The Rhetoric

of C o n s c i o u s n e s s AYJOHN HOLLANDER

VV HAT are some of the ways in which both ordinary language

and the extraordinary language of literature—of lyric poetry in
particular—contrive, in first-person accounts, to represent vari-
ous states of consciousness to other minds, and to persuade them
of the authenticity of such representations? This is a vast question,
and I intend primarily to investigate how the epistemological
problems raised by accounts of inner states generally—and of
whatever one may want to call altered ones, particularly—are
immensely complicated by the impulses to use language to repre-
sent them. Notionally—in literary fictions both narrative and
lyric—and literally—in the oral discourse of self-presentation—
the rhetoric of such representations will liken a direct experience
of such a state, or an imagined one, to that of another such con-
dition, with all the unacknowledged interpretive construction of
the purity and innerness of the experience that inevitably occurs.
Some altered states tend to become what our inadequate dis-
course says they are, while remaining untouched by it, and caus-
ing us to feel—without really sufficient cause—that language
continues to fail us in some profound way.
But consider for a moment the very language with which we
frame the notion of "altered states." Our use of the term covers
"states" of mind, of consciousness—even, for some kinds of dis-
course, of being, let alone our "estate" in the world at large and
in some sort of society in particular. But certainly what we call
states of hypnotic trance, REM sleep, pathological hyperaesthesia,
extreme sexual excitement, despair, remorse, paranoid delusion,
sin, innocence, ignorance, lie confusedly together in one con-
tainer, whether labeled "state" or "condition." Some of these may

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 68, No. 3 (FaU 2001)

 590 SOCIAL RESEARCH

be thought of as particular states of «n-consciousness, for exam-

ple. Literature—along vwth philosophical writing and the texts
that underlie particular religions and are produced by discourse
about them—both perceives such states and creates new ones. I
shall consider some aspects of these conjoined perceptions and
creations.
But another question is implicitly begged by the rubric of this
conference's agenda, namely "altered from what?" It may be a
crude one, but my particular concern with language leads me to
wonder not only at what a "normal" or "unaltered" state might be,
but the fuller implications of what we mean by "state" as well. Let
us consider it for a moment. Our English word "state" comes
through Old French from the Latin, meaning manner or way of
standing; indeed, Greek stasis and Germanic stand are related.
(Our other sense of state = polis, OED senses IV, is from a totally
different etymological branch.) When considering the human
condition, we should observe that its stateis by no means identical
with what in older parlance would have been called its nature.
That nature may generate, yield, provide, or otherwise account
for a variety of different states, nonce or recurrent. The popular
but somewhat technical term "states of consciousness" in which
the agenda for this conference is framed is preceded in the his-
tory of English usage several hundred years earlier by the sense
bodily states, or momentary conditions of health. It is as an exten-
sion of this that "state of mind' comes in the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury, and grows so sufficiently complex 200 years later that Dr.
Johnson can observe "It seems generally believed that, as the eye
cannot see itself, the mind has no faculties by which it can con-
template its own state." (He seems to be anticipating our con-
temporary, the philosopher Colin McGinn, here.)
The extension to mental states generally comes later: the OED
has an 1810 citation of "state of consciousness." ff so, what about
mental states and related or unrelated physiological ones, for
example, a "state of mind." Thackeray in 1848 talks of a "state of
feeling" and Albert Moll's Hypnotism (1891) apparently for the
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 591

first time of "hypnotic states." "State of consciousness" could be

opposed either to unconsciousness, or to some other condition or
substate of consciousness.
And here we must consider the notion of phase or stage, as
opposed to a more continuing condition. As might be expected,
these tend to come from the natural sciences (although even this
use might be considered a continuation of the earliest sense in
English of "bodily states" previously mentioned). For example,
the nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century locution "states of
matter"—solid, liquid, gaseous—now more generally called
"phases," as opposed, in later-twentieth-century scientific lan-
guage, to one of two conditions in a binary system, still called
"states." We may think of sleeping, waking, dreaming as phases of
a normal state. If we mean something else by consciousness, per-
haps, as different states in themselves, along with a wide range of
other conditions of consciousness, I would include intense men-
tal concentration, directed acute visual or aural observation, sud-
den recognition, various modes of puzzlement, generalized
doubts, or even awe in the mode of the aesthetic sublime. And
perhaps also the kinds of moment of involuntary memory
described so brilliantly by Wordsworth in The Prelude and Proust
throughout his great work, etc.). And likewise, the condition of
wonder in which Socrates had it that philosophizing begins.
Obviously, we could call altered states those ascribable to some
external somatic input—drugs, physical pressures that may affect
vision, hearing or levels of oxygen reaching the brain. In that case
it would be the waking phase that is being altered. But what
about, for example, the presence of another person never seen
before that precipitates (what Christopher Marlowe first specifi-
cally called) "love at first sight"? And would such sight of a person
be like a pill? Is either the onset—or the prolongation—of imme-
diate erotic excitation to be called an altered state? A pioneering
work in neurophysiology was Walter B. Cannon's Bodily Changes in
Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage: An Account of Recent Researches into the
Function of Fmotional Fxdtement (1915)—and note the meaning of
592 SOCIAL RESEARCH

