Strangeness as ProfundityA Theme in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book III

CHRISTIAN KOCK

Unobtrusive Strangeness

In the third book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric an arresting idea shows up several times that has not

received much attention. It is the idea that a rhetor ought to speak in a style which is on the one hand

strange, unfamiliar or deviant—but which on the other hand is not noticed as such.

Aristotle’s emphasis in Book III on clarity as an absolute requirement in rhetorical prose is well

known, and also his insistence on a definite distinction between poetry and prose and the importance

in rhetoric of never sliding into poetry. Nevertheless he repeatedly makes the point that rhetorical

prose should have some of the typical features and hallmarks of poetry, only not too much, i.e., not

so much that their presence are detected by the audience.

Among of the passages in question is the following:

The use of nouns and verbs in their prevailing [kyrios] meaning makes for clarity; other kinds of

words, as discussed in the Poetic, make the style ornamented rather than flat. To deviate [from

prevailing usage] makes language seem more elevated [to gar exallaxai poiei phainesthai

semnoteran]; for people feel the same in regard to word usage [lexis] as they do in regard to strangers

[xenous] compared with citizens. (1404b5)1

Here we have the notion of deviating (exallaxai), which may lend the speech an air of the

elevated. We are clearly to take it that this elevated feel in the speech is a good thing for the rhetor to

aim at. Further on, we read:

As a result, one should make the language unfamiliar [dio dei poiein xenēn tēn dialekton]; for

people are admirers of what is far off, and what is marvelous is sweet. Many [kinds of words]

accomplish this in verse and are appropriate there; for what is said [in poetry] about subject and

characters is more out of the ordinary, but in prose much less so (1404b11).

Here, the difference of genre between poetry and prose is invoked to remind us that in rhetoric the

tendency to deviate and the strange air must remain within certain bounds; but the fact remains that

1 All quotations from Aristotle are to The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Volume Two. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Aristotle counsels rhetors to “make the language unfamiliar”. However, the advice is always two-

sided: the deviation, strangeness or unfamiliarity should not reach the level where it is consciously

noticed.

Next, we read: “As a result, authors should compose without being noticed [dio dei lanthanein

poiuntas] and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally.” (1404b18-19)

Here, the injunction is to hide [lanthanein] one’s pursuit of the effects just mentioned or pursue

them as it were surreptitiously, so that one does not seem to speak “artificially” or, as one might

say, by design [the adverb used is peplasmenōs, from the verb plassō, to shape or form]. However, it

is clear that what the rhetor does in heeding these pieces of advice is precisely to speak by design,

but in such a way that he does not seem to speak by design—a way that is not obvious and thus likely

to go undetected.

Somewhat later we read this: “Thus, it is clear that if one composes well, there will be an

unfamiliar quality [xenikon] and it escapes notice [lanthanein endechesthai] and will be

clear.”(1404b31)

Here again we have the two intimately connected and mutually dependent features in one

sentence: the “unfamiliar” or “strange” quality, and the importance of keeping it unnoticed. Stating

this dual requirement is tantamount to saying that Aristotle envisages a subliminal, or at most a

“liminal”, effect on the hearers’ minds. They must not become conscious of what the rhetor does in

this respect, but the rhetor is advised to do it nevertheless; if this apparent contradiction is to be

meaningful it follows that this particular aspect of the rhetor’s work is meant to be unconscious on

the hearer’s part or, at least, (sub)liminal or not fully conscious.

Later in Book III, where the topic is metaphor, we get this: “In speech it is necessary to take

special pains to the extent that speech has fewer resources than verse. Metaphor especially has clarity

and sweetness and strangeness [to xenikon]” (1405a7).

Clarity and sweetness—two properties unreservedly recommended by Aristotle—here go hand in

hand with strangeness, and a similar view is reflected in his words on the use of epithets: “if used

immoderately they convict [the writer of artificiality] and make it clear that this is poetry. Though

there is some need to use them (for they change what is ordinary and make the lexis unfamiliar

[xenikon poiei tēn lexin]), nevertheless one should aim at the mean” (1406a11). As we see, the fact

that epithets may contribute xenikon is taken, without further argument, as a reason why it is

advisable to use them.

