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Chapter 7. The Rhetorical Phenomenon: Occupying the Interspace Where Subject and Object Are Joined by Language
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The Rhetorical Phenomenon: Occupying the Interspace Where Subject and Object Are Joined by Language When the young Buckler was discovering literature and beginning to write, the formalistic innovations of modernists such as Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Stein, Mansfield, Forster, and Faulkner were at their height. Certain writers such as Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and the early Faulkner, were part of a movement promoting cultural nationalism that advocated a break with European stylistic decorum. They grounded their writing in the literary rendering of spoken American English, thus generating an effect of simplicity and repetition, even a certain liturgical monotony. Yet other writers, notably Gertrude Stein who subsequently influenced Sherwood Anderson and the older Faulkner, were fascinated with the mechanisms of language. They used multitudinous rhetorical functions ,1 and delighted in calling attention to the artifices of the writer's craft. Buckler's daring use of rhetorical devices, of startling imagery, places his works firmly within this modernist tendency. His Notes for chapter 7 are on pp. 247-48. 7 191 192 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment \ sophisticated writing contains highly figurative and metaphorical language even in dialogue, as do the Faulkner works he so admired. As Janice Kulyk Keefer has pointed out, his true narrative voice is "not artless or folksy, but contrived, convoluted" (204). Claude Bissell has commented Buckler's adventurousness in exploring language, and Alan Young, in his Preface to Ox Bells and Fireflies, pays hommage to Buckler's "daring and innovative search for metaphors and verbal effects that will express precisely the complexity of ideas and feelings that he wishes to communicate" (xvi). Yet little attention has been paid to Buckler's intense preoccupation with language . Except for the landmark book Under Eastern Eyes by Janice Kulyk Keefer and essays by Laurie Ricou, "David Canaan and Buckler's Style in The Mountain and the Valley/' and D.J. Dooley, "Style and Communication in TheMountain and the Valley," Buckler's protean language with its plethora of conceits and artificially convoluted innovations has rarelybeen studied in depth, and has often engendered incomprehension and irritation in readers and critics alike. His tendency to present simple ideas in a brilliant but abstruse way—what French rhetors call phoebus—would be termed bomphilogia by anglophone critics , who foreground the device's dimension of boastfulness rather than that of brilliance.2 WarrenTallman asserts with respect to the writing in The Mountain and the Valley that Buckler "has no compositional key except maximum intensity" and that "[s]entence after sentence is forced to a descriptive pitch which makes the novel exceptionally wearing to read" (14). Gerald Noonan criticizes the "overwrought verbiage" that engenders the novel's "structural and interpretative disharmony" (68). Andrew T.Seaman acknowledges Buckler's "poet's trick of transposing what is in the mind into figures of speech," resulting in an "intensity of emotional experience" exceeding anything done by his fellow Atlantic writer Charles Bruce. He remarks that as a result, whole sections of Buckler's prose become extended prose poems. But he finds the effect "not always desirable," arguing that while this is "perfectly appropriate in his pastoral idyll, Ox Bells and Fireflies," it "slows the pace of the already ruminative The Mountain and the Valley to a near standstill at times" (30). Janice Kulyk Keefer acknowledges that his prose is "at times superbly charged," but deplores its "tortuous quality," and points out that he "often tumbles into mere preciousness, or that he develops certain tiresome verbal twitches." She argues that the "verbal binges on [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:01 GMT) The Rhetorical Phenomenon 193 which Buckler goes, his wildcatting with words, are not necessary risks taken in an inventive and experimental context so much as a frenzied whistling in the dark" (204). David Dooley is offended by Buckler's "overwriting" (672), by his "over-use of assonance and alliteration," declaring furthermore that the writer "uses paradox in too precious a way." All the while admitting the "suggestive parallel" of Faulkner and his "stylistic excesses," he claims that Buckler "is a writer who is trying too hard to secure his effects, whose style calls too much attention to itself" (671). Lawrence Mathews attacks Buckler most virulently, in a witty article that cleverly classifies CanLit critics into three categories. Although he chastises them for "their inability or unwillingness to come to grips with the problem of language" (4), Mathews flippantly dismisses serious studies that do exist, such as LaurieRicou's analysis, calling it Ricou's "get-stoned-on...