"Emerson and the Death of Pathos" (article)

My thesis is straightforward: Emerson is the essentialized Romantic Idealist whose solipsism does away with pathos, the result being a rhetoric (or anti-rhetoric) that is self-expressive rather than communicative. Paradoxically, of course, this self-expressive rhetoric has communicated itself powerfully within English-department humanities (i.e., literary studies and composition), creating the scene in which imaginative literature is highly valued and non-imaginative literature (e.g., autobiography, biography, essays, history) is devalued and in which creative writing is sacred while composition is profane. In adopting and then etherealizing rationalist views of the mind, Emerson, like the British Romantics, internalized invention, transforming it from discovery to imagination or creativity; in viewing the imagination as a dual faculty, Emerson, following Coleridge, created the basis for splitting the canon and for degrading composition.

A prerequisite to the discussion that follows is clarification of an ambiguity in the meaning of "rhetoric." One sense of the word applies to practice and the other to theory; thus, one can speak of the rhetoric of Aristotle's Rhetoric. Even though Emerson did not compose a Rhetoric, a systematic treatise, from his writings there emerge a rhetorical theory and an implied pedagogy. Taking the power of his rhetoric for granted, I will be concerned with the theory and pedagogical doctrine embedded in the works of this "mind of America."

Emerson and the American Psyche

The texts of Emerson's religion of self-reliance are, of course, as indeterminate, as richly ambiguous, as those of any other sacred belief, which is precisely why Harold Bloom says that Emerson's

American Religion of Self-Reliance is a superb literary religion, but its political, economic, and social consequences, whether manifested Left or Right, have now helped place us in a country where literary satire of politics is impossible, since the real thing is far more outrageous than even a satirist of genius could invent. ("Introduction" 9)

From Emerson, William Bennett could gain (and, for all I know, has gained) both solace for his dismal vision of America and substance for his conservative philosophy; on the same source, Henry Giroux could base his commitment to the ideal of teaching and his radical pedagogy. (It is not outrageous to say that Emerson could be the spiritual mentor of both Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.) Emerson is, after all, very easy for an American to love. Writing about "Nature," Kenneth Burke says, "An enemy might want to rate this early essay of Emerson's as hardly other than a Happiness Pill. But I admit: I find it so charming and buoyant, I'd be willing to defend it even on that level" ("I, Eye, Ay" 186).¹

The distinction that Bernard DeVoto somewhat impiously makes between Mark Twain and Emerson is crucial:

[T]he genius of New England was a genius for formalizing, for abstraction, for insulating the mind from mortality. . . . Holmes and Emerson versified pious generalities. . . . They were village internationalists and whatever Lucretius or the Buddha had said about the soul was immediate in their minds, but they basked in an assurance of provincial distinction and they knew nothing whatever about mankind. (185)

Holmes, Emerson, and the other New England sages were precious and provincial; they moralized and didn't tell stories; they were, in fact (at least in DeVoto's judgment), not in the American mainstream, as was Mark Twain. Could it be that Americanists must be either Emersonians or Twainians, denizens of Emerson's spiritual Concord or of Mark Twain's carnal Hannibal, Virginia City, and San Francisco? An essay on Mark Twain as the precursor or founder of an American religion, even in Harold Bloom's metaphorical sense ("Emerson: The American Religion"), is inconceivable, yet DeVoto is able to speak of the Emersonian philosophy being "well along toward its eventual fulfillment in Christian Science" (184).

Emerson and Method

In the last half of the eighteenth century, faculty psychology, associationism, and "method"² tended to bring invention out of the agora and confine it in the individual consciousness (Crowley, Winterowd and Blum), but it was Emersonian Idealism-Transcendentalism that completed the process for Americans. In fact, Emerson converts faculty psychology into mysticism. The intellect is the great methodist; it "pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles" ("Intellect" 293), which explains the greatness of Plato, the definer whose "defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world" (Emerson, "Plato" 475; emphasis added).