With the phenomenon that I wish to unpack thus identified, it may be helpful if I sketch how this

paper will unfold. First I will address the issue of rhythm in oratory, of which Aristotle says things

that are similar to his pronouncements on strangeness and unfamiliarity. I will then consider what

some of the commentators on Book III have had to say about the issue, and try to make clear why I

think there is more to say. Next, I will explain more fully what that is. By way of illustration, I will

then introduce two examples of authentic readers meeting “strange” features in oratorical texts and

responding in ways representative of the mechanism I have described. A final section presents, in an

attempt at further illumination of the phenomenon, a reading by an outstanding literary scholar of a

famous piece of oratory in which he finds features that I see as resembling the “strange” but

unobtrusive rhetorical features that are my subject.

On Rhythms

The idea that a rhetor should do something that is on the one hand effective but which on the other

hand should not rise above the hearer’s threshold of consciousness (because only then will it be

effective in the intended way) is evident in Aristotle’s advice of the use of rhythm. We need not here

go into what exactly he means by the two related terms rhythm and meter; even for our modern

languages whose pronunciation is fully known to us (unlike that of Ancient Greek), that is a thorny

issue. The point is that rhetorical prose should have one (rhythm) but not the other (meter), and that

if one exaggerates rhythm it approaches meter. This will not do because by approaching meter the

rhythm becomes noticeable; it should be there, but unnoticed, not breaking through the threshold of

consciousness. Aristotle says:

The form of the language should be neither metrical nor unrhythmical. The former is unpersuasive

(for it seems to have been consciously shaped) and at the same time also diverts attention; for it

causes [the listener] to pay attention to when the same foot will come again (1408b21).

A similar piece of advice follows, where Aristotle discusses which kind of rhythm to recommend.

The heroic (dactylic and spondaic rhythms, as in Homer) “has dignity, but lacks the tones of the

spoken language”; on the other hand, iambic rhythms (as in drama) resemble “the very language of

ordinary people … but in a speech we need dignity and the power of taking the hearer out of his

ordinary self” (1408b33-35). The recommended middle-of-the-road solution is the use of “paeanic”

rhythms, where one of the syllables is long and the other three short. The paean rhythm is best “since

from this alone of the rhythms mentioned no definite metre arises, and therefore it is the least

obtrusive of them” (1409a9-10) (it is more easily hidden: hōste malista lanthanein). So again we

have the curiously two-sided ideal: there should be a kind of structuring that is akin to poetry and

thus strange to everyday prose (in this case highly formalized poetry like the odes of Pindar, which

use paeanic rhythms), but on the other hand it should not be consciously perceptible.

Looking over the textual features and devices of “strangeness” recommended by Aristotle for use

in oratory we can see that they may be divided in to two main categories: deviations and regularities.

In later rhetorical treatises we find a related categorization of rhetorical figures in schemes and

tropes, where schemes are characterized by regularity and tropes by deviation from some assumed

norm of plain speech. In our time, there is for example Geoffrey Leech’s work on the linguistic

features of English poetry, which applies a distinction between deviations and regularities.2 These

two phenomena may be seen as nicely symmetrical in the sense that whereas regularities can be said

to represent an over-application of a rule, deviations may be seen as the opposite: breaches or under-

applications of rules.

In Leech and many other contemporary students of poetic language the term foregrounding has

been used to describe how poetic language, in virtue of regularities and/or deviations, steps into the

foreground of the reader’s attention. The term is derived from the Czech word actualisace, as

employed by the Prague structuralists of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, with Jan Mukařovský as the main

figure. In our time, the term has been used in many studies of poetic texts and also in empirical

studies of literary reading. For example, studies by David Miall and others have clearly shown that

readers slow down over passages high in foregrounding and also that they consistently rate such

passages as affectively more intense.3 But these findings were made in connection with poetry. We

might perhaps say that Aristotle similarly recommends a certain amount of linguistic foregrounding

in oratory—if it were not that if we are to follow his advice, strangeness in the form of either extra

deviation or regularity should not be foregrounded, but remain in the background; it should be

“backgrounded”, i.e., (sub)liminal. But it should be there nevertheless.

We are left here with the question we began with: Why should there be, on the one hand, this

twofold excess of formal or poetic properties: of deviation as well as of regularity; and on the other

hand, why should their presence not be consciously noticed by the audience, the way it is noticed and

enjoyed when we read poetry?

At this point, I shall anticipate what will be my answer to the question of the function of

subliminal strangeness as understood in Rhetoric III.

In poetry there is no need for the presence of strangeness—regularities and deviations—to be

subliminal; poetry readers expect these properties and read poetry in order to enjoy the aesthetic

effects they generate. In oratory, by contrast, the features of strangeness should, according to

Aristotle, be kept subliminal or at least unobtrusive because the audience should not feel that they are

2 Leech, Geoffrey N. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Routledge. 1969; new edition 2014.3 Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. "Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories."