"function" as/Mncfzomng-rather than purpose or effect here. "Pain,"

"Hunger," "Fear," and Rage" cover a narrow range of those inner
states that some would want to call "emotions" (leaving out the
glaringly absent "erotic excitation" may give this list more of a
Hobbesian than a Darwinian character). Then there are all the
other states more generally thought of as emotions rather than
conditions of awareness: sorrow, the array of elations, disgust, and
so forth. These various states naturally manifest themselves to
their subjects, and to others, in different ways.
A distinction among them has been marked in the past by one
of the differentiations between representation and expression, the
one rather trivially but commonly framed between produced indi-
cations of thoughts and feelings. Expressions of pain, sorrow, and
fear are manifested in verbal ejaculations or physical gestures, but
these manifestations may be more linguistic than we usually
acknowledge. For example, "Ouch! or "Ow!" are, of course, Eng-
lish: "ach.'" being the German, and "/ai/" I suppose the transla-
tion into southern European, and some can be ambiguous—like
the English "O!" of wonder. (You say "Oh!" and I ask "What?
meaning "What are you 'Oh!'ing at?" etc.) Or consider that a pre-
cise perception of the completeness of a mathematical proof one
has discovered, in all its triumph and elegance and fulfillment,
can only be represented in and by a presentation—such as writing it
out—of the proof itself. But the elation, surprise, delight, even
terror that the mathematician may feel at exactly the same
moment can clearly be expressed by some synonym of the later
twentieth century: "O, Wow!"
An expression and a representation differ profoundly, too, in
that the latter may be subject to rhetorical or even aesthetic eval-
uation. One would never say, for example, in response to
another's "ouch" of sudden mild or moderate pain, "'Ouch?'—
no, 'Otch!' would have been better (more expressive, more
impressive, slighdy less irrelevantly melodious)." On the other
hand, medical diagnostic questioning demands representation, not
expression, for its answers. And, most mysteriously, there is the fun-
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 593

damental expression (acknowledged as such by Darwin but not by

Cannon) of a sudden apprehension that something one is attend-
ing to is funny—in a moment of one kind of surprise—that we call
laughter. What is funny in any situation may easily depend on the
apprehension of a verbal construction, complex and allusive and
dense as any highly wrought poem. And yet people's impulses to
express so many inner states or phases grope instead for an appar-
ently needed mode of representation. It might be remarked here
that what is often considered to be expression in poetry is in fact
a representation of expression, a metaphor, or even a metonymy
for "Ow!" "Oh!" "Wow," etc., and that "expressiveness" in litera-
ture is not, say, a simulacrum of expressed emotion, but a picture
of it far more genuine in many ways than a mere likeness-not
crocodile tears, but drops of trope.
Older visionary psychologies fancifully—albeit ingeniously—
located internal states like emotions or dispositions in various
organs of the body (heart, stomach, liver, spleen) or in humoral
balances. But so does our post-Cartesian language about such
states tend to construct and shape our conceptions of those states
as well. This is a notion that our thoughts about "feelings," for
example, often repress. In Alice in Wonderland, the Mock Turtle is
comparing the upper-class Victorian child's schooling to his own
education under the sea. This produces a wonderfully subversive
curriculum, made alternative to Alice's through puns ("drawing
and sketching and painting in oils" becomes "drawling and
stretching and fainting in coils"). But the deeply shocking obser-
vation is about the classics master, who taught "Laughing and
Grief." That an expression of feeling and—worse—a feeling itself,
could be thought of as linguistic, conventional, and thereby cul-
turally determined is the most appallingly Darwinian of the
notions surfacing in the narrative of that most non-Darwinian of
notional creatures, the Mock Turde. I suggest that literary—par-
ticularly poetic—conceptions of inner states drift out of their tex-
tual contexts and enter general discourse in just the way that the
Mock Turde's classical languages, "Laughing and Grief," emerged
594 SOCIAL RESEARCH

