreground of historical literary research. The extrinsic factors became for many the answer in the comprehension of the of the writings which appeared in this way as the logical result of the combination of some forces more or less related to literature itself: economic, social, political, psychological as well as cultural aspects. The literary texts are viewed as the place where such forces express themselves artistically. Hegel was the authority who mostly oriented attention to context and to the relationships that the text has with the exterior which it actually reflects. Literary histories thus became a mixture of critical commentaries, bibliography, cultural references, social analyses, etc. Gustave Lanson, the first important literary historian, who defined his method reflecting the guiding principles in his discipline, noted: “Literature does not stop, it cannot stop at the individual’s observation, at the analysis of the personal creation; it always plans, knowingly or not, a social objective. It is thus important to understand that most of the time we do not study individual phenomena, but phenomena of the same order as the ones which, by definition, belong to sociology.”8

Auxiliary literary history The work of documentation became transformed into a fundamental aspect, essential in this discipline, and it was unnaturally exploited by the specialists to the point of confusing it with the exclusive mission of the literary historian. George Călinescu, probably the greatest Romanian literary historian, talked about the existence of two literary histories: the literary history proper that implies the talent of the critic,9 his capacity of pertinently analyzing a text, and the auxiliary literary history that presupposes the examination of factual material: manuscripts, preliminary notes, plans, drafts and other documents, and editions; it is responsible for the establishment of the paternity and of variants of the critical editions, it studies the artist’s biography and everything that could be related to the text as a finite product. Information of this type does not have to have an absolute value 8 Cited by Clément Moisan in Istoria literară, trans. Maria Ivănescu (Bucharest: Cartea Românească Publishing House, 2000), p. 32. 9 For this reason it seemed more natural to him to speak about literary historians rather than of literary history.

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or to be in the foreground of the exposure. There could be no authentic literary research in the case of simple listing of data without interpretation, analysis and synthesis. Thus, rightly, literary studies were blamed by more recent critical orientations10 because they dabbled in matters exterior to the artistic phenomenon such as biography, historical aspects or social conditions, and all sorts of information that was anything but literary history.

The representativeness of the context in research into the literary phenomenon Views of the significance of the context changed tremendously after the Second World War. Most literary histories were immanent-­type histories, isolating the literary series from concrete social conditions and from external factors. Because every context depends on the angle from which it is seen and analyzed, it was concluded that the circumstances that define a text cannot be truly or fully known. The perspective is therefore partial, probable, without any certain reference points to ascertain that that part of the context emphasized by the historic element is indeed the most relevant to the literary phenomenon described. Moreover, to pay disproportionate attention to the extrinsic aspects of the literature is not productive, not only because the writing needs to be foregrounded, but also because studying the context cannot offer an answer, let us say, for the diversity of artistic creations that have the same framework, and the same external social, economic, political, cultural conditions. Otherwise, the writing needs to be placed in the context where it belongs, it is said. Every literary text is, in fact, anchored in a certain reality of beliefs, values, and specific cultural elements that cannot be ignored and that guarantee either innovation or the continuation of tradition. Jean Starobinski noted that it would be an error to neglect the historical context and to deny its regulating function, because it “favors the expression of the innovating originality of the ‘personal genius’, when it excludes it rigorously to the benefit of a traditional rhetoric.”11 The two “histories” are not incompatible; on the contrary, it is natural to combine with any literary history that respects its status, and lately context has regained ground in this discipline of literary research. It is only that, naturally, it has abandoned the narrow determinism according to which the text “reflects” or is the “expression” 10 The trend was set by the Russian formalists who bluntly claimed that the evolution of the literary system cannot be explained by facts and events external to the literature. 11 Jean Starobinski, “Préface” to the book Leo Spitzer, Etudes de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 33.

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of the context, bringing into discussion the issue of how the data related to the social and historical context should be introduced: separated from criticism of the text or in alternation with it? In the end, when it is a matter of the proper criticism of the writings of the past or of the presentation of circumstances exterior to them, the interpretation is nevertheless the key, although a study of the context can suggest some scientific work and objectivity. It is only that in order to have a science of literary writings, of movements and trends, of writers, it is necessary for the observations on the objects of study to lead to ideas and general laws that can be checked as often as possible in the literary field. It is exactly the issue that poetics was confronted with, especially in the 20th century.

3.5. Classification – the privileged method of classical literary history Literary history finds its justification in the attempt toorder rich, even dense material, extremely varied, almost confusing due to its protean nature. The literary historians who used to be involved in the work of classification of the writings that form the literary field knew that they needed to order, categorize and distribute authors and writings into categories, classes with a higher or lower level of generality, because the discourse of literary history was and still is a collective and generalizing one, even contradicting the unique nature of works of art. Thus the periods, genres, schools or literary movements had the role of umbrella concepts under which the writings were interrelated and the metaphors found, metaphorically, their origin. Everything that was to be being classified had, invariably, one characteristic: heterogeneity. Then as now, the specialist had to do nothing but to choose a criterion or several criteria that could not answer all particular aspects. Sometimes even previous classifications were simply taken over without adjustments, as if they were permanent tools. The question to be asked, consequently, is if these classifications are not reductive and if they succeed in offering an adequate image of the literary past despite its specific diversity. We can easily imagine how classifications became a Procustes’s bed for texts that defy any enrolment, cataloguing, or introduction into categories and that are in opposition to another, which represents the source of their uniqueness. Taxonomies have a partial validity, because we cannot decide on the basis of firm criteria which of the classifications should be chosen to the detriment of another. The relativity in this sense does not need be totally confusing; the text presents itself as reference, the indicator that

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shows when its essential, its relevant aspect is not respected and then, obviously, the classification does not find a justification or it ceases to be a useful tool. Although the criterion for the configuration of a classification must principally be the very literary event that it concerns, quite often it is noted that the source of taxonomies, their reference, is in the present rather than in the past. The aesthetic demands that the literary historian responds to are, obviously, of their time, even the way of relating to the cultural treasure that he recovers and better highlights for his contemporaries is determined to a high degree by the interest of the present. The purposes aimed at and the sympathies and antipathies of the literary historian have something to say about the classifications that were made. Some of the classifications are artificial, even harmful, especially when they are visibly ideologically charged, which should not make us think about the necessity of abandoning them. Thanks to classifications, the texts find a place of their own in a “family picture” of literature which subsequently re-­orders itself. Comparisons can be made; “spaces” can be offered for other writings that aspire to the prestige of being included in the literary history, the status of heritage. Literary writings and their authors need to be grouped in order to organize the literary field that cannot be offered to scholarship in a chaotic form, justified only by the observation of their uniqueness. In the same texts, besides the individual elements, there are features that demonstrate choices from an assembly of aesthetic practices common to an era, to mentalities; concepts and representations that indicate convergences in thinking, sensibility or viewpoints. Therefore, taxonomies demonstrate their perenniality even today; it is only that there is a greater attention to the motivation of the option for one classification or another. Literary historians are more aware than those of the past of the fact that their choices are contextual, and the taxonomies are not immutable and, thus excessively categorical ideas or too rigid divisions are to be avoided. Nevertheless, they are aware that by classification and organization, the literary world of the past is explained, as much as possible, thereby becoming more accessible to the present.

