Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice by Webb Ruth;

Author:Webb, Ruth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

Reception and Imagination

This detour through the heightened memory-images of ancient lovers reveals the connection between perception, memory and language which underlies the rhetorical theories of enargeia. Language derives ultimately from mental images. The speaker, as we saw in Quintilian’s account of the murder in Book 6 of the Institutio oratoria, makes use of knowledge (visually stored) of what ‘usually happens’ derived from experience of analogous events and from shared cultural knowledge. This visualization is expressed in words. At the receiving end the audience goes through a similar process. They, too, have souls stocked with images, derived from sense perception, or from shared cultural knowledge. The speaker’s words act as triggers for the retrieval of stored images which are recombined as necessary, with the addition of related features, as Quintilian’s account of his response to the description of Verres shows.

So far, I have pieced this process together from a wide variety of sources. But Augustine gives a uniquely clear account of how the listener calls upon existing visual traces in response to verbal descriptions. He explains that when he hears a description of Alexandria, a city he has never seen for himself, he imagines it as best he can by drawing on his knowledge of the closest sight within his experience, the city of Carthage.51 He adopts from the Stoics the distinction between the image which results from direct experience (and therefore corresponds to reality), which he terms phantasia, and the phantasma, which does not. He knows that his phantasma of Alexandria, cobbled together as it is from features of another city, does not correspond to actuality and claims that he would be astonished if someone were to tell him it was indeed accurate. But it represents the best that the listener can do to create a mental image of something he has not seen, as orators’ audiences were so often required to do. While, from the philosophers’ point of view, such phantasmata were to be distinguished from truth, they were sufficient for the orator’s purpose of creating an immediate impact.

Augustine’s remarks are vitally important because they confirm the close association between memory and imagination in the audience’s response to description. This suggests that there is more than just a logical concern for credibility behind Quintilian’s concern that the speaker’s visualizations be ‘like truth’. For the more a scene corresponds to the empirical, or culturally acquired, knowledge stored in the audience’s minds, the easier it will be for them to supply the images suggested by the orator’s words, and the easier it will be for the orator to predict the audience’s response.

In order to be effective then, enargeia, and thus ekphrasis itself, must therefore be a re-presentation of familiar and accepted material – it is this very familiarity which gives the speech its evocative and emotive power. If we believe the rhetoricians, the impact of enargeia is immediate, leaving any intellectual judgement of the credibility of the images to a later moment.52 The orator does not have the time to wait for a reader’s more leisurely process of deciphering.

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