the art of finding something to say
I was searching for the house of invention one morning, or searching, rather, for its blueprints. I was looking for the master plan so that I could find Julio’s room. The life of my own house – my kids and their overnight guest reading and playing, my then-wife painting and baking a key lime pie, the two tiny refugee kittens curled up safe in the file box behind me, all of this – went on around me almost unnoticed, and certainly not engaged. I even passed up, so intently focused was I upon the object of my search, a trip to Sunday market in Etla.
It was just then that the wind blew across my path a remarkable book (I’d read already once without noticing) by Gerald Bruns called Inventions. He wants, as he begins by saying “to give an example of a criticism that has no greater ambition than to discover [Gk. heuresis, Lat. inventio – Eureka!] what can be said in any given case. Such a criticism may be called rhetorical, because it is more concerned with finding than with proving, is more speculative than analytical, more heuristic than polemical, the more so as it requires a discourse that proceeds thoughtfully [he might have said “mindfully”], even copiously, but not necessarily with great method or system.”1
“Method in criticism,” Bruns reminds me, “is an alternative to invention,” which is “the art of finding things to say, and saying them, for whatever purpose.” He’s talking about what I’ve been doing here: wandering around in the labyrinth, in the forest of Julio’s words, stumbling into a fragment, picking it up, saying what I have found to say about it, before putting it down to continue my wandering. “It will appear to many,” Bruns warns me, “that such criticism fails by desiring no results, only talk, when results are what we need, for they are the index of our proceedings and the assurance we are getting somewhere. But the rhetorician does not desire to get anywhere [autonauta de la criticopista?]. This is a primary meaning of his disregard of method.”
So the Left chastises Italian Autonomia for “desiring no results” [Ù60]. So Jason enforces delays in his architecturing [Ù62]. Julio and Carol play on the road to Marseilles [Ù13, 19].
Beware the impulses in yourself, Yago, that would restrain your invention. For, as Bruns explains,
“The philosopher is naturally defined by a position, the rhetorician by an occasion [like catching this passage on a breeze] . . . The desire to reduce things to their natures, or to remove their contingencies and local identities, is a philosophical desire, nor is anything more admirable than to yield to philosophy, thus perhaps to arrive at a conclusion, or to render a judgment, as on the best textual evidence, or according to undeceptious method. For the rhetorician, however, nothing textual is ever evidentiary, and nothing methodological is very eloquent. What is evidentiary and what is methodical are often alike in being censorious.”
Beware, too, the intellectual tendencies prevailing in our shared profession, in 1982 as today.
“Somewhere someone is no doubt thinking advanced thoughts about a theory of criticism raised on the principle of an open and complaisant delight in the discovery of things to say, but for my part I hope it never happens. . . . a theory of the kind of criticism I have called rhetorical would be a vain expense of the spirit, especially since such a criticism would naturally hope to flourish – and would prevail in any case – outside or between the systematic constraints that normally hold the mind fast to theoretical positions or to linear and developing programs of thinking. To journey outside any sort of system is, of course, by turns dangerous and impossible, but it has always seemed to me that literary study remains virtuous in rough proportion as it is unassuming and confined.”
Sure his opposition between the philosopher/theorist and the rhetorician is overstated. Sure it depends, anyway, on a limited definition of the philosopher. But if you just remember John Dewey’s definition of the philosopher, and “theory’s” etymological roots as a “way of seeing”, you can accept his caution without needing to defend the territory of the philosophy or theorist. The names aren’t the important thing anyway. The stance – and the effects – are what matters.
Finally, Professor Bruns (I use the title – for once without irony — with the respect of a student for a teacher) offers a kindn of primer in the art of criticism as invention, spinning his own words from the twin threads of “allegory” and “satire”, over the course of seven very learned pages before abruptly ceasing: “Here is a good place to break off these reflections [like a rhizome, any place is a good one because the thing always grows back somewhere else], [Ù23] for it is beyond my purpose or ability to get carried away by invention, which is often what happens, however [think of the infectious quality of Julio’s inventions], because invention is meditative rather than systematic: it proceeds topically rather than methodically, follows courses of learning rather than of logic, and thus it is apt simply to stop rather than to end.”
Now, for some reason, when he here stops his eulogy to the art of finding something to say—this talker’s way of doing criticism, I think of what Lao Tzu might find to say on this occasion, in the one passage of the Tao te Ching that truly vexes me and disturbs my peace: “Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.”2
1 Gerald Bruns, Inventions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 1-13.
2 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage, 1997), 56th poem.