Lawrence Durrell's "Echo"

Below is one of my favorite Durrell poems, the fragile and gorgeous "Echo," which opens the 1956 edition of Durrell's Selected Poems. Read the poem out loud and notice its use of echo (rhyme), which builds to a crescendo in the final line, especially in the exquisite "unbeckonable," which overtly echoes "echo" in the very spine of the word, and in the final "bird," which nicely re-sounds the "b" from the prior word at the same time that it picks up the "word-heard" rhyme from lines 3 and 4, respectively. The poem manages to echo the ultimately inaudible ground from which language arises and to which it beautifully strains to return.

ECHO

Nothing is lost, sweet self,

Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

Whitman's Poetics of Memory in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

“Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts”:

Whitman’s Poetics of Memory in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

As readers and critics have long intuited, Walt Whitman fancies himself the poet of the future. Eerily yet matter-of-factly, entreatingly yet confidently, Whitman’s multivalent, polymorphically-perverse poetic “I” often looks forward by employing a poetic fiction of looking backward. In other words, Whitman’s poetic voice has a tendency to speak from out of a liminal, immemorial “space” that is always already anticipating the reader. Among all of his real and imagined orientations, then, Whitman is generally future oriented – the later Whitman even exaggeratedly so.1 Perhaps because of this undeniable forward thrust of Whitman’s poetry, few critics have noted the richness with which some of Whitman’s poems – the Sea-Drift poems in particular – explore the complex workings of human memory. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the human act of re-membering, of putting back together the “thousand warbling echoes” (392) of the lived-in past, merges with the self-reflective poetic act. Whitman’s poem thus offers readers a poetics of memory, one that remembers the act of remembering, as it were, and in so doing reveals memory itself to be an inherently poetic activity: memory as poiesis. If the late Whitman views the future as an abstract locus of poetic and democratic revolutions, the earlier Whitman sees the past as an imaginative topos where loss and desire come together to form the poetic impulse. To sing the poet’s memorial engagement with the past, Whitman’s poem implies, is to confront the “pains and joys” (388) of Love and Death, those two ultimately inseparable primal realities at the heart of the human condition.

Edward Hirsch insightfully claims that “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” formally creates the “very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind… Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth” (22). Hirsch does not specifically name the prosodic techniques in Whitman’s poem that “loosen the intellect for reverie” (Hirsch 22), that rhythmically rock the reader back and forth into a kind of active dream state that is the sine qua non of memory as poiesis, but some of these techniques can indeed be made explicit. Rhythm in free verse, though subtle and seemingly immune to formal analysis, nevertheless results from precise poetic effects. The anaphora of the first three lines (“Out of”) combines with internal metrical echoes – note the dactyl plus trochee pattern that splits the ten-syllable first line into two echoing, mirroring halves, thus creating in effect the ghost of a caesura in the medial position ("Out of the cradle endlessly rocking"); the dactyl-trochee pattern recurs at the end of the second line (“musical shuttle”) – to create a sense of regularity within difference that immediately evokes in the first three lines the calm movement, the dreamy activity that the poem as a whole describes. Additionally the rapid flights of human memory, which proceed not logically but “[a]s a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing” (388), are imitated by an incredible prepositional energy released by the first word of consecutive lines: Out, Over, Down, Up, and From variously flitter about as the opening words of the first fifteen lines. As James Hillman claims in his psycho-linguistic analysis of the poetic imagination, prepositions both precisely position the reader in an imaginative scene and make propositions about the relational matrices at work within (or alongside, or underneath…) that scene. Hillman writes: “So, we never seem to catch imagination operating on its own and we never can circumscribe its place because it works through, behind, within, upon, below our faculties. An overtone and undersense: is imagination prepositional?” (175) The prepositions in Whitman’s poem indirectly suggest through the poem’s manner of proceeding that memory is fundamentally imaginative movement, imagination rhythmically rocking back and forth so that it can prepositionally dart where its memorial whims take it.

If the formal aspects of “Out of the Cradle” imitate the ebb and flow of memory’s imaginative flights in general, the content of the poem directly recounts a specific act of memory that is complexly doubled back upon itself. The poetic voice revisits a childhood scene in which “the child / leaving his bed wander’d alone” (388) down to the sea, where he heard the mockingbird’s mournful song. The poetic voice thus conjures up his reminiscenceFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist. (388)

In the line “From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,” “memories” functions in an ambiguous, double sense: on the one hand, it refers to the poetic voice’s memories of the bird that he heard as a child down by the sea; on the other hand, though, the “memories of the bird” must be taken as the bird’s own memories of his vanished loved one, the content of the bird’s song. The poet is therefore remembering the bird’s memories, turning memory upon itself so that its imaginal ground can be recovered and re-membered. In the last four lines of the first stanza, memory’s double movement is so successful that the poetic voice becomes indistinguishable from his childhood past. In the hands of the poet, memory unites dream and action so as to bring the past directly into the present of the poem:A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. (388)

Note that the past and present are united by the poet “by these tears,” as if memory remembered itself only by recollecting the timeless ache in its heart. The above final lines of the first stanza also initiate a process in which the poet’s own song merges with the song of the bird. From the “beginning notes of yearning and love” sung by the bird in memorial longing for his mate, the poet sings the “pains and joys” of memory writ large. For the rest of the poem, the poet and the bird, the rememberer and the memory, remain virtually indistinguishable.

