Longinus

Longinus shrinks and shrink-wraps Aristotle. Where Aristotle attempts to describe living literature, pressing upon it form and category and not unmindful of the violation, Longinus prescribes. Those wishing a good critical review of Aristotle's strictures (something that bears quite directly upon any practical use of Longinus' theories) might check out J. Hillis Miller's Reading Narrative, which methodically pries apart Aristotle's readings of Homer and, particularly Sophocles. Miller doesn't answer all the questions he raises, but then, doing so may take some time.

Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.

Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:

1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:

"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)

As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.

He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:

EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:

Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.

IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.

WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.

For examples, see the following:

1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.

2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.

3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.

4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.

INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.

* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.

ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:

"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).