The Privileged Moment: a Study in the Rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe

Abstract

The rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe is part of his legend.’ Building a fury of signs, he elevated words and sounds to an intensity which is qualitatively their own and unique to his style; protean and boundless, he urged language into a wildness and power that signalized his transcendent view of the world as a labyrinth of the lonely and the alone. Wolfe’s style, then, is as striking as his great figure must have been; and there is no critic of his work who has failed to remark its reach and also its problematics.² But as with so many other features of the Wolfe legend, there has been more mention of his rhetoric than there has been serious analysis of it.³ Somehow it has been taken for granted for the very reason of its immediacy. That much has been lost in this way I hope to show; but the present essay cannot claim to be a study of Wolfe’s style or an anatomy of his language. Rather, I am here concerned with his rhetoric as a single, though crucial, facet of a phenomenology of language, a facet which will, however, lead to nuclear issues in rhetorical theory.

“Every language is the whole of a world, a space in which our souls live and move. Each word breathes the air of the whole. Each is open toward an unbounded horizon. A language is not an aggregate of words and rules. It is a potential world, an infinity of past and future worlds, merely a frame within which we speak and can create our world, actualizing ourselves and our language.”

Kurt Riezler