3.6. Literary history: a discipline of continuity? Every literary history is in itself a far-­reaching project and it remains so even if the result is not the expected one and the text does not become a bibliographical reference. Histories “from the origins to the present” have a monumental character, but histories of genres, periods and trends are not far behind in their aim of proposing a general and sometimes unifying vision. But the huge structures that literary histories constitute seem to be obsolete in the period when we live

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or simply by going beyond the capacity of a single person (in those cases where these synthetic writings are not the work of authors’ collectives). The highly technical theoretical doctrines of the 20th century, such as formalism, structuralism, semiotics, post-­structuralism or de-­constructivism, forced literary history to become a science. The models were offered by the structural linguistics, formal logicand the theory of communication, but literary history did not keep peace, going through a crisis that led to an important revisiting of the domain, both methodologically and conceptually. This new reinforcement was offered by the fashionable disciplines, but they applied to certain constants that have always defined literary history. One of these was, especially in the 19th century, the concept of organic structure, of unity, of the continuity in literature. Given the fact that, from the very beginning, this discipline wondered if there were close bonds between the elements of literature and if they could be proved. Another question devolving from the first: how is it better to relate to literary history by a series of delimitations orby taking the long view? In the classical period of this discipline, as we may term it, the tendency was to reply affirmatively to the first question and to choose the second variant in the case of the second. The root of this vision, implying a manner of understanding literature itself, is Platonic because it concerns the metaphysic of timeless essences that, it is presupposed, should exist objectively in art and should be discovered by the critic or the literary historian in the filiation of the texts. From this perspective, literature is seen as a whole, and the stages that compose its route are interconnected, so that one stage prepares for another and this one, in its turn, for the next one. We are thus at the heart of positivist determinism, with a great influence on the domain of literary research, which was probably the most widely- criticized view of the history of literary history, because of the narrow, mechanical reductionism that it promoted, as texts are not the effects of easily detectable causes and the literary process is not at all predictable. But in spite of accepting as justified this critic, it does not need to represent a sentencing of the idea of the existence of continuity in the literary history. To understand some texts some by means of others means to noting the similarities as well as the differences between them, to take into account each time of what had happened “before” the text, as well as what it foreshadows and announces.

The national model in literary history In the 19th century too, the “spirit of time” or Zeitgeist was looked for – one of the essences – England and France setting the trend in the consolidation of national ideologies, and of histories and national literatures. The historical context was 131

perceived in homogenous terms, according to a structural coherence that would dominate global history beyond variations. “The narrative of a nation,” wrote David McCrone, “is told and retold through national histories, literature, the media and popular culture which together provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, events, symbols and rituals. Through these stories, national identity is presented as primordial, essential, unified and continuous.”12 Certainly it is a comfortable vision, thanks to its teleology, but not necessarily realistic. Quite often this homogeneity, motivated by the patriotic nationalism, presents literary histories as attempts to find in their objects of study the expressions of some national particularities that are always reflected in the language of a nation. But the effort of ordering the material equally meant forcing entrance into an inappropriate pattern, incapable to mould forms so resistant to serialization. The national model was criticized because it isolated texts and national literatures from texts and cultural context belonging to other geographical areas. Thus French literature visibly influenced Romanian literature, especially in the period of the Wallachian revolution period, James Joyce influenced many other literatures, and Marquez influenced postmodern English literature, and many other examples can be given.

Philosophical principles of literary history Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the most important historians of the 19th century, can be invoked in any discussion referring to the legitimacy or lack of legitimacy of continuity as an organizing principle of literary history. In his view, the event undergoes a series of changes and each of these changes is possible only on the basis of the preceding one. Dilthey believed that the periods of time are unified from an ideological and spiritual point of view, but he himself disputed the stability of this unity, inasmuch as existence itself is very varied and equally changing. Another resonant name, also echoed in literary history, thanks to his philosophy which refers to dynamic phenomena in terms of vital impetus, duration and continuity, is Bergson; Albert Thibaudet likewise noted the impact of Bergson on literary history. Nevertheless literary changes, as well as historical ones, do not have only primary causes; the causal explanations are many, as was firmly stated, by a skepticiam originating in the 20th century, referring to the possibility of the existence of literary history itself, because this, according to the original definition of the field, should propose a single point of view or at least a limited number of points of view on the 12 David McCrone is cited in Rethinking Literary History. A Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés, (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 71.

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similarities and differences of the heterogeneous objects that it tries to clarify. As for classifications, they were not referred to either, in the same 20th century, even if the literary historian could not have managed without resorting to them as capable of representing the realities of the past. Considered as simple conveniences, varying by interests and the intended aims, classifications were amended in the same process of discrediting that the literary history had undergone.

The contestation of the principle of coherence The tone in the concert of contestations was set, among the first, by the Russian formalists. Interested in the modalities of writing themselves and in the immanent rules of the structure of texts, these theoreticians did not bring into discussion the possibility or the necessity of literary history, but they contested the deeply-­ rooted idea, due to positivism, of the literary changes that might be explained by aspects exterior to literature and to concrete social-­political conditions. In brief, the object of study of literary history, the formalists say, does not need to be the succession of texts, but the succession of systems, change which takes place (see Tynianov in The literary fact) by leaps and bounds and a progress of discontinuity in relation to the previous moments. At the same time as the formalists, Benedetto Croce launched a strong attack on literary history. The essence of his position consists in the idea that every literary work is unique, the value that it represents when it is indeed a value being self-­ sufficient. Consequently, attempts at classification and generalization represented real abuses against the anatomy and the unique character of aesthetic creation. It could not, therefore, be a question of continuity. Some decades before, Roland Barthes concluded in the essay About Racine that literature does not have access to history as such, but only to a historical mythology. Literary histories are, as he noticed, only monographs about isolated people, when they should be concerned with the serial and the collective, with the ideological and linguistic aspects, and with institutions, not with individuals. In this list of the opponentss of the principle of coherence we may mention Michel Foucault, who refused to see history in terms of linearity and development but in terms of contingency and instability. And as literature could only be a discourse like any other with a manipulative role and power, Foucault advised his readers to reject the traditional concept of literary change as continuous development and to admit, on the contrary, the principle of discontinuity in every historical representation. In the end, New Historicism, starting from the idea that history is unpredictable and arbitrary, proposes an image of history not as a whole made up of homogenous episodes, but as fracture and textual pulverization. 133

If the literary history as a discipline had its beginnings under the privilege of a total trust in the harmonious whole that literature represents and which passes from one period to another through literary works that communicate in synchronicity, but also in diachrony, this fact was the natural consequence of a certain mentality – a mentality that seemed eternal due to its longevity and to the accent placed on tradition. The need to build formal symmetries, to totalize and unify in order better to understand and seize literary reality in its origins made irrefutable findings: changes are unpredictable, and differences sometimes major; the literary field is heterogeneous and controlled by contradictory forces impossible to reduce to a common denominator of continuity. It is no wonder that all the contesting theories enjoyed success, especially in modern times. In spite of all this, the principle of the continuum does not seem to be a simple myth.

The organicist conception In 1769 Robert Wood wrote his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer. For this work he travelled to Asia Minor, and noticed that the mentalities and the way of life of its people were similar to the representations of life in the Iliad. Wood explained this fact by the continuity of physical and political structures and concluded that he could use without restriction the data of his present age and of the culture that Homer had represented to interpret the Iliad, which had been written thousands of years before. Influenced by Bergson’s philosophy and simultaneously admitting Otto Lopez’s law, according to which a century is the material and spiritual expression of three generations – a generation lasts for thirty years of creative life13 – Albert Thibaudet, in Histoire de la littérature française de 1789 à nos jours, published in 1936, tried to present literature as an osmotic and global whole; the organizing principle, being that of the literary generation, allowed Thibaudet to note the continuity of the society, of inner life and literature. The writers and their writings belong to generations, families and groups, and the belonging to a generation with everything that it contains the fact of belonging to the same age, the awareness and participation in the same events, the sharing of aesthetic opinions – create powerful inner bonds in such a community. Convinced that absolute harmony is nevertheless an illusion, Thibaudet notices that no generation is monolithic, and the divergences in the group are at times as necessary as those between generations because, although there is experience, a sort of savoir that each generation 13 For the Latins a century was made of three aetates or three generations.

