Chapter 22: Hyperbata

But hyperbata must also be put down as part of the same idea. These are an excited arrangement of style or conception out of natural sequence and are, as it were, the truest stamp of struggling emotions. You see, as those who in reality are angry or frightened or under pressure from an emulous type of character or from some other emotion—for the emotions are many, even innumerable, and no one can say how many there are—when on each occasion they have put forth some points, they lay the points aside and go jumping after others, throwing some of them in the middle irrationally; and then, circling back to the first points, and straining every­ where from the sense of emotional struggle, as though blown by an unstable wind in a contrary direction, they completely change the arrangement of their style and cast of thought from their natural sequence into tens of thousands of turns: so in the most excellent prose-writers mimesis approaches the workings of nature. Then is technique fulfilled, when it is the general opinion that it is nature at work; and, as already suggested, nature comes out luckily whenever she has in her a technique that escapes notice. As Dionysius of Phocaea says in Herodotus:

You see, matters for us are poised as on a razor’s edge, men of Ionia, whether we are to be free men or slaves­ and runaway slaves at that. Now, then, if you are willing to undergo suffering, you’ll struggle for the present, but you’ll also be able to overthrow your enemies.

2. Here is what would be the natural arrangement:

0 men of Ionia, now is the right moment to take on struggles; matters, as you see, are poised on a razor’s edge for us.

He has moved from its natural place the phrase, “men of Ionia,” and at once, from fear, he directly threw in the “razor’s edge” clause, as though, in view of the danger hanging over them, he could not wait to address them first-though here he transposes the arrangements of his thoughts. You see, before saying that they ought to struggle (which is what he is calling on them to do), he tells them why they ought to struggle, saying, matters for us are poised on a razor’s edge,indivisible and by hyperbata driving them away from each other. Demos­ thenes, though not quite so wilful as Thucydides, is the most insatiable of all speakers at this sort of thing, and at conveying from his hyperbata his sense of struggle and (by heaven) of speaking on the spot and, in addition, at drawing his hearers along with him into the danger of his hyperbata, [4.] for often he will leave what he has started to say hanging, and in between, in an abnormal and unlikely syntax, he will cart in extraneous matter upon extraneous matter, throwing his audience into a fright lest the whole speech or writing fall to pieces and compelling the audience to share with the speaker the danger of the struggle; next, unexpectedly, after a long time, put in at just the right moment, at the end, having presented in payment of his debt what has long been sought, by the very hazardous use of asides thrown in among the hyperbata, he astounds his audience much more. But let me be sparing of more examples because there are so many of them.

Commentary

hyperbata: lhe device of hyperbaton is classified by the rhetoricians sometimes as a figure, sometimes as a trope. Thus Phoibammon and an anonymous au­ thor both place it in books entitled On Figures (Spengel III.48, 136); Trypho, Gregory the Corinthian, and Cocon­ drius (Spengel III.197, 218,238) discuss it in books entitled On Tropes. Both groups treat it now as a device of style, now as a device of conception or thought.

Hyperbata come in several kinds. The simplest is tmesis, a device we do not have in English, for it consists of separating a prefix from its root and inserting other words in between. For example, were it allowable in English, we would write: He co with his brother operated, where the prefix “co” is se­ parated from the rest of the verb by sev­ eral words. English does have a form of tmesis in such verbs as have a semi­ attached suffix, e.g., “cut off.” One can write and say sentences in which these are separated by intervening words; e.g., “he cut his son off without a cent.”

The device called hysteron proteron is also a kind of hyperbaton, for the normal sequence of actions is reversed. Instead of saying, for example, the usual “born and bred” one may say “bred and born.” These examples­ tmesis and hysteron proteron—are me­ chanical forms of hyperbata.