The mind talking to itself—the ultimate solipsism! And Emerson is, of course, the great solipsizer. It is almost redundant, though necessary, to quote from "Self-Reliance":

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought [sic]. (145)

Everyone who interprets Emerson recognizes this movement inward, this radical individualism. For Matthiessen, it is "how a single man contains within himself, through his intuition, the whole range of human nature" (7). Bloom speaks of "God in oneself" and quotes an entry of October 27, 1831 from Emerson's journals: "It is God in you that responds to God without, and indeed is God in oneself" (Bloom, "Introduction" 5).

That methodism was a major force shaping Romantic rhetoric is beyond doubt, and for evidence, we can turn to Coleridge. In Essay IV of The Friend, he starts out with a comparison of educated men of superior mind with ignorant men. The ignorant use memory alone, recalling events seriatim, as they occurred, strung together in the telling with "and then," "and there," and "and so" (317). In fact, this ignorant person doesn't understand method:

Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of method. (318)

The excellence of art is its method. For example, the genius of Shakespeare consists in "that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science" (323). Plato was, of course, a methodist, for he sought "a ground that is unconditional and absolute . . . thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system" (326). According to Lee Rust Brown, Emerson, seeing the apparent diversity of nature systematized and realizing that the rhodora or any other plant in the garden was synecdochic, became a methodist on his visit to the Parisian Jardin des plantes in 1833 (57-80). Whether or not his visit to the Jardin was the catalyst, he nonetheless had become a Platonist long before his visit to Paris, and he (and Coleridge) viewed Plato as the supreme methodist.

Now we can ask ourselves, "How would a methodist go about composing if, that is, he or she took the philosophical-psychology seriously—and what sorts of texts would be valued? The answer arrived at inductively from the premises is that the Emersonian version of the methodist would survey his or her inner resources and then assemble them methodically according to the guiding inner vision, without concern for the addressee. This is a momentous step, for it leaves both invention (as discovery) and pathos (as direct concern for audience) behind, to desiccate in the aridity of the rationalistic past.

Emerson is as enigmatic and contradictory in his statements about the composing process as he is with other subjects, but one can extract a theory of composition from his writings. Early on, Emerson says:

Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of the truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. ("Nature" 39)³

Emerson's process, as Robert Spiller and others have given accounts of it, enfranchises a paradoxically methodical way of bringing order out of chaos. Spiller says that Emerson's method of composition was to mine nuggets (pluck rhodoras) from his journals and then build around them, "as a musician might a symphony, a composition made up of the notes (the pun is inescapable) he gleaned from his own written words. . . " (115). In Thoreau, Henry Seidel Canby, as quoted by John McAleer, says that Thoreau learned to compose "by sentences or brief paragraphs inconsecutive as the flashes of perception which they recorded" from Emerson, as well as arranging these bits and pieces around a central theme (McAleer 337).

Finally, we have Spiller's testimony: "[T]he essays themselves are very difficult to read, a fact which has often worried me as I have leapt from one brilliant phrase to the next but plodded through the long paragraphs which seemed to lead nowhere" (115). The difficulty, says Spiller, arises from the method of Emerson's thinking, not from its complexity—from Emerson's reliance on intuition rather than logic, language being "for him the symbol of spiritual insights rather than the conveyor of ideas and facts" (115). "We live in succession, in division, in particles," says Emerson, and one cannot help but think that his journals recorded those particles:

Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and spectator, the subject and the object are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. ("The Over-Soul" 262)

In the essays, Emerson methodically attempted to bring the particles into a whole.

And now we encounter one of the great ironies of American Emersonianism: his currency in poststructural English-department humanities. Poirier says that Emerson is uncomfortable in using—making concessions to—conventional sentences and paragraphs, "with their implicit commitment to ideas of duration, sequence, and logical progression" (169-70). He continues:

Obviously I am not describing what a dreary criticism likes to call "verbal strategies," as if language were passively available to an author's already premeditated intentions. His, rather, is a design upon language and syntax, an exploratory and never completed effort which the reader is asked to join. He struggles, and he knows he struggles, within the mediations which consciousness creates for itself through language. (170)

