TOWARD A DEFINITION OF TOPOS Also by Lynette Hunter *G. K. CHESTERTON: EXPLORATIONS IN ALLEGORY *MODERN ALLEGORY AND FANTASY: RHETORICAL STANCES OF CONTEMPORARY WRITING GEORGE ORWELL: THE SEARCH FOR A VOICE *RHETORICAL STANCE IN MODERN LITERATURE: ALLEGORIES OF LOVE AND DEATH
* Also published by Palgrave Macmillan Toward A Definition of Topos Approaches to Analogical Reasoning
Edited by
LYNETTE HUNTER
Lecturer, Department of English University of Leeds
M MACMILLAN Editorial matter and selection, Preface and Chapter 9 © Lynette Hunter 1991 Chapter 1 © Paul Tynegate Piehler 1991 Chapter 2 © Michael Leslie 1991 Chapter 3 © Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson 1991 Chapter 4 © Francis Goyet 1991 Chapter 5 © Paul Hammond 1991 Chapter 6 © Stephen Bygrave 1991 Chapter 7 © Lambert Wierenga 1991 Chapter 8 © Alan Roughley 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-52353-7
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First edition 1991
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Toward a definition of topos: approaches to analogical reasoning. 1. English literature. - Critical studies I. Hunter, Lynette 820.9
ISBN 978-1-349-11504-4 ISBN 978-1-349-11502-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11502-0 Contents
List of Illustrations vii Preface viii Notes on the Contributors xviii 1 Allegories of Paradise: Rhetoric and Archetype 1 Paul Tynegate Piehler
2 Gardens of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Landscape, and Literature in the English Renaissance 17 Michael Leslie
3 Sight Unseen: Problems with 'Imagery' in Macbeth 45 Ann Thompson and John 0. Thompson 4 The Word 'Commonplaces' in Montaigne 66 Francis Goyet 5 The Play of Quotation and Commonplace in King Lear 78 Paul Hammond
6 The Pursuit of Sophia 130 Stephen Bygrave 7 The Rhetoric of the Commonplace: 158 Argumentation and Ideology (Jules Verne and Emile Zola). Lambert Wierenga 8 Commonplace and Cliche elements in the Textual Topoi of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 182 Alan Roughley 9 From Cliche to Archetype 199 Lynette Hunter Index 228
v List of Illustrations
2.1 Inigo Jones, Garden scene for a masque, 1630s. 18 (Photo supplied by Caurtauld Institute of Art)
2.2 Kenilworth Castle from William Dugdale, 21 Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656)
2.3 Villa Lante at Bagnaia from Descrizione di 22 Roma moderna (1697)
2.4 Joris Hoefnagel, Nonsuch Palace (1568) British 25 Museum, Mansell Collection
2.5 Jacodus Hondius, Nonsuch Palace: south front 26 and Privy Garden, from John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611)
2.6 The 'Diana' fountain from the Lumley inventory 27 of 1590. Earl of Scarborough
2.7 Bomarzo, Hell Mouth: Giovanni Guerra's 29 drawing in the Albertina, Vienna
2.8 Knot garden from Didymus Mountain, The 33 gardeners labyrinth (1571), p.80. In Garland facsimile series
2.9 The gardens of Wadham College from David 35 Loggan, Oxonia illustrata (1677)
2.10 Padua, the botanic garden, from G. Porro, 40 L' horto de i semplici di Padova (1591)
2.11 Leyden, the botanic garden, from P. Paaw, 41 Hortus publicus academiae Lugdunum-Batavae (1601)
Vll Preface
The classical focus on topos or the topoi was concerned with ways of structuring arguments as analogical reasoning from a probable rather than a factual basis. A topos provides a general setting for a discussion, a framework for arguments rather than a fixed set of rules, standards or axioms. Those involved in the discussion need to agree that the setting is appropriate - for example that it is helpful to consider 'the garden' as an image of civilisation/ cultivation/culture, or to consider 'the family' as a suitable image for larger, social, structures of power - but they do not have to accept the truth of a specific organisation of interrelated facts, for example the 'Laws of Nature' in post-Renaissance science, or the necessary relations in various mathematical systems. The attitude toward the basis for reasoning in either topical or factual argu• ment is quite different. For nearly two thousand years the schools of rhetoric from the classical period in Western history through to the Renaissance engaged in studied, rigorous, and often heated debate over the status of such reasoning and the means by which it could be validated, because it lies at the heart of rhetoric: the art of persuasion on probable grounds. However, during the Renais• sance the use of such reasoning began to disappear from the discourses of education, science, religion and the new human• ities. The essays that make up this collection are all concerned with aspects of this kind of reasoning, with its function in late medieval and Renaissance writing, and with the alternative modes of reasoning - among others, commonplace and cliche - which come to fill the gap left when topos was discarded and the study of rhetoric inexorably eroded into ornament. A phrase from Montaigne, quoted in Francis Goyet's contribu• tion, serves well to describe this collection: a nosegay of strange flowers. The essays were brought together in an attempt to begin to address what is undoubtedly a large and complex field of study and inquiry. While they cluster around the Renaissance and