from the classical texts of Comedy and Tragedy (from which the
Grief, if not the Laughing, might have been taught.)
But back to physiology for a moment. It seems clear that Can-
non's altered states are rather phases of normal ones, or substates
in a normal envelope. Perhaps an altered state might be one in
which one or another of these phases never occurs or appears.
Perhaps true despair might be an altered state rather than, like
these others, a phase or stage of the normal. The theologically
defined condition of being without hope of any kind is often
today considered called an unequivocally altered state of clinical
depression. But what happens when some conditions of con-
sciousness that occur very rarely are present often or for extended
periods? This matter of scale, both of intensity and, particularly, of
duration, may be significant. The late Daniel X. Freedman, a psy-
chopharmacologist, assessing the prior experience with altered
states of possible participants in LSD trials, sometimes asked them
this: could they recall or even recognize the total bodily and con-
scious feeling resulting from first hitting the water when diving in
after not having swum for a considerable time? He proposed that
they imagine what it would be like if instead of that instantaneous
shift in and out of a different sense of the world, we remained in
it for an hour or so.
Another momentary altered state of sudden onset would be
this. You and I are looking across at a near-distant hill; you say
"Look at that remarkable gnarled tree with purple blossoms on
it." I do not see this and say so. You insist that since we are stand-
ing very close together, given the distance of the hill, the parallax
is almost nil, and that I have to be looking right at it. Now imag-
ine the continuous and unrelenting clicking-on of such "notic-
ings" during the course of a waking day. What kind of altered state
would that be? This does also lead one to consider that the mere
suddenness of the onset of what would ordinarily not be consid-
ered "unaltered" might itself provide such alteration—an alter-
ation, as it were, of the state of consciousness of being conscious.
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 595

And perhaps it is sometimes the case—particularly in the very

modern world—that a phase-change in our ordinary state that we
cannot account for by ordinary means, or occurring under extra-
ordinary conditions, constitutes another degree or level of state-
change? And that when the state-change is demystified, we move
from that other level back to an "unaltered" one, even though
continuing to experience the primary alteration? I think of the
relation between large upper-class houses without cast-iron stoves,
the effect of moving rapidly across a draught in them without
knowing that one has done so, and the great vogue of ghost-sto-
ries in nineteenth-century England.
The stories that we tell in literary fictions about our inner states
will often be concerned with such odd and marginal shifts as
these. It is important that an unacknowledged trope or metaphor
hidden in our ordinary idiomatic language about inner states is
one that peculiarly reverses the internal and the external, the
container and the thing contained (a metonymy, in fact). We
speak of being "in" a mental or emotional or "spiritual" state—"a
state of X" = something within you—and yet it is you who are said
to be in hope, or doubt, or despair, or fear, or despite of, some-
thing. Such phrases are grammatically symmetrical with those
representing other conditions such as "in debt," "in sin," "in dan-
ger," and clearly physical ones like "in prison" or "in Detroit,"
where "in" is more clearly literal. But in our language of mental,
emotional, "spiritual" and even some interpreted physical condi-
tions, "a state of X" = something in you.
We may recall that an expression seems more unmediated than
a representation. Expressiveness became an important element of
the fables literature and art produced about themselves in the
baroque period and in romantic poetry. But one thing is clear: if
for poetry expression were all, the "Ow!" that emerges from drop-
ping a heavy weight on my foot would be purer poetry than a
poem of Keats or Mallarme. As I noted earlier, many inner states
seek to represent, rather than to express, themselves. And lan-
guages lacking any universal taxonomic vocabulary for hundreds
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of inner phases or states must turn to the rhetorical modes of