The disastrous implication here—whether Emerson's or only his interpreter's—is that the writer cannot know what he or she is setting out to do, let alone understand the means whereby that purpose might be accomplished. A homely anecdote—written in conventional sentences—will clarify my intention. When a student comes to me with one of his or her texts (i.e., a theme or term paper), my first question is this: "What do you want this paper to do?" If the response is "To explain my conception of genius," I might say, "Well, it seems to me that you've succeeded admirably, for I think I know what you're getting at," or I might say, "Gosh, from my limited point of view, at least, you haven't succeeded." If, however, the student said, "I want my paper to demonstrate the mediations which consciousness creates for itself through language," I think I would probably respond thus: "Gee, I don't know how you can avoid doing that, for everything you write is such a demonstration." And, in any case, Poirier apparently feels that his explication has clarified Emerson's semantic intention; that is, I take "The Question of Genius" to be an expository essay. Poirier, like the other commentators on Emerson, attempts to rationalize texts that are fragmentary, contradictory, and basically incoherent. And this is a poignant moment in criticism, for Poirier and his confrères are so much products of Western rationality and a scholarly tradition that they must regularize (rationalize) texts ("The Wasteland," Pound's Cantos) to make them fit the criteria. How can one write an incoherent essay to explain the incoherence of another text, and how can a merely incoherent text be part of the canon?

The phenomenon of an academic writer explicating and defending texts that presumably transgress the norms of logical, conventional discourse and indeed urging other writers to transgress is both common now (in our poststructuralist era) and paradoxical, for the very arguments in favor of transgression are themselves patently conventional, within the norms of genre established by long tradition and maintained by such institutions as the Modern Language Association of America.⁴ Furthermore, as literary scholarship goes, so goes composition/rhetoric: embedded as it is within the English-department institution, it is unsurprising to find composition/rhetoric echoing (imitating, conforming to) modes and trends of literary scholarship. Until composition became self-consciously a field, such imitation was not the case, but since the 1960s, when composition emerged as a discipline housed in the English department, it was inevitable that compositionists, for a variety of reasons (not all of which are mendacious or self-serving), would let the currents of literary scholarship carry their barques toward that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns (e.g., Faigley, Fragments of Rationality; Gere, ed., Into the Field; Harkin and Schilb, eds., Contending with Words; Spellmeyer, Common Ground).

Emerson, (un)fortunately, lacked the vocabulary, but he was very much in the spirit of our deconstructive age (which some now claim is passé). McAleer quotes a passage from Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson where Emerson says to Woodbury, "The most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him; that will be better for . . . both. A little guessing does no harm, so I would assist him with no connections" (McAleer 6). Art, Emerson tells us, does not convey truth; it is the image of a soul ever progressing, but never getting nearer the truth ("Art" 305-15). Poirier puts it this way:

A criticism that proposes to find in literature things "to know," "to learn," "to propagate," has already decided that literature is not to "flow," as Emerson would have it, but to "freeze" ("The Poet"), a kind of immobilized treasure trove out of which "thoughts" and "sayings" and ideas might be lifted, allowing for the concession that each age will have somewhat different preferences. (181)

Again it is Poirier who provides the moment of illumination. Emerson does get himself into inextricable tangles, and "Having followed the writer into the maze, the reader may at any time decide simply to leave him there, particularly if the confusions turn out to be the results of incompetence or laziness or a limp dependence on someone else's terminology" (169). However, Emerson is not such a writer; he is in a battle with language, a never-ending war in which, it seems, neither side wins. The poet, that unique individual who contains all knowledge, goes into the field (or the ring) in the hopeless contest against "the institutional force of language" (169). According to Poirier, "[Emerson] gets almost audibly exasperated with the prospect that his reader might actually believe what he is saying, that the writer really is expected to mean what he is saying" (169). It is only Emerson's naive reader, then, who bases his or her faith on the text, who attempts to draw eternal wisdom from the essays. The great paradox is this: insofar as the minds of English-department humanists are Emersonian, they would call for "writerly" texts and give the best marks to those that are "readerly."

