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• W4324032893 abstract "The Subtle Subtext: Hidden Meanings in Literature and Life (a translation of L’art du sous-entendu: Histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi [2018]) is an important book by a distinguished scholar, Laurent Pernot, who is a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Strasbourg, a past president of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and the author of several significant contributions on classical rhetoric, including the 2015 monograph Epideictic Rhetoric. The book under review should be of particular interest to rhetoric scholars for his analysis of figured speech.The Subtle Subtext deals with its topic comprehensively, inventorying types of subtext, and explaining how subtexts function in myriad contexts. This survey of types constitutes the substance of chapters 1, 3–4, and 7–9 of the book, while chapters 2 and 5–6 are devoted to figured speech, a powerful rhetorical tool, prominent in antiquity, but still woefully understudied.The catalog of examples of subtexts in chapters 1, 7, and 9 certainly bears out the title of chapter 1: “Subtexts All around Us.” Pernot considers the circumlocutions of politeness, the intentional obfuscation of fedspeak, dramatic irony in literature, and the implied meaning in satire, allegory, and fable: all say one thing on the literal level while also implying something quite different. In chapter 7, “Sexorama,” Pernot takes up subtext in the context of allusions to sex acts and body parts—the “art of saying less to imply more” (145). Double entendre, allusions, ambiguous diction, hints, ellipsis, even silence: he offers an impressive range of examples from French, Italian, British, and Russian literature. He supplements these with examples of media reports, perhaps most impressively those describing the death of French president Felix Faure in 1899. The reports of Faure’s death (from apoplexy in the throes of oral sex gifted by his much younger mistress) display a French talent for vicious subtexting.To this cornucopia of allusions Pernot adds in chapter 9 “A Catalog of Further Examples,” demonstrating again his remarkable range of reference. Many of his examples capture what is perhaps the classic use of subtexting: to avoid confrontation or resistance by implying a meaning that is not stated. One of his examples is the French foreign minister’s use of subtext as a strategy of deferral in the UN Security Council. When the United States sought the council’s imprimatur for its invasion of Iraq, rather than oppose the invasion outright the French foreign minister insisted repeatedly that there was at this point insufficient evidence or provocation, stating “Not yet” while subtexting “Never.”Chapter 3 explores how modern theories of the subconscious and literary theories dethroning the author as privileged interpretive authority have complicated our understanding of subtexts. Eccentric overinterpretation, imagined vulgarities, and unintended puns complicate the interpretive challenge. Here, too, Pernot’s range of examples—from Plato and St. Jerome to Ian McEwan and Florence Noiville—impresses. He also identifies ways in which authors and speakers can attempt to limit interpretive possibilities—paratext, asides, or scare quotes, for example.Beginning in chapter 2, Pernot turns to figured speech, a type with a notable pedigree. Indeed, the only “preparatory work to guide the explorer in this field is buried in the writings of the rhetoricians of antiquity,” as Leo Strauss (1941, 11) testified in an essay in which he urged historians to go beyond and behind the literal and actively read for the subtext “between the lines” when interpreting political speech. Drawing on Strauss and on Frederick Ahl’s pioneering 1984 essay, Pernot analyzes the nearly five-hundred-year discourse in rhetoric on figured speech (logos eskhēmatismenos in Greek, figura oratio in Latin). Quintilian, Pernot tells us, is the best guide. He takes up the phenomenon in his general consideration of the figures in the Institutio, specifically under the figure emphasis, which Quintilian defines as occurring “when a hidden meaning is extracted from a phrase,” adding that the figure occurs when we “drop a hint to show that what we want to be understood is not what we are saying” and that this use of emphasis is “very common” (Institutio 9.2.64). Thus, for Quintilian, this variety of subtext is nicely circumscribed: it provides an intentional disguise but a disguise meant to be deciphered by at least some of the audience. A classic case would be rhetorical discourse intended to pass the scrutiny of censors—or, in Quintilian’s context, informers—but be noted by the cognoscenti.According to the Institutio (9.2.64), authors use figured speech for three reasons: safety (Quintilian knew the risk of direct or frank speech in Domitian’s Rome), propriety (frank criticism, even if deserved, can reflect poorly on the critic if, e.g., the person criticized is a friend of the speaker’s or a deeply respected person), and eloquence. Pernot next turns to the books attributed to Hermogenes of Tarsus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, known as “Pseudo-Hermogenes” and “Pseudo-Dionysius,” who emphasize the mechanics of figured speech. The techniques include attenuating or sugarcoating, hinting or slanting, letting the facts speak for themselves, and saying the opposite but in such a way that the audience can still infer the intended meaning (39). Also interesting is Pernot’s analysis of Quintilian’s consideration of figured speech in the context of declamation. Pernot (like Ahl) offers the possibility that Quintilian’s discussion of cases