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accumulates and wants to pass on, those who come after reject this baggage; they revise the tradition and set up new values. In this case, it seems that it is not a matter of continuity and nevertheless what is presented at first sight as a novelty is, most frequently, only an older value according to the principle that sons carry on the ideals of their grandparents rather than those of their parents. Other avatars of the principle of the continuum, expressing an ideal of coherence and unity, are evoked by David Perkins in his book Is Literary History Possible? and converge with the idea of cyclicity – for example, Wilhelm Scherer’s theory that claimed that the German literature reaches a peak every six hundred years (600, 1200, 1800 and 2400), Yeats’ wheel of culture depending on the 28 phases of the moon, Northrop Frye’s rotation of modes from myths to irony, and the countless theories that present the evolution of literature as a succession of two fundamental phases: progress and decline, life and death, or the observance of conventions and traditions and, on the other hand, their contestation.

Continuity revisited It is an acknowledged fact today that historic realities are hard and sometimes impossible to really know, because the contexts are, as Perkins says, “extensive” and cannot be entirely described, many considering them “constructions” of history. The interpretations themselves are subjective. The history of historians being an interpretative practice and not an objective discourse, we can no longer believe, except by being naïve, that it could serve towards the measurement of the correctness of the interpretation of literary texts. In the end, continuity is hard to be noticed in difference, due to late influences, fluctuating tastes, and unpredictable reception, but as Antoine Compagnon emphasizes, the history of literature needs to be, because it cannot be otherwise, “in search of the critical equilibrium between events and series,” since it weaves two threads: on the one hand, order and continuity, and, on the other hand, genius, difference, rupture and originality.14 Each piece of writing is unique by virtue of its particular composition, but also by the moment of creation and that of its reading. Nevertheless, there are functions and common features, permanence and stability; otherwise literary fact could not be recognized as such. Nor is the discrepancy between these features so great as to appear incompatible: continuity does not exclude novelty, and the differences and ruptures are in fact the expression of an uninterrupted process of transformation. As Harold Bloom says, every poem is the “rewriting” of a previous poem. 14 Antoine Compagnon, “Faire l’histoire littéraire du XXe siècle,” in: L’histoire littéraire à l’aube du XXIe siècle. Controverses et consensus (Paris: PUF, 2005), p. 472.

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Today we know that the reconstruction of the past, including the literary one, represents only one possibility among others, and this past is eventually inaccessible. Yet we can accept a partial knowledge, with possible explanations, with acceptable and plausible interpretations. The literary historians help us to understand, as far as possible, the sense that the texts had for those who created them and for those to whom these writings were addressed. They succeed (if they succeed …) in making this possible because all kinds of circumstances, values, conventions and relations between the authors and their readers are analyzed. This is a form of continuity as long as there is a kind of a necessary rapprochement between the readers of other times and the readers of today. The ideal is that of the happy meeting between the original sense and a network of senses at whose end there is the current sense that the writing receives. Gide, a follower of Sainte-­Beuve and of the discovery of the human beyond his writing, wrote in 1939 in Tableau de la littérature française: “Every historian of literature is more or less concerned with considering every author in his relationship to his time; it outlines affiliations, influences; it establishes certain subtle correlations, certain motivations that decipher this author to us.”15

The necessary “fictions” Taxonomies are artificial and do not totally correspond to historical realities, but only by their help we can bring the past closer. Our perceptions of the historical components (and of literary history) are distorted, and for this reason, some say, can be catalogued as fictions, but necessary ones. As for the “eternal essences,” “from Plato to Husserl – Paul Veyne notes – history, like every feeling, has ceaselessly questioned the essence; our view of living is a view of essences, but they are jumbled: nevertheless, they give sense to the manifestation.”16 The entrance of literary history into a process of revision was one of the effects of the discrepancy between a mentality where the desire for order, organization, structuring, and unification of the existence under the umbrella of some classes, categories and hierarchies is primordial and on the other hand, the awareness of indeterminacy, heterogeneity, disorganization, lack of stability, and difference that questions every certitude. It is symptomatic that we continue to watch the creation of forms and frameworks, even if this impulse runs counter to the “naturalness” of existence, which is basically fragmentary and incoherent. Also “natural” is its 15 André Gide, Tableau de la littérature française (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), p. 7. 16 Paul Veyne, Cum se scrie istoria, trans. Maria Carpov (Bucharest: Meridiane Publishing House, 1999), p. 316.

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call for unification, organization and hierarchy, and the need to look at the literary phenomenon in its historical continuation, because “texts” – says Nicolae Manolescu, who does not ignore the principle of the continuum – “not only follow one anothers in an endless sequence, but have a specific dialogue between text and text.”17 The continuities and the universals, as old as the discipline itself, will probably remain the themes of literary history as long as they are noticed and differentiated, because the phenomenon of literature has its own dialectics where even the most daring innovations and the most radical breaks with tradition have their predecessors and inevitably, their continuers. Every revolution is the result of a series of “literary events” which involve transformations and recurrences; “periods” derive from one another. Literary history needs to find the right balance between the unique nature of an author and of his writings on the one hand and, on the other, the generation he is part of, the group or the trend to which he belongs. It appears that the “organic” model by which literary forms are born, bloom and die cleared the place for a model called by Todorov “dialectic,” structured on the pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is possible that the 21st century may bring back into discussion the reconstruction of the continuum, namely of the bonds that unify the elements of literature. Everything will still depend on the views of literary historians. At the moment there is a tension between those who, as Walter Benjamin would say, want to “bomb the continuum of history” and those who still care about this continuum.18 Any historical perspective that will leave as little doubt as possible, that can convince us that it is plausible, coherent, and intellectually attractive, could succeed.

3.7. Diachronic and synchronic Literature being a dynamic phenomenon, implying the idea of change and modification, the appearance of a discipline to study its history and having as a reference criterion the temporal dimension is somehow natural. But literary history, being perfectly compatible in its structure with the study object, is, in its turn, subject 17 Nicolae Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. Cinci secole de literatură (Piteşti: Paralela 45 Publishing House, 2008), p. 13. 18 In this case, it does not only involve advocates of a traditional critical vision. Feminist literary histories, for example, or those of Black or those of other minorities greatly appreciate not only the feeling of unity and solidarity inside the group, but also te temporal continuation of the situations that this groups confronted.

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to transformation, be it from the perspectives it takes, be it by the methods that it has recourse to. The situation is not excluded when, as we have seen, the discipline itself goes through reorganization or redistribution of emphasis. Referring to the past has its benefits and advantages. The comprehensive aim of holding in the same horizon the most different, individual or ill-­assorted tendencies can have the advantage of unification into a coherent universe. In this way, literature can be conceived as a system and not as a conglomerate of writings that do not communicate between themselves. Perspectivism leads to the revelation of points of convergence, of bonds and synonymities, just as it will lead to an emphasis on the divergences, discontinuities and differences that make it unique. Distance in time clarifies things and constitutes the safest way to authenticate values, and to checking their resistance, as Marc Block suggests: reculer pour mieux sauter!