Emerson and Imagination

A brief map of the territory that I am about to cover will make my argument easier to understand—and to attack! Like Coleridge, Emerson split the imagination into two faculties, thus making hierarchy inevitable. As Coleridge is frequently interpreted or misinterpreted, the primary imagination was the recorder (analogously, a photographer: Margaret Bourke White) and the secondary imagination was the synthesizer and creator (an artist: Mary Cassatt). This hierarchically conceived duality was, as I said earlier, the basis for (1) the split in the canon between imaginative and non-imaginative literature and (2) the elevation of creative writing and the degradation of composition. But another consequence was equally disastrous: the devaluation of action and the concomitant exaltation of contemplation.

Even though Emerson did not, so far as I know, use the rubric "primary" and "secondary," in fact he defined two faculties more clearly than had his master. The "Commodity" section of "Nature" is a statement of one common interpretation of primary imagination, and the "Beauty" section equates with secondary. "Under the general name of commodity," says Emerson, "I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature" (7). Though commodity is no small boon, it is "the only use of nature which all men apprehend" (7) and includes the useful arts, technology, and sense experience (8). When one conceives of the imagination as twofold, the inevitability of hierarchy ranks one above the other, and such is the case in Emerson, for one finds in the offhand remark about all men apprehending the "advantages which our senses owe to nature" the basis for that maddening elitism which enables one who has read Finnegan's Wake to assume humane superiority over one who has not.

But, says Emerson, "A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty," and he goes on, in effect, to define the nature of beauty, which, of course, is in here, not out there: "First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight" (9). It's such a necessary part of human experience that, "in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty" (9; emphasis added). Even the Hottentots and Lapplanders that Hugh Blair compares with Longinus and Mr. Addison are capable of—cannot avoid—this perception (1:II, 27). For Emerson, "To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again" ("Nature" 9-10).

It is the case, then, that one does not need the pleasures of taste, the acumen of a Longinus or an Addison, to achieve this spiritual renewal; the New World of nature is there for the taking, and the Old World of (literary) culture is at least unnecessary.

What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re-form for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with blue east for their background, and the starts of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music. ("Nature" 10)

Yet Emerson will not be satisfied, because "The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to [Nature's] perfection" ("Nature" 11). This spiritual element is there for the taking, yet most men are—and I use my language advisedly—slobs. The average man "may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution" ("Nature" 11). The "higher spiritual element" is apparently Blair's "taste" rarefied, etherealized, but eerily it does not include kids, grandkids, family, or friends. It is pure, essential, ideal. And never in the essays, Emerson's official pronouncements, do actual human relationships play a part; the world of the essays, the corpus that sets forth the American religion, is (per DeVoto) one of abstractions, as if the actual, the palpable, the real would sully the ideal wisdom distilled from the journals. And here is the paradox: in the journals, Emerson captures the texture of life as he was unwilling to do in the essays; in his writing for public consumption, he was, in his abstractions, more a Bacon than a Montaigne.

With characteristic wit and wisdom, James Kincaid (in an unpublished paper delivered at the 1994 CCCC) said this about English-department humanists: they eternally prepare for action, but are never ready to act; they are coffee-room radicals (my term, not his). Of the three sorts of rhetoric named by Aristotle, only epideictic is not aimed at action; the purpose of judicial rhetoric is to determine guilt or innocence (exoneration or punishment), and the purpose of deliberative rhetoric is to determine what actions to take in the future. Emersonian rhetoric is quietistic. The key sentences are these, from "The Transcendentalist": "Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to perform it. . . . It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, of events, or of actors, but imports" (98-99). Causes—"say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism"—become commodities, to be peddled in small doses; Emerson scorns pettiness and looks toward the ultimate Cause: the unification of the soul in transcendental bliss: "I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate" (98, 100). No one could be more radical—not even my colleagues over coffee—than he who says, "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist" ("Self-Reliance" 148). This stance is so radically to the left that it comes full circle to the right and absolves the philosopher of any obligation to causes, even Abolition:

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, "Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off." ("Self-Reliance" 148-49)

