297. Gentlemanly Prose

Gentlemanly Prose

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For disambiguation and demystification see critical pedagogy

 and critical theory.

Gentlemanly Prose is a logocentric stylistic deriving from the classical discourse of privileged classes in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known at the time as "the Republic of Letters."   Its product is variously self-described as writing that is "easy," "simple," "clear," or "perspicuous."

Gentlemanly Theory is the extension of this stylistic into theoretical or philosophical discourse.

Nomenclature.  Practitioners have retained the class- and gender-inappropriate term "gentlemanly" for its historical, and therefore explanatory, function.  "Prose" is synechdochic for non-metricized discourse.

Foundational proponents.  Frequently cited as avatars are Socrates (Attic or Athenian style) and Cicero (Roman style midway between the humble Attic and the aspiring Asiatic style). 

Foundational frame.  The cultural frame, taken to be foundational, is that of slave-holding Greek and slave-holding Roman aristocracies, with corresponding lifestyle: patriarchal banqueting and discourse while women ("flute girls") provide the music.

History.

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Gentlemanly prose in the purest Attic style was first valorized in England by the theorist Francis Bacon, exemplified by the chemist Robert Boyle, and imposed in 1662 by the founders of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in their requirements for submitted papers.  The need for "precision and objectivity" paralleled similar needs and similar impositions in France, where René Descartes was the exemplar.

Less pure, but only slightly, was the Attic of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose conceptual aspirations forced concessions to the Asiatic , making a space for metaphor.

Enlightenment scientists and philosophers retained in their "objectivity" the racialized subjectivity of the Attic avatars, reflecting in the eighteenth century the cultural hegemony of ancient Athens, where Scythian speech was freely called "barbaric" and clumsy forms "barbarisms."  Calling obscure Medieval writers "Gothic" continued this prejudice.

Gentlemanly theorists cite the writing of Joseph Addison as a model of balance between Attic and Asiatic, recreating in the English language Cicero's compromise ("a plain, middle style") in Latin.  Addison's Spectator papers (early eighteenth century) are taken to be the model for the "easy but precise" writing in the magazines produced for the educated middle classes since his time, as now in The New Yorker.  It is the style of Jonathan Swift, taken as the exemplar for longer interventions, observable in the following:

I know not how it comes to pass that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe.

Politics.  Consciousness-raising efforts have led some gentlemanly practitioners to believe themselves marginalized in some areas of the American university.  They have raised complaints against Communications, Sociology, and English (cultural studies) departments, and have felt condescension in Women's Studies and Black Studies programs.  However, little evidence of oppression has been offered, and none of abuse.  Though many gentlemanly writers are struggling to make a space for themselves, there has been little activism.

Polemics.

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Gentlemanly prose has not lent itself to direct polemical assertion.  Literary satire is favored, as in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, a poem "celebrating the goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain" (Wikipedia) or in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, third book, satirizing "scientizing pedants" (the theorists' name for them).  The language of all of Dulness's agents, in the Dunciad or out, is taken to be antipodal to the language of liberally educated gentleman.  Duns Scotus, known for jargonized Scholastic abstractions, and giving his name to the Dunciad, is the pole figure.

Difficulty in identifying current targets in these anachronistic satires no doubt accounts for the ineffectiveness of this polemic — that, and their distance from central postcolonial discourse, within which they appear as "belletristic irrelevance."  For those with a sense of political relevance "gentlemanly," then, demarcates not a positivity but simply a positionality vis-à-vis the normative. 

Pedagogy.  Language used in the way of Socrates and Cicero was imposed on students and teachers in the schools identified with the rise of "humanism" and the education called "liberal."  Renaissance court schools like Vittorino's "House of Joy," in which "anything in the nature of fine writing, of prolix or over-laden description, or of empty commonplace decked out in verbiage, was ruthlessly torn apart," are given credit for shifting the paradigm. The revived Ancient and Renaissance models went on to prevail in Oxford and Cambridge tutorial teaching, and the "tearing apart" there was retained in English Composition courses in America where, though often insensitive, gentlemanly prose became generally gender- and class-neutral.  Writers of such  prose held up as models for students today are as likely to be women (like Zoë Heller and Martha Nussbaum) as men (like Atul Gawande and Tony Judt).

Gentlemanly Theory.  Though hidden agendas are suspected, the open agenda of gentlemanly theorists has been to meet objections to gentlemanly prose. Their three most emphatic responses, condensed:

 (1) "No, gentlemanly prose is not just a feature of European cultural hegemony; it appears clearly (in a different idiom, of course) in the classical Chinese of Han scholars.  It appears in India and in Persia.  It is the writing of advanced civilization."

(2) "Yes, the language of Athenian gentlemen, Roman patricians, and Florentine governors is appropriate for the democratic masses in America because Americans — in their periodicals, on their websites — have to debate, and the language of these 'oligarchs' and 'hegemons' is still the best language for democratic debate.  It is clear, ample, and part of an easily dramatized revolutionary tradition: Paris ferment, salon exchanges, editorial wars, biting commentary, plain-spoken philosophy.  It's the great medium of the dialectical testing democracy depends on."

(3) "No, gentlemanly prose is not a belletristic indulgence; it is a necessary feature of realistic philosophy, as witness the appeals to its standards by the Ordinary Language philosophers of Oxford."

