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TRADITION: A VOICE FROM THE PERIPHERIES1

Jerzy Axer

Warsaw University

Who better than you to talk about tradition, wrote Michael Leff,

tempting me to accept the honor of addressing the Conference on

the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies to be in Chicago by the

Alliance of Rhetoric Societies. Like a skilful Devil, he appealed to

my vanity and my laziness. I could take pleasure in the honor of

speaking to you for many monthsthe job was a long way off. In

the end, though, the time was nearly up and I had to consider what

I would try and interest you in. So many have talked about tradition

superbly and at great depth. And thousands discuss it shallowly and

stupidly.

I nervously started leafing through the ancient writers, losing

my self-confidence by the minute. After a few days I decided to call

Michael Leff and explain that maybe a year ago, I could have said

something about tradition, but today nec res nec verba suppetunt,

and he (the consummate commentator of Ciceros De oratore) would

be sure to add non esse laudandam infantiam eius cui verba non

desint rem tamen ignorat. . . And then release me from my promise.

Since the time difference between Warsaw and Chicago is seven

hours, I decided to take a bath before I called. I submerged myself in

bubbles and turned on the water to keep it properly warm. Suddenly,the water pipes made a sound like a hiccup or a cough, and straight

out of the faucet came a tightly rolled wad of paper and set sail

across the bath water. It can only beI thoughta letter from the

Sea Devil. Sindbad the Sailor received such letters before every long

voyage to his next catastrophe. Just in time I thoughtfor me to

abandon my trip across the Ocean (in Poland we call it the leap over

the puddle). Only this wasnt a letter from the Sea Devil, but lost

fragments from Book Three of Ciceros De oratore, which thus cameto me out of the blue (down the chimney, probably the same one that

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I will quote this priceless relic of the great rhetorical tradition in

its English translation so that its momentous content can be placed

immediately in academic circulation, avoiding the usual disputes anddiscussions among classical philologists as to the meaning of the Latin

phrases, which modern academic culture has in fact radically resolved

by replacing the Latin and Greek originals with English translations.

I expect, said Scaevola with his characteristic elegance, the time will come

someday when it becomes clear that society and the state prefer to devote money

and effort to educating true specialists. Oratory will be a specialization just like

the profession of a soldier and it will turn out that you are wrong, Crassus, to think

that broad culture is necessary for practicing rhetoric. Our art will triumph because,

without claiming to be some kind of super-science, it will bring a fair income and

satisfaction to politicians and lawyers, leaving decent citizens alone.

I know very well, Crassus replied, my dear Scaevola, that such a view may

achieve substantial success in the future due to peoples natural tendency to avoid

anything difficult and requiring long learning. But I find it hard to believe that such

pragmatization could eliminate the divine yearning felt by those whose spirits have

looked beyond Platos cave for at least a moment. It is the desire to find something

constant, a dreaming about the ideal, even if it is impractical and impossible to

attain.

And what would you say, Scaevola asked, if the times changed so much that

regardless of what was burning in the orators soul, the auditorium would force him

to put out that fire? Antonius was right when he said recently that the orator is nothing

without the audiences support. You argued yourself that the essence of success lies

in kindling emotions in the listeners, and that this is achieved by awakening similar

emotions in oneself. Do you really wish future orators so ill, wanting them to stoop

to the level of the ignorant crowd, devoid of taste, knowledge and hearing? To share

its passions and ideas?

I know, Crassus replied, it is not the actor who educates the viewer, but the

viewer who educates the actor. I also realize that broad culture and a philosophical

education would be worthless for associating with people completely insensitive to

intellectual arguments, who had none but primitive desires and passions. But even if

our world came to an end, the value of the immortal formulae, rules and principles of

human communication, harder than marble though they are constructed from words,

would not come to an end. These are patterns of reference for anybody in the future

who wishes to come out of the darkness into the light, instead of watching shadows

on the wall, and to name things in their wonderful uniqueness and unfathomable

repeatability.

Nevertheless, Scaevola insisted, even if we manage to erect verbal structures

more magnificent than the most beautiful temples of Rome, one can easily imagine

that a time will come when teachers and students born in tribes and peoples whoseexistence we cannot even sense today, will reach the conclusion that tradition is not

a value, but a threat. Then, the principles and norms we create will be treated as an

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TRADITION:AVOICEFROMTHEPERIPHERIES 259

cost of an infinite variety of outlooks and aesthetics that will emerge in the future, or

already exist beyond the horizon of our world. Then, will those whom you have set

your hopes on, those desiring to escape from the Platonic cave, profit in any way from

referring to our words and thoughts?There is a simple answer to that, Crassus said. Namely, . . .

