Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism (review)

"Where do we find ourselves?" Emerson's famous question proposes a revolutionary basis for philosophical reflection that he called "Experience." Yet experience has had a difficult time establishing itself in the history of philosophy. William James founded "Pragmatism" upon it. But the acceptance of pragmatism as philosophy, and in part for the reason of its experiential founding, has been rather parochially limited to American shores. In a more continental mode, Husserl developed it as phenomenology. But the broad cultural success of psychology has nibbled away at the prestige of phenomenology on its practical side, and the assimilation of phenomenology by Heidegger into ontology has blunted it on the theoretical, expanding it so beyond practical bounds that experience has come to seem everything and nothing, no one's experience at all. More closely at hand, for the analysis of literature, the special experience of a text has been difficult to come at with the philosophical tools available. "Pragmatic" textual approaches have never really been developed, perhaps because the inherent interest of pragmatism in the "cash value" of things seems so unsuitable to issues of textuality. And though phenomenological studies, following the example of Georges Poulet, were the rage for a time in the 1950s and 1960s, the particulars of various texts tended to get lost in a kind of woozy impressionism, dissolving the experience of plot, character, and all the resources of narrative thought into the "consciousness" of its author, giving short shrift to his actual production, the textual thing-in-itself.

Even the development of ordinary language inquiry, though it helped a good deal in philosophy, has had to wait until very recently for appropriation by literary critics. Austen's "performatives" located meaning in the experience of everyday speech. But Austen himself regarded literature as by definition non-performative, and even literary critics sympathetic to an Austenian approach would admit that his acolyte, John Searle, got much the worst of his well-known argument with Derrida, a deconstructor of Austen, but possessed of a much finer literary sensitivity. Wittgenstein has been more promising, and though he had little to say about literature, except in largely non-philosophical obiter dicta, the Philosophical Investigations, after all, are nothing if not literary, a great "book" by a great writer, as Richard Rorty has said. And Stanley Cavell, who saw the non-propositional tenor of Wittgenstein's thinking as precisely literary, has taken up the Emersonian thread and placed it squarely on the literary table.

And now, directly and fully elaborated: Walter Jost. Following the train of Wittgenstein and Cavell—in a continuation of the work that he began, with this reviewer, in collecting a volume of what we called "ordinary language criticism"—Jost gives a rhetorical frame to the question, tracing the pedigree of experience to the language of classical rhetoric, which he proposes as an old/new set of tools. With Aristotle and Cicero at the ready, and a keen literary sensitivity that knows how to adapt them, he deploys the language and categories of classical rhetoric, the experience of speaking and listening, to unpack writing and reading to remarkable effect. Experience finds a more relevant literary language here, and in keeping with Jost's "ordinary" interests, experience means what everybody ordinarily means by it and that which the art of rhetoric was invented to develop: the address of the self to the other, in a community of selves and others, or speaking a shared "grammar," in Wittgenstein's term. Texts, here, are meant rather to lay that grammar out than, in the traditional philosophical mode, to correct it. Their narratives are less arguments designed to prove something than cases meant to show, less to discover new knowledge than to remind us of what we know already. In Jost, that is, the way of approaching the experience of a literary work is to see its characters as they are situated in language, to investigate the linguistic world in which they find themselves, their "tropes" and their...