The recuperative mission of history Beyond the matter of values, it is important to note that the inevitable distance between the literary historian and the text in the past that he analyzes might lead to the idea of the possible, probable, credible and certainly partial perspective offered by every literary history. Irrespective of how much the specialist would like to reconstitute as accurately as possible the initial context of the writing, this is hard to achieve. As Mario Valdés emphasized “there is no basis for the persistent idea that there is a determinate historical actuality, an Ur-­history that serves as the referent and measure for our inquiries into what really happened in the past. What really happened is to be constituted by the gradual enlargement of points of view. […] There can be no doubt that it is we who make the past.”19 Perhaps we are not entirely the exclusive authors of the past as long as the effort is to assemble, rediscover the literary “events,” and observation of them. The original context becomes more and more difficult to perceive as time passes by, but the recuperative purpose of history should not be minimized because it can offer elucidations for the implied allusions that the text contains, deciphering certain significances that were accessible only to its contemporaries. On the other hand, the aesthetic climate where the literary historian lives may represent a serious impediment to the perception of the other climate, that of the text. Major changes that appeared in the interim distort the image of the past, and the interpretation is actually a “translation,” which means that the historian does not have free access to the original sense which unfortunately may be lost for good.

19 Valdés, Rethinking Literary History. A dialogue on Theory, pp. 80–81.

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The guiding criteria in the study of the literature of the past Should the literary historian adapt to the norms of the past period, reconstitute them, and then adopt them, thus ignoring the artistic canon of his time? Some voices answer this question in the affirmative, because every piece of writing needs to be understood in terms of the values and aesthetic perspectives of its time. Others claim that the approach is nevertheless utopian simply because many of the consequences of events are hard for their agents to predict, their intentions are conscious as well as unconscious, and the contingent factors are more or less known to them. Sometimes it is very difficult to find out what the reception in previous periods (or in many of them) was and what the evaluation criteria actually were. Where there are indices in this sense, they will be part of the factual material to be analyzed, but when the literary historian does not have the benefit of these data, he will not be taken away his study objects, given the absence of necessary instruments. He inevitably retorts to the criteria of his time which he cannot totally ignore, and the temporal distance has the benefit of having clarified matters. Literary history addresses the present to which it offers the image which it perceives of the past, i.e. filtered through the prism of vision, taste, and contemporary aesthetic perspectives. As long as the literary historian offers a point of view, his own point of view, the result of the combination of factors such as personality, interests and values that guide it, there is no such thing as the ideal of objectivity in literary history. Many theoreticians see literary histories as hypothetical constructions on subjective foundations. The literary historian cannot abandon the culture or mentality characteristic of him.

The synchronic dimension in literary history Besides the subjective/objective dichotomy, the issue of synchrony is brought into discussion, which was inconceivable for some, given the fact that it seemed the exclusive preserve of the literary critic. “Founded” – wrote Michel de Certeau – “on the cleavage between a past, that is its object, and a present that is the place of its practice, history does not cease to find the present in its object and the past in its practices.”20 Without opting for the preeminence of literary criticism, the Russian formalists revolutionized the perspective on literary history, switching the focus from the diachronic perspective to the synchronic one, and foregrounding procedures and literality instead of the aspects exterior to the artistic act. Tthe theories of the formalists partly derive from the Hegelian concept. Before realizing what it is made up of

20 Michel de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 48.

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and in order to understand the context where it appeared, we need to remember the names of Herder and of Friedrich Schlegel who supported the idea of the natural evolution of literature. In other words, because the role of the individual is minimal, some forms evolve from others; their literary development, similar to that of an organism, is continuous, slow, and obviously predictable by the laws of natural determinism. Hegel fundamentally contradicts this idea which, aiming to find similarities in nature at all costs, would alter to an unrecognizable degree the principle of literary genesis. The philosopher would justifiably notice that the changes in the artistic domain are not slightly perceptible, but on the contrary, the transformations that move the mechanism of literature are most often radical and sudden, with forms being quite often replaced by their opposites. This idea was developed by the Russian formalists; famous, for example, was the position of Tynyanov who speaks of replacement as a fundamental law of literary evolution. It is interesting that the Hegelian theory did not impose itself irrevocably. In the time of Darwin and Spencer, evolutionism21 would also witness a comeback in literature. Coming back to the Russian formalists, whose theories would be continued, even if with a gap of a few years, they do not exclude cooperation between the two dimensions, diachronic and synchronic. In Iuri Tynyanov’s article, written in collaboration with Roman Jakobson and entitled Questions of the study of literature and language (1927) the following opinions appear: “The idea of a purely synchronic system proved to be an illusion. Every synchronic system has its past and its future that are inseparable parts of the system. (The archaic elements represent a fact of style: the literary and linguistic background can be interpreted as a worn-­out, out-­of-­date style; or, on the contrary, innovating tendencies in language and literature can be interpreted as refreshments of the system).”22 It is obvious that the literary writings are substantially more or less visibly related to a tradition that influences them by the models that make them viable. Yet, at the same time, they can be perceived as individual entities seen in their synchronicity. “More fascicles of diachronic lines” – wrote later Paul Zumthor23 – “are really presented in the synchrony of the text.”

The reference of literary history Tynyanov emphasized, and after him Curtius and other poeticists, that the object of literary history is the variability of literature. That means, as Zumthor asserted, that the evolution of the sequence and implicitly the reorganization in a different 21 See Darwin’s theories referring to natural selection or to the transformation of species. 22 According to Wellek, Conceptele criticii, p. 52. 23 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 12.

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configuration of literary forms, the favoring of new procedures, or the attribution of distinct functions, possibly different from those of the previous system. The essential fact is emphasized by Paul Zumthor: in these redistributions, delimitations are hard to make, no literary form is an isolated one or the product of some combination of elements that are not to be found in the literary field. The viable configurations are always different; the materials are always the same. Just as literary writing is the product of intertextuality, the macrostructures are under the control of the same laws of re-­arrangement and “mixture,” because “literary history is also the history of this intertextual relay race by which the diachronic axis is projected on the synchronic axis.”24 It is certain that the history of the literature means diachronic as well as synchronic, the literary texts of the past seem to be documents of the past and aesthetic experiences for present. To neglect one of these dimensions is equal to truncating and deforming perspectives on phenomenon of literature, because “synchronic description,” Jakobson said, “deals not only with the literary production of a given period, but also with that part of the literary tradition that remained alive or that was resuscitated in that period.”25

3.8. Reasoning – between relativism and absolutism In order to be more than simple archive keeping, data recording and document ordering, literary history needs to include the axiological coordinate. It does not have the duty only to describe, but also to assess and interpret. Thus every self-­ respecting literary historian is capable of realizing when it is a question of talking about a value and when it is a non-­value, being a literary critic in his turn. For this reason, G. Călinescu believed literary history to be one of the most comprehensive forms of criticism. The act of evaluation is or needs to be consubstantial. It is equally true that generally the literary historian is at the forefront of some already established hierarchies. He can nevertheless dispute the hierarchy, making a selection and proposing another order or other criteria of appreciation, if necessary. The authority of his point of view is checked by the fact that, once again, the literary critic must take into account the order of the proposed values in literary history. The agreement about the duty that it must have to utter reason is not maintained when it is a question of perspectives on these values. There are two general orientations in this sense: relativism and absolutism or, to put it differently, 24 Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. Cinci secole de literatură, p. 13. 25 Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 212.

