SOURCE: "Caragiale and 'Rhetoric'," in Romanian Review, Vol. 41, No. 6, 1987, pp. 78-88.

[In the following essay, Calinescu discusses the theoretical principles underlying Caragiale's drama and fiction.]

Let us begin by resuming one of Caragiale's well-known texts:

Oh, sacred rhetorics!

It is most piously that I remember the highly elevated Cours francais de rhétorique, the first udder from which I sucked the milk of literary science.

A wonderful book! And what joy I experienced in learning that the principles and method of my very old French course, in its n'th edition, this time in our mother tongue, keeps feeding as nourishingly as of old, the intelligence of the younger generations of Romania, who dedicate their lives to literary duty.

Out of this old course, still green and full of sap, whose empire cannot be usurped by any innovation, we have been learning numberless kinds of styles: the clear style, the terse, pompous, light, grandiose, simple, sublime, pathetic, majestic, adorned and even the florid styles and so many others. And it is from the same course of lectures that we have learnt what figures of speech or tropes are—how we call the taking of the whole for a part and of the part for the whole, of the man for his place of origin, of the place for the man, etc., well, to put it in a nutshell, all the subtle formal differences between the hundreds if not thousands of ways in which man expresses his thoughts.

Commentators have interpreted this passage as an unequivocal condemnation of rhetoric. But a first question arises immediately: what kind of rhetoric is involved? Caragiale's text is dated between the appearance of the last great manuals of rhetoric (Dumarsais, Fontanier) and the emergence of stylistics as a discipline. It was the period of the transmission—and distortion—of rhetoric through schoolbooks, apparently represented also by this mysterious Cours français de rhétorique to which he refers. Secondly, Caragiale's texts have been correlated with the numerous passages in which the writer ridicules rhetoricity, taken derogatorily as grandiloquence, pomposity, exaggeration; which once more causes us to drift from the initial objectives of rhetoric (though this semantic glide, this decadence of the term is no less significant for the evolution of the discipline).

Caragiale has two objects in view: the classification of styles and the classification of figures of speech. As his literary practice points out, our writer "felt" the figures of speech as aberrations. There are but few "serious" comparisons or metaphors: with Caragiale figures of speech are enormous and ridiculous; epithets are almost always predictable, therefore considered clichés and denounced as such: many testimonies—from the writer himself or from those who were intimate with him—converge in pointing out his aversion to the abusage of adjectives, in which he saw a distinctive mark of romanticism (another bête noire of our writer). As regards the problem of styles, things are more intricate, for here is how Caragiale's text continues:

There was an excellent school for tailoring in my course with that classical motto: le style c'est l'homme, and I learnt from it how to cut all sorts of clothes, how to sew them, to embroider them, to patch them up if need be, to repair them and to clean every spot on them; and yet I never learnt for whose practical use are meant those wonderful and distinguished clothes; not knowing my customer, it goes without saying that I could not learn how to take his measurements. So I learnt tailoring without for a moment thinking that it is an art whose purpose is to clothe someone's body.

So, when I became I journeyman and wanted to get some work on my own account, when a customer came up to me—meaning an idea—to commission from me a coat enabling it to appear in the world, I just picked up at random from the heap of clothes, and pulled over the fair curly head of a young prince, the loose cape of an unwashed pilgrim, then an imperial purple mantel on the back of a cranky and lanky harlequin, and covered the lofty shoulders of a young Caesar, with the motley cloak of a hunch-back clown.

And I released them into the world like this; and the world, which judges people by their clothes, as the wise Nasr-ed-din-Hodja says, gave alms to the royal child, worshipped the harlequin and hooted and hissed my young Caesar!

Successfully! … But why?

Because there is one style alone which my elevated French course forgot to teach me, one style alone: the adequate style, precisely the one I needed, the only one that can be called style, properly speaking.

There is only one.

I don't know who once said by way of a joke that it was the easiest thing in the world to carve a statue. You only need a block of stone; inside it, in its very heart there is an Apollo imprisoned like a living kernel waiting for the wooden nutshell to break. Well! You only need to break that shell and to release the captive … So you pick up a chisel and a hammer and step by step you carve out the useless cover, fragment by fragment and there is Apollo emerging, victorious and brilliant. You must only take care not to let your chisel go too deep and harm the kernel.