As absorbed and translated by the poet, the song of the bird expresses yearning for the bird’s mate, now vanished. Because of the present absence of the beloved, the past becomes the “object” of the bird’s loss and desire, the place simultaneously out of which and to which his mournful memory sings. In an apostrophe that contains one of the most stunning uses of epizeuxis ever utilized by a bird (much less a poet), Whitman’s bird addresses the past directly:O past! O happy life! O song of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more. (392)

The haunting past participle “Loved!” reveals the interrelationship between loss and desire as the fundamental ground of memory. The bird desires a lost object, and the loss of the object issues in the bird’s desire – from this irresolvable tension memory attempts to recreate the past in the present. Strikingly, while the bird’s song directly embodies this movement of memory through the circuits of loss-desire, the poet’s attempt to remember the bird’s song and re-create it in the present of the poem indirectly communicates such a movement of memory – in this regard, the poet’s skillful use of onomatopoeia serves not only as a poetic technique but also as a metaphor for an act of memory that seeks in essence to imitate the past and thereby re-call it in the present. Readers thus experience the act of memory in both the content and the process of the poem.

The act of remembering appears successful for the poet, who again becomes exultingly inseparable from the boyhood self who directly witnessed the bird’s memorial “aria”:The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying.
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

In his ability in and through language to articulate the stirring of memory, or, better put, in his ability to singmemory, the poet discovers a sense of poetic vocation: “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake… A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die” (392). The ancient connection between poetry, particularly oral poetry, and memory – Mnemosyne is, after all, the mother of the Muses – is remembered by the poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

In the latter stages of the poem, the sea, implicit throughout the poem as its guiding image, as indeed the “cradle endlessly rocking,” emerges explicitly as a complex trope that manages to locate within the same poetic image both the workings of memory and the work of poetic craft. The sea is both memory poeticized and poetry remembered. Mimetic of the mockingbird’s direct address to the past as the locus of loss and desire, the poet addresses the sea as the ineffable reality in which the interrelated mysteries of both poetry and memory resound:O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
…Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? (393)
The sea responds with the “delicious word death,” expressing it using epizeuxis – which inevitably ties the sea’s “Death” to the bird’s “Loved!”:Death, death, death, death, death. (393)

The poet directly connects – or fuses, as he puts it – the bird’s song with the sea’s delicious utterance, as well as with his “own songs awaked from that hour” (393). Love and death, loss and desire are the prima materia of both memory and poetry, and the sea is their imagistic “place” – a paradoxical place out of which memory and language attempt to satisfy a never-to-be-satisfied desire, whose hidden face is loss. Yet only the poet can fuse all of these realities into one delicious word, Death, a word whispered by the sea. The poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle” finally exults in the ability of poetry to name, to absorb and to translate both the workings of human memory and indeed its own workings. Where memory ends and poetry begins, however, remains an open question. Hints and indirections are no doubt whispered, now and then, by that Whitmanian trope of tropes: the sea.


1 As Roy Harvey Pearce persuasively argues, the later Whitman seeks rather unsuccessfully to transform his poetry from “archetypal autobiography” into literal prophesy. See Pearce’s “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860,” as reprinted in Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom.


Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea House, 1985.

Hillman, James. “Image-Sense.” In Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of
Archetypal Psychology, ed. Benjamin Sells. Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2000.

Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. NY: Harvest, 1999.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Library of America Edition, 1996.