Poetics 22.5 (1994): 389-407.

being influenced by “merely” formal, aesthetic effects. But if, on the other hand, the “strange”

features are kept just barely noticeable, i.e., subliminal or unobtrusive, then the audience may feel

that there is a yet untapped and uncomprehended residue of content, of a deeper and more

momentous meaning lurking underneath them that cannot not fully grasp in a first encounter.

Further I wish, in anticipation, to emphasize that I believe the kind of effect at issue here—an

effect known and recommended to orators by Aristotle—is generally a spurious one: the feeling or

impression of hidden depths of meaning that one might experience, more or less subliminally, on

hearing a piece of oratory with unobtrusively “strange” features in it does not imply that there

actually are any such hidden depths underneath the words. There might be, but the strangeness is not

a reliable sign that there is.

Aristotle himself only gives us few pointers as to what the strangeness consists in, and in

particular he says little on why it is to be there, and what its workings are. He refers to the way

oratory with “backgrounded” poetic features may appear more “elevated” and compares this with

how we may “admire” what is “marvelous” and “out of the ordinary” and “unfamiliar” and find it

“sweet”; and he talks about aiming for “dignity” and “the power of taking the hearer out of his

ordinary self”. But whereas he completely accepts a full and even obtrusive use of these features in

poetic texts, the constant injunction for its use in oratory is to keep it “unobtrusive” and have it

“escape notice”. Why?

The aspects of Aristotle’s advice that are least challenging are perhaps those that have to do with

excess regularity (such as rhythm). Cicero, for example, in the Orator, notes that the use of rhythm

(numerus) is particularly appropriate toward the end of a speech when the listener is “in the grip” of

the orator and does not suspect manipulation, but, in admiration of the speaker’s power, wishes him

to carry on to the end (tum valet cum is qui audit ab oratore iam obsessus est ac tenetur. Non enim id

agit ut insidietur et observet, sed iam favet processumque vult dicendique vim admirans non

anquirit4 quid reprehendat).4 Powerful repetitive effects toward the end, rhythmical or otherwise, are

standard in poetry and music. Cicero’s observation also suggests why the orator should hold such

effects in check until the end: they are in place when the audience is already persuaded of the

rightness of the orator’s case, and they may then serve to mobilize or energize the audience’s support

of it in a quasi-physical way. But obtrusive rhythm is out of place when the actual persuasion is still

in progress; in that phase an audience will want to think that it is being persuaded by appeals to

logos, ethos and pathos, in other words, by attending to the content of what the speaker says, not

being carried away by purely formal devices. Aristotle’s recommendation to orators that there should

be rhythms all along, but unobtrusive ones, becomes understandable in this light: the orator wants the 4 Cicero. Brutus, Orator. (Loeb Classical Library, 342). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 62.210.

audience to draw listeners along while he unfolds his case, they should be kept attentive and

expectant, and unobtrusive rhythmical features can help achieve that—but they should feel all along

that they attend to content for the content’s sake; that is why Aristotle repeatedly cautions against

sliding into poetry (a caution echoed by Cicero and others). What is at issue here is the difference

between listening for content and listening to poetry; that difference may become clearer if we

remember Roman Jakobson’s famous definition of the “poetic function” of language: language

functions poetically when the listener/reader has “focus on the message for its own sake”.5If an

orator intends to persuade an audience, then the audience should not feel that the orator intends them

to have “focus on the message for its own sake”; that is why, as Aristotle has it, openly metrical

language is “unpersuasive” (1408b). However, as Cicero makes clear, it is different when the

audience is fully persuaded—then obtrusive rhythms may be welcomed by listeners that enjoy the

shared energy it injects in them.

But this does not really give us a satisfactory answer to those aspects of “strangeness” that have to

do with deviations, with the “unfamiliar” (xenikon).

The Commentators

If we go to the commentators (commentators on Rhetoric III are not numerous), most of them are

not very helpful in throwing light on this question.

E.M. Cope, in his monumental introduction to the Rhetoric and his three-volume commentary

(1877), is mostly satisfied with giving very elaborate paraphrases with numerous parallels in other

classical authors.6 However, it is suggestive that he points to a recurrent assumption in Aristotle: “the

pleasure of ‘wonder’, and the gratification of curiosity in learning”, as mentioned in the Rhetoric I,

1370a.7 This, I suggest, can be seen as a clue to understanding the functioning of strangeness in the

form of unobtrusive deviations: they may give a listener a feeling that there is an alluring further

store of wisdom to acquire. Such a feeling, which I believe the “strange” features recommended by

Aristotle are apt to arouse in hearers, is a key point to which I shall return.