The rhetorician who comes closest to Longinus in subtlety of perception is Hermogenes, in his book On the Me­ thod for Being Powerful (Spengel 11.438- 39). Hermogenes begins by objecting to an interpretation of hyperbaton which had apparently become current—that it was simply an “interweaving of the sentence structure and a beautified kind of period.” The hyperbaton, he says, is not only a fine thing but a necessary one. We have a hyperbaton, Herma­ genes says, whenever the speaker puts into the middle of his sentence that which the audience yearns to hear, namely the thing responsible for the speech. As a result, he adds, hyperbaton becomes “an instrument of lucidity.” Hermogenes, later in his chapter, acknow­ ledges the emotional impact of the device, and he quotes Homer to show that hyperbaton is not just any kind of transposed word-order.

We may duplicate the effect of hyper­ baton in English by imagining the fol­ lowing situation: in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, the manager of the theatre walks on the stage and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it is regrettable to have to—you see, Mr. Jones [who plays the role of Hamlet] has just dropped dead of a heart attack—and so I feel it improper to continue the performance.” The material contained within the dashes is the cause of what he says; it is what the audience “yearns to hear” both from the manager’s appearance and from the word “regrettable.” The manager, despite his intention of con­ cluding his second infinitive “to-“, has interrupted his own interruption to thrust in the key fact.

Longinus selects a situation parallel to this one except that his example is a hyperbaton of a hyperbaton: the speaker in Herodotus is so disturbed as to begin with “you see,” as if the manager of the theatre had begun, “You see, Mr. Jones…”

Russell observes that the technical term hyperbaton was already current in Plato’s day, for Plato uses it in his anal­ ysis of a poem by Simonides (Protago­ ras 343e) without explanation.

Rhys Roberts, in his edition of Dio­ nysius of Halicarnassus’ On Composi­ tion (p. 26, n. 2), cites some amusing examples of hyperbaton from Matthew Arnold:

• the grand thing in teaching is to have faith that some apti­ tudes for this every one has.
• one thing that Protestants have, and that the Catholics think they have a right, where they are in great numbers, to have too, this thing to the Prussian Catholics Prussia has given.

As William Smith observes, Hamlet’s soliloquy “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh” (I.ii) is marked by intense agita­ tion made manifest in the hyperbata:

So loving to my mother That he might not beteem the
winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth,
Must I remember: Why, she would feed on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet within a month—
Let me not think on ‘t. Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or e’re those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe all tears, why she, even she—
Oh God, a beast that wants dis­ course of reason
Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle….

Perhaps the master of hyperbaton, in modem English, is Henry James, whose separation of idiomatic modifiers from that which they modify becomes a mannerism:

He would have, strangely enough, as it might seem to him, to come back home for it, and there get the impression of her rather point­ edly, or at least impatiently and independently, awaiting him.

The Golden Bowl, ch. 25 Max Beerbolm parodies this manner­ ism in his book of parodies, A Christ­ mas Garland, “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” which begins:

It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something….

the same idea: in 8.1, Longinus had used the word “idea” of the five catego­ ries which contribute to sublimity; the particular category which he has in mind here is that of “figures” (16.1).

style of conception: the rhetoricians differ on whether hyperbaton should be classified as a figure of thought or a figure of speech. Longinus avoids the problem by making both types of “fig­ ure” one category with two subdivi­ sions that overlap.

out of natural sequence: see ch. 16 for the problem of a “natural” order in prose. The word “excited” shows that hyperbaton is closely allied with “emo­ tion.”

you see as: this is the first of two enor­ mously complex hyperbata which Longinus himself employs in the course of his analysis. The basic sentence is simple: an “as-clause” balanced by a “so-clause.” In between, however, Lon­ ginus has thrown an elaborate series of parenthetical and participial clauses in imitation of the device. One of these, as Russell observes, is remarkable: the word “the” is separated from the noun it modifies by ten words in Greek, an effect impossible in English without sounding like Mark Twain’s parody of German (see Appendix to A Tramp Abroad).

