The New Rhetoric of Obscurity
[I]n the earlier ages, in the dawn of civility, there will be a twilight in which science and religion give light, but a light refracted through the dense and the dark, a superstition.
[T]he particular form, construction, or model, that may best be fitted to render the idea intelligible… is not necessarily the mode or form in which it actually arrives at realization.
Coleridge, On The Constitution of Church and State, 44-5, 21.
In the context of the current study, which locates the origins of our contemporary discourse of clarity and obscurity in Western revolutionary political upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century, the two most important and influential rhetoricians of obscurity were Robert Lowth and Edmund Burke.1 As a figure of some political, theological and hermeneutical importance, Lowth functions well as a starting-point for a discussion of the unfamiliar tradition of obscurity partly because his work has not been the subject of extensive Romanticist critical attention, and is not therefore burdened with obfuscating preconceptions and assumptions. Furthermore, an ambivalence with respect to obscurity in his writings and in his relation to Enlightenment ideals reveals a complex interrelation of clarity and obscurity which obviates any simple, reductive representation of the meaning of his life and work.
Critics have generally considered Lowth’s most significant contribution to the rhetorical debates of the mid-late eighteenth century to have been his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, first delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Oxford in the 1740s and first published in Latin in 1753.2 Much of the preoccupation of the new rhetoricians with the relationship between poetics, philosophy and rhetoric may be traced to its influence, as indeed may be Lowth’s far more famous influence on the treatment of the Bible as literature.3 In the Lectures, obscurity is conceptualised and positively valued in relation to prophecy, the contemplation of God, and the limits of human knowledge. This positive valuation of limitation has a certain political resonance in the context of Lowth’s life as a whole, for as Bishop of London (by virtue of which he was an ‘administrator in charge of the colonial churches’), Dean of the Chapel Royal, and sometime member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, Lowth was implicated in the conservative institutions of church and government.4 In the 1770s, for example, Lowth engaged in an exchange with Richard Price which mirrors Burke’s crucial reaction to Price in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and established a connection with the functions of obscurity which were of essential importance to later conservative ideology.5 Finally, Lowth offers both a unique combination of the sublime and clarity, which serves to undermine the general subjection of obscurity to the discourse of the sublime, and also functions as a figure of ambivalent secular and theological interests, mirroring the indeterminate interchangeability of the divine and the demonic within the discourse of obscurity.
Lowth was also the author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), ‘probably the most influential, and widely used text-book for the rudimentary instruction of English produced in the eighteenth century’.6 Along with a problematically secularized reading of biblical texts, Lowth’s promotion of the principle of clear communication as the condition for the spread of knowledge seems to place him, paradoxically, in the tradition claritas, and in discussions of these and similar principles he does, indeed, value clarity positively and obscurity negatively in the language of the every-day and indeed in poetry. It also places him in the radical and dissenting tradition of writing grammar books with a view to promulgating universal education and the promotion of clear writing and plain speaking. Unpacking (without necessarily resolving) this paradox of perspicuity by a demonstration of Lowth’s distinction between obscurity as a style and obscurity as a roughly epistemological concept will reveal much that is central to the ambiguous relationship between the concepts of obscurity and clarity in his day.
With respect to an obfuscating familiarity the case of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) is another matter altogether. From its importance in 1790s radical and reactionary texts to its appropriation by twentieth-century critics in relation to the sublime, its significance is overdetermined in contemporary literary scholarship. While historians sometimes scoff at the importance it is given in literary criticism, its influence on the language of political exchange is so generally acknowledged that even claims like the following might not appear to be very great exaggerations: ‘[t]here is a real sense in which the cold war can be said to have begun in November, 1790, with the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ever since that date, the idea of revolution has been an important factor in our intellectual life’.7
But this interest has been determined largely by the interests of the sublimity industry, and a re-reading of the Enquiry which isolates and consciously considers obscurity at length as a primary rather than a secondary concept is therefore essential for an understanding of Burke’s positive obscurity. Burke’s analysis of communication and knowledge in the Enquiry is protoscientific and physiological, and he draws more than a metaphorical connection between the limits of perception and the limits of thought: he collapses together the literal and the figurative in his discussion of perceptual and epistemological limitations, which appear merely as different manifestations of an underlying concept of obscurity. Burke then inscribes this concept in language itself, generating the possibility that obscurity is not a consequence of sublimity in the object, but rather that sublimity in the object is a consequence of obscurity in language. As I will show, Burke’s early articulation of obscurity must be read in the context of his infamous reactionary turn in the 1790s and his subsequent use of obscurity in that decade to promote an anti-revolutionary, conservative politics.