Modern commentators on Aristotle’s Rhetoric have had their difficulties and challenges with

these recommendations of artful, “unfamiliar” features of discourse that are nevertheless to be kept

below the listeners’ threshold of consciousness. The most frequently quoted contemporary authority

on Aristotle’s Rhetoric is George Kennedy, whose translation with commentary (first published

5 Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”. In Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, 350-377; quotation from p. 356.

6 Cope, Edward Meredith. An Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric. London: Macmillan and Co., 1867; Cope, Edward Meredith. Aristotle: Rhetoric, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1877.

7 Aristotle: Rhetoric, Volume 3, p. 15.

1991) remains a standard text and reference.8 Kennedy generally takes a rather dismissive attitude

towards the whole of Book III and does not have much to say in answer to the query raised in this

article. In relation to the motion of “unfamiliarity” he points out, rightly, that the Russian

“Formalists” have extended the view of literary language as “defamiliarization”.9 He also points out

that Aristotle’s remarks on this score are perhaps the earliest statement in criticism that the greatest

art is to disguise art,10 but he does not recognize that this leaves unanswered the question of why the

art that should be disguised should include strangeness. As for the recommendations on prose

rhythm, Kennedy criticizes Aristotle’s remarks on the poetic rhythms as being “unsatisfactory in

several ways”, in particular in regard to his claims about the occurrence of the various rhythms in

various genres.11 It is likely that Kennedy is quite right about this, but he has little to say on the

general question why there has to be rhythm in oratory in the first place, and why it nevertheless has

to be unobtrusive.

Only few commentators have tried to take up the challenge that others have passed over. The few

attempts there have been to face the challenge have tended to re-interpret the concepts of strangeness

etc. as epistemically motivated properties, i.e., as particular aspects of “clarity” and as means to a

deeper and truer insight than may be achieved through “mere” ordinary clarity.

The rhetorician Scott Consigny has noted that commentators on the Rhetoric III tend towards a

one-sided emphasis on clarity, making little or nothing of the striking injunction to give one’s speech

a foreign air (but one undetected by the audience).12 However, Consigny himself proposes clarity, but

now in a different understanding, as the key to Aristotle’s position: “’clarity’ is itself achieved

through artifice,” he interprets, and goes on to quote 1404b: “Wherefore those who practice it this

artifice must conceal it and avoid the appearance of speaking artificially instead of naturally.” But

the text doesn’t really make it plausible that “this artifice” refers to clarity (in some alternative

understanding of the concept). Throughout, Consigny reads Aristotle as if clarity in this special

understanding of it is the overall aim of rhetorical style. So the problem he faces in his interpretation

is “to resolve the apparent contradiction between construing clarity as a criterion of undistorted style

and, in contrast, as a deception which results from the skillful manipulation of verbal tropes”.13 His

answer is that there two notions of clarity (saphes), namely that which is “apparent” and that which

is “distinct.” 8 Kennedy, George A. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. (Second Edition.) Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2006.9 On Rhetoric, p. 198, fn. 16.10 Ibid., p. 198, fn. 18.11 Ibid., p. 213.12 Consigny, Scott. "Transparency and Displacement: Aristotle's Concept of Rhetorical Clarity." Rhetoric Society

Quarterly 17.4 (1987): 413-419.13 ”Transparency and Displacement”, p. 415.

I agree that distinctness (or distinction) is certainly a criterion in Book III, but I find it artificial to

claim that the distinction meant by Aristotle is a certain construal of clarity. To maintain this dual

sense of “clarity”, Consigny resorts to a rather forced metaphor: “Achieving clarify means becoming

clear of competing styles, as in a forest of competing voices or texts. The clear style is not like a

window; it is like a bell”. Rhetorical style is “an apparatus for establishing and amplifying places,

within which one may perceive a situation”.14 So the strangeness, according to this interpretation, the

xenikon that is required in rhetorical style, is really a kind of epistemic device, a means of imparting

a superior content, of giving the audience insight into the way things are in the rhetor’s world, for

“there is no ‘subject matter’ which can be perceived prior to its articulation in style”.15 However, at

the same time the rhetor “must convince his listener that his style is indeed transparent ... that his

articulation is the real ‘window’ on the situation” (417); that is to say, the rhetor must “render his

style invisible”.