And thats where the manuscript from my bathtub ended abruptly.

Im neither an expert on speech and communication nor on

contemporary culture, and I know next to nothing about the United

States. I was raised in a society that knew political oppression and

totalitarian violence, but had never even heard of the political

correctness that oppresses you. I stood no chance, then, of success infront of the kind of audience you are. No shared world, no chance for

shared emotions. But now I had that ancient text and could act like

any normal classical philologist: reconstructing and reproducing the

interrupted flow of thought of an ancient author. Thats something I

can do, its exactly what I was taught to do.

Thus, quaerendum est: Why did Crassus think he had a simple

answer to the now banal accusation that longstanding rhetorical

tradition, the tradition of rhetorical studies in which specific authors

and specific works constitute road signs, was politically incorrect? Why

did he think it would be easy to quash any fears that ones own tradition

would preclude other traditions, that the equality of political cultures,

attitudes and desires of different nations, different communities within

one nation, and different people within each of those communities,

would make the very concept of tradition useless?

I thought that maybe he had planned to offer the following

arguments. Each time rhetoric is reborn, it will have to transform from

a technical instruction, from the science of composition, into a study

not indifferent to historical precedents, it will have to combine the

field of speech and communication with philosophy and theory of

literature. Then it will be possible to resolve the issue of a canon by

way of some sort of compromise, to write books in which the choice

of texts and authors will be decided not by magnificence of style, but

by criteria of ability to create knowledge and organize societysuch

an ability in a sense as universal as possible. It will also be possible in

these anthologies to place in a central position texts once consideredmarginalcriticizing and blowing to pieces the canon itself from the

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Cicero, Plato and Erasmus. The monolith of rhetorical tradition with

holes drilled in it and sticks of dynamite stuck inside them.

Then I realized that my bookshelf housed an anthology, (The

Rhetorical Tradition, Boston 1990) whose reasoning looked to me

twelve years ago, when I got it, not far from that. No, Crassus could

never have considered such a compromise as being a simple and

obvious solution!

Thats when I thought: Either you believe in tradition, or you dont.

Faith in tradition means faithfulness to certain signs and rejection of

others. The guarantor of that tradition is something outside methis

is what I have to feel if I want to retain respect for my choice. This

is God, and in the social dimensionones native land. Therefore,

tradition means my tradition, divided from and by its nature separate

from other traditions. I used to like this simple thought.

If the Russians hadnt withdrawn the rest of their army from Poland

in 1991, I probably would still like it. If I were a Chechen, I would be

willing to die with such a declaration on my lips. But today I am no

longer able to take refuge in my Eastern European historical memory. I

can no longer repeat like a prayer the formulae of an Aesopean oration

of the persecuted; the luxury of easy communication with deceased

generations has been taken away from me. And thats when I thought

the best thing to do would be to read De oratore carefully once again.

What is this book really about? The relations between being a

citizen and being a person, between being an artist and a philosopher, the

borders between pragmatism and striving for perfection. It is also a book

about the contradiction, impossible to evade, between the individual

and society, between public activity and instinct of self-preservation,

between renouncing activity and preserving ones dignity.It is also a book about dreams: Dreams of an ideal reconciliation

between reason and art, of unity between the person speaking and the

person listening; of a civil society born of the word. The arguments that

Cicero uses, the road along which he leads the reader, is not a simple

profession of faith in a single tradition and a single interpretation of that

tradition. This is more of a multiple-voice chorus, in which some voices

resound more strongly and others more quietly as the work develops.

The only certain thing is that the writer deeply believes in his diagnosisand his dreams. He believes in them the more strongly the more he feels

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Reading De oratore, we return to the sources of a certain

teaching tradition. This is the republican and civic tradition.

At the same time, it is a tradition that, while not questioningdemocracy, assumes that the aim of teaching is to create an elite.

At the foundation of such teaching lies a belief in cultures constant

capacity for renewal through reinterpretation and reformulation

of ones own tradition while maintaining absolute opennessor

evena grasping readiness to draw from the tradition of others.

After all, Cicero constantly robs and sucks dry the Greeks, turning

into Roman things something that just a generation earlier had been

alien and foreign to the Romans.