The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

Between Never-Never Land and the Essence of Things:

The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

In the Western intellectual life, few figures inspire as much controversy as Gorgias of Leontini and Friedrich Nietzsche (unhappily, as he often claims) of Germany, two master stylists forever resisting fixedly falling into the categories – philosophy, poetry, sophistry – thrown at them by a Western tradition unsettled by their playfully serious provocations. Nietzsche himself directly links his work to Gorgias by claiming that, after all, the sophists, Gorgias included, were right. When Nietzsche writes that “[e]very advance in epistemology and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists” (The Will to Power, 233), he of course implies that his own anti-metaphysical move beyond good and evil, as the major advance in epistemology and moral knowledge, is in a fundamental sense in line with the work of the sophists.1 The precise nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatement of sophism, however, remains a matter of debate.2 Engaging in just such a debate is perhaps one way – a compelling one, I believe – to characterize and contextualize contemporary conversations and contentions in many fields of intellectual endeavor. Between the increasingly merely playful dance of differance carried out by gleefully-postmodern academics, on one side, and the increasingly reactionary and dogmatic assertions of anti-anti-foundationalists, on the other, figures such as Gorgias and Nietzsche are points of contention, usually claimed as heroes of multiplicitous invention by postmodern theorists and vilified as enemies of the good by critics of postmodernism. Perhaps, though, Gorgias and Nietzsche actually, and maybe even most radically, offer a middle way, an alternative between meaningless play and falsely-secure seriousness. This paper, in examining Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”3 and Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen,4 seeks to trace a suggestive though by no means complete sketch of such a Nietzschean-Gorgianic middle way, a middle way that can most succinctly be described as the way of metaphor.5 Both Gorgias and Nietzsche assert the fundamentally tropological nature of human language and perception, and they thereby affirm that fitting or “true” logos is a logos that is self-aware of its non-absolute status and that, in and through this self-awareness and its concomitant “danger,” combines play and seriousness in a discourse that can serve the human good.

While Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” utilizes imagistic and metaphorical means6 so as to disclose the unavoidably metaphorical nature of human discourse, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen functions as a kind of praxis, a metaphor-in-action illustrating how a discourse that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can uniquely serve the human good. As such, the two texts are here treated in reverse chronological order, Nietzsche’s more theoretical text grounding the reading of Gorgias’s Helen. Such an approach overtly seeks to interpret Gorgias’s text through a Nietzschean lens; nevertheless, it certainly cannot be denied that this Nietzschean lens itself draws on and is partially constituted by the insights that Gorgias’s text makes possible. Suffice it to say, both Gorgias and Nietzsche would be at home with, and no doubt delight in, such interpretive circularity.

In “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche claims that, at each stage of human perception and communication, the fundamental material of perception – for Nietzsche, nerve stimuli – is translated from one medium to another, just as in metaphor two distinct entities are “falsely” – in other words, metaphorically – equated. As Nietzsche writes: “First, he [a human being] translates a nerve stimulus into an image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a sound!7 The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overlapping of spheres” (“Truth and Lying,” 248-249). For Nietzsche, the metaphorical activity of perception and communication necessitates that all communication, and thus all language, is always already rhetorical, for humans do not communicate reality itself but rather the relational ground in which reality is apprehended in a metaphorical manner. 8 Persuasive metaphors, and not facts, are the true unit of exchange in the human realm. “What is truth?” Nietzsche writes in a passage that deserves to be cited in full. It is

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. (“Truth and Lying,” 250)

Note Nietzsche’s use of metaphor – truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” truths are “coins” – to describe the metaphorical nature of truth. Such metaphors of metaphor – Gorgias’s “Speech is a powerful lord” (Helen, 52) is another example – are true to the metaphoricity that, for Nietzsche, is unavoidable in human formulations of the truth, a metaphoricity that is apt to be forgotten when truths become “solid,” “canonical,” and “binding.” To forget the metaphoricity of truth – its poetic, rhetorical, and relational nature – requires a “lie,” one that, in taking truth not as metaphorical but as absolute, makes of truth itself an illusory kind of anti-metaphor that does not recognize its own metaphoricity and thus lies about its own truthful untruth, as it were. The seemingly paradoxical jumbling of “truth” and “lies”/“untruth” in the preceding sentence, as well as in “On Truth and Lying” itself, is purposeful, for in effect Nietzsche plays with these terms, in the process transforming them into metaphors of one another. His ultimate aim in this most Odyssean of endeavors is to illustrate that human speech is most true when it does not attempt to extricate itself from the non-absolute intersecting gradations of similarity and difference in which it is by its very nature fastened. In sum, then, despite the undeniable polemicism of both Nietzsche’s argument and the mobile army of metaphors of metaphor used to carry it out, Nietzsche does not here claim that human truths are mere fabrications and thus absolutely not true. Rather, Nietzsche suggests that truth taken absolutely is untrue insofar as it forgets or denies its ground in the “primeval faculty of human fantasy” (252).