Now you can bring out Apollo guarding his flocks and lighting the primitive shepherds of Thessaly, driving his chariot, defeating the serpent or playing on his seven-string lyre after having sacrificed the bold satyr; you can therefore bring out a simple, majestic, thundering or sublime Apollo—all this being merely a matter of style.

"All right (quoth I, who have learnt the French course in rhetoric by heart) I know in how many ways Latona's sun may appear to me, I know all the styles, there is but one little thing that I don't know: how to carve the statue."

"If you don't know, go and learn!" my jokester answers me. "You'll see (if you indeed have the calling to learn) that you needn't know all styles: you only have to know one style—the adequate style, which comprises all of them, in order to adapt them to any intention whatsoever, according to necessity."

So what the French course was pointing out to me as different styles, were in fact the variations of attributes of one and the same style,—attributes which ought to be kept locked up in the wardrobe and put on only in case of need. Woe to the man who gets the coat wrong; that one will incur the same punishment as I got when I released into the wide world my young prince, my harlequin and my Caesar, all in the wrong attire.

Therefore adequacy was the fundamental principle of Caragiale's so-called anti-rhetoric. The principle to which the writer insistently reverts in his text "A Few Opinions". He says there that in a living organism, organs are not independent, but intercondition themselves in order to maintain the balance and coherence of the entire complex (we must admit that the idea is typically structuralistic, avant la lettre); likewise, in the work of art there must be "fitting" between intention and expression, or else the result is a monster. The work exists through its structure:

"Therefore, very much as life in Nature can only clothe a structure of intimate size, proportions and relations, within the same intimate economy, subject to the empire of necessity, in much the same way artistic intention must—for its own existence and maintenance—don a form of expression, a material structure of absolutely necessary size, proportions and relations of intimate economy." According to Caragiale, to master style means to harmonize your own melodic invention with the movement of the "eternal prelude" of the world and of the soul. There must be adequacy, harmony between language and thinking: "Never has thinking a worse enemy than words, when they are not obedient and loyal servants …" (Caragiale, Works, Volume, V, 1938, pp. 83-84).

But, returning to "A Few Opinions," let us note the ample digression on such expressions as "it fits him", "it misfits him,"—synthesizing the writer's conception of adequacy. The examples provided by Caragiale are no less significant: to the ham actor in the "straight theatre" he prefers the clown at the circus ("they fit each other"); to the marble statue, carved by all the standards of realism that dominated 19th century sculpture, Caragiale prefered the little gingerbread doll bought at a cheap price in the fair; a monumental historical painting by Makart abounding in "realistic" details (Caragiale says: "no historical mole is absent from any face") is held by him inferior to a cartoon describing a dog contest. Important in this case is also the fact that all examples of adequation are taken from the marginal arts—de bas étage—opposed to the conventionalism of "official" art.

Caragiale was the first Romanian writer considerably to broaden the concept of art—in the most modern spirit. Therefore "it fits or it misfits." But this is the way in which Caragiale restores the key principle of great ancient rhetoric, before its crisis and decline: adequacy, functionality. Moreover, the metaphors used by Caragiale in order to illustrate the necessity for adequation—the human body, the clothes covering the body—recall, occasionally in a downright surprising manner, the metaphors used for the same purpose by Aristotle, Cicero or Tacitus (for instance, in Aristotle's Rhetoric we find the following passage: "We ought to see whether a purple tissue suits a young man, what kind of material suits an old man, as it is impossible for the same attire to fit both of them." Here is a passage from Tacitus' Dialogue on Orators: "It is much more convenient to clothe your speech even in a coarse toga than to dress it gaudily, like a courtesan." And with Cicero, in his Orator, we find a similar idea: "Very much as about some women it is said that they use no fard, and that sits them well, in much the same way, the precise style is likeable, even without ornaments.")