Thus, De oratore has to be read like a manifesto and a journal

at the same time. This is a manifesto calling for salvation for civil

society, in which the oratoractorveritatiswould play the role

of the moderator of a compromise saving democracy, a constantly

repeated ceremony of republican initiation. The author of this

manifesto is the greatest master of the living word that Mediterranean

culture has ever produced, an artist aware of his greatness, confident

that he can influence not only the audience of his time, but also

future generations. The journal layer in this work, on the other hand,

comprises the shocking confession of a failed politician, a student of

murdered teachers, who realizes that the same fate awaits him at some

point in the future. Both the manifesto and the journal were written by

a man who combined a multiple-theme rhetorical tradition and carried

out a new synthesis of discourse and knowledge.

This is the kind of tradition that can be useful to us todayin

the global world. We need that sort of tradition particularly in those

moments when we feel like the passengers of a luxury liner wherenobody is able to say where were coming from or going to, and the

crew have forgotten the name of their home port.

With this conviction, when I was president of the International

Society for the History of Rhetoric, I proposed that the program of this

organizations congresses include a new, permanent element: the Past

Present Forum. This was an invitation to colleagues dealing with the

history of rhetoricwhich is the mission of this societyto believe

once more that the distant past can help in better understanding anddiagnosing what happened later. I have always thought the distant

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Faith in the value of this effect, in its educational effectiveness,

was also behind everything I have written and said about the need to

create a new educational theater. Let me paraphrase my own text:2

I see the sense of creating programs containing a core curriculum and based on

the so-called Great Books, provided that we can use them as a scenario for an open

educational theater. If it is true that the teacher must undergo transformation from a

magister into a rhetor; if it is true that the latters mission is not to persuade and to

impose specific interpretations on texts, but to explore an open network of obligations

that keeps the question of meaning open as a locus of debate, we are dealing with a

purely rhetorical task . . . .

The speakerteacher from the educational theater must seek, predominantly,

a new principle for establishing contact with the audience. He is no longer a priestopening the door to the temple, nor does he have at his disposal free admission

tickets to the salons. His role has become totally different, and if he is to be effective,

then he should regard himself as a castaway in an alien world, the sole survivor of

a catastrophe, the relic of a tribe annihilated by a deluge. His task is to proclaim

a message in a renascent world. No legal regulations or coercion will guarantee

him success among those who were born in this new world. Such success may be

obtained only by resorting to deceit. The new Quintilian must be simultaneously a

new Machiavelli. Socrates must once again become a jester, but this time much more

comical than the one who accosted people in the streets of Athens. This is our sole

chance, if we are not to bore our listeners to death before we die too . . . .

Such were the slogans under which we founded the liberal education

movement in its Eastern European version, with encouragement and

support from Nicholas Farnhams Educational Leadership Program.

Today, it comprises a network of interdepartmental individual studies

in the humanities centers at the leading universities of Poland and

countries east of Poland, and a network called the Artes Liberales

Academy, educating young faculty from the region. A new typeof discourse and faith in a multiple-voice traditionconstantly

undulating but anchored in Socratic dialogue, is the guiding principle

behind these activities, which some consider crazy.

In everyday practice, this means we are trying to treat the

traditional Mediterranean classical rhetorical canon as obligatory,

without removing from it or contesting even those elements that

contemporary pedagogy is inclined to criticize as being contrary to

the attitudes we would like to shape in our students. On top of such a

foundation we are adding a layer of texts from authors of lesser rank,

but who are linked to the local regional cultural tradition In our case

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centuries in the region that today is Poland and, more broadly, in the

region of Central and Eastern Europe. Only then comes the time for

groups of authors, broken up into many variants, who have lost faithin the canon, questioned it, criticized it or replaced it with their own

proposals.

What I consider fundamental here is consenting to our listeners

making their own choices and constructing their own hierarchies

within tradition. Before doing so, however, they should not be offered

a canon of compromise, castrated, tamed, imposing politically

corrector in our view the most fittingcorrections and shifting of

accents. Let these be texts of the highest artistic standard, reflecting

the historical order in which they appeared. Let a wise and forbearing

teacher used them as scripts in the educational theater, respecting

and accepting the reactions and proposals of students endowed with

personality and sensitivity. And may God deliver us from any other

kind of student.

I have told you what practice we adopted in the community we

have managed to build, and how we are trying to continue it. I can

easily imagine other strategies, where from the very start the axis

of conversations between master and pupil would be the idea of

questioning the canon, or proposals for an alternative canon to the

Greek-Roman tradition. I can even easily imagine that the educational

theater could be replaced with a special variant: putting tradition on

trial. I am unable to condemn this, but neither am I able to feel any real

liking for such conduct.

