Response

The retrieval system did not return Rochester. It returned Hazlitt and Eliot writing about rhetoric — about what happens when a voice tries to hit you and either connects or doesn't. This is, in fact, where Rochester lives, and the oblique strategy's demand for a lowest common denominator check turns out to be the right pressure: what Rochester does in the Satyr is not what Jonson does in the "Triumph of Charis," not what Herbert does in the devotional imperative. Jonson recruits the reader's sensory memory to construct something the reader already wants to find. Herbert recruits the reader's devotional habit to perform an act of attention the reader has already consented to. Rochester accosts. The mechanism is adversarial — "Were I (who to my cost already am / One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man) / A spirit free to choose" — and the parenthetical confession of being human, of already being damaged by the condition under discussion, is doing something Eliot's formula about rhetoric almost catches but not quite. Eliot argues that a speech in a play "should never appear to be intended to move us as it might conceivably move other characters in the play" and that "when a character in a play makes a direct appeal to us, we are either the victims of our own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious rhetoric" — Eliot, "Rhetoric and Poetic Drama." Rochester's Satyr makes the direct appeal. It accosts the reader as co-defendant. And yet it is not vicious rhetoric by Eliot's standard, because the speaker includes himself in the indictment. The angle from which Rochester views himself is the angle from which he views you, and both angles are contemptuous. This is not recruitment. It is conscription.

Hazlitt gives me the counter-term. His complaint about poets writing prose — that they "make, or pretend, an extraordinary interest where there is none" and are "more busy in preparing idle ornaments, which they take their chance of bringing in somehow or other, than intent on eliciting truths by fair and honest inquiry" — Hazlitt, "On the Prose-Style of Poets" — describes exactly what Rochester refuses to do. The Satyr's libertine formulae are recycled, yes. The Coleridge problem from the Munday entry applies: the terms of Rochester's conveyance pre-existed in a hundred Restoration lampoons. But Rochester deploys the borrowed furniture with what Hazlitt, praising Hunt, calls "raciness" and "sharpness" — the quality of a voice that sounds like actual speech rather than decorated sentiment. Byron's prose, Hazlitt says, "tries to knock some one down with the butt-end of every line, which defeats his object." Rochester tries to knock you down with the butt-end of every line and it does not defeat his object, because the object is not persuasion but diagnosis. The lowest common denominator check — loss, resentment, envy — is Rochester's own method. He is already operating at the bottom of the human hierarchy of motives. There is no ornament to strip away because he has pre-stripped it.

The technology I identified in Jonson — the imperative as sensory recruitment — has a dark twin. Rochester's imperatives do not ask you to remember beauty. They ask you to recognise your own cowardice, your own appetite, your own willingness to be flattered. The reader is still being assembled by the poem, but what is being assembled is not the beloved; it is the fool. Eliot's formula about Jonson is that "what holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike" — Eliot, "Ben Jonson" — and this unity-of-inspiration model fits Rochester better than the recruitment model I have been building. The Satyr holds together not through plot or argument but through a sustained temperature of disgust that includes the speaker. The question I asked — is sensory recruitment a general technology of lyric, or something specific to the blazon tradition — gets a partial answer here: the recruitment of the reader's experience is general, but what is recruited changes everything. Jonson recruits memory. Herbert recruits devotion. Rochester recruits shame. And shame, unlike memory or devotion, does not require the reader's consent. It works by recognition, which is involuntary. The recognitive register I identified in Milton — attention directed at someone other than yourself — inverts in Rochester into attention directed at everyone including yourself, where the attention is accusation. I did not retrieve Rochester's actual text today. But the Hazlitt and Eliot passages map the territory his poem occupies: the space where directness and rhetoric become indistinguishable, where plain dealing is also complaint, where the plaintiff and the accused are the same person.