comparison that have always marked our literature. One of the
oldest of these is the use of simile, which eventually becomes a
kind of presentational default mode. In Homer, the use of what
we now call epic simile often occurs as a kind of teaching device
in the midst of the narrative. It bridges the conceptual boundary
between a bronze-age culture of the heroic age Homer tells of,
and the iron-age culture of "Homer"—the singers of those sto-
ries—and their audience. The paradigm here is ""Hmv can I tell you
people what it was like then ? Well—have you ever noticed how, when you
see X, and Yhappens, then it all becomes Z? Well—that's what it was like
when they. . .etc." Getting across to someone else what one is feel-
ing-thinking-dreaming-imagining-concluding-experiencing can
be very much like getting across to one fundamental sense of the
world what things are like for another one.
Certain phases of consciousness clearly do not demand repre-
sentation or even ordinarily, expression (when one expresses sat-
isfied desire it will usually be as an expression of gratitude to the
provider thereof, for example). But imagine someone saying, "I
had the weirdest experience last night. I lay in bed and shut my
eyes and then it was morning and I opened my eyes to a sunny
room. I wish I could tell you what it was like not to know that all
those hours were going by. It was like. . .like. . .but I don't know
how to put it into words. It's as if I had gone away somewhere and
then come back while—I guess—a different person was lying
there in my place." This would sound very peculiar, not because
of the condition described (clearly recognizable) but because of
the startling inappropriateness of the description and the
speaker's apparent sense of a need for some simile. Among other
things, he or she was unable or unwilling to acknowledge that
normal sleep was not an altered state of one of the sorts that
poetic language attempts to elucidate. Rather it is what I will call
one of the reference points for other states. The oldest of these is
found in the Greek fable that Hypnos and Thanatos are brothers.
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 597

that is, "What's death like? Who knows? Well, you could say I guess that
it's like sleep."
We can note, then, that while altered states are represented in
literature, some of the less common ones are represented, in sim-
ile or in metaphor, by others. Physical sensation as a figure for
other, less immediately neural "feelings," is of ancient lineage.
Consider metaphorical pain, for example. The English word of
unknown origin pangs arises in all three senses between ca. 1525-
1570: sudden physical pain, sudden onset of mental anguish, and
(obsolete by 1700) sudden onset of emotion of any kind. Mental
anguish—perhaps what clinical psychology textbooks of the early
part of the twentieth century used to call "psychic pain"—unac-
companied by definite physical feelings, seems more "inner" than
unambiguous local pain. But other commonly experienced
states—dreaming, intoxication, vertigo, unfocused vision, some-
what high fever in an adult, or the sorts of disorientation of scale
mentioned earlier—can become metaphors for others, and some-
times less common ones such as madness, or ecstasy as well, first
in our imaginative literature and then in our spoken idiom. This
even extends to purely fictive constructions of what these inner
states are like. Insanity is the chief of these, but, after the later
eighteenth century and its interest in relations among the senses,
metaphorical—^which is to say, linguistically virtual—synaesthesia
substitutes the senses for one another in literature, sometimes as
a figure for more general derangements.

The Erotic

But for Western lyric poetry, erotic experience was a central

matter almost from the beginning. Although we may see traces of
this in lines by her slightly earlier precursor Archilochus, it is in
the almost totally fragmentary work of Sappho that we find the
originating canonical account of one's own feelings of erotic
desire. Thus she famously declares to a beloved
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[your] lovely laughter which made my heart [kardian]

flutter in my breast; when I actually look at you for a
moment my tongue [my language] gets stuck, then a thin fire
runs under my skin, I can see nothing, my ears hum, sweat
pours down me and trembling grabs me—paler than grass, I
seem not far from dying (Edmonds, 1952).

And she goes so far as to invent the oxymoronic word "bitter-

sweet" {glukupikron) to characterize "Love, the loosener of limbs
[weak-kneed?]" who stirs her irresistibly (Edmonds, 1952).
Tropes—even if only hyperbolic—of feverish sensation, and
reaching out for paradox in order to express what these feelings
are "like," eventually become, following Catullus and other Ladn
poets, the "freezing and burning at once" that through Petrarch
becomes a commonplace of European Renaissance poetry. But
we may also notice how Petrarch co-opts the fever agenda for
inclusion in a list of paradoxes which themselves strive to represent
the disoriented state: "I fear and hope, and burn and am of ice;
and I fiy above the heavens and lie on the ground; and I grasp
nothing and embrace all the world. . . ." {Eime Sparsi 134). This is
parallel to Catullus' celebrated epigram "odi et amo—I'm in love
and I'm in hate: you ask how this could be? I don't know but sen-
tio et exarudor—I feel it and am tortured." The speaker of Randall
Jarrell's poem "Seele im Raum," reports a visionary experience
that may be hallucinatory or not: "Shall I make sense or shall I tell
the truth? / Choose either—I cannot do both." Some inner states
seeking representadon must claim to be unrepresentable.

