The New Rhetoric of Clarity

The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.

George Eliot, Romola, 346.

And whatever is feeble is always plausible: for it favors mental indolence…. It flatters the Reader, by removing the apprehended distance between him and the superior Author.

Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 410.

Late eighteenth-century radical writers in Britain shared a politically motivated resistance to the rhetoric of obscurity that originated in the new rhetoric and manifested itself most dramatically in response to Burke and his Reflections. Perceiving the necessity of rapid, effective communication and education for generating social and political reform, they developed a rhetoric of clarity contradistinguished from the Burkean rhetoric of obscurity, which they inversively represented as an instrument for the perpetuation of tyranny and oppression. As Tom Paulin has argued, the relationship of rhetorical interest to political interest was of the utmost importance in revolutionary reflections on the Reflections: ‘[t]he question of style, not simply content, clearly exercised the reformers who challenged Burke, and this was because they belonged to a culture which set a high valuation on prose style. It was therefore important to attack not just what Burke said, but how he said it’.¹ Through the productive dissemination of revolutionary thought, the new rhetoricians of clarity thus sought to do in politics what the Royal Society had tried to do for the language of science. An original member of the Society, Robert Hooke, wrote in 1963, the year of the Society’s ‘second and definitive charter of incorporation’, that ‘[t]he business and design of the Royal Society is — To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments — (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick)’.² But, as Howell rightly claims, this parenthetical clause ‘was at odds with what happened’, since the statues of the Royal Society asserted that

in all scientific reports made by members of the Society, “the matter of fact shall be barely stated, without any prefaces, apologies, or rhetorical flourishes….” This particular kind of meddling… was so far-reaching as to rule out of scientific exposition all rhetorical styles except that of plainness, and the new rhetoric was to respond accordingly as time went on.³

For the radicals who published in the Reflections controversy in the early 1790s, however, the ‘meddling’ influence of this self-conscious, artificial constitution of clarity involved not only the expansion of the scientific rhetoric of clarity to include all forms of discourse, but also the metarhetorical rejection of suspicious forms of figurative information from the realm of legitimate progressive discourse.

Crucially, though Howell does not note this change (in accordance with his general eschewal of directly political interests in rhetorical theory), the institutional constitution of clarity was expanded to include political discourse and a radical politics of rhetoric. Thus radical writers in the 1790s sought to reform systems of classical education and institutionalized political communication (which generally endorsed the rhetoric of obscurity) as instruments for restricting the dissemination of knowledge and hindering constitutional progress.⁴ One significant element of this rhetoric of clarity was the tradition of writing politicised grammars (instituted by Lowth’s Short Introduction in 1762) which acted as ‘a major factor in a huge liberalizing movement in which [such grammars] inculcated the adoption of English in all its traditional, Northern integrity and [which] rejected Classical models’.⁵ An apposite example of radical participation in this movement is Horne Tooke’s ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΕΑ, or The Diversions of Purley, in which Tooke attacks traditional theories of the correspondence between words and things according to which ‘[a]ll things… must have names’, and notes ominously that ‘[f]rom this moment Grammar quits the day-light; and plunges into an abyss of utter darkness’.⁶ For prominent members of the new rhetoric of clarity, which included Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, the development of a revolutionary rhetoric was related to a metarhetorical representation of successful public influence in published communication (the aim of Tooke’s ‘winged words’, after all, was not merely communication but communication ‘with dispatch’). As Lisa Plummer Crafton states, ‘[a]s they both [Price and Blake] take up the mantle of the prophetic orator, it is not surprising that both use rhetoric about language itself as a component of their own revolutionary discourse’.⁷ For those participating in the new rhetoric of clarity, ‘[t]he regulation and production of speech was to be as necessary to the well-being of a harmonious and productive community as the legislating of fundamental human freedoms’.⁸ Consequently, the rhetoric of clarity involves not only the act of writing and speaking with clarity, but also explicit investigations about the nature of a theorised and politicised clarity.