The poet of genius is, of course, the great unifier, and the perfect poem leads to unity in the soul of the reader, not action. After all, "Beauty is its own excuse for being"which ranks with "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string" as the most widely quoted of Emersonian quotables. The universe has three children, differently named in succeeding ages, but easily enough recognized as the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer ("The Poet" 321). "The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty" ("The Poet" 321). Critics, "infested with a cant of materialism, hold that physical activity and manual skill are the greatest merits of humankind, disparaging those who are not doers, but what the critics miss is the fact that some men are simply destined to be sayers, not doers; these shortsighted critics even confuse doers who attempt to imitate the sayers with real sayers ("The Poet" 321-22). Not only is the poet the sayer who does not do, he also is the writer whose material flows into him without his putting forth any inventive effort:

The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. ("The Poet" 331)

Now this "ear," which hears the music of the pre-cantations, is not an organ of intellect. Every intelligent person can learn that beyond intellect is an energy on which he can draw "by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him" ("The Poet" 332).

The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the mind"; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so much we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. ("The Poet" 332; emphasis added).

It follows as the night the day that the inspired, imaginative poet is less concerned with craft than with the effluences of nature which, detected by the sensitive nose, sweep the poet away, "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem. . . . [T]he thought is prior to the form" ("The Poet" 323). Whether or not thought is prior to form, whether they are concurrent, even identical, is not the point necessary to my argument; the mere fact that Emerson, typical Romantic, devalues form has considerable dire implications for composition/rhetoric, and I will deal with them hereafter.

Emerson has, then, explained the nature of poetry and the poetic process, but he has yet to tell us directly what use we can make of poetry—which is, of course, precisely the wrong way to phrase the idea, for speaking of the uses of poetry debases it to the level of trade, engineering, and crafts (see below), from the ideal to the material, from the one to the many. Thus, I am at a loss for words, as I think Emerson (and Wellek and Warren and I. A. Richards and Northrop Frye and Murray Krieger) have been. Perhaps this is the needed phraseology: What good is poetry? In "Plato; or, the Philosopher," Emerson answers the question. (I cannot resist suggesting that Emerson could well have written "Plato" without ever having read Plato, so general and airy, so typically Emersonian, is the essay.)

I have already quoted Emerson's definition of philosophy as "the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world" ("Plato" 475). Further, "Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one and the two. . . . Oneness and otherness" ("Plato" 475). The most noble goal of humankind is to perceive and achieve the oneness that is the basis for the universe, to reach what Theodore Roethke longed for, "the imperishable quiet at the heart of form" ("The Longing" 14). Emerson tells us that "Men contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance" ("Plato" 476). He continues:

If speculation tends to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course of gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. ("Plato" 477)

Emerson then goes on to set forth a dizzying list of attributes, which are most easily comprehended in tabular form:

Speculation/Mind
one
being
necessity
rest
power
strength
consciousness
genius
earnestness
knowledge
caste
king
pure science

Action/Nature
many
intellect
freedom
motion
distribution
pleasure
definition
talent
possession
trade
culture
democracy
instrumentality

This wonderful list typically invites endless interpretation; it gives credence to any sect in the American religion. However, of this we are certain: mind is superior to nature; the one transcends the many; and genius is higher than talent. We might even go on to argue that in ranking possession with the one and trade with the many, Emerson belittles American mercantilism.

Plato, exalted though he may be, is nonetheless not a poet, for "he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose" (473), and beauty is its own excuse for being, not for some political, economic, personal, or social end. Insofar as Plato was a poet, he achieved personally "a balanced soul" (479) and expressed that balance in his works, through which his readers could also achieve balance.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety. ("Plato" 479-80; emphasis added)

A fitting answer to the question What good is poetry? is this slang phrase: It allows us to get it all together. (Other, scatological, slang is even more appropriate.) If poetry does not relate to action, how can one rank it in the scale of human values? Well, it makes people better. And how does it achieve this? By balancing their souls or psyches. This justification for poetry, this explanation of its "uses," was to permeate literary esthetics throughout twentieth-century English-department humanities. For instance, in 1922 Ogden, Richards, and Woods explained,

In equilibrium, there is no tendency to action, and any concert-goer must have realised the impropriety of the view that action is the proper outcome of aesthetic appreciation. When impulses are "harmonised" on the other hand they work together, and such disciplined coordination in action is much to be desired in other places. When works of art produce such action, or conditions which lead to action, they have either not completely fulfilled their function or would in the view of equilibrium here being considered be called not "beautiful" but "stimulative." (76-77)

Perish the thought that any poem should be stimulative. But, of course, rhetorical texts, unlike poetical, must be stimulative else they fail in their purpose. English-department humanists have devoted themselves to the higher calling of unstimulative texts, with the result that mere rhetoric in its manifestation as composition is not only devalued, but stigmatized.