Intoxication

Alcoholic intoxication is one of the most ancient reference-

point tropes, going back to biblical language. In Hafiz, Sa'adi,
and Omar Khayyam and other Persian poets with a Sufic strain.
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 599

wine is totally allegorical for access to another, imagined, "higher"

state. From the point of view of the imagination, likeness to intox-
ication, by alcohol and by opiates, becomes, like dreaming,
almost conventional. Disorientation is the romantic imagination's
doorway to a higher reorientation. Opiates became less exotic by
the end of the eighteenth century, but they were crucial for
romantic fiction, as other pharmaceuticals were in the twentieth.
Keats' famous Nightingale Ode begins "My heart aches, and a
drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had
drunk,/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute
past, and Lethe-wards had sunk." Then the speaker, wanting some
other wine to move him into a visionary darkness ("Tender is the
night!") privileging smell and hearing, and particularly hearing
the nightingale singing out of darkness in Milton, envisions the
bird's song as having "Charmed magic casements, opening on the
foam / Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn." "Forlorn!" the
next stanza begins, "the very word is like a bell / To toll me back
from thee to my sole self!" and the recognition of what he hadjust
said is associated with being somehow out of self. The poem con-
cludes with "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that
music:—Do I wake or sleep?" but the answer must be "neither."
Many children of the sort who are aware early on of the capacities
of language for work and play may have had the experience of
repeating a word over and over again until it seems to lose mean-
ing; rare and scarier would be doing the same thing with the word
"I"—to do that and then stop would be quite like Keats' trope.
Tennyson's remarkable poem expanding upon an episode in
Homer, "The Lotos-Eaters," is an elaborate representation of a
profoundly allegorized version of "spacing out," with the poet
brilliantly introducing a realm of intoxication by means of the
introductory narration itself. The poem begins

"Courage!" he [Ulysses] said, and pointed to the land,

"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land
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In which it seemed always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon.
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

—and one may notice how it is the at first glance poetically lazy
repetitions of land and afternoon that invoke a languor even more
pointedly than the stage-setting air does.

Madness

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet" says Theseus in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream, "are of imagination all compact" and Plato
discoursed of poetic frenzy. Madness became a metaphor for
poetic imagination—furor poeticus—as well as for purported
visionary modes used to give authenticity to prophetic discourse.
(The actual, perhaps narcotized states of the young women sitting
on the tripod at Apollo's oracle at Delphi are literal, of course,
and yet Plutarch could discuss why it was that the girls burblings
always came out in dactylic hexameters in the priest's translation.)
Insanity has been represented—and employed in representa-
tions of other conditions—in literature in such stereotyped fash-
ions that these have themselves become the subject of joking. A
convention of the late-eighteenth-century stage is being joked
about in Richard Sheridan's 1779 comedy. The Critic, when a
cliche-ridden bombastic play is produced during which, at one
moment, the stage direction reads "Enter Tilburina, stark mad in
white satin. Enter confidant [maid], stark mad in white linen,"
and one needs no footnote to conclude that a distracted virginal
female, her hair in disarray and clad in white perhaps to suggest
undergarments or bedclothes, was a stock figure. This kind of
conventionahzed insanity is even more apparent in the genre of
the so-called mad-song, which we find in English from the early
seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. The speaker is a
young madwoman, descending from Ophelia in Hamlet, deploy-
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 601

ing her madness with her own "method" in it—the rhetorically

violent return of repressed sexual discourse, the implication that
the madness itself stems from erotic betrayal and abandonment,
which provides a counterpart of Hamlet's pretended distrac-
tion—^who populates later literature.For example, there is Robert
Herrick's "The Mad Maid's Song" (1648), which starts out full of
echoes of Ophelia:

Good morrow to the days so fair;

Good morrow sir to you;
Good morrow to thine own torn hair
Bedabbled with the dew.

Good morning to this primrose too;

Good morrow to each maid;
That v«n with fiowers the tomb bestrew.
Whereon my love is laid. . . .

I'll seek him in your bonnet brave,

I'll seek him in your eyes;
Nay, now I think they've made his grave
In the bed of strawberries. . . .

Sir Walter Scott, in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), has the

crazed Madge Wildfire sing this as she lies dying:

Proud Maisie is in the wood.

Walking so early.
Sweet Robin is in the bush.
Singing so rarely.

"Tell me, thou bonny bird.