Let us then point out this curious assertion in Caragiale's article "Is the Theatre Literature?" Caragiale says that since the theatre is also speech, it ought not to be considered a literary genre because "in this light, the theatre seems to be more closely related to the oratoric art" which, quite unexpectedly, relegates the theatre to the sphere of rhetorics (let us repeat, classical rhetoric, which covered the functionality, efficiency and adequacy of the discourse.) Last but not least, one has to make it clear that while refusing rhetoricity, Caragiale did not in the least mean that it was easy to write prose, an undertaking within anybody's reach, because fiction could be free of any secrets and could therefore do without rhetoric. On the contrary, it is common knowledge that the writer had earned a reputation (sustained by himself) of a forçat de la plume, that he laboured on certain texts with Flaubertian obstinacy. Like Flaubert, Caragiale tried to impose the idea that a prose writer has to face numberless dificulties in his struggle for mastering language and for building sentences. Flaubert was the first French writer to have the ambition of raising prose to the dignity of poetry, pointing out that it was as difficult to write prose as to write verse. Caragiale (not very much in love with poetry, actually) went one better: he considered prose harder to write than poetry, whose secrets may be discovered by learning a handful of rules, while prose is more intricate than is shown by any treatise on rhetorics:

The technique of versification, at first sight very difficult, is definitely much easier than that of prose. In modern languages, syllabic verse has barely two or three rules: respect for the natural accentuation of words, the number of syllables and the accuracy of rhymes—rules that any intelligent school-boy can grasp and apply. Then, one may write quantities of quite decent verses whitout much thinking, if their appearance is more or less accomplished. In prose, however, one can hardly go along such a line. If prose fails to clothe some thoughts, it immediately sounds hollow to the mind of a current reader, it immediately denounces itself as worthless. Besides, precisely for the man who thinks, who therefore has something to say, the technique of prose conceals hundreds if not thousands of secrets, whose subtlety easily defies even the most refined course in rhetorics. It is an art which—for those who do not know it—appears as easy and as natural as learning common speech, but, for those who are acquainted with at least a few of its secrets, it remains a permanent desideratum. Whoever has but once penetrated its difficulties, must have become convinced that he can never triumph fully over them ("Good Reading," Works, Volume IV, page 286).

Therefore, an important role in Caragiale's aversion to normative, didactic rhetoric (actually also in the obviously unjust condemnation of poetry) is played also by his vanity as a prose writer.

What happens to the other "styles" (besides the adequate one) mentioned by Caragiale in "A Few Opinions"? Far from driving them out of his literary practice, our writer used them insistently, thus offering us genuine exercises in style. As professor and esthetician Tudor Vianu noted, in the course on rhetoric evoked by Caragiale "the style appears as set, codified, structures, apt to be proposed to our choice, like any other thing made before we came into the world. The ancient rhetorical wisdom teaches us that there are clear as well as terse styles, pompous as well as light, grandiose, simple as well as sublime, pathetic, majestic, adorned and even florid. It is enough to choose the style of your own work in order to find, in the respective column, the norms guaranteeing it for you." (Tudor Vianu, The Art of Romanian Prose Writers, 1941, p. 125). It is precisely what Caragiale did: he resorted to those imaginary columns (in a sort of Mendelejeff' s periodical table of styles) and proposed to us stylistic variations, exercises on given themes and in manners "imposed from the outside." No less important is the fact that this exploration of the possibilities offered by speech and manners is made through peripheral, marginal genres (particularly on the border between literature and journalism)—the results being the emphasis, thickening and vehement denunciation of the manner. Or, from another angle, as Pierre Kuentz puts it: "C'est dans la marginalité que se réalisent les opérations rhétoriques ou, plus exactement, c'est dans la marginalisation qu'elles se soutiennent" ("L'enjeu des rhétoriques", in Littérature, 18, p. 3).

Another idea obsessively recurrent with Caragiale is that of compositional motivation. The way he puts it coincides with the way in which it has been tackled by modern poetics. Presumably, the writer first has an acute awareness of the proliferating, infinitely catalysable nature of the text (and of the sentence). The romantic drama is also rejected because it includes numberless redundant passages.

