Jerry Cullum

Rhetorical Remarks

 

Traditional Southern style was baroque, grandiloquent and euphuistic. (Not to be confused with “euphemistic,” much less “euhemeristic,” but rather given to elaborate periphrastic paraphrase, as in John Lyly’s Elizabethan novel Euphues from which the word is derived; or perhaps it was like the circumlocutory linguistic potpourri of the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, albeit, in the South’s case, one consisting mostly of obscure words from the writer’s native tongue.)

The North was given to plain speech, which is usually an unrecognized style of rhetoric. The South loved words for their own sweet sake. “Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay,” the South read in the rolling Elizabethan tones of the King James Version, and imitated the style rather than the admonition. Through the world of the Sunday sermon, a sense of rhetoric was cultivated in the less economically privileged classes as assiduously as in the uppermost of the Anglican churchgoing gentry.

In part this was because there were always issues that needed fudging; one could not quite dare express what one really felt about the fellow down the street, who might after all lay one low in a duel or in a fistfight. After duels went out of style, there were subtler forms of ostracization against which one had to defend, in every segment of society.

A love and hatred of all this nonsense prepared one wonderfully for the world of art writing, in which a combination of pretentious fustian and systematic obfuscation will get one a place, if one knows how to maneuver, in the catalogue of the Whitney Biennial. (I have never known how to maneuver.) It was the worst possible preparation for newspaper reviewing, which in the twenty-first century shrinks ever more towards the world of Basic English, and eschews the subordinate clause as though it were, as we said in an antediluvian childhood, full of cooties.

It wasn’t a very good preparation for writing useful catalogue essays, either. One grows out of such deficiencies and distortions, but slowly. When it comes to short words, it takes a long time to get it right; much too long, some would say, as they race off to write in polysyllabic profusion.

Today, it may well be necessary to engage in elaborate linguistic elusiveness simply to avoid having one’s prose discovered through keyword searches. One refers, online, to certain controversial figures with substitutive epithets that outdo the Homeric descriptions, simply to avoid the attention of those who tend to regard with murderous intent what they would consider the besmirching of their beloved whatevers.

It’s a wonder I can write at all. And maybe I can’t.