Some gentlemanly theorists argue (4) that meeting the standards of gentlemanly prose is a reliable test for sound philosophy.  Since "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" (George Orwell, taken axiomatically), slovenly philosophers are going to present readers with foolish thoughts.  To avoid this "foolishness" careful thinkers are urged to go to the most gentlemanly teacher or tutor they can find.  "Does this word make sense to you?  Is that paragraph foolish?"  It is claimed that no other test or appeal, as to "reality," provides more reliable protection against folly than this.

Philosophy.  A claim for the deepest relevance of gentlemanly prose has been made as follows: "What philosophers most need is a precise language that is in touch with the world.  Gentlemanly prose satisfies that need better than any other. The language of medieval theologians, the Scholastics and other abstract schematizers was, like that of mathematicians and logicians, precise, but it was not in touch with the world. The language of the marketplace, like that of poets and novelists, was in touch with the world, but it wasn't precise.  The gentlemen who held students to the standards of Socrates and Cicero and Locke and Addison were men of the world, in touch with the world, readers of literature that kept them in touch, and therefore the best servants, and trainers, of philosophers" (feetofsocrates 239).

69. Watching Students Riot While Teaching Christian Authors

That was a painful sight, bad students throwing bricks and good students smiling on them as they screwed up their revolution. Few of us could explain it — or much else connected with the riots.

Old-time Christians could explain it, of course.  They had a scheme into which the rioting students fit perfectly. Human beings rioted because since Adam's fall they were born to do evil. If they weren't reborn in Christ, they'd keep doing it.

The name "Yahoo" brought in the whole Christian scheme. It was the name Jonathan Swift, an Anglican priest, used in Gulliver's Travels for the unregenerate man. Those university people who couldn't bring in the Christian scheme (out of scientific scruple, say) or didn't know it (out of curricular neglect of the humanities, say) were left in doubt.

I wasn't in doubt long because I was teaching a lot of Christian authors at the time. One of them, John Milton, gave me not only the scheme but the warning to political humanity that went with it. It's so apt and so well put that I'm going to quote it here in full. The archangel Michael is speaking to Adam, who has just recoiled from a vision of Nimrod, the first tyrant.

Justly thou abhorr'st

That Son, who on the quiet state of men

Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue

Rational Liberty; yet know withal,

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty

Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells

Twinn'd, and from her has no dividual being:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From reason and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since he permits

Within himself unworthy Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in judgment just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords,

Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom. Tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.

Paradise Lost, XII, 79-96

Teaching Milton to a class with revolutionaries of the sixties in it was thrilling. Milton's revolutionary credentials were impeccable, and so easily dramatized. He had come hurrying back from Italy as soon as he heard of his friends getting engaged in Parliament's stand against the king, he had joined the movement, he had risen, he had become propaganda minister in Cromwell's revolutionary government, he had defended the killing of the king before a Europe full of threatening monarchies. And all the while he was writing those essays on divorce and freedom of the press whose progressive ideas would resound for centuries. You couldn't ask for a better revolutionary.

And here he was coming out for the old internal hierarchy, where reason's place over the passions was firmly fixed. It was Plato, it was Dante, it was Shakespeare, it was medieval, renaissance, and, yes, even enlightenment. It was pretty much the whole Western intellectual establishment, up to the romantic period.

There were a lot of other authors, just in my undergraduate courses, ready to put sixties behavior in perspective for us. Herman Melville, in "The House-Top" (printed out, below) showed us why we were so slow at recognizing the Yahoo, or the Yahoo in ourselves: we were a romantic nation. T. E. Hulme, in an essay in our criticism anthology, made romanticism clear. It taught that "man was by nature good," and that "it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him." Its opposite, classicism, taught that man was "an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal," but that he could be "disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent." (You can read the whole essay, "Romanticism and Classicism," at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238694)

Not everybody will say that that is moral clarity but I'm going to say it. I didn't know what I was seeing in my students and T.E. Hulme cleared away the fog. There were the students, there were my authors, and there was my country, all clearly placed. My seeing that may not count for much in the larger scheme but this is about personal morality — the person being me.

Like many moral clarifications this one was satisfying because I was in the picture, and standing in a very good light. Professors of the humanities, especially English professors, taught the tradition by which "something fairly decent" could be got out of this creature. I was particularly privileged because I, through Milton, taught the revolutionary tradition, the discipline and order in it.

Reading Hulme in preparation for a class, reading him anew with images of the OU riots crowding in, was the curtain-parting moment of insight. It deserved to be called an epiphany.

Well, if "epiphany" is the word, I'll use it for the moral of the story: don't trust epiphanies. They don't dispel the fog for long. T. E. Hulme, it turns out, was a fascist. Or, in 1908. a fascist precursor. He ran around with the crowd at Action Fancaise, whose founder was the anti-semite Charles Maurras.

But that wasn't the only thing obscuring the moral picture. Other clouds were coming over, as I'll show in the next post.

--------------------

The House-Top

Note: When the Union began drafting soldiers to fight the Civil War affected New Yorkers rioted for four days, attacking mainly blacks — the cause of the war — and hanging scores from lampposts in the city. Arson was directed mainly at black institutions. The mobs went on to general destruction and grew until they overpowered the police. The riots ended only when a regiment marched up from Washington (under the command of a colonel referred to below as "wise Draco") and in effect re-conquered the city.

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And blinds the brain—a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there.
The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that jars the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrannies of honest kings;
He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.