On the Return of (the Repressed): Rhetoric

Using a Freudian metaphor reinterpreted by Jacques Lacan, this essay argues that rhetoric is returning to humanities. That return manifests itself in partial returns through topoi, truncated returns via figure, fuller returns in feminist criticism, and in varying degrees of success, but always with playful seriousness that is rhetoric's trademark. It is always heartwarming to see a cliche return to fresh usage, as return it apparently must. Perhaps Freud was right after all--perhaps the return of is inevitable; or, in Lacan's terms, perhaps very mechanism of language, sign, itself split into a signifier and a signified, is locus of a primal repression that subject enters into and engages willy-nilly every time he or she speaks. any case, I was delighted several years ago to witness return of cool to contemporary slanguage. Everybody, it seemed, was using word as an endorsement of nearly highest sort. Even English professors, some of them old enough to have repressed knowledge that cool had been a bon mot during their adolescent years, were part of this return. My students were stunned, however, when I refused to allow it as a critical term in textual analysis. But I stood firm, thinking that if I allowed cool then I would have to allow also hot, somewhat less positive, and somewhat more posit ive. Thus, or so they told me, Coleridge would be wicked, Wordsworth cool, and Blake merely hot. Despite buzz at my workplace about learning paradigm, I did not think that a metaphor from hell was a useful instrument of analysis. Rhetoric, too, has (nearly) returned from being repressed. It has, of course, its specialist journals--the somewhat conservative Rhetorica and contemporary Pre/Text, but return is wider and deeper than that, wider and deeper than even flourishing departments of communication and composition in chiefly United States colleges and universities. Literary Review of Canada's The Globe and Mail, for example, has for several years run subheading Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric. a recent issue, cultural critic Robert Enright writes of the photograph as not mentioning Doris Lessing's comment that visual arts are spatial, not temporal, and not mentioning, either, rhetoric's much older figure, ecphrasis, a temporal account, often a narrative, of a visual work of art. Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, with its ironically excessive praise of still life pictured on urn leading to aporia (another rhetorical figure) of a devastating judgement in poem's closing lines ( Cold Pastoral!), is a well-known example of latter. With popular press and academic journal, in other words, we have come a long way from time when rhetoric meant simply failed or bad rhetoric, at best bombast, at worst falsehood. We may not fully recover term before it slides into disuse once more, of course, but no matter; it's principle of return that is my focus here. For that return is itself a figure of language writ large and is called by a dizzying number of names--anaphora, epanalepsis, ploce-- all of them variations on idea of repetition. Heraklitis remarked long ago that one cannot step in same river twice, and in that sense repetition is never simple, always complex. In my end [beginning] is my beginning [end] , says poet T.S. Eliot, and so it is with cool and rhetoric. Both Kerouac and Aristotle would be pleased, I think, with this (re)turn of events. Rhetoric as term and theory is still repressed in much contemporary criticism (also, but misleadingly, called theory), although rhetoric itself is very much present in that criticism's reliance on trope and figure. Thus, deconstruction endlessly discovers aporia (J. Hillis Miller), psychoanalytic criticism recovers ethos of subject (Jacques Lacan), reader-response theory pathos of audience (Stanley Fish), new historicism studies relations among ethos, pathos, and logos (Michel Foucault), and so on. …

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