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CHAPTERS Pleasure IN SEVERAL OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS, the orator has constructed himself via an aggressive relationship to his own body and soul and to the bodies and souls of others. This relationship allows him to establish himself as himself in vigorous contradistinction to a number of other unlivable sUbjects. We need to explore directly the problem of pleasure, or, more precisely, the problem of pleasure seen specifically as a rhetorical problem. Furthermore, as we have seen with the actors, performance particularly bedevils oratory as a site invested with pleasure. Only after we have squarely confronted this issue can we proceed to the final chapter of this study, where a sublime homosocial erotics pervades the scene of performance . This final abreaction against the flesh will help to set out more clearly the refusals upon which the sublime is predicated. Lucian's Praeceptor rhetorum (The orators' teacher) provides a parodic treatment of rhetorical education and its dangerous relationship with the pleasures of the performative body. The comic or satirical quality of Lucian offers a ready view onto the lay of oratory's psychic landscape. Where other texts participate in the dialogue of bodies, souls, and pleasures at a metaphorical level, Lucian literalizes for us all of these themes. Lucian makes real, lived bodies out of rhetorical styles and likewise makes the choice of one's educational pursuits into the literal pursuit of a concrete path down a physical road. Lucian's wit is thus like Aristophanes' in the Clouds: there too educational styles are personified and made corporeal. One cannot, therefore, accuse Lucian of vulgarity or a crass misunderstanding of the noble project of education. His racy essay has an impeccable intellectual pedigree. For more than seven hundred years the metaphors of ancient education have pointed to these physical forms.1 I will begin, then, at a point that is for us somewhat near the end. Lucian was born around 120 C.E. in Samosata,2 and hence he occupies the extremes in both space and time of this study. Lucian's native tongue was perhaps Aramaic rather than Greek. In any case, the Attic Greek of his own literary prose is far removed from the common usage of the average 149 150 STAGlNG MASCULINITY Greek-speaker of the age.3 Lucian provides an example of a man born in the provinces who successfully won for himself a prominent social position as an intellectual by way of a very traditional sort of training in the "classics " of high culture.4 In many ways, then, Lucian could be seen as an ideal student of the essay that we shall shortly examine; and hence the essay itself is a sort of comic rehearsal of the inaugural scene for Lucian's own intellectual life. While Branham sees Lucian's essay as autobiographic (1989, 29), I would like to identify the narrator and the author more cautiously. I would say instead that the narrative voice makes claims for the intellectual world that have unavoidable consequences for Lucian as the author of those same statements. But this scene depicting the foundation of intellectual life also portrays a moment of refusal. Lucian indicates that a profound choice is made as one sets out to assume the title of an educated man. Lucian also makes it clear that this choice is made at the level of the body, and it is a choice of a whole economy of bodily pleasures with vast implications for the psychic life of rhetorical power. In this chapter I would like to discuss a number of key themes surrounding the speaker's body. The issues, though, are confused and confusing : each element routinely impinges upon, alludes to, or complicates all of the others. Briefly, I want to examine the following: what kind of pleasure is found in the orator's body? what are the possible sources from which this pleasure is derived? what is the proper relationship between the speaker, the pleasure that is inscribed in his body, and the sources of this pleasure? what is the relationship between the pleasure found in the body and the pleasure that originates from the orator's language?5 The answers to these questions will become clearer if we carefully pick our way through Lucian's essay and offer a sort of running commentary on the text. According to the passage that opens the Praeceptor rhetorum, the field of oratory would seem to be necessarily martial and agonistic: the youth apparently seeks some force (OUVU!!lV...

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