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in a word processor we don’t want the programmer constantly diverting us from our writing.10 When we go to the movies we don’t like to see boom mics hanging in the shot, fake props and settings, or other such signifiers of constructedness that call attention to artificiality. DVDs are designed with the ability to turn director’s commentary on and off. One of the biggest questions for a stylistician regarding the continuum of attention, then, is when do audiences enjoy immersion in artificial environments and when do they feel such an immediacy is unethical? Alternatively, when do audiences enjoy viewing the constructedness of writing, and when is such a focus distracting?
The problem with point of attention, as Lanham, Burke, and McLuhan all argue, is that it is difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. It’s hard to become absorbed in a book’s plot, proofread its grammar, analyze its binding quality, and apply theoretical interpretations simultaneously. This may be the origin of the literature student’s common complaint of “you ruined my favorite book!” Once an instructor teaches a student to read in an analytical manner, the point of attention shifts from plot to construction and theory, and the level of absorption changes. This is the “economics of attention.” This is why sleight of hand magicians can perform their tricks. We have examined the Longinian sublime as focusing the audience’s attention on content and as being “unethical,” but the “clear” and ethical style discussed in the opening of this chapter does a shockingly similar thing.11 Each seeks immediacy of content, but in opposite ways. As Strunk and White direct, “Write in a way that draws attention to the sense and substance of writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author” (1979, p. 70). If a style of transparent immediacy is offered in so many style manuals, a sublimely immediate style could easily be offered as an “ethical” option as well.
The two other styles this chapter explores, which seem to get more and more traditionally “ethical,” similarly direct the audience’s attention to two other places. Sprezzatura places the audience’s attention on the rhetor and the act of writing, whereas confession places the audience’s attention on the medium and the audience’s relationship to the text. Each is an act of concealing and an act of manipulation yet, to their champions, each one appears more ethical than the sublime, perhaps because what each conceals, especially in confession, is less apparent than in the sublime. Though Longinus uses some ethically troubling phrasing, “get[s] the better of every hearer,” “enslaves the reader,” “hitting the jury in the mind,” proponents of the more “ethical” styles should investigate whether their style of choice does the same thing. If “Art [and rhetoric] is whatever the artist wishes to call our attention to,” every rhetor needs to ask what is and is not being focused on in their composition (Lanham, 2006, p. 43).
Thus, before writing, rhetors should consider what they want their audience to pay attention to at each point of their text and choose a style accordingly. At points where writers want their audience to participate emotionally, a sublime and immediate style is the strongest; where writers want their audience to examine the author and their ethos, a sprezzatura style can be invoked; where writers want their audience to participate in logical and critical analysis of production, a confessional style might be more appropriate.12
III. Sprezzatura, Leaked Constructedness, and the Continuum of Apparent Mediation
Sprezzatura
Renaissance stylistician Baldesar Castiglione (1478-1529) wrote his Book of the Courtier to educate courtiers on how to speak, perform, and impress in the presence of royalty. Much of Renaissance rhetoric, especially that of Castiglione’s Italy, which underwent massive court restructuring with the invasion of Louis XII in 1499, was built on a system of kairos. A true courtier needed to know how to identify the opinions of the shifting center of power and to adapt not only his speech but also his entire identity to the delight of that authority in order to gain its patronage. Founded upon this intense kairos is Castiglione’s primary stylistic point of counsel, sprezzatura:
To use possibly a new word, to practice in everything a certain spezzatura that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought. From this I believe grace is in large measure derived, because everyone knows the difficulty of those things that are rare and well done, and therefore facility in them excites the highest admiration; while on the other hand, to strive … is extremely ungraceful, and makes us esteem everything slightly, however great it be. (2000, pp. 35-36)
Sprezzatura, often defined as “the art of artlessness,” requires a rhetor to be well-prepared to argue but also well-prepared to disguise the effort it took to gain and organize that argument. It is key that one’s identity not appear constructed to please the court but instead give the impression of being naturally in alliance with the seat of power. Like Longinus’s sublime, Castiglione’s sprezzatura disguises style. But rather than obscuring artifice through a mesmerizing focus on image and immediacy, sprezzatura controls perceived artifice by focusing on the acting of the casually unprepared orator. In The Book of the Courtier such performances usually begin with the courtier feigning ignorance on a topic then slowly unfold into a display of wit and wordplay on a theme the orator has secretly prepared in advance. Part of sprezzatura, therefore, involves steering the course of conversation into an area in which one can thrive. Thus, unlike sublimity, sprezzatura still retains some perceivable styling and the semblance of a creationary act but only enough to illustrate that the act was easily constructed. All hint of the artifice is filtered by the careful hand of the rhetor.
For instance, an orator might plan a digression into his speech that at first appears to be completely detached from the course of conversation but then skillfully connects back to the topic, evoking new thoughts on the subject. Such a digression highlights the orator’s quick wit as nonchalant, natural, and kairotic, hinting that “He who does well so easily, knows much more than he does” (Castiglione, 2000, p. 38). Of course, Castiglione is only one champion13 of natural style and “flow,” but, with sophistic echoes, he seems the most honest in holding that the idea of naturalness (as well as the identity of the perfect orator) is subjective and constructed; to survive an orator needs to be deceptive in constructing the strongest “natural” ethos possible.
Beyond casting Longinian shadows in the disguising of art, sprezzatura has a similar effect on the mind of the listener, “[W]hoever hears and sees us may from our words and gestures imagine far more than what he sees and hears, and so be moved to laughter” (Castiglione, 2000, p. 120). Where the concussion of the sublime leaves the audience thinking it was they who came up with the idea they experienced, the manipulation of sprezzatura urges the audience to look carefully into everything they hear; deeper meaning, produced communally by author and interpreter, is always just below wit and style. Thus, casual construction and stylistic devices that encourage interpretation like juxtaposition, subtle extended metaphors, and digressions perpetuate a sprezzatura style.
Castiglione also discusses the fate of rhetors who fail to conceal their art, or worse, fail to conceal the concealing of art: “If it is discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem” (2000, p. 36). Further, he reminds readers that such failure has consequences, both for creating more wary audiences (“men who are ever fearful of being deceived by art”) as well as for compromising an author’s ethos (“If it had been detected it would have made men wary of being duped”) (2000, p. 36). Audiences are suspicious of the art of concealing because style might cloak bad ideas, intentions, and people. And in the case of the court, a constructed style might reveal that the courtier does not truly agree with the sovereign. At times, though, Castiglione seems less concerned about breaking an audience’s trust and more worried about destroying the orator’s beauty. The ultimate goal of sprezzatura is grace. An ice skater who performs a nonchalant triple lutz is more graceful than one who performs it while showing great effort.14 Or, as Castiglione explains, “Do you not see how much more grace a lady who paints (if at all) so sparingly and so little, that whoever sees her is in doubt whether she be painted or not; than another lady so plastered that she seems to have put a mask upon her face” (2000, p. 54).
Leaked Constructedness
A nonchalance similar to that which Castiglione instructs appears in numerous modern publications, advertisements, and websites in the form of what I dub “leaked constructedness.” To create