These writers appropriated figures of clarity and obscurity in variously motivated ways, and it is in the study of their individual figurations of clarity and obscurity that their ideological differences and similarities may be best distinguished, signifying a conscious reconception of and challenge to influential political and religious systems which themselves made use of these figures through the rhetoric of obscurity. Thus the overdetermined figures of darkness and mist, long associated with evil, limitation, sublimity and the grandeur of God, and the imagery of light and the sun, associated also with God and with transcendent forms of knowledge, were employed subversively by the rhetoricians of clarity, effecting a threefold transvaluation of traditional normative associations with these figures in Western religious and philosophical history. According to Crafton, it was not just ‘words like “freedom” and “nation” and “the people” [that] had to be redefined, for it was the traditional definition of such terms that allowed maintenance of the status quo and preservation of prevailing social systems’.⁹ Likewise, Jon Mee argues that ‘the well-established idea of there being a “debate” over the French Revolution is misleading, especially in 1792, if it neglects the extent to which there was a struggle over words and images in which radicals defined their positions by undercutting the authority of the traditional rituals and symbols of politics’.¹⁰ That the revolution controversy was crucially informed and determined by theories and forms of language which metarhetorically exploited inversion and transvaluation is a point well established in critical and historical literature.¹¹ Therefore, my focus in this chapter will be on the particular nature of the battle of reciprocal figuration between the new rhetorics of clarity and obscurity, and their ultimate approximation as the optimism of the rhetoric of clarity collapsed under internal and external pressures. This battle of reciprocal figuration involved a similar attempt by both rhetorics to exploit metarhetorical techniques which ultimately rendered their relation to speech and virtue indistinguishable. Though Burkean rhetoric invokes a ‘positive’ functional obscurity that was explicitly denounced by the radicals, it nonetheless represents ‘a deliberate alternative to the Puritan (and English Ramist) commitment to plain speaking; or, more exactly, it claims a different kind of plain speaking, one affiliated with skeptical self-fashioning and nuanced reflection rather than with propositional self-confidence’.¹² In other words, ‘[e]ach faction tried to have the debate on its own terms’, but the process of reciprocal figuration ultimately meant that the debate took place on both sides in the same terms.¹³

Before I proceed to my consideration of the reaction to Burke in detail, I will broadly sketch the three important trends of transvaluation in the new rhetoric of clarity. The first is based on a practical interest in the dissemination of knowledge and the capacity for scientific/empirical enquiry. The propagation of information through the creation of corresponding or debating societies, the pulpit, or through affordable books or cheap pamphlets was typically represented as the spread of reason and knowledge, figured alternately as sunlight, or the sun itself. A dominant figure associated the printing press with the sun: ‘where the press is free, the people may be sometimes misled, but can never be enslaved. It is the Sun which Illuminates the Human Mind, and dispels the dark clouds of ignorance and error’.¹⁴ Marcus Wood has considered the historical significance of this figure in relation to the printing press as a conflation of the sun and the eye in Romantic and pre-Romantic textual and visual culture: ‘[t]he image [of the printing press] had been used on the title-pages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books as a manifestation of the enlightening capacity of a free press’.¹⁵ Fittingly, the spread of correct information was figured as the diffusion or the dissemination of light. Such associations were hardly new, but it is the positive association of light and the sun with knowledge that has revolutionary political content (related specifically to principles associated with the French Revolution) which made these deceptively standard tropes radical. This is more evident, perhaps, in the use of the Promethean imagery of firelight, and of spreading fire or energy, to signify not the dissemination of knowledge, but of a radical passion or enthusiasm for reform which had an at best problematic relation to the usually dispassionate ‘reason’.

