Rhetorical Character: History and Allegory

Abstract

If, as I suggested in the last chapter, the rhetorical text is essentially intersubjective, then the subjectivities that it seeks to construct are represented from within that tripartite division of the human which Aristotle reasserts at the beginning of the Poetics as pathos, ethos and praxis. Mediaeval and renaissance accounts of literature — or of any other form of developed linguistic use, any other rhetoric — are formed at base by Aristotle’s terminology, by the definition and evaluation of the human that it implies. The pre-modern notion of character can be seen to depend on a particular definition of the human subject, a particular notion of the role of writing and theatre in relation to that subject. These terms, in other words, give rhetoric a basic framework for understanding not only those subjectivities that can be taken to be depicted within the text (as ‘character’, in whatever mode) but for the operation of the text itself, as the meeting of the subjectivities of writer/voice and reader/listener. Pathos, praxis and ethos provide rhetorical theory with a continuously open problematic, existing in division to provoke the attempt to re-unite.