Chapter 5: Novelty

Surely all of these impressive qualities in speeches and writings grow naturally because of one cause-the concern for novelty, for which most men nowadays are in a corybantic frenzy indeed. You see, what is vicious in us loves to come into being from almost the very same sources as what is good. Thus, finely structured sentences, sublimities, and pleasing touches contribute to correctness; but just as with a lucky result, these very same things also contribute to their opposites. Something of the same is true for variation, hyperbole, and the use of the plural number; but I shall demonstrate later the dangers of these. For just this reason it is now necessary to discuss how one may escape the vices which are mingled in with the sublime.

Commentary

the concern for novelty:</strong Hume remarks (Essay XX, Of Simplicity and Refine­ment in Writing):

The endeavor to please by novelty leads men wide of simplicity and nature and fills their writings with affectation and conceit.

See ch. 13, n. on mimesis and emula­tion. In our own day, starting with Joyce (ca. World War I) and continuing until now (the 1980’s), we have seen first language itself made the subject of radi­cal experimentation and then genre and logic, i.e., contemporary experiments in “tychistic” and “aleatic” art—for example, the movies of the Italian director Fellini or the novel which was published un­bound, so that the reader may shuffle the pages around at random and arrive at his own personal artistic sequence. See Monroe C. Beardsley, “Order and Dis­order in Art,” in The Concept of Order, ed. Paul Kuntz (published for Grinnell College by the University of Washing­ ton Press: Seattle, 1968), pp. 191-218.

corybantic frenzy: the corybants were priests of Cybele and are often used as a type of either orgiastic religion or en­tranced and hyper-ecstatic moments in the individual’s psychic life. Socrates speaks of the effect of philosophy on him at the end of the Crito:

I seem to hear these things [the words of the Law] just as those who are corybants seem to hear the flutes, and this echo of its [the Law’s] speeches hums in me and makes me unable to hear others.

Longinus is here using the phrase “corybantic frenzy” as a synonym for his frequent Dionysiac images. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irra­ tional (Berkeley: University of Califor­nia Press, 1951), esp. pp. 77 ff., for a discussion of the phenomenon and references.

structured sentences: from the Greek word we derive our word “hermeneu­tics,” the science of interpretation or exegesis. Often used loosely in Greek, its stricter rhetorical meaning appears in Demetrius, in the opening para­ graph of his book On the Structure of Sentences. Demetrius says that, as poe­ try is classified by meters, so prose is classified and divided by the so-called cola or clauses. Here the word means something very close to our “sentence­ structure,” though with a rhetorical as well as a grammatical overtone.

pleasing touches: a technical term (literally, “pleasures”), which Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his book On Compo­sition (11), discusses at length. He brackets pleasing touches with “fine phrasing”; both deal with melody, rhythm, and variation. Under “pleas­ ing touches” come specifically a summer-like quality of loveliness, grace, euphony, sweetness, and persuasiveness. Each of these is then taken up.

variation: the term is defined by Tiber­ius (On Figures: Spengel 3.76) as a change not only of case but also of words; by Zonaeus (On Figures: Spen­gel 3.168) as a “different” presentation of a concept; of course, if one changes the words, one generally changes the idea, at least to some degree. Variation is taken up again briefly in ch. 23.

hyperbole: Apsinus, in his Art of Rhe­toric (Spengel I.405), says that hyper­ boles contribute to emotion. Tryphon, in his book On Tropes (Spengel 3.198), says, “a hyperbole is a phrasing which steps beyond the truth for the sake of development (i.e., amplificatio) or of belittlement. Other rhetoricians follow Aristotle, who observes (Rhetoric l4l 3a22) that a metaphor may conceal a hyperbole, for they classify it as a kind of similarity. Hyperbole is discussed at length in ch. 38.

plural number: discussed at length in chs. 23 and 24. Grube renders the sense neatly in his phrase “the poetic plural.”