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either the value is seen as dependent on the era and, consequently, it is changing, or it is considered as absolute, fixed, ahistorical, eternal. Within each category there are, as might be expected, different variations. For example, historicism, a movement that appeared and manifested itself in 19th century Germany, assumes the relativist point of view. It relies on the idea that each era establishes its own values and that there are no unitary, final and categorical criteria of appreciation. Erich Auerbach denies the accusation of “eclecticism” brought against historicism, clearly highlighting the fact that the literary historian will discover in the very material that he studies the appreciation categories that he needs: “The historian will learn to extract from the material studied the categories and concepts that he needs in order to characterize and differentiate the various phenomena. These concepts are not absolute; they are elastic and provisional, changing at the same time as history.”26 By attacking this position, the theories of a famous aesthetician such as Benedetto Croce would become classic. For the Italian researcher, a literary text exists or does not exist, from a value point of view, and in the case of the creations that impose in literature, temporal conditionings and bonds between texts are out of the question. Therefore, the most appropriate research methods might be monographs and essays that highlight the individuality of a piece of writing, its uniqueness, beyond procedures or styles. This holistic vision of the text (the literary creation is seen as a whole, as singularity) automatically excludes from discussion the analytic model, the one that places the text in a family, a period or a genre. Continuing these ideas, Eliot has a personal point of view and a new perspective which seems to reconcile the holistic and the analytical points of view, however paradoxical it may seem. The truly valuable creations are simultaneous temporal realities. In his view there is an interconnection of literary works, and every new entry in the general system of the literature leads to a redistribution and reorganization within this system. The consequence is not that the writings are outshone by novelties, but that they simply do not occupy the place given by tradition. In this way, the very concept of tradition changes, without excluding dynamism and change. Eliot’s ideas were received enthusiastically by British and American critics, and his point of view was not isolated, being given different variations. In French culture, for example, the writer and theoretician Michel Butor would change the emphasis to reception and interpretation, saying that each text can be read in different ways depending on the “reading grid” that is offered by the other texts to which it is necessarily related. 26 According to Wellek, Conceptele criticii, p. 13.

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Between relativism and absolutism Because a literary text that is a definite value also belongs to the moment when it appeared, but actually steps out of history because it lasts, time does not alter its qualities, and the categorical option either for relativism or for absolutism is wrong. Extreme relativism annuls the idea of judgment on the basis of certain criteria, of certain categories, which leads to the mixture and anarchy of values. In this sense, absolutism ignores the relevance of the changes that time brings about. The perspectives on a piece of writing cannot be the same from one era to another, and the norms of judgment do not have eternal validity. Certainly, the most appropriate attitude in this matter is the combination of the two tendencies, which is not impossible and which means to capture in one perspective what lasts and what changes in a text, with the mention that what lasts for a period can then change, and what changed can last for a period that is hard to predict. On the other hand, literary histories are themselves carriers of values. For example, when they offers information about the past, they have an informative value; equally, they can plead for aesthetic, humanistic or political values. They are not excluded from offering points of view, perspectives that imprint themselves on the memory of readers, but by accepting a limit: it is not about the complete image (what can that actually mean? …) of the literary past. Like all knowledge, literary knowledge is fragmentary and partial, and the literary historian is actually an intermediary a mediator, says Jean-­Marie Schaeffer, between the artist and his potential audience. Such a mediator “can fulfill his mission but in a very narrow historical window, the one het shares with its contemporaries.”27 Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the questionable abdications of some contemporary literary historians, who no longer want to establish values nor to impose any kind of canon. But in this way literary history thus functions as a simple recording of the phenomenon of literature, archives or a neutral presentation of a discourse whose axiological relevance I still feel the need to know, even though it may be temporary.

3.9 The narrative literary history Paul Ricoeur’s theory relating to the way in which people narrate the temporary experience, an essential experience for the human species, had so great an impact on mentalities that it triggered a change in the perspective of the literary historians on their object of study. The French philosopher explains how we resort to the 27 Jean-­Marie Schaeffer, Adieu à l’esthétique (Paris: PUF, 2000), p. 55.

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narrative function in order to give sense and structure to events that we could otherwise understand only chaotically, as a disordered conglomeration with an alienating effect on us. This assignment of meaning to all human actions is consciously done, but also unconsciously, as a comfortable support for our situation in the world, for our historical way of being in the world. Having this explanation, it is no wonder that precisely the narrative dimension was the one to have offered an identity to literary history: “Literary history as an autonomous discipline,” René Wellek noted, “appeared only after biography and critique fused and when, under the influence of political historiography, it began to be used as a narrative form.”28 Paul Ricoeur points to the fact that both history and literature have a primordial common referent which is human time, which means that the two corresponding discourses should not be interpreted, as it has happened, as opposed to each other. The factual discourse of history has almost never been on the same level with the fictional one, that of literature. Like every narrative discourse that belongs to humanist science or literature, it is built on the same principles that forbid the creation of strict dichotomies between discourses: it never reflects the pre-­existing world loyally or passively, it means the processing of data, of factual material, and this very discourse means novelty and deviation from the subject. Thus the historical narrative whose main mission is to explain events, what happened and mostly why, cannot be the unaltered image of the past, irrespective of how much the most ambitious historian would like to it to be. Narrative means “getting into the plot,” the configuration of the sequence of events, their “translation” into a symbolic key, their ordering so that they seem coherent (even when they are not). All these operations testify to the universal capacity and human need for sense. There remains the question about what “plot” or “subject” might mean in the case of literary history. The answer given by those who believe in this narrative dimension is that, although it is not much, yet, the appearance and the decline together would represent the “subjects.” The “heroes” of these plots might be a literary genre or a style, a logical subject, a literary trend … Thus in many literary histories there are emerging and declining literary trends, such as the very famous example of Classicism and Romanticism which also meant a conflict, since the second opposed the first, as a reaction against it. Hayden White’s model of a narrative history presupposes three stages: the first when the material to be analyzed is chronologically organized, making up a sort of “chronicle,” the literary historian then configures this chronicle in the form of a history and, in the end, in the last stage, the author identifies certain archetypes 28 Moisan, Istoria literară, p. 75.

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of the conflict/ victory type. The “narrative” method was successfully adopted by one of the greatest Romanian literary historians, George Călinescu. “A history of literature,” he stated, “is a real human comedy, having the writers as subjects.” Certainly, the assimilation to a common narration is made with some difficulty; the narrative literary history is not truly a narrative, but on the other hand it is not entirely history either, because it is narrative … The “story” cannot attract us as much as fiction, because there are no incidents that keep us breathless, nor authentic characters or sensational intrigues. And as the narrative history already has a tradition, inevitably reproaches appeared, maybe the most important being that the narrative mode is artificial, as life is neither coherent nor always explicable or capable of being given meaning and sense.