The “as-clause” is terribly long; the “so-clause” is crisply short. As a result of the disproportion we suffer a sense of anti-climax that is almost comic—as Longinus intended. Demetrius (On Style 18) says that, in sentences contain­ ing several clauses, the last should be longer than the rest and should contain what precedes. Longinus seems delib­ erately to violate this rule.

emulous type of character: in view of Longinus’ predilection for imitative analysis, and especially in view of the elaborate joke played in this chapter (see below, n. on be sparing… so many of them), we should probably take his choice of examples as referring to him­ self: under the pressure of emulating and imitating the device in question he has himself become involved in hyper­ bata. In 13.4, where Longinus discussed Plato’s emulous and competitive imita­ tion of Homer, he commented on the virtues and vices of this attitude.

turns: the word, in Greek, is cognate with the type of trope; the play on words is deliberate, for hyperbaton was clas­ sified as both a “figure” and a “trope.”

prose-writers: presumably Longinus specifies writers of prose because hyper­ bata would be more unusual here than in poetry, where they would sometimes result from metrical requirements.

mimesis. . .workings of nature: the problem of whether art imitates nature directly or imitates models which them­ selves imitate nature is a vexed one. It appears everywhere in Plato’s discus­ sion of mimesis; and the late rhetorical writer Alexander, in his book On Fig­ ures (Spengel III.11-14), is at pains to argue the distinction between the ap­ parent use of figures in ordinary private speech and the real use of them by pub­ lic speakers. His argument involves him in a Platonic discussion of the soul’s nature.

fulfilled: the Greek word means “com­ plete, final, fulfilled, perfect.” Tech­ nique will have reached its final end or perfection when it is taken as being natural, and vice versa. For the relation­ ship of nature and technique, see chs. 8, 36, and 40.

luckily: i.e., “successfully,” having “lighted on” the right thing. We may compare Agathon’s famous line: “art loves chance and chance loves art.

in Herodotus: the passage—rather loosely quoted—comes from Herodotus 6.11. For the rhetorical principle exemplified in the quotation, see above, n. on hyperbata.

Demosthenes … : the second of Longi­ nus’ own involved hyperbata. This is the next to last sentence in the chapter; it sprawls over two of the paragraph numbers assigned by Renaissance edi­ tors (3 and 4) and is even harder to read than the first one—though it will yield good sense if one hears it read aloud, with due emphasis and delivery. The point of having two such imitative examples will become clear after the first sentence of the chapter.

After struggling with this sentence, the reader may be glad to agree with Theon, who says in his Progymnas­ mata (Spengel II.82) that one should be wary of using hyperbata: “Wedo not, in general, approve of this kind of thing… for the expression becomes artful and not like ordinary speech.” Or he might agree with Cassius Longinus, who, in his Art of Rhetoric (560), says, “if you should use hyperbata out of season, for­ cibly separating words, breaking the events, and disturbing the sequence, you will displease and irritate, and your language will be ambiguous and show great gaps, even if the period be unsea­ sonably extended and its limits exceed all measure” (tr. Prickard). But he adds, “You will not carry men with you, unless you are a wizard with grace and pleasure in your gift, changing and embroidering your terms.” If Longinus is to be forgiven, it must be on these grounds. Probably no other Greek prose author could have carried such enor­ mous hyperbata off successfully except Plato.

next, unexpectedly… hyperbata: a stun­ ning hyperbaton which we have tried to duplicate in the English word-order. Three sets of two adverbial phrases interlinkingly surround the participle “having presented in payment of his debt” and its object “what has long been sought”:

• (a) deceptively; (b) after a long time
• the thing sought for
• (a) at just the right moment; (b) at the end
• having presented
• (a) by the very hazardous; (b) thrown in among the hyperbata

This set of five interlinked items is itself set in between “next” and the main verb “astounds,” with which the whole in­ dependent clause opens and closes (the adverbial “much more” precedes the verb in Greek).

be sparing… so many of them: the joke is outrageous, for Longinus has cited only one example. He is, of course, referring to his own two enormous hyper­ bata as well. No matter how well Teren­ tianus knew Greek, and even if the deference paid the young Roman by Longinus be sincere, we may well be­ lieve that he had some trouble with the chapter. Let us hope that Terentianus was able to smile when he read the last sentence.