Consigny’s paper represents a determined effort to defend and “naturalize” undetected

unfamiliarity and deviation as devices meant to better communicate the rhetor’s views, or

viewpoints, to the audience. A weakness in this argument is that we get very little by way of specific

demonstration of how this is supposed to work. How can discourse that is, for example,

surreptitiously rhythmical, establish for the audience a certain place from which to see the situation?

Kenneth Burke, in Counter-Statement, has another, very down-to-earth view of the relationship

between form and theme: he doubts any “quasi-mystical” attempt to see specific formal patterns as

having a specific relation to a particular content and claims that we are more likely to find “formal

designs or contrivances which impart emphasis regardless of their subject”.16 Thus, the presence of a

form-induced, subliminal sense of artfulness, deviation or unfamiliarity could not really help the

audience understand specifically what unfamiliar “place” the rhetor is speaking from; even a sense of

the “elevated” produced in this way lacks specificity in the sense that it doesn’t help the audience

discern what elevated position the rhetor occupies, distinct from the elevated positions of other

rhetors speaking from competing positions.

Another attempt to naturalize Aristotle’s calls for unfamiliarity and strangeness is found in John

Walt Burkett’s comprehensive commentary on Book III of the Rhetoric—a generally very helpful

and insightful work undertaken to compensate for the absence of a third volume of the commentary

on the Rhetoric by William Grimaldi, whose volumes on the first two books Burkett refers to as his

admired models.

14 Ibid., p. 416.15 Ibid.16 Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931, p. 135.

Like Consigny, Burkett’s presents a view of Aristotle’s strangeness implying that it is actually a

cognitive or epistemic tool that eventually serves the promotion of clarity of insight: “his view of

prose style has the aim of turning common terms into striking phrases that create new perspectives,

similar to what Burke calls ‘perspective by incongruity’”17. Burkett believes that Aristotle in this way

combines his rhetorical and mimetic theories. He sees the use of the strange features which he

prefers to call "exotic", as an element of being “mimetic” and conveying content, creating a natural

impression and being clear and appropriate. As in the case of Consigny, I am skeptical and instead

see strangeness as a device that works beneath the conscious level, creating an impression that there

is more wisdom and greatness in the speaker's words than one can immediately fathom, thus giving

the speaker's words impressiveness and added power; this it is not in any real sense a matter of

conveying content, and it does not bring either naturalness or new insights and perspectives.

Unobtrusive Strangeness—a Signal of Profundity

The alternative reading I wish to present does not see those aspects of strangeness that Aristotle

talks about as having an epistemic function, i.e., as serving to communicate content. In my view,

these strange features do not actually serve clarity in any understanding of the term; their purpose is

not really to make listeners understand anything in the content of the speaker’s message better than

they would otherwise have done. Instead, their function is to generate a feeling in the hearers of awe

and respect—a feeling that the speaker’s words have unfathomed wisdom in them that is not readily

understandable, but which causes hearers to experience the words, and their speaker, as “elevated”,

and to transmit a sense of elevation or uplift to listeners themselves. I do not believe that the

“strange” elements in a speech help listeners specifically understand what wisdom or insight is

concealed behind the strangeness of the speaker’s words—they only engender the feeling that there

is something hidden in them or beneath them that inspires awe.

This presence of strangeness is, however, only one side of the coin. The other side is, as we have

seen, the importance for the speaker of hiding [lanthanein] his intentional use of strangeness from

the hearer, i.e., to keep it under the threshold of consciousness. The speaker should appear to speak

straightforwardly, not artificially. Only then will the effect come about. If the hearer feels that the

strangeness of the speech does not spontaneously spring from a real and unfathomable wisdom in the

speaker, but rather reflects the speaker’s deliberate effort to appear unfathomably wise, then the

reading of the strangeness as actually signifying unfathomable wisdom is compromised and no

longer credible: if the speaker is perceived as speaking “strangely” in order to seem profound

17 Burkett, John Walt. Aristotle, Rhetoric III: a Commentary. Texas Christian University dissertation, 2011. [electronic resource] https://repository.tcu.edu/bitstream/handle/116099117/4295/Burkett.pdf?sequence=1, p. 69.

beyond the hearer’s capacity to understand, then the hearer will be led to conclude that the apparent

profundity is a sham.

Keeping this use of strangeness under the hearer’s threshold of consciousness in order to achieve

an affective impact on the hearer is important in public rhetoric, which is Aristotle’s subject here, as

opposed to poetry and other aesthetic genres. A public speech is supposed to deliver sincere advice,

argument or (in epideictic) praise or blame; the speech is supposed to be a means of addressing

shared issues and concerns, not to be an object of admiration and contemplation in its own right.