3.10. Revisions of the subject of literary history The obsession of the second half of the 19th century and of the first of the 20th century was the scientific spirit which had to permeate all kinds of research, irrespective of their object of study and specific nature. Because in its beginnings literary history was composed of a series of author biographies and literary works considered exceptional, the view changed radically because literary history was criticized for being too descriptive and devoid of theory. Its subject, literature, was seen as a form of ideology, and therefore the method chosen was the historical-­ sociological one. The literary work was considered the result of the combination of certain social, class and political factors and the consequences of economic determinism. This intrusive sociologism was somewhat detrimental to literary research because it offered a deformed image of the literary phenomenon, forcing the literary historian to abdicate from his main mission, that of including the singular within a wider picture. It is well-­known that science is generally concerned with collective aspects, with what is serial and with the particular, exceptional and atypical, because these last features are quite often features of literature. And thus the uniqueness of which art is proud was ignored, the specific literary act being disfavored and ignored. It was not by chance that later, when these errors were fully understood, specialists seriously questioned whether the history of literature should be written or that of its authors! The domain of literary history was thus subjected to successive revisions in order to correct errors; some famous names put their imprint on this process. In the first decade of the 20th century Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy of history and his orientation to national histories emerged, but the mistake was that the reader, was not given any role at all and the way in which the reader understands the literary work, was not given any role at all. It is exactly this omission that Hans 145

Robert Jauss would remedy in the 70s, at a time when the student protests signaled the stringent necessity for change in higher education that would revolutionize the domain of literary history. A literary historian, he stated, needs to know the literary work he is studying, as this is seen as a “score” which allows of several interpretations; he also needs to know its author and his intentions, the context, and above all the “waiting horizon” of the reader, as this is the decisive instance in all historical analysis. When one says “waiting horizon” one needs to think of the first audience, to their knowledge that is based on comparisons between reality and the world of books, between the daily language and the artistic one, etc. Jauss noticed that quite often, especially when it is a matter of innovative literary works, there is a distance between the waiting horizon and the literary work. In any case, the very concept of literary history was modified by the inclusion of the quasi-­ historic analyses of reception, because the initial context of the literary work was given the necessary attention, but not only this, because it only represents part of the equation. It is quite likely that when we want to rebuild the waiting horizon of the past, we are, in fact, in our own waiting horizon.

Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and the New Literary History As we have already seen, Roland Barthes set the trend in France for a virulent attack on literary history. The occasion was offered to him as an answer to a discussion in a radio show when the topic referred to the bond between art and history. Barthes’ position is known to us from his book On Racine, when he clearly states that it is an illusion that literary history might have access to history; rather, we are imposed on a historical “mythology.” By conjuring up different articles, he demonstrates that it is nothing but a series of monographs, and that, in fact, “the history” is a … chronicle for which history is a kind of background. Barthes has his own views and philosophy of what history means and, in this sense, he points out that literary history is not defined by a temporality similar to that of military history, for example. As for the literary work, it is at the same time a sign of the history and a resistance to to it, because it is not the sum of its “sources, influences, or models,” i.e. that is exactly what places it on the trajectory of history. For this reason, the theoretician proposes in an astounding fashion style, to try to see not what history tells us about the literary work, but what the literary work tells us about history! On the other hand, Barthes rightly notes to what degree the literary histories of his time, but equally those of other eras, paid special attention to the author in isolation, while history, by definition, focuses on the on-­going collectives. Is literary history indeed history? And if it becomes history, doesit not fatally lose its aesthetic value, because it is like any other activity in the historical circuit? 146

Foucault’s criticism, a real challenge, changed the perception of historical works and of their validity in traditional forms, even if it did not lead to the configuration of clear alternatives. Foucault practically “deconstructed” the so-­called “historic truth”29 in his Archaeology of Knowledge. He catalogued literary history as a discourse among other discourses, a practice with its own rules, argumentation strategies and rhetorical elements. The historian is one who has a view of his own on history and consequently he imposes his way of understanding the past, the result being an “ideological construct” that may dominate until the appearance of another to replace it. Later, specialists agreed that Foucault’s notion of episteme as a set of disjunctive, discontinuous relationships that connects the discourse to a dominant scale of values in the era is more appropriatet as a tool for literary history than the old notions of period or Weltanschauung. Foucault’s “archeological” approach presupposed, as Corneliu Bîlbă emphasized, “getting rid of those notions that are bound to the postulate of continuity, such as: tradition, influence, development, teleology, mentality, spirit of the era. The reason for the rejection of these categories is that they are recent, they belong to modernity, and their retrospective application presupposes a number of hypotheses and analogies that the pre-­modern culture cannot stand without being deformed. Our thinking schemata are not universal, and their application to a class of statements belonging to a different epistemic configuration resorts to suppositions that are metaphysical, referring to unity and historical continuity.”30 In this way Foucault decisively oriented the Western ideas conception with reference to the “historical” character of what had long been considered ahistorical! In 1969 there appeared the famous magazine New Literary History, in which there were published many studies on the matter of innovations within this field, and about criteria for the selection of writers, literary works, genres, and values. Many of the opponents of literary history in its traditional, static form rejected its validity, saying that it was not truly history, but merely a glossing of data and opinions related to styles, eras and ideas, all isolated from different contexts and collectivities. Consequently, it was said, the literary should not focus, only on geniuses who created literary works “beyond time,” but rather on the literary cultures and communities that produce them. 29 He was subsequently followed by Hayden White with, for example, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, by Paul Ricoeur with Temps et récit and by David Carr with Time, Narrative and History. 30 Corneliu D. Bîlbă, Hermeneutică şi discontinuitate. Studii de arheologie discursivă (Iaşi: “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Publishing House, 2011), p. 118.

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The concept of the “knot” in literary history In the 80s the new historicism asserted itself more and more by studies that demonstrated a return to the diachronic aspects of literature. The main reference, the starting-­points and sources of inspiration were the theories and papers of Michel Foucault and of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The literary works are seen as a result of the clash of different social discourses, so that the idea of plurality becomes dominant and guiding. Mario J. Valdés, taking over Foucault’s idea about the “knot-­book” in a network of references31 to other books, other texts, and other phrases, proposes the concept of the “knot”, intended to function as an ordering principle, organizing the new literary histories.32 There are “temporal knots” such as the years 1848, 1914, 1945, 1989 in Europe, or “topographic knots,” for example, towns that generated a famous literary culture, such as Prague or Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century. In this case, demographic and urban studies can complete the literary ones. We could equally speak about “institutional knots” such as the Academies in Central Europe or the Jesuit schools in Latin America, or about “figurative” ones, such as the poet, the national symbol. Literary history can no longer be cumulative, nor can it take over, randomly and without any critical examination or update, topics for discussion, ideological positions, and perspectives promoted by the historians of the past. The monumental literary histories, written by a single author, seem to tempt the specialists to impose in their place those written by collectives of researchers, because the historian is no longer, as Michel de Certeau emphasizes, the person who builds an empire or talks about “the paradise of history.” However, the university literary histories are equally impressive, even if they no longer have single authors but are written by collectives of authors. They are joined by textbooks destined to teach the history of literature and the histories published by specialized printing houses, the differences being mainly dictated by the types of audiences they address, as well as by ideological and cultural trends. The models and the stereotypical national and ethnical constructions with their rigid, homogenous dimensions are questioned because history today is seen as relational,33 involving a variety of perspectives, being itself irremediably markedby

31 The concept of intertextuality launched by Kristeva is linked precisely to this reality that Foucault was talking about. 32 Valdés, Rethinking Literary History. A Dialogue on Theory. 33 “The new historicists”, New Historicists, greatly influenced by Clifford Gertz, speak about history as being irrational, unpredictable, discontinuous, which is actually no bad thing because “Discontinuity is freedom!”, as Harold Bloom used to say.

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the global context. Thus literary history should not ignore the social sciences such as demography, political economy, anthropology and sociology because it needs to frame a picture dominated by the idea of multiplicity, and not by that of unifying totality. The nation is seen today as a concept subject to reconfigurations, since historical conditions always change which renders dysfunctional the organicist and teleological model of continuity that dominated literary history from as early as the 19th century until the 1970s.

