The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Pleasured speech
The limits of rhetoric

The good man, skilled in speaking. Attributed by Quintilian to Marcus Cato the Elder, this was the aim of instruction in classical rhetoric. The phrase also serves as an epigraph for Peter Dimock’s brief, difficult, and moving novel, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Like the Phaedrus, A Short Rhetoric takes the form of a lesson in writing. The novel is set in 1990, during the buildup to the first Gulf War. Jarlath Lanham writes a letter to his nephew, General, and to his ward, Des, bequeathing his share of the family estate to them once they attain their majority (in 2001). The estate is substantial, and it is hinted that Des may actually be Jarlath’s son. Jarlath is prohibited by a legal agreement from seeing both boys. The only thing he asks in return for his behest is that they read the instructions in rhetoric that form the body of his long and meandering letter.

Jarlath is half-mad with grief and guilt. He is the son of one of the principal planners of the Vietnam War, whom he calls simply Father and who closely resembles McGeorge Bundy, the prominent New England WASP who advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the escalation of the war. Like Bundy, Father was the author of two secret memos directly responsible for involving the United States more fully in the war—the first advocating a “Policy of Sustained Reprisal” against the Vietnamese populace, the second arguing for the increased use of combat troops and air strikes. (Jarlath quotes verbatim from Bundy’s real-life memos, which were first made public in the Pentagon Papers.) The reason for both types of escalation was political expediency: Bundy/Father knew the war was un-winnable but felt it would doom LBJ’s presidency to admit as much. Jarlath considers Father a war criminal. In addition, his brother, AG, was an army officer in Vietnam who seems to have allowed his men to collect human ears as souvenirs of combat.

Jarlath has been institutionalized a number of times, unable to cope with his inability to confront his father about the atrocities he put into motion. He writes his Short Rhetoric as an attempt to help Des and General do what he could not: speak truth to power. As he urges them, “Practice some method of direct address with which to produce sound in the pleasured mouth for another history” (34).

But once again he fails. For while Jarlath is obsessed with articulating what he calls, in the first line of his letter, “a reliable method of direct address” (5), he is unable to follow one in his own writing. His “reliable method” turns out to be a version of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest surviving Latin treatise on rhetoric, from about 80 BCE. While sometimes attributed to Cicero, the distinguished Roman statesman and author, the ad Herrenium is usually considered too pedestrian to be his work. It is most noted for its discussion of memory, which suggests that orators create a series of visual backgrounds and images that will help them remember and order what they want to say (a technique now commonly known as creating a Memory Palace). Jarlath seizes on this system, using five photographs from the Vietnam War as backgrounds and five family scenes as images. One of these photos is the famous image of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire; another is of Hanoi under American assault; still another is of AG with his soldiers, one of whom holds a necklace made of severed ears.

But the method gets the better of him. While Jarlath describes each photo and scene over and over, he is never able to use them to create a “direct address” to Father, to speak capably against what he knows has been done. Instead, his memories interrupt and overwhelm his attempts at speech.

Indeed, several of the scenes Jarlath employs for his memory system describe moments of speechlessness. Jarlath tells of watching Father’s lover attempt suicide (by immolating herself, like the monk in the photo) without being able to shout or run to help her (36—37). (Father rescues her.) He recalls storming into Father’s office, eager at last to confront him—“I wanted Father to have to say something about AG, and I would answer” (60)—but instead being reduced to a wordless rage, reaching across the desk and “grabbing and briefly holding the white softness of the front of Father’s shirt” (27). (Security intervenes.) The last time he is permitted to see Des and General, he places the five photos he has been guarding so carefully in a mesh bag attached to a kite they are flying together. When Father and AG rush toward them (they are afraid Jarlath may harm the boys), he releases the kite and the photos into the thin air. The book ends with Jarlath sitting by Father as he lies dying, confused and unable to communicate. Each of these scenes marks a failure of language. Jarlath never leaves the family. He never makes any sort of skilled or “pleasured” speech.

He does argue, though, that all these events occurred before he formulated his method:

If you take nothing else from this moment of direct address, take this possibility: that the possession of an ornamented style may be all you need. If ever you, too, should find it necessary to leave the family, consider that you may not have to wait for something more in order to speak. (100)

And so, Jarlath continues to place his faith in system, in “the constant application of a practiced mind” (80). He hopes his rhetoric will enable Des and General to speak in ways he could not: “Without an applied art of rhetoric, this task cannot be done” (57).