With poetry and related genres, the balance tips the opposite way. Poems and other aesthetic objects

are not primarily means of providing wisdom, but objects of which the fascinated perception is

sensed by individuals to be and end in itself—because it gives affective rewards of various kinds.

Thus when we read a poem or a novel it is not a problem if the writer is sensed to have intentionally

used strangeness to make us feel awe, rapture and similar affects; after all, those effects are arguably

the main motives that make people (other than academic professionals) read novels and poems. The

features of strangeness used in literary discourse to bring about such affects are in principle the same

as in public rhetoric; only they are openly used. Their presence does not have to be kept under the

threshold of consciousness; the manner of their working might still be.

Two Readers’ Responses to Strangeness

To better understand the nature and effects of what Aristotle refers to as strangeness I would like

to bring in some specific instances from a reception study I did some years ago.18 I asked a class of

students in the Rhetoric program at the University of Copenhagen to bring to the class selected texts

or passages that had had a strong aesthetic impact on them, and to submit along with these selections

some informal remarks on the nature of this impact. The aim of the study was then to look for

recurrent features, helping us to understand what it is in aesthetic objects that make them apt to

generate strong aesthetic experience, somewhat along the lines of Aristotle’s analysis of “tragic

pleasure” (Poetics, Ch. 13-14) and Longinus’s study of the “sublime” or “greatness” (hypsos). At

least two of the students brought texts that would not normally be classified as being literary in a

narrow sense, but more as religious, prophetic or philosophical (Longinus also draws his examples

from a broad selection of sources without making any distinction between poetry and other genres).

One informant who brought a selection of this kind had chosen the section on marriage from

Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet.19 This work, now in the public domain, has enjoyed enormous

18 Kock, Christian. “Hvad læser vi for? Er litteraturens interessemoment semantisk eller psykodynamisk?” Edda 4 (1994), 319-335.

19 Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet (22. Printing; original edition 1923). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1946.

popularity ever since its first publication; it exists in millions of copies, is translated into well over 50

languages and has never been out of print. Its genre, however, is somewhat undecidable; Wikipedia

rather enigmatically calls it describes it as “a book of 26 prose poetry essays”.20

This is the passage:

Then Almitra spoke again and said, "And what of Marriage, master?"

And he answered saying:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

The informant, in a note attached, described the effect of this book with a psychodynamic

concept: “this book ‘lifts me’ out of the daily grind and almost makes me a unique person”; it “gives

me the experience of being a valuable person.” This “uplift,” according to the informant, is brought

about by the text “through its symbolism and choice of words.” We may recall Aristotle’s words

about deviations making language seem “more elevated” [semnoteran], and even more his view that

metaphor especially “has clarity and sweetness and strangeness [xenikon]” (1405a7); and the effect

on this informant suggests that language with this kind of uplift may transmit a correlated feeling of

uplift to the hearer/reader. What, more specifically, characterizes the language of this passage? The

informant mentions, among other things, repetitions. There are verbatim repetitions such as “you 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_%28book%29.

shall be together”, but in particular there are partial repetitions ones involving changes of word order,

and there are repetitions of sentence structure instantiated by different words and rhetorical figures.

Above all, we see the converse phenomenon: repetitions of identical or related ideas, expressed

through different metaphors and other tropes.

A somewhat more specific understanding of the particular appeal of Gibran’s The Prophet may be

gained from an article in the BBC’s online news magazine from 2012.21 While contributing little to

the question it raises, the article does provide, besides an informative account of Gibran’s life and

work, some suggestive statements from people who have admired the book, such as this: "This book

has a way of speaking to people at different stages in their lives. It has this magical quality, the more

you read it the more you come to understand the words". These are the words of the Reverend Laurie

Sue, an interfaith minister in New York who, according to the article, has used readings from The

Prophet in conducting hundreds of weddings; the passage quoted would probably have been among

them. The statement, while seemingly banal, still gives us a few clues about the book’s power. Both

the point that it speaks to people “at different stages in their lives” and the point that the more one

reads, the more one comes to understand suggest that a major attraction is the feeling the book

generates that it says more than one understands here and now; it is felt to have unplumbed depths of

meaning. These meanings, however, are felt to be of a kind one does not understand now, but maybe

later; still the feeling is that they are there.

