Remarks on Method: The Genre of the Sage

George P. Landow

Since the preceding discussion of sage-writing might seem to employ a potentially puzzling mixture of historical and ahistorical approaches, let us observe in what ways it follows historical method and in what ways, or on what occasions, it does not. To begin with, what does one mean by historical approaches to the study of literary genre? To this query I respond that there are at least five ways of locating the individual genre in history, the first and most basic of which takes the form of making a descriptive definition. Since the conception of sage-writing I have advanced concerns already existing works rather than an ideal exemplar -- what Carlyle and Thoreau wrote rather than a prescriptive formula for the genre -- it is historical, indeed inevitably and essentially so. The second historical approach to genre that I have employed investigates its sources and origin, a project the previous pages have carried out by pointing to the derivation of the sage's techniques from sermons, satire, and Scripture. A third approach, which this study does not much employ, examines the specific situation that occasioned an individual work, and a fourth investigates the more general reason such works appear in a particular society and at a particular time. The fifth historical approach, which this work does not follow, studies a genre's transmission from work to work and author to author, concentrating on the influence of one author upon another.

Elegant Jeremiahs relies primarily upon the first two of these approaches, the first because it is fundamental to all others and the second because it offers a clear, convenient means of carrying out the first. Strictly speaking, however, genre definition does not require explanations as to how genres arise or how they are transmitted between individual works and writers. The assertion that one can apply generic description to works written in different times and places at first glance might appear ahistorical, but it is not and only appears to be so because this notion of sage writing is itself somewhat novel. Writers on lyric poetry and the novel rarely feel obliged to trace the exact heritage of specific techniques or themes, just because they assume the existence of genre and the fact of generic transmission. This book purposely does not examine the influence of Victorians upon each other and of Victorians upon moderns. It makes little attempt, for example, to prove that Carlyle influenced Thoreau or that Didion and Mailer consciously drew upon their nineteenth-century predecessors, and it does not do so for several reasons. A full study of influences and confluences, such as David DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, is more than double the size of this work. But length is not the only or chief argument against trying in this book to map influences and interrelations: Doing so distracts from the main issue and can disguise weaknesses in theory. If my conception of sage-writing provides a useful way into the writings under consideration, some of which are not usually considered together, then it works, whereas if it does not, then assertions of influence and source studies become meaningless as a means of proof.

In fact, if this description of the genre created by the sage offers a useful approach to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings -- to, say, certain works of Carlyle and Mailer -- then it has produced important results whether or not one can demonstrate specific lines of influence and inspiration. I would claim that a situation in which one could not find any evidence of such influence of Victorian upon modem authors would prove particularly interesting for an examination of this genre, since it would suggest that specific social, political, and literary situations generate specific kinds of writing -- that similar contexts prompt the weaving of similar texts. Although I do not believe that such a situation obtains here, the origins of both ancient Greek and medieval European drama in religious ritual show that such a possibility is not as outlandish as it might at first seem.

Before continuing this examination of the sage's writings, I want to make clear another aspect of the approach adopted in the following pages. To describe the genre of the sage, I have chosen to concentrate upon examining those techniques that, when taken together, constitute this literary form. I have therefore not organized the individual chapters in this book around themes, authors, or individual works. Instead, each of the following chapters examines a single technique or group of closely related techniques and provides examples of them. Each chapter begins with instances drawn from the writings of the Victorian sages -- and I include the American Thoreau under this rubric -- and then offers additional ones taken from twentieth-century authors, particularly when these more recent authors modify or give their own coloring to the sage's techniques. With the exception of the first chapter, which concerns itself largely with the prophetic pattern that only the Victorian sages employ explicitly. each devotes approximately equal space to nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples.

Although such an attempt to define the genre created by the writings of the sages ultimately aids in interpreting individual works (since genre rules and genre recognition determine our rules of interpretation), the following pages do not concern themselves largely with interpreting entire works or even long passages from them. The passages cited serve chiefly as a means of setting forth a useful taxonomy of the techniques that define and limit this literary form. My approach will be to examine passages that exemplify one or more techniques of the sage in order to define those techniques, chart their contributions to the genre, and indicate their intended effects upon the audience. In making such descriptive analyses and analytical descriptions, one quickly encounters instances of what I take to be a central axiom "of literary form, one that applies with equal force to the individual work and to its interpretation -- all facts in a work, all facets of a work, are multidetermined, and therefore no one explanation of any literary phenomenon suffices. In terms of this attempt to make an accurate description of the congeries of techniques that make up the genre of the sage, this axiom of multideterminateness suggests what indeed turns out to be the case; namely, that individual techniques simultaneously participate in various regions of our taxonomy: Individual techniques, such as the use of bravado interpretation or grotesque set pieces, frequently also function as a means of satire, defining language, or both. Few individual passages provide examples of only one technique or of a technique used singly.

At the same time that the following chapters thus set out to describe the individual techniques that together comprise the writings of the sage, they also point to the roots of such techniques, and hence of the genre, in other often extraliterary genres (or ones that readers today tend to consider extraliterary, such as sermons, biblical commentaries, and the Bible itself). Although individual techniques rarely remain completely unmodified when they appear in the writings of the sage, the roots often appear quite easy to perceive, and this fact suggests two important points. First, it is the combination of these literary and rhetorical strategies that constitute this genre rather than any particular one of them; and second, each of these techniques has roots in another genre or genres. In other words, each technique provides a necessary and sufficient -- but by no means unique -- "cause" of this genre. For example, ethos, the appeal to credibility, provides what I take to be the one essential technique, one that is the result or effect of all the other techniques of the sage working in combination, but it is by no means unique to the writings of Carlyle and the other creators of this form, as indeed its very name, taken from the old manuals of rhetoric, indicates. Nonetheless, as we shall observe, ethos in the writings of the sage differs from that in other literary forms, if only because it becomes the major effect and not merely a subsidiary or contributing one.

As the reader will gather from the preceding descriptions of method, I do not intend this study of the sage to be encyclopedic, and I have omitted from discussion many obvious examples of Victorian and modern sage-writings. Similarly, although it is possible that works of writers outside the Anglo-American tradition, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Miguel de Unamuno, and E. M. Cioran, have much in common with this genre, I have chosen to concentrate upon its English and American inventors and some major instances of twentieth-century practitioners of the form. By surveying the techniques that characterize this genre, I hope to clarify the implicit rules for reading it. If we can ascertain the proper way to read the writings of the sages -- the way, that is, the works themselves indicate we shall also attain to a better understanding of individual instances of the genre, its relation to other literary forms, and the history and development of nonfictional prose.

Last modified 2000