adymatonics...

Jerome McGann has written admiringly of Kathy Acker’s argument that ‘The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless’, identifying it as a less polite version of Laura Riding’s representatively modernist lapse of faith in poetry as art. ‘Adequate’, as he points out, reaches right back to Matthew Arnold’s inaugural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford (1857), throughout which forms of the word ‘adequate’ recur. There it defines the determinate characteristic for Arnold of ‘the Modern Element in Literature’: ‘adequacy, and the “intellectual deliverance” it is supposed to bring’ (McGann 2009: 131). Both Riding and Acker (from positions, as it were, respectively above and below normative cultural institutions) judge the demand for an adequate mode of expression to be problematic ab initio. So far, so good. But the notion that this is something new and revolutionary seems to me extremely dubious. It’s there implicitly in Petrarchan poetry, to name just one place. It is perhaps most evident in the use of adynaton, the rhetorical figure which draws attention to the failure of expression in order to express strong emotion. As Huw Griffiths notes, in the England of Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’, one of the genres that makes habitual use of adynaton is lyric verse, and in particular Petrarchan poetry. Griffiths cites a witty example from the third book of Sidney’s Old Arcadia. This opens, bawdily enough:

What tongue can her perfections tell
In whose each part all pens may dwell?

before proceeding over 140 lines to give an extended, comprehensive blazon of every ‘part’ of the woman’s beauty, concluding

As I began, so must I end:
No tongue can her perfections tell,
In whose each part all pens may dwell

Griffiths argues that Sidney’s use of adynaton here serves to comment ironically on the inadequacies of language and the impoverishment of the Petrarchan tradition, claiming more broadly that as a rhetorical figure it can offer the reader a critique of the language being used, exploring its limitations. Its users can deploy it to indicate their scepticism about their own rhetorical strategies. Adynaton clearly has relatively localized rhetorical uses, but in Petrarch, the best Petrarchists - and perhaps, sticking my neck out, implicitly wherever it is used – it points to the ultimate incommensurability of language with the real. Of course, it remains to be shown that this is so, and I’m still not sure that pushing together these two fragments from my recent reading for teaching and for the thesis respectively isn’t wholly missing the/a point. Ah well, if nothing else I’ve added to my shamefully limited lexicon of rhetorical terms.