In Caragiale's short fiction, the (otherwise numerous) "fillings" exist only through the writer's parodistic intentions: otherwise—it was noted a long time ago—descriptions, digressions, a.s.o. are eliminated—whence the dramatic effect of many of his sketches and "moments" (his critic and editor Paul Zarifopol very accurately noted that "the artist simply does not know how to get rid of words, in order to show as directly as possible the figures which suffer from the slowness and abstract dryness of words."—"The Public and Caragiale's Art"). The essence of the work lies in its internal coherence and logic; decisive is the construction, the way in which the architecture of the work is achieved. Here is, along this line, the testimony provided by one of his sons, the poet Luca Ion Caragiale: "He proved to me that Macbeth was a masterpiece of dramatic art. The architectural construction is offered to you from the very beginning. Macbeth's fate is sealed from the very first scene and, perfectly knowing what is going to happen, you are only interested in the purely artistic side of the work, the way it is going to happen" (reproduced in Caragiale, "Critical Library" Eminescu Publishing House, Bucharest, 1974, p. 22). The work must lie under the sign of equilibrium, of the concordance between its inherent laws and what it proposes to embody: "Let the mirror be imperfectly spherical, irregular in shape, distorted, wavy, stained in various ways, as such it will preserve at all times the same kind of reflexion—there will always be an equilibrium, a constant ratio between what is reflected and the way it is reflected" (Caragiale, Works, Volume IV, p. 47; this sentence actually contains the fundamental thesis of the new sociological criticism descending from Lukacs and represented for instance by Zéraffa, who studies the consonance between the structures of novels with Balzac, Joyce, Kafka, etc. and the social structures represented in the respective novels). Such is therefore the fundamental and infallible criterion: "To put it briefly, is (the work) logical in its relation to itself? For, if we are interested in something else than its own logic, then we may lose our way and never find it again." (Ibidem, p. 462).

From this, up to discussing compositional virtualities, the possibilities available to the creator, out of which he is to choose the adequate one, the aberrant versions which may be reached through transgressing the motivational norm—there is only one more step to take. Well, taking it, Caragiale replaces classical rhetoric and poetics through poietics. He placed himself at the very heart of the work, in the very centre of the process of manufacturing, producing, establishing the work; he adopted the angle of (in his own words) "a practitioner" of literature, which he judges from inside.

Let us first analyse one example of a current illogical, unjustified version of a work: commenting upon Barbu Stefanescu Delavrancea's drama Sunset—much praised for the logic and symmetry of its construction and for the accuracy of the mediaeval fresco—Caragiale wrote: "But the eye of a person unaccustomed to such things is sure to require from the brilliant, ample frescoes, spicy miniature details—'pompadours'; is always going to pretend from a heroic tragedy an ingenious melodramatic plot—some infant kidnapped out of its cradle and drowned during the prologue but found retrieved in his old age and saved in the epilogue ('Thank you, my Lord!')—or some letter written before the first act which all personages are seeking everywhere, and the main hero can hardly give up the ghost until he swallows the … lost letter by the end of the fifth act; or the same reader will wish for the gratuitous piercing of a soul which has appeared as round and whole as the sun …" (Works, IV, p. 464). Caragiale concluded his article with a quotation from Goethe which is also most representative of the theory of compositional motivation: the poet, Goethe says subordinates the nature of his characters to the effect which he wants to obtain; thus, if he had represented Egmont, in keeping with historical truth, as the father of many children, his behaviour would have appeared most unlikely: the personage Egmont is a different Egmont, "in harmony with my practical intentions." There is in this assertion of Goethe's—endorsed by Caragiale—an emphatic underlining of the principle of the intrinsic verisimilitude of the work of art: we find here again a fundamental principle of Aristotle's Poetics, taken over and synthesized by Boileau in a famous dictum (very seasonably) quoted even nowadays in certain debates on the theme of realism: "Le vrai peut quelquefois n être pas vraisemblable. "

Very much like Lessing in his Hamburg Drama and Treatises on the Fable, Caragiale made experiments in potential literature: proceeding from a given theme, from a certain subject, he imagined the various possible modalities of treating the subject, of "mise en texte. " There are two significant examples in the above quoted "A Few Opinions." In a first stage, Caragiale reduced the plot to a minimum (he used the term "fable") of two plays sharing some elements—King Lear and Schiller's The Robbers—after which he developed the plot along two different lines, later comparing the resulting versions. Naturally enough, they are the directions followed by Shakespeare and Schiller, yet it is important that, by adopting the standpoint of the creator who has to make a choice out of several possible developments, Caragiale remade the road covered by each author, checking the validity of the solutions through referring them to the motivational criterion. Thus, Shakespeare lets his characters do what they can, while Schiller obliges them to tell us what they are like. Caragiale praises Shakespeare for having his personages act by their nature, and condemns Schiller for his interventions (extolling, criticising or admiring his heroes) as well as for the abuse of tirades, so that in The Robbers Caragiale identifies "a continuous torrent of exterior affirmations, devoid of any interior confirmation."

