"By particularizing and subjectivizing the world, rhetoric was essentially weakening those bonding forces that hold a culture together, thereby leading to its utter disintegration," postulates John Poulakos, in his article "Gorgias' Encomium to Helen and the Defense of Rhetoric" (6). This is an interesting thought that strikes a chord with weak-kneed advocates of the faith of politics. This concept contributes to the bad reputation that leave a bad taste in the mouths of those who follow and attempt to hold accountable the action of the body politic of the nation, both in Gorgias' time and in ours. Considering the apagogic approach taken by Gorgias in an attempt to alleviate Helen of the blame for starting the Trojan War, I felt as if I was watching a session of Congress on C-SPAN2. Reading Helen was like being a fly on the wall of a certain building on a certain hill in Washington D.C. By showing that impossibility of the idea that Helen was to blame by examining the validity of alternate arguments, Gorgias was able to avoid the issue at hand completely, until the end of his speech--a sort of filibuster technique that instead of providing empty rhetoric, provided alternate means of persuasion. This reminded me of the Three-Card Monty guy that one encounters in most major cities: "Follow the queen. Where's the queen? Where she went, nobody knows."
I have to agree with George Kennedy in that Gorgias' speech is more of a "demonstration of a logical proof" (footnotes, 6) than an attempt at clearing Helen's name. What was Gorgias' motive for freeing Helen of the burden of being the sole person responsible for one of the greatest wars in world history? Did he really find an opportunity to right a historical wrong? Or, was this historical event the perfect model by which Gorgias could show off his wit and eloquence? I have to believe that some of the Sophists had to be showing off as much as seeking a logical way to rationalize the truth of an event--perhaps, another thing to attribute to bad reputation of rhetoric.
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2 comments:
Hey, Steve!
I agree completely with you. I actually had to read through the Poulakos piece twice to really understand it. I believe that the arguments the encomium introduced were so weak, that it HAD to be a metaphor! I thought about who the writer was, and how he claimed emphatically that rhetoric was the "queen of all the arts!" I figured, "hey, if he's so good at rhetoric; if he loves it SO much, wouldn't he come up with some better defenses?! But it made perfect sense to me that he would write about the maladies of rhetoric under a guise of some sort. It wasn't an embraced topic in that day, so I'm sure that there weren't too many readers that would pick up on the analogy enough to convict him of a crime. I think that, in hindsight, as much as he lamented the misuse of rhetoric in public, he made up for it by drawing the reader in to a topic that he didn't really believe in (Helen's innocence) and expressing his love and sadness for the field that he adored so much.
AP
Yes, Steve, you’ve hit the nail on the head (in my opinion, anyway), and I appreciated both your political and card-trick analogies. While reading Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, I kept looking for the meat of the alleged topic. I wondered, did this old Greek (O.K., transplanted Sicilian) have his tongue firmly placed in his cheek while he was writing? The “praise” in this work of praise seems minimal and is certainly outweighed by “defense.” And the defense, while perhaps lacking in the substance I was seeking, is both distracting and entertaining. At any rate, the piece sucked me in and seemed to provide a nice little vehicle to show off the author’s cleverness. (In contrast, modern politicians seldom succeed in either sucking me in or showing cleverness!). . . Furthermore, Poulakos’ commentary adds an interesting dimension to the Encomium. . . Judy
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