The literary history in the era of globalization As a global, transnational identity becomes more and more predominant instead of a national one, it is natural to question what literary history will be like in a global world. For now, it is difficult to say as there is no new model of literary studies. It is certain, though, that the arrogant idea of a cultural superpower and the principles of euro-­centric humanism34 are being rejected. Let us remember how, in his lessons on universal history, Hegel would establish a center and peripheries. Greece and Italy were presented as the theatre of world history, and the nucleus of Europe was considered to be made up of France, Germany and England, with visible influences on the whole of Europe. The western European cultural model imposed itself in this way on other models and in this exercise of power geographical and cultural territories that would otherwise have merited attention were marginalized or even ignored. It is known today that the historic study of literature needs to be designed as an open system, as a network where there are data, information and interpretation of literatures in different geographical areas, with different species, languages and artistic and literary means of expression. Consequently, literary history will not be limited to the canon, to what the intellectual elite selected. It will be a history of literatures: popular, oral, written; a history attentive to gender, race, ideology and social class differences, not in order to mask them or to overlook them, but in order to configure a cultural painting as close as possible to reality. Gender studies, postcolonial studies, de-­constructivism and feminist studies, because of their demolishment of some principles and traditional values, cannot represent a source of inspiration for current literary history. Certainly, inherent eclectism will be a problem – not from the perspective of the coherence that narratives presuppose, because, as we said, this model that 34 See, for example, Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha’s studies: Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994).

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does not reflect cultural polyphony was dropped. And when the imperatives of unification, rationalization and unification do not function any more, the excuse of getting lost in digression can no longer be used. As David Perkins says, in literary history the form that imposes itself now is the encyclopedic one where separate essays about separate authors are collated. Yet there is a danger that the specialists brought together to compose a literary history may not form a real team or there may not be a unity of vision or, even worse, of method. The results are also eclectic from the point of view of the critical genres that are assembled here: biography, bibliography, social history, intellectual history, data about the reception of literary works, semiotics, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Literary history was accused at the beginning of the 20th century of being too concerned with what was exterior to literary works or to the literary system. The formalists triggered the radical change of views within literary research that concentrated almost exclusively on the literary work in itself. Today it seems that general attention is directed again to the cultural network of which the literature forms part. It is very probable (or not …) that it will not repeat the mistakes of the past and that literary history will no longer be … a cultural history in disguise. As long as literature remains the main reference of the discipline in discussion, the danger is still distant. On the other hand it is very true that the era we live in imposes the opening of horizons, a dialogue that involves agreements and disagreements. We are citizens of the world and not of a certain country, and the literatures that represent us are no longer strictly national ones, because they cannot be strictly national. In the literary research this means comparative study, for example: the literatures of Eastern and Central Europe, the literature of medieval Spain, including its Arab and Jewish dimensions, the literatures of Eastern Asia, etc. or the finding of some nuclei or “knots” to coagulate and to function as new unifying principles for elements and heterogeneous and heteroclitic literary phenomena. One of the most recent tendencies is the one instituted by Franco Moretti, known under the name of a quantitative literary history. Professor Moretti’s research paper appeared in 2005 from the Verso publishing house and is entitled Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Starting from a hard to contradict reality (it is impossible to read and assimilate the literary material in its assembly in order to be able to offer, as a literary historian, an overall vision as well as a direct analysis), Moretti proposes a brave but risky, even debatable approach. Instead of close reading he proposes distant reading, a method for literary history that reminds one more of poetics and of its aspirations to the general and legitimated in the study of literature. It is thus admitted that literary works 150

would no longer be seen and attentively analyzed but viewed from afar. We cannot but wonder if this knowledge might be trusted, if the “overview” does not miss the necessary targets for the stakes, values and nuances of literary art to be understood. We need to take over the fact that we are doomed to live in an era of the result, of the “abbreviation,” of the shortening, but the historical type studies are maybe meant to save what can be saved, or needs to be saved, beyond the “summary.” The abbreviated form that the literary history can resort to is a concentrated form, even if its validity cannot be long-­standing.

3.11. Conclusions To make history means to try to recuperate, to reconstruct what no longer exists. The attempt is, as we have seen, despite all ambitions, attempts at objectivity by information or by “transposition” into the era, doomed to fail. Never will the past be wholly reconstructed, even if it involves the past of the document-­book, of the book that is preserved in its immanent immateriality. The context, which is one of the configuring factors of literature, cannot be reconstructed entirely, nor can the conditions that led to the writing of a literary work. But literary history is more than a reconstruction of the context and circumstances. As Clément Moisan35 states, “History is not a compilation of facts, events or names; it is a construction and a creation.” The fact that the history of historians is permanently doomed to be incomplete is not so frustrating as to minimize the main benefit that the subject represents for the culture of humanity: a barrier against forgetfulness, against the disappearance of the significant past. History attenuates the erosion that time causes and participates in the legitimizing and valorizing of the literary processes. All the commentaries, analyses, notes, and explanations the literary historian usually resorts to have this main function: to preserve, to conserve the text and at the same time to make it more accessible to all categories of audience, because the “professional reader, who is” the literary historian, Elvira Sorohan says, “a specialist even in the discipline that he theorizes here, has the capacity of placing himself in the text, experimenting with a double life: firstly reconstructing, internally, in the imaginary, the creative act, secondly he works on an actualization of the text here and now (hic et nunc) .”36 It is not unimportant that the most remarkable formative role that the literary history has is it involves young men. Roland Barthes said that “literature is what is 35 Clément Moisan, Istoria literară, p. 40. 36 Elvira Sorohan, Introducere în istoria literaturii române (Iaşi: “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Publishing House, 1997), p. 17.

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being taught,” actually reducing literature to a canon and to its didactic function, certainly a disputable idea, but highlighting at the same time the pedagogic mission of literature and implicitly of the discourse that promotes it. As early as the Renaissance, there were exercises in schools by which literary Greek or Latin texts were deciphered and explained from the perspective of the content and grammar, vocabulary, versification, etc. Literary history can thus not only popularize the literature of the past, but also can help it to be understood, making it interesting by reducing the discrepancies that the passage of time can create. It can be asserted that the subject has a responsibility in the education of the young. Paul Valéry, speaking about the history that historians “recuperate,” signaled that it can intoxicate whole nations, give fake memories, maintain open wounds, and perpetuate illusions of grandeur and persecution. No bond exists, it may seem, between this history and that of the literature! The literary historians express, willy-­nilly, their subjectivity; they have the power to perpetuate fake values and they may hide, to the detriment of culture in general, other values that may unjustly disappear. Sainte-­Beuve, for example, while studying French Romanticism, searches by every means around 1828 for French forerunners of this literary period, obstinately rejecting evidence of foreign influence. Nor did the German critics of the 1760s want either to accept the French influence on their literature, so they rediscover, somehow forcefully, the Teutonic ancients! The examples are very numerous, especially when it is about cultures that have the vanity of their own value. Reversely, the cultures willing to assert themselves want by all means to be synchronized with the vain ones. Some theoreticians (it could be interpreted as historians), Fernand Baldensperger ironically says, “love to look for in the gallery of half-­length portraits where they can choose their ancestors from, not right genuine models, but petrified archetypes in whose absence everything in our history would be nothing but fumbling, groping and mistakes.”37 Intoxication can thus occur in literary history as well, unlikely as it may seem. But recuperation, albeit partial, of what existed before cannot occur from a static perspective. Time sweeps away interpretations, analyses and reconstructions equally. Therefore history itself needs to submit to a process of updating. As we have seen, history is not exempt from redefinitions; in fact, it is questioned. The main factor that triggers the recurrent reform of the domain is literature itself, difficult to define, difficult to understand precisely because one cannot talk about its “essence”, about its immutable elements which might have been a guiding light for

37 Fernand Baldensperger, Literatura. Creaţie, succes, durată, trans. Virginia Şerbănescu (Bucharest: Univers Publishing House, 1974), p. 149.