Yet, in a higher stage, Caragiale imagines things in an absolute manner, indeed inventing versions. He submits to us the plot (the minimal narrative) which is going to be developed and the work appears—to resume Etienne Souriau's expression—Un monstre à nourrir. The next fragment from "A Few Opinions" offers a wonderful example of poietic research, of investigating, exploiting and analysing the virtualities of the literary discourse:

One author tells us the story of two friends, sworn brethern, who quarrel, hate each other, fight and kill each other—for a woman, that goes without saying.

It is an old story; but that does not matter: if the story teller is an artist, we shall listen to it once again with delight, very much as we always listen to a song we have known from our infancy, provided it is well sung—beautiful things never age.

Let us see.

The artist first shows us what close links there had been, ever since grammar school, between the two friends, Peter and Paul; how they had never failed in their mutual devotion and esteem; how one had saved the other from death at the peril of his own life, and so on, and so forth … But here is how Peter, jealously in love with a woman, Kate, came to be suspicious of Paul.

The woman was a woman like any good woman: she was no fool to struggle hard in order to dispel his suspicions; moreover, through ambiguous smiles, through deliberately clumsy protestations, through ostentatiously delicate tears, she systematically nurtured those suspicions. The woman mastered her art to perfection: as long as a man has his fears and doubts, he is easier to hold in hand. She knew that a good friend of the man who loved her was always a great danger for her empire; therefore, a quarrel between the two friends, the removal of the importunate one, was an indispensable triumph for the woman's policy—a policy of peaceful and unquestioned domination. In order to reach that triumph, the woman had a whole arsenal of weapons; she may vainly break all of them, except one—the supreme one, absolutely unfailing.

So Kate started talking to Peter only about Paul: Paul now and Paul then; Paul here and Paul there; Paul is nice, witty, agreeable, waggish, charmant. Peter started losing his temper. But here is Paul coming in: Kate can hardly keep back a cry and a gesture of satisfaction. Although Paul says he is in a hurry, she does not allow him to leave: he must by all means dine with them. During the dinner, Peter finds fault with the servants, is about to break a plate on the cook's head, while Kate and Paul keep laughing and telling each other all sorts of pretty nothings. In the evening, at supper, she tells Peter she regrets not having invited Paul to join them. She has lost her appetite and she is in a pensive mood, staring vacantly; she drums her fingers on the table; she sighs; she stands up; she is impatient; she starts crying all of a sudden, without being able to give any reason. Then, she rises from table altogether and goes to sleep sobbing. Well, after all, a whole area of alarming symptoms. Overnight she keeps writhing in her bed, oppressed by a nightmare; she groans, she yells and Peter hears her uttering a name between her clenched teeth … Terrible! Oh! Paul!"

Now Paul's fate is sealed. Peter has had a few bickerings with his friend now and then; but this time he must mark the break with full pomp. They meet. Peter, frowning sullenly, invites him, according to their habit, to have a glass of beer together in a quiet pub, because "he's got something to tell him." … Hard and violent accusations on one side … protestations of innocence on the other; and, as the discussion became more heated:

"Scoundrel! Traitor! … For my woman …"

"Blockhead! for a …"

Then Peter stands up straight, picks up his mug of beer, lifts it over the forehead of his old friend and, A line of dots.

And? … And? … I ask myself worried to death.

We must say (the author continues) that Peter was one of those passionate natures which at the bottom of their soul carry more reasons for agitation than the world can drive out: they are like the sea. Look at it under a clear sky, under the oppressive haze of the equator, when not even the lightest breath of wind blows above it, look at it how it starts seething; it boils up and down, it swells, it heaves enormous; it writhes, it grinds round, ever harder, ever faster, the vast anarchy of billows over billows! We have killed the gods! Neptune is now dead! There is nobody to settle it, to quiet it down by one frown, by one sign alone. Look at this satanical turmoil arisen out of the blue! Listen to that bellow which causes the very skies to shake! Sailor, don't waste here your time which is so precious for saving your soul! Let alone the ropes of your sails and raise a prayer: the deep keeps calling you impatiently! The terrible hurricane is at its height! But who? Who has started it with such terrible commands? The sea itself. The sea which tortures itself out of its own deep restlessness. That is what the soul of the passionate man is like.

