FROM RHETORIC TO DECONSTRUCTION
Lecture Four: Rhythm in General
Rhythm: characteristic of both prose and verse; the difference: in prose, the rhythmical unit is the
sentence, in verse, the line. Prototypical rhythmic patterns to be observed in nature & in the
functioning of the human body. Consider Joseph Hillis Miller, writing on V. Woolf:
For the Greeks, rhythm was an extrapolation from the measured movement of the body in
dancing, hence male and female rhythm, the one ‘participating’ (in the pulsation of the creation
[the created world], which is already there), the other ‘creative’ (abrupt, interrupted, more suited
to the biological and social conditions of a woman’s life, bringing something into existence, a
pattern repeating and repeatable).
Definitions: “a regular pattern of change,” “a movement or fluctuation marked by the regular
recurrence or natural flow of related elements.” Time / movement made more easily comprehensible
and controllable by recognizable (predictable) pattern.
Rhythm in literature: 1. (I. A. Richards): “a texture of expectations, satisfactions, surprisals, which
the sequence of syllables brings about” (more pertinent to poetry). 2. Expectations, satisfactions, etc.
brought about by other elements of imaginative writing (image, situation, event, character, etc.),
typical of longer pieces of fiction and poetry.
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Most broadly conceived: it is the fulfilment of the human need for order. Consider

Eliot: “The division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only
good verse, bad verse and chaos.” (“Reflections on Vers Libre” [1917]).

Woolf’s mouthpiece, Bernard, in The Waves, after failing to find any coherence and meaning in
life: “The true order of things—this is our perpetual illusion—is now apparent. Thus in a drawing
room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky” (order = time and rhythm,
reflected by the structure of the novel). Why ‘illusion’? Cf. the title. Cf. also her diary entry: the
book was to be a “series of interludes and dramatic soliloquies” in which “the rhythmic design
should dominate the facts.”
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Rhythm and change (cultural & social)—two considerations:

Like verse, prose is affected by history, and ideals of what constitutes effective prose change with
the ages. English prose style at the end of the eighteenth century, after a predominantly oral
culture has lost ground to print culture, is characterized not only by a higher proportion of
polysyllables, nominalizations and abstractions, but also by a different, more tightly-knit and more
carefully patterned rhythm. Prose is addressed to more literate audiences by rhetorically and
grammatically better educated authors, who are aware of the confusion that may arise if they do
not express themselves clearly and effectively. Periodic sentences, exciting and keeping the reader
in suspense by delaying the most important information to the last few words, become more
numerous, while loose sentences, which make a major statement at the start, then amplify it by
stringing lots of non-restrictive clauses together, or just change direction, are less common, as a
comparison, for instance, of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson will reveal.

Will, one’s capacity for control of one’s life and for personal fulfilment through action, is the
central value of the Victorian Age. Literature reflects this orientation, among other things, by the
use of energetic, affirmative rhythms. The change of orientation (rejection of Victorian concern
Lecture Four: Rhythm in General 2
with material things) at the end of the nineteenth century is accompanied by change in style and
rhythm. As Yeats wrote,
we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which
are the inventions of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone;
and we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the
embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates because it has done with
time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty. (“The Symbolism of
Poetry” [1900])
Rhythm philosophically—Yeats and Eliot:
 The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation,
the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by
hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that
state of perhaps real trance. (Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry”).
 “Only by the form, the pattern / Can words and music reach / The stillness” (stillness = eternity
= God) (Eliot, Four Quartets). The same in his essay, “Poetry and Drama”: verse drama, by
imposing order upon reality, elicits some perception of order from reality; his own plays as
evidence.
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Rhythm in prose as well as in verse has a mimetic and also an expressive function. From the point of
view of the speaker, the two functions coincide (rhythm reflects as well as expresses the speaker’s
state of mind). This is an inherent quality of language, as Plato already well knew. As in Book III of
The Republic his mouthpiece Socrates the philosopher explains, “grace or the absence of grace is an
effect of good or bad rhythm,” and “beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend
on simplicity, [. . .] the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character.”
The mimetic and expressive in literary prose—consider the appeal of language to Stephen Dedalus in
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):
Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the
russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was
not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic
rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as
weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing
sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the
contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple
periodic prose?
The styles of the episodes are shaped by this consideration. Periodic, as is borne out by most of the
novel, implies the use of rhythm which, although it creates suspension and surprise, moves forward at
a more or less even pace. Yet when in the climactic scene a highly agitated Stephen meets a girl whom
his imagination transforms into a personification of the aesthetic idea of beauty, there is a change of
style. Through the use of rhetorical devices for repetition (employing the figures of epanodos and
chiasmus), the rhythm suggests that time in those visionary moments of great intensity has ceased to
matter to the young man. “Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of
some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the
wonder of mortal beauty, her face.” Language by the change of style performs a double task: it
represents what Stephen is experiencing; at the same time, it expresses how he is responding to that
experience.