“On Truth and Lying” goes on to argue that the human intellect – prone to arrogance and self-delusion – fashions the original intuitive metaphors of perception into concepts, those “worn-out metaphors” that “after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation” (250). Precisely because the intellect “forgets that the original intuitive metaphors are indeed metaphors and takes them for the things themselves” (252), it can build overarching conceptual structures that allow the human being to put “his actions under the rule of abstractions” (252). Such conceptual structures, though they help bring about a distinctively human world, do not ultimately satisfy what Nietzsche calls the “drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire in man, which cannot be discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man himself” (254). The drive to form metaphors, which “rational man” both utilizes and stifles so as to form conceptual abstractions, eventually “seeks a new province for its activities… and generally finds it in myth and in art” (254). The “intuitive man,” as exemplified by the artist and the mythmaker, “constantly confuses the categories… [thus] showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams” (254). In self-consciously working with intuitive metaphors, the intuitive man rediscovers his inventive capacity and the inherent flexibility of the human world. In putting himself “under the rue of abstractions” that results when human concepts are not themselves recognized as metaphors, the rational man denies his inventive capacity and essentially severs the basis of his connection to the world.9

Because Nietzsche frequently describes the conceptual order of the rational man in undoubtedly negative terms – for example, as “a prison fortress” (254) – many a postmodern theorist has taken Nietzsche to be wholeheartedly urging the endless deconstruction of meaning, the creative artist’s inspired assault against the conceptual order propagated by the falsely secure rational man. To read Nietzsche as univocally championing intuitive man, however, is, just like reading Nietzsche as simply declaring that truth of any kind does not in fact exist, to mistake Nietzsche’s polemicism for absolutism – a move that Nietzsche himself warns against by questioning absolutist readings, even absolutist readings of non-absolutism. As Nietzsche writes when attacking rigid conceptual assumptions:

[E]ven our distinction between individual and species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, although we also do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it. For that would be a dogmatic assertion, and as such just as unprovable as its opposite. (249-250)

For Nietzsche, the dogmatic assertions of delusional absolutism are best combated by situating one’s discourse within a middle position that cannot run for cover toward either absolute truth or absolute meaninglessness. In the end, “On Truth and Lying” suggests that human beings, in order to rise above pure animality, cannot avoid building with concepts. Nietzsche cautions, however, that “the building must be light as gossamer” (252). Rather than taking their conceptual structures as absolute truths, conceptual artists of a Nietzschean bent remain aware of the non-absolute metaphorical base of all their concepts, remembering that “the origin of language is not a logical process, and the whole material in and with which the man of truth, the scientist, the philosopher, works and builds, stems, if not from a never-never land, in any case not from the essence of things” (249).10 Maneuvering between these two “nots” – the absolute freedom of a never-never land and the absolute truth of the essence of things – the speech-artist Gorgias demonstrates with his Encomium of Helen that a speech that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can serve the human good by experientially provoking the realization that the human truths crafted in speech can never obtain an absolute status that makes them canonical and binding in every particular situation. If, then, Nietzsche’s text points the way to how truth can be told in an extra-moral sense, Gorgias’s text exemplifies such truth-telling.

Gorgias’s ostensible task in the Encomium is “to refute those who rebuke Helen… to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance” (50), a task that Gorgias carries out by arguing that, whether persuaded by fate, force, logos, or love, Helen possessed zero freedom and therefore deserves zero blame. However, the stated task of proving “the truth” proves problematic because, from the Encomium’s opening lines, the Gorgianic notion of truth is anything but straightforward. Though Gorgias claims that truth is becoming to a speech (50), the overall category of the “becoming” – fitting, ordered, cosmic (class lecture) – is primary, while truth, as in essence a species of the larger genus “becoming,” is secondary. Further, Gorgias almost immediately revises his initially stated goal of proving the truth: “I shall go on to the beginning of my future speech, and I shall set forth the causes through which it was likely that Helen’s voyage to Troy should take place” (51). In a Gorgianic cosmos in which absolute knowledge is not possible – “it is not easy for [humans] to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future” (52) – the very idea of the truth, it seems, is supplanted by the likely. Even more than the slippery nature of the Gorgianic conception of truth, though, the following statement calls into question Gorgias’s stated purpose in the Encomium: “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument” (52). The inclusion of both past and present verb tenses suggests that, even as Gorgias argues that Alexander used a false argument to persuade Helen to accompany him to Troy, Gorgias himself acknowledges that this very argument taking place in theEncomium is itself false! No wonder that Gorgias’s claim in the Encomium’s final line that it is a “diversion” is often taken as an acknowledgment that Gorgias, as a precursor to postmodernism, realizes that his discourse inevitably contradicts itself and in effect unsays the very possibility of its own saying.

