Rhetoric for Everybody

A READER'S GUIDE TO LITERARY TERMS (230 pp.)--Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz--Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy ($4.95).

Anyone who has suffered the pain and humiliation of having his ARETE cut from under him by a well-aimed charge of unresolved DICHOTOMY thrown in by a character loaded with gin and HUBRIS at a literary cocktail party ought to buy this splendidly written dictionary. Without being exactly a manual for the uncertain intellectual, it does live up to its blurb ("not only useful but enjoyable"). If a great many of the hundreds of terms seem Greek to the reader, the reason is that a great many of them are, for the Greeks were first in the study of rhetoric--the rules, classifications and terms for various kinds of literary enterprise.

Pathetic Fallacy. Modern education has deprived all but very senior readers of a schoolbook knowledge of rhetoric; few nowadays can tell the difference between an ANAPEST and an Anabaptist (the former being a verse meter, as in "He flies through the air with the greatest of ease," and the latter being one who questions the efficacy of infant baptism). Those who say to this, "I couldn't care less," utter not only an AMPHIBRACH but a CLICHE, although they might be astonished to hear it, much as Moliere's bourgeois gentil-homme was astounded to discover that all his life he had been speaking PROSE.

As a further example of a cliche, the authors modestly offer: "Beckson and Ganz, busy as bees, are working like dogs to obtain filthy lucre." Whatever their motive in writing the book, they obviously do not believe in the cliche that one man's opinion on a work of art is as good as the next man's, and they hold that it is easier to judge a work if one commands a set of technical terms.

The reader may feel that he is no more likely to run across a PATHETIC FALLACY than an abominable snowman. But he will be wrong. The term was originated by English Critic John Ruskin "to describe the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects," and has been described as "a confusion of actual meteorological conditions with the weather in the soul." Any moviegoer or TV watcher--dimly aware that acts of love seem to occur in the presence of windblown oatfields or sexily curling surf, and that crises seldom take place without timpani and brass on the sound track--is the plaything of the pathetic fallacy.

Trade Terminology. Most of the terms discussed are available in any dictionary or encyclopedia, but Authors Beckson (who teaches English at Fairleigh Dickinson University) and Ganz (who teaches the same at Rutgers) have chosen very lively illustrations for their literary zoology. To explain the IAMB(US), or basic "da DA," of English speech in prose or poetry, they have picked not a respectably well-worn Shakespearean line but A. E. Housman's absurdly memorable

The Griz/ zly Bear/ is huge/ and wild;

He has devoured the infant child.

The infant child is not aware

It has been eaten by the bear.

Another advantage this book has over the ordinary reference work: it is not always and maddeningly changing the subject. Those still incurious about ANACREONTICS, TRANSFERRED EPITHETS, INSCAPE, PARNASSIANISM, PASTORALS, PASSION PLAYS or PASTICHE, and all the trade terminology of literary criticism from Aristotle to Harry Levin to John Crowe Ransom (THE NEW CRITICISM), might still like to get a digested clue to EXISTENTIALISM, SYMBOLISM or even VORTICISM ("A brief literary movement centering around the magazine Blast, which appeared only twice").

Literary status seekers are bound to give this book a brisk under-the-counter sale. It could even be useful in the schools, if they have not entirely abandoned the study of language. More work, however, remains to be done. What can the innocent reader make of the recent literary criticism without an entry under ANGST, SYNCRETIC, AMBIVALENCE, KITSCH Or ENAGEMENT, and how is he expected to follow W. H. Auden's recent criticism without the lowdown on CHARISMA?

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