Repetitive effects, however of a different kind, is also at the core of another informant’s self-

selected example of a text of intense aesthetic power. It is the passage about the New Jerusalem from

the penultimate chapter of Revelation (21, 1-7). The informant herself used a Danish translation;

what I quote here is the New King James Version):

Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of

heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from

heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they

shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away

every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no

more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And He said to me,

“Write, for these words are true and faithful.”

21 “Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: Why is it so loved?” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17997163.

And He said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I

will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts. He who overcomes shall

inherit all things, and I will be his God and he shall be My son.

The informant also cites a later passage (22, 5):

There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives

them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

What is noteworthy here is particularly the use of repetitions with a slight difference that makes

one ask: what could this difference mean?

The effect of the repetitions in the text is underscored in the informant’s written comment; she

states: “Whether or not one chooses to believe in this message, I don’t believe one could help being

affected by the ‘solemnity’ permeating this text. The repetitions ‘there shall be … ,’ ‘no … no … nor

… ,’ and words like ‘sorrow,’ ‘death,’ ‘light’ help create this mood.” The “solemnity,” we should

note, is not a property of the text’s referential content, but rather a description of the mood that,

according to this reader, is expressed by text and experienced by its reader. A related term from

ancient rhetorical thinking might be semnotēs according to Hermogenes. It is a subtype of

“grandeur,” megethos, and the translator’s counterpart for it is precisely “solemnity”.22

This kind of repetitions called by some scholars parallelismus membrorum, or grammatical

parallelism, is typical of the prophetic books as well as the books of wisdom in the Old Testament,

but also of folk poetry all over the world. Roman Jakobson repeatedly highlighted the way poetry

favors parallelism of these kinds, as in his early pamphlet on the newest Russian poetry (1921) and

several later papers.23 In the former text, Jakobson quotes the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins

for the following: “The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces

itself to the principle of parallelism”.24 Jakobson himself states: “Those poetic patterns where certain

similarities between successive verbal sequences are compulsory or enjoy a high preference appear

to be widespread in the languages of the world”.25 Perhaps his most famous general formulation of

the same principle is this: "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of

selection into the axis of combination.”26 22 Wooten, Cecil W. Hermogenes on Types of Style. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 19-26.23 Jakobson, Roman. "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet." Language (1966): 399-429. Jakobson, Roman.

"Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry." Lingua 21 (1968): 597-609.24 “Grammatical Parallelism”, p. 399.25 Ibid.26 “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, p. 358.

Both verbatim repetition and partial repetition with some degree of variation, of either expression

or content, may be sensed as deviating from ordinary speech that prioritizes purely communicative

effect; a hearer is likely to wonder, perhaps involuntarily and subliminally, what motivates verbatim

repetition since no new content seems, on the face of it, to be communicated, and, in the case of

repetition with slight differences, what different nuances they intended to communicate. Both these

feelings are apt to generate the feeling that “more” is being said in this elevated language, and more

is going on, than is immediately apparent; but one cannot fully fathom what it is. Such a feeling also

will also be apt to correlate with a sense that the speaker, whose words are sensed to contain so much

more than one can presently understand, is for that very reason himself elevated and worthy of awe

and respect.

Booth on “Perversities” in the Gettysburg Address

Additional insight in the nature and effects of “strangeness” in oratory may be gained from a

remarkable close reading of a celebrated rhetorical text by the literary critic Stephen Booth, whose

work particularly on Shakespearean texts has for decades generated admiration as well as

controversy among literary critics. In his book Precious Nonsense he presented a 40-page

commentary on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, along with similar commentaries on Ben Jonson's

“Epitaphs on His Children” and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.27 He declares that the driving motive

of the book is simply this: “I wanted to know what was good about them”.28 A challenging view

advanced by Booth in several of his long series of works is that there are “remarkable but almost

universally unremarked ideational and stylistic anomalies, contortions and perversities in well-

known, well-loved works of literature”29—and precisely these features are perhaps the crucial, secret

ingredient that more than anything helps account for what is “good about them”.