Does Gorgias really want to persuade his audience to believe that Helen is innocent of all blame – in other words, is Gorgias being serious? Or, is the Encomium a mere diversion and therefore not really concerned with persuading the audience of anything – in other words, is Gorgias being playful? The additional possibility that Gorgias’s Encomium enacts a serious form of play from a Nietzschean middle position arises upon considering that by not believing Gorgias his audience experientially discovers the following: speech may indeed be “a powerful lord” (52), but it is not all-powerful. The freedom to disbelieve even the most incantatory, spellbinding speech is directly provoked by Gorgias’s hard-to-believe, though powerfully rendered, argument. To not believe Gorgias’s stated argument is to recognize that the Encomium is most fundamentally a speech about speech in which Gorgias highlights the metaphorical nature of speech. Like Nietzsche, Gorgias most effectively demonstrates the tropological nature of speech when speaking about speech itself in metaphorical terms. After metaphorically defining speech as a “powerful lord” (52), Gorgias goes on to equate speech’s power with, in turn, poetry and sacred incantations. As he remarks upon making these metaphorical shifts, “But come, I shall turn from one argument [logos] to another” (52). Indeed, Gorgias in effect turns the metaphorical power of speech upon itself, trying to capture the ever-flowing creativity of speech within specific moments of creative verbal expression. For Gorgias, as for Nietzsche,logos is metaphor, and thus perhaps Gorgias’s seemingly contradictory claim that all persuasion involves “molding a false argument” is not that contradictory after all. For what else is metaphor but a “false argument,” one that, as Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” points out, is all-too-often taken as a literal truth. In such a reading, Gorgias’s argument as a whole, precisely in its falseness, serves as an overarching metaphor of metaphor. By disclosing persuasion as metaphorical, Gorgias does not claim that, because of its failure to anchor itself within absolute truth, human discourse is therefore meaningless. He does, however, imply that by seeing that the nature of speech is metaphorical and not absolute, an audience experiences the freedom to evaluate human speech as more or less “becoming” for particular human communities and particular occasions. By not believing that Helen was persuaded by all-powerful speech, Gorgias’s audience comes to believe in their own freedom to avoid “unbecoming” persuasions.

In conclusion, the Nietzschean and Gorgianic texts discussed above reveal that working with intuitive metaphors recognized as metaphors allows humans to rediscover the inventive capacity at the root of their most fundamental linguistic and perceptual interactions with the world. Such a rediscovery promotes an increased sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in any particular human situation, and thus increases human freedom. Even the most buttressed conceptual fortresses, and even the most incantatory speeches seeking to force one into unbecoming belief, cannot enjoy absolute rule when their own ground is disclosed to be the ever-shifting ground – the human ground – of metaphor.

Work Cited

Consigny, Scott. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Columbia, South Carolina: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. In The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Columbia,
South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2001.

Heller, Erich. The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1988.

Krell, David Farrell. Infectious Nietzsche. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1996.

Magnus, Bernd., and Kathleen M. Higgins. “Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

McComiskey, Bruce. Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life As Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and Trans. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 246-258.
---The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
Books, 1968.

Sallis, John. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago, Illinois: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.

Thomas, Douglas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1999.

White, Alan. Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.


Notes

1 For a helpful discussion of sophism as it relates to Nietzsche’s work, see Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (especially 51-93). Thomas writes of sophism that it “marks an important transformation from the study of rhetoric as techne, the fairly straightforward study of particular structures and aspects of argument, to the study of rhetoric as imitation or style. Sophistic rhetoric became a means of imparting a style of rhetoric that challenged both long-held beliefs about the nature of the world, the physis, and challenged the moral foundations of Greek culture” (53).

2 A debate, moreover, that essentially takes place on two fronts: scholarship (usually occurring in philosophy departments) concerning Nietzsche’s work per se, particularly his perspectivism; and scholarship (usually taking place in English and communications departments) directly involving the sophists. Regarding the former, Nehamas goes so far as to claim that the problem of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is essentially the challenge confronting all readers of Nietzsche’s work (see Nehamas, 1). In one way or another, determining whether or not Nietzsche is an utter relativist or a relative relativist – and therefore what the nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatemet of the sophists might be – requires grappling with his perspectivism. In claiming that Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains both that no single perspective is absolute and that nevertheless some perspectives are better than others, Alan White maintains a middle position (Nietzschean that he is, he calls it a Dionysian affirmation of this world) similar to the one attributed to Nietzsche in this paper (see White, especially 3-14). White nicely characterizes the two positions that he seeks to avoid: “I attribute to Nietzsche a perspectivism that avoids both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism – the insistence that we make epistemic progress by relying on facts while avoiding interpretations – and the postmetaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism – the claim that there are no facts, there are only interpretations” (11). On the other front, debate about the sophists has raged within the humanities ever since the social turn in rhetorical studies, “a turn toward social constructionism and (social) epistemic rhetoric” (McComiskey, 5), took place in the 1970s and 1980s. As McComiskey puts it, “The political commitments that… scholars brought to their disciplines, as well as their concern for recovering marginalized voices in the history of rhetoric, made the sophists an obvious and rich object of analysis… In what had come to be known as ‘the sophists’ – those ancient antifoundationalists, champions of democracy, teachers of rhetoric – many scholars found a friend in the fray, ancient validation for the arguments they wanted to make about contemporary rhetoric” (5). Scholars championing the sophists as anti-foundationalists remarkably similar to many contemporary intellectuals include John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, Susan Jarratt, and Victor Vitanza. While these (and other) scholars self-consciously blur the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation – a line that they may indeed argue does not actually exist – Edward Schiappa, among others, argues that sophistic rhetoric as many scholars understand it is actually a “mirage—something we see because we want and need to see it – which vaporizes once carefully scutinized” (5). Regardless of whether or not its historical validity is interrogated, a “new sophistic rhetoric” has been embraced by many scholars. McComiskey succinctly summarizes three essential assumptions of the new sophistic rhetoric: “first, knowledge(s) (that is, epistemologies) can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments” (13). For a more detailed discussion of controversies within Gorgianic studies specifically, see below.