When shall I marry me?"
"When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry ye."
 602 SOCIAL RESEARCH

"Who makes the bridal bed.

Birdie, say truly,"
"The gray-headed sexton
That delves the grave duly.

"The glow-worm o'er grave and stone

Shall light thee steady.
The owl from the steeple sing,
'Welcome, proud lady.'"

And early in the twentieth century, Walter de la Mare's "Song of

the Mad Prince" is allied to these allusively:

Who said, "Peacock pie"?

The old King to the sparrow
Who said, "Crops are ripe"?
Rust to the harrow
Who said, "Where sleeps she now.
Where rests she now her head
Bathed in Eve's loveliness"?
That's what I said

Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"

Sexton to Willow
Who said, "Green sleep for dreams.
Moss for a pillow"?
Who said, "All dme's delight
Hath she for narrow bed.
Life's troubled bubble broken"?
That's what I said.

Yeats' Crazy Jane is a very different figure of madness, since she

speaks nothing but good anarchic sense. But two other, earlier
mad songs are a different matter. The great anonymous Tom O'
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 603

Bedlam song from ca. 1600 is a dramatic lyric of a mendicant

madman. It starts out with a theatrically mimetic imploring open-
ing, displaying a real touch of psychic terror:

From the hag and hungry goblin

That unto rags would rend ye
And the spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye!
That of your five sound senses
Ye never be forsaken
Nor travel from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon!

and moves from that to the wonderful power of

I know more than Apollo,

For oft when he lies sleeping,
I see the stars at bloody wars
And the wounded welkin weeping. . . .

and the last stanza

With an host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander
With a burning spear and a horse of air
Through the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.

(I regret that there is no room here to go into this great poem—

with its alternation of verismo and mythopoetic vision—in detail.)
And most interesting of all is the satirical vision of literary
monologues like many of these, in a very early poem of William
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Blake (from Poetical Sketches). The "Mad Song" sadrizes its

speaker—"Like a fiend in a cloud / With howling woe, / After
night I do croud, / And with night will go"—but at another level,
the purely literary tradidon of "mad song." And, more pro-
foundly, the nodonal psychic state wish is generated by such liter-
ary expressions. (Harold Bloom has observed that "The grim
humor of the poem is that he is not as mad as he wished to be,
but presumably will attain the state through perseverance.") And
in our day Elizabeth Bishop's bedlamite poem, "Visits to St. Eliza-
beths," exhibits some of Blake's conceptual power. The trope of
obsessiveness in the poem's very form (based on "The House that
Jack Built"), with its maddening repeddons and the details of the
scene confronting the visitor to the insdtudonalized Ezra Pound,
produces a reciprocal figuradon of what's inside a madhouse and
what's inside a madman's head.
Given the pervasiveness of convendonal tropes for feelings of
derangement, it is somedmes hard to decide whether or not one
of them has been invoked. Consider, for example, the last stanza
of William Cowper's "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity"
(concerning Abiram in Numbers 16, who was swallowed up by the
earth. . .):

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice

Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fieshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.

It is difficult to determine here whether the metaphor of

imprisonment in a bodily tomb, and the paradox linking the
doubt-ridden speaker and the idolater punished by Moses, are at
all of the "expressive" sort {how do I feel being crazy, like being jailed
in myself?) or are instead the usual good poedc revision of a
medieval commonplace (the soul imprisoned in the body).
One may also remark on the treatment in modernist literature
of the world of very early childhood, such as in the opening pages
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 605

ofJoyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or of an idiot, as in

Faulkner's handling of Benjy's monologic secdons of The Sound
and the Fury. In all these cases, a basic alteration of some of the
very discursive or stylisdc ground represents the basic altered state
being invoked, although what is done expositorily within that
shifted rhetorical system may be expressive of a pardcular state of
feeling, knowledge, doubt, etc, within that altered consciousness.