viii Preface ix around English-language text, there are also contributions on eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, and on writing from other European countries, particularly France. Fur• ther, the modes of critical approach vary from the semiotic, to the historical, to the pedagogical, to. the deconstructionist. Yet all the essays focus on questions of rhetoric, the interrelation between writer, text, and audience, and specifically on the social context that the field of rhetoric always calls to our attention. Indeed, if there is one unifying factor to these essays, it is the emphasis on topos, commonplace and cliche as inexorably linking the process of reasoning with a specific historical materiality. The opening contribution, 'Allegories of Paradise' from Paul Piehler, analyses the function in poetic practice of a particular topos, the locus amoenus, or 'pleasant place', which is most often applied to a setting in natural surroundings (such as a garden), and studies its relation to the rhetorical prescriptions for the topos in late medieval handbooks. While taking on the broad sweep of the current debate about poetic and rhetoric, the essay specifically looks at Chaucer's writing and the handbooks of English rhetori• cians. Chaucer appears consciously to employ the rhetorical prescriptions for the locus amoenus, yet he infuses them with energy; or rather, as Piehler suggests, he recovers the energy that made the topos significant in the first place. This recovery is made possible by the use of allegory which, it is here suggested, acts as the bridge or transforming element between poetic and rhetoric. Allegory not only makes possible the generation of a topos through an ethical and rational reinterpretation of myth, making it specific to a particular society, but also provides for a link between the topos and the archetypal or unconscious energies of human beings. The essay argues that Chaucer, through his use of allegory to reinterpret the rhetorical device for his own time, infuses the topos of the garden as a place of rest with the joy of ordering and locating. The argument is skilfully doubled and self-reflective in that the locus amoenus topos can itself be read as a topos for commonplace, a place for finding common ground for agreement - the garden being one of Plato's images for the cultivation of active reasoning. But gardens are constructed in very different ways, and Michael Leslie's study of 'Gardens of eloquence' brings a rare insight into the sophisticated conventions of garden construction in sixteenth• century England and the effect that an understanding of this X Preface
sophistication has on our modern readings of the locus amoenus in sixteenth-century texts. Leslie looks at the way in which Spenser develops two strikingly different environments for the locus amoenus in The Fairie Queene: in the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis. To make sense of the difference, a modern reader has to be willing to accord a high degree of consciousness to the different details Spenser allocates to each garden yet to do so requires historical detail. Providing that historical detail in order to enable our reading of the topos, is exactly what the essay does. This discreet demonstration of the way that topoi are not neces• sarily used prescriptively and severed from current history, but refocused with specific significance for each age and place, also raises a fundamental question about rhetoric and its topical reasoning. The argument acted out by the two gardens in The Fairie Queene is one between rhetoric as manipulative persuasion and rhetoric as studious creativity. The former is presented by Spenser in terms of a Roman garden and focuses on the flam• boyant, riotous games played by the semiotic elements; in con• trast we find an orderly Venetian garden 'of pleasure and delight' but dedicated to educative, recreative purpose. The essay not only demonstrates how the topos is used, but asks how it is recognised and examines the deeply-rooted historicism of that understanding. Like the Garden of Adonis, it is an essay that teaches us how to read. Just as the locus amoenus is only superficially a visual topos, because the garden is seen only by way of socially mediated convention, just so all the images which make up analogical topoi are also mediated by the pedagogical expectations of the reader. Not only do we as readers need to be taught the historical basis for a particular topic, but we also need to re-examine our response to topos as an 'image'. Ann Thompson and John Thompson look at the complexity of the reader's response by examining from a psychological perspective the broadly standard pedagogical account of 'image' as visual or sensual. They do this in the process of a study of the topos of sight in Macbeth - a topos where the standard account of imagery might be expected to come into its own but where, instead, it consistently falls short and often obscures reading practice, ultimately limiting the text. The essay explores the need to recognise that imagery is not primarily seeing a 'natural', or visual, or even sensual likeness, but is conceptual metaphoric practice. The argument addresses Preface xi one of the most obvious but most pernicious problems in our understanding of what happens when we read, for it remains general experience that many students leaving secondary educa• tion still equate a response to the structures of image only with the pictorial, and many scholars still seem, at least residually, to do the same. The problem is of particular importance to an understanding of the images structuring the topoi because topos• as-place appears to privilege the external visual account of inter• pretation, to equate it with 'natural', experiential knowledge. Yet as Michael Leslie indicates and as the Thompsons demonstrate in their study of the topos of sight in Macbeth, the visual itself is for both the Renaissance and the twentieth century a far more subtle and sophisticated process. Francis Goyet' s discussion of Montaigne is a study of 'ordering', and of the construction of commonplace books which traditionally held all the topics that a writer would note down and which would be referred to when searching for ideas with which to develop an argument. The discussion focuses on the structur• ing of a commonplace book and the process of conceptualising the topics. Goyet surveys