3 Of Nietzsche’s posthumously-published manuscripts from the period 1872-74, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is the most well-known and influential. As Magnus and Higgins point out, “The stock of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has risen in the eyes of many scholars over the past few decades, primarily because it analyzes truth in terms of metaphor… The essay’s striking images have also inspired reflection and commentary from contemporary literary critics” (30). Unconcerned as it is with the later Nietzschean notions of will to power and eternal return, though, “On Truth and Lying” by no means exemplifies all the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s thought in toto; nevertheless, it undeniably sums up Nietzsche’s specific ideas about rhetoric and the nature of language. As such, it proves ideal for the present inquiry, not only because the topic of rhetoric overtly brings Nietzsche into an implicit dialogue with Gorgias, but also because “rhetoric” is in many ways the nexus of contemporary academic debate about the nature of ethics, truth, language, and culture: if postmodern theorists celebrate a “new sophistic rhetoric” in which linguistic inventiveness can hail culture into being, foundationalist reactionaries hearken back to Plato’s sentiments in such dialogues as Gorgias and The Sophist as a means of claiming that rhetoric, and hence postmodernism, is nothing more than relativistic opportunism.
4 It should be noted that Gorgianic interpretation is an especially problematic endeavor because the surviving texts of Gorgias are fragmentary at best and are often transcriptions, citations, or paraphrases written by later commentators. Scott Consigny, in Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, claims that two distinct modes of reading Gorgias have arisen in response to the particular hermeneutical aporia presented by the problematic status of Gorgias’s surviving texts (see especially the chapter “Seeking the Sophist,” 1-35). On the one hand, the “subjectivist” or rhapsodic interpreters such as Eric White argue that “Gorgias sees reality as a Heraclitean flux in which every unprecedented kairotic moment is apprehensible only through subjective intuition” (Consigny, 27). Objectivist interpreters, on the other hand, argue that Gorgias most fundamentally espouses rational argumentation and the development of a scientific approach to logos. In the objectivist view, Gorgias works against traditional associations of logos with magic and witchcraft. Consigny, influenced particularly by contemporary postmodern pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish, proposes a third interpretive approach: “In order to avoid the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of rhapsodism in our attempt to escape the hermeneutic aporia that we face in seeking Gorgias, I suggest that we adopt a model of interpretation that may be characterized as pragmatic, conventionalist, or ‘communitarian’ – a model adumbrated by Protagoras and developed more recently by such scholars as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish… In this model of interpretation, there is no original and determinate text to be discovered, for texts themselves are fabrications made available through the use of hermeneutic conventions. That is, there are no ‘uninterpreted texts’ that exist apart from, and prior to, interpretations. Since the texts themselves are available only through the conventions and procedures of the interpretive community, it is only within these interpretations that an author’s thought becomes available, and there is no external entity or meaning that the interpretations represent” (17-18). Consigny’s approach, which articulates the necessity of grounding one’s arguments within a specific interpretive community, undoubtedly has affinities with the “middle way” I trace in this paper. However, whereas my middle way relies heavily on a “tropist” approach to philosophical rhetoric, Consigny, Rotry et al. tend to rely more on an argumentative approach to rhetoric (for the “tropist”- “argumentative” split, see endnote number four below). By emphasizing image and metaphor, a tropist approach ultimately claims that the tropological nature of discourse exists even prior to its embodiment within particular interpretive communities. In other words, a tropist approach emphasizes the individual process of ingenious discovery arising out of the fundamentally metaphorical ground of human existence, thus claiming that particular discourses are “discovered” within the metaphorical dynamics of the world per se rather than “thought up” within the logical repartee of intellectual communities.
5 The Nietzschean/Gorgianic middle way as I present it here has strong affinities with what Timothy W. Crusius, in his Forward to Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, calls the tropist approach, as opposed to the rhetoric-as-argument approach, to philosophical rhetoric. Crusius helpfully outlines these two “paths” characterizing rhetorical studies: “Philosophical rhetoric has taken and continues to take one of two paths, already well worn by the time the Sophists were contending with Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, we have rhetoric as argument, represented in recent thought by Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, and James Crosswhite, among many others. For them, rhetoric is informal reasoning about issues that arise in a radically contingent and uncertain world, especially public issues, where, if sweet reason fails to address difference, contention translates all too readily into power politics and the use of force. In a world armed to the teeth and always at war or on the edge of war, one need not strain to defend a rhetoric of reason. On the other hand, we have the “tropists” of modern rhetorical theory, who see the power of language as residing more in image and metaphor than in argument. Were it not for Kenneth Burke, whose thinking is tropist…Grassi would have no serious competitor on the ingenium side of recent rhetorical thought. As it is, the two must share the stage and continue to inspire resistance to the seductive narrowing of rhetoric to informal reasoning. Rhetoric is much more than a rhetoric of good reasons; if formal reasoning depends on ingenium for its beginning points, informal reasoning surely depends on ingenium no less” (xvii-xviii). As is evident from Crusius’s discussion, Grassi locates image and metaphor as primary for the inventive faculty of ingenium (for Grassi’s discussion of the notion of ingenium as it derives from Cicero, see Grassi 8-10; for his discussion of metaphor as the basis of rhetoric and philosophy, see especially 32-34). Without ever explicitly mentioning Nietzsche, Grassi throughout his Rhetoric as Philosophy articulates a tropological conception of human perception and communication that is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s claims in “On Truth and Lying” (see, for example, Grassi, xv, 33, 61, 65, and 89). What Grassi’s amazing little book does so successfully is trace the intellectual genealogy of the placement of metaphor at the center of human life from Cicero and Quintilian through the Italian Humanists (Pico, Bruni, and others) to Vico. All of these thinkers, according to Grassi, view metaphor not as secondary or added to a non-metaphorical primary reality, but as constituting the human reality of life in the world. Rather than serving as a possible embellishing tool of reason, metaphor as conceived by the line of thinkers Grassi discusses is actually the fundamental ground of reason. Grassi argues that without the inevitably metaphorical first principles (for the claim that all first principles are metaphorical in nature, see 33) that rational thought needs to carry out logical demonstrations (proofs) – first principles that are ingeniously “discovered” rather than rationally proven – rational thought could not do its work (see especially 21, 44, 62).


