Obscure Language, Unclear Literature: Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment by Päivi Mehtonen (review)

REVIEWS 246 Approaches will be of use to all students of medieval literature and feminist theory for its freshness, range, and exemplary use of interdisciplinary methods to illuminate an important part of the medieval literary tradition. THOMAS JOSEPH O’DONNELL, English, UCLA Päivi Mehtonen, Obscure Language, Unclear Literature: Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment, trans. Robert MacGilleon (Helsinki : Academia Scientiarum Fennica 2003) 229 pp. When Päivi Mehtonen makes the theme of Obscure Language, Unclear Literature : Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment a history of literary obscurity, she seems to be setting herself up for what might be a bad joke. Fortunately, however, Mehtonen acquits herself in this philosophical survey with clarity and thorough, inventive research. Robert MacGilleon’s translation , moreover, communicates these qualities with agility and charm. On the level of the sentence and paragraph at least, Quintilian, whose influence on Western thought is something like the work’s protagonist, would be proud. In Obscure Language, Unclear Literature, Mehtonen seeks to establish a genealogy for modern notions of obscurantism in order to dispel misconceptions about their origin and the nature of their articulation. She takes issue with formulations that locate the stimulus for “the withdrawal of the modernist poet into his and her own linguistic world” in “the disintegration of the great (social, religious) systems of meaning and the increasing fragility of the sensus communis ” (23); rather, she shows that an interest ambiguity and vagueness has been present, either as qualities to be cultivated or vices to be avoided, since Antiquity . In a more-or-less chronological fashion she moves from Greco-Romans like Quintilian, Varro, and Sextus Empiricus, through medieval theoreticians like Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Boccaccio, all the way up to Enlightenment figures like A. G. Baumgarten, Locke, and George Campbell. Along the way she is able to elaborate on theoretical points of interest. In particular, she wants to show that aesthetics is not first and foremost a discipline whose roots lie in the fine arts but rather from the interactions of different portions of the liberal arts, particularly grammar, rhetoric, and, with the passage of time, dialectic. Hers is an interdisciplinary obscurity. She further adumbrates that “clarity and obscurity are not merely metaphors for linguistic presentation, knowledge or ideology ... they also constitute in concrete fashion modes and foundations for the analysis of language” (11). She suggests in other words that the “elemental dialectic of light and darkness”—Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s words, which Mehtonen quotes—shape our experience of language before we have chosen to submit to the “sovereignty of visual perception” (11). Mehtonen begins with Heraclitus the Obscure, and details the ways in which rhetoricians of the ancient world approached obscurity as a problem to be solved rather than a mark of “high” literature.” Christians of the Middle Ages, when confronted with the Bible and other authoritative texts that became more and more difficult to construe as time went on, began to see obscurity as a necessary part of a reader’s experience and an opportunity to crowd meaning in one phrase. In Mehtonen’s representation, medieval thinkers were just as aware as modern ones about the complications which arise in the interaction of author, audience and text. Opponents of obscurity remained, but defenders of poetic REVIEWS 247 license such as Boccaccio were given new ammunition with which to wage rhetorical war. Once the controversy over obscurity reaches the time of the Enlightenment, the question of obscurity’s purpose has only become more vexed. Empiricist investment in the immediacy of apprehension so dominates the English scene that “an unclear text is not deserving of any undue effort on the reader’s part” (168), even when rhetoricians like Campbell allow for obscurity within poetry and prophecy. In Germany, Baumgarten is a “middle of the road” obscurantist who nonetheless held that a clear poem “is more satisfactory and magis poetica—more poetic—than the poem which consists of obscure representations” (182, 179). In order to keep a handle on her material and to maintain the comparison between contemporary and historical formulations of obscurity, Mehtonen does not proceed in a cause-and-effect fashion. Instead, her discussion of the antique world makes constant...