what Montaigne actually says about not using 'undigested' commonplaces; and from his own study of Montaigne's library, offers a version of the writer's sense of ordering or compiling. The essay first considers the potentially tedious and rather rigidifying or limiting steps that go into the construction of a commonplace book: the choice of passage, the selection of headings, and the copying out. What the reader in Montaigne' s library finds is that he tends to use each book as its own index of commonplaces. For example, under the first mar• ginalian heading for any topic will come a series of page numbers referring to locations of subsequent passages relevant to that topic. Hence you only need to know what headings are in each book and where the first one is located. There is no need to copy out passages, and of course the writer/reader in search of a topic will always be returned to the context of the book. Goyet also notes that the method of annotation or creation of a heading, indicates a procedure whereby topos is dynamic, not fixed. The annotations are increasingly in keywords not sentences as Mon• taigne grows increasingly flexible in his attitude toward compil• ing, and increasingly aware of the need to reread in context and to re-reread, before writing. The suggestions made about Mon• taigne's attitude toward compilation, ordering and quotation xii Preface indicate the flexibility of topos, the immediacy and necessary relation to the contigent day-to-day life that topos must have for this Renaissance writer. Commonplace should be no fixed head• ing: to be more than piece-work, flour paste, indigestible quota• tion, it must be location and physical place for present rereading. This concern also lays bare the medieval concern with the difference between poetic and rhetoric, in terms of rereading and copying, the dynamic and the static. This ambivalent facing toward custom and convention that topos and commonplace evidence in their ability both to enable and to oppress and limit, is the arena for Paul Hammond's essay, 'The Play of Quotation and Commonplace in King Lear'. King Lear becomes the site for an exploration of the play of scepticism over the authority of sources for quotation and commonplace, and is contrasted to the confidence both of its forerunner The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and of the rewritten The History of King Lear by Nahum Tate (1681). Each Lear conveys a different cultural, social and political approach toward the activity of commonplace and topos. The earlier and the later Lears are shown to be more reassuring, although for different reasons, in their attitude: commonplace and topos tell us of a convention that is recognised and ultimately they speak of a divine order. But in Shakespeare's King Lear their strategies are destabilised by the technique of quotation which reveals a web of rhetorical devices used to create and expose the illusion of the 'natural'. While both the earlier and the later plays find expression through conven• tion, they are also severely compromised into an oppression implicit in the authority of the society and culture which under• writes their conventions. But Shakespeare's King Lear is an activity questioning the heart of such compromise - often with quotations from Montaigne. Shakespeare and his audience were immensely sophisticated about the use of rhetorical topoi; they learned the structures and strategies of persuasion as the central core of their education. The argument here is that the historical context for that education made writers and their audience peculiarly aware of and uniquely able to challenge the shifts in status, power and authority; the context also foregrounded the double-edged activity of language as both enabling and limiting. The narrative of King Lear passes the topoi of family and quest, which are so central to romance structure of the earlier King Leir, through the play of self-conscious and self-critical quotation Preface xiii which severs their significance from authority. The essay con• cludes by suggesting that Tate's History reappropriates an authority for these topoi into the Restoration concern for social behaviour and self-made consistency, a concern which fundamen• tally changes the purpose of the rhetorical devices. The passage of the topoi of family and quest into the new authority of patriarchy in the eighteenth-century novel is the central focus of Stephen Bygrave' s 'The Pursuit of Sophia'. The essay follows the replacement of quest, family, hero and fortune with the pilgrimage and the rejection and rediscovery of family, in relation to questions of the individual (erstwhile hero) and the new authority of providence, the 'Protestant imperative'. But this is no simple replacement, for its activity in the development of the 'realistic' novel is full of contradiction, throwing into relief the dislocations in epistemological concepts of time and space which reorder concepts of logic and causality. The topos of family may be taken as a fictional element in a realistic story, providing information and precept with all the confidence in linguistic transparency needed to underwrite factual rational logic. Taken in this sense it is no longer ambivalent, but has become so conven• tional as to represent an informational 'truth'. What Bygrave' s study examines is the way that the family and the jou;rney also work as rhetorical elements in a materialist story which allows the writer and reader to approach the implications of epistemological change through rewritings and reorderings of the topoi of romance as they shift their effect in the novel. Both writer and reader have to learn about the new epistemological framework, and in reworking romance, sloughing off its preconditions, com• plications arise. The process becomes not only a