Or maybe that title should be, “The Would-Be Encomiast”.
I’m on the internet social-networking space Orkut, at the invitation of a kind and generous friend, who also wrote me what Orkut calls a “Testimonial”. While I know it’s rude to question the product of generosity, I’m not quite sure how to feel about Orkut: it makes me feel like I’m in a very demonstrative and cliquish high school where the accepted practice is to walk around and demand of people: Will you be my friend? If it’s not clear from what I write here, I was never good at that. I’m a big-time introvert. But there’s something interesting going on there, in that closed-off private networked space: people are performing encomia, for no apparent reason.
Why would anyone do such a thing? We review movies, we give books a set of stars, but can we commodify people, reduce them to a value? Well, of course we can. I haven’t yet (written a Testimonial, I mean), because I’m not sure how to start: all the good qualities of the folks to whom I’m networked seem self-evident in their profiles and online writings, so how might I be original in my praise without seeming obvious or redundant? Anyway: the existence of such things on Orkut makes me ask: how common a form is the encomium these days? Letters of recommendation — yes, I’ve written a few of those for students. Political endorsements — yes, I’ve heard a few of those this year. But the first form is hardly public, and both forms seem more deliberative (you should hire this person, vote for this person) than epideictic (praise for the sake of praise). And in the wider world, testimonials themselves seem to hold little purpose other than as the advertising industry’s form of deliberative rhetoric. So I’m led to what feels like a very odd question, one to which I think the answer is less obvious than it might immediately seem: why — to what end or purpose — might we publicly praise people?
Gorgias, the teacher of Isocrates and eponymous subject of the Platonic dialogue, wrote the encomium by which many know the genre’s name, the Encomium of Helen, wherein he finds Helen at no fault for giving in to the persuasions of Paris: according to Gorgias, “speech is a powerful lord”, and much like a drug in its effects on people. But the more important understanding from Gorgias is that rhetoric functions not only on the level of logic and ideas, but on the level of affect and ethos: we believe not only because a person makes sense, but also because we think the person is good. In an election year, we’re all highly aware that character can seem as important as issues, and in fact hear such observations repeated often, as they have been for the 2400 years since Aristotle’s time.
Consider another variation. I think of encomia, and rhetorics of praise, and I think of the title of the famous book with photographs by Walker Evans and text by James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But the book, a brilliant and painful study of rural Southern families during the Depression, a book from which one cannot look away any more than one can look away from Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, has no encomia for famous men. The faces of poor farmers’ families stare at you from its pages, forthright and unashamed. So why the title? It’s a quotation from the Apocrypha, actually, and taken in context, its irony — as Agee intended — is savage. “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who begat us”, the Book of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) begins. It continues:
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born, and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant. Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore. The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise.
As with Sirach, so with Agee and Evans: the praise, and its permanence, is for the common woman and man, for glory’s preterite. The word common is important here, because it indicates those who are not singled out by fortune (interestingly, Quintilian suggests that the encomium ought to include a person’s “excellencies of fortune”), but rather those who — in being not singled out by fortune — are just like the rest of us. For Sirach, and for Agee and Evans, the value of praise lies in its dispersion. This seems just, particularly if we consider the encomium — and this may be where I answer my earlier question — as a form of gift. The encomium, as gift, extends and cements social bonds, offering membership in the community to those outside the community, or reinforcing the ties and boundaries of the community.
One possible question would be: does this always happen the same way? If a person writes many encomia, do those encomia then become less valuable? Should we be miserly with our affection and with our praise?
I don’t think so, and I think the impulse towards being miserly is one that comes from our ideas about economy more than it comes from our ideas about affection and praise. I think the valuation of praise based on its scarcity is foolish, and see more value in its fullness and its commonality, for who would wish that virtue were scarce?
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