in the context of declamation is itself a disguised form of speech: by analyzing the invented situations of declamation, Quintilian could avoid arousing the wrath that dealing openly with real events might spark (46).Chapter 5, “Greek Pretenses about Rome,” deals with figured speech by colonized subjects under the conditions of the Roman Empire. Greek-speaking elites in Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East often lived privileged lives, at least relative to those generally subjugated by an occupying foreign power. But that privilege came with costs: the need to cooperate with the occupiers, even to participate in propaganda campaigns or at least seem to. Predictably, even those who cooperated mourned the loss of the type of life they lived before they were conquered. These subjects often criticized their rulers safely and decorously using disguised or figured speech.Pernot features two such dissidents, both of them Greek “by language, culture, and identity” (89): Dio Chrysostom (40–110 CE) and Aelius Aristides (117–180 CE). Both used the verb to figure in the technical sense of speech that disguises the orator’s intent to describe their approach, which they used as an alternative to, on the one hand, parrhesia and, on the other, groveling flattery. In his Discourses on Kingship, Dio employs rhetorical techniques that Quintilian and the other theorists identified—ethopoeia, or talking in the voice of, for example, a created character. Dio was “not an opponent” of Trajan’s (99), but he was a proponent of an ideal monarch that he thought Trajan should strive to meet. Rather than state this directly, he imagines a dialogue between Alexander and Philip in which a youthful Alexander presents a portrait of an ideal king to his father. Alexander contrasts this ideal king to a tyrant (98). Dio’s implication is clear enough: Trajan has so far failed.For his second case, Pernot takes up the Encomium of Rome by Aelius Aristides. Aristides—born in Asia Minor, educated in Greece, with a strong Greek identity—would praise Rome reluctantly. Pernot sets out the standard topics under the type “praise of a city,” as set forth in the progymnasmata and elsewhere (102). These topics are employed by Aristides also: he praises Rome’s geography, civil administration, and military prowess, concluding with praise of the emperor Antonius Pius. But, as Pernot points out, it is what Aristides does not say that is telling: no mention of Rome’s famous monuments, its distinguished literature and art, or a single illustrious Roman. An “encomium” of Rome without the Coliseum, the Forum, the Punic Wars, the Gallic campaigns, Cicero, Augustus, Virgil: as Pernot notes, “none of the basics” are mentioned (103), and all are conspicuous for their absence. In Pernot’s reading, the implication is that Rome is but an imperial power, not the center of culture and civilization that Greece was.Chapter 6 takes up the uses of coded languages under the conditions of modern totalitarianism in France under German occupation and in Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union. The goal of figured speech here is to speak to those in the know while escaping the censor. In a long, nuanced analysis, Pernot deals with the case of the distinguished French novelist and poet Louis Aragon. During the German occupation, Aragon practiced what he called contrabande, or “smuggling”: writing poems that were not apparently political but carried a political message or at least expressed emotions that paralleled those felt under the conditions of repression. His stated goal was “‘to get through to large numbers of people without attracting the prohibition of those in power’” (112). Pernot notes the similarity of Aragon’s claim to Quintilian’s: “to plead in such a way that the judges understood what had happened but the informers could not seize on any explicit statement” (Institutio 9.2.74; Pernot 117). Pernot works effectively with Aragon’s complicated intentions and multifaceted allegiances to identify what he “smuggles” into the public sphere.A second case is the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who used figured or disguised speech to counter Soviet repression. Miłosz borrows the Arabic notion of ketman (the art of dissimulation to escape persecution) to characterize his strategy. He and other dissidents in the Soviet sphere employed a number of methods, including deliberate anachronisms, obvious hyperbole, and conspicuous omission. The purpose was typically not to protest but to create solidarity among the resistance of like-minded people (128). Finally, Pernot shows that, in the People’s Republic of China, the limited resistance that can be safely mounted in the Chinese parliament is carried out by familiar means of disguised speech: praising the Party for something it did not want to do or praising only a small section of the prime minister’s speech (128–29).In comprehensively confronting subtexts, Laurent Pernot has defined a linguistic and rhetorical subfield worthy of exploration. For rhetorical critics, especially fruitful are the sections of The Subtle Subtext on figured speech. Susan Jarratt’s 2019Chain of Gold demonstrates how reading a work through the lens of figured speech can bring to the surface a rhetoric of protest otherwise invisible. The Subtle Subtext should make possible similar studies, especially under conditions of modern autocracies where political protest can be registered only indirectly." @default.
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• W4324032893 title "The Subtle Subtext: Hidden Meanings in Literature and Life, by Laurent Pernot, trans. W. E. Higgins" @default.
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