getting rid of convention but also an intervention into the new. Whereas Don Quixote can parody and hence continuate romance, Tristram Shandy uses it as something that can alert us to displacements; both are conscious about what has been discarded and what has been appropriated, but they are making us aware of reasoning and knowledge in different ways because of their different epistemological set. While Don Quixote can use topos and fight against it within the certain strength of traditional argument, Tristram Shandy is communicating in a world where topos has no status within logic or causation, where in effect the only accept• able logic is rational and informational. The effect of a dominant tradition in rational and informational logic continues to be a central concern for those interested in the xiv Preface history of rhetoric, particularly in its post-Renaissance manifesta• tions. The emergence of this tradition appears not only to have denied any value to analogical argument but also to have drawn up many of the topoi into the accepted grounds for ideology. Lambert Wierenga's essay 'The commonplace and its use in argument' suggests that the device of commonplace now occupies a position between the formal and purely logical position of topos as a place where we can find premises for syllogisms, and the semanticised, inexorably reified position of cliche - which pres• ents ideological stereotypes. Wierenga is specifically concerned with the role of commonplace within the persuasive structures of argumentation rather than demonstrative analytical proof. Argu• mentation needs to convince the audience of its natural and obvious grounds. It does this by generalisation and elliptical structures which omit to question the authority of its bases, but which also allow for the covert introduction of argument into the narrative. Argument will produce ambiguity both by the ideologi• cal valorisation of necessity in narrative and by making an example or illustration of ideological verisimilitude in description. Both procedures produce distortions in informative, demonstrat• ive discourse and result in pleasure for the reader, but neither is intended to expose its own activity. It is suggested that the primary structure of novels here, particularly those of Verne and Zola, is this ellipticalisation; and the degree to which it is carried indicates the degree both of hidden ideology, and of the atten• dant pleasure from the text. The essay provides a detailed and precise account of the process through which non-demonstrative argument may be enacted in the novel, and is exemplary in its illustration of how topos may be naturalised into cliche the closer it gets to the semantic content of current ideology. Importantly, it underlines the suggestion in Bygrave' s essay that the 'making aware' of construction is the first and crucial step in recovering hidden structures for thought, knowledge and perception. The strategies of 'argumentation' are only a part of rhetoric, but they are now commonly perceived as the whole. Such a percep• tion lies at the root of popular criticisms that rhetoric persuades by hiding, omitting, and unfairly manipulating. Yet considering its efficiency we can perhaps understand James Joyce's distaste for this kind of formal rhetoric and his savage joy at destabilising its argumentative power. In the process, of course, he enacts other aspects of rhetoric and these form the basis of Alan Preface XV
Roughley's study, 'Commonplace and Cliche Elements in the Textual Topoi of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake'. The primary device for decontextualising and destabilising is the conflation of the literary with the non-literary, the high with the demotic. Cliche is seen as an intertextualising strategy that questions the notion of 'literary' language. Joyce uses cliches as pre-texts for writing and transgresses the decorum of quotation by using those from both the literary and the non-literary, from convention and advertising slogans. The quotation violates the normal use not only in order to disrupt ideology but, in Finnegans Wake in particular, to imitate a signifying play with morphemic, lexical and semantic elements not implicated in the initial cliche. Roughley looks in detail at the creation of narrative topoi surrounding death, humanity, sex and religion by means of cliches drawn from food and drink, arguing that Joyce draws attention to highly artificial structures by using domestic details as central signifiers. Like Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Joyce is concerned not only with indicating the process by which the ideological is incorporated into the text, but also the contingency of materiality. The recognition of context the writing asks for has not only to do with history and society but also with language. Joyce is not merely exposing convention but, like Chaucer, making convention work, making it indicate its material basis, insisting that it contextualise itself by surfacing through the dislocation of its own tradition or cliche, as a sounding of its present value, present materiality. The final contribution to the collection, my own 'From Cliche to Archetype' owes much to all the essays in the collection. From Plato and Aristotle, to Cicero, Boethius, Valla and Agricola, successive rhetoricians have attempted to emphasise to a greater or lesser extent the need for social context and historical mater• iality to ensure the validity of topical argument. They each address the problem that what begins as a topic for consensus for agreement soon becomes an unexamined basis for ideological action. It outstays its welcome, retaining its formal properties as if they were necessary, even though it has a new and different historical context; it becomes a prescriptive technique in a hand• book rather than a poetic strategy; it becomes precept rather than example, information rather than a place for discussion. A broad rhetoric makes room for and encourages flexible topics, open to rewriting and rereading. Without rhetorical awareness, or with rhetoric limited to argumentation, the topics all too easily become ways of setting up and confirming ideological assumptions. xvi Preface