Emerson and Rhetorical Theory

If we were to view the essays as a Rhetoric, or if we were to extrapolate a Rhetoric from them, what rhetorical theory would it set forth? After all, the purpose of this essay has been to characterize the tacit rhetorical beliefs—one can hardly say "theories"—that have been a major cause of English-department humanities in this century. However, before I answer my question, I must state two disclaimers. First, my reading of Emerson is clearly plausible, but, as I have both stated and implied, it is not the only plausible reading that can be derived from the essays. Second, in what follows, I tried (unsuccessfully, it has turned out) to avoid being judgmental. My purpose here is to show what Emerson does or could make possible.

Throughout the Emersonian scriptures runs the continuo that often bursts forth as a major theme: I gain my knowledge by looking within myself. That is, no motif in the essays is more insistent than that of solipsism. From this solipsism--the death of pathos--arise the other mutations that must result in a rhetoric much unlike that of Aristotle, Quintilian, Chaim Perelman, and Kenneth Burke.

Without an audience, the writer (for I cannot now say "rhetorician") can be absolutely true to him- or herself, uncorrupted by the exigencies of genre, institutions, or,certainly, audience expectations. The death of pathos allows the writer to be radically transgressive, and in the process, the teacher's role is changed, for his or her only function is to respond sympathetically. If there is no audience—if the purpose of writing is primarily, if not solely, to discover some inward provisional truth or to express oneself—the teacher has no access to the student. Invention, the very heart of rhetoric from the ancients onward, becomes introspection, and thus rhetoric tends to become expression. In fact, the writing teacher can ask the student to be original, to develop ideas, and to give examples, but can offer no help in the techniques whereby a writer finds subject matter. Heuristics disappear, and such concepts as "voice" come to express what traditionally had been called style. One can help students with their style, but they must discover their own voices.

The death of pathos and the birth of creativity and voice eliminate what I like to call "semantic intention," and this is one of the most vexing problems in composition. The traditional step-by-step model of the composing process is so inadequate, even nonsensical, that one wonders how it gained such widespread power. With variations, it goes something like this: first determine exactly what you want to say; then, through an outline, plan the way in which you want to say it. The reaction against this patently false model is, however, equally flawed: the common notion that a writer doesn't know what he or she wants to say until it is said. Certainly in even the most mundane writing, one can very seldom predict the exact form that the saying will take, which, however, does not mean that a writer cannot know what he or she wants the writing to accomplish; that is, most writers start with a semantic intention, something they want the writing to do, and after they have written can judge whether or not they have accomplished their purposes, i.e., have fulfilled their semantic intentions. Clearly readerly, closed texts are also suspect, for, we recall, a little guessing does the reader no harm. Emerson's approval of indeterminacy--his suspicion of closed texts--is one reason for his currency in this poststructuralist era; he is a man of our times though born nearly two centuries ago.

I have mentioned the consequences of the split imagination and will only remind you that Emerson refined Coleridge in dividing works on the basis of their imaginative construction or reconstruction, thus making the split between fiction and non-fiction and between creative writing and composition part of the American religion. Finally, the values that Emerson places on contemplation versus action degrade argument and persuasion, another aspect of English-department humanities. Argument and persuasion--the very stuff of rhetoric--have been noticeably absent from composition during most of this century.

Whether or not we can trace out a family tree showing that Emerson is the progenitor of William Coles, Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and other compositionists whom we might label the New Romantics, we can be certain that Emerson was a major influence, creating the values and epistemologies in which Romantic composition could flourish and, paradoxically, an institution in which all composition (and its concomitant non-imaginative literature) is degraded.

JAC Volume 16 Issue 1