On Eloquence (review)

Denis Donoghue’s most recent book, an informal and wide-ranging set of speculations on the various forms of eloquence in literature, was evidently written in response to what this eminent critic takes to be the sorry state of literary studies today. “It has occurred to me, during the past several years as a teacher of English, Irish, and American literature at New York University,” Donoghue notes in his opening chapter, “that the qualities of writing I care about are increasingly hard to expound: aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, ‘how to do things with words’” (13). In response to the current politicized climate, in which literature is too often viewed as the bearer of didactic messages, Donoghue wants to remind his reader what it is that makes—or should make—literary study so pleasurable. His answer is eloquence, which, he insists, is by no means a “subset of rhetoric” (3). “Rhetoric has an aim, to move people to do one thing rather than another”; eloquence, in contrast, has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means . . . . The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness . . . . Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it” (3).

The difficulty with this initial formulation is that “eloquence,” rather than being equated with what the Russian Formalists called poeticity—the “orientation toward the neighboring word” that characterizes the poetic function as such—becomes rather a special effect, a momentary “grace note” or sudden frisson that recalls nothing so much as Matthew Arnold’s fabled touchstone. Indeed, the catalogue of “eloquent” phrases Donoghue gives us at the beginning of chapter 3—e.g., Shakespeare’s “Those are pearls that were his eyes” or “She should have died hereafter”—seem cut from the same cloth as Hamlet’s “Absent thee from felicity a while,” which is one of Arnold’s favorites. Indeed, in an Arnoldian move, Donoghue takes eloquence to be the quality of that word, phrase, or line of verse that has “broken free from its setting and declared its independence” (44–45).

Such “irreducibility” is certainly characteristic of aphorisms and bon mots, found within the poetic context, but many of Donoghue’s examples are puzzling. Take the phrase “The fire that stirs about her when she stirs,” which encapsulates W. B. Yeats’ defense, in “The Folly of Being Comforted,” of his inability to give up his love. What makes the couplet in question—“Because of that great nobleness of hers / The fire that stirs about her when she stirs”—so striking is precisely the contrast between the curious abstraction of the first line and the visual and sonic image of the second. Surely, it is the whole poem, not just the touchstone line, that is—or is not—an instance of eloquence.

What compounds the problem is that Donoghue does not take eloquence to be intrinsically verbal; it is not, in other words, as it would be for Wittgenstein or Roman Jakobson, a function of language itself but an eloquence “beyond” the verbal. There is, for example, the “eloquence of situation” or “song without words,” as in the early scene in Madame Bovary, when Charles, the local physician, makes a house call to the farm owned by Emma’s father, and Emma offers the widowed—and hence eligible—doctor a glass of cordial. Neither speaks, but movement and posture, as rendered so brilliantly by Flaubert, say it all: “The erotic force of this episode is entirely the result of act and gesture; it as little to do with words as is consistent with the minimally verbal character of writing” (57).

But how do we know Emma’s act and gesture except through language, not to mention that in this case, the passage in question is first cited in the English translation of Margaret Mauldon—“the tip of her tongue, poking between her beautiful teeth”—a phrase that arguably resonates rather differently from Flaubert’s, “sa langue, passant entre...