My choice of Lawrence as an example is in part fortuitous, in part predestined. He fits the case, and I am a Lawrentian.
3
What is poetry, essentially, but the attempt to say the unsayable?
Elsewhere I have written that an economic theory can account for wealth, but only a story can explain what it means to be wealthy. The science of aerodynamics explains the flight of a 747, but only a poem can convey my exhilaration when I feel the first lift of takeoff and hear the shocks thump to their full extension as the wheels leave the ground.
It is useful here to think of a distinction made by Susanne Langer in 1942—that between discursive forms and presentational forms. She is on the track when she says,
I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolic schema other than discursive language.
And the psychologist Endel Tulving helps, with his distinction between verbal and episodic knowledge. The verbal is conceptual, depersonalized: “The formula for table salt is NaCl.” But episodic knowledge is biographical, personal, contextualized: “I remember learning the formula for table salt, NaCl, from a dog-eared, navy blue chemistry text during my freshman year in high school. In class, I sat next to Anne Holt and. . . .”
Perhaps, for a beginning, we can say that poetry is the residue, the excess, after the discursive, purely verbal element of meaning has been extracted—what remains after “alembification,” to use one of Kenneth Burke’s favorite terms. Once our students have stated and hence removed the thesis of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the leftovers are poetry, a kind of knowledge so puzzling that a whole industry labors away to account for it. (No Fermi Lab for this gigantic enterprise, of course.)
If there is an excess, it was created by someone: the author or the reader. Or both. Since you and I can take anything to be a poem, we can create excess—superabundance—in any text. Or, alternatively, we create the excess and hence take the text to be a poem. Guilt ridden as we are, we will always attribute the fecundity to the author, not to our Spartan selves.
In the game of “chicken,” we can force our students to experience the principle of speakability. In the game of poetry can we force our students to experience the principle of sayability.
4
Starting, I presume, with Aristotle, “rhetoric” has through the centuries undergone the pressures and counter- pressures of definition. On the one hand, it is the art of finding the available means of persuasion in regard to any subject whatever and, on the other hand, it is the search for identification, consubstantiality. (As I think of numerous other hands, the image of the many-armed Indian goddess arises, but I shall desist.)
Not that I can resist adding my own definition of rhetoric to the hundreds that we could accumulate with a couple of hours in a modest public library. Tentatively, stipulatively, without signing contracts or taking oaths, asking in advance for tolerance and forgiveness, I shall posit, for now, that rhetoric is the study of the unspeakable and the unsayable.
Though I will not, in this essay, limn the anatomy of the newly conceived field, we could begin to think of rhetorical theories of scene (for speakability is always an intense agent-scene dialectic), of rhetorical epistemology (following the leads of Kenneth Burke), of a rhetorical psychology, and, not least, of a rhetorical linguistics. (With what fields of knowledge would the rhetorical stop? What area of inquiry is arhetorical?)
But rhetoric has never been merely a “study of” subject; it has always concerned “how to.”
English 101, The Unspeakable and the Unsayable. Introduction to the principles and practices of pushing language to its limits. Students will be encouraged to produce writings that test the very limits of speakability. The class will also write much poetry in the attempt to say the unsayable.
English 101 as the “chicken” game and the poetry game!
5
Then what about English 400, Advanced Composition? I can think of three possibilities.
The first and most obvious is that it be a course in painting—beyond the unsayable to the visual image.
English 400. Beyond the Sayable. Students will use paints, brush, palette, and canvas to express their ideas. No assigned writing. No class discussion.
The second, and certainly most practical, move turns out like this:
English 400. Business Writing. Instruction and practice in writing such documents as reports, memos, proposals, and business letters. Assignments will be individualized according to the career goals of the students.
“Business Writing,” you see, would result from an act of purposeful forgetfulness, a general strategy so necessary for survival in the academy and of the academy that a study of our institutions of higher learning should concentrate on what faculties and administrations don’t think they’re doing rather than on what they say they’re doing and what they actually think they’re doing. (The discrepancy between what they say they’re doing and what they actually think they’re doing is also an important source of understanding for disinterested observers or partisan investigators.)
When it is proposed, the third possibility is almost certain to encounter trouble with the university’s curriculum committee, and yet it follows most logically from our argument and is in many ways the most attractive:
English 400. Silence.
Insomniac Rhapsody on Vitalism1
July 9, 1985
2:13 a.m.
Insomnia, my God I’m insomniac!
Can’t sleep on my stomach or on my back.
Thoughts race through my muddled brain,
Do U-turns and race back again.
I like the last couplet of the quatrain. Definitely, I have a flair for rhyme. In fact, that might be my only flair.
My flares are all burned out. My gifts are silver ashes and hollow red tubes beside life’s freeway. The semis roar past, carrying their cargoes into the night, through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada. “Breaker. Breaker. This is Boilermaker. Smokey’s parked behind the Little America billboard. So slow down, you hard drivin’ mothers.”
If I had any guts, any initiative, I’d call ___2 right now and arrange to meet you in Las Vegas, where we’d see some shows, play some roulette, drink some whiskey—because, you know, Las Vegas is LIFE! The glittering signs, the whirr of the ivory ball as it races around the wheel, the snap of the cards, the clank of the one-armed bandit, all the cigarette smoke, the prime rib dinner (any hour of the day) for $4.99, and look at that fat lady over there in the pink polyester pantsuit: her hair is blue! She’s pumping quarters into the slot. A widow from Southern California. (Her husband was a fireman in Anaheim.) My heart goes out to her—poor lost soul in her K Mart clothes, looking for some kind of lease on life (before she joins her late husband in the family plot at Rose Hills Memorial Park), pumping coins into the slot as if . . . as if . . . as if she had found a hypnotic, mechanical act of love to see her through. Oh, may she achieve the three-bar orgasm that will bring a cascade of quarters, enough to sustain her through the next two days, for she’s on a three-day tour and has allowed herself only twenty dollars for gambling. Notice her posterior. As the saying goes, it’s as broad as two ax handles and a plug of tobacco. If you’ll get a bit nearer to her, you can smell her perfume—so sweet that it reminds me of a childhood visit to a candy factory.
No, I’m not tempted by this little bon-bon, the Tootsie Roll. But why am I now turning cynical, for, you see, my intent was to understand and love her, yet the perfume was so overpowering