We need a Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cer• vantes, Sterne or Joyce, to reawaken us to the relevance, the contingency of these grounds. McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, quoting at length from the last four writers, and adding writers from the twentieth-century theatre of the absurd, address them• selves to those topics which can be helpful to contemporary writers and readers. In the midst of the technology of the mass media with their post-Renaissance stress on the 'realistic' image and informational truth, they suggest topics dealing particularly with deceit and doubling such as parody, hendiadys, parable, allegory, among others. But a further complication is added: it has been suggested that to arrest the slippage of the analogical argument of rhetoric from the consensual into the unexamined ideological, we can insert the idea of the corporate. The corporate is held to be a form of stable consensus, which because it remains conscious avoids the dangers of the ideological. McLuhan is sceptical of this position, and indeed it underwrites much current liberal pluralism. However, it remains to be seen what response will be made to the dangers implicit in the corporate. This collection of essays at least begins to address some of the issues which bear immediately upon the question.
Lynette Hunter University of Leeds Notes on the Contributors
Stephen Bygrave is Lecturer in English at King's College, London. He is the author of Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egotism (1986) and of articles mainly on eighteenth-century themes. He is currently working on a study of rhetoric and politics in the work of Kenneth Burke.
Francis Goyet An alumnus of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Francis Goyet is Associate Professor at the University of Valen• ciennes. His main publication is the critical edition of Les Bigassures, a collection of Rabelaisian puns and curious poetics by Tabourot des Accords (1583; Geneva: Droz, 1986). He is currently completing a comprehensive work on the Renaissance meanings of the terms loci and loci communes.
Paul Hammond is lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He is the author of John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (1983) and editor of Selected Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1982) and Selected Prose of Alexander Pope (1987). His forthcoming books include John Dryden for the Macmillan Literary Lives, an edition of The Poems of John Dryden for the Longman Annotated English poets, and two studies of Shakespeare.
Lynette Hunter lectures in English at the University of Leeds. She has published critical studies of G. K. Chesterton and of George Orwell, as well as the rhetorical studies Rhetorical Stance in Modern Literature (1984) and Modern Allegory and Fantasy (1989). Her current interests include the publishing history of domestic texts, the history and philosophy of science and twentieth-century theories of rhetoric.
Michael Leslie lectures in English Literature in the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Spenser's 'Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loves': Martial and Chivalric Symbolism in 'The Faerie Queene', and
xvii xviii Notes on the Contributors articles on Renaissance art and literature. He is an editor of Word & Image: a journal of verbaVvisual enquiry; is on the editorial board of the Journal of Garden History; and is also Director of the Hartlib Papers Project.
Paul Tynegate Piehler studied with C. S. Lewis and J. A. W. Bennett at Magdalen College, Oxford and with A. K. Hieatt and W. T. H. Jackson at Columbia. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at McGill University. His articles include work done on Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser and Milton. He has also published The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory (1971) and edited A Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Montreal (1972).
Alan Roughley is a lecturer in English at the University of New England. He has recently completed a study of James Joyce, Finnegans Wake and Deconstruction, and is currently writing a book on Joyce criticism.
Ann Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. She has edited The Taming of the Shrew and has also published Shakespeare's Chaucer and The Critics' Debate: 'King Lear'. She is co-author with John 0. Thompson of Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor and is currently working with him on a book on metonymy in modem literature and film. She is co-editor with Helen Wilcox of Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies.
John 0. Thompson is a Lecturer in Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool. His teaching interests include film and video, symbolic anthropology, and the rhetoric of advertising. As well as his work with Ann Thompson, he has published a number of articles on film, edited Monty Python: Complete and Utter Theory of the Grotesque, and is the author of a book of verse, Echo and Montana.
Lambert Wierenga is charge de recherche en litterature Fran~aise, a l'Universite de Groningen-NL. He has written widely on the work of Gamier, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Verne, Zola, Dumas and on Saint Paul. His fields of interest include the history of rhetoric, the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century French literature.