"What beautiful style! How wonderful! How wonderful!" you will say. "Here is a model of pompous, grandiose, sublime style."

"I must confess," I will answer, "that I have not read a course in rhetoric for a long time. Perhaps in your official rhetoric such a thing is called sublime style; but please allow me to call it, with all due respect for you …"

"To call it what?"

"Poor style."

"But why? This is the style of all famous poets, like Victor Hugo, Schiller, Lamartine, the Romanian Bolintineanu … "

"Even if it were the style of Saint John the Golden-Mouthed still it is what I call it."

"But why? I can't understand."

"Precisely because you can't understand! … You must have forgotten that while we have been watching together the splendid panorama of the sea, merely for the sake of a commonplace, hackneyed comparison, you have forgotten that, far from that impressive spectacle, in the dark corner of a beerhouse, our friend Petra is holding his mug of beer over the forehead of his would-be rival. You are not noticing, because your attention has been diverted, that the two old friends are in this way condemned to stand for a long time in the same attitude, like Canova's statuary group Theseus Killing the Minotaur, because the author has another thirty pages or so of digressions—which modern criticism calls psychological analysis."

"But then, would you like to reduce the short story to the size of a mere three-line news item and the novel to the strict form of a police report?"

"Not at all; but please take me a sail at sea timely and wisely. All the seascapes and all your banal ingeniousness in likening for my benefit the torment of the human soul to that of the billows, are perfectly gratuituous for you, null and void for me. What I want to hear is the mug breaking on Paul's head … You're taking me away from that through a worn out artifice; you brutally check a gesture that is already in progress; you take me on a trip to the equator, artificially starting another movement, with an entirely different rhythm, and while I tremble for the fate of Paul, cornered in a tight place, you are trying to have me lament the fate of a sailor lost in the desert of the billows. But what am I after all? What is my head for you to play with it like a child with a ball, which he stupidly throws at all the walls, now hitting it with his hand, now kicking it? Just listen to that! In order to have me call your style sublime, you're trying to make me take a mug of beer for Damocles' sword and a beer-house for the labyrinth, to mistake Peter for Theseus and Paul for the Minotaur!"

Well, definitely no! I cannot call sublime the style that wants to fool me in this way sublime: I call it something else.

The first question that Caragiale is trying to answer here, after having submitted the plot schematically is: how to "fill" the text, or, to put it differently, how to alter the text, how to "textualize" the main data of an epic conflict. To this question, the writer immediately adds a second one, equally important: how to avoid unjustified "fillings", redundant, parasitical digressions. The model of "pompous" style," which Caragiale rather abusively assimilates to "psychological analysis," is in fact a digression which arbitrarily checks the plot, suspends action, therefore dealing a blow also at the level of narrative temporality. The moral: one has to delete whatever is superfluous. Then Caragiale's imaginary interlocutor fears such a thinning out for the text, fears that the short-story or the novel would be reduced to the proportions of news in brief or of verbatim reports: this is a major statement, for the idea of the possibility to summarize a narrative text has been exploited by modern literary theory also in the other sense, hence the thesis of derivation of literary forms from the so-called "simple form" (cf. André Jolies, Einfache Formen, 1930). And then does not Caragiale himself tell us in his sketch "A Very Lucky Man": "I was just thinking what an eventful though serene novel could emerge from a study on the life of this typical happy man … ?" (our italics, A.C.) As regards the issue of fillings, Caragiale's sentence is unequivocal: digressions must be made "timely and wisely" …

We are coming across this poietic practice also in Caragiale's literary texts. Let us quote the end of his sketch "Two Lottery Tickets:" "Should I be one of those authors who respect themselves and are consequently very much respected by the readers, I would conclude my story like this … ( … ) but … as I am not one of those authors, I prefer to tell you frankly: after the row made in the banquer's house, I simply do not know what further happened to my hero and to Mrs. Popescu."

By laying bare the method, Caragiale at the same time makes potential literature, capitalizing on two of the possible ways of "closing" a text: "Should I be an author like … I should do like this …" This is a poietic modality of understanding literature. His wish to go beyond rhetoric, which he considered compromised by having abandoned the principle of adequation, turned Caragiale into our first poietician, on the plane of both theory and literary production proper.