have “spoken” his homoeroticism, did speak it both in the suppressed beginning of Women in Love and in the conclusion of that novel. In the last scene, Ursula asks Birkin, “Did you need Gerald?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a
woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted
a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”
“Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?”
“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”
“Well—” he said.
“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”
“It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”
“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.
“I don’t believe that,” he answered.
You say to me, “But ‘Red Willows’ is nothing more than a pictorial statement of what Lawrence said explicitly in other places, as in the conclusion to Women in Love, an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”
“I don’t believe that,” I answer. “In part, yes, the painting strains at the limits of ‘speakability,’ but goes beyond those bounds into the realm of the unsayable, the sort of knowledge that is as certain as the flick of a dry fly toward an eddy in Rock Creek and the sort of knowledge that is not certain at all, that flickers dimly and briefly, like a grouse gliding through the aspens across the creek, or perhaps not a grouse at all, for one can’t be certain, knowing only that among the white stripes of aspen trunks a dark blur materialized and vanished.”
My choice of Lawrence as an example is in part fortuitous, in part predestined. He fits the case, and I am a Lawrentian.
3
What is poetry, essentially, but the attempt to say the unsayable?
Elsewhere I have written that an economic theory can account for wealth, but only a story can explain what it means to be wealthy. The science of aerodynamics explains the flight of a 747, but only a poem can convey my exhilaration when I feel the first lift of takeoff and hear the shocks thump to their full extension as the wheels leave the ground.
It is useful here to think of a distinction made by Susanne Langer in 1942—that between discursive forms and presentational forms. She is on the track when she says,
I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolic schema other than discursive language.
And the psychologist Endel Tulving helps, with his distinction between verbal and episodic knowledge. The verbal is conceptual, depersonalized: “The formula for table salt is NaCl.” But episodic knowledge is biographical, personal, contextualized: “I remember learning the formula for table salt, NaCl, from a dog-eared, navy blue chemistry text during my freshman year in high school. In class, I sat next to Anne Holt and. . . .”
Perhaps, for a beginning, we can say that poetry is the residue, the excess, after the discursive, purely verbal element of meaning has been extracted—what remains after “alembification,” to use one of Kenneth Burke’s favorite terms. Once our students have stated and hence removed the thesis of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the leftovers are poetry, a kind of knowledge so puzzling that a whole industry labors away to account for it. (No Fermi Lab for this gigantic enterprise, of course.)
If there is an excess, it was created by someone: the author or the reader. Or both. Since you and I can take anything to be a poem, we can create excess—superabundance—in any text. Or, alternatively, we create the excess and hence take the text to be a poem. Guilt ridden as we are, we will always attribute the fecundity to the author, not to our Spartan selves.
In the game of “chicken,” we can force our students to experience the principle of speakability. In the game of poetry can we force our students to experience the principle of sayability.
4
Starting, I presume, with Aristotle, “rhetoric” has through the centuries undergone the pressures and counter- pressures of definition. On the one hand, it is the art of finding the available means of persuasion in regard to any subject whatever and, on the other hand, it is the search for identification, consubstantiality. (As I think of numerous other hands, the image of the many-armed Indian goddess arises, but I shall desist.)
Not that I can resist adding my own definition of rhetoric to the hundreds that we could accumulate with a couple of hours in a modest public library. Tentatively, stipulatively, without signing contracts or taking oaths, asking in advance for tolerance and forgiveness, I shall posit, for now, that rhetoric is the study of the unspeakable and the unsayable.
Though I will not, in this essay, limn the anatomy of the newly conceived field, we could begin to think of rhetorical theories of scene (for speakability is always an intense agent-scene dialectic), of rhetorical epistemology (following the leads of Kenneth Burke), of a rhetorical psychology, and, not least, of a rhetorical linguistics. (With what fields of knowledge would the rhetorical stop? What area of inquiry is arhetorical?)
But rhetoric has never been merely a “study of” subject; it has always concerned “how to.”
English 101, The Unspeakable and the Unsayable. Introduction to the principles and practices of pushing language to its limits. Students will be encouraged to produce writings that test the very limits of speakability. The class will also write much poetry in the attempt to say the unsayable.
English 101 as the “chicken” game and the poetry game!
5
Then what about English 400, Advanced Composition? I can think of three possibilities.
The first and most obvious is that it be a course in painting—beyond the unsayable to the visual image.
English 400. Beyond the Sayable. Students will use paints, brush, palette, and canvas to express their ideas. No assigned writing. No class discussion.
The second, and certainly most practical, move turns out like this:
English 400. Business Writing. Instruction and practice in writing such documents as reports, memos, proposals, and business letters. Assignments will be individualized according to the career goals of the students.
“Business Writing,” you see, would result from an act of purposeful forgetfulness, a general strategy so necessary for survival in the academy and of the academy that a study of our institutions of higher learning should concentrate on what faculties and administrations don’t think