Aware, however, that in order to effect social and political change people must not only be persuaded by radical politics - a slow process without guarantees - but must also be moved to act, Priestley, Paine, Wollstonecraft and Thelwall endorsed the careful use of figures such as metaphor and other modes of what were classically considered ‘ornamentation’. Though they might obscure the content of the text, such figures might nonetheless serve to increase clarity by keeping the reader’s mind occupied and entertained in the midst of the exercise or labour involved in reading clear though difficult works. In this manner the traditional danger of the figurative (associated in rhetoric with the communication of potentially uncontainable and pre-rational passion rather than ‘information’) was justified as a rhetorical device. It was justified, that is, as a qualified and morally sanctioned ‘entertainment’ which acted as a balance to the potential for a counterproductive laborious excess within a radical work ethic which otherwise represented leisure and ornamentation as forms of aristocratic decadence and veiling. Thus the radical reactions to Burke, critical as they are of his flowery bombast and overblown rhetoric, themselves often ‘suffer from the same faults’¹⁶ as the rhetoric they explicitly attacked but implicitly adopted. The decline of radical optimism is related to the adoption of Burkean rhetoric, and the conflation of the rhetoric of clarity and obscurity which characterises the historical formation of the Romantic rhetoric of obscurity.

The second radical transvaluation concerns the positive association of the figures of clarity with the political goals of the radicals and the revolutionaries. Figures of illumination and enlightenment are constantly used to signify the promotion of egalitarian and scientific principles, while obscurity carries a normatively negative charge and is associated with institutions or individuals which traditionally set restrictive and class-based, hierarchical boundaries to knowledge or, epistemologically speaking, to the capacity of common understanding. Priests, popes and bishops, kings, lords and dukes, all came to be represented by figures of darkness in the repression of political and educational reform. In her D.Phil thesis on Henry Fuseli’s ‘Milton Gallery’, Luisa Calè has considered the genealogy of the rhetoric of clarity’s symbolic figurations in relation to radical politics and visual culture, locating the origin of significant symbolic transvaluations in Milton and his appropriation by Priestley:

[t]he indeterminacy of Milton’s allegory [of Sin and Death] is read in two different ways. On the one hand, it resonates a radical, Unitarian agenda centering on Priestley’s deconstruction of the Christian supernatural as a metaphorical effect born in errors of textual transmission. This, in turn, bears on the Christian underpinnings of monarchical power along lines explored in Milton’s regicide and antiprelatical tracts. It thereby restores the political currency elided by gaps in textual annotation and brings into focus a picture representing something looking like a head wearing the likeness of a kingly crown. Priestley’s analysis of power and his deconstruction of its religious foundations were central to the radical circle Fuseli communed with.¹⁷

By contrast, reason was represented by democratic, anti-hierarchical figures of light which are accessible to common understanding. Classical education, the teaching of dead languages, and complexity were all considered to be forms of wilful obfuscation in contrast to the democratic or egalitarian principles of simplicity and clarity. As a result, abstract, restrictive and elitist forms of political and legal speech were not up in the clouds, as it were; rather, they were the clouds which kept the earth in darkness.

The third transvaluation involved philosophy and epistemology. While the positivity of clarity had been institutionalised by the Royal Academy and in the tradition of Descartes and Locke had been considered an essential accomplishment in good (and virtuous) communication, the new political associations with which it was being loaded made it into something of direct epistemological significance. Clarity was not merely a sign of skill or sincerity, nor was it merely a practical means for effective communication, but was also a sign of truth itself, secularising the classical association of elevated speech with virtue. Obscurity was a sign of a confused idea, of falsity or dishonesty, and the unjust imposition of unnecessary labour on the reader (or the lack of a compensatory labour on the part of the author, which by virtue of its unequal or unprofitable exchange violated the figurative economics of rhetoric). Obfuscation could therefore represent a deceitful and/or an honestly misguided agenda, a cheat, a bad bargain.

This latter possibility, however, was ultimately devastating for the rhetoric of clarity. Once a style associated with clarity was established, it could be appropriated by anyone with the skill and patience to learn it, and could produce in readers the same effect or impression as a clear discourse connected with truth, even when it was in fact false or misleading. The ultimate artificiality of the rhetoric of clarity undermined its claims to a natural connection with the truth which was closer to incarnation than mere mimesis. Since it contradicted the association of plainness with virtue, this possibility led to an anxious awareness of the potential interchangeability of the divine or the demonic origin of any communication, clear or obscure.