As Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown in her important book The Eloquence of Color (1993), this broad conception of rhetoric, which is quite old, has long been connected to acting, painting, and the visual arts in general. In ancient Greece, it was a techne that controlled the entire empire of communication, and at a later, more specialized, moment in its history, it became one of the three crucial disciplines of the Roman trivium, which eventually shaped the curriculum in European schools. Even so, as John Bender and David Wellbery have pointed out in their anthology The Ends of Rhetoric (1990), rhetorical art was never without critics, who usually accused it of fostering luxurious excess, irrational power, and demagogic manipulation. Plato, in his quarrel with the sophists, distinguished between the language of rhetoric, which deals in mere adornment and emotional affect, and the language of philosophy, which deals in truth. Francis Bacon and every major scientist from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment denigrated rhetoric in contrast to the neutral, transparent discourse of scientific discovery. Immanuel Kant described the major part of rhetoric as “the art of deceiving by a beautiful show” and attacked its use in both the law court and the pulpit on the grounds that it was designed “to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom” (Critique of Judgment, 171). Not long afterward, the romantic poets forsook what M. H. Abrams calls the “mirror” of neoclassical art with the “lamp” of individual expression, thus asserting the primacy of the literary artist’s imagination over the need to communicate with an audience.
From the time of Plato and Aristotle until the nineteenth century, rhetoric was usually subordinated to philosophy and devoted to the study of inventio, dispositio, and elecutio in verbal language. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had narrowed to a typology of figures of speech, all of them labeled with Latin names, and to a genteel, highly controlled application of these figures and their appropriate gestures to the arts of acting and public address. The printed word had long since gained ascendency over oral communication, and verbal and visual rhetoric of the more flamboyant kind began to take on negative connotations associated with bourgeois pretentiousness, populist politics, and the newly emerging mass-communication and advertising industries. At this point, artistic modernism attempted to administer a deathblow to rhetoric. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, and particularly in the years immediately after World War I, there was a wholesale artistic revolt against the very term, which was seen as a discredited technique of an imperial establishment whose representatives usually spoke in the elevated tones of moral preachment.
What was at stake during these years was not so much an abandonment of suasion, which would have been virtually impossible, as a new and heterodox contempt for certain audiences—an antirhetorical rhetoric that almost defined the modernist ethos. The keynote of modernist architecture was the rejection of classical ornament in favor of less decorative forms derived from industry or landscape; modernist painting divested itself of the sentimental, representational imagery of the nineteenth century, becoming increasingly abstract; art photography favored the austere, intellectual qualities of disegno over the emotional qualities of colore; and modern dance was predicated on a rejection of the rhetorical hierarchies in ballet in favor of what was sometimes called “task performance.” This suspicion of elevated tone and direct appeals to emotion was particularly apparent in modernist poetry, whose readers, according to T. S. Eliot, were never to be addressed “as if [they] were at a public meeting” (quoted in Stead, 169). Eliot himself went further, stripping poetry even of the social conventions of communication. The Waste Land (1922) was an ironic, deliberately antirhetorical poem addressed to a hypocrite lecteur and based on an art of verbal collage, or on what Hugh Kenner called “juxtaposition without copula” (quoted in Stead, 169). Despite the many academic commentators who tried to make it seem coherent, The Waste Land steered very close to surrealism, providing eloquence, rhetorical flourish, and a sense of luxury only through quotations.
Something roughly similar was happening in the novel, and this development, particularly in the hands of writers such as Joyce and Nabokov, later provoked Wayne Booth’s criticism in The Rhetoric of Fiction on the grounds that it left readers with no moral and ethical guideposts. Whether or not one agrees with Booth, it’s certainly true that the whole tendency of twentieth-century fiction was to become more ambiguous and in one sense “cinematic,” less explicitly “rhetorical.” In the English language, modernist fiction began in the first decade of the century with the attempts by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford to elevate showing over telling, and it culminated with James Joyce’s “invisible” narration and pastiche of literary convention in Ulysses (1922). Significantly, the seventh or “Aeolus” chapter of that book is devoted to the art of rhetoric, which it treats satirically. It shows us a group of Dublin windbags, most of them journalists and small-time politicians, lolling about a newspaper office, quoting speeches and news reports from the good old days. The conversation of this group contains almost a hundred examples of Latinate rhetorical forms (chiasmus, diasyrm, asyndeton, enthymeme, apostrophie, epigram, etc.), but the two most sympathetic characters in the chapter, the adman Leopold Bloom and the poet Stephen Dedalus, are markedly plain, sometimes even cryptic in their speech. In different ways, both are estranged from Dublin’s charmingly seductive but ultimately empty world of masculine palaver and antiquated eloquence.
An analogous development occurred in the theater. The word actor in English was originally meant to suggest the “action” of orators, and early textbooks on acting were designed to teach the artful employment of gestures and tones of voice to move, persuade, and embody traits of character. The connection between acting and speechmaking began to disappear around 1890, with the debates surrounding William Archer’s Masks or Faces? (1888), which prepared the way for what I’ve elsewhere described as a “shift from a semiotic to a psychological conception of performance” (Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 52). On the stage, actors sometimes stood in corners or turned their backs to the audience, and the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky led to a complete rejection of a centuries-old tradition of codified pantomime. The Stanislavskian revolution didn’t completely eliminate rhetoric, any more than novels or poems eliminated communication, but, like most forms of modern art, it was less openly solicitous or directly aimed toward the audience; it often relied on indirection, requiring viewers or readers to work at the discovery of meaning.
What, you may ask, has all this to do with movies? The answer is that Hollywood has a paradoxical or mixed relation to the modernist movements, at once participating in the general reaction against flamboyant rhetoric and fostering a full-scale return to bodily eloquence and visual suasion. D. W. Griffith is especially interesting in this regard because he’s both a modern aesthete and a Victorian ideologue. The Birth of a Nation (1915) helps to create a new form of intimate, vernacular acting and an “invisible” style of continuity editing, but at the same time it’s a definitive example of the cinema as argument—an emotionally charged, propagandistic melodrama, filled with spectacle and preachment, punctuated with title cards that aspire to old-fashioned oratory. When Griffith said that he was trying to make us “see,” he was declaring his affinity not with Joseph Conrad but with the ancient orators—who, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein demonstrates, were trained to paint pictures with words, and who sometimes unveiled paintings before their audiences as a way of achieving emotional assent to their arguments. Lichtenstein points out that ancient philosophy usually tried to control the powers of this visual rhetoric because of its dangerous emotional effects. Plato and Aristotle were alike, she notes, “in their determination to grant the spectacle only a secondary function. . . . They suggest that the greatest danger for the poet’s and the orator’s arts resides in the performances of acting and staging . . . and that a constant threat to the [priority