6 For a provocative discussion of Nietzsche’s style, which, in its reliance on images and metaphor, is described as “the grand style… of creative self-affirmation and world-affirmation” (60), see David Farrell Krell’s Infectious Nietzsche, particularly 56-82.

7 Two fruitful discussions of Nietzsche’s conception of language occur in Erich Heller’s “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche” (in his The Importance of Nietzsche, 141-157) and in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Tropes” (in hisAllegories of Reading, 103-119).

8 In unpunlished lecture notes contemporaneous with “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche explicitly claims that all language is both rhetorical and metaphorical (poetic): “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]” (23, brackets Gilman, Blair, and Parent); “What is usually called language is actually all figuration… the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25).

9 John Sallis’s Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, especially 9-42, investigates in the context of a detailed analysis of The Birth of Tragedy the way that, for Nietzsche, images possess the ability to open up the specificity of the world in a particularly human manner.

10 In a similar fashion, Grassi points out the disguised metaphoricity operative in the ostensibly purely rational realm of logic (i.e., the realm of the scientist and many a philosopher): “One problem, however, seems yet unsolved, namely, that an essential moment of rhetorical speech is metaphor. Can we claim that the original, archaic assertions on which rational proofs depend have a metaphorical character? Can we maintain the thesis that the archai have any connection with images as the subject of a ‘transferred’ meaning? Surprisingly enough, perhaps, we can speak about first principles only though metaphors; we speak of them as ‘premises,’ as ‘grounds,’ as ‘foundations,’ as ‘axioms.’ Even logical language must resort to metaphors, involving a transposition from the empirical realm of senses, in which ‘seeing’ and the ‘pictorial’ move to the foreground: to ‘clarify,’ to ‘gain insight,’ to ‘found,’ to ‘conclude,’ to ‘deduce.’ We also must not forget that the term ‘metaphor’ is itself a metaphor; it is derived from the verb metapherein ‘to transfer,’ which originally described a concrete activity” (33).