Ecstasy

We must inevitably turn to a more profound version of the

inner/outer matter discussed earlier, with reladon to idiom in
English. In this case, does the figuradon going back to Greek "out
of oneself = "too far into oneself? Ecstasy (ekstasis) means, in
Greek, standing, or staying, out, and the completion "out of one-
self is our English interpredve addidon: the "self here can be
"body," mind," "normal state," or whatever concept a particular
interpredve paradigm will apply. In such traditional notions of
ecstadc experience as that of music's drawing the soul out of the
body—a figure from antiquity privileged in Baroque musical aes-
thedcs—it is hard to tell which of two sorts of altered condition
might be the one pinpointed here: whether of intense absorpdon
because of deeply engaged listening—aided by some knowledge
of music generally—or of a trancelike condition that some would
speak of as lying beyond the mental realm of attentiveness. Anal-
ogously, there are the opposed condidons resulting from gazing
at an icon or intendy reading a painting with an informed eye.
The heightening of consciousness that might be claimed for each
of these are of two radically different sorts, I think, and poetic lan-
guage can use one of these as a way of dealing with others.
And so with modern psychopop near-death experiences—
always the light, and perhaps there may be some kind of neuro-
physiological account for that. But a passageway into or through
that light, some figure of what the Greeks called a psychopompos or
606 SOCIAL RESEARCH

guide out of the world (the god Hermes, for example), all come
from popular romance and its centuries-old vulgarizations of epi-
cal metaphors. Yet the conventions of such reportage, as with the
rhetorical structures of dream accounts, are fundamental to the
construction of such experiences.

An Unacknowledged State—Extreme Attentiveness

or Absorbed Concentration

This is an analogue, perhaps, of an ecstatic state; instead of

being "out of oneself," one is out of most of the world, save for the
object of contemplation, or the particular task. Such states rarely yield
expressive lyric accounts, but a particularly telling and exemplary
metaphor is deployed in the refrain of William Butler Yeats' litde
poem "Long-Legged Fly," which considers Caesar planning a bat-
de "Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves
upon silence" followed by two similar glimpses of Helen of Troy
and Michelangelo, both analogously absorbed.

Dreaming

I shall conclude with a brief observation on the exquisitely

"normal" realm of dreaming, a state we inhabit along with ani-
mals. Only with regard to waking should we call it an altered one;
it is a phase of the normal, and yet can be a reference point, like
burning, freezing, intoxication, ecstasy, a metaphor for altered
ones. Poems and other literature speaking of dreamlike states
(and particularly hypnogogic/hypnopompic-like) or "visionary,"
prophetic, phantasmagoric, metamorphic experiences are
preparing metaphoric grounds for some kind of fiction. (And I
do not mean just the narrative fiction that he or she was sleeping
or dreaming or hallucinating under certain circumstance, but
rather that an original and privileged state of consciousness was
 THE RHETORIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS 607

being explored. This would be true to the degree that poems pro-
pound ficdve places and then explore them, their interiors, their
terrain, etc.) When Wordsworth speaks—in the Immortality
Ode—of his memory that in childhood every common sight
seemed to possess "The glory and the freshness of a dream"—he
means what, in reference to painting, Greek called enargeia—
vividness, but something, more as well.
First-person accounts of dreams in English literature from
Chaucer up through the eighteenth century most frequendy
begin with the phrase "Methinks I saw [orwas]," and the relation
between the histories of poetic dream accounts and oneirocriti-
cism—dream interpretation—is a fascinating subject that I can-
not even begin to explore here. In general, what is said about
inner states both subjectively and—in any particular mode of dis-
course—objectively, are culturally determined in many ways. But
the more discursively complex, and the more of a textual history
a culture has, the more complex and subde will these conceptual
construcdons and interpretations be. The literary convendons of
narratology marking even naive speakers' dream reports in the
twendeth would yield further insights into the nature of the ref-
erence point dreaming provides. This is particularly true in an
age in which intoxicants other than alcohol are so common, and
in which intoxicadon itself can seem more like a phase of the
norm, like dreaming, than an altered state of anything like being.
In conclusion, it becomes clear that the epistemological prob-
lems raised by accounts of inner states generally—and of whatever
one may want to call altered ones particularly—are immensely
complicated by the impulses to use language to represent them.
Notionally—in literary ficdons both narradve and lyric—and lit-
erally—in the oral discourse of self-presentation—the rhetoric of
such representations will liken a direct experience of such a state,
or an imagined one, to that of another such condition, where all
the unacknowledged interpretive construction of the purity and
innerness of the experience inevitably occurs. Some altered states
tend to become what our inadequate discourse says they are.
608 SOCIAL RESEARCH

while yet remaining untouched by it, and causing us to feel—with-

out really sufficient cause—that language continues to fail us in
some profound way.

References
Cannon, Walter B. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage: An
Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement.
New York and London: Appleton and Co., 1915.
Edmonds, J. M, ed. Lyra Graeca. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1952.
Petrarch. Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Trans, and ed. R. M. Durling. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.