The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric

7. The Methodical Memory on Display: The Five-Paragraph Theme

7 The Methodical Memory on Display: The Five-Paragraph Theme A popular conceit among eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists characterized the relation between thought and its expression as analogous to that between soul and body. George Campbell employed the analogy in the Philosophy of Rhetoric as follows: In contemplating a human creature, the most natural division of the subject is the common division into soul and body, or into the living principle of perception and of action, and that system of material organs by which the other receives information from without, and is enabled to exert its powers. . .. Analogous to this, there are two things in every discourse which principally claim our attention, the sense and the expression; or in other words, the thought and the symbol by which it is communicated. These may be said to constitute the soul and the body of an oration, or indeed of whatever is signified to another by language. For, as in man, each of these constituent parts hath its distinctive attributes, and as the perfection of the latter consisteth in its fitness for serving the purposes of the former, it is precisely with those two essential parts of every speech, the sense and the expression. (32) Campbell's metaphoric distinction between an inner core and an outer envelope endured within current-traditional thought. To supply only one example of its many appearances, I quote Day in the Art ofDiscourse: "No process of art is complete until its product appears in a sensible form; and language is the form in which the art of discourse embodies 120 The Methodical Memory on Display 121 itself, as sound furnishes the body in the art of music and color in that of painting" (208). In the modern rhetorical systems I am examining here, language was treated as a pliant medium that exactly represented thought. Thought, the "soul," "interior," or "core" of discourse, always preceded, and was superior to, language, which was a secondary, fallen, exterior embodiment of what was really important. Because language had only one function-to mirror thought-the function of arrangement came to be very like that of style in currenttraditional rhetoric. Both served to externalize the internalized process of invention. Where arrangement made graphic the larger movements of mind, such as analysis or synthesis, style made graphic its connections between simple ideas. Indeed, early current-traditional rhetoricians acknowledged this likeness between the two canons by submerging their treatment of arrangement within that given to style. For example, Alexander Jamieson included arrangement in his general remarks on style in his Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Literature (originally published 1818). I Samuel Newman also placed his very brief treatment of arrangement in the Practical System of Rhetoric under the heading of style. Thus many current-traditional authors maintained that rhetoric, and hence composition, had only two canons: invention and style. Arrangement , suspended as it was between the binaries of thought and expression never quite found a comfortable home in their textbooks. Occasionally it was submerged within invention, as when various sorts of aims were associated with their respective orders of development within genres. Of course this was made possible by the two-faced nature of method, which could both direct the progress of thought and exactly represent that progress in discourse. Despite all of this, current-traditional authors were very concerned with arrangement, even though they no longer gave that name to the disposition within a discourse of its larger parts or divisions. Two developments characterized mature current-traditional treatments of the arrangement of discourse on a page: the hardening and reduction of methodical principles into the trinity of unity, coherence, and emphasis and the emergence of what I call the "nesting approach" to composing. Early Commentary on Arrangement In On Invention, Cicero discriminated six parts that could appear in any rhetorical discourse: the introduction, which readied audiences to receive the argument; the narration, which gave the history of the case; the partition, which announced the issues that would be addressed and 122 TheMethodicalMemOlY the order in which the rhetor would address them; the confirmation and refutation, which presented the rhetor's arguments for the case and against those offered by opponents; and the peroration or conclusion, which excited enthusiasm for the rhetor's argument or set the audience against the case advanced by opponents (2.20-190). The arrangement of any discourse was determined by the rhetor's assessment of the rhetorical...