A Modern (and Brief) Look at Rhetoric

The idea of ekphrasis seems, to me, not only archaic in its intentions but also decidedly uncreative and unimaginative in the approach.  It is a technique that seems proper for an encyclopedia, but almost contrary to the tenets by which most literature is conceived.  The ancient Greek “art” of rhetoric that spawned ekphrasis, was devised by and taught to the elite.  Its purpose; to use language as a means of persuasion. Rhetoric in argument and politics was quite useful, but when it crosses over to art is where my mind starts to wonder.  Does the audience of a piece of art, really need to be persuaded? Do they need to put themselves fully in the hands of the artist? When looking at a piece of art, no matter the type media, part of the pleasure and most of the entertainment lies in my interpretation of the artist’s representation. When the artist tells me exactly what it is I need to look at and how it needs to be understood, the piece of art transforms into a lecture of sorts.  It’s then that I begin to ask whether the artist can be trusted as a teacher, and if that artist can’t be trusted as such, what good is their “art” in the way they deem it necessary to be viewed?

Rhetoric in art must have seemed necessary to the Greek upper class, not only did they extend their teachings to include ekphrasis, but they laid the claim that art is not art without following strict rules of rhetoric.  Possibly they saw the potential audience of a piece of art, as unable to understand what it meant—If someone did not see art in the way the artist himself saw it, then there was no point in the piece at all.

Yet, works of wonder can be created through the principles of rhetoric and ekphrasis.  The ability to describe an object as Homer does in the Iliad is masterful.  His creativity shines, but it is written in a way that is almost self-aggrandizing.  He requires nothing of the audience; no imagination, no emotion, no thought outside of what he has already stated, and in his extensive attempts to so fully describe something as real he loses what true art should always represent—that which is uniquely of the artist himself.

Plato and Aristotle would have been proud to read the Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.  It is the modern representation of an ancient Greek lyric.  He goes beyond telling you what you need to picture when reading of an object, he tells the audience what they are supposed to feel.  This seems to me an artistic failure from the start, but the self-glorification present throughout creates a poem nearly inaccessible to a modern reader. The final two lines, two of the most famous in all western poetry, snap any connection the audience may feel towards the rest of the poem.  To anyone who has existed outside a bubble, these lines show how inexperienced the poet is and creates a lack of trust that makes the rest of the poem difficult to swallow.

In opposition to the modernist concerns of the early part of the twentieth century, Auden did not consider an economy of words as the means to convey his perceptions.  Auden claimed in his essay Writing that truth should be told in art and poetry so that the art cannot be claimed to have any “ulterior purpose”.  Auden used Homer’s description of the shield to writes poem that recreates the image, while at the same time is a clear indictment of war especially in the modern era.  His belief that only through words can the “truth” be told, is a mistake when it comes to art—each individual must find their own truth, decide for themselves what to take from each piece, or what use is an actual audience when a mirror would give the same effect.  In opposition to the beliefs of Auden is Williams a true modernist poet.  The contrast between these two is seen most clearly in their respective poems about a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Williams leaves a plot in the hands of his audience, rather than bombarding them with imagery.  Meter and language take precedence in “Landscape With the Fall Of Icarus”. To Williams the poem has a separate existence from the reality in which we live; art not as an attempt at exact reconstruction but rather as the transmutation of an image from the mind of the artist to the paper. In Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” the reader is again seeing a modern example of ekphrasis; plot conveyed thoroughly through exhaustive imagery.

My major quarrel with rhetoric and its devices such as ekphrasis would be along the same lines as Williams or Eliot.  I prefer to see the creation of art that represents itself as art, not of reality.  As I said above, art based in rhetoric requires nothing of the audience except their open ears. While I do acknowledge the artistry that goes into describing something as convincingly as Homer or Keats, I also have a difficult time finding art out of their work as part of the audience.  When there is nothing left to discover or dwell on after the final word has been read, then the whole thing seems to be labor above a love.  Ultimately the textbook-like approach is resolutely far from art, but the creativity and imagination involved in translating an image into words as precisely as possible is, to many, an enviable artistic ability.