Booth’s reading of the Gettysburg Address can be said the a step, or several steps, further than

Edwin Black’s classic rhetorical criticism of it, which celebrates its “radiant multiplicity” and

“inexhaustibility” and finds that it “eludes even line-by-line or word-by-word analysis”.30 Booth

emphasizes how the speech presents itself as apparently straightforward discourse: it is heard or read

as plain, direct speaking that does not need meticulous scrutiny to be understood; yet at the same

time, it is full of little oddities, apparent illogicalities, and other bewildering features. “The simple,

straightforward Gettysburg Address is full of small gratuitous stylistic perversities that complicate—

27 Booth, Stephen. Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

28 Ibid., p. ix.29 Ibid., p. 23.30 Black, Edwin. ”Gettysburg and Silence.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994), 21-36; quotation from p. 21.

but do not weaken—our perceptions of the continuity and connection that syntax, logic and phonetic

patterning assert.”31

I would suggest that the effect of all the observations Booth makes might well be a vague feeling

that there are depths of meaning in the text which elude us as we hear or read, and which we might

go on plumbing without ever exhausting them; on the other hand the words and thoughts appear

simple and straightforward. This resembles Aristotle’s insistence that oratory should, on the one

hand, have a touch of strangeness, xenikon, but on the other hand this strangeness should only be felt

and not rise above the threshold of consciousness in the hearer or reader. It is arguable that it is this

feeling of “strangeness” that makes it appear “more elevated”, on the condition that the strangeness

remains subliminal or unobtrusive. The very first words of the speech, “Four score and seven years

ago”, constitute a small example. The use of this phrase rather than “eighthy-seven” makes no

difference in regard to referential meaning, but then what point, what other kind of meaning does it

have? One may easily get the feeling that someone who speaks like this must have profounder, more

important and more solemn thoughts and ideas in mind. Part of that feeling may also come from the

vague biblical resonance of the phrase (as Booth points out, the Nineteenth Psalm has “threescore

and ten” as a measure of the human lifespan). Another example of the features highlighted in

Booth’s analysis is the many occurrences of the syllable for (respectively, four or fore); they become

very audible, but their syntactic and semantic values keep shifting; in other words, the same sound

resonates powerfully through the speech, but its meaning flickers. This may well create a subliminal

feeling that the text, simple though it seems, contains unplumbed depths of meaning.

For a final example of the phenomena that Booth labels “perversities” we may cite his analysis of

the last sentence of the speech. The sentence follows here:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these

honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full

measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people,

by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Booth highlights, among other features, the resonance of the six prominent thats in this sentence,

and in a tour de force of close reading he lays out how they help create a tangle of semantic/syntactic

complications, involving ambiguities, progressive reinterpretations and indeed contradictoriness, all

beneath a surface of straightforwardness. This excerpt on just one clause within the sentence may 31 Ibid., p. 38.

serve as an illustration:

the identity of the that we . . .resolve clause is multiple. As one hears it, one hears it in several

independently signaled, syntactically incompatible, but nonetheless coexistent, relationships to the

clauses it follows: (1) the that we . . .resolve clause repeats the form of the clause it immediately

follows (the that from these honored dead clause), and the substance (a) of that clause, (b) of the

first clause of this final sentence, and (c) of the whole of the sentence that precedes this one; (2) it

is a syntactically subordinate continuation of the syntax begun in clause 1; (3) it is effectively a

syntactically independent unit—the promised act of resolution. The act of understanding the

clause is paradoxical (the clause is not paradoxical, but the act of understanding it is). One’s mind

easily and casually masters more than common sense says it is possible for a mind to master32.

A way of making the same point is perhaps to say that Lincoln’s oratory here is apt to make

hearers feel they have intuitively grasped a treasure of deep and solemn wisdom that they cannot

even begin to unravel. Another way of saying this is to repeat Aristotle’s terse observation: “To

deviate [from prevailing usage] makes language seem more elevated”.

Summing up, I suggest that part of the rationale for Aristotle’s recommendation of what we may

call (sub)liminal strangeness in oratory is the consideration, not explicitly formulated in his own text,

that the features we have grouped under this heading tend to give listeners (or readers) a feeling that

there may be an unexplored store of deep wisdom just beneath the surface meaning of the words. I

am also suggesting, in contrast to some of the interpreters referenced above, that this feeling is is fact

spurious. Features of subliminal strangeness do not (at least not necessarily) enrich content and

impart depth of wisdom to a discourse—but Aristotle is aware that they may be felt to do this. The

kind of feeling in the audience that I mean may be paraphrased as “I understand the immediate

meaning, but I feel that there is a latent deeper meaning underneath it that I may only get to

understand by and by—and this feeling makes me feel wonder and awe”.

If this suggestion has any plausibility, it helps clear up one source of puzzlement for attentive

readers of the Rhetoric, Book III: the repeated reference to the usefulness in oratory of (sub)liminal

strangeness. At the same time it raises another intriguing question on which I have nothing to offer:

why and how could Aristotle endorse the intentional attempt of rhetors to induce spurious, i.e.,

essentially deceptive, feelings in audiences? But something suggests that he did.

32 Ibid., p. 58.