Since the manuscript found in the bathtub ended abruptly before

Crassus managed to present his defense of tradition, everyone has to

find their own formula on their own responsibility.As for me, Im sure that our generation, and the younger generation

after us, could attempt to write a De oratore of the 21st century. Like

the original, it has to be a manifesto but also a diary. The diary will bear

witness to the terrible experiences of the 20th century. Remember

our teachers were killed, our books and libraries burned, our language

was corrupted, and the human tendency to dream was abused on

an unheard-of scale. The manifesto, on the other hand, is essential

if we want to continue to practice ars rhetorica and encourage ourstudents to do the same. The formula can be simple, like Ciceros or

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So, lets declare we still believe that power over words supported

by a thorough education can protectat least some peoplefrom

marginalization in the world of commerce, from a cooling of theheart in the world of mass media, from loss of contact with reality

in the virtual world. Lets confirm that we want to trust tradition.

Because it is our task to constantly rinse the sand of what was

with the water of what is, in the hope that what is left at the bottom

of the basin will be flecks of gold, in amounts sufficient for paying

a deposit on the future.

Postscript

Accepting the honor of the invitation to speak at the Conference

on the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies, I realized that I owed

it to my membership in a regional community with a very special

culture and political memory. That is why I chose a self-ironic

essay as the form of my address. In this context, I also parodied my

own attitude as a reader of the anthology The Rhetorical Tradition:

Readings from the Classical Times to the Present.

Not only Prof. Walkers witty reply to my address, but primarily

the subsequent reaction of Patricia Bizzell, were best proof for me

that the tone I had used had been understood correctly. Patricia

Bizzells lecture shortly after the conference, given at the Center for

Writing and the Interdisciplinary Minor in Literacy and Rhetorical

Studies, University of Minnesota,of which she devoted the second

part to the rhetorical tradition and its plurality (with a broad

reference to my address), shows how real political correctness

opens up the mind.Patricia Bizzell interpreted the hidden message of my address

with great sensitivity. She also said some fine words about my

ideological stance: I amnot sure he really understood all of the

implications of that phrase [political correctness] for American

academics. She was absolutely right, let me add: I pretended to

understand less than I actually did, because my real adversary was

not, and is not, of course, the Rhetorical Tradition, but the attitude

towards tradition in my peripheral community. A caricaturizedversion of political correctness, not experienced and not internalized

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give a community new strength but takes away its traditional

cohesiveness.

My main emphasis was on issues that Patricia Bizzell understoodvery well, and even added the punch line in my stead:

Axer also had interesting things to say about that. . . . So, it may be, he didnt

use this metaphor, but it may be a way of trying to explain, the way I understood

it was, its almost as if tradition were the gene-pool, the intellectual gene-pool,

that preserves ideas through hard times, ideas that we may read later. And then

theyll be there for us to draw on, share, and pass down to our students. So, for

him, clearly, tradition did have a positive quality.3

Today, three years later, my text will be read in a different context.

On the one hand, its occasional character is gone, while on the

other, in Poland the concept of tradition and restoring the canon

in education has become part of the propaganda and political

platform of the political option that won the last elections. Neither

the language used in this platform, nor the proposed educational

concepts, have anything in common with the kind of educational

theater that I believe in. That theater is based not on ideology but

on pietas, or, as Prof. Walker was good enough to say (referring toa thought of Santayanas), loyalty to the sources of ones being.

After some thought, however, I decided not to change anything in

the text. Ultimately, Sidera manibus Aethiopi tacta non nigrescunt,

as the Romans used to say. What I have just written, I hasten to

correct. I used this proverb once before, and was accused of a lack

of political correctness by my American friends. Therefore, I will

put it differently: Cum duo faciunt idem, non est idem.

Notes

1. The text below, with the exception of the Postscript, was presented as a

plenary address opening the Conference on the Status and Future of Rhetoric Studies

held in Chicago by the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies at Northwestern University,

September 1114, 2003. It was part of a dialogue whose other part was the reply of

Jeffrey Walker. The Postcript references Prof. Walkers reply and responds to a

subsequent exchange with Prof. Patricia Bizzell.2. See Axer 2003, 190.

3 Bizzell 2003 2728

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References

Axer, Jerzy. 2003. The Reader as an Actor: The Canon of World Literature and

Educational Strategy (East-Central European Case Example). Rhetoric of

Transformation, ed. Jerzy Axer, 18896. Warszawa: OBTA UW&DiG.

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, eds. 1990. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings

from the Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford-St.Martins.

Bizzell, Patricia. 2003. Future Directions for Rhetorical Traditions. A Lecture

presented by the Center for Writing and the Interdisciplinary Minor in Literacy

and Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Elizabeth Oliver. Speaker Series, 23. Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota.

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