Chapter 21: Insertion of Connectives

Come now, insert the connectives, if you want to, as the Isocrateans do,

And indeed one should not leave this point aside, that the boxer would do many things, first with his bearing, and next with his look, and next of course with his voice,

and you will understand, by consistently transcribing it in this way, that the harried and rough qualities of the emotion—if you should level them with connectives—fall off into pointlessness and are at once quenched. 2. You see, just as if someone connected the bodies of runners together, he would remove their rapidity, so emotion also feels the pressure when the connec­tives and other insertions impede them: emotion loses its freedom of running and its effect of being shot from a catapult.

Commentary

insert the connectives: As the absence of connectives is technically called asyn­deton, their presence in quantity is called polysyndeton.

as the Isocrateans do: perhaps the plu­ral is used poetically, a device Longinus discusses in 33.2-3. Longinus would say of Isocrates what Mark Van Doren used to say of George Santayana: the style lacks “punch.” On Isocrates see ch. 4, n. on panegyric.

In the parody of the Isocratean manner-which Longinus displays both in the actual re-writing of the pas­ sage from Demosthenes and in the chapter as a whole-we find two kinds of insertions: connectives and particles. The absence of connectives is called “asyndeton.” Particles are words-not easily translated into English-which suggest tone of voice; the subject is highly complex and is treated with a fineness of distinction worthy of the ancient rhetoricians by Denniston in his massive book Greek Particles (Ox­ford: The Clarendon Press, 1954). Greek writers often used several even in a short sentence; e.g., Homer (Iliad I.101 has four in a sentence of nine words. The difference in English between a sent­ence without particles and one with them may be seen in the following two versions of an answer to the question “What are you doing tonight?”:

1. I am going to the movies to­night.
2. Well, actually, if you really want to know, I thought I would damn well go to the movies.

In sentence (2), the words “well,” “actu­ally,” and “damn well” are particles. Denniston remarks (p. xxxix) that once a student has learned the subtleties of particles, the difference between read­ing a page of Plato and one of Thucy­dides is the difference between reading a score by Beethoven and one by Bach.

In our version of Longinus’ parody of the Isocratean manner, we have managed to translate virtually all of the particles.

transcribing: from the Greek word we derive the English “paragraph.” The substantival form signifies first a sign written in the margin to mark the close of a sentence; by extension it could mark a spurious passage or a change of person in a play. By further extension it came to be a technical term in rhetoric designating an exception made by the defendant to one part of the charge. And it could also denote an interpolation or even an imitation. In law, it referred to the practice of writing, in parallel columns, the general law and a particu­lar decree whose legality was questioned. These last two uses are probably what Longinus had in mind for his metaphor.

rough: the root has a technical mean­ing in rhetoric: words having a close collocation of hard, rough sounds, like “b,” were called “rough.”

level … quenched: the level style—smooth, even faultless—cannot be great, in Longinus’ opinion. So, in 9.12, he remarks that Homer does not sustain his level of tension and greatness in the Odyssey; in 33.5, he says that the impulsive blaze of sublime artists like Pindar and Sophocles is often “quenched” and fails unluckily. Roughness and uneven­ness are necessary concomitants of sub­limity, just as Mount Aetna will spew up blazing fire mixed with rocks and dust.

connected: the play on the etymology of the word is not fully matched either by the normal English word “conjunc­tions” or by its looser synonym “connec­tive.”

feels the pressure: Longinus uses this word in a variety of contexts. In 9.10, it describes the feelings of Ajax, trapped in darkness and futility on the bat­tlefield; in 17.1, it describes the feelings of a judge when a smart lawyer tries to trick him by rhetoric; in 22.1, it is brack­eted with anger and fright as represent­ing kinds of emotions. Its use here in ch. 21 is a powerful piece of personification.