I find this faith both moving and misguided. Jarlath is a witness to evil and atrocity. He understands that for the sake of political gain, his Father cynically helped to engineer a war he knew was un-winnable and that his brother participated in its horrors. And he is ashamed to admit that “we lived those years without speaking the family history all of us knew” (78). But still, he hopes these failures of human empathy and courage can be atoned for by a theory of “careful speech for another history” (101).

To be fair, Jarlath is aware that “theory without continuous practice in speaking is of little avail” (31). And unlike Socrates, who has Phaedrus right in front of him but shows little interest in what he might have to say, Jarlath seems to hold real affection and respect for Des and General. To some degree, he also seems to realize that he has become captive to the images and scenes he revisits so compulsively, and he urges the boys not to simply use his system but to create images of their own “for your own progress in this art of pleasured speech” (21). But the terms of his release from the hospital do not permit him to meet in person with Des and General, and so, in the end, all he can offer them is his theory, a method, a long and meandering letter in which he obsessively recycles an old Latin treatise on rhetoric. Even he seems to glimpse the futility of this project, as he tells Des and General in the last paragraph of his letter, “If I do not hear from either of you, I will understand” (114).

One of the key terms in Jarlath’s thinking is pleasured. He repeats the word time and again: “pleasured speech,” “a pleasured style,” “the pleasured air,” “a pleasured man.” But it’s not a word I’ve ever seen used in other discussions of rhetoric or writing, and Jarlath never says exactly what he means by it. I suspect, though, that he offers a clue to its definition when, near the end of his letter, he mentions that “I sometimes thought of calling my method Some Speech for Father Descending in Asia: The Pleasure of Rule” (94). For while Jarlath fears and hates Father, he also admires his ability to act, to shape events to his will, or pleasure. Jarlath aims for a similarly pleasured shaping of language; he suggests, for instance, that an “ornamented style” may also exhibit a “pleasure of rule” (99). Pleasured speech is thus language controlled by the speaker and through which he controls events. It is an ineffectual man’s dream of power.

Like Socrates, Jarlath imagines a rhetoric that can solve the problem of writing or speaking in advance. The good man, he believes, if properly trained, will not be stopped speechless before events, will not have to resort to physically attacking his Father across his desk, but will rather be able to call upon the images and scenes he has stored in his memory to make an argument that “will secure, as far as possible, the agreement of your hearers” (101). The poignancy of the novel stems from our realization that no method alone can make that happen.

I am aware of shortchanging A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by reading it simply as a lesson in writing. What Jarlath hopes to teach through his rhetoric is not the same thing Peter Dimock hopes to achieve in his novel. Jarlath hopes to construct a system, a rhetoric, that will allow him to cope with the pain his life and family have brought him. Dimock’s novel reveals the madness and futility of trying to do so. (Although I suspect that, in some other ways, Dimock’s goals are not entirely unlike Jarlath’s—that he also hopes his novel will help keep the political cynicism that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War lodged in our cultural memory.)

But I also think there is a value in asking what, if anything, Jarlath actually manages to accomplish through his rhetoric. And here, as with the Phaedrus, the lesson seems to me a cautionary one. It is hard to imagine Des and General reading Jarlath’s convoluted and repetitive rhetoric with anything more than bafflement and perhaps thanks: our crazy uncle has left us his money and this weird letter. As works of literature, both texts are brilliant. As lessons in writing, both are failures. I suspect this is on purpose—that Plato and Dimock want us to notice how the lessons of their teachers begin to falter, to see the limits of their rhetorics. Socrates fails through his indifference to the actual views of the person he is talking with. Jarlath fails because he asks his method to do more than any method possibly can.

These are, of course, versions of the same problem. The more time you spend elaborating a general theory of writing, the less you have to give to the specific projects of individual writers. This is not to suggest that theory has no place in teaching writing. To the contrary. If a theme runs through the novels, movies, and plays I’ve looked at in this book, it’s that theory gains its value in the act of teaching, of responding to student work. When Sassoon helps Owen revise the lines of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” in Pat Barker’s Regeneration, he draws on a theory of poetry. When Frank pushes Rita to produce a more “considered essay” in Educating Rita, he relies on a theory of criticism. When teachers have no theory of writing, their work can be little more than a simple exercise in charisma, of dead poets and wonder boys seducing and inspiring their charges.

A good teacher needs to respond to a piece of writing with a sense of what it might become. To do so requires not only something like a rhetoric, a theory of writing, but also a close attentiveness to the aims of individual writers. We need to be willing, that is, to respond to one piece after another, each in its minute particulars, over and over again, to imagine that the next writer we read and work with might have something to say we haven’t heard before, that their text might find a form that differs from what we’ve seen before. The measure of our work is what we help others to write.