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist'

Question(s): Is digging possible for a dead-naturalist?; or: How to dig from above the ground?; or: How can Antaeus best avoid his “elevation, [his] fall”?; or: Can the work of poetry (“I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”) turn up an imaginal ground when the poet himself is a physically ungrounded, struggling Antaeus?; or: Can poetry catch the fleeting sound of a mythical landscape (“the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat”) when the poet’s ears are plugged by a map of sociopolitical categories?; or: How does poetry proceed in/respond to a climate of what Yeats calls “intellectual violence”?

Despite its ostensible status as primarily a volume of ars poetica – a kind of imaginative excavation that simultaneously investigates and demonstrates the craft of poetry – Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist reverberates with the above variously articulated question. Though the violence in Northern Ireland to which Heaney would overtly respond in North was still a few years away when Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist, latent political tension and a history of cultural dislocation were present in the soil worked in Heaney’s first volume of poetry. To put it another way: In Death of a Naturalist, Heaney is digging imaginary gardens of peat with real explosives in them. In response to a potentially volatile political situation, Heaney uses his squat pen to “dig” through personal and collective layers of memory in service of uncovering/creating a “personal Helicon,” a mythical Ireland that can serve as an imaginative ground for wandering – and increasingly threatened – Antaeuses: those for whom the oppositional, absolutist, grid-like logic of political ideology is not adequate for responsibly negotiating the contingencies of human life. As such, Death of a Naturalist reveals a characteristic of poetry missed by those critics who charge Heaney with irresponsibly shirking the political realm in some of his work: namely that, by creating

an order… true to the impact of external reality and… sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being… An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections (From “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, in Opened Ground, pg. 417),

poetry touches upon a fundamental human activity – imagining reality – antithetical to violent political movements that require fixed views of reality in order to proceed with their bloody work. In short, poetry redresses the falsely narrow vision of political ideologies that view the world in static us-them/right-wrong terms.

Many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist both affirm the poetic vocation and express doubts as to its efficacy in a non-literary, gun-filled world. In “Digging,” even as the poet’s pen powerfully evokes three overlapping layers of time, bringing together in a single lyric moment three generations of diggers in the Heaney line (pardon the pun); and even amid the stunning onomatopoeia of “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge” (note the placement of “edge” at the end (edge) of the slightly enjambed line), the poet hints that his work with words comes out of a felt lack, as if digging with a pen is somehow less “manly” than digging with a spade – “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”[1] The crisis of the poem turns upon the spade-less poet’s endeavor to find a way to “follow” ancestors at once personal and collective, ancestors who by digging into peat and bog are working a pre-political landscape, a mythical Ireland, an imaginal terrain. The final stanza provides an affirmation of the poet’s ability to work this terrain with his pen so as to unearth images of sensual specificity that nourish the collective inhabitants of a landscape. The poet discovers that joining his ancestors in digging occurs precisely through his ability to commemorate their – and his – activity: the poet digs by digging into the process of digging. The last three lines of the poem echo the opening stanza, with one change: “snug as a gun” in the first stanza gives way to “I’ll dig with it.” Thus at its end the poem both echoes its beginning and responds to it in such a way as to bring about a sense of resolution. One wonders: what else could the poet have done with his pen besides dig, and does the alternative to digging relate to the gun-like quality of the pen? In other words, is the declaration that “I’ll dig with it” a decision necessitated because the opening stanza obliquely raises a more violent alternative?

“Digging,” like Death of a Naturalist as a whole, poetically renders poetic craft. Part of this poetic rendering involves making thematic a tension concerning the role the poet can (should? must?) play when confronted with the threat of a form of violence that seeks to circumscribe personal memory and mythical landscape within reductive, factional categories. A distinction between, on the one hand, the attempt to dig into the reality-constructing wellsprings of the imagination, and on the other, the attempt to map reality rationally in the service of hierarchical sociopolitical projects (is this what a gun-like pen does?), is tentatively represented in Death of a Naturalist.[2]

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[1] Granted, this line could be read in other ways. Instead of revealing an insecurity, or at least an uncertainty, in relation to poetry’s role(s) in the world, it may display the opposite sentiment. Much depends on how one reads the phrase, “men like them.” Based on the poem as a whole, which appears to express a sense of awe toward these digging men, I reject a reading that would see a derogatory quality to the poet’s assessment of his digging predecessors.

[2] In order to develop this notion I would need to spend more time with the poem “Death of a Naturalist” in particular. Violence – both in the forced dislocation of the frogspawn and in the resulting vengeful response of the frogs – plays a more overt role in this poem. Removing the frogspawn into a classroom to observe the burgeoning tadpoles echoes the violence of constructing/ manipulating sociopolitical categories. Also, “Antaeus” appears to touch upon the incipient violence involved in the abstracting, lifting-off-the-ground movement of “map thinking.”