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researchers. As long as the subject of literary history, literature, is a dynamic object, a mobile and organic assemblage that exposes itself to knowledge in its functional dimension rather than in its ontological one, literary history does not need to do anything but adjust to the literary imperatives. Literature does not stagnate; its forms are not petrified, not even the old ones. That is why synchronization and adaptation of this domain of literary research to the characteristics of the object of study are compulsory. Is literature a process? Literary history will have, in its turn, to submit to changes by permanently adapting to the new demands of literary evolution. Thus, from time to time, literary history needs reorientation, especially by the new methods that it takes on, which is understood mostly by those who noted that the dilemma of literary history was caused by an incapacity to study literature as a phenomenon that changes over time. A rigid meta-­literature in relation to a mobile reference is, obviously, inappropriate, deforming or, as Marc-­ Mathieu Münch expressively stated, referring to literary history: “On n’étudie pas le train en oubliant qu’il roule” (we don’t study the train, forgetting that it moves)! The literary text is the permanently living source of many other commentaries and interpretations. For this reason literary history needs to maintain a permanent dialogue with the social, historical and cultural contexts of both production and reception and does so now even more than before … But the domain of literary history is made not only by the literary works themselves in the context where they appeared and in the context of their reception. More than that, there is also the theoretical space of literary history that presupposes theories, concepts, guiding principles. Russian formalism, Croce’s idealism, Eliot’s theories and even the new historicism greatly contributed to the amendment of literary history, at least in its configuration. Its resistance in these conditions indicates its perennial nature…

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4. The Variable Reference If we consider literature and rhetorical discourse as identifiable “realities” in poetics, literary history and rhetoric, we will soon notice that we are not offered precise and complete knowledge, although this is the aspiration that underlies each of the three domains. But literature as art and rhetoric, an art in itself, not to mention the fact that literary research flirts with artistry, signal by their very status its straying from the principles of objectivity and of the axiomatic truths that are traditionally in control in the domain of science. Nevertheless, on more than one occasion the meta-­domains in the humanistic area have claimed a scientific character, even if the desire to adopt the methodology and the general behavior of the exact sciences, in an effort to align themselves with what society credited and valued positively, was prejudicial. We cannot attain a firm and final knowledge, and the ordering, the setting in explanations, concepts and principles of the material that represents the starting-­point is always subject to the threat of imperfection. But the adoption of a different attitude in relation to the diversity of aspects that the research into literary and discourse reference generated can be fruitful. Thus we can perceive in totality and synchrony and we can accept that the new points of view do not annul the old ones but complete them. We have access to a general image of literature and of rhetorical discourse that we have to accept to be evolving, never final. This reality is no reason to trigger a feeling of powerlessness and to lead to the abandonment of the project of knowledge. Literature was and is studied through its particular literary works, at the level of assemblies (directions, movements, generations, national literatures etc.), as parts of wholes, or from a more abstract, logical-­structural perspective, as a system. As for discourses, if the primary rhetoric is prescriptive, offering networks, suggestions, and composition recommendations, in modernity it is limited to observing or to glossing the reality of discourses, and thus it is descriptive. For a long time the topic was limited in poetic research to the way in which literature handles the relationship with the exterior, the observance of certain demands that claimed to be precise, but in reality were very unclear, leading, it was thought, to the ideal form of artistic creation. Thus the ethical or moral content of the literary work, its rapport with the truth that it had to reflect or its rapport with the reality that it had to copy (irrespective of what this reality meant: mimesis praxeos, namely imitation of actions, nature, the past, Greek and Latin literary models, popular art or an ideal reality, possible worlds, etc.) were central concerns in poetics for many centuries. It is exactly this subordination of 155

literature to a universe that has always represented only its point of departure that dictated the strategy of literary history in its beginnings. Some said that it was a cultural history rather than a literary one. But things changed radically at the beginning of the 20th century, when literary research was required to be exclusively … literary, because literary facts would be irreducible to different extra-­literary causal forces. As literature is by its nature verbal creation, it was natural and closer to the “object”, the systematic research into literary material, from the internal organization and the structure of creations, to types of verse or elements of the story, images and figures of style, etc., namely, everything that offers specificity to the literary discourse. The intrinsic study of literary works, of their “form” as “literary fact” was sporadic since antiquity to modernity and it was organized, perseveringly, since the 20th century. That happened thanks to Russian formalism which opened the horizon to the “scientific” approach as much as possible. The assemblies of procedures by which the literary work belongs to the domain of art and to the aesthetic functioning of the language represent the “literality” of a text that became a reference for poetics, but in literary history this topic is represented by a succession of literary systems or of literary institutions, not of literary works. The situation changes again nowadays because cultural studies brought about an important openness in current literary history as it refers to the literary phenomenon from the perspective of its relationships to society, politics and ideology – in a word, to the context. The cultural network that also comprises literature as well is no longer ignored, literature being, as Foucault said, a discourse among other discourses. In fact, as early as several decades ago, Barthes recommended that histories of the literary functions should be written (other than the strictly aesthetic ones), histories which should pay attention to production, dissemination and consumption, which brings into discussion the sociological dimension of literature. In rhetoric, the way in which a discourse is organized or composed was important from the very beginning, and the rhetoric of style with all its figures of speech, sound, syntactic and sense represented a constant preoccupation, although that led to the reproach that the domain came to be mistaken step by step, due to this preoccupation, for … stylistics. Not coincidentally, rhetoric provided literary research with the necessary categories for the identification and classification of expressive procedures. Nevertheless, the subject of rhetoric was not essentially, as in the case of poetics, the specificity of literary discourse, but the production, literally, of its verbal effect. For this very reason, the logical and psychological categories such as persuasion, likelihood, the probable and the hypothetical were discussed in the past, and are still discussed today. 156

The subjects of poetics, of literary history and of rhetoric exist in a complex way and offer more perspectives which in their turn vary over time. This subject with its varied and variable aspects suggests more solutions, answers that can satisfy. The problems that it poses can be discovered, seen and exploited from different angles, based on different hypotheses. Given the fact that there is such a rich field of possibilities, certainly, the domains of the subject in literature and discourse will be permanently moving, and this will occur most frequently in the sense of enrichment, not of the annulment of previous points of view.

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42

Marzena Kubisz: Resistance in the Deceleration Lane. Velocentrism, Slow Culture and Everyday Practice. 2014.

Vol.

43

Bohumil Fořt: An Introduction to Fictional Worlds Theory. 2016.

Vol.

44

Agata Wilczek: Beyond the Limits of Language. Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse. 2016.

Vol.

45

Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse I. Origines, Iberia, Slavia et Europa Media. 2016.

Vol.

46

Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse II. Britannia, Germania et Scandinavia. 2016.

Vol.

47

Julia Szołtysek: A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual. 2016.

Vol.

48

Manyaka Toko Djockoua: Cross-Cultural Affinities. Emersonian Transcendentalism and Senghorian Negritude. 2016.

Vol.

49

Ryszard Nycz: The Language of Polish Modernism. Translated by Tul'si Bhambry. 2017.

Vol.

50

